The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The lighthouse on the island of Pharos was the only ancient wonder with a practical job. Built by the Ptolemies, the Macedonian dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great, it guided ships past the shoals into Alexandria, the busiest port of the Hellenistic world, and at well over 100 meters it ranked among the tallest buildings on Earth for centuries. A fire burned at its summit by night, and some accounts say a great mirror reflected sunlight by day. Its name became the word for lighthouse in Greek, Spanish, Italian, French and other languages. Earthquakes finally brought it down in the 14th century, and divers have been recovering its stones from the harbor floor since the 1990s.

Pharos was once a separate island off Alexandria, joined to the mainland by a causeway that silt and later building widened into the neck of land now covered by the city's old Turkish quarter. Ancient descriptions and coins show a tower in three stages, a square base, an octagonal middle and a cylindrical top, crowned by a statue, probably of Zeus or Poseidon. On its site at the tip of the Eastern Harbor stands the Citadel of Qaitbay, a squat 15th-century fortress of pale stone built partly from the lighthouse's ruins. Offshore, on the seabed below the fort, lie thousands of submerged blocks, columns and statues, among them colossal granite figures of Ptolemaic rulers thought to have stood near the lighthouse's base.

Ptolemy I began the tower and his son Ptolemy II completed it around 280 BCE, with the architect Sostratus of Cnidus usually credited. It kept working under Roman, Byzantine and Arab rule, though earthquakes repeatedly damaged it, notably in 956 and 1303, and by 1323 it was largely ruined. The traveler Ibn Battuta, returning in 1349, found it impossible to enter. In 1477 the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay began building his fort over the remains. A team led by the French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur began mapping the underwater ruins in 1994, and in 2025 the PHAROS project, led by Isabelle Hairy of the French research agency CNRS, lifted 22 large blocks from the seabed to feed a detailed digital reconstruction of the lighthouse.

• The Colossus of Rhodes
  The bronze sun god that stood over a Greek harbor city for barely half a century another ancient wonder
• The Great Pyramid of Giza
  The oldest of the ancient wonders and the only one still standing another ancient wonder
• Mediterranean Sea
  The cradle sea of Western civilization, locked between three continents guided ships on
• Egypt
  The gift of the Nile and a bridge between Africa and Asia located in
• Nile
  The world's longest river, lifeblood of ancient Egypt near the delta of