Hypatia And The Great Fall Of Alexandria | Alexandria | Timeline

Just imagine a city that housed all the knowledge of the world, all the mathematical and scientific treatises, all the works of literature and the flights of philosophical fancy. A place where writers and artists and scientists met to debate and to pioneer thought. Just think of what ideas and inventions that city would produce, what power its knowledge would bring to its rulers. Just think of what would happen if that wealth of knowledge was destroyed, burnt to the ground or scattered to the winds. A terrible moment when civilization itself stopped in its tracks. This sounds like some kind of science fiction fantasy, but this was a reality and this was the real place where it happened. A city where its secrets are hidden beneath the sea and beneath its streets. This is the city of Alexandria and this is its extraordinary story. Although we might think that Athens and Rome were the greatest cities in antiquity, for my money, that claim could well go to Alexandria. For over 2,300 years, the city has occupied a key junction between the Eastern and Western worlds. Lying in Egypt at the top of the Nile Delta on the coast of the Mediterranean, today it's a sprawling place and every inch is jam-packed with activity. But curiously, the ancient city is conspicuous by its absence. It's really hard to get a handle on ancient Alexandria. You could wait here for that really. What was really a roll call in the spirit of antiquity, because it was here that Alexander the Great was buried. It was here that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony and Caesar and this was the home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Piecing together the scattered jigsaw puzzle, I'm going to explore the incredible story of this extraordinary city, where the Pharos lighthouse shone its beacon out over spectacular theatres, temples and colonnades. Monuments as grand as anywhere in the ancient world. This colossus is a human scale. It's more than 30 metres high. Which combined the best of Greek, Roman and Egyptian design to create a dynamic, hybrid culture. We're mixing and matching. We're being purely Alexandria. We're taking what we want, sticking it together. We're open to everything. And most importantly, where intellectual advances, new philosophies, new sciences were a driving force of the city. And that's what makes this place so special. Although Alexandria was immensely wealthy, it didn't just sponsor grand monuments. It put an absolute value on wisdom. Because wisdom meant power. And it was Alexandria's ultimate ambition to become the most powerful city on earth by capturing all the world's knowledge within its walls. An ambition which stemmed from its very beginnings and the vision of its founder. By ancient Egyptian standards, Alexandria was a relative new build. It was founded only 2,300 years ago. Halfway in time between the pyramids and us. The 4th century BC was a kind of in-between time in history. Golden Age Athens had dimmed and Rome was still a provincial backwater. But a very unlikely corner of northern Greece was about to have a huge impact. From there was going to come a man who would be a real player on the world stage. In fact, he was somebody who was going to change the world order. It was Alexander the Great. Great because Alexander's achievements were truly outstanding. From provincial Macedonian beginnings, he united the Greeks as a nation, defeated the Persians, and set about creating the largest empire the world had ever seen. From northern Greece, his territories stretched out across the Mediterranean, deep into the Middle East and towards North Africa. Alexander was prodigiously ambitious and by the age of 24 he was already cutting a swathe through the territories of the known world. But he could not rest easy until he laid his hands on the really big prize. Egypt. Because this was one of the most admired and envied countries in the whole of antiquity. The Nile River, which watered the land, gave it vast agricultural wealth, creating the manpower and resources to cover the land in glorious artworks and engineering triumphs. Even the Greeks, who thought they were culturally superior to everyone else and described anyone who wasn't Greek as barbaroi, barbarians, respected Egyptian achievements. The Greek father of history, Herodotus, said that nowhere else in the world were there more marvellous things, more works of unspeakable greatness. Such a rich prize was irresistible to Alexander. In 332 BC, he invaded Egypt and overcame the Persians, who dominated the Egyptian people for the past two centuries. But to seal his victory, he now had to win over the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people, whose unique religion and culture had been rooted in the land for over 3,000 years. By the time Alexander arrived in Egypt, this pyramid was over 2,300 years old. But the locals here didn't think of it as some kind of antique curiosity, because this is where a gold king had been buried. The Egyptians believed that it pulsated with a sort of sacred power. Confronted with a culture so alien to his own, Alexander didn't underestimate the challenge that faced him. He realised he'd have to come up with an ingenious approach to get the Egyptians on side and accept his new Greek rule. And