Passage IV

The Pharos of Alexandria

Towering above the harbor in Alexandria, Egypt, the Pharos (lighthouse) was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Roughly the height of a forty-story building, a signal fire was present there that guided sailors for hundreds of years.

Alexandria, sat tight where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Nile River, was a center for commerce, scholarship, and the arts. The flat coastline and treacherous reefs made it's harbor dangerously to navigate, however. Sometime in the early third century BC, Ptolemy I Soter, the ruler of Egypt, decided to build a beacon on the island of Pharos in Alexandria's harbor. Wanting the magnificence of the structure to reflect the citys preeminence. Alexandria now handles about four-fifths of Egypt's imports and exports.

The structure was built of huge blocks of stone, with molten lead used as mortar. Its base was a gigantic square stone platform, upon which sat three levels. The lowest level was the largest, was about a hundred feet square and two hundred feet tall. (54) The middle section was octagonal and offered a broad balcony where visitors could buy food and admire the views of city and sea circular top section served in later years as the beacon chamber, in which an enormous fire burned. Estimates of the structure's finished height range from 380 to 450 feet or more, and some historians believe that sailors could see its fire by night and smoke by day from as far away as one hundred miles.

[1] For centuries, the lighthouse guided ships to safety. [2] In 1303 and 1323, however, earthquakes damaged it. [3] Today, some stone blocks and decorative statues are all that remain, but much is known about the lighthouse because its image is on many ancient coins and because many travelers and scholars of its time described it in their writings. (57)

The lighthouse also lives on in digital form. In one computer game, players seek to build an empire gain enormous advantages by reestablishing once again the Lighthouse of Alexandria.