How Alexandria laid foundations for the modern worldDrawing of the two ports of Alexandria. When pla
How Alexandria laid foundations for the modern worldDrawing of the two ports of Alexandria. When planning the city, future roads and houses were marked with barley flour in a life-sized blueprint.“Alexandria was the greatest mental crucible the world has ever known”, claim Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, authors of a book on the city’s origins. “In these halls the true foundations of the modern world were laid – not in stone, but in ideas.”Although it is ancient Alexandria’s individual showstoppers – the lighthouse, library and museum – that are best remembered and celebrated in our own time, the city’s influence on contemporary life truly begins with its overall design. Alexander’s chief architect, Dinocrates, envisaged an epic gridiron that would knit together public space and private, spectacle and function, as well as land and sea. EM Forster, who became one of Alexandria’s most famous chroniclers in the 1920s, called it “all that was best in Hellenism”. [source] -- source link
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