Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age 233 might learn it but indifferently, Greek became, nevertheless, the daily language of the great cities and of an enormous world throughout the Mediterranean and the East (Fig. 115). Fig. 102. The Lighthouse of the Harbor of Alexandria IN the Hellenistic Age. (After Thiersch) The harbor of Alexandria (see map in corner above) was protected by an island called Pharos, which was connected with the city by a cause- way of stone. On the island and bearing its name (Pharos) was built (after 300 B.C.) a vast stone lighthouse, some three hundred and seventy feet high (that is, over thirty stories, like those of a modern skyscraper). It shows how vast was the commerce and wealth of Alexandria only a generation after it was founded by Alexander the Great, when it became the New York or Liverpool of the ancient world, the greatest port on the Mediterranean (p. 232). The Pharos tower, the first of its kind, was influenced in design by oriental architecture, and in its turn it furnished the model for the earliest church spires, and also for the minarets of the Mohammedan mosques. It stood for about sixteen hundred years, the greatest lighthouse in the world, and did not fall until 1326 a.d. In a large city like Alexandria, founded as its name sug- Alexandr gests by Alexander, in the western corner of the Nile Delta, a Greek of the Hellenistic Age felt very much at home. Fie heard his own language in every street and market. Just as in the
