In January of 1888, a European adventurer stepped off a boat in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria.

He had come to the ancient city for one reason and one reason only,

to make an archaeological discovery that would get the attention of the entire world.

The adventurer didn't have any one archaeological treasure in mind when he came to the city,

but he just felt confident that Alexandria was going to be a fertile hunting ground for flashy, headline grabbing artifacts.

And he came by this opinion honestly.

2000 years earlier, Alexandria had been one of the most important and magnificent cities on the Mediterranean.

It had been the capital of Egypt during the reign of the Taulemies,

the Greek-speaking kings who had taken control of Egypt in the third century BC after the death of Alexander the Great.

During the height of the Taulemic period, Alexandria became a city of wonders.

Taulemie I, Alexander the Great's cousin, had actually managed to hijack the wagon train that was transporting the mummified body of the deceased Alexander.

He took the body back to Egypt, where eventually he had it interred in a glorious mausoleum in Alexandria known as the Soma.

The corpse of the Great Conqueror became the site of religious worship and functioned as a key symbol of royal legitimacy for Taulemie and his descendants.

It also became a bit of an ancient tourist destination, with many famous visitors paying their respects to the body of Alexander.

But if you were visiting Alexandria during the reign of the Taulemies, that wasn't the only site worth seeing.

Perhaps you would stroll down to the harbor and gaze out at the great lighthouse that stood on the island of Ferris.

At the time, it would have been one of the tallest man-made structures in the world, and it used a giant mirror to light the way for ships entering the city by day and a great fire to light the way by night.

While you were in town, maybe you would take in a show at one of the hundreds of small theaters that were popular in the city.

Maybe you would visit one of the cities or Nate temples, like the Serapim. That was the massive temple dedicated to Serapis, the patron deity of the Taulemies, who was an interesting hybrid of Zeus, Osiris, and the Egyptian apis bull god.

The god was a kind of Greek Egyptian mashup, which was meant to represent the union of cultures encouraged by the Taulemic regime.

And finally, if you were a traveling scholar, you might be given special permission to enter the Taulemies' great library.

Now, no one's exactly sure where this institution was located, although it seems likely that it was part of the massive palace complex, the Tuck-Up over a quarter of the city.

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