Ancient Alexandria: The History and Legacy of Egypt’s Most Famous City by Charles River Editors

Author:Charles River Editors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charles River Editors
Published: 2015-08-26T22:00:00+00:00

The shape and height were the Pharos Lighthouse’s most apparent – and to some extent most marketable – features, but other aspects are also of interest to historians. On most artistic depictions of the Pharos Lighthouse, there is a statue on the very top, and most scholars believe that the statue was of Zeus Soter, the patron god of the Pharos (Clayton 1999, 144). Various coins also depict the Egyptian goddess Isis next to the Lighthouse. Isis was the Egyptian goddess of magic who came to be worshipped by many Greeks and Romans in post-pharaonic times as part of a “mystery cult” that increasingly associated Isis with fertility and motherhood (Shaw and Nicholson 1995, 143). The Romans spread the Isis cult throughout their empire from Britain to Mesopotamia until it became one of the more popular cults in Rome, so it should be no surprise that her image appears on Roman coins. However, Susan Handler believes that the image of Isis next to the Pharos Lighthouse on Roman coins depicted an actual statue and that “there was probably a cult placed in her honor on Pharos Island (Handler 1971, 60).”

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