Alexandria

Alexandria, on the Egyptian coast, was founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great and became the capital of the Ptolemaic kingdom, famed for the Pharos lighthouse and the Great Library. It was also a chief city of early Christianity and the seat of one of the five patriarchates.

Its Catechetical School, led by Clement of Alexandria and later by Origen, made the city a center of biblical theology. Gnostic teaching also took root here: Basilides taught his dualist doctrines between roughly 117 and 161, and his followers remained active in the Nile Delta into the late fourth century.

Arab forces under Amr ibn al-As took Alexandria in 641 after a fourteen-month siege. It passed to the Ottomans in 1517 and regained some of its trade after the Mahmoudiyah Canal linked it to the Nile in 1820.