Roman Amphitheatre (Kom el-Dikka)

The only Roman theatre yet found in Egypt, sitting in an excavated hollow in the middle of downtown Alexandria with traffic circling above it. Thirteen tiers of white marble seating curve around a small orchestra floor, with room for perhaps six hundred people.

The site is larger than the theatre alone. Around it lie the excavated remains of an entire late-Roman quarter, and the whole complex takes an unhurried hour.

What else is on the site

• The Villa of the Birds — a Roman townhouse with exceptional floor mosaics of birds, under a protective canopy (separate ticket)
• A bath complex with the brick underfloor heating system exposed
• Rows of lecture halls, each with tiered stone benches and a raised seat for the teacher
• Cisterns, streets and column fragments recovered from the surrounding excavation

The site was found by accident. In 1960 workmen clearing rubble to make way for a government building struck stone; a Polish archaeological mission was called in, and it has been excavating here ever since — one of the longest-running digs in Egypt.

The name is a slight misnomer. It is not an amphitheatre in the Roman sense — there was no arena and no combat — but a small roofed theatre or odeon, used for music, recitals, and probably for public meetings.

The lecture halls

The most significant discovery here came later. Excavation to the east uncovered around twenty rooms of a very consistent design: rectangular, with stepped stone benches around three sides and an elevated seat in the middle of the back wall.

They are teaching rooms — the physical remains of a late-antique university complex, and the only such structures known anywhere in the Mediterranean world. Alexandria was one of the great centres of learning in late antiquity, and these plain stone rooms are where a good deal of that teaching actually took place, in the 5th and 6th centuries CE, right up to the Arab conquest.

Layers

Kom el-Dikka means "mound of rubble", which is what the site was for centuries — a hill of accumulated debris with a Muslim cemetery and Napoleonic fortifications on top. Everything visible now was under that. Alexandria's ancient city generally lies four to six metres below the modern one, and under water along the old shoreline, which is why so little of it is accessible.