The base, he wrote, was formed by a square that measured 45 steps on each side: “Sea waters lashed often the platform that surrounds the building by its east and south sides. Between the building and the wall [which enclosed the platform] there are 12 cubits.… The building’s foundations are on the rocks, under water…. This wall is built very steadily, as if only one piece due to the tight juncture of the limestone stones … the inscription is on a wall of white stone looking to the sea … with only the shapes of letters, set in hard stone, long and black … still visible.”
That the words were faded would be no surprise, as the inscription had weathered more than 1,400 years of salty sea breezes. Dedicated to the lighthouse’s builder in 297 bce, it was ordered by Alexander’s general Ptolemy i and finished 12 years later by his son Ptolemy Philadelphius. Although Ibn al-Shaykh could not read it, an earlier visitor had recorded it. Translated from Greek it read: “Sostratus the Cnidian, son of Dexifanos dedicates this to the savior gods on behalf of those who sail the seas.”
Ibn al-Shaykh next described and counted the 68 doors and rooms he entered while ascending the ramp from the first floor gallery, as well as its total height: 53 fathoms, plus nearly seven substructures. He was attentive to every dimension: “I wrote down all this on-site, since I went to the Lighthouse with the inkwell, and paper, and marked cord, so as not to lose even the smallest detail, for the Lighthouse is a wonder.”
Then he described the shapes of the tower’s three tiers: at the base, square; in the middle, an octagon; at the top, a cylinder. On top was a small mosque, said to have been built by one of Egypt’s first great Muslim rulers, Ahmad ibn Tulun, on the upper flat roof: “Four doors give entrance to it, as if it were a dome.” He added that the wood fire of its mirrored beacon was still lit, as in Greek and Roman times, on this upper part in order to guide boats into the harbor.
An added motive for Ibn al-Shaykh’s fascination with the lighthouse was likely something that had recently befallen a similarly legendary lighthouse less than 100 kilometers from his hometown. In Cádiz, a famous lighthouse, reputedly of Phoenician origin, had been destroyed the invading navy of the conquering Almohads, who commanded that it be leveled in order to steal treasure that was rumored to be buried beneath it.
The 12th-century Granadan geographer Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr al-Zuhri, who lived to see the destruction of this lighthouse in Cádiz, described it as a three-level, squared-off construction topped by a statue of a man facing east, as if looking out across the sea to meet the gaze of the far more famous, six-meter statue of Poseidon leaning on his trident atop the Alexandria lighthouse.
Al-Zuhri’s description lacks all specificity, but in the eyes of a reader of his day it could not help but call to mind the anonymously and contemporaneously written
Description of al-Andalus, which praised Cádiz’s pre-Islamic architecture by saying, “The whole city had also wonderful ancient remains which have not been altered by the passing of time. These vestiges testified to the city’s power and the existence of a great kingdom.” After al-Maymoon’s wanton act, the city certainly had been altered for the worse, and as an architect and builder, Ibn al-Shaykh knew it.
When in 1165 Ibn al-Shaykh took such a great interest in the Alexandria lighthouse, was he perhaps thinking of the one that his countrymen had lost just 20 years earlier? Was he also making the case for the conservation and protection of Alexandria’s, which was already in poor condition? And was he implicitly criticizing the Almoravids for having demolished it? It is fair to speculate that the reason Ibn al-Shaykh made such a detailed description of Alexandria’s beacon was to remind his friends at home of what they had lost in Cádiz.
For two centuries after Ibn al-Shaykh’s visit, the lighthouse of Alexandria was still in use for its function in the seaport was essential. Boats were controlled and guided from it, and their sailors, frightened after often hazardous journeys, felt relief in their hearts after glimpsing it, as we know well from written testimonies.
Ibn Battuta of Tangier, who visited Alexandria in 1326, just three years after the earthquake that toppled it, pointed out that already “one of its façades was in ruins.” When he visited the city again in 1349, “it was such a total heap of rubble that it was not possible to get into it anymore, nor even to go up to its door.” It was replaced by a small watchtower that stood until 1480, when the Mamluk Sultan Qayt Bey built over its ruins a fortress to which he gave his name, and which still guards the harbor to this day.
Although the lighthouse, called in Arabic
manarah (place of fire that is used for illumination), ceased to exist, it has remained present in the West not only through historical memory but also generically through the word “minaret” in English and its French and Spanish equivalents,
minarete and alminar. Thanks to Ibn al-Shaykh’s description, we can envision it as it stood, a beacon for both navigation and imagination.
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. This article appeared in issue number 33, titled "Ibn al-Shaij de Málaga: deslumbrado ante el Faro de Alejandría."
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