ALEXANDRIA, called Iskanderieh by the Arabs, the only seaport of Egypt, stands on an artificial neck of land which joins the con tinent to the ancient island of Pharos. It has two ports. The old port on the west side of the town, is at the extremity of an exten sive roadstead ; there are three passages into this roadstead, the deepest of which will admit frigates, and probably vessels of the line. The new port, which is on the east side of the town, is more exposed and shal lower than the old port. The fort of Pharos, which is also a light-house, is connected with the island of Pharos by an artificial dyke, made in part of antient granite columns laid transversely.
Alexandria is the chief commercial town of Egypt. All the products intended for foreign export are conveyed by the Nile and Mahmoudieh Canal to Alexandria for ship ment. The Mahmoudieh Canal, which was restored and completed by Mohammed Ali, in 18l0, joins the Nile at Atfeh, 40 miles from Alexandria. Alexandria has become an important station in the line of communica tion with the East Indies, and its importance in this respect is annually increasing. Steam boats from England, Marseille, Trieste, and Constantinople, sail to and from Alexandria regularly, and goods and passengers, as well as mails, pass by the Mahmoudieh Canal and the Nile to Cairo, thence across the desert to Suez, then by the Red Sea and Arabian Sea to Bombay; and so from Bombaybythe same route back again.
It is an instructive example of the changes which mark the history of commerce, that this same city of Alexandria, which is now growing in trading importance every year, was a great centre of commerce more than 2,000 years ago ; while in a great part of the intervening period it sank to a position of insignificance. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, says Under Ptolemais Philadelphus, scarcely half a century after the death of Alexander the Great, and even before the first Punic war had shaken the aristo cratic republic of the Carthagenians, Alexan dria was the greatest commercial port in the world, forming the nearest and most com modious route from the basin of the Medi terranean to the south-eastern parts of Africa, Arabia, and India. The Ptolemies availed themselves with unprecedented suc cess of the fulvantages held out to them by a route which nature had marked, as it were, for a means of universal intercourse with the rest of the world by the direction of the Arabian Gulf, and whose importance cannot even now be duly appreciated until the savage violence of eastern nations, and the injurious jealousies of western powers shall simulta neously diminish."