The Surprising History of the Sea Monsters That Destroyed Alexandria

​This weekend, I worked on translating chapters from ibn ’Abd al-Hakam and al-Mas‘udi on the foundation of Alexandria. These chapters contain a mixture of history, legends associated with the Alexander Romance, and fossilized bits of more ancient mythology, particularly references to the Arabian myth cycle of Shaddād bin ’Ād, the legendary builder of Iram of the Pillars and the pyramids. In Arabic myths, Alexandria wasn’t merely the city Alexander built but rather the successor to a marvelous ancient city called Raqūdah. As al-Marqizi put it in a marginal note found in his personal manuscript of his book Al-Ḫabar, “Alexander did not found the city of Alexandria as it already existed, being known as Raqūdah (Rhacotis). He rather restored the city and made it the capital instead of Memphis” (trans. Mayte Penelas). 

​Now, surprisingly, this turns out to actually be based in truth. The name “Rhacotis” appears in hieroglyphics on a stela erected in Alexandria in 311 BCE, and Strabo makes mention of it in his Geography (17.1.6), as does Pliny in the Natural History (5.11). The real Rhacotis was likely a small settlement, or perhaps just a port or construction yard, and only in medieval times did it become an ancient duplicate of its Hellenistic successor. However, just as Rhacotis had a real ancient pedigree, the legends recorded by the Arabs are likely not their total inventions either but reflections of Late Antique Coptic tales mixed with Islamic stories (e.g. Shaddād bin ’Ād, a distinctively Arabian figure).
 
The story itself, though, must have come into Islamic lore relatively late. It doesn’t occur in Greek literature, and the oldest Arabic account of Egypt, by Ibn ’Abd al-Hakam, a century before our stories, has only a vague notion that Alexandria had been inhabited once before: “Alexandria remained inhabited for seventy years, was settled for thirty years, and was ruined for thirty years”
 
Many of the stories told about ancient Alexandria or Rhacotis are repeated from one author to the next, especially those that claim that the ’Ādites destroyed Raqūdah and those that describe the mythical wonders of the Pharos lighthouse. The story of a mirror atop the Pharos that supposedly could make visible ships approaching from over the horizon was especially popular, as were claims of treasure chambers beneath the lighthouse and interior corridors so complex that an army could get lost in them. Interesting, the Arabic authors could not decide whether the Pharos was built by Cleopatra, Ptolemy, Alexander, or the (legendary) ancient queen Dalūka. The same stories sometimes appear in different time periods depending on the author’s preference.
 
In Arabic-language lore, there are two versions of the city’s initial founding: In the first version, either Miṣraīm ibn Baīṣar or his son Qoftim built Raqūdah after the Flood, and it was destroyed by the ’Ādites when they invaded. In the second version, either Shaddād bin ’Ād or his son built the city after the Flood, and the ’Ādites destroyed it when they withdrew from Egypt back to Arabia. The former obvious attempts to give Alexandria an Abrahamic (Biblical/Qur’anic) pedigree, while the latter version emerged among Islamic Egyptian scholars who identified Raqūdah with Iram of the Pillars, the ’Ādites’ failed attempt to build heaven on earth.
 
The second founding is more consistently told. Al-Wālīd ibn Dūma‘, the Amalekite, rebuilt the ruined city after the Exodus as a gift for the Egyptian queen he wooed, and it was destroyed by the sea in the reign of (the fictitious) Marīnos sometime after the Battle of Meggido. The third founding is always the same: Alexander rebuilt it yet again in his day.
 
In reading through these chapters, I found an interesting story about the foundation of Alexandria, that sounds like something straight out of an H. P. Lovecraft story. It involves fish-people coming up out the sea each night to destroy the city while it was under construction and Alexander diving down beneath the sea to investigate. Of course, I didn’t realize what a pain in the neck it would be to track down where it came from. I ought at this point to acknowledge my debt to Jelle Bruning’s 2022 chapter on the subject in the edited volume Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean World, though my analysis differs, sometimes markedly in places, from his.
 
