ï~~Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 49 (2012) 355-358
Michael Sabottka, Das Serapeum in Alexandria. Untersuchungen zur
Architektur und Baugeschichte des Heiligtums von der fruhen ptolemuischen Zeit bis zur Zerstbrung 391 n. Chr. Etudes alexandrines
15. Cairo: Institut frangais d'archeologie orientale, 2008. xxvi + 520
pages. ISBN 978-2-7247-0471-6.
In 1895, after centuries of spoliation and decay, the Serapeum of Alexandria, once one of the most splendid temples in the Mediterranean, was described by G. Botti, the director of the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria,
as "a rocky plateau, surrendered to stray dogs and tour guides of ill fame."'Since
then, several excavation projects have been carried out to lay bare the scanty remains of this famous site, each with its own limitations. The first major excavations, by Botti himself(1894-1898), were hardly systematic, while the following
project, in the context of the so-called "Sieglin Expedition" (1898-1902), did
include a detailed recording of the evidence and the creation of an important
map, but remained unpublished. The fullest archaeological exploration of the
site was done by A. Rowe during the Second World War (1942-1945), in which
several important discoveries were made, such as the foundation plaques of the
Serapeum dedicated by Ptolemy III. Some of the areas outside of the temple
precinct, mainly to its west, were also explored. However, Rowe did not have
access to certain areas that were excavated by the German mission, so that its
publication is indispensable for a complete view of the building phases of the
Serapeum.
In his 1985 dissertation at the Technische Universitat of Berlin, Michael
Sabottka (henceforth S.) fulfilled this desideratum by collecting all the relevant
Sieglin Expedition materials and incorporating them in an architectural study
of the Serapeum. Unfortunately, the dissertation was never reworked into a
monograph and was, since 1989, only accessible on microfiche. The Centre
d'Etudes Alexandrines has now made this important work available to a wider
audience by including it in its series. The book is a basically unaltered version
of the 1985 dissertation. This means that the exhaustive recent treatment of
the Serapeum by Judith McKenzie (and her team), which - partly building on
the work of Sabottka - has led to a refinement of the different building phases
' G. Botti, Lacropole dAlexandrie et le Serapeum d'apres Aphtonius et les fouilles (Alexandria 1895) 3: "[u]n plateau rocailleux, abandonn6 i des chiens errants et a des
cicerones mal fames" The passage from which this sentence derives is provocatively
put below the well-known passage from Ammianus Marcellinus (22.16.12), calling
the Serapeum second in importance only to the Capitolium in Rome, at the start of
Sabottka's 1985 preface (p. xix).
