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Liber XVI · Indigenous & Ancient Religions

Liber XVI · Indigenous & Ancient Religions · Chapter II: Ancient Egyptian Religion

The Destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria in 391/392 CE

The destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria explained: the cult of Serapis, Theodosius's laws, Bishop Theophilus, the sources and the end of pagan Egypt.

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The destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria, usually dated to 391 or 392 CE, was the demolition of the great temple of the god Serapis by Christian crowds and imperial soldiers after a violent clash between pagans and Christians in the city. It came amid the laws of Emperor Theodosius I against sacrifice and temple cult, and ancient writers on both sides treated it as the moment when the public religion of the old gods ended in Egypt's capital.

Serapis and the Greco-Egyptian Religion of Alexandria§

Serapis (also spelled Sarapis) was a deliberately composite god. His name derives from Osiris-Apis, the deified Apis bull of Memphis, whose burial galleries at Saqqara were also called a Serapeum. Under the early Ptolemies, the Macedonian dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great, this Egyptian figure was given a Greek form: a bearded, enthroned god resembling Zeus, Hades or Asclepius, wearing a grain-measure (kalathos or modius) on his head and often accompanied by the three-headed dog Cerberus.

Ancient writers disagreed about how the cult began. Tacitus and Plutarch tell a story in which Ptolemy I, prompted by a dream, brought a statue from Sinope on the Black Sea, with the Egyptian priest Manetho and the Greek religious expert Timotheus advising him. Whatever the truth of the legend, Serapis became the patron god of Alexandria, a healer and giver of oracles and dreams, and the consort of Isis, whose cult spread with his across the Roman world. His worship drew on the deeper traditions described in Ancient Egyptian Religion, but its language and imagery were thoroughly Hellenistic.

Serapis also appears in the ritual handbooks of Roman Egypt. The spells of the Greek Magical Papyri invoke him alongside Helios, Osiris and the Jewish God, a sign of how freely Egyptian, Greek and Near Eastern divine names mixed in the religious life of the province.

The Temple on the Hill of Rhakotis§

The Alexandrian Serapeum stood on a raised platform in the old Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis, in the south-west of the city. Foundation deposits found by excavators in the twentieth century, inscribed in Greek and Egyptian, show that Ptolemy III Euergetes (reigned 246–222 BCE) built or rebuilt the first major sanctuary. The complex was enlarged and reconstructed in the Roman period, probably after a fire in the late second century CE, and the tall granite column known today as Pompey's Pillar, erected in honour of Diocletian around 298 CE, still marks the site.

Late Roman visitors described a vast colonnaded court, halls and chambers raised on vaults, and at the centre a colossal cult statue, said by Christian authors to be made of wood covered with precious metal, its arms touching both walls of the sanctuary. Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the 380s, ranked the Serapeum second only to the Capitol in Rome for magnificence. The temple also housed books: a "daughter library" of the great Library of Alexandria is reported there in earlier centuries. Whether any significant collection survived until the 390s is uncertain, because the ancient accounts of the destruction do not mention books at all.

Theodosius I and the Laws Against Pagan Cult§

The Serapeum fell during the most decisive phase of imperial legislation against traditional religion. Christian emperors since Constantine had restricted sacrifice and closed some temples, but enforcement had been uneven, and Emperor Julian (361–363) had briefly restored the old cults. Theodosius I (reigned 379–395) went further. Laws now preserved in the Theodosian Code forbade sacrifice and visits to temples, first in a constitution of February 391 addressed to the prefect of Rome and then in a similar ruling of June 391 sent to the officials of Egypt. A sweeping law of November 392 banned even private household worship of the gods.

These laws did not order the general demolition of temples, and many buildings remained standing for decades or were converted to other uses. But they removed legal protection from pagan cult and gave confidence to bishops and monks who wished to act against it. In Alexandria, a city with a long history of street violence between rival communities, the result was explosive. Theodosius's broader legal framework belongs to the history traced in Roman Religion, where the end of public sacrifice marks the close of a thousand-year tradition.

Bishop Theophilus and the Riot of 391/392§

The fullest narrative comes from the Latin church historian Rufinus of Aquileia, who had lived in Egypt and wrote about a decade after the events, with later accounts by Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen and Theodoret. According to these writers, Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412, obtained permission to convert a disused pagan building into a church. During the work, cult objects were uncovered and paraded through the streets, apparently to ridicule them. Outraged pagans attacked Christians, then withdrew into the Serapeum with prisoners, under the leadership of a philosopher named Olympius. Christian sources claim that some captives were killed inside the temple.

The imperial officials referred the matter to the emperor. Theodosius's reply, read publicly before the temple, pardoned the pagans, declaring the Christians who had died to be martyrs, but ordered that the cult of the gods be abolished and its temples destroyed. The defenders fled. Olympius is said to have left the city, and the grammarians Helladius and Ammonius, who had taken part in the fighting, later taught in Constantinople. The traditional date of 391 has been questioned, and several historians now prefer 392; the sources allow either.

