Dinocrates Rhodes
The architect who built
Alexandria had roads, and a tram stop named after him. His 332 BC plan for Alexandria became a blueprint for modern town planning. Without chalk, he improvised the use of barley grain to mark roads and the angles of crossroads, competing all the while with seagulls swooping down to eat them. At the time, some said it was a bad omen; others said, a sign from the gods that the great city would nourish and sustain the whole planet.
Alexander and founding Alexandria
Alexandros ho Megas, standing on Pharos Island in 332 BC was a historical event. His Ptolemaic Dynasty (332–30 BC) established Alexandria as the capital of an independent and powerful nation-state, with Greek running for centuries in parallel with the two varieties of Egyptian language: the dying official hieroglyphics and the thriving demotic Egyptian. Alexandria was conceived in a dream, a revelation given by the gods to Alexander. She was built and designed from scratch to hold the philosophised knowledge and mind of the universe when ancient Egypt’s achievements met Greek philosophy. Alexander’s godly dream wasn’t just a smart theo-political plan but a philosophically driven divine mission.
Democratisation of Knowledge
Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, who in turn was taught by Plato , and Plato by Socrates. Those philosophers were celebrities in Greece as they debated with their opponents in marketplaces. With this philosophy-based democratisation of knowledge, Alexander set out to conquer most of the then civilised world, armed with education and philosophy before horsemen and spears. In the lands he ruled, Alexander was keen on establishing binary cultures in which Greek philosophy and thinking married with the local, indigenous ethos and wisdom. The Egypt of the fourth century BC was inward-looking, shut off, strictly centralised and hierarchal – her priceless treasures of learning in medicine, architecture, astronomy and mathematics controlled by the elite priests in her temples. The population remained ignorant of those treasures; only their manual labour and skills were needed for building monuments, farming and combat in the army. Controlled by religion and their obsession with the afterlife, the Egyptian masses had no concept of democracy, open debate or public philosophy.
Alexander’s concept of binary culture democratised knowledge, making wisdom, philosophy and science accessible to the people of Alexandria – which became the seat of world learning and the cultural, political, spiritual and commercial capital of Egypt.