In the north-east one can make out the remains of a nilometer, which was used to calculate the rise of the Nile flood and so the yield of the harvest. One should not be surprised to find this device in such a situation; in fact, nilometers were even attached to sanctuaries a considerable distance from the river, such as that in the oasis of Kharga in the Libyan desert, more than 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of the Nile valley (not to mention an example outside Egypt: the nilometer installed in one of the sanctuaries of Sarapis on the Greek island of Delos).

A stoa, which no longer exists, housed the ‘daughter library’ of the famous library of Alexandria. Whereas, the latter contained manuscripts for the use of the scholars affiliated to the Mouseion, duplicate copies could be consulted by the public in this annex, which housed some 700,000 papyrus rolls. It was without doubt this library which was destroyed by the Christians. The history of the library and of the Mouseion, of their organization and physical appearance, are nowadays much debated. As for the ‘daughter library,’ it must have been a center for teaching and lectures, as the story of the famous Hypatia shows. As we learn from surviving letters written to her by her pupil Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, it was here that, following in her father’s footsteps, this pagan philosopher of the fourth century taught, before being assassinated by a Christian mob. The Christians wanted to wipe out not only the pagan cults but also the whole tradition rooted in the centuries-old thought of the Greek philosophers.

Archaeologists have, however, had the good fortune to find physical remains of the foundation of the great temple of Sarapis. In 1943 and 1945, Alan Rowe, who was at that time acting director of the Greco-Roman Museum, undertook some additional investigations on the site and was lucky enough to find, in the south-west and south-east corners of the building, some foundation tablets, now in the museum. There are two series of ten tablets in gold, silver, bronze, faience, and glass, dating from the reign of Ptolemy III, which record in Greek and Egyptian the foundation of the sanctuary. It is a strange feeling to find in this way the identity tags of a building which has completely disappeared.

The cult of Sarapis was, as we have seen, linked to that of the pharaonic deity Apis, who was especially revered at Memphis in the form of a bull. In the nineteenth century, Auguste Mariette discovered at Saqqara the huge subterranean galleries in which the sacred bulls were buried. At the Sarapeion in Alexandria, two galleries have been cleared. At the back of one of them, an oratory had been installed, in which a life-size statue of Apis in black basalt had been placed. The dedication, which can be examined in the Greco-Roman Museum, carries Hadrian’s name. Nowadays guides to the site show visitors one of these tunnels, now completely denuded of the finds made there in the nineteenth century, and tell anyone gullible enough to listen that this was the famous Library, no less! It is, at any rate, a monument to the vitality of the Sarapis cult in the middle of the second century AD and to what people still felt about the relationship between this quintessentially Ptolemaic god and the zoomorphic deities of the pharaonic religion.

Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandria: Rediscovered (George Braziller Publisher, NY, 1998), p 96-97.