Past, Present Clash in Ancient Egyptian City : Alexandria: Excavators are getting to what’s buried as quickly as possible, then turning the site over to developers.

Throughout Alexandria, archeologists who want to save the ancient city--or at least record it--are in a race with builders determined to erect a new one.

At stake is the hazy history of a Mediterranean metropolis built on the dreams of Alexander the Great. To win, the scholarly excavators must stay one step ahead of the bulldozers.

This is salvage archeology: getting to what’s buried as quickly as possible, recording what’s there, then turning the site over to the developers.

It is the same story wherever past and present collide: London, Rome, Athens, Beirut, Jerusalem. Even in the youthful United States, road-building crews strike ancient Indian burial mounds or Civil War remains.

In Alexandria, countless treasures sleep beneath a city that has lived more than 2,000 years.

Under a blinding sun, French archeologist Jean-Yves Empereur hurries from excavation to excavation--five at the moment--where his colleagues are trying to find everything in time.

A Roman bath here, bits of mummy wrapping there. Parts of an ancient house, the torso of a statue, a broken amphora filled with 1,200 Roman coins.

“Perhaps this was once a garden,” Empereur said. “Someone buried the coins here for safekeeping and never made it back.”

Many centuries later, the garden became the site of a theater, which in its turn has been sacrificed to progress.

Alexandria probably holds tens of thousands of such tales, but Empereur does not have the leisure of daydreaming. Archeologists estimate they have no more than a decade left to dig.

“Everything is a piece of the puzzle that is Alexandria,” said Empereur, on loan from France’s National Center of Scientific Research to help the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. “We could lose everything.”

Exhuming Alexandria’s 2,300 years of history is a little like cutting into a pan of lasagna. The earth holds layer after layer of time.

For centuries, Alexandria’s buildings had no foundations. New buildings rose on top of old, leaving a lot of history intact. Also, Alexander’s architects designed the city in grids, like Washington, D.C. Excavators have an idea where buildings should have been.

“Every time you lower a shovel in Alexandria, great things come up,” said Bob Bianchi, a Greco-Roman historian from Brooklyn, N.Y.

Alexandria’s story began in 332 B.C.

As Bianchi describes it: “Alexander came down from Syria along the coastline. When he reached the site of what was to be Alexandria, he looked out and said, ‘What a harb”

Alexander, a Macedonian prince with great affection for things Greek, ordered a city built right there, to be named for him and to become the capital of his empire. He died nine years later in Babylon without seeing it.

Ancient Alexandria, as large as a good-size American city, was designed for beauty, with palaces, temples, gardens, fountains and the renowned Alexandria Library.

In its heyday, “the Pearl of the Mediterranean” had the world’s finest port. In beauty and culture, it rivaled Rome. Alexandria’s design became so evocative that at least 34 communities around the world adopted it as their own, 12 of them in the United States.

The city flourished under many rulers, including Cleopatra and Mark Antony. But after they committed suicide in 30 B.C., disaster struck.

Riots, battles, invasions, earthquakes, fires and fluctuating sea levels took their toll on Alexander’s city. Lost within its ever-changing precincts were the library; the tombs of Alexander, Cleopatra and Mark Antony; colonnaded temples; the world’s largest gymnasium; mosaic-covered baths, and docks for small sailboats that took families on Sunday excursions.

By the Middle Ages even the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was gone.

Bianchi said two modern events had done the most to interfere with the preservation of Alexandria’s past:

* A British bombardment in July, 1882, that destroyed major portions of the city.

* Construction of a waterfront highway a few decades ago that turned innumerable relics to powder, then dumped them into the sea.

Modern architecture has become the latest threat. High-rise buildings require deep foundations. At many sites, piles are driven almost 45 feet down, mutilating everything in their path. The archeologists try to get there first.

Mohammed Awad, an architect, is a founding member of the Alexandria Preservation Trust, whose 300 members scour the city for signs of antiquities on building sites.

If necessary, they file lawsuits to stop construction. That happened in 1993 when an extraordinary mosaic and other valuable antiquities were discovered at the site intended for a new Alexandria Library.