57-542: The Lighthouse of Alexandria , sometimes called the Pharos of Alexandria ( / ˈ f ɛər ɒ s / FAIR -oss ; Ancient Greek : ὁ Φάρος τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας , romanized : ho Pháros tês Alexandreías , contemporary Koine Greek pronunciation: [ho pʰáros tɛ̂ːs aleksandrěːaːs] ; Arabic : فنار الإسكندرية ), was a lighthouse built by the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Ancient Egypt , during
114-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
171-448: A 30 by 30 m (98 by 98 ft) square base. The Arab authors indicate that the lighthouse was constructed from large blocks of light-coloured stone . The tower was made up of three tapering tiers: a lower square section with a central core; a middle octagonal section; and, at the top, a circular section. Al-Masudi wrote in the 10th century that the seaward side featured an inscription dedicated to Zeus. Geographer Al-Idrisi visited
228-418: A 35 mm camera to take the first underwater pictures of the scattered remains of collapsed columns and statues. Empereur's most significant findings consisted of blocks of granite 49–60 tonnes in mass often broken into multiple pieces, 30 sphinxes , 5 obelisks and columns with carvings dating back to Ramses II (1279–1213 BC). The cataloguing of over 3,300 pieces was completed by Empereur and his team at
285-465: A dedication to the "Saviour Gods" inscribed in metal letters on the lighthouse. Writing in the first century AD, Pliny the Elder stated in his Natural History that Sostratus was the architect, although this conclusion is disputed. In his second century AD educational treatise How to Write History , Lucian claimed that Sostratus hid his name under plaster which bore the name of Ptolemy, so that when
342-527: A derived word means " headlight " ( phare , farol , far , фар , фара ). Since 1978 proposals have been made to replace the lighthouse with a modern reconstruction. In 2015, the Egyptian government and the Alexandria governorate suggested building a skyscraper on the site of the lighthouse as part of the regeneration of the eastern harbour of Alexandria Port . The lighthouse remains a civic symbol of
399-525: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as
456-478: A manner that the foundations were undermined, and the Pharos collapsed. The agent managed to escape in a ship waiting for him. Gaston Jondet made the first detailed description of the submerged ruins of the old port of Alexandria in 1916. He was followed by Raymond Weill in the same year, and by Sir Leopold Halliday Savile in 1940. In 1968, the lighthouse was rediscovered. UNESCO sponsored an expedition to send
513-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
570-403: A statue of Triton was positioned on each of the building's four corners, and a statue of Poseidon or Zeus stood on top. The fullest description of the lighthouse comes from Arab traveller Abou Haggag Youssef Ibn Mohammed el-Balawi el-Andaloussi, who visited Alexandria in 1166. Balawi provided a description and measurement of the interior of the lighthouse's rectangular shaft. The inner ramp
627-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either
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#1732766037974684-487: A team of marine archaeologists , led by Honor Frost , to the site. She confirmed the existence of ruins representing part of the lighthouse. Due to the lack of specialised archaeologists and the area becoming a military zone, exploration was put on hold. A team of French archaeologists led by Jean-Yves Empereur re-discovered the physical remains of the lighthouse in late 1994 on the floor of Alexandria's Eastern Harbour. He worked with cinematographer Asma el-Bakri who used
741-437: A view to the pleasure of present praise. Bibliography Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ),
798-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
855-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
912-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
969-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about
1026-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek
1083-705: The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the extant Great Pyramid of Giza , surviving in part until 1480, when the last of its remnant stones were used to build the Citadel of Qaitbay on the site. In 1994, a team of French archaeologists dived into the water of Alexandria's Eastern Harbour and discovered some remains of the lighthouse on the sea floor. In 2016, the Ministry of State of Antiquities in Egypt had plans to turn submerged ruins of ancient Alexandria, including those of
1140-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
1197-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between
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#17327660379741254-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
