Excerpt from Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, Vol. 36: From January to June, Inclusive, 1857 This first seat of commerce, united with navigation, was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, after a siege of thirteen years, but not until the Tyrians had retreated with their ships, merchandise, and people, to a neighboring island, whence they returned and rebuilt their city, to be again destroy ed, and this time finally, by Alexander the Great, after a siege of seven months. That great man, perhaps irritated by this resistance, which seems long in his ra id career of victory, or more probably impressed by it with the power an wealth derivable from commerce, founded the city of Alex andria, to command that trade of the East which had princi ally sustained the opulence of Tyre. This new city, at the mouth of the ile, first under the Ptolemies, and then under the Romans, surpassed for many centuries the ancient commercial renown of the Tyrians. It was also the seat of the arts and of learning. It was here that the seventy made that trans lation of the Hebrew Scriptures, known to us as the Septuagint. The Alex andrian library, consumed by the torch of Omar, has always been the regret of scholars. The duties on the imports and exports of Alexandria, under the Ptolemies, have been calculated by some writers to have reached the annual amount of two hundred and seventy-four millions of pounds ster ting; but such figures are incredible. After the first devastation of its conquest by the Saracens, it regained something of its former trade, and never lost a certain degree of commercial importance. Should modern science, renewing the achievements of the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and the Caliphs, again reunite the waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas, Alexandria, now the only remaining monument of the conquests of the mad boy of Macedonia, may again revive its ancient splendor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.