Rhacotis

Ancient city in Egypt
Rhacotis (Egyptian: r ꜥ qd(y)t, Greek Ῥακῶτις; also romanized as Rhakotis) was the name for a city on the northern coast of Egypt at the site of Alexandria. Classical sources from the Greco Roman era in both Ancient Greek and the Egyptian language suggest Rhacotis as an older name for Alexandria before the arrival of Alexander the Great. Rhacotis was located west of the now silted Canopic branch of the Nile. Unlike ports within the Nile Delta, it was reliably accessible to large ships, and enough water for a city could be supplied by a canal. It is also described as the home of sentinels who protected the Egyptian kingdom from outsiders.

The root of the name, qd, means "construct". The prefix r ꜥ can be used as a derivational morpheme forming nouns of action from infinitives, so a likely interpretation of the name as a whole is "building site" or "construction in progress". Michel Chaveau of the École pratique des hautes études argues that Rhakotis may simply have been the Egyptian name of the construction site for Alexandria;

The original city may have included the island of Pharos, a harbor mentioned in Homer's Odyssey as the kingdom of Proteus. Plutarch writes that this reference influenced Alexander in his decision to found a new capital at the harbor of Pharos. The earliest text from Alexandria, a hieroglyphic "satrap" stela from the month of Thout in 311 BC, refers to R qd as the preceding name of the city. Strabo, in his description of Alexandria, describes Rhacotis as the home of Egyptian sentinels guarding the Nile. Alexandria was planned by Dinocrates, an experienced Greek architect and city planner from Rhodes, who modeled the new city after the Hellenistic architectural style popular in the Greek world at the time. The existing small village of Rhacotis, then a fishing port, became the Egyptian quarter of the city, located on the West side. Egyptians may have continued to refer to the whole city as Rhakotis, and in some cases resented its existence.

Continuing maritime archaeology in the harbour of Alexandria has revealed details of Rhakotis before the arrival of Alexander. In 1916, while preparing construction of a new port, French engineer Gaston Jondet found a sophisticated ancient port facility west of Pharos. Kamal Abu el Saadat continued research in the 1960s with a pioneering submarine archaeology campaign which found more ruins and a 25 ton statue fragment. Another campaign began in the 1990s under the supervision of Franck Goddio, finding numerous artifacts including twelve sphinxes, some apparently removed from Heliopolis by the Ptolemies. Wood pilings and planks dated chemically and stratigraphically to c. 400 BC, and potsherds dated to 1000 BC, have been recovered from Alexandria's eastern harbor. Recent chemical analysis of artifacts found in the harbor has discovered high levels of lead in the third millennium BC, peaking circa the turn of the 23rd century BC (Old Kingdom), and again near the turn of the first millennium BC (Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties), as well as in the Hellenic era following the conquest of Alexander. Some or all of the remains of Rhacotis may lie beneath the densely populated modern city of Alexandria, and thus remain off limits to archaeologists. No attempts to date have discovered remains of an early city in the Alexandrine neighborhood with the same name.

The importance of Rhacotis remains a matter of debate. If the Rhacotis was indeed no more than a building yard, it may have been an inconsequential part of the Egyptian civilization before the arrival of Hellenic invaders who eventually established the Ptolemaic kingdom.