The Moving Statues of Alexandria

Statues move in Alexandria. So do obelisks. Seven hundred and fifty ton blocks of stone quarried at Aswan and erected by the Pharaohs in the sanctuary of the sun god at Heliopolis were “borrowed” by the Ptolemies to decorate their new capital at Alexandria. Then the Roman emperors came along with the same idea and took them to Rome. Thereafter, these stones travelled to London and to New York where they still stand. In the modern era, bronze and marble statues, of Saad Zaghloul or of Mohamed Ali and Alexander the Great, both on horseback, were commissioned in Paris and Athens to decorate Alexandria’s public squares. Some statues, like those of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismail, were dismantled after the revolution of 1952. It seemed that they had been condemned to oblivion, but they suddenly reappeared around the year 2000 to adorn new sites in the city without any explanation as to what lay behind this rehabilitation. History isn’t erased, it is just shuffled around.