typically, when it comes to making sense of the story of Alexandria, the clues to how he did this are buried deep beneath the desert sands. So, have you been walking down here in Alexander's day? What would we have seen? You would have seen something quite different. It would have been far grander. You would have had these limestone, beautifully cut blocks. You would have inscriptions. It would have been a big processional way, lined with statues. So, it would have been quite glamorous, not quite what it is now. Was it typical to have things underground like this? For the ancient Egyptians, yes. Underground stuff is a good place for rebirth and resurrection and anything secret, so they used it a great deal. It's certainly pretty atmospheric. Yes. And that's what Alexander had to get to grips with, a culture which not only believed in life on Earth, but which was obsessed with life after death. Wow, because I knew there was a sarcophagus down here. I had no idea it was this size. It is absolutely enormous. It's sort of 3 metres by 5 metres and it weighs more than 60 tonnes and it's made of absolutely solid granite. Oh, it's got glyphs on it. Yep, yep, here, see? You can just make out, this is in fact the name of who it belongs to. It's Harpi in glyphs and it actually returned into Apis by the Greeks. And so it's Harpi, who's the great bull god, the Apis bull, and this is his sarcophagus. So, it's a bull buried in here? Yeah, it's a bull. I just presumed, as it's so kind of glorious, it would be a human. No, it actually is a bull burial, because this was the sacred incarnation of one of the Egyptian gods and so he was buried here after his death. And here it says, Apis, son of, beloved son of Osiris, may he be given life, eternity and prosperity and so on. And here's his name one more time, so you really knew to whom it belonged. I mean, the Egyptians do do that in their religion, don't they? They mix up animals and men very happily. Very much so. For the Egyptians, each god had a totemic animal, so they were always closely allied, which is very different from the Greeks. And so how did Alexander deal with that very alien landscape when he arrived here? Alexander was brilliant. I mean, he, instead of coming in and saying, you all are fools, he instead said, ah, I am part of this whole thing, and he came and he made offerings to the Apis, he gave money and lands to the temples. The Egyptians thought, wow, one of us, we love him. And then, in this brilliant move, he also visited a temple where he was hailed as the son of the chief Egyptian god, so he was supposed to be the divine ruler on earth, which fits in with the Egyptian belief system that their pharaoh is divinely born and a god on earth. And so there was Alexander as a pharaoh, really, and the Egyptians loved him. Alexander was canny. By choosing to embrace Egyptian customs rather than just stomp on them, he managed to effect a very sympathetic kind of regime change. The Egyptian people didn't think of him as one of them, but one of us. You know, he had done remarkably well. He realised his grand Egyptian dream, and now he was being celebrated here not just as a conqueror or a king, but as a true living god. But even that wasn't enough for Alexander. He didn't just want to be another in a long line of pharaohs. He really wanted to dominate the country, and that meant creating a new city that would bear his name for all time. But first, he had to find a suitable location. The ancient Egyptians had always looked inwards, their key cities centring on the Nile. But in this, Alexander differed. He also wanted his new city to look back towards his Greek homeland and outwards towards his new empire. And it was said that he had a very illustrious figure to guide him on his way. The ancient author Plutarch tells us that Alexander was drawn to this very spot, a place called Pharos, by a prophetic dream. Then in the night, as Alexander lay asleep, he saw a wonderful vision. A venerable man with shaggy hair and a beard appeared to stand by his side and recite these verses. Now, there is an island in the much dashing sea in front of Egypt. Pharos is what men call it. Alexander believed that the mysterious visitor was none other than Huma himself, the great epic bard. And as well as being a hard-nosed politician, he was an incurable romantic. And so he took his advice, and this is where he came to found his city. But the barren stretch of coastline Alexander encountered couldn't be more different from today's hectic metropolis. When Alexander got here, Pharos was still just an island. There was a tiny little settlement here, and the coastline of Egypt was very jagged, which meant it was very difficult for boats to land. But Alexander had a grand plan to link Pharos to the mainland. And so he built a causeway running all the way across, almost a mile long, and he extended this bit here to create a man-made harbour. This would become the busiest port in the world, the gateway to one of the richest and most multicultural cities on earth. And that was only part of the dream. Alexander and his successors, the Ptolemies, ravened for knowledge, knowledge that would give them the power to trade, to build, to conquer. Their ambition, for Alexandria to become the intellectual engine room of the ancient world. Ancient Egypt, land of the mighty Pharos, living