Alexandria

The Egyptian name of the site of Alexandria, Rꜥ-qd, built on the verb qd, “to build, to construct,” and most plausibly meaning “the building site” or “the construction.” Whether it names an older village on the spot or simply the great building-works of the new Greek city is debated; either way it is the Egyptian designation for the place, written with the determinative for a town. From it come the Greek Rhakōtis and the Coptic Rakoti.

Rꜥ-qd is the substrate beneath the most Greek of cities. While Alexander’s surveyors laid out a Hellenic grid and the Ptolemies built the Library and the Pharos, the Egyptian inhabitants kept, in their own language, this plain workaday name for the place, “the building site.” It is the headwater of the native tradition that would outlast the Ptolemies in Coptic, the Egypt under Alexandria insisting, in three of its own successive scripts, that the city had been theirs first.

The name Alexander gave the city, Alexandreia, “the city of Alexander,” founded in 331 BCE and distinguished from his other foundations of the same name as Alexandreia hē pros Aigyptōi, “Alexandria by Egypt.” It is the name of the Ptolemaic capital and Hellenistic metropolis, the city of the Library, the Museum, and the Pharos, used throughout Greek literature and inscription and carried by Greek influence across the whole Mediterranean and Near East.

Alexandreia is the headwater of the second tradition on this page, the one that conquered the world while the native Rakote held only Egypt. Alexander founded and named some twenty cities after himself, and nearly all lost the name or the city; this one kept both and became, simply, Alexandria, the Alexandria. From this Greek form descend the Latin, Syriac, Geʿez, and, through the Persian Iskandar, the Arabic names, a single king’s name spread by a single city across half the languages of the ancient world.

The Greek rendering of the Egyptian name, Rhakōtis, used by Greek and Roman writers not for the whole city but specifically for its old Egyptian quarter. Strabo reports that before Alexandria was built there was a village called Rhakōtis on the site, garrisoned to keep out foreigners, and that the name persisted for the district where the native Egyptian population lived, the quarter around the great temple of Serapis. The Greeks thus borrowed the Egyptian Rꜥ-qd and kept it as a name for the Egyptian part of their own city.

Rhakōtis is the rare case of the conquerors recording the conquered name and even using it. Greek had two names for one city and divided them along the seam of ethnicity: Alexandreia for the Greek foundation as a whole, Rhakōtis for the Egyptian quarter within it. The same split that ran through Coptic and Demotic ran through Greek as well, the Macedonian name and the Egyptian one naming, in one language, the two halves of a divided city.

The Demotic form of the native name, Rakote, current in the everyday Egyptian writing of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, exactly the centuries when Alexandria was at its Greek height. Demotic documents from the rest of Egypt refer to the great Mediterranean capital by this Egyptian name rather than the Greek one, recording obligations “at Rakote” or persons “of Rakote.” The script is the cursive Demotic of the late first millennium, which has no usable Unicode representation.

Rakote in Demotic is the proof that the native name was not a fossil but a working word. In the very heyday of Ptolemaic Alexandria, Egyptian scribes drawing up contracts and accounts called the city Rakote, as if the Greek Alexandreia on the coast and the Egyptian Rakote in the documents were two cities occupying one site. The split between the conquerors’ name and the conquered’s was a living fact of daily paperwork.

The Latin name for the city, Alexandrīa, taken from the Greek with the contraction of the -ei- to -ī-. Rome knew Alexandria intimately, as the capital of the last Ptolemy and Cleopatra, the granary that fed the city of Rome, and after Octavian’s conquest a possession of the emperor himself; the name fills Latin history, geography, and poetry. It is the form English and the modern European languages inherited.

Alexandrīa is the bridge by which Alexander’s city-name reached the modern West. Through Latin, Alexandria became the standard European name not only of the Egyptian metropolis but of the personal name Alexandra and of dozens of later towns named in imitation. The single Greek foundation that kept its founder’s name handed that name, through Rome, to the whole of Western nomenclature.

The Syriac name for the city, Aleksandriya, taken from the Greek and well attested in the Peshitta New Testament: the learned Apollos is “an Alexandrian by birth,” and the centurion finds “a ship of Alexandria” to carry Paul toward Rome. Alexandria loomed large in Syriac Christianity as a center of learning and theology, and its name, transcribed straight from the Greek, was a familiar word in the Syriac churches.

Aleksandriya is the Greek name carried east into the Aramaic world, the form through which the Semitic Near East first received Alexander’s city. It also stands at the head of the road to Arabic: the Syriac and Aramaic handling of Alexander’s name, by way of the form Aleksandar, lies behind the Arabic Iskandar and the al-Iskandariyya that names the city to this day.

The Coptic name for Alexandria, Rakoti, the ordinary word for the city in the language of Egyptian Christianity. Where Greek and Latin texts of the same period write Alexandreia, Coptic literature, including the lives of the Alexandrian patriarchs and martyrs, calls the city Rakoti, the direct descendant of the ancient Rꜥ-qd. The vocalization is given directly by the Coptic vowel letters.

This is the entry that completes the inversion. In Coptic, the native tongue of Egypt in Late Antiquity, the greatest Greek city in the world is not Alexander’s city at all but Rakote, the old building-site, and it is by that name that the Coptic church remembers even its own see. The patriarch enthroned in Greek-speaking Alexandria was, to his Coptic flock, the bishop of Rakoti. The conquered kept the older name to the end of their language, and used it for the very institutions the conquest had built.

The Geʿez name for the city, Ǝskǝndǝryā, taken from the Greek by way of the Egyptian church. Alexandria held a unique place in Ethiopian Christianity: from the fourth-century conversion until the twentieth century, the head of the Ethiopian church, the abun, was a monk consecrated by the patriarch of Alexandria and sent south from Egypt. The city’s name was therefore a fixture of Geʿez ecclesiastical literature, the seat of the mother church.

Ǝskǝndǝryā is the southern reach of Alexander’s name, the Greek form of the city carried into the Ethiopian highlands not by conquest or trade but by apostolic succession. For some sixteen centuries an Ethiopian Christian seeking the source of his church’s authority looked to Ǝskǝndǝryā; the name of a Macedonian king’s Egyptian capital became, in Geʿez, a synonym for the wellspring of the faith.

The Arabic name for the city, al-Iskandariyya, a feminine relative-adjective (“the Alexandrian”) built on Iskandar, the Arabic form of Alexander’s name. Iskandar arose from the Greek Aleksandros by way of Aramaic and Persian, the initial a- of the name reanalyzed as the Arabic article and dropped, leaving Iskandar; from this the nisba al-Iskandariyya was formed for the city. After the Arab conquest of 641 CE the geographers describe al-Iskandariyya as the still-great port of the Mediterranean, with its lighthouse and its column.

al-Iskandariyya is the city’s name as it has stood for fourteen centuries, the living continuation of Alexandreia in the language that replaced both Greek and Coptic in Egypt. Where Coptic had quietly kept the Egyptian Rakote to the last, Arabic took the conqueror’s name instead, but at a remove: the Greek Alexandros had become so thoroughly the Eastern hero Iskandar that the city now bore the name of a figure of Arabic and Persian legend as much as of the Macedonian king.