A sample of what appears in the Real Messiah order it hereMy original question to Harry - the Passio Petri says that when Peter is standing outside the Martyrium he could communicate with people walking along the nearby road. Is there any evidence that any major roads existed where the beach and water are now?
His answer:
The Mahmoud El Falaki plan of ancient Alexandria, the most serious cartographic attempt to understand the hypodamean grid of ancient Alexandrian streets [based on trenches that El Falaki dug in the 1860's] show the site of the alleged Martyrdom in between two large streets running perpendicularly to the coast. Until the early 1900, when the Corniche road was opened, there was no road running parallel to the sea.
Harry
N.B. I am attaching a photograph of the El Falaki map. In the count the ancient streets marked in red, from right to left, it is the second and the third perpendicular streets. The annotation near the letter "Beta" says "santon Chatiby" [it translates as Sidi Chatby, the burial of a holy Muslim man called Chatby that has given the name to this suburb, in fact that chapel with the burial -- a tourba-- was removed some 110 years ago, when the coastal road was built. It is now incorporated in a modern small mosque just across St. Mark College...another relic!]. That location coincide with the proposed site of the St. Mark Martyrium.
But you may wonder that the Easter walls of the city as proposed by El Falaki go much further than the Martyrium location. El Falaki did arbitrarily expand the fortifications eastwards, without having any tangible remains, so the walls of the Alexandria of the 4th and 5th century, when the legend of the martyrium did first start were probably passing exactly at Chatby [then called "Boukolia" or "Boukolou" or any other derive of this word], later the fortification shrunk and the walls went a little further West.
--- On Thu, 30/4/09, stephanhuller@aol.com