The Breaking of the Statue§

The destruction of the cult statue became the symbolic centre of the story. Rufinus reports a rumour that if anyone touched the image, the earth would dissolve and the heavens collapse. A soldier struck the statue's jaw with an axe; nothing happened; the crowd took heart, and the image was broken into pieces, dragged through the city and burned, while, in Rufinus's telling, a swarm of mice ran out of the hollow head. The story is shaped as a demonstration that the god was powerless, a theme Christian writers repeated for centuries.

Crosses in the Hieroglyphs§

Socrates and Sozomen add a curious detail. Among the hieroglyphic signs carved in the temple, Christians found a figure shaped like a cross, the ankh or sign of life. Converted pagans who knew the old script reportedly explained that it meant "the life to come", and some pagans, hearing that an ancient prophecy foretold the end of the temple when this sign appeared, accepted Christianity. Whatever its accuracy, the anecdote shows Egyptian symbols being reinterpreted as Christian ones at the very moment the cult that made them disappeared. The Nile-measuring cubit kept in the temple was moved to a church, and when the river still flooded, Christian historians took this as proof that Serapis had never controlled it.

What Followed: Churches, Monks and the End of Public Cult§

Theophilus built a martyr's shrine and church on the site, associated with relics of John the Baptist, and his campaign extended to the Serapis temple at Canopus, east of Alexandria, where monks were installed. The busts of Serapis that Alexandrians had placed on their houses were removed and replaced with crosses. Other temples in the city were closed, converted or demolished, though cult activity continued quietly in Alexandria and especially in the Egyptian countryside for generations. The Isis temple at Philae on the southern frontier remained active until the reign of Justinian in the sixth century.

Intellectual paganism also survived. Neoplatonic teaching continued in Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the murder of the philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob in 415, under Theophilus's nephew and successor Cyril, became the other great emblem of religious violence in the city. Historians increasingly stress that both events grew out of local politics, rivalry between factions and the authority of the patriarch, as well as theology.

Pagan Laments, Prophecies and the Hermetic Asclepius§

Pagan writers saw the destruction as a catastrophe. Eunapius of Sardis, in his Lives of the Sophists, mocked the monks and soldiers who boasted of victory over statues and claimed to have waged war on stones. He also recorded that the philosopher Antoninus, son of the Neoplatonist Sosipatra, had foretold that the temples of Egypt would become tombs, a reference to the relics of martyrs placed in former sanctuaries.

Readers of Hermetic literature recognised a still older prophecy. The Latin Asclepius contains a lament in which Hermes Trismegistus foretells a time when the gods will abandon Egypt, foreigners will fill the land and the worship of the gods will be forbidden by law. The passage was probably written before the fourth century, but after 391 it read like a prediction fulfilled. Augustine quoted and discussed it in The City of God, interpreting it as a demonic foreknowledge of Christianity's triumph; his treatment is examined in Augustine's City of God and Magic.

How Historians Interpret the Serapeum's Fall§

From the eighteenth century the Serapeum became a symbol in arguments about religion and reason. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, portrayed Theophilus as a violent enemy of learning and blamed him for the loss of the library, a view repeated in popular works ever since. Modern scholars are more cautious. They note that the sources for 391/392 say nothing about burning books, that the Alexandrian libraries had suffered many earlier losses, and that the surviving narratives are themselves polemical, written to show God's victory or, in Eunapius, Christian barbarism.

Historians such as Christopher Haas and Edward Watts place the event within the social history of late antique Alexandria, while Johannes Hahn and others have analysed temple destructions across the empire as local, negotiated conflicts rather than a single coordinated campaign. Archaeology has clarified the plan of the sanctuary but not every detail of its end. What is clear is that the fall of the Serapeum was understood at once, by Christians and pagans alike, as the end of an age: the largest temple of a god who embodied the fusion of Egypt and Greece was gone, and with it the public face of Egyptian religion in the city Alexander had founded.

Frequently asked questions§

When was the Serapeum of Alexandria destroyed?§

The destruction is traditionally dated to 391 CE, but many historians now prefer 392. The ancient sources do not give a precise date, and the chronology depends on how they are aligned with Theodosius's laws of 391 and 392.

Who destroyed the Serapeum?§

The demolition was carried out by Christian crowds, monks and imperial soldiers under the direction of Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, after an imperial ruling ordered the temple's cult abolished. It followed a riot in which pagans had occupied the temple.

Did the destruction of the Serapeum destroy the Library of Alexandria?§

Probably not in any simple sense. The Serapeum had housed a library in earlier centuries, but the accounts of 391/392 do not mention books, and it is uncertain whether a significant collection still existed. The decline of the Alexandrian libraries was a long process with many causes.

Who was Serapis?§

Serapis was a Greco-Egyptian god whose name derives from Osiris-Apis. Promoted by the Ptolemies, he was worshipped as a god of healing, fertility, the underworld and oracles, and his cult, with that of Isis, spread throughout the Roman Empire.

Sources and further reading§