Alexandria (Radio Edit)

Greg Jenner is joined in Egypt by historian Professor Islam Issa and comedian Athena Kugblenu to learn all about the history of science and philosophy in the city of Alexandria. Founded by ancient conqueror Alexander the Great, Alexandria from its earliest days was a city at the forefront of scientific discoveries, philosophical enquiry and religious debate. At its height, the city’s famous library housed nearly one million texts, and attracted thinkers like Hypatia of Alexandria, Euclid and Heron (who invented the steam engine). This episode tells the story of this incredible site of knowledge and culture, taking in its epic founding, the rise of Christianity and its impact on the city, its fate during the Crusades, the coming of Napoleon, and its role in the rise of the Arab nationalism movement. This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Emma Bentley Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:47Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today, we are packing our travel guides and venturing back over 2,000 years as we trek all the way to Egypt to trace the cultural and intellectual history of the city of Alexandria. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests in. History corner. He's a multi-award winning author, broadcaster, curator and academic. He's a professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University and an expert in the cultural history of the Middle East. He's also the author of the award-winning book Alexandria, the city that changed the world. It's a brilliant book. Highly recommend it. It's Professor Islam Isa. Welcome Islam.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Thank you. I'm excited and a little confused why we're not doing this recording in Alexandria.

• 2:33Greg Jenner?

  The budget, yeah, the budget didn't quite stretch. Sorry Athena.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  All the money was spent on me. That's what the problem is.

• 2:41Greg Jenner?

  And in comedy corner, she's a comedian, writer and podcaster. You may have heard her on numerous radio four shows or on her podcasts Bust or Trust, a kids' mystery podcast, and Keeping Athena Company. She's even written a funny history book for kids, History's Most Epic Fibs. But you'll know her best from past appearances on this very podcast. It's Athena Kabler. Welcome back Athena.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me back.

• 3:00Greg Jenner?

  Delighted to have you back. We've had you on many times because you're very good at this. Plus, you also write history books for kids.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  I do, yes.

• 3:07Greg Jenner?

  Do you know much about the history of Alexandria?

• 3:09Speaker 04

  I know very much like Stevenage is named after Stephen, Alexandria might be named after someone called Alexander. Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  That's a good start.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Is that all right?

• 3:22Greg Jenner?

  We're halfway there.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I know it had a library that burnt downloads.

• 3:25Greg Jenner?

  It did. It did. So what do you know?

• 3:34Greg Jenner?

  This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, will know about today's subject. And I think, like Athena, you will have heard of the city of Alexandria. I think you will have heard of the library and the famous fire that burned it down. Alexandria pops up quite a lot in pop culture. It is in the Liz Taylor iconic movie Cleopatra, of course. The famed Egyptian director Youssef Shaheen set many of his films in the city, including Alexandria. Why? Clues in the name. And if gaming is more your thing, you may have roamed the streets of Ptolemaic Alexandria in Assassin's Creed Origins. But how did a small fishing village become one of the greatest intellectual hubs of the world? And how exactly do you smuggle a dead saint out of a city? Let's find out. Right, Professor Islam, let's start with the basics, please. Where is our

• 4:20Greg Jenner?

  Alexandria, I know it's in Egypt, but like, you know, where, what time period are we starting on? I know we're doing like a big old history. Why is Alexandria important? Three big questions for you to start the show.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  So it's on the Mediterranean, on the Nile Delta. So that's where the Nile River spreads into the Mediterranean. So it's sort of south of Greece, but it's also in Africa, in the north east of Africa. In terms of time period, how long do we have?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Radiocarbon dating of the seashells there tells us that there was a settlement as early as the 27th century B.C. So we're talking like 2,600 B.C. It's originally a series of small fishing villages. And then Alexandria itself, the city, is founded in 331 B.C. It's founded by Alexander the Great. Fourth century B.C. it's founded. Yeah. And it quickly develops into the capital of Egypt, the capital of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Ptolemy the first is Alexander's friend in general. And the Ptolemies go all the way to the famous Cleopatra, Cleopatra the seventh. It becomes a global knowledge capital.

• 5:32Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  And the trade capital, and it lives on today. You know, by 1950, it's still got a million people in it. And today it has about six million people in it. So.

• 5:41Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Wow, I'm actually amazed that that's like London's like eight million, right?

• 5:45Greg Jenner?

