Alexander the Great envisioned a city network designed to control “spear won” territory in the wake of his conquests. Alexander imagined a world bridging Greek and Asian cultures – a new era of globalization. He was willing to force whole populations across continents to this end, via city mergers, mass deportations, and resettlements. From its Macedonian foundations, the Hellenistic Age had urban roots. Greek economic influence spanned from Afghanistan to the Atlantic. Trade increased markedly, as did cultural exchange. There was unprecedented hybridization, closely reflected in city building. The urban form dwarfed what existed in the old poleis. Their geopolitical importance increased under territorial empires, the dominant form of statecraft. Cities managed flows of resources. They defended trading routes against nomads, projecting royal military power. Out of Alexander’s splintered empire, his namesake Alexandria was the closest realization of his global vision. There were darker sides to this: Alexandria was part of a system entailing political domination over peripheral zones.

Chapter 2 relates the shocking death of Elmer Ellsworth, the effect it had on his men, and the regiment’s first battle experience at Bull Run. Conflicting accounts emerged in the aftermath of the fight: some positive, heralding the Fire Zouaves’ reckless bravery; but many others were damning, painting a portrait of the men’s panic and fear.

Chapter 6 returns to William Thackeray’s Mediterranean travel writing to show how his humor fails to challenge the dominant heritage discourse in Jerusalem. Although Thackeray derides other Mediterranean sites for inauthenticity, he cannot profane Jerusalem, which means he cannot return it to human (and imperial) use, either by word play or physical contact. Anthony Trollope takes up this problem in his novel The Bertrams, in which he reconceives some places, like Alexandria, for modern use. These sites are wiped of their significance to British heritage discourse as ancient lands and rendered available for modernization. Jerusalem, though, proves too sacred, and thus too integral to British cultural heritage, to be colonized in the same way. Some holy sites thus endure as historical relics while others are rewritten as a “middle” East.

I loathe everything to do with The People,’ writes Callimachus, and this (public) turning away from the public poetry of the fifth century is a stance, a gesture, repeated in a multiformity of guises throughout the texts of the Hellenistic period. Although the practices of literary production, performance and circulation are known in even less detail for this period than for the fifth century (and many questions about, say, the constitution of the public of Hellenistic literature are simply not answerable with any security), none the less there are much-discussed and highly significant shifts both in the conditions of literary production and in the presentation of the poet’s voice which require some brief introductory remarks.

This chapter draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

Chapter 2 relates the shocking death of Elmer Ellsworth, the effect it had on his men, and the regiment’s first battle experience at Bull Run. Conflicting accounts emerged in the aftermath of the fight: some positive, heralding the Fire Zouaves’ reckless bravery; but many others were damning, painting a portrait of the men’s panic and fear.

This chapter gives an overview of the major hydraulic works that have been undertaken in Alexandria from its foundation to the Arab conquest. Fresh water in and around Alexandria is positioned as a historical agent around which the city’s plurisecular history wove itself. Built on a rocky substrate that, until recently, protected it from the subsidence that affected most of the northern edge of the Delta, the city stood on a locus that was rich in subterranean water. This chapters shows how for centuries, Alexandrians were careful to collect, store, and distribute this underground freshwater as a way to keep themselves alive. Concomitantly, geoarchaeological and written evidence document sustained yet at times interrupted attempts by state authorities to enhance the city’s commercial appeal and water supply by tying it to the Nile via artificially maintained canals. These canals’ histories, as well as those of the city’s known hyponomes, cisterns, and other lifting devices, allowed the Macedonian foundation to develop on a grand scale, and to survive during periods of water crisis.

The image of Alexander flourished across the disiecta membra of the empire he created and far beyond it. Consideration is given here to the appropriation of the king’s image in the broader sense – and principally through the medium of texts – in relation to the founders of the greater two of the Successor dynasties, those of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The legend of Seleucus was richly bathed in Alexander-imagery, and this imagery was focused, in different ways, on the person of Seleucus himself. Some of the tales focus syntagmatically on his personal interaction with the king, whilst he yet lived, and indeed in one case even after even he had died. Others serve to establish paradigmatic or typological parallel between the actions of Alexander and those of Seleucus, and some seek to do both. The case of Ptolemy is different: whilst there is again some focus on Ptolemy’s personal interaction with Alexander, much of the legend-generation focuses rather on Alexander’s relationship with Ptolemy’s city of Alexandria, the glory of which was the king’s tomb. So long as Ptolemy remained ensconced in the city, he could afford to bask in a more indirectly reflected variety of the king’s charisma.

This chapter deals with the main issues bearing upon Clitarchus and his work, moving beyond the usual division between Testimonia and Fragmenta and giving attention to the context and the agenda of each writer that mentioned him. Attention is given to his popularity as an Alexander historian and as a fine writer, as well as to the real significance of the narrative material attributed to him. This evidence can be combined with his few known biographical details in the evaluation of his chronology, which remains uncertain. The last two sections, dealing with his chronology and with the presentation of Alexander in his work, end with a question mark and invite the reader’s own reflections.

