Excerpt from The Story of Our Lighthouses and Lightships: Descriptive and Historical Or on hili-tops* commanding clear and extensive Views of the neighbouring waters; but we may be certain that the difficulties in the way of maintaining such fires in stormy weather would speedily suggest the construction of some permanent shelter or protection. And therefore I see no reason to doubt the statement that long before Greece had become a maritime nation, light-towers, which served as landmarks during the day as well as beacons during the night, had been planted along the coast - line of Lower Egypt. The first, however, of which we have any certain infor mation was the celebrated Pkcwos of Alexandria, so celebrated that its name is very generally applied to lighthouses in our own day, and exists in the French Phare. It was erected about 280 B.o., during the reign of King Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, on the strip of shining calcareous rock lying about a mile off Alexandria that sheltered both its ancient ports - the Greater Harbour and the Haven of Happy Return - from the fury of the north Wind and the occasional high tides of the Mediterranean. Its site was a kind of rocky peninsula at the east end of the island, and it stood conspicuous from its great height and the whiteness of the stone of which it was constructed. Whether the light it sup plied was obtained from an ordinary fire, or some more effective system of illumination, we have no means of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.