NECROPOLIS

It has never been a surprise to "discover" the necropolis of Alexandria, a true city of the dead, 3 km long and 1 km wide, bordered to the north by the sea, to the south by the lakes, to the east by the city of Alexandria, and to the east by the desert on which it was built. Strabo mentions its existence in writing. As with all these emergency excavations, the archaeologist specializing in the Hellenistic period, Jean-Yves Emperor, always found a way to interfere between the destruction of a recent building and the construction of another, to the misfortune of the promoters who had to wait at least six months before they could resume work.

It was the digging of roadways to pour concrete pillars to support a bridge linking the port of Alexandria to the road to Cairo that gave the team at the Alexandria Centre for Alexandrian Studies the opportunity to look over part of the necropolis (a word invented here, like the lighthouse, and meaning "cities of the dead") and to find vast rooms from the Greek period, most of them submerged by the water table that had become higher. We then discover 40 collective tombs stored in these cavities which were used to store the bodies but also hundreds of lamps, painted funeral urns, coins... So imagine that when you leave Alexandria by the street "Saba banet", or of the seven girls, for 3 km, the city that stirs all around you is a vast Greek cemetery.