  So. Alexander supposedly visualizes the city in front of him, right? And he plans it out with seeds?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he's already read about it in Homer. You know, it's inspired him to go and he arrives. And he realizes that the location is great because it's at the intersection of three continents, Africa, Asia and Europe. And obviously his main goal is world domination.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  So he thinks this will be a great place to build and carry on with his ventures.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  It's like a place in the sun, but for like megalomaniacs.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Isn't that a great view of places you can invade? It's like, yeah, great. I'll take it.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  So he gets down on his knees, according to legend, and he puts with grain on the sand a map of the city as he imagines it.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  It has, you know, the markets and the temples and the shrine to the muses, which will become the library. It's probably also worth mentioning, though, that when he arrives there, there's already a canal system, for example, that the ancient Egyptians had built that will make transporting the grain easier. There's access to the Nile that will make him have irrigation systems, sewage systems and so on. And then he leaves it to the most famous architect of the time, Denocrites, to build the city. After he designs the city, he leaves straight away to Siwa, further south in Egypt, because there's an oracle there where he wants to find out if he's divine. And true enough, he finds out that he is divine.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  What are the chances? Yeah, you're divine, Alex. Yeah. Now, please let me live.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Actually, for that reason, he never sees a building go up in Alexandria. He never returns.

• 7:22Greg Jenner?

  And the interesting story, actually, is, you know, you mentioned the Ptolemaic dynasty, Islam, which obviously gives us Cleopatra much, much later on. But it's the first Ptolemy, a man called Ptolemy, who founded the dynasty, who kind of puts Alexandria on the map in terms of its power and status. He then uses Alexander's death to put himself on the map too. Do you want to know how?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Oh, does he write a book? He sings a song like Hand in the Wind.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Is that not it, Greg?

• 7:54Greg Jenner?

  I mean, that's a lovely idea. You've lived your life like a candle in the wind, never failing to conquer Egypt and India. No, he literally stole Alexander's body.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. And just stuck it on his wall like a big antelope.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  Lion.

• 8:11Greg Jenner?

  Not quite.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  No.

• 8:13Greg Jenner?

  It's a heist, right? He takes an army, he intercepts the funeral cortage, which is moving from Syria to...

• 8:18Speaker 03

  It's around Babylon.

• 8:19Greg Jenner?

  Right, okay.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  And it's heading towards Macedon, you know, where Alexander is originally from.

• 8:26Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Alexander's request apparently was to be buried in Siwa, which is the oracle where he found out he was divine. So he claims Ptolemy that he's taking him, you know, to Egypt because that's where Alexander would want to go.

• 8:40Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  But he realizes, actually, if I go to Alexandria, then I can really legitimize it as a capital.

• 8:48Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  And as Alexander's city. And so he takes the corpse to Alexandria and builds an amazing mausoleum there that actually became like a site of pilgrimage for Roman emperors, but is now lost.

• 8:59Greg Jenner?

  Wow. Ptolemy puts Alexander on the map, he's taken the corpse of Alexander to legitimize himself. And what does he do for the city of Alexandria? What has the city become under Ptolemy the first?

• 9:09Speaker 03

  He tries to develop like a very unique identity for the city that's Greco-Egyptian. He also continues to invite people from all around the region. So we have people coming from like the Holy Land, there's a lot of Jews who come to Alexandria and have freedom of worship in the Jewish quarter. There's people from the Levant. There's even evidence of people from as far as India in the Ptolemaic days coming to Alexandria. So there's jobs and there's freedom of worship. The idea is that they can live in relative tolerance. He also commissions important monuments. We've mentioned Alexander's tomb, there's big temples, public gardens. It becomes a very populous city. It's thought by some to be the first city that reaches a million people.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  But that sounds incredible, right? Isn't that the model of the kind of cities you'd like to live in now?

• 9:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it's a 15-minute city.

• 9:56Greg Jenner?

  Alexandria is now in its Ptolemaic era. We get these new building projects, as well as the Garden of Eleusis, we also get the Pharos Lighthouse, which is one of the seven wonders of the world.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Yes, and I know this because I used to play Civilization.

• 10:08Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, there we go, another classic game for our elder millennial listeners.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  And that was a big landmark when you built the lighthouse.

• 10:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  I used to get a little graphic come up with the lighthouse.

• 10:17Greg Jenner?