1311-510: The 19th century, represents all that is left of the island of Pharos, the site of the lighthouse at its eastern point having been weathered away by the sea. The lighthouse was constructed in the third century BC. After Alexander the Great died, Ptolemy the First ( Ptolemy I Soter ) declared himself king in 305 BC and commissioned its construction shortly thereafter. The building was finished during
1368-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
1425-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
1482-669: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs, How to Write History How to Write History ( Ancient Greek : Πῶς δεῖ ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν ) is the title of a study by the classical Syrian writer Lucian , which may be considered
1539-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for
1596-587: The Pharos, into an underwater museum . Pharos was a small island located on the western edge of the Nile Delta . In 332 BC, Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria on an isthmus opposite Pharos. Alexandria and Pharos were later connected by a mole spanning more than 1,200 metres (0.75 miles), which was called the Heptastadion ("seven stadia"—a stadion was a Greek unit of length measuring approximately 180 m). The east side of
1653-404: The Pharos. In view of this, Caesar took the precaution of landing his troops while the enemy was preoccupied with fighting, seized the Pharos and posted a garrison there. The result was that safe access was secured for his corn supplies and reinforcements. Notes After he [Sostratus] had built the work he wrote his name on the masonry inside, covered it with gypsum, and having hidden it inscribed
1710-784: The additional remains of wharves, houses and temples which had all fallen into the Mediterranean as a result of earthquakes and other natural disasters. It is possible to go diving and see the ruins. In 2012 the secretariat of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage was working with the Government of Egypt on an initiative to add the Bay of Alexandria (including
1767-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
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1824-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
1881-553: The city of Alexandria and of the Alexandria Governorate with which the city is more or less coterminous. A stylised representation of the lighthouse appears on the flag and seal of the Governorate and on many public services of the city, including the seal of Alexandria University . Now because of the narrowness of the strait there can be no access by ship to the harbour without the consent of those who hold
1938-563: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
1995-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under
2052-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at
2109-468: The earthquake of 956, and then again in 1303 and 1323. Earthquakes propagate from two well known tectonic boundaries, the African–Arabian and Red Sea Rift zones, respectively 350 and 520 km from the lighthouse's location. Documentation shows the 956 earthquake to be the first to cause structural collapse of the top 20 metres of the construction. Documented repairs after the 956 earthquake include
2166-443: The end of 1995 using a combination of photography and mapping. Thirty-six pieces of Empereur's granite blocks and other discoveries have been restored and are on display in Alexandria museums. Satellite imaging has revealed further remains. In the early 1990s, the underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio began exploration at the opposite side of the harbour from where Empereur's team had worked. Satellite and sonar imaging has revealed
2223-520: The fallen stone. The 10th-century Arab writer al-Mas'udi reports a legendary tale of the lighthouse's destruction, according to which Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan ( r. 705–715 ) the Byzantines sent a eunuch agent, who adopted Islam , gained the Caliph's confidence and secured permission to search for hidden treasure at the base of the lighthouse. The search was cunningly made in such
2280-457: The installation of an Islamic-style dome after the collapse of the statue that previously topped the structure. The most destructive earthquake in 1303 had an estimated intensity of VIII+ originating from Crete (280–350 km from Alexandria). The stubby remnant disappeared in 1480, when the Sultan of Egypt , Qaitbay , built a medieval fort on the larger platform of the lighthouse site using
2337-460: The lighthouse in 1154 and noted openings in the walls throughout the rectangular shaft with lead used as a filling agent in between the masonry blocks at the base. He reckoned the total height of the lighthouse to be 300 dhira rashashl (162 m). At its apex was a mirror which reflected sunlight during the day; a fire was lit at night. Extant Roman coins struck by the Alexandrian mint show that
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2394-572: The mole became the Great Harbour, now an open bay; on the west side lay the port of Eunostos, with its inner basin Kibotos now vastly enlarged to form the modern harbour. Today's city development between the present Grand Square and the modern Ras el-Tin quarter is built on the silt which gradually widened and obliterated this mole. The Ras el-Tin promontory, where Ras el-Tin Palace was built in
