The Pharos, the enormous third-century BCE lighthouse that offered Mediterranean sailors a safe welcome to Alexandria, Egypt, is easily one of the most fascinating buildings of antiquity. It stood until the fourteenth century, when it was destroyed by an earthquake. Its disintegration was, however, not an annihilation: its blocks lie strewn on the seabed near the original site and are still studied today. The Qaitbey Fortress was later built on the spot where the Pharos once stood.
The author of the quirky publication under review aims to bring scientific rigor to the study of the Pharos, which he argues has been relatively neglected, and to explain the Alexandrian author Achilles Tatius’ remark (Leucippe and Clitophon 5.6) that the lighthouse was like a “second sun”. The book also serves to work toward a new reconstruction, which the author hopes will be shown in a 3D model (discussed in chapter 11). In many places, the book responds to older literature, such as Hermann Thiersch’s important 1909 book, in which a much-reproduced reconstruction first appeared.[1]
As with so many ancient wonders, the reception history of the Pharos, even within antiquity itself, is often as interesting as the original construction; reception history is what our sources give us, and it is through these sources that we must understand and reconstruct the monument when material culture does not tell us enough. In this case, the “late” Arab context of the Pharos cannot be ignored, as it is in those centuries that the Pharos was perhaps most influential as a wonder: it would seem possible that the minarets of Egyptian mosques may even be based on the Pharos’ architecture. Reports from this era, such as that by Al-Masudi, are especially valuable, and fortunately the book engages with these texts throughout.
The first five chapters concern the Pharos’ “Genesis”, “Fame”, “Fate”, “Fantasies”, and “Form”, followed by more technical chapters on tall buildings generally, the Pharos’ height, the statue that stood on top, its light, reconstruction, and modern legacy. The division can seem arbitrary at times, with some contents seemingly randomly assigned to each chapter. One moment the subject is Alexander the Great as the possible patron of the Pharos; the next it is proto-colonialism, building material, sculpted phalluses, or Arab sources. This stream of information is sometimes difficult to follow. A division of chapters into source type, or one treating each constructional element strictly in turn, might have made more sense.
In the first chapter, the author puts Sostratos of Knidos in the spotlight as the architect of the lighthouse. The next chapter contains a discussion of its status as the Seventh Wonder of Antiquity, as announced in the book’s subtitle. The author correctly observes that the Pharos’ status as a wonder is late, since it first appears in a sixth-century list by Gregory of Tours (p. 28); yet he still treats the list we use today as traditional and speaks of the lighthouse’s “incorporation in the list of the Seven Wonders of the World” (p. 24). The difficulty is that no list survives from the ancient world in which the Pharos is deemed a wonder; and I fail to see how one can call it the seventh with confidence. It is true that in the Dutch Renaissance, Hadrianus Junius and Maarten van Heemskerck included it in a list and depictions of eight wonders (also featuring the Colosseum, with Martial’s De Spectaculis an obvious source). However, it remains unclear why these men recognized the Pharos as a wonder instead of the Altar of Horns on Delos, which Martial did mention. It is furthermore unclear how, where and when the often-cited modern list of seven wonders (Hadrianus’ list minus the Colosseum) came into existence. The author rightly recognizes that Junius’ list rests on something now perhaps lost; but there is no engagement with Kai Brodersen’s important books, in which all extant lists of wonders are conveniently collected.[2] Strangely, the author speculates that, because Babylon lost much of its status after 305 BCE, the list we have must be older (p. 27), and was possibly even compiled by Callimachus, for which there is, however, no evidence. The author further reasons that a wonder could be included in a list only if it still existed, so that the disappearance of a wonder furnishes a terminus ante quem for the list. However, the wonder lists may reflect bucket lists by eyewitnesses, imaginary records based on traditional memory on existing or disappeared wonders, or anything in between. We must therefore be very careful in making such assessments.
