The world's most crowded cities through history

Alexandria, Egypt

When did it dominate?

300 BC - 200 BC

Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, Alexandria quickly grew to a city of around 300,000 people and was famous for its lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world, its Great Library, and the catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa. Today it is Egypt’s second largest city, with a population of almost five million.

What’s left of its golden age? Teresa Levonian Cole writes: “Little survives of the glory days. Like one of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Alexandria is a city of the imagination, which permits only ghostly glimpses of her illustrious past. The famous lighthouse, built in the third century BC, was destroyed by earthquakes during the Middle Ages, its foundations and pillars of Aswan granite subsequently incorporated into a 15th-century fortress.

“The fort overlooks the Eastern Harbour, in which archaeologists still seek remains. Statues have been dredged from the watery depths to grace the city's elegant museums while, back on terra firma, successive generations of donkeys have fallen through loose rubble to reveal, here and there, a Hellenistic temple, ancient catacombs, a Roman amphitheatre.”

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