god-kings, whose people built fantastic monuments in their honour. A civilization which had been a key player in the region for over 4,000 years. In the 4th century BC, the Greek Alexander the Great conquered this land, winning over the Egyptian people and making it his own, creating a new city in his name, Alexandria. Starting from scratch, Alexander envisaged a unique model city, strictly laid out on an innovative grid system, where Greek and Egyptian culture came together to create one of the richest places on earth. Today, so little is left above ground. To get a sense of the ancient city, you have to descend deep beneath the modern metropolis into a city of the dead. I mean, they're fantastic, aren't they? Well, it's, you know, typically Alexandrian. We've got this mishmash of different styles. Yeah. The Medusa, purely Greek, the act of a demon, Greek, but then Egyptian elements. The frieze up there of copper heads and little silver disks on top, all of Egyptian tradition. And this was just the tomb for one family? Well, one family, we presume. We're not sure. There's three sarcophagi in there. No bodies were ever found. The tomb robbers got here long before the archaeologists did. They might not have left any bodies, but they've got some pretty lifelike guardians for the tomb. Well, archaeologists over the years have presumed the statues on either side of the entrance represent the owners of the tomb. But what's interesting about them is, if you look at the head of this male character over here, the face is detailed, the hairstyle is pure Roman, Greco-Roman tradition, and yet the body, you know, stiff, one leg forward, arms to the side, typical of Egyptian statues. It's quite ugly in a way, the way the two have been stuck together, though. Oh, it's not particularly well done, no, but that's part of the charm of this place, is we're taking, we're mixing and matching, we're being purely Alexandrian, we're taking what we want, sticking it together. We're not melding, creating a new art form. We're just, we're just, we're open to everything, we're very receptive. And there's a great example just inside the doorways here. To the left, you get another really good example of it as well. Oh, yes. Because this is the Anubis figure, right? Yeah. Anubis was the Egyptian god of embalming, the dog-headed figure. But look how he's dressed. He's dressed as a Roman soldier, but with his Egyptian head, guarding whoever's buried within this tomb. Isn't it fantastic? It's just like Top and Tail, isn't it? Because he's got a very Egyptian head, and then this kind of Roman body, this little Roman skirt. That's mix and match. Yeah. I mean, the only thing I think, though, is that throughout the ancient world, you do get this exchange of cultures. You know, in classical Athens, you've got Eastern cults, and the Romans are very good at taking on the East as well. So why is Alexandria particularly good at it? I think because Alexandria was a new town, and it had to sort of, it had to create its own legitimacy. It was a new town on a very, very ancient land, which had a certain weight within the ancient world as well. I mean, Egypt, the Greeks were in awe of Egypt, so there was all this sort of cultural baggage here already. But they also brought with them their notions of Hellenic culture, of Greek culture, and by doing that, it draped itself in the mantle of Egypt, but at the same time brought with it its Greek notions. It was also an extremely wealthy town, and it's a port town, and they're always open to influences. What you have to remember is that this was no ordinary city, and it hadn't grown up organically at the Bronze Age or the Classical Age like so many of the great cities of antiquity. This was, if you like, a kind of high-minded new town, the brainchild of a visionary and highly educated man. From the age of 13, Alexander had been taught day in, day out by the great philosopher Aristotle, and a spirit of enquiry was imbued in every cell of his body, and when he founded Alexandria, he passed that spirit on into the very DNA of the city. This was a place where knowledge was as valuable a currency as grain or gold. And in a precious archaeological oasis in the heart of the city, Kom Eldika, archaeologists have begun to find the evidence to prove it. A Polish team have been working on a discovery which reveals exactly where Alexandria's ideas were played out. Here we are in one of the lecture halls. Probably it was one lecture from the complex of the university. It's really interesting, you've got the lecture rooms right on the main street. Yes, it was the centre of social life in late antique Alexandria. Now we have here three rows of benches in the classrooms, and the benches are devoted for the students, and here we have the main chair, the topmost seat, probably for the teacher. You can just imagine how intimate this lecture hall would have been, seating just 30 students, studying law, rhetoric and science. And here we have a singular block of stone, and probably this kind of platform or kind of podium for the student's reclamation. So the students have to do a kind of demonstration. I'm going to be the teacher, so if I'm sitting here, it's on a teacher, very comfortably, on your steps, and then the student would be there giving their paper or presentation. Did it get hot here? You