The English traveller John H. Allan went up the Nile, and published his account, with drawings, in 1843, under the name A Pictorial Tour in the Mediterranean (online here).
Coming back down the Nile from Nubia, he visited Antinoe or Antinoupolis, and included a sketch:
John H. Allan. Antinoe. 1843
He wrote as follows:
January 31st. – Sheik Abadeh, site of the ancient Antinoe, founded by the Emperor Hadrian. A walk the village brought us to the remains of a colonnade of granite pillars without capitals. At the back of heaps of rubbish containing many architectural remains we saw a large enclosure said to be the ancient Hippodrome. The direction of its streets is still to be traced running in a regular manner, and judging from the fragments, it must have been a city of great magnificence. A large portion of the ruins were used in constructing the Pasha’s sugar manufactory at Al Rairamoun, on the opposite side of the river, amongst large plantations of sugar cane.
I also learn from this site that the revolution in Egypt has been a disaster for the site, where the locals have been bulldozing the Hippodrome and other sites. James B. Heidel, president of the Antinoupolis Foundation writes:
“Each year vast new swathes of ancient cemetery, parts of the ancient city wall, and in the last two years even half of the ancient hipprodrome, have been bulldozed flat, raked with a front loader and marked out with white blocks for new cemetery plots,” Heidel says.
“Two years ago fully half the hippodrome was leveled, and in spite of our protests to the Ministry of Antiquities, no protections were put in place,” he says.
“This year a further, smaller area of it was bulldozed flat, and the construction of walls for tomb plots were completed which were the year before only marked out with pebbles,” he adds.
Those wishing to locate the site will find that the name is given as El-Shaikh Ebada, 10km north of Mallawi in Menia governorate, which is here on Google Maps.
The satellite view of the ancient city area is as follows, with the Hippodrome clearly visible! The dark area is the ancient city:
Zooming in, I get this:
This shows the damage to the Hippodrome clearly, and the encroachment of the fields of modern tombs.
In fact the blog post linked above gives the following picture of the damage, recorded by the Italian excavation team.
Few of us perhaps would ever visit Antinoupolis. But somehow we are all impoverished by this useless, needless destruction.
UPDATE: I found this small satellite image, from a site dated 2008. At that time, the left hand side of the Hippodrome was complete. Apparently “building cemeteries” is a standard ploy for those wishing to dig without permission in Egypt.
The emperor Hadrian founded (or refounded) a city in Egypt which he called Antinoupolis or Antinoe, in memory of his favourite Antinous. The city was of considerable extent, and existed into the Islamic period.
The ruins were destroyed in the 19th century for building materials to erect a sugar factory. However they were still visible as late as 1798, and the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte (list of volumes here) contains plans and drawings which are, frankly, rather impressive.
Book 14 (1809), Volume IV – Planches : Antiquités, online at Heidelberg, gives us the pictures and plans. Planches 53-61 are the images from Antinoupolis. Here is a view of the site:
The ruins of Antinoupolis. Description de l’Egypte.
And here is the plan of the city, albeit at low resolution. Note the Hippodrome at the top, and the Nile and the modern village at the bottom.
Antinoupolis. Plan of the city ruins.
I recommend downloading the PDF from Heidelberg – you can zoom into the pictures and see incredible details.
There are still ruins at Antinoupolis, of course. A Pharonic temple of Ramasses II still stands, sort of. Modern excavators have been at work. But I think we must all mourn the loss of the magnificent colonnades still visible to Napoleon’s men.