  Exactly, a little fanfare. Yeah. I mean, the Pharos Lighthouse is one of the seven wonders of the world. So it's incredibly important in the ancient world and it's still. I mean, archaeologists were digging and diving down there like last month, I think. Amazing, isn't it?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  It is. The remains are still there and that was on the Pharos Island. So when Alexander arrived, he connected the fishing villages with Pharos Island. With a causeway and that's where the lighthouse was built. And the lighthouse's remains are there and now there's a citadel there.

• 10:47Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Modern Alexandria.

• 10:48Greg Jenner?

  That's very handy. And of course, also at the same time, they build the famous library, the one you mentioned on the way in Athena. How many texts do you think were held in that library?

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Oh goodness, okay. It's gonna be silly. 10,000.

• 11:00Greg Jenner?

  I mean, that's a lot of books, right?

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Well, they had, wouldn't they be like scrolls?

• 11:03Greg Jenner?

  They would be scrolls.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  I think 20,000.

• 11:05Greg Jenner?

  Oh, you've gone bigger.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, go on, hit me.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  We don't really know.

• 11:10Greg Jenner?

  All right, ruin the tension.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Well, let me say this. When Ptolemy hired Demetrius to found the library, he said to him to find every book in the world. I'm quoting from a letter that's been found. The job description was every book in the world.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  That's too many.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  So the estimate is sort of from 500,000 to a million.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  So basically the internet.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  To over a million.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Put the internet in here.

• 11:36Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  There are like letters from Ptolemy to the librarian saying, have you got all the books yet?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  So he's checking, he's checking in.

• 11:45Greg Jenner?

  Okay, and we get incredible scholars coming to the city, don't we? I mean, maths fans will know Euclid of geometry fame. Who else is showing up and playing their intellectual trade?

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Aratosthenes said that the world's not flat. Aristarchus said that the earth goes around the sun, which was a very odd thing to say at the time. They developed fields like alchemy. Someone called Maria the Jewess was somebody who developed alchemy and her main aim was basically turning anything into gold and living forever.

• 12:17Greg Jenner?

  Two good aims.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Heron or Hero of Alexandria, who invented all sorts of things like the first steam engine, also the first vending machine.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Oh, what a king.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Usually for holy water. And there was a school of medicine, which which allowed women in, which wasn't the case in Athens.

• 12:36Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Whereas it was only men. Different types of poetry were invented.

• 12:40Greg Jenner?

  And we also get Ptolemy the fourth, so you know, once you've got Ptolemy one, you get two, three and four. He built a shrine to Homer, the great poet who gave us the Odyssey. Well, he may not have existed, but you know, the idea of him.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  What? I think you're part of that.

• 12:53Greg Jenner?

  He may not have been a real guy, but that's a different episode, Athena. But they're also scammers, right? There were people showing up pretending to be great intellectuals or pretending to be have been taught by great intellectuals.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  That's right. But certainly, yeah, the library, all sorts of issues arose because, you know, getting every book in the world is not very selective. And it's borderline obsessive.

• 13:14Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Anyone who could write would write anything because they were guaranteed to sell it. And then even better, you could scam. Was there no quality control?

• 13:22Greg Jenner?

  No.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Is this what you're saying? Eventually there was. Okay. You could then scam the librarians by pretending you heard someone famous speak and that you're writing their speeches, for example.

• 13:34Greg Jenner?

  Okay. So it's like the kind of AI slop on Amazon, where it's just like sort of dodgy knockoffs of famous books.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:40Greg Jenner?

  So the city was flourishing intellectually. And then obviously, as is the case with all libraries, was it sort of devastated by budget cuts? Because that's what seems to be happening to modern libraries.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  It's not far off.

• 13:50Greg Jenner?

  Oh, okay.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  I mean, a library is a good way of understanding the priorities of government. And under later Ptolemy, so all basically the Ptolemies were all called Ptolemy or Cleopatra, pretty much. So by the time you get to Ptolemy the eighth, Ptolemy the ninth, they'd evicted some scholars. They'd given the the job of librarian to their allies, for example, to an army general rather than a scholar.

• 14:14Greg Jenner?

  Oh, no.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And then, of course, you have the fire in the first century B.C. When Julius Caesar was at war with Cleopatra's brother. And actually, he writes about the fire.

• 14:24Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  His autobiography is in like the third person, Caesar did this and Caesar did that. Caesar set a fire in Alexandria. So he confessed to it. Yeah, he does, he thinks it was a great idea, but it was, he set some ships on fire.

