Lost Cities

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Strong Mediterranean currents can churn the water near the mouth of the Nile river into a sea of mud. But when divers led by French explorer Franck Goddio plunged overboard into the Bay of Abukir one morning last year, good visibility made their mission easier. As they removed centuries of silt from a jumble of limestone blocks on the sea bed 6.5 m below the surface, one of the divers noticed a large granite imbedded in the clay. The divers flipped it over to read Egyptian hieroglyphs on a stele that had been perfectly preserved for nearly 2,000 years. "We were the first to receive this message from the past," Goddio recalls. "Suddenly, we felt that we had made direct contact with the ancient world."

They had done more than that. After e-mailing a digital underwater photo of the inscriptions back to Paris for identification, Goddio learned that his team had confirmed the discovery of Herakleion, the fabled ancient gateway to Egypt that fell into the sea some 1,300 years ago.

Gradually, the coastal settlements of ancient Egypt, buried by earthquakes and massive collapses of sediment, are being brought back from the depths of the sea. For centuries, historians have relied heavily on the works of contemporary travelers such as Herodotus and Strabo for knowledge about Cleopatra and other rulers just before and during Egypt's Ptolemy dynasty (305-30 B.C.). But for the last decade, marine expeditions off the coast of modern Alexandria have produced thousands of artifacts, including statues, sphinxes, jewelry and coins, providing important clues to one of the most elusive periods of classical times. "The discoveries inspire us to continue the work," says Ibrahim Darwish of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities. "What we have found represents less than 1% of what is still underwater."

Perhaps the most significant breakthrough is Goddio's discovery of Herakleion, named for the Greek hero Hercules, which predates the founding of nearby Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. Goddio's team from his European Institute of Archaeology tentatively located the city during an expedition in 2000, but it was last year's findings that confirmed the discovery. The most important clue was the stele, erected by the King Nektanebos I in 380 B.C. Its inscription concerning customs taxes identifies the site as Thonis, the Egyptian name for Herakleion. But Goddio's divers also brought up a pink granite naos, or inner sanctuary, that archaeologists believe belonged to the sacred temple of Amun-Gereb at Herakleion, visited by Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. In addition, the temple yielded three colossal statues, 5.7 m high and weighing 15 tons, depicting Hapy, the god of Nile fertility, as well as a pharaoh and a queen.