Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Cities

Alexandria

Also Known As Alexandrian
Egypt

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Alexandria was founded on the Egyptian coast by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE and grew within a century into the largest city of the Hellenistic world, a deliberately cosmopolitan capital where Greek, Egyptian and Jewish religious life mixed. Its Ptolemaic rulers promoted the syncretic cult of Serapis to bind Greek and Egyptian subjects under one temple, its Museion drew scholars from across the Mediterranean, and its later Christian community, home to Origen's catechetical school and to the presbyter Arius, made the city a central battleground of fourth century Christological debate. It remains the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Facts
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
The Serapeum was destroyed by a Christian mob in 391 CE under Bishop Theophilus, following Theodosius I's edicts against pagan worship; almost nothing of the temple survives above ground today 1
Origins
Founded
Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, laid out by his architect Dinocrates 1
Attributions
Tradition
Hellenistic Egyptian syncretism (the cult of Serapis), Judaism and Christianity in turn 1
Traditions
Sacred and Liturgical Languages
Koine Greek for the Ptolemaic and early Christian city; Coptic emerged later as the liturgical language of Egyptian Christianity 1
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A City Built for Many Gods

Alexander the Great chose the site in 331 BCE, on a strip of land between the Mediterranean and Lake Mareotis, and left his architect Dinocrates to lay it out on a grid; Alexander himself never saw the finished city, and later tradition held that his own body was eventually entombed within it. Under the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that inherited Egypt after Alexander's death, Alexandria became the largest city in the Mediterranean world. Ptolemy I Soter promoted the cult of Serapis, a deliberately invented god combining the Egyptian Osiris-Apis with the iconography of Greek Zeus and Hades, to give Greek settlers and Egyptian subjects a shared object of worship. The Serapeum, his temple, grew into one of the largest religious buildings of antiquity, standing on high ground in the city's western quarter.

Beside it stood the Museion, "the shrine of the Muses," a religious foundation in its own right as well as a center of scholarship, and its associated Library, the most famous collection of texts in the ancient world. Both declined in stages, damaged in the fighting during Julius Caesar's siege of 48 BCE and further diminished under later Roman rule. The Serapeum itself came down deliberately: in 391 CE, following imperial edicts against pagan worship under Theodosius I, a Christian mob led by Bishop Theophilus destroyed it, ending Serapis's cult at its own center.

Philosophers and Bishops

Alexandria's large Jewish community produced Philo, active in the early first century CE, who read the Hebrew scriptures through Platonic philosophy and gave later Christian interpreters a model for allegorical exegesis they would use for centuries. Christian Alexandria built on that habit of reading: its catechetical school, associated with Pantaenus and then with Clement and Origen in the late second and early third centuries, became an influential center for training converts and developing Christian doctrine, and Origen in particular produced a vast body of scriptural commentary before his death around 254 CE.

The city's bishopric carried unusual authority in the wider church, which made its internal disputes matter far beyond Egypt. Around 318 CE, the Alexandrian presbyter Arius began teaching that the Son was created by, and therefore not co-eternal with, the Father, a position Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and his eventual successor Athanasius opposed. The controversy split the wider church and was addressed, though not permanently settled, at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Alexandria's classical philosophical tradition had its own late figure in Hypatia, a mathematician and Neoplatonist murdered by a Christian mob in 415 CE, an episode often read as marking the effective end of the city's pagan intellectual life. Today Alexandria remains the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Alexandria directly: "over orthodox Christianity: had Alexandria prevailed over Rome, he writes, the "extravagant and muddled stories" he has summarized would read as "coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary."

Source Vindicacion del Falso Basilides, Una (Borges Center)Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh

The cult of Serapis, promoted by Ptolemy I, drew on the Egyptian Osiris-Apis and was worshipped at the city's Serapeum.

This source names Alexandria directly: "associated above all with Origen of Alexandria, covering its Stoic background, its condemnation history, and the scholarly disagreement over what Origen himself actually held."

Source Apocatastasis (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Alexandria directly: "It was founded by Basilides, who taught in Alexandria under the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (roughly the 120s to 140s CE) and is reported to have written a lost Gospel and a multi-volume..."

This source names Alexandria directly: "biographical entry on Basilides of Alexandria, founder of the Basilidean Gnostic sect."

Source Basilides (Encyclopaedia Britannica)The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This source names Alexandria directly: "Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, it coordinates and supports around 168 member agencies that between them run the largest private social service network in the United States, delivering food..."

Source Catholic Charities USA (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Alexandria directly: "USA in 1986, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the national office of the network of local diocesan Catholic Charities agencies."

Source Catholic Charities USA (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Alexandria directly: "first bishop of Aksum by Athanasius of Alexandria."

