Swallowed by the Sea, Ancient City Reveals Its Secrets

A ghost city untouched for 2,000 years has been discovered 30 feet under the waters of the Mediterranean, about 3.5 miles off the coast near Alexandria, Egypt, French archeologists said Saturday.

Referred to in ancient texts as either Herakleion or Thonis, the city was a major port at one of the mouths of the Nile until it mysteriously disappeared. New evidence collected by his team indicates that it was destroyed and sunk by a major earthquake, according to underwater archeologist Franck Goddio.

“It is the most exciting find in the history of marine archeology,” Gaballa Ali Gaballa, head of the Supreme Council on Antiquities, said Saturday at an Alexandria news conference.

Coins and jewelry scattered in the streets and ruins testify to the opulence of the residents’ lifestyle and to the haste with which the city was abandoned.

Herakleion/Thonis lies close to the legendary “Canopic” branch of the Nile, whose location was lost in the mists of history but has now been rediscovered.

“We were absolutely astonished” to find the city and the riverbed, Goddio said.

Closer to shore, his team also uncovered the remains of the city of Menouthis, which was destroyed by an earthquake in the 4th century, was rebuilt and crumbled again and was submerged beneath the sea near the end of the 8th century.

The new findings, combined with the earlier discoveries of Napoleon’s fleet and Cleopatra’s palace in the same general area, make the Alexandria coast “the richest area of artifacts in the world today,” said Ibrahim Darwish, head of the underwater department of Egypt’s Supreme Council on Antiquities.

“We are used to finding the remains of a tomb, a church or a mosque, but this time we are finding complete cities--cities that were only heard about from the classical writings,” Gaballa said.

It will take years, if not decades, to excavate and explore the two ruined cities, but Goddio’s team has already made one very important discovery--a large fragment of a black granite tablet from what is called the Naos of the Decades.

The Naos of the Decades was the inner sanctum of a temple dedicated to Isis, erected by Pharaoh Nectanebo I in the 4th century BC. Hieroglyphics on its interior walls documented the origins of the Egyptian calendar, with its 36 decades--the 10-day periods defined by the appearance and disappearance of significant stars.

The temple was originally constructed at Saft in the eastern Nile delta, then moved to Menouthis between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. Christians later destroyed the stone chapel, and its pieces were dispersed over a wide area.

Mapping the Bay Near Alexandria

One fragment was discovered in 1777 by the naturalist Soninni de Manoncour and now resides in the Louvre in Paris. A second was excavated in 1940 by divers under the direction of Prince Omar Tousson and is in the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria.

The new section now provides “a text of a kind that was previously totally unknown,” according to archeologist Jean Yoyotte of the College de France.

The text tells us, he said, that an Egyptian scholar attributed immense prophetic powers to the stars and planets long before Greek astronomers devised the zodiac and Assyrian astrologers developed their own system of stargazing.

The new discoveries were the result of a continuing project in which Goddio’s team has been mapping the floor of Aboukir Bay near Alexandria since the mid-1990s, using magnetometers and other sophisticated electronic devices. Those studies previously led him to the ruins of Antirhodes--the island site of Cleopatra’s palace--in Alexandria’s harbor and the remains of Napoleon’s fleet, destroyed by the British in the bay.

They also found two fields of debris, one about half a mile square and a little more than a mile off the coast, the second about 700 yards long and 400 yards wide in the middle of the bay, more than 3.5 miles from the coast.

When divers investigated, they found that each represented the remains of a city.

The debris field farthest from the shore lies adjacent to what geophysicist Amos Nur of Stanford University has determined was an ancient branch of the Nile, most likely the Canopic branch--named for the nearby city of Canopus. “From ancient texts, we knew there was a city at the mouth of the Canopic branch, but nobody knew where it was,” Goddio said. “We were lucky enough to find both the city and the fossil Canopic branch.”

The texts refer to cities named Thonis and Herakleion, but those were probably different names for the same place, Goddio thinks, or perhaps two smaller communities that merged into one. They served as the major port until Alexander the Great began construction of Alexandria in 331 BC.

The tumbled walls and columns of Herakleion/Thonis were all leaning in the same direction, a sure sign of an earthquake, Nur said. Amid these ruins, Goddio found a spectacular colossus of red granite, measuring from 5 to 7 yards tall. Scattered around are antique brasses, ceramics and coins. “Nothing has been touched” over the millenniums, he said.

In addition to the remains of the port infrastructure, Goddio discovered an intact naos--the enclosed part of a temple--with inscriptions on it. “It’s quite fabulous, and totally forgotten for 2,000 years,” he said.

The city near shore was Menouthis, which was a suburb of Canopus. The approximate location of Menouthis was known, but the ruins were buried under sand and silt and had never been excavated.

Goddio’s divers discovered the foundations of many buildings, including one very well-built structure about 30 yards square, that may have been a major temple. Nur found an earthquake fault almost immediately below this structure.

Nearby was a section of wall about 3 yards thick and 19 yards long that may have been part of a larger structure or a city wall. Several monuments were scattered around the structure, as were “very nice pieces of statues, many dedicated to the Isis cult,” Goddio said. Divers also found the heads of sphinxes, colossi, jewelry, pottery, coins and hundreds of other artifacts.

Many of the crumbled buildings had clearly been scavenged for use in rebuilding the city after an earthquake that probably struck in the 4th century AD, Goddio said. The most recent artifacts date to the end of the 8th century, suggesting that the city was destroyed by a second earthquake about that time.

Because Menouthis was an important religious center, the excavations should shed a great deal of light on the period surrounding the beginning of the Christian era. In addition to a major temple dedicated to Isis, the city also had an important basilica and two sanctuaries containing the tombs of St. John and St. Cyr, the saint of surgeons.

Each year, tens of thousands of people from throughout the ancient world would make pilgrimages to Menouthis to pray for miracles from one religion or the other, Goddio said. “Eventually, we will be able to see what those pilgrims saw,” he said.

Goddio’s expedition was sponsored by the Hilti Foundation and the Discovery Channel. Further information will be available in a few days on Goddio’s Web site, https://www.franckgoddio.org.

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Safe Harbor

Archeologist Franck Goddio and his team have made several discoveries in Alexandria Harbor and Aboukir Bay, including the sunken island of Antirhodes (with Cleopatra’s palace), Napoleon’s fleet (destroyed by the British) and now the submerged cities of Menouthis and Herakleion/Thonis.

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Times wire services contributed to this story.