A Short Excerpt from The Electric Mirror on the Pharos Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting
CHAPTER 7
A MIGHTY TALL TOWER
This bizarre description of the good monk—whose light ecclesiastic duties probably denied him the ability to climb 1,800 feet to verify its height—should be accepted with caution. We can, however, safely assume, after about 400 years, and a description as fabulous as this one, that the Pharos did, indeed, recover from any damage that it might have suffered from the great earthquake and tsunami of the year 365.
In fact, it apparently recovered within only a few decades of the disaster, if we accept the verbal credibility of Synesius, the refined bishop of Ptolemais. Around 400 A.D., in a letter addressed to his brother Euoptius, in a somewhat amusing anecdote, he tells of booking a passage in Alexandria with a largely Jewish crew and navigator named Amarantus, whom he recounts as “a teacher of the law”—that is, Old Testament law. After getting underway, the Sabbath arrived and a horrific storm violently blew in and was about to turn over the vessel. However, the pious captain and his devout followers, being ever mindful of following the Scriptures to the letter and preserving the Sabbath, refused to navigate the vessel—and the ship and all the poor souls aboard almost wound up praying at the bottom of the sea!
Nevertheless, beyond Synesius’s probable embellishments to his story, what is important is that he noted that the last landmark that he saw in Alexandria, before proceeding on his precarious voyage to Cyrene, was the statue of Poseidon, the Greek sea god, atop the Pharos Lighthouse. So, from this account, we can be reasonably certain that it retained, or at least resumed, a reasonable semblance of its previous stature. Furthermore, for many centuries thereafter, travelers spoke of several other tall monuments still standing in Alexandria, but gave no indication that the Pharos was not still standing tall.
This, however, does not mean the Pharos was not suffering severe damage during this time. And there is one particularly unnatural example of it in the century after the Muslims had invaded Egypt and captured Alexandria—on 8 November 641 A.D. Alfred J. Butler, our renowned early twentieth—century expert on the Arab conquest, quoting the prolific fifteenth-century Arab writer Suyuti, recounts an incredible story of needless injury to the Pharos as follows:
“The story is that in the caliphate of Al Walid ibn ‘Abd al Malik, i.e. early eighth century, the Romans were so annoyed at the advantage which the Pharos gave to the Muslims as a watch-tower against sea-raids and surprises, that they resolved to destroy it by stratagem. Accordingly one of the courtiers of the Emperor went with rich presents to the Caliph, and feigning to have incurred the Emperor's mortal enmity, professed his desire to become a Muslim. He was believed and welcomed to Islam, and to the friendship of Al Walid, whose imagination he fired with stories of buried treasure in Syria. This was duly discovered; and the Caliph, becoming greedy of wealth, listened eagerly to the report of the wily Roman, that a vast store of gold and jewels, which had belonged to the ancient kings of Egypt, was buried in vaults and chambers beneath the Pharos. So the Caliph sent troops to conduct the search, and they pulled down half of the lighthouse tower, removing the mirror, before the plot was suspected. Then the people resolved to stop the work of destruction, and to send a report to the Caliph: whereupon the traitor fled by night to his own country. But of course the mischief was done: one half, or at least a third part, of the tower had been thrown down: and the traitor had accomplished his purpose by destroying the magic mirror.
“Too late the Arabs saw that they had been duped: ‘They rebuilt the manarah of brick, but could not raise it to its former height; and so, when they replaced the mirror, it was useless’ [Here he directly quotes Suyuti].
“There is no reason to question the substantial truth of this story: nor is it surprising that the damage proved irreparable. The Pharos must indeed have been a miracle of construction to stand secure for centuries, while towering in the air to that astonishing height [100 statures of man]; and the builders under the Arab dominion could not hope to rival the architecture of the Ptolemies.”
Perhaps a realistic alternative to “the substantial truth of this story” lies in the fact that in 796 “the top of the Pharos Lighthouse fell down because of an earthquake in Alexandria.” For much more on the famous lighthouse at Alexandria, read The Electric Mirror on the Pharos Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting.
This page was last modified on Friday, August 20, 2010