‘Alexandria: The City That Changed the World’
By Islam Issa
Pegasus Books, 496 Pages

Alexander the Great created the city of Alexandria, mapping out its streets and envisioning a civilization that would incorporate the world he had conquered, which had a place for many different peoples and religious faiths. He imagined that he could create a civilization from scratch that would outlive him. At times the city has fulfilled the Alexandrian vision, welcoming Arabs, Jews, Christians, Europeans, and Asians at a crossroads of history, perched between continents.

Napoleon thought he could fulfill Alexander’s catholic vision of imperial enterprise, but the British fleet following the lead of Admiral Nelson defeated him. The Romans and Egyptians, coupled for a brief moment in the romance of Antony and Cleopatra, might have fulfilled the Alexandrian vision, though Antony was too much of an adventurer and Cleopatra had her own Egyptian dynastic designs that came to grief.

Strabo called the city a necropolis, where the illustrious and the less so came to die. It is this Alexandria that haunts Islam Issa, whose family has resided there for many generations. What Alexandria presents to him is a record of history and of its erasure. No one even knows the location of Alexander’s tomb, or exactly what happened to the great library of Alexandria.

Mr. Issa might have made even more of Alexandria’s supreme poet, Constantin Cavafy, who seems to have taken the city’s history and its eradication to heart by deciding not to publish much of his poetry. He thus made his own lonely example a fitting extension of a metropolis that has been destroyed, rebuilt — lost and found, so to speak — and nationalized so that its diversity has been diluted, and its centrality as the bridge between East and West attenuated.

It is a melancholy story, the one that Cavafy yearned to recover when he could only speculate and dream about what had been lost when so many of Alexandria’s inhabitants, famous and otherwise, had been put to death in wars and invasions and climate upheavals that put much of the ancient city under water.

Mr. Issa tells the excruciating story of Hypatia, member of a “respected polytheistic family” and, like other Alexandrian women, “highly literate,” a professor who surpassed her father in mathematics and philosophy. She attracted a huge following, published widely, and was regarded as an exemplary figure — and beautiful as well, but scornful of romance. She is supposed to have spurned a besotted male, showing him her “white rag stained with her menstruation blood,” saying, “It isn’t beautiful.” The story may be apocryphal, yet it suggests that she rejected what would have been involved in surrendering to a male-dominated world.

Hypatia seems to have been as independent as Socrates, and she suffered a fate even more gruesome than his execution via hemlock. When Alexandria became dangerous, with statues of the gods destroyed, she remained as the city’s “public intellectual” despite rumors that she had become demonic. A group of Christians skinned her alive with broken pottery, roof tiles, and oyster shells. They gouged out her eyes, then dragged her through the streets and threw her into a fire.

This grisly episode is indicative of just how Alexandria has, in different periods, departed from Alexander’s regime of tolerance. Mr. Issa is circumspect, though, about contemporary history, and what it has in store for women who might want to exercise their Hypatian rights.

His book ends with a fitting epilogue of what he might have called “Alexandria: The Biography of a City.” As he goes about identifying important sites, he meditates on the history that has been destroyed and also on how much of it ought to be preserved, assessing the demands of the present and what is owed to the past.  

Mr. Issa is strikingly unsentimental, implying, it seems to me, that in every age the people of the city, like all people, have their own challenges that sometimes involve the elimination of what was precious to previous epochs. In Alexandria, climate change is not a new topic. Much of its past is under water, and laments for what has been inundated, he concludes, cannot be allowed to dominate what has yet to be done.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.” He lives in a small community in southern New Jersey named Alexandria.