• 14:38Greg Jenner?

  Hmm.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  And it kind of spread into the city. It didn't completely destroy the library, actually.

• 14:43Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, one of the wings goes, it says. It's kind of a partial, but there is also a book burning by the next Roman, or the first Roman emperor, Octavian, who becomes Augustus, and he orders the burning of books.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  That's right, and more of those occasions, actually, Caraculla in the third century, he thinks that Alexander was assassinated by Aristotle, who was his teacher, so he burns all the Aristotelian books.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  So this is something that would have happened hundreds of years ago, but he's like, time to get my vengeance.

• 15:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:13Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, I mean, Caraculla is in the third century, so he's, what, 500 years, 600 years?

• 15:19Speaker 03

  He thinks he's the new Alexander.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And then, and then, you know, Aurelian burns the royal court, which has the library in it. You know, we've got the rise of Christianity that had some book burning. In the fifth century, we have a Roman historian called Erosius, who talks about empty shelves. So we know it's still there in the fifth century, but there's a slow decline.

• 15:41Greg Jenner?

  That's a shame. I mean, you mentioned the rise of Christianity. So the city had already been multi-ethnic, multicultural. You'd talked about Jews coming and living there beforehand, but the rise of Christianity is a really interesting and important story in the city's history. Can you tell us more?

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yes, it's largely based on the fact that Saint Mark, the evangelist, brought Christianity to Africa through Alexandria. That he arrived in Alexandria and founded the church there and would end up being murdered there as well. Alexandria was a kind of open-minded place traditionally. You know, the Greeks of Alexandria were seen as very liberal compared to the Greeks of Athens. The Jews of Alexandria, there's a quote about them, that they're more interested in the theatre than the synagogue. They were different to the Jews of Jerusalem. So it made sense for this new faith to gravitate towards Alexandria and be influenced by all these other faiths as well that were already there.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  So if like, so what was they into then? Because if you've got like Jewish people into the theatre, what was like, what was their thing?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Debate, I think.

• 16:44Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Greg Jenner?

  Sorry, Athena.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Bring back the theatre, guys.

• 16:51Greg Jenner?

  So, obviously, we've talked about pagans, we've talked about polytheistic people, we've talked about Jews and Christians, and now we need to talk about the arrival of the Arab Caliphate. That's in the 7th century, is it?

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that ends 7 centuries of Roman rule. The Arabs are led by somebody called Ahmed ibn al-Az, who's a commander who knew the Prophet Muhammad, and, you know, he turns Egypt into part of the Caliphate. What that does for Alexandria is that about a millennium after it's founded, it's no longer the capital of Egypt. So they move the capital, because Alexandria for the Arabs is too diverse. They don't know how to deal with all these different groups.

• 17:33Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  And also, they don't have a navy. They're desert people.

• 17:37Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  So it's a hard place to defend, and so they move the capital.

• 17:42Greg Jenner?

  To Cairo?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  To what is now Old Cairo.

• 17:45Greg Jenner?

  Old Cairo, okay, thank you, yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  The initial idea is there's still freedom of worship, there's still freedom of expression, but as far as buildings are concerned, you know, we do see temples become churches and churches become mosques. And even today, there are mosques that have gone through that journey.

• 18:01Greg Jenner?

  Okay. We start to get what's called the Islamic Golden Age. The Abbasid dynasty bring that about in Baghdad. Does it spread out to Alexandria?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  To some extent, because of the texts and ideas that have come out of it. So even though Baghdad has become the kind of knowledge capital of the Arabs, they're still looking at texts that existed in Alexandria.

• 18:23Greg Jenner?

  So Alexandria was sort of coming back to its best. We have to do, I mean, we must mention another famous heist. So we've had one heist where they stole Alexander's body. Now we get another one. Venetian travellers stole the body of St Mark out of Alexandria. How do you think they pulled this off?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Oh, how do you steal a body?

• 18:41Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Well, what you do is you go to a fancy dress shop, and you'd kind of like, you'd get a costume for it, and then you'd be like, oh, don't mind my mate, he's had too much. You know, when people have too much to drink and they pass out and they're just dead weight? And so, and the costume would be, or they could be like the back end of a camel, and you're the front end.

• 19:02Greg Jenner?

  Like a pantomime horse?

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically. So costumes, fancy dress.

• 19:07Greg Jenner?

