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Antirhodos

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Also known as Antirrhodos, Anti Rhodes

Antirhodos (sometimes Antirrhodos or Anti Rhodes) was an island in the eastern harbor of Alexandria, Egypt, on which a Ptolemaic Egyptian palace was sited. The island was occupied until the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla and it probably sank in the 4th century, when it succumbed to earthquakes and a tsunami following an earthquake in the eastern Mediterranean near Crete in the year 365. The site now lies underwater, near the seafront of modern Alexandria, at a depth of approximately .

Key facts

Ancient site.name
Antirhodos
Ancient site.image
Plan of Alexandria c 30 BC Otto Puchstein 1890s EN.svg
Ancient site.caption
Map of ancient Alexandria."2" marks the island of Antirhodos.
Ancient site.map_type
Egypt
Ancient site.map_caption
Map of Egypt showing the location of Antirhodos.
Ancient site.altitude_m
-5
Ancient site.location
Alexandria
Ancient site.region
Egypt
Ancient site.type
Island
Ancient site.part_of
Alexandria Port
Ancient site.built
c. 250BC
Ancient site.cultures
Ptolemaic Kingdom
Ancient site.occupants
Cleopatra
Ancient site.excavations
1996
Ancient site.archaeologists
Franck Goddio
Ancient site.condition
Submerged

via Wikipedia infobox

~5 min read

Encyclopedic overview

4 sections
Contents
  • Rediscovery
  • References
  • Citations
  • Bibliography

Antirhodos (sometimes Antirrhodos or Anti Rhodes) was an island in the eastern harbor of Alexandria, Egypt, on which a Ptolemaic Egyptian palace was sited. The island was occupied until the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla and it probably sank in the 4th century, when it succumbed to earthquakes and a tsunami following an earthquake in the eastern Mediterranean near Crete in the year 365. The site now lies underwater, near the seafront of modern Alexandria, at a depth of approximately .

Descriptions of the island were recorded in classical antiquity by Greek geographers and historians. Strabo described a royal house on Antirhodos in 27 BC and wrote that the island's name ("counter-Rhodes") derived from the island's rivalry with the island of Rhodes. Antirhodos was part of Alexandria's ancient royal port called the Portus Magnus, which also included parts of the Lochias peninsula in the East and the island of Pharos in the West. The Portus Magnus was abandoned and left as an open bay after an earthquake in the 8th century.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Antirhodos” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

On the map

2 mapped locations