This chapter argues that the representation of the inhabited world by the Periegesis of Dionysius of Alexandria, dateable between 130 and 18, is not, as sometimes suggested, timeless, but very alert to the impact of Rome on peoples it has incorporated into its empire, and displays pride in the Hellenic culture that has spread even beyond that empire’s frontiers.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt represented the first modern attempt to incorporate an Islamic society into the European fold. Although the expedition was a military fiasco, it left a lasting legacy in the region. The invasion constituted the formative moment for the discourse of Orientalism, when all of its ideological components converged and a full arsenal of instruments of Western domination was employed to protect it. The occupation itself did little to modernize Egyptian society, because the revolutionary principles that the French tried to introduce were too radical and foreign, and met determined local resistance. But Napoleon created a political vacuum in Egypt that was soon filled by Kavalali Mehmet Ali Pasha, who, within a decade of the French departure, began laying the foundation for the reformed and modernized Egypt that later would play such an important role in the Middle East.

This is the introduction to the volume as a whole. It opens by considering Apuleius’ claims to dissection as evidence for a widespread interest in anatomy and dissection in the ancient world, particularly in the Roman period. It goes on to define the terms dissection and anatomy as used throughout the book and to lay out the overarching subject and aims of the project, while situating it within existing literature related to the topic. It particularly seeks to highlight the prevalence and importance of animal dissection, as opposed to the much rarer instances of human dissection, and to emphasize the pivotal role of the Roman period, which has often been underplayed in favor of the Hellenistic period. It concludes with an overview of the structure and contents of the book.

This chapter is concerned with Alexander in Egypt in both life and legend. Subjects discussed include his foundation of Alexandria, which became a new capital for Egypt on the Mediterranean coast, his expedition through the Libyan desert to Siwah, where the oracle’s recognition of the conqueror as son of Zeus-Ammon resonated in both Greek and Egyptian cultic terms, his acceptance as the pharaoh of Egypt, and finally, after his death in Babylon, his return for burial to Egypt, where his embalmed corpse and tomb in Alexandria became the centre of Ptolemaic ruler cult, a focal point for later visits of Roman emperors, and where the question of its actual location remains a source of continuing fascination and debate. In the accounts of classical historians, Alexander in Egypt is already variously presented; the historiography is as important as the history. From the start some specifically local legendary elements may be seen and over time the Romance or Legend of Alexander in its many different forms overshadows and surpasses any strictly historical account.

This chapter surveys the main treatments of Alexander in Jewish literature (in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic), from the Hellenistic period to the Hebrew Alexander Romances and the medieval biblical and Talmudic commentators. Themes discussed include the prophecy of Daniel regarding Alexander and Makedonian rule, the king’s visit to Jerusalem, the analogies drawn between his character and role and those of Cyrus and Antiochos IV, and the value attached to his name and personality by the Jewish community in Alexandria. The Romances tell of Alexander’s adventures with gymnosophists, Amazons, and his wise judgement given to the king of Katzia. Though a hero and sage in Jewish tradition, his aspirations to divinity make him an imperfect role model for the rabbinic scholars.

This chapter deals with two different types of capital formation. Alexandria was by far the most important royal city in Egypt. Urban centers in the imperial possessions outside of Egypt never conflicted with the centrality of Alexandria. The Seleucids, by contrast, took over a more heterogeneous, mobile and paradoxically more connected empire with a tradition of several royal cities already established. Identifying a political center is more problematic there, but governance was “a network of ever-shifting, personalized relationships between interest groups and powerful individuals based on reciprocal transactions.” There was a particular need to establish a symbolical political center that was Seleucia-Pieria first, and then Antioch. Both authors observe, however, that it was imperial competition, and to a lesser extent local discourse, that shaped the vision of Ptolemaic and Seleucid capitals. Looking at foundation myths as a guide to the symbolic construction of these capitals, they observe a deeply entangled discourse. Each court and population responded to each other and to Rome in an antagonistic interaction that manifested itself in many other forms than war alone.

In this chapter the reader is introduced to the background to Roman Egypt, starting with Egypt’s experience of foreign rule under the Kushites, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks. The impact of the three centuries of rule by the dynasty of the Ptolemies, who took over after the death of Alexander the Great, is explored; many traditional Egyptian institutions remained in place, most importantly the great temples. Many Persian administrative innovations were also kept, but the Greeks brought in their own financial practices. Substantial immigration from the Greek world and the Levant changed the population, and Greek largely displaced Egyptian as a language of power, even though Egyptian society was substantially multilingual. Periodic revolts show that foreign rule was not universally accepted, but many Egyptians became part of the Ptolemaic administration and served its economic goals, which depended heavily on exporting wheat. Romans began to settle in Alexandria in the last decades before the Roman conquest.