Returning to the actual Pharos, many new ideas are presented here—and they come fast and furious. It is helpful that the author takes clear positions on what is real and what is fantasy and offers a definite reconstruction. However, many questions remain. For example, the 800 talents of silver spent on the Pharos’ construction are called relatively cheap—but relative to what? More explanation of the historical value to ancient and medieval reports of earthquakes and damage at the lighthouse would have been welcome. And it is not clear how much weight can be put on the idea found in Arab sources that Alexander the Great was responsible for its commissioning, or that the statue on top was a Helios representing Alexander, as the author believes for the Colossus of Rhodes.[3] A more careful disentanglement of lore, reception, and the actual Pharos would have been useful.
Ideas about the Pharos’ appearance drawn from pictorial representations could have been substantiated with more comparative evidence. The reconstructions (including Thiersch’s) that crown the Pharos with a round cupola supported by columns and a fire within may well be a fantasy. Yet, can an engraved gem seal demonstrate that the statues on the Pharos are tritons with drooping phalluses, as the author speculates, or rather the forelegs of ichthyocentaurs? Can Pirro Ligorio’s sixteenth-century drawing, which shows no phalluses, therefore be a “polite side-stepping of the need to portray the prominent phalluses” (pp. 57–58)? Did the figures’ horns blow in the wind? Did the statue on top of the Pharos revolve, and can such a conclusion be drawn from coins? In general, it is unclear why certain pictorial representations used in these arguments should be taken as representative in their details while others should not.
Many parts of the book deliver on the author’s promise to bring a scientific perspective to the Pharos in a way that classicists often do not feel comfortable researching.[4] It is argued that the lighthouse covered the entire area of the Qaitbey fortress rather than a smaller internal footprint, that all the blocks found by divers around the fortress originate from the Pharos, and that its internal structure consisted of stacked rings of columns surrounded by tapering walls. There is also an investigation of the range of the Pharos’ light in relation to the curvature of the earth, which leads to a digression on Eratosthenes and Hellenistic calculations of the distances between the earth, the sun, and the moon. One chapter is devoted to the light of the Pharos. It remains unclear how this light was produced, even though our accounts speak of a mirror on top of the tower that could see as far as Constantinople. The author provides calculations to demonstrate the intensity of the fire or light and proposes that the lamp was a transparent globe held by the Helios-Alexander statue on top. These conclusions are reached through expositions of relevant physics formulas. To this reviewer, this approach may clarify what was physically possible, and the ensuing ideas are worth contemplating. However, they do not necessarily demonstrate how the actual Pharos was built and functioned.
The writing style is colorful but at times distracting. In the introductory paragraph to each chapter especially, the reader is surprised by forced alliteration (which extends into the chapter titles), by tautologies, and, more than once, by the gratuitous description of the Pharos in sexual terms, as a phallus (e.g., p. 62). It is helpful that many original texts are given to the reader in translation, though it is unclear why the original Greek or Latin is supplied in some cases but not others. The book also suffers somewhat from low-resolution, black-and-white images that obscure their own content: for example, in the case of detailed maps. Full-color print would have suited this spectacular material; as it is, the visuals fall flat.
In sum, this book offers idiosyncratic and interesting perspectives on the Pharos from a physics-based standpoint, which could, however, have benefitted from more contextual evidence. The book can serve as an introduction to the sources for the lighthouse and is mostly an enjoyable read even if better production could have been made this “second sun” of antiquity truly shine again in print.
Notes
[1] Hermann Thiersch, Pharos. Antike, Islam und Occident. Ein Beitrag zur Architekturgeschichte. Leipzig, Berlin: Teubner, 1909.
[2] Kai Brodersen, Reiseführer zu den Sieben Weltwundern: Philon von Byzanz und andere antike Texte. Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1992; Kai Brodersen, Die sieben Weltwunder: legendäre Kunst- und Bauwerke der Antike. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996.
[3] This identification is not found in Nathan Badoud’s excellent The Colossus of Rhodes: Archaeology of a Lost Wonder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
[4] Not unlike Michael Denis Higgins, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: Science, Engineering and Technology. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.