Ancient Alexandria between Greece and Egypt.

• Author: Gambetti, Sandra
• Position: Book review

Ancient Alexandria between Greece and Egypt. Edited by W. V. HARRIS and GIOVANNI RUFFINI. Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, vol. 26. Leiden: BRILL, 2004. Pp. xx + 296, plates. $99.

This new volume of the Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition publishes the acts of the conference Ancient Alexandria: Between Greece and Egypt, sponsored by the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean of Columbia University and held in New York on October 11-12, 2002. This is a very welcome contribution to the study of Alexandria almost ten years after the beginning of the new wave of excavations that have renewed interest in the ancient city. Moreover, the combination of all the individual articles invites the reader to look at ancient Alexandria in a new way--a very different way from the antiquarian approach of the still-important Ptolemaic Alexandria of Peter Frasier (1972).

The book effectively presents an in-the-round Alexandria through both chronological (from its foundation to Late Antiquity) and geographical (between Greece, and Lower, Middle, and Upper Egypt, as the title suggests) perspectives. The ensemble of all the contributions, with its wide range of treated topics, portrays Alexandria as a multifaceted city, which developed through time, shaped by its Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish heritages. Also from the point of view of the methodologies privileged by each scholar, this book presents a variety of choices, ranging from the most traditional approaches to the more recent and most ground-breaking ones.

The volume offers a sequence of articles arranged chronologically from the foundation of Ptolemaic Alexandria to Roman Late Antiquity, treating issues of demography (Scheidel), relations between Greeks and Egyptians (Baines), Macedonian and Greek heritage in literature (Stephens) and art (Bonacasa), Ptolemaic and Roman administration (Burkhalter and Capponi, respectively), the relationship between Jews and others (Birnbaum), social and economic studies of the Roman period (Abd el-Ghani), medicine (von Staden), and religion and culture in Roman Egypt--Christian, traditional, pagan (Haas, Haggag, Ruffini). This is all crowned by el-Abbadi's reflections on the myth of the foundation of the city. But the reader may just as well attempt a personalized approach to the book, without ever losing the idea of the complexity of Alexandria conveyed by the volume in its entirety.

The role of Alexandria as cultural and political center of the...