The following remains can be visited (_see_ Plan 144).
(i). _“Pompey’s Pillar.”_ 84 feet high and about 7 thick; made of red granite from Assouan. An imposing but ungraceful object. Architecture has evolved nothing more absurd than the monumental column; there is no reason that it should ever stop nor much that it should begin, and this specimen is not even well proportioned. The substructure is interesting. It is made up of blocks that have been taken from older buildings. On the eastern face (nearest turnstile) is a block of green granite with an inscription in Greek in honour of Arsinoe, the sister and wife of Ptolemy Philadelphus (p. 14). On the opposite face (upside down in a recess) is the figure and hieroglyph of Seti I (B.C. 1350), suggesting the great age of the settlement on Rhakotis.
Probably to the Emperor Diocletian, about A.D. 297. There is a four line Greek inscription to him on the granite base on the western side, about 10 feet up. It is illegible and indeed invisible from the ground. Generations of scholars have worked at it with the following result:—
“To the most just Emperor, the tutelary God of Alexandria, Diocletian the invincible: Postumus, prefect of Egypt.”
The formidable Emperor (p. 46) had crushed a rebellion here and was a god to be propitiated; the pillar, erected in the precincts of Serapis, would celebrate his power and clemency and presumably bore his statue on the top.—There is another theory: that the column was dedicated after the triumph of the Christians in 391 and glorifies the new religion; if this is so it must itself have previously been pagan, for by this date the Alexandrians had not the means or the power to erect a new monument of such a size.
(ii). _The Temple of Serapis._ West of the Pillar, reached by a staircase, are long subterranean galleries, excavated in the rock and lined with limestone. These were probably part of the Serapeum—basements of some sort—and enthusiastic visitors have even identified them with the library where the books were kept; in them are some small semi-circular niches of unknown use. Some marble columns stand on the ground above.—South of the Pillar, near the Sphinxes, are more passages, lined with cement; these too may have been part of the temple. All is conjectural, and the plan of the Serapeum, as we gather it from classical writers, can in no way be fitted in with existing remains. According to them, it was rectangular, and stood in the middle of a cloister, with each of whose sides it was connected by a cross-colonnade. The temple consisted of a great hall and an inner shrine. The architecture was probably Greek; certainly the statue was—made of blue-black marble (p. 19), the work of Bryaxis.