Alexandria: The City that Changed the World

by Islam Issa

Overview

An original, authoritative, and lively cultural history of the first modern city, from pre-Homeric times to the present day.

Islam Issa’s father had always told him about their city's magnificence, and as he looked at the new library in Alexandria it finally hit home. This is no ordinary library. And Alexandria is no ordinary city.

Combining rigorous research with myth and folklore, Alexandria is an authoritative history of a city that has shaped our modern world. Soon after being founded by Alexander the Great, Alexandria became the crucible of cultural exchange between East and West for millennia and the undisputed global capital of knowledge. It was at the forefront of human progress, but it also witnessed brutal natural disasters, plagues, crusades and violence.

Major empires fought over Alexandria, from the Greeks and Romans to the Arabs, Ottomans, French, and British. Key figures shaped the city from its eponymous founder to Aristotle, Cleopatra, Saint Mark the Evangelist, Napoleon Bonaparte and many others, each putting their own stamp on its identity and its fortunes. And millions of people have lived in this bustling seaport on the Mediterranean. From its humble origins to its dizzy heights and its latest incarnation, Islam Issa tells us the rich and gripping story of a city that changed the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639365463
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	01/02/2024
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	390,717
File size:	37 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Islam Issa is an award-winning British-Egyptian writer, curator and broadcaster, and was recently named by the BBC as "one of the United Kingdom's most significant new thinkers." He is Professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University, has authored several academic books and contributes regularly to the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Editorial Reviews

11/20/2023

Historian Issa (Shakespeare and Terrorism) delivers a lively chronicle of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities from its beginnings almost two and a half millennia ago to the present. Founded by Alexander the Great on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Egypt at the western edge of the Nile River delta, Alexandria started as a fishing village and became a place where “East and West could meet.” Issa highlights the Ptolemaic rulers who succeeded Alexander and turned the city into the Hellenistic capital with palaces and temples; the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world; and the city’s Great Library and the Alexandrian Museum, which attracted scholars from around the world. Among other accomplishments, these scholars “developed geometry... proved the earth isn’t flat... invented the steam engine,” and collated and emended classical texts from many traditions, including Hindu, Jewish, and Zoroastrian. Julius Caesar’s siege in 47 BCE and Octavian’s showdown against Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Alexandria in 30 BCE brought the city under Roman rule, until the Arab Rashidun Caliphate captured it in 642 CE. Issa vividly recounts subsequent invasions by the Crusaders, Ottomans, French, and British, and shows how in the modern era Alexandria continued in its role as a cultural hub and social and religious melting pot. This impressively researched account reveals a captivating city through the ages. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Crackling with good storytelling across more than two millennia, this is a love letter that makes us long for Alexandria."

Paul Edmondson

"Issa combines love for the city with nostalgia for its vanished past - for a place where for over two thousand years different communities coexisted. He describes them, their achievements and their woes with admirable balance. Issa has brilliantly illuminated the history of a great city."

Literary Review

"Issa takes the reader on a mesmerising journey. He does a fantastic job of explaining the history, taking the time to share the stories, both mythical and factual, that have made Alexandria the city it is today. His history is a tribute to Alexandria, a reservoir of knowledge on the city, and sets a marker for those wishing to tell the stories of the world’s great cities. "

Al Jazeera

"This lively cultural history of the place that is often described as the world’s first modern city is full of fascinating facts and amazing stories. Issa chronicles the splendours and events of its past quite wonderfully, offering us a work that is both scholarly and entertaining."

The Gleaner

"Brimming with the sights and sounds of the streets of Alexandria, this is at once a moving family memoir, an exciting travel book, and a grand sweep history of one of the most thrilling cities on earth. A real journey, and yet a voyage of the mind to the Capital of Memory."

Michael Wood

"A masterpiece worthy of the Great Library itself!"

Tristan Hughes

"Issa is a genius guardian of Alexandra."

Women's Weekly

"In Islam Issa's monumental and vividly imagined new tale of the city, Alexandria comes to life. This book is a fitting tribute to a city that has survived, changed and grown for so many centuries."

The Telegraph

"A fascinating and important book, telling the story of Alexandria from antiquity to modernity with great erudition worn lightly."

Natalie Haynes

Islam Issa’s history takes the city from Alexander’s transformation of an Egyptian fishing village around 331 BC through its multiple subsequent lives ... Issa, an Alexandrian himself, is an assured narrator with an easy manner, who unearths myths and stories that give vivid life to his more sober account of Alexandria’s travails and triumphs

The New Statesman

"A fascinating and much-needed book about this singular city written with vibrancy and skill. Issa’s personal knowledge and passion for Alexandria, past and present, shine through every sentence."

Violet Moller

"Islam Issa's Alexandria: The City that Changed the World is the book on this amazing city that I've long been waiting for. It's wonderfully easy to read, solidly researched, and totally engaging"

Philip Freeman

"Islam Issa’s Alexandria is a fabulous book, in every sense of that word. It is a history of the city, of its multitudinous people, of its heroes and villains, of its Library and its Pharos, down through the ages to his own family and his life growing up there. It is a cornucopia of fascinating details, every page revealing a new delight. A work of brilliant and informed scholarship, as well as being a labour of love. It is as if Islam Issa was born to write this book."

Paul Strathern

Had things gone differently for Antony and Cleopatra, then today we would be lauding the glories of Alexandria instead of Rome. But Islam Issa refuses to see Alexandria as an also-ran and does a fine job in this book of guiding us through Alexandria's long, colourful, rarely peaceful, past. By evoking the splendours of its palaces, temples, libraries, churches, museums, synagogues, mosques, bazaars, dance halls and cafes, the book provides a multifaceted history of an enthralling city.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

2023-09-05
A comprehensive history of a city that has served as a “representative illustration of some of history’s most consequential empires.”

An Alexandrian by birth, Issa, a curator, broadcaster, and professor of literature and history, relates his native city’s past principally through attention to its most famous figures and rulers. Alexandria may carry the name of an extraordinary world-historical military genius, but many other celebrated figures—Homer’s Helen of Troy and Paris, Aristotle (Alexander’s teacher), Cleopatra and Antony, and the Ptolemy dynasty—have been associated with it over the centuries. Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egypt’s founding strongman, was born there; writers C.P. Cavafy, Anatole France, and Lawrence Durrell evoked it in their work; and composers like Sayed Darwish, known as “the father of Egyptian music,” called it home. Alexandria’s famous library housed the world’s first great collection of knowledge, and its lighthouse was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. As a Mediterranean seaport on the western edge of the Nile Delta, Alexandria’s grain trade sustained other significant cities like Athens, Rome, and Carthage. As Issa emphasizes in his brisk tale, the city’s founders successfully “gambled on two outrageous hypotheses: that gathering a diverse set of people to live and work together would make the strategically located spot a world trading centre; and that collecting and generating knowledge would render it a global power.” Thus, from its earliest days, Alexandria, whose history embodies most of the history of Mediterranean civilization, prefigured later, modern communities in its diverse, polyglot population of pagans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It remained vital even as it fell to successive conquests by Rome, Arab dynasties, the Ottomans, French, and British, before Egypt gained its independence in 1953 and Alexandria became the Arab city it is now.

A well-researched, readable history of one of the world’s oldest and most consequential cities.

Kirkus Reviews