Egypt to rebuild Alexandria Lighthouse, once one of World’s Seven Wonders
Egypt plans to rebuild the ruined Lighthouse of Alexandria, a monument that was once regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Comprehensive studies and a final building plan has been submitted to Alexandria’s governor for approval, Dr Mostafa Amin, a representative from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told privately-owned Egyptian newspaper Youm-7.
Built by the Ptolemaic Kingdom in around 280 BC, the white marble lighthouse stood at an estimated 137m tall. It was among the world’s tallest man-made structures for hundreds of years, garnering a mention in an epigram by the Greek poet Posidippus.
“This tower, in a straight and upright line, appears to cleave the sky from countless stadiums away, during the day, but throughout the night quickly a sailor on the waves will see a great fire blazing from its summit,” he wrote.
But the lighthouse was badly damaged by three earthquakes between 956 and 1323, and in 1480, remnant stones were used to build the Fort Qaitbay. Dr Amin said the replica lighthouse will be built close to the original site.
Lying for centuries on the sea bed, ruins from the Lighthouse of Alexandria were discovered by French archaeologists in 1994.
Jean-Yves Empereur, lead archaeologist, wrote at the time that he had found “columns of all sizes, in their hundreds, column bases and capitals, sphinxes, statues, and some immense blocks of granite which, given where they lie, certainly came from the famous lighthouse.”
Experts said the importance of Alexandria’s lighthouse lies with the far-reaching influence of its innovative architecture. Its distinctive tapering tiers have been influential in both Islamic and western styles of architecture, according to Dr Judith McKenzie, an archaeology lecturer of the University of Oxford and the author of Architecture of Alexandria.
“You still see that structure on church spires now if you look at any churches in London designed by Christopher Wren, and even minarets on the mosques of Cairo,” she said. The word ‘minaret’ is derives from the Arabic for lighthouse.
Little information about the location or the cost of the planned replica is publicly available at present. Egypt’s antiquities ministry has previously been criticised for its poor record on the preservation and restoration of its heritage buildings and antiquity sites.
In an economy still reeling from Egypt’s tumultuous 2011 uprising, Alexandria’s architectural gems have often fallen prey to opportunistic developers, legal loopholes, and insufficient government oversight.
Over the coming year, local courts will rule on whether dozens of buildings listed in 2008 as sites will be removed from an official list of heritage sites in preparation for their demolition.
In April, local media reported that the walls of Fort Qaitbay have begun to split and crack as a result of groundwater seeping in.
Source: The Telegraph