  I quite like that. That's fun. Islam, is that how they pulled it off?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  It's probably as eccentric or more eccentric, isn't it? They covered it in pork.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And then swapped it with the body of another saint.

• 19:26Greg Jenner?

  So they just sort of hid it under a massive ham?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, in a basket, in a basket.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I think that makes a lot of sense.

• 19:34Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, I mean, if, if we, if we were pitching an ideas and someone said, great, great idea about magic dress Athena, but how about pork? I'd be like, yeah, do the pork one. Yeah. I'm really humble like that. That's a better idea.

• 19:47Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, okay. Then we get the Fatimid dynasty, but then the 14th century brings some disasters. Athena, do you know what happens in the 1340s?

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Black death.

• 19:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  But it reached all the way to Alexandria.

• 19:59Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Because of the harbour, everything reached Alexandria, good stuff and bad stuff.

• 20:05Greg Jenner?

  Some real tough times happening in the 1300s, 14th century. And then you get the city under new management again. This time is the Ottoman Turks Islam, and this is where the city does actually decline.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the Ottomans captured Egypt in 1517.

• 20:20Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  And that's probably the, the least exciting part of Alexandria's history. It does dwindle. We know the population during the later Ottoman times, so sort of 18th centuries is about 15,000.

• 20:33Greg Jenner?

  But there is of course, a famously big guy, well, he's famously not big of course, but he, he shows up in the late 1700s. He's a, he's a Corsican, he's a Frenchman.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Napoleon.

• 20:43Greg Jenner?

  Napoleon.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:44Greg Jenner?

  He arrives in Alexandria because he's a big fanboy of Alexander Great. And his trip to, to Egypt is famously violent. He, he goes around, you know, attacking armies and whatnot. But he also brings scholars, his famous savants, his artists, his archaeologists, right?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  He arrives in, in, at Pharos, you know, where Alexander was because he wants to emulate him. He does this wonderful speech to his soldiers about how they have to respect the locals and respect the faith of the locals as Alexander did. And then he literally blows up the synagogue. Which by the way, has recently been renovated and very beautifully. He kills 700 locals as he. He enters the city. They are serious about Egyptian archaeology.

• 21:26Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  They draw lots of really nice pictures of Egypt at the time and but they also take or help themselves to lots of stuff from Egypt as well. And I don't mean like little things. I mean things like obelisks.

• 21:39Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. And of course, the British are there too. I mean, famously, you know, the Battle of the Nile, you've got Lord Nelson fighting against Napoleon. The British presence in Alexandria did not last that long. In 1817, they signed an agreement to leave Egypt and in comes a guy called Muhammad Ali. Not that one, not that one. That'd been amazing, but not that one. He's ruling with Ottoman support. And the city becomes interesting culturally again. In 1897, the Lumiere brothers shot a film there in the city. So it's, you know, the Egyptian cinema industry, it's famous, like they're great filmmakers, but it starts so early, 1897. So we get something called the Nahdah, the Arab Enlightenment, if I mispronounced that.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Nahdah, yeah.

• 22:16Greg Jenner?

  Thank you.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So as you said, the Lumiere brothers go to Alexandria. Everyone's excited. You know, we have Ian Forster, among others, who writes a history of the city. We have the Egyptian Cultural Renaissance as well, because don't forget that Europeans are there and, and, you know, we said Egyptology, European Egyptology has begun. Well, you know, there's lots of stuff being plundered, reports of, you know, tomb findings being used as decor for homes.

• 22:44Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  And they use mummy cases for cooking fuel and things like that. So Egyptians want to have some autonomy. And one way of doing that is through this, what's called this kind of Arab Cultural Awakening.

• 22:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  The Nahdah, which is a way of sort of creating cultural autonomy as a way of countering the European influence at the time.

• 23:04Greg Jenner?

  Does it work? Arguably it does, because of course, Britain had ruled Egypt from 1882 until the Revolution of 1919. And then in 1922, there is an independence granted, a partial independence granted, but certainly it's an important date, isn't it, in Egyptian history?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. It works in the sense that people realise they have an autonomous identity, that their culture is capable of creating amazing things, just like English and French culture is.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  And also simply the subject matter of the things being written was calling for people to realise their independence. So, you know, to give an example, you have an opera called Cleopatra and Antony, where Cleopatra is the hero and it's played by, you know, Alexandrian artists and actors, that kind of use of Egyptian instruments, all of these things that suggest autonomy and independence.

