On Egypt鈥檚 northern coast, where the Nile delta meets the sea, there once stood two cities of such wealth and grandeur that they were famous throughout the ancient world. Today, their remains lie buried beneath a shallow bay.
Around 500 BC, the ports of Herakleion and Eastern Canopus were thriving trade centres, the gateways into Egypt for Greek ships passing down the Nile. These cities were also important religious centres, their temples attracting thousands of pilgrims each year. Yet until recently, almost all that was known about them came from ancient texts. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BC that they looked like the islands of the Aegean, but set amid a marsh.
Inspired by such accounts, French businessman and archaeologist Franck Goddio began surveying an area a few kilometres west of the Nile delta called Abu Qir Bay. Goddio has been running underwater excavations at nearby Alexandria since the early 1990s. But Abu Qir may yield even more exciting results.
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In 2000, Goddio revealed the discovery of two sets of ruins, including walls, temple remains, columns and statues, buried in sand under 7 metres of murky water. The first set of ruins lies 1.6 kilometres from today鈥檚 coastline. In annual excavations there since 2000, Goddio鈥檚 team has retrieved coins, amulets and jewellery from as far back as the 6th century BC. A slab of black granite (pictured above), inscribed with a tax edict, names the city as Heracleion and it is signed by Pharaoh Nectanebo I, who ruled from 380 to 362 BC.
The team has also identified two temples, dedicated to the Greek hero Heracles and the god Amon (the Greek version of the Egyptian deity Amun). Just to the north of the Heracles temple, the divers discovered many bronze objects, which were probably dropped into an ancient waterway as offerings. 鈥淲e have found ritual deposits made by the priests in quite precise places that were known only to them,鈥� says Goddio. 鈥淲e feel as if we are penetrating to the heart of the ancient liturgy.鈥�
A few kilometres away, the second set of ruins has been identified as Eastern Canopus. There, divers have discovered ceramics, parts of temple doors, coins with the profile of Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt in the 1st century BC, and a black granite shrine from the 4th century BC, dedicated by Nectanebo I, which boasts a series of astronomical and calendrical inscriptions.
The two cities were connected by a network of channels and waterways to a now-defunct branch of the Nile, geophysicist Jean Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC reported in 2006 (). The cities鈥� grand stone buildings were perched at the river鈥檚 edge, built on mud and sand without any solid foundations or pilings. When the Nile suffered particularly high floods, the extra weight of the water would have caused the ground beneath them to collapse, says Stanley.
The damage may not have been too disastrous at first. Huge cracks beneath some of the buildings at Eastern Canopus were deliberately filled with sand, and artefacts and coins found at the site date from as late as 740 AD. However, fallen columns and statues, as well as human skeletons and valuables found underneath toppled walls, suggest the end came quickly. After centuries of fighting the subsidence, a particularly dramatic flood, known from historical records to have occurred in 741 or 742 AD, finished the city off, Stanley thinks. During the same flood this branch of the Nile may have shifted eastwards ().
鈥淗uman skeletons and valuables found underneath toppled walls suggest the end came quickly鈥�
For the cities鈥� inhabitants, the economic advantages of building on such a precarious site probably eclipsed long-term safety considerations 鈥� a warning, says Stanley, to coastal cities of today.