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Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Alexandria.

So sometimes on this show, we like to do a biography of a place rather than a person, and it is hard to think of a more exciting location than Alexandria, the super city founded

almost two and a half millennia ago. As befits a city as complex, as storied, and as spectacular as

Alexandria, the idea of it came to its founder, Alexander the Great, in a dream. I know,

so the backstory you need to know before we get to that is that Egypt had been unified towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE.

Before that, it was upper and lower Egypt. It's unified by King Nama. He becomes the first Pharaoh.

And then Egypt is under phoronic rule until Alexander pitches up in the fourth century BCE, so quite a while.

Egypt is a really fertile land.

It has a Mediterranean coastline, and the spot right on the Nile Delta was always going to be a good one.

But the thing that made it an absolute gimmy for Alexander is that there was once a small

island, right opposite where Alexandria is,

known by the Greeks as Ferros. And the earliest reference, I think we get to it in Greek

literature, is in the Odyssey, in Homer. So it's book four, I think, of the Odyssey, where

Menelaus is explaining how he got home to Sparta, and he gets temporarily stranded at Ferros,

and then he has to get out of it by putting on a dead seal costume and wrestling the Seagod Proteus

in order to find out the way home, or as I like to think of it, Friday.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome to the stage?

My glorious guests, they are Edith Hall and Islam Issa.

Islam, thank you so much for coming.

You literally wrote the book on Alexandria, and you are yourself, coming. You literally wrote the book on Alexandria, and you are

yourself, Alexandrian. You mentioned in the book that your dad's DNA test came back, and he's

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