The produce of the valley was thus brought down the river and through the canal to the city.  Here immense warehouses and granaries were erected for its reception, that it might be safely preserved until the ships that came into the port were ready to take it away.  These ships came from Syria, from all the coasts of Asia Minor, from Greece, and from Rome.  They brought the agricultural productions of their own countries, as well as articles of manufacture of various kinds; these they sold to the merchants of Alexandria, and purchased the productions of Egypt in return.

The port of Alexandria presented thus a constant picture of life and animation.  Merchant ships were continually coming and going, or lying at anchor in the roadstead.  Seamen were hoisting sails, or raising anchors, or rowing their capacious galleys through the water, singing, as they pulled, to the motion of the oars.  Within the city there was the same ceaseless activity.  Here groups of men were unloading the canal boats which had arrived from the river.  There porters were transporting bales of merchandise or sacks of grain from a warehouse to a pier, or from one landing to another The occasional parading of the king’s guards, or the arrival and departure of ships of war to land or to take away bodies of armed men, were occurrences that sometimes intervened to interrupt, or as perhaps the people then would have said, to adorn this scene of useful industry; and now and then, for a brief period, these peaceful vocations would be wholly suspended and set aside by a revolt or by a civil war, waged by rival brothers against each other, or instigated by the conflicting claims of a mother and son.  These interruptions, however, were comparatively few, and, in ordinary cases, not of long continuance.  It was for the interest of all branches of the royal line to do as little injury as possible to the commercial and agricultural operations of the realm.  In fact, it was on the prosperity of those operations that the revenues depended.  The rulers were well aware of this, and so, however implacably two rival princes may have hated one another, and however desperately each party may have struggled to destroy all active combatants whom they should find in arms against them, they were both under every possible inducement to spare the private property and the lives of the peaceful population.  This population, in fact, engaged thus in profitable industry, constituted, with the avails of their labors, the very estate for which the combatants were contending.

Seeing the subject in this light, the Egyptian sovereigns, especially Alexander and the earlier Ptolemies, made every effort in their power to promote the commercial greatness of Alexandria.  They built palaces, it is true, but they also built warehouses.

One of the most expensive and celebrated of all the edifices that they reared was the light-house which has been already alluded to.  This light-house was a lofty tower, built of white marble.  It was situated upon the island of Pharos, opposite to the city, and at some distance from it.  There was a sort of isthmus of shoals and sand-bars connecting the island with the shore.  Over these shallows a pier or causeway was built, which finally became a broad and inhabited neck.  The principal part of the ancient city, however, was on the main land.