Pompey's Pillar

Start with your hand. If the site allows it, rest your palm against the base of the column. The stone is red granite, flecked with black and grey. In the morning it feels cool. By afternoon it holds the heat of the Alexandrian sun. Around you, the sounds of the Karmouz district drift over the low walls: car horns, a vendor calling, the rattle of a minibus. And above you, one single shaft of stone rises straight into the sky.

This is Pompey's Pillar, one of the largest ancient monuments still standing in Alexandria. It is also one of the city's best-known mistakes. The column has almost nothing to do with Pompey, the Roman general who fought Julius Caesar and was killed in Egypt in 48 BCE. So why does it carry his name? That story comes later. First, look at what stands in front of you.

The column stands close to twenty-seven metres tall, including its base and capital. The main shaft is cut from one piece of granite. There are no joints and no stacked drums. Think about that for a moment. Someone found a single flawless block, cut it, and moved it hundreds of kilometres down the Nile. The granite almost certainly came from the quarries at Aswan, in the far south of Egypt. Then workers raised it upright on this hill.

At the top sits a Corinthian capital. This is the decorative crown of a classical column, carved with stylised acanthus leaves. From the ground the leaves look soft and simple. Up close they would be huge, each one larger than a person. The capital and the base were made separately from the shaft. Look closely and you may see that their stone and finish differ a little from the long, smooth body of the column.

Now the real story. On the base there is a Greek inscription. It dedicates the column to the Roman emperor Diocletian, and it names a Roman prefect of Egypt as the man who set it up. This places the column at the very end of the third century, around 297 or 298. Historians link it to Diocletian's campaign in Egypt. Alexandria had rebelled, and the emperor besieged the city to end the revolt.

After the siege, Diocletian seems to have taken steps to help the city. Many historians connect the column to a gift of grain to the people of Alexandria. In a city that depended on bread, that mattered. The details are still debated. But the core is clear: this is a Roman imperial monument from about three hundred years after Pompey died. The inscription is worn, so it can be hard to read from the path.

So where did Pompey come in? In the Middle Ages, European travellers and crusaders came to Alexandria. They knew the old story that Pompey had been murdered in Egypt. Some believed his head had been buried here, and that the column marked the spot. There is no evidence for this. Still, the name stuck, and it has lasted for centuries. In Arabic the monument has another name, Amud al-Sawari, often translated as the Column of the Horsemen.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The pillar does not stand alone in empty ground. It rises from the site of the Serapeum, once one of the great temples of the ancient world. The Serapeum honoured Serapis, a god created under the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. Serapis mixed Greek and Egyptian ideas into one figure. He was meant to give a mixed population a shared god.

The temple was built under the Ptolemies and later rebuilt in Roman times. It was more than a place of worship. Ancient writers describe a library connected to it, often called the daughter library of the famous Library of Alexandria. Then, in 391, the Roman Empire had become Christian. Under the emperor Theodosius, the Serapeum was attacked and destroyed. The column survived. Almost everything around it fell.

Walk around the site and you will find traces of that lost temple. There is a pair of granite sphinxes, calm and patient, their faces softened by time. Scattered fragments of columns and carved blocks lie in the grass. Look below ground level too. Underground passages cut into the rock run beneath this hill. Some people link these galleries to the library. Others think they had a religious use. Either way, they are cool, dim, and quiet after the bright glare outside.

The site also includes a Nilometer, a structure used to measure the level of the water. In ancient Egypt, the height of the Nile flood decided whether the harvest would be good or poor. A measurement like this could mean feast or hunger for a whole region. It is a small, practical object. Yet it tells you what this city cared about most: water, grain, and survival.

There is one more tale people love to tell. According to a popular story, British sailors in the early nineteenth century flew a kite over the top of the column. They used its string to pull up a rope. Then they climbed to the summit and, so the story goes, ate a meal up there. Accounts vary, and the details are hard to confirm. But imagine sitting on that capital, with the whole city and the sea spread out below.

Today the pillar stands in an ordinary working neighbourhood. That contrast is part of its character. Apartment blocks with laundry on the balconies frame an emperor's monument. Children walk past on their way home. Local families sometimes visit on weekends. Alexandria is a city where the ancient world sits under the modern one, often unseen. Here, for once, a piece of it still stands above the rooftops.

Before you leave, step back to the edge of the site and look up one more time. Follow the column from the base to the capital. Notice how the red of the granite changes as the light moves. This stone was cut in the south, carried down the river, and raised on this hill. It has stood through the fall of a temple, centuries of changing names, and the growth of a modern city. As you walk out into the street, listen to the traffic... and remember what still stands behind you.