know, the lecture halls were covered probably by the flat roof. We don't have any indication, but probably the auditorium could be high, up to 5.5 metres at the level of the columns. And how many teaching rooms like this are there? So far we've found 20 lecture halls, probably it was much bigger. These teaching rooms were a hothouse of knowledge in the very heart of Alexandria. This was in no way a city of ivory towers. It was buzzing with provocative and cutting-edge ideas. Its rulers had wanted to acquire the intellectual tools to unlock the mysteries of the universe, to allow them to rule the world. It was where the mathematician Eratosthenes proved that the Earth was round and accurately measured its circumference. Where a thousand years ahead of his time, Aristarchus suggested that the Earth moved around the sun, and where the greatest minds and most extraordinary thinkers began to map their way through the stars. Now I've got to confess that Alexandria has got a particular allure for me, for one reason. It's a rather wonderful and mysterious woman called Hypatia. Now Hypatia ran her own philosophy school here, and by all accounts she was quite extraordinary. Hypatia was born in around 350 AD, and the very fact she was a woman in a world dominated by men makes her achievements doubly exceptional. For over 40 years she made groundbreaking advances in algebra and revolutionised astronomy. And correspondence from a fellow philosopher really sums up just how much she was valued. It's a collection of letters written to her by one of her former students called Sinecius. The language used is very, very intimate, so you get a real sense of her character, and just how respected she was. Sinecius says, for instance, that nothing in the world is more wonderful than her, and that even in Hades she is the only thing that he'll remember. Actually, she's been remembered by some others too. A crater on the moon's surface bears her name. A journal of philosophy is called Hypatia, and she's just been immortalised in a new film, Agora. Imagine Hypatia working late into the night, the famous Alexandrian street lamps burning outside. Her staring up into the night sky for inspiration. She was a philosopher in the true sense of the word, in that she was a philosophos, a lover of wisdom. What's really interesting about Hypatia, though, as with so many of her Alexandrian colleagues, is that she didn't just deal in abstract thought, but she had a very practical application for her ideas. For instance, she used her mathematics and her geometry to redesign this amazing gizmo. It was really a kind of multifunctional instrument, the sort of iPod of her day, if you like, only in her day it had a much more romantic name, because this was called an astrolabe. Literally, that means a catcher of the stars. One of the things that was worked on here in Alexandria and perfected was this amazing instrument, the astrolabe, your clutching one. What did it allow people to do? The astrolabe has many functions, telling the time of the day, telling your latitude, your altitude, it can measure the height of mountains, it can measure the width of rivers, but I'll tell you how to measure the time of the day. Now, here is the astrolabe and here is the pointer. This is what we call the pointer. We align these two holes, pointing to a star. When we align these two holes like this, pointing, we get a reading with the pointer right here. We take this reading here, which is a letter, an Arabic letter, but for them it's a number. We take this number, we turn the astrolabe, and we have this spider here. We point the pointers here to the number that we have taken from the back. And when we point it to here, we get the reading. You see that pointer here? It will point to the degrees. The degrees that the sun has risen, or the star has risen from the horizon. 360 degrees is equal to 24 hours, so each one hour is 15 degrees. So if we have here the number of degrees, I can know the time of the day. It's a very powerful instrument because it allows you to do all kinds of things. If you know the night sky, you know your latitude, if you know the height of a mountain, you can explore, you can trade. Alexandria did sponsor pure reason, pure thoughts, ideas just for ideas' sake, but it was also an immensely busy and practical place. The astrolabe, for example, was very beautiful, but when it was applied, it allowed men to trade and to travel and to conquer. The whole city was very enterprising and outward-looking, and that ethos was directly in line with the vision of its founder. Alexander had created a unique city, a central point between East and West, where the greatest thinkers not only explored pure thought, but applied their ideas to become real players on the world stage. The scale of Alexandria's intellectual ambition was immense, to house within its walls all knowledge, and with that knowledge, make its rulers the most powerful people on Earth. Although ancient Alexandria is virtually invisible, the ghost of its presence is there in the layout of the modern city. I'll tell you what is very exciting. Because the modern city is laid out on the ancient grid plan, when you walk down these streets, you are physically walking in the footsteps of Hypatia and all those other fantastic philosophers, and that feels like a very good place to be. The