History
It started as a small fishing town during Ancient Egyptian times and the reign of Alexander The Great and was named Amunia. There are ruins of a temple of Rameses II (1200 B.C.). Mersa Matruh became known as Paraitonion in the Ptolemaic era. When Roman occupation came to Egypt, the town became an important harbor for trade and shipping goods and crops to Rome. It was named Paraetonium by the Romans. During World War II, the British Army's Baggush Box was located to the east. Starting with the completion of an extension from the previous railhead at Fuka in February 1936, Mersa Matruh was the terminus for a single-track railway, which passed through El Alamein.
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“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)