This source names Alexandria directly: "Morton Smith's Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark reports Smith's own 1958 discovery at Mar Saba monastery of a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria quoting an otherwise unknown..."

This source names Alexandria directly: "Eileen Caddy, born 26 August 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, was a British spiritual teacher and writer who co-founded the Findhorn Foundation with her husband Peter Caddy and their friend Dorothy Maclean."

Source Eileen Caddy (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Alexandria directly: "states she was born 26 August 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, moved to a caravan near Findhorn, Scotland with her husband Peter Caddy, their children and their friend Dorothy Maclean on 17 November 1962..."

Source Eileen Caddy (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Alexandria directly: "given autocephaly by Shenouda III of Alexandria, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, after Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, and separately covers the 2005 to 2007 removal of..."

Frumentius was consecrated bishop for Aksum by Athanasius there, beginning a dependence of the Ethiopian church on the Egyptian patriarchate that lasted until 1959.

This source names Alexandria directly: "Letter 39, written by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 for the annual Easter announcement to the churches under his authority, is the primary early Christian text listing the twenty seven books that..."

Source Festal Letter 39Athanasius of Alexandria
Hermeticism, Religions

The city where the Corpus Hermeticum was chiefly composed.

This source names Alexandria directly: "provenance from the Eddé collection in Alexandria and its function as a repository for mummified falcon remains dedicated to the god."

This source names Alexandria directly: "Maria Dzielska's Hypatia of Alexandria is a scholarly biography of the fourth century Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician, written by a classicist working carefully to separate the..."

Source Hypatia of AlexandriaMaria Dzielska

This source names Alexandria directly: "the late second century in Clement of Alexandria and in the epitaph of Abercius of Hierapolis."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Alexandria directly: "the conquest with the fall of Alexandria in 642, ending Byzantine administration and opening Egypt to Islamic rule."

Judaism, Religions

Philo of Alexandria's Platonic reading of Jewish scripture was produced in and shaped by the city's intellectual culture.

The sea's greatest ancient port, producing the Septuagint and early Christian theology

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

This source names Alexandria directly: "pageant staged by the Pentecostals of Alexandria, a United Pentecostal Church International congregation in Alexandria, Louisiana, dramatizing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus with worship..."

Source Abreaction, Messiah and Bill Clinton (Mockingbird Magazine)Mockingbird Magazine staff writer

This source names Alexandria directly: "before capturing the great city of Alexandria in 641 following a negotiated surrender; a brief Byzantine attempt to retake Alexandria by sea in 645 to 646 was repelled, securing Egypt permanently..."

This source names Alexandria directly: "first century BCE, chiefly in Rome and Alexandria, reviving the older Pythagorean interest in number as the key to reality and the soul's journey through successive bodies, and combining it with..."

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyEdward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.)

This source names Alexandria directly: "a different name on a farm in the Alexandria district of the Eastern Cape, where she died in 1898."

This source names Alexandria directly: "century Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, that all rational beings will eventually be restored to union with God."

Source Apocatastasis (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Physiologus, Sources

This source names Alexandria directly: "text, likely composed in Greek in Alexandria in the early centuries of the Christian era, describing real and legendary animals and assigning each a moral or allegorical Christian meaning, and this..."

Source PhysiologusAnonymous (Physiologus tradition)

This source names Alexandria directly: "April 8, 2000, at the Pentecostals of Alexandria church in Alexandria, Louisiana, following a performance of the church's own annual Messiah pageant."

Source Remarks by the President at Performance of Messiah (Clinton White House Archive)The White House (Clinton administration), official transcript

This source names Alexandria directly: "as an institutional record, is the Alexandria, Minnesota museum's own account of its founding and its custody of the Kensington Runestone, a runic inscribed stone reported found in 1898 and claimed..."

Source Runestone Museum (institutional record)the holders' own account

This source names Alexandria directly: "directly in translation: "Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary." Used here for..."

The Arian controversy began with an Alexandrian presbyter, Arius, and was addressed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Source The Canons of the First Council of NicaeaFirst Council of Nicaeathe holders' own account

This source names Alexandria directly: "Valentinus, who taught in Rome and Alexandria and was, by some ancient accounts, briefly a candidate for the Roman bishopric."

Source The Gnostic GospelsElaine Pagels

Contained In

Egypt, Countries

Alexandria lies on Egypt's Mediterranean coast.

Related To

Sacred To

Alexandria's catechetical school and its Patriarchate made it a central seat of early and modern Christian authority.

Alexandria remains the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Sources
1. From Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age
Peter Green, University of California Press, 1990
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
The Canons of the First Council of Nicaea
First Council of Nicaea, 325the holders' own account
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