ALEXANDRIA, real and Imagined

Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2006. Book. Very Good. Paperbound. 8 vo,. pict. paper covers, xxx, 401 pages : illustrations, index. Offers a portrait of an extraordinary city as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants and by outsiders, from the time of its foundation in the 4th century BC up to the 20th century. As the capital of a Hellenistic kingdom, then as a major city in the Roman, Byzantine and Arab empires, Alexandria was renowned as an intellectual city. CONTENTS: 1. Alexandria, the Mouseion, and cultural identity / Herwig Maehler -- 2. Ptolemaic Alexandria and the Egyptian tradition / Sally-Ann Ashton -- 3. The face of Alexandria -- the face of Africa? / Jessie Maritz -- 4. Mosaics of Alexandria / Anne-Mane Guimier-Sorbets -- 5. Roman Alexandria from the perspective of the papyri / Jane Rowlandson and Andrew Harker -- 6. Images of Alexandria in the writings of the Second Sophistic / M.B. Trapp -- 7. Life after death : an original form of bilingual iconography in the necropolis of Kawm al-Shuqafa / Anne-Mane Guimier-Sorbets and Mervat Seif el-Din -- 8. Jews and Christians in ancient Alexandria from the Ptolemies to Caracalla / James Carkton Paget -- 9. The Alexandria Library in history / Mostafa El-Abbadi -- 10. Venetian merchants and travellers in Alexandria / Giovanni Curatola -- 11. Merchants, pilgrims, naturalists : Alexandria through European eyes from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century / Anne Wolff -- 12. Environment, health and disease in Alexandria and the Nile Delta / George Contis -- 13. Alexandria 1860-1960 : the cosmopolitan identity / Robert Mabro -- 14. For Cavafy, with love and squalor : some critical notes on the history and historiography of modern Alexandria / Khaled Fahmy -- 15. Towards a social history of modern Alexandria / Khaled Fahmy -- 16. Egyptian literary images of Alexandria / Azza Kararah -- 17. A passage through Alexandria : the city in the writing of Durrell and Forster / David Roessel -- 18. Cavafy's Alexandrianism / David Ricks -- 19. Alexandrian poetry from Gallimachus to Eliot / Michael Silk..