cultural melting pot with intellectual ambition, ancient Alexandria became a unique environment for scholarship, a place where the extraordinary thinker Hypatia, schooled in Greek thought, could also draw on Egyptian wisdom and Babylonian science to help her map the stars. Where a wealth of traditions from around the world combined, enabling the greatest thinkers to make scientific advances achievable nowhere else, creating a new Egypt and a model for society in the future. One of the great characters of medical history came to Alexandria. He was a man called Galen, and even though he travelled right across the eastern Mediterranean, it was the cosmopolitan conditions of this city that allowed him to make quite extraordinary advances. In fact, he was here, he made scientific breakthroughs that wouldn't be bettered for another 1,500 years. So what are these treasures that you're removing from the tubs here? There are a variety of things. There's a brain of a horse, and this one with a spinal cord attached. Oh! That's a dog. Oh, it's lovely. I hope you realise I'm very strict to vegetarians. This is way beyond my life experience. That's all right, I'm not expecting you to eat them. Good. Just explain to me, because you're a veterinary anatomist, so why have you got a particular interest in Galen? It's really because of the brain, because I think Galen was the central mover in the history of studying the brain. He was the first person who realised what it was and what it did. And why was Alexandria such a key city for him? In the European part of the Mediterranean world, there were taboos and then eventually laws against chopping up dead people, dissecting dead people, which made life very difficult for him. So he had to use animals like these, where really what he wanted to know was he wanted to know about what was going on in humans. And this was much easier in Egypt, because the Egyptians had much more of a tradition, and partly because of mummification, they had much more of a tradition of dealing with parts of dead human people and perhaps not worrying about it so much. But the brain wasn't of any particular importance to the Egyptians. There are stories of them, when they're doing the mummification, of them pulling the brain out through the nose, for instance. Yes, well, we don't know whether... It's Herodotus who said that. We don't know whether that's actually true. You need an enormous nose to get a brain out through. But it's certainly true. The thing that the Egyptians and the Greeks had in common, neither of them thought the brain was very important until Galen came along. Aristotle said it was probably just the radiator for the heart. The heart creates all this heat, and the brain is just a way of radiating it away out of the body. And so why was Galen different? How did he come to realise that there was something else going on? Because he looked at the brain. You look at the human brain, you look at animal brains, and he said, well, if you look at them, they're incredibly complicated. He said, for example, here's the cerebrum up the front with all its folds, and here's the cerebellum at the back with all its even finer folds. You look on the inside, and you see there's the brain stem down there. It's even more complicated. So it's got all these different bits, so it doesn't look like something that's just there to radiate heat away. He said it must be doing something more complicated than that. The other thing he noticed about it was, first of all, if you look at the brain, it has the senses attached to it. If you dissect a brain, this is a sheep brain with the eyes still attached. Yes, lovely. Thank you. And that's the important thing. He said, well, the brain is connected to the special senses by these large, thick nerves. He said that must mean something. And he had this wonderful phrase he used where he said, the brain is surrounded by the special sense organs as if they are the servants and guards of the great king. So he'd already elevated the brain to being in the position of a king in control of the special senses. I'm glad he added a bit of poetry to something fairly disgusting like that. And so he demonstrated that not only is it the brain where all the sensory information comes in, but also he'd shown it's where all the nerves radiate out to the body to move the body. So he's really showing the brain takes the information in, processes it, puts it out again. Really, the brain is where you think. It's where you are. And really, he was the first person to show that. That is immensely important. I mean, if you prove just how powerful the brain is, that's going to revolutionise what people think about the human body and, I mean, all sorts of things, and the human soul as well. He completely changed the way we think about the body and especially the brain. Alexandria created a buzzing environment where men like Galen and women like Hypatia could meet like minds and begin to reveal the workings of the universe. Because these thinkers weren't working in isolation. And that's possibly Alexandria's greatest achievement. It had created an environment where great minds could gather to discuss and develop their ideas. The largest store of knowledge the world had ever known. Like so much of ancient Alexandria, its libraries have long since disappeared. But modern Alexandrians