Last summer I was in Alexandria for a one-day visit to my friend. It was incredibly crowded and it seemed that all Cairoians just invaded the city so my friend and I avoided the sea and cronich altogether and went inward for a deep exploration.
After breakfast and a lovely conversation over coffee, we started our tour. For my friend wasn’t a very good expert of her own city, we used Google Maps and walked around looking for the places we marked for visits. After a really long walk, we finally got to the Roman Amphitheater.
It was a bit strange when we stepped inside the site because the entire place was below the ground level. Built in the 4th century, we later knew that the site was completely buried underground and wasn’t discovered until the 1960s all by coincidence when al-Mahmoudiya Canal was being dug, the canal that links Alexandria to the Nile.
As we started exploring the site, we headed first to the the theater, which you can see in the picture above. It resembles a large open-air lecture room (maybe it was a part of an old university?) with giant circular steps that work as seats and can understand up to 600 spectators. The speaker or performer stands on the ground level while the audience surrounds him/her.
So excited by the place, my friend and I started playing the role of a professor giving a lecture to hundreds of Roman students when something unexpected happened. As my friend was standing on what seemed like a large stone made specifically to be where the speaker should stand, her voice was just up as if she was using a microphone! She turned around and the volume of her voice was back to normal again!
So excited by our unexpected find, we took turns standing on the stone and rotating while speaking until we could identify the direction from which the voice was amplified! What was more interesting is that this direction faces the middle part of the theater which, we concluded, belonged to the elite! It was magical! A virtual microphone that’s been working for 16 centuries! How the heck could they do that!
We do believe that all the old civilizations were so developed and had their own inventions but being able to experience any of their long living technologies is just… enchanting.
Hit by magic and drunk by the unexpected experience, it was so hard for us to separate from this lovely place. Yet, we could eventually move to explore the rest of the site and keep up with our plan of the day.