The Lighthouse of Alexandria: An Ancient Greek Engineering Marvel greekreporter.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greekreporter.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World and the most famous lighthouse in antiquity. It was a technological triumph and is the archetype of all lighthouses since. It stood on the island of Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria and is said to have been more than 350 feet (110 meters) high.
An accurate rendition of the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria enables an understanding of the use of Eratosthenes’ calculations of the circumference of the Earth.
Life in Hellenistic Egypt
Hellenistic Egypt was very different from the Egypt of the earlier times. The pharaoh still ruled in Egypt, though he spoke in Greek. It was still a highly bureaucratized society, although the Greeks were in charge. So, how do we know so much about Hellenistic Egypt?
Alexandria was an important city in Hellenistic Egypt and it was still an important city in Byzantine times and remained so until the Arab conquest in the 7
th century A.D. (Image: Luigi Mayer/Public domain)
The Use of Papyri in Hellenistic Egypt
We know more about daily life in Hellenistic Egypt than we do about any other part of the ancient Greek world at any other time. That’s because it has yielded tens of thousands of papyri comprising birth certificates, death certificates, contracts, leases, wills, receipts, marriage contracts, lists of various kinds, complaints to officials, tax returns, lawsuits, divorce decrees, and so on.