What Was There Before Alexandria?

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 332 BCE. The usual next sentence is that he built it on an empty shore, beside a fishing village of no importance. That sentence should never have survived contact with a map.

This is the best natural harbour on the whole Egyptian coast. It sits beside the mouth of what was then the largest branch of the Nile. It is the hinge between the river and the Mediterranean, on the edge of one of the richest agricultural regions in the ancient world. A place like that does not sit empty for three thousand years waiting for a Macedonian to notice it.

It did not. Three separate bodies of evidence — sediment cores, underwater excavation, and a Greek historian writing a century before Alexander was born — say the coast was busy. Here is what was actually there.

Rhakotis, underneath the modern city

The settlement on the site of Alexandria itself was called Rhakotis in Greek, Râ-Kedet in Egyptian.

In 2007 a team led by the geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley published a study of sediment cores drilled from Alexandria’s East Harbour. They dated the layers and looked at what was in them: ceramics, rock fragments carried down from Middle and Upper Egypt, and sediment loaded with lead, heavy minerals and organic matter. Lead and worked stone do not arrive on a beach by themselves.

Thonis-Heracleion, the port that did the work

About thirty kilometres east, at the mouth of the Canopic branch, stood the port through which goods entered Egypt. The Egyptians called it Thonis. The Greeks called it Heracleion. For a long time it was known only from texts, and some scholars doubted it had ever existed.

It existed. It is on the floor of Abu Qir Bay, rediscovered in 2000.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, already knew the place and its officials. He is telling a story about Helen of Troy, and in passing he describes the coast:

A temple of Heracles on that coast. A named official in charge of the river mouth. This is not a legend about a lost city. It is an administrator being mentioned in passing, the way you would mention a customs officer, more than a century before Alexander arrived.

The recent geology fills in the rest. A 2024 study by Gilles Brocard, Jean-Philippe Goiran and Damian Robinson describes Thonis-Heracleion and neighbouring Canopus as fluvial ports, one to two kilometres inland from the Canopic mouth, in a bay that then gave sheltered access to the largest channel of the Nile. Between 480 and 350 BCE the centre of the city was moved a few hundred metres south, onto a site now called the Central Island — a city being rebuilt, before Alexander.

Then the ground gave way. The same study reports that continuous subsidence has lowered the two sites by 4.6 metres over twenty-five centuries. Whether they sank slowly or collapsed suddenly is genuinely unsettled; the authors reach no definitive conclusion, and favour localised ground collapse on top of slow delta subsidence. The coastline has since retreated another four kilometres.

Naukratis, where the Greeks already were

There is a third site, and it undoes the other half of the story — the idea that Alexander brought Greeks to Egypt.

Naukratis sat inland, on the Canopic branch, in the territory of the Egyptian capital at Sais. Ross Thomas, writing in 2014 for the British Museum’s research project on the site, opens with the point directly: Naukratis was a hub for trade and cross-cultural exchange long before Alexandria was founded, established in the late seventh century BCE as a base for Greek and eastern Mediterranean traders.

Late seventh century. That is roughly three hundred years before Alexander. Greek merchants had been living, trading and worshipping in the Egyptian Delta, under Egyptian authority, for three centuries by the time the Macedonians arrived. Alexandria did not open Egypt to the Mediterranean. Egypt had been open, on Egyptian terms, and Alexandria changed who set the terms.

Why the empty coast persisted

Three things kept the story alive, and none of them is evidence.

The written sources are Greek and brief. Greek writers were interested in the founding, not in what the founding replaced. Rhakotis gets a clause, not a chapter.

The ground hid everything. The Egyptian settlement was built over by a Greek city, which was built over by a Roman one, then a medieval one, then a modern city of several million people. The port cities went under the sea. Until the techniques existed to core a harbour floor and survey a bay, there was nothing to look at.

And the story was convenient. A city founded on empty sand is a gift from the founder. A city founded on a working coastline is something else: an appropriation of infrastructure that already existed. The first version flatters the Greeks. It is also the one that got copied for two thousand years.

The emptiness was a gap in the record. It was never a fact about the coast.

Why this matters for where alchemy came from

It matters because the same move is made about ideas.

Alexandria is where the first formal alchemical writing appears, and the standard account treats that as a Greek beginning. But the city was planted on a coast with its own ports, its own priests, its own temples, and its own three-thousand-year tradition of working metal, dye, glass and perfume. The workshops did not arrive with Alexander either.

None of this makes alchemy simply Egyptian, and the argument over the word itself remains open — set out in the African origins of alchemy. What it does is remove the blank slate. Whatever happened in Alexandria happened on top of something, and that something has a name, a location, and a published excavation record.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Alexandria called before it was named Alexandria?

The settlement on the site was called Rhakotis in Greek, Râ-Kedet in Egyptian. Historic records name it as a settlement on that coast before Alexander founded the city in 332 BCE. What it was is argued — a modest fishing village, a larger walled centre, or a fortified settlement — and no excavation has reached it beneath the modern city.

Was the Egyptian coast empty before the Greeks arrived?

No. Sediment cores from Alexandria’s East Harbour confirm human activity on that coast for at least seven centuries before 332 BCE. Thonis-Heracleion, at the Canopic mouth, was the port through which goods entered Egypt. Naukratis, inland, had been a working trading city since the late seventh century BCE.

What is Thonis-Heracleion?

A sunken Egyptian port city in Abu Qir Bay, rediscovered in 2000. Thonis was its Egyptian name and Heracleion its Greek one. Herodotus names a warden of the Nile mouth called Thonis in the fifth century BCE. It controlled maritime trade into Egypt before Alexandria took over that role.

Why is it often said Alexandria was built on an empty shore?

Because the written sources are Greek and brief, the Egyptian settlement was buried under later cities, and the port cities sank. The underwater and geoarchaeological evidence is recent. The emptiness was a gap in the record, not a fact about the coast.