2451-635: The name of the reigning king. He knew, as actually happened, that in a very short time the letters would fall away with the plaster and there would be revealed: 'Sostratus of Cnidos, the son of Dexiphanes, to the Divine Saviours, for the sake of them that sail at sea.' Thus, not even he had regard for the immediate moment or his own brief lifetime: he looked to our day and eternity, as long as the tower shall stand and his skill abide. History then should be written in that spirit, with truthfulness and an eye to future expectations rather than with adulation and
2508-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
2565-420: The only work on the theory of history-writing to survive from antiquity. The first part of Lucian’s essay involved a critical attack on contemporary historians. Lucian maintained that they confused history with panegyric, overloaded it with irrelevant details, and weighed it down with overblown rhetoric. Lucian recommended instead the virtues of clear narration, and the valorisation of truth. He argued that
2622-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
2679-622: The plaster eventually fell off, Sostratus's name would be visible in the stone. The blocks of sandstone and limestone used in the construction of the lighthouse have been scientifically analysed to discover where they originated, with mineralogical and chemical analysis pointing to the Wadi Hammamat quarries, in the desert to the east of Alexandria. Arab descriptions of the lighthouse are consistent despite it undergoing several repairs after earthquake damage. Given heights vary only fifteen percent from 103 to 118 m (338 to 387 ft), on
2736-565: The reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (280–247 BC). It has been estimated to have been at least 100 metres (330 ft) in overall height. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World , for many centuries it was one of the tallest man-made structures in the world . The lighthouse was severely damaged by three earthquakes between 956 and 1323 AD and became an abandoned ruin. It was the third-longest surviving ancient wonder, after
2793-429: The reign of his son, Ptolemy II Philadelphus , and took twelve years to complete at a total cost of 800 talents of silver. The light was produced by a furnace at the top, and the tower was said to have been built mostly with solid blocks of limestone and granite . In his encyclopedic manuscript Geographica , Strabo , who visited Alexandria in the late first century BC, reported that Sostratus of Cnidus had
2850-671: The remains of the lighthouse) to a World Heritage List of submerged cultural sites. Legend has it that the people of the island of Pharos were wreckers ; hence, Ptolemy I Soter had the lighthouse built to help guide ships into port at night. The etymology of "Pharos" is uncertain. The word became generalised in modern Greek to mean "lighthouse" (φάρος 'fáros'), and was borrowed by many Romance languages such as French ( phare ), Italian and Spanish ( faro ) – and thence into Esperanto ( faro ) – Catalan, Romanian ( far ) and Portuguese ( farol ), and even some Slavic languages like Bulgarian ( far ). In French, Portuguese, Turkish, Serbian and Russian,
2907-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
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#17327660379742964-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with
3021-522: The wrecked condition of the lighthouse was then only noticeable by the rectangle tower and entrance ramp. He stated the tower to be 140 shibr (30.8 m, 101 ft) on each side. Battuta detailed Sultan An-Nasir Muhammad 's plan to build a new lighthouse near the site of the collapsed one, but these went unfulfilled after the Sultan's death in 1341. The lighthouse was partially cracked and damaged by earthquakes in 796 and 951, followed by structural collapse in
3078-420: Was 24 ba (16.4 m, 54 ft) in width, and the diameter of the cylindrical section 12.73 ba (8.7 m, 28.5 ft). The apex of the lighthouse's oratory was measured with diameter 6.4 ba (4.3 m 20.9 ft). Later accounts of the lighthouse after the destruction by the 1303 Crete earthquake include Ibn Battuta , a Moroccan scholar and explorer, who passed through Alexandria in 1326 and 1349. Battuta noted that
3135-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
3192-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in
3249-484: Was described as roofed with masonry at 7 shibr (189 cm, 6.2 ft), noted as to allow two horsemen to pass at once. In clockwise rotation, the ramp held four storeys with eighteen, fourteen, and seventeen rooms on the second, third, and fourth floors, respectively. Balawi reported the base of the lighthouse to be 45 ba (30 m, 100 ft) long on each side with connecting ramp 600 dhira (300 m, 984 ft) long by 20 dhira (10 m, 32 ft) wide. The octagonal section
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