Pompey's Pillar & Serapeum

A single column of red Aswan granite, 26.85 metres of polished shaft rising from a low hill of rubble in the middle of Alexandria — the tallest ancient monolithic column still standing anywhere.

Around its base lies the excavated ground of what it once belonged to, and that is the real reason to come. Two granite sphinxes flank the approach, there is a Nilometer, and a set of underground galleries with niches cut into the rock.

The name is wrong

It has nothing to do with Pompey. Crusaders assumed the Roman general's ashes were in a pot on top and the name stuck. The Greek inscription on the base actually dedicates it to the emperor Diocletian, and it was raised around 298–302 CE.

The hill under the column is the site of the Serapeum of Alexandria, the great temple of Serapis — a god deliberately invented under the early Ptolemies to give Greeks and Egyptians a deity they could both worship, combining Osiris and Apis with the appearance of Zeus. It was one of the most magnificent buildings in the ancient world; Ammianus Marcellinus ranked it second only to the Capitol in Rome.

The daughter library

The Serapeum housed the daughter library of the Library of Alexandria — the overflow and public collection, held in rooms around the temple precinct. Estimates of its size are unreliable, but it was substantial, and by the late Roman period it may have been the larger surviving part of the collection.

In 391 CE, following an imperial edict against pagan worship, the Patriarch Theophilus led a crowd that destroyed the temple. What happened to the books is not recorded, which is itself telling. The popular image of the Library of Alexandria burning in a single dramatic fire is a simplification: it declined across centuries through neglect, funding cuts, civil war and finally this — and the Serapeum's destruction is the closest thing to a definite ending it has.

What is underneath

The galleries cut into the rock below held Apis bull burials and, in some chambers, niches thought to have been library storage. You can walk part of them. Standing in an empty rock-cut corridor under a hill of broken masonry is an oddly fitting way to visit the most famous library in history.