• 23:58Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  So they did Alexandria and Cleopatra the Musical before, like, Tina the Musical, before Back to the Future. They were like on it. That's very ahead of their time.

• 24:09Greg Jenner?

  By the mid 20th century, so the 40s, 50s, 60s, Alexandria is the home of anti-monarchical revolution and radicalism as well, isn't it? It's a city of politics.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's interesting because the king was often residing in Alexandria, in the palace there. And then when he's kicked out of Egypt, he's kicked out from Alexandria.

• 24:30Greg Jenner?

  This is King Farouk, is it?

• 24:31Speaker 03

  King Farouk, exactly.

• 24:32Greg Jenner?

  So he's replaced in 1952 by Nasser, the prime minister, who sort of becomes a president figure, doesn't he?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  He does. I mean, Nasser doesn't become the first president. He's sort of the deputy to Nagib, who becomes the first president, but Nasser becomes the famous president from a few months later. It's a time of rising Arab nationalism.

• 24:50Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so there is a sort of sense of the city becoming an Arab cultural centre? And today Alexandria is a beautiful city and is still linked back to its history. I mean, it's extraordinary story, Athena, isn't it?

• 25:01Speaker 04

  It's sort of weird how it kind of goes around in circles as well, like it's kind of like multiculturalism, liberalism, and then something else, and then back to that, and then back to that, and back to that. So it's a city that's always fighting to be a certain place.

• 25:20Greg Jenner?

  Time now for the nuance window. This is where Athena and I sit in the quiet section of the library for two minutes while Professor Islam tells us something we need to know about Alexandria. So take it away, Professor Isa.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  I want to say something obvious, that there's much to gain when Egypt is studied by an Egyptian, or in this case, an Alexandrian. Me, Alexandrians today are the one hundredth generation to carry that name. Even as a child, darting across the promenade, Cleopatra-embossed pocket money clinking in my pocket, I felt the city's magnitude, its history in the air. To capture this tapestry, scholarship alone isn't enough. I discovered and translated ninth-century Islamic poetry about Alexander, and eleventh-century letters from Alexandrian Jews. I took in folktales and oral histories.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  I drank tea with family elders and friendly strangers. I chatted with librarians and eccentric vagabonds. Coffee reached Alexandria before Italy and a century before England, so cafes fittingly became central to my experience. In one, the barista wrote my name on the cup in beautiful Arabic, and I almost wept, overwhelmed by its sheer normality. In another, I paused at a portrait of Alexander blowing a big pink bubble. In cafes, I heard a dozen theories about his tomb's location. It confirmed, impossible to a non-native speaker or cultural outsider, that Alexander lives on in the city's collective consciousness.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Armed with linguistic and colloquial fluency, with cultural knowledge and memory, I roamed Alexandria's streets, unraveling the threads woven into its soul. With its universal appeal, Egypt continues to be explored, even claimed by scholars whose narratives, at best, miss the nuances of its culture and history, and at worst undermine or erase the people for whom that history isn't a mere curiosity or day job, but a defining, enduring identity. People often ask what Alexandria means to me, expecting facts and figures about an ancient city. But for me, it's people watching from the balcony. It's cats weaving around my feet.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  It's the sound of a classical Egyptian melody echoing in a moonlit café.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. That's beautiful. I've done a few You're Dead to Me's, which is a real honour. This is probably the one that makes me want to go and book a holiday, like, right now. What a lovely way to contextualise history as something that's here today and it's inherited by the people who are present there and the diversity of it. And I think that's a wonderful advertisement, rather than "in 1066", it's more like, "Come and have a coffee. We're writing a name on it. It's lovely."

• 28:14Greg Jenner?

  Thank you so much, Athena. And listener, if you want more from Athena, check out our past episodes on Haitian Revolution. We did Madame C J Walker, we did Njinga of Adongo and Matamba. If city's your thing, have a listen to our episode on Istanbul in the Ottoman Golden Age with Sue Perkins and Professor Ebrou Boyar. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in history corner. We had the wonderful Professor Islam Isa from Birmingham City University. Thank you, Islam. Thank you, Greg. And in comedy corner, we had the awesome Athena Kablanu. Thank you, Athena.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 28:42Greg Jenner?

  And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we explore another historical hotspot. But for now, I'm off to go and smuggle out my favourite library books, hiding them inside a ham sandwich. Bye!

• 28:56Greg Jenner?

  You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

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