have begun to acknowledge their amazing heritage with a new state-of-the-art library capturing its predecessor's spirit. There have been collections of texts and books in other ancient cities, but the ambition of the library here was quite extraordinary. Alexandria wanted to be the repository of all knowledge on Earth. And so a copy of every single book in the world was to be stored here. Every work of literature, tragedy, comedy and poetry. Every history, every scientific treatise from maths to medicine, physics to astronomy. And not just Greek texts, but works from around the world, in Hebrew, Latin, Babylonian and later Arabic. Even today, putting together such a collection would be quite a feat. But this was the age before mass publishing. Each work existed as a handwritten papyrus and that scroll might be the only copy of that papyrus in the whole world. Today, the majority of the few fragments that remain now survive not in Alexandria, but another bastion of learning. Oxford University. How many of these texts would there have been in the libraries? I reckon half a million. Everything from Homer, some of the earliest Greek papyri were texts of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Plato, philosophy written in Greek on papyrus, to, in the later period, Arabic and even earlier Hebrew. The scale of ambition is extraordinary. So physically, how did they get the work into the city? They were sending people out to all parts of the Mediterranean. They had a list of the nine canonical lyric poets that they wanted their works of, and they sent people to the festivals where their works had been composed, Olympia and Delphi, and they borrowed the official copy of the Athenian tragedies from the Athenians so that they could make a copy of it. Then they refused to give it back. So they were, in some ways, acting like bantiquarian book collectors, in other ways acting like an institution building up a fundamental collection for scholars to work on. But if you've got this massive volume of work, how are they keeping tabs on it all? How are they organising it? They developed a system which was really the invention of the modern book catalogue. The Alexandrian scholar Callimachus invented the first book catalogue which simply had an entry for author, title, genre, type of work, in this case comedy, and also the total for the number of lines. At the end, scribes were paid by the number of lines they copied, so here you can see the name of the comic poet Aristophanes. You can just about make it out. It's, yes, Stephanos. In Alexandra, are they mainly copying material, or are they actually adding to it? Are you getting new scholarship there as well? Absolutely. They're constantly commenting on them. This is a copy of Plato's Republic in which a tiny hand has been writing a marginal commentary into the margin, explaining and correcting the text, so you get the feeling of a kind of buzzing hive of readers and scholars working and operating on the text. It's so impressive, isn't it? So you've got the genius of Plato, and then you've got somebody else centuries later adding their own ideas. Access to information enabled the Alexandrians to revolutionise scientific thought. But they also studied theology. It was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek. By understanding a wealth of cultures and beliefs, they had the power to master and control. They were so intent on obtaining all the knowledge in the world that laws were passed so that no book could leave the city, and even ships entering its harbour were searched to see if new text could be found to be added to its famous library. The modern library of Alexandria has got over half a million books, which is actually almost exactly the same number as they had in the ancient library. But what it's also got here is this mega computer which, every few days, saves all the information on the world wide web. In the 21st century, we're just so used to that ease of access to information where everything is stored electronically. But in the ancient library, they often held the single existing copy of a book. So just imagine if that was lost. You'd lose those ideas forever. And tragically, that's exactly what happened in Alexandria. Knowledge had made the city an intellectual powerhouse of antiquity. It had made thinkers like Hypatia powerful forces within the city. It was an environment where new thoughts could flourish and evolve, where anyone from anywhere could voice their ideas. So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point, some ideas would come into conflict. And for the ancient world, Alexandria, its libraries, and for Hypatia herself, the result would be catastrophic. By the end of the 4th century AD, Alexandria had been flourishing for nearly 700 years, producing extraordinary thinkers like the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia. It was an immensely powerful city, second only to Rome in might, yet its power wasn't built on military force, but on the strength of ideas and the ambition to house all the knowledge in the world. And that included beliefs from the latest school of thinking, the fledgling religion, Christianity. Alexandria was always attracted in cutting-edge thought and men who were at the top of their game. So it should be no surprise that from the 1st century AD, the key