Here is how al-Ma‘sudi gave the story in his Meadows of Gold, in a section he completed around 944 CE (except where indicated, all translations are my own):

As construction progressed, and despite the presence of guards tasked with driving the animals back whenever they emerged from the water, the previous day’s work was found destroyed every morning. Alexander was seized with anxiety at this sight; he pondered what course of action to take and sought a means to rid the city of such a calamity. One night, while reflecting in solitude upon all these events, a stratagem occurred to him. The following morning, he summoned workmen and had them construct a wooden chest ten cubits long and five cubits wide. Glass panes were fitted all around the exterior and interior of this chest, and layers of pitch, resin, and other coatings were applied to the wood to prevent water from penetrating inside; space was also left to attach ropes. Alexander then entered the chest with two of his secretaries, skilled draftsmen, and ordered that the opening be sealed and plugged with the same coatings. Two large ships then headed out to the open sea. Iron and lead weights, along with heavy stones, had been attached to the underside of the chest to drag it down to the seabed; for, being filled with air, it would otherwise have floated on the surface rather than sinking to the bottom. The chest was then secured by cables between the two vessels, which were kept from drifting apart by transverse planks, and as the cables were paid out, the chest descended to the very bottom of the sea. Thanks to the transparency of the glass and the clarity of the water, Alexander and his two companions beheld marine creatures and beings resembling demons, possessing human forms but with heads like those of wild beasts. Some held axes, others saws or hammers, and with these tools—so similar to their own—they bore a resemblance to laborers. Alexander and his companions sketched and meticulously drew all these monsters on paper, reproducing their hideous appearance, their stature, and their varied forms. Then they waved the ropes, and, at this signal, the chest was hoisted up by the crews of the two vessels. Alexander stepped out and returned to Alexandria. There, he ordered the craftsmen who worked with iron, copper, and stone to reproduce these creatures based on the drawings he had brought back. Once these figures were completed, he had them placed atop blocks along the shoreline; then, the construction of the city resumed. When night fell, and the sea monsters emerged from the water only to find themselves confronted by their own likenesses positioned along the coast, they immediately retreated to the open sea and were never seen again.

​The story (which was repeated by many later compilers, such as Ibn Khaldun) is interesting on its own, but I recognized it as being extremely similar to one told in the Akhbār al-zamān, composed in all likelihood only a few decades after al-Mas‘udi. The foundation of the story is the same, but the details are all different. In this version, the story takes place not at the time of Alexander and the third founding of Alexandria but at the time of al-Wālīd ibn Dūma‘, the Amalekite, during the reign of the queen who succeeded the pharaoh of Abraham. She is called Hūriā in the Akhbār al-zamān, but the stories told of her are otherwise assigned to Dalūka, the successor to the pharaoh of Moses, in other sources. And in this version, the story is a romance!
 
The story is far too long for me to quote in full here, but it starts similarly: “Every night after the workers had placed the stones of the foundations for the day, upon leaving the sea beasts tore up the stones, ruined the walls, and upset all the work. This occurrence repeated itself for months; the city’s founder conceived a violent grief and constantly sought ways to remedy this evil.” In this version of the story, the action then moves away from the royals toward a shepherd who watched the queen’s sheep. He saw a beautiful slave-girl from among the fish-people rise up from the sea, and he fell in love. She told him that they would wrestle, and if he won, she would be his, but if he lost, it would cost him two sheep. She won each time, and the herd diminished. Al-Wālīd was enraged to see his beloved’s sheep vanish, so he swapped places with the shepherd and won the next match. In victory, he gave the slave-girl to the shepherd.
 
The slave-girl then told the shepherd a secret, which he gave to al-Wālīd: “I will teach you something that you will need to write on sheets of paper attached to small stones. Painters should get into boats, equipped with the stones, and venture out in the middle of the day to such-and-such a point in the sea. There they should stop and throw the inscribed stones into the water on the right and the left, then wait about an hour. All the beasts of the sea will be gathered together in this place, will revolve around the boat, and will show themselves above the water. The painters must seize this moment to draw their images; they should make them as lifelike as possible and they should bring back the most they possibly can. When they return, you must build on the model of these images, statues of gold, copper, or stone, which you must place between the foundations of the city and the sea. When the monsters coming out of the waves notice these figures, they will run away, never to return.”
 
