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Of all the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt still remain. War, neglect, and natural disasters have wiped them from the face of the earth with only descriptions left by ancient historians and geographers, or perhaps an occasional coin or painting, as tokens of their greatness. Since the Seven Wonders were first formulated by Greeks, most of the Wonders were located in and around Greece, but two of them were found in Egypt.

====The Construction of the Lighthouse====

Although located in Egypt, the city of Alexandria was founded by the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great when the wrested Egypt away from the Persians in 331 BC. Alexander liked the location of the area because of its natural harbor and so decided to build a city there as a monument to his greatness and to promote the Greek concept of Hellenism. Construction of the city began under the first of the Greek-Macedonian rulers of Egypt, Ptolemy I (ruled 305-282 BC), who commissioned the architect Dinocrates of Rhodes to design the city on a grid-pattern, which was quite revolutionary at the time. <ref> Clayton, Peter A. “The Pharos at Alexandria.” In <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415050367/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0415050367&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=0c34edcaf986a3565afe119b4add2288 The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World].</i> Edited by Peter Clayton and Martin J. Price. (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 140</ref> The centerpiece of this bold new city would be the landmark known as the Pharos Lighthouse or Lighthouse of Alexandria.

Although Caesar’s troops caused a certain amount of destruction on the Pharos Island and also apparently to the Lighthouse itself, it took little time for the Romans to rebuild Egypt’s second entry into the Seven Wonders of the World. Alexandria continued to be an important city once its control passed from the Ptolemies to the Romans. The Romans apparently quickly repaired the damage to the Lighthouse because when the first century AD Jewish historian Josephus wrote about it, no damage was mentioned.

“For Egypt is difficult to enter by land, and the coast is almost harbourless. . . It is difficult even in peacetime for ships to approach the harbour of Alexandria; the entrance is narrow, and submerged rocks make a straight course impossible. The left side is shut in by artificial moles; on the right the island of Pharos lies off shore, and from this rises an enormous lighthouse whose fires are visible thirty-five miles away, warning visiting ships to anchor at night well away from the shore because of the difficulty of making port.” <ref> Josephus. <i> [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0913573868/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0913573868&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=f5b83d2e6b5f8e95048b5b4745ac77f2 The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged].</i> Translated by William Whiston. (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1987), Book IV, 6043</ref>

Besides demonstrating that the Lighthouse was functioning fully again about 100 years after Caesar’s campaign, Josephus’ passage relates that it was a true lighthouse, which used firewood as its source for light. Other ancient descriptions of the Lighthouse can be found on coins that were minted in Alexandria during the Roman period. The so-called “Pharos Coins,” which featured a depiction of the Lighthouse, were issued through the reigns of six emperors from Domitian through Marucs Auerilius and then again in the twenty-ninth year of Commodus. <ref> Handler, Susan. “Architecture on the Roman coins of Alexandria.” <i>American Journal of Archaeology</i> 75 (1971), p. 182</ref>

====The Destruction of the Lighthouse of Alexandria====

As discussed above, the Lighthouse of Alexandria incurred its first recorded man-made damage at the hands of Julius Caesar. There were few accounts written about the Lighthouse after Josephus. The medieval Islamic historian, Ibn Battuta, visited Alexandria twice during his epic journeys of the Islamic world – 1326 and 1349 – and found the Lighthouse severely damaged on his first trip and all but destroyed on the second trip. Battua never gave an opinion on what caused the destruction. Thanks to advances in science, modern scholars have been able to determine that much of the damage the Lighthouse suffered in the post-Roman/Islamic Period was due to nature.

Alexandria was a city built by Greeks and then inherited by the Romans and later the Byzantine Empire. To these peoples, Alexandria was an important place in their empires and the Lighthouse was the physical focal point of the city, both literally and metaphorically. When the Arab Muslims conquered Egypt in AD 642, they viewed the city of Alexandria and the Lighthouse in very different manner. Although the Muslims were impressed with certain aspects of Hellenic Civilization, they were not part of it and monuments such as the Seven Wonders of the World list were of little consequence to them. Egypt played an important role in the new caliphate, but the newly built city of Cairo, not Alexandria, became the focal point of medieval Egypt.

====Conclusion====

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