Founded in 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, Alexandria was intended to supersede Naucratis as a Greek centre in Egypt, and to be the link between Macedonia and the rich Nile Valley. If such a city was to be on the Egyptian coast, there was only one possible site, behind the screen of the Pharos island and removed from the silt thrown out by the Niles mouth. His keen eye noted the strategic possibilities of the site occupied by an Egyptian townlet, Rhacotis, already stood on the shore and was a resort of fishermen and where in the old days the Pharaohs stationed a garrison to prevent the Greek pirates from coming on shore. Behind it (according to the Alexandrian treatise, known as pseudo-Callisthenes) were five native villages scattered along the strip between Lake Mareotis and the sea. Alexander occupied Pharos, and had a walled city marked out by Deinocrates on the mainland to include Rhacotis. The city itself had been created by adding to the ancient Pharaonic city of Rhacotis, a suburb called Neapolis to the west. The two cities together came to be called Alexandria. The apparent plan of this was to provide Alexander with a naval base for his assault on Persia.
A few months later he left Egypt for the East and never returned to his city; but his corpse was ultimately entombed there. His viceroy, Cleomenes, continued the creation of Alexandria. The Heptastadium, however, and the mainland quarters seem to have been mainly Ptolemaic work. Inheriting the trade of ruined Tyre and becoming the centre of the new commerce between Europe and the Arabian and Indian East, the city grew in less than a century to be larger than Carthage; and for some centuries more it had to acknowledge no superior but Rome. It was a centre not only of Hellenism but of Semitism, and the greatest Jewish city in the world.
Today, Rhacotis is now a park featuring Pompey's pillar, raised in AD 300 for Diocletian, and the two red granite Ptolemaic Sphinxes. In 280 BC the great temple of Serapis stood on the Hill of Rhacotis in Alexandria. The Ptolomies had build a new suburb beside the old town (inhabited already for more than 1000 years) and calls old and new jointly after Alexander the Great. The foundation ceremony of which took place on 25th of the Egyptian month of Tybi (20th January), was intended, among other things, to be the connecting link between Alexander's kingdom in Macedonia and Greece which lay under his enforced hegemony, on the one hand and the eastern empire which he was in the process of acquiring at the time on the other. The final unity of the two regimes under his sway marked the turning point of a new era. It was impossible to restore the line of ancient kings. The Egyptians therefore cheerfully submitted to the Ptolemies, who reciprocated this kindly feeling to the full. They patronised the Egyptian religion, they built many temples in the ancient style, they went to the city of Memphis to be crowned, they sacrificed to the Nile at the rising of the waters, and they assumed the divine titles of the Pharaohs. The priests were content, and in Egypt the people were always guided by the priests. The Rosetta Stone, that remarkable monument which, with its inscription in Greek, in the Egyptian vernacular, and in the sacred hieroglyphics, has afforded the means of deciphering the mysterious language of the Nile, was a memorial of gratitude from the Egyptian priests to a Greek king, to whom in return for favours conferred they erected an image and a golden shrine.
But while the Ptolemies were Pharaohs to the Egyptians, they were Greeks to the colonists of Alexandria