As you can see, the solution to the sea-monster problem is the same as it was for Alexander.
 
This exact tale appears almost verbatim in Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf around the year 1200, but al-Wālīd and Hūriā have been replaced with Gebirus the Metapheguian and Charoba. (They are obviously the same people, by context, but their names have been hopelessly corrupted.) The sea-monsters, too, have been transformed into “Spirits or Demons.”   
 
The story appears again two centuries later in the recension of the Akhbār al-zamān included in the Great Book of Marvels by Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, but now it is pushed back in time yet again, the age of the first Raqūdah. That book is lost, but al-Marqrizi quotes from it in his Al-Khitat, and this time, the monsters don’t just attack Raqūdah but the whole of early Egypt: “Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, speaking of the stories related to Miṣraīm ibn Baīṣar, son of Noah, adds: He also taught them to make talismans; as the beasts came out of the sea and devastated their fields, their gardens, and their dwellings, talismans were made against them, and these beasts disappeared, never to return. They built, somewhere other than on the river, towns, among which was Raqūdah, on the site of Alexandria.”
 
Just to make matters more interesting, Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf, writing at the same time as Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, and from the same source texts, gives the same story in almost the same words (despite also telling of it in the time Gebirus and Charoba!), but assigns the knowledge of how to combat the sea monsters not to Miṣraīm but to Philemon, the antediluvian priest who helped Surid build the pyramids! “Philemon taught them also to make Talismans; for there came out against them out of the Sea certain Creatures which threw down their Buildings, whereupon they made Talismans against those Creatures, and they never came afterwards. They built several Cities upon the Roman Sea, and among others that of Racoda, at the place where now Alexandria stands” (trans. John Davies).
 
So, where did this come from? Well, it turns out that ibn ’Abd al-Hakam preserves the oldest version of the romance story, which has very little to do with the later stories. He speaks of a time when Alexandrians feared sea-monsters who snatch them if they went out after dark. “It is told that a shepherd was grazing his flock on the seashore when something would come out of the sea and seize one of the sheep, carrying it off to a place where it disappeared. One day a young woman appeared there; he fell in love with her, and she gave herself to him and clung to him. He took her to his home, where she stayed for a day. But when the sun set, she vanished and did not come out again. He searched for her but could not find her; she had returned to the place from which she had come.” Ibn ’Abd al-Hakam placed this story alongside his description of the founding of Alexandria, making it easy to conflate the two originally separate anecdotes.
 
This story is ultimately just a folk tale of the sea-bride motif, which somehow became conflated with a Greek legend from the Alexander Romance about a serpent that attacked during the foundation of the city. It appears only in one Greek version, the Armenian version, and Julius Valerius’ first Latin translation—but not, weirdly, the surviving Syriac version used by Arabic translators:

​Now they began to construct Alexandria from the plain of Mesos and the district took its name from the fact that the building of the city began there. While they were occupied there, as happens, a serpent appeared and terrified the workmen who stopped working because of the arrival of the creature. This was reported to Alexander. He gave orders on the next day, whenever it came down, to capture it. So having received the order, when the creature appeared near what is now called the Stoa, they surrounded it and killed it. Alexander then ordered that the spot should be a sacred enclosure and he buried the serpent in it. (trans. E. H. Haight)

​I think you can see how the story evolved from the Alexander material and the folktale, gradually getting pushed farther back in time and gradually transformed into more monstrous antagonists. The bathysphere addition in some versions is another addition from the Alexander Romance, transposed from a different episode.
 
This example is particularly interesting because we can trace how a late story told about a figure from historical time became the template for later myths and legends projected increasingly far into the past. This is also the suspected pattern for many of the antediluvian myths and legends found in medieval Arabic wonder literature, even if the original tales on which they were based did not survive.