Mike Aquilina has some things to say about Smithsonian Magazine’s cover piece on ancient Alexandria:

I was thrilled to see the cover story in April’s Smithsonian. “Wonders of Alexandria: Rediscovering the Fabled City of Cleopatra,” reads the headline below a beautiful undersea shot of a statue standing amid fallen columns. My heart sank, though, as I read the story inside. The author’s potted history of the city pretty much skips over the Christian period, moving from the Ptolemies to the Muslims in a blink. He briefly returns to the Alexandrian Church as he discusses the murder of Hypatia. Christianity is present only as an undertow of anti-intellectualism that dragged away Alexandria’s culture. I’m not making this up. Here’s the transition.

“The go-go era of the Ptolemies ended with the death, in 30 B.C., of the last Ptolemy ruler, Cleopatra … Rome turned Egypt into a colony after her death, and Alexandria became its funnel for grain. Violence between pagans and Christians, and among the many Christian sects scarred the city in the early Christian period.” New paragraph: “When Arab conquerors arrived in the seventh century A.D., they built a new capital at Cairo.”

Christianity, you see, brought violence and a seven-century Dark Ages upon the land.

snip

We can, perhaps, take some consolation because we’re not alone in this author’s neglect. The Alexandrian Jews fared little better. There’s no mention of Philo (!), the Septuagint, the Thereapeutai.

I see a trend here. This article is a worthy successor to the silliness that Smithsonian published on Mary Magdalene amid the Da Vinci Code hype. Don’t buy this month’s issue. If you want to encounter ancient Alexandria, read something good instead, something that’s relatively true to the history of Egypt’s Christian era. For instance …

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