leaders of a new religion should want to come here to play out their ideas. Only a few years after Christ's ascension, the gospel writer Mark came to Alexandria to spread the news, bringing Christianity into Africa. As one of the most forward-thinking places on Earth, with its tradition fusing eastern and western cultures, Alexandria was an ideal place for Christianity to gain a foothold. But reconciling a multi-faith environment with a religion whose followers believed exclusively in one god proved a testing challenge for the city. St Mark himself died at the hands of pagans for preaching his faith. It was a foretaste of the violence to come. Yet for centuries, Christians and pagans did manage to live alongside one another happily, productively. The very early Christians spent a great deal of time and energy trying to square pagan and Christian thought. For instance, one of the most prolific early church fathers who lived in Alexandria said that the works of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were science tinged with piety as long as they were righteous. Now, in a world like that, where Christianity is just another stream of thought, then Hypatia has a very secure place. But the problem came when the Christians wanted not just spiritual but temporal power. And then all that tolerance and piety becomes muddied with power politicking. Unfortunately for Hypatia, she'd come into conflict with one of the greatest political operators of the day. Hypatia herself wasn't anti-Christianity. Many of her students were in fact Christian. But the problem came when a new bishop, Cyril, was ordained in the city. Cyril not only wanted spiritual authority but power on earth. And he didn't want to share it with pagans. His arrival would change the face of Alexandria forever. You walk into somewhere like the Caesar Inn and you see what originally we built as an Egyptian and Greek temple with all the heads removed from the statues. And the cult statue has gone and in its place you have a huge cross looking down. And you see how people like Cyril could change a world. He is a man seeking power and he wishes to gain control not just of the religious state. He wants to really run a theocracy, be in charge of everything. Hypatia is a wealthy, educated pagan. To him that means witch. He puts around rumours about all of the objects she makes for astronomy, her instruments. Clearly they're used for divination. They're for finding out what will happen in the future. It is black magic and as such she has to die. And in one contemporary account we learn that it was Hypatia's work with the astrolabe in particular that sparked hatred against her. Spurred on by one of their leaders, the blood of the Christian mob was up. They started to seek Hypatia out through the city and found her driving through these streets on her way home. They dragged her out of her carriage and ripped off her clothes. For a high-born woman like her, this would have been a terrible public disgrace. But then things got even uglier. They pulled her into the Caesareum, which had been a temple and then recently converted to a church. And there, picking up anything they could find. We're told they were ostraca, which were probably broken pots or broken roof tiles. They started to flay her alive. Once she was dead, they pulled her body limb from limb and then they took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the city where they burnt them on a pyre. In effect, this was a witch's death. Hypatia's tragedy was the tragedy of Alexandria. The destruction of its spectacular monuments. The desecration of its extraordinary libraries. And with that, the heartbreaking demise of the wealth of knowledge which had made it great for over 700 years. There are a few lines, desperately sad, written by a pagan who was wandering through the streets of Alexandria watching the world he knew crumble around him. Is it true that we Greeks are really dead and only seem alive? And in our fallen state, we imagine that a dream is life. Or are we truly alive? And is life itself dead? For some, Alexander's dream was becoming a living nightmare. After centuries of onslaught, only 1% of Alexandria's vast book collection has survived into the modern world. Rather bizarrely, one of the survivors of Alexandria's destruction has ended up here. It's that massive lump of red granite, the obelisk that we very affectionately now call Cleopatra's Needle. It was brought here from Egypt in 1878. But in its heyday, it stood just at the edge of the Caesareum. So it was only a stone's throw away from where Hypatia was killed. I think that in many ways, Hypatia was an incarnation of Alexander's dream. She was living proof that knowledge is power. She was immensely knowledgeable, and therefore the extraordinary city that she lived in allowed her a huge amount of influence. But the key word here is extraordinary because Alexandria was a city less ordinary. Its ambition, that dream to acquire and to caretake all the knowledge of the world, was just too perfect to last. We should bear that in mind. It is, of course, a very modern dream. That is what the World Wide Web does. And so when we know that Alexandria failed, and as a result, a whole epoch failed, we should take a very careful note. For that reason, we mustn't bury the memory of Alexandria, but celebrate it.