Lost cities #6: how Thonis-Heracleion resurfaced after 1,000 years under water | Cities | The Guardian 16/08/16,

6, 21:31

Lost cities #6: how Thonis-Heracleion

resurfaced after 1,000 years under water
Ancient Egypt’s gateway to the Mediterranean – submerged and buried under layers of
sand – is an eerie reminder of how vulnerable cities are to nature’s forces

Jack Shenker
Monday 15 August 2016
07.30 BST

He stood for centuries at the very edge of ancient Egypt, gazing down imperiously upon the
trading ships as they blew in from the Mediterranean. His name was Hapy: god of fertility,
lord of the river, life-giving steward of its floods. And, on his plinth at the western mouth of
the Nile, a massive red granite gatekeeper to one of the greatest port cities on earth.

Until one day, probably towards the end of the second century BC, there was a tremor and
the ground began to churn and liquefy at Hapy’s feet. He wobbled, lurched, and then six
tonnes of intricately carved stonework crashed into the sea.

In time, the rest of the settlement that Hapy guarded followed suit. A place written into the
legends of antiquity – the site of the divine hero Heracles’ first footsteps in Africa, and
where Sparta’s Helen famously sought refuge with her abductor, Paris of Troy – disappeared
completely under water and was buried, seemingly forever, by layer upon layer of sand and
silt.

In the early 2000s, however, a group of divers working off the Egyptian coast found a large
fragment of rock under the seabed, and brought it up to land. It was a piece of Hapy, salt-
encrusted but intact. They continued searching, and eventually unearthed six more.
Around these pieces lay other treasures: the ruins of temples, shards of pottery, precious
jewellery, coins, oil lamps, processional barges and busts.

“As an archaeologist, discovering a tomb is exciting, but it’s the tomb of one individual,”
says Aurélia Masson-Berghoff, curator of the Sunken Cities exhibition at the British
Museum. “Discovering a whole city, which was home to thousands and thousands of people
over more than a thousand years … Well, that’s something else.”

The home in question was Thonis-Heracleion. And now, more than a millennium after it
was first submerged, Hapy’s city is returning to the surface once again.

‘ Part marshland, part urban sprawl’’

Unlike Babylon, Pompeii or mystical Atlantis, few people today have heard of Thonis-

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Heracleion. Indeed, until the remarkable finds of recent years, there was a danger that the
waves of the Mediterranean would consign to history not only the city’s physical remnants,
but even its memory as well.

And yet if you were a European merchant in the fifth century BC – an importer of grain,
perfume or papyrus perhaps, or an exporter of silver, copper, wine or oil – then Thonis-
Heracleion loomed large on your horizon. The same was true if you were a Carian
mercenary, an educated Greek, a professional sailor, or a member of the Pharaonic court.
Scattered across a series of interlinked islands, sand and mudbanks, Thonis-Heracleion –
part aquatic marshland, part urban sprawl – was ancient Egypt’s bustling, cosmopolitan
gateway to the Mediterranean, and thus its nexus with the western world.

Founded around 2,700 years ago on the site of present-day Abu Qir bay, 15 miles north-east
of Alexandria, Thonis-Heracleion predated its better-known neighbour as the main
emporion (trading port) for the region by several centuries and was a hub for international
commerce.

Criss-crossed by a network of canals and dotted with harbours, wharves, temples and
tower-houses – all joined together by a network of ferries, bridges, and pontoons – the city
controlled most of the maritime traffic coming into Egypt from the Mediterranean. Goods
would be inspected and taxed at the customs administration centre, and then carried on for
distribution further inland, either at Naukratis – another trading port that lay almost 50
miles further up the Nile – or via the Western Lake, which was connected by a water channel
to the nearby town of Canopus and offered access to many other parts of the country.

Although Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus are mentioned by many of the great chroniclers
of antiquity, from Herodotus to Strabo and Diodorus, most detailed knowledge of their
existence was feared to have been permanently lost.

Before 1933, when an RAF commander flying over Abu Qir glimpsed ruins in the water,
most historians believed Thonis and Heracleion to have been two separate conurbations,
both of which were situated on the current Egyptian mainland. The pilot’s sighting,
however, kicked off a whole new era of offshore research. By the turn of the century a team
from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology – originally attracted to the bay by
the presence of French warships that sunk in the late 18th century – had created a series of
maps sketching out the ancient topography of the region.

These charts – and the painstaking work of underwater excavation that has followed – relied
upon hi-tech survey techniques and tireless human effort. The waters here are murky and
visibility is low; in the aftermath of storms, “the sea is all stirred up, and charged with
floating sand and mud that makes it difficult for us divers to see what is going on,”
explained one researcher.

Archaeologists had to begin with side-scan sonar, directing pulses of sound energy at the
seabed and then analysing the echo to establish the changing depth of the ocean floor. A
nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometer, which can detect localised anomalies in the
earth’s magnetic fields, was then used to identify geological faultlines caused by the weight

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of long-submerged buildings pressing down upon and fracturing layers of sediment, and to
pinpoint the presence of large objects.

With the most promising excavation spots now fixed, scuba divers were sent in. They
carried water-dredges: huge underwater vacuum-cleaners that hoover away overlying
blankets of sand and expose the archaeological layers beneath. The biggest items, such as
building fragments and colossal statues – a Ptolemaic king and queen, each five metres high,
among them – were the easiest to find and resurrect from the seabed, but smaller and more
eclectic gems soon followed, including goblets, figurines, ritual pails, and 13 limestone
animal sarcophagi.

One by one, each artefact was catalogued, photographed, and then – if safe to do so –
winched up to the deck of the Princess Duda research boat before being subjected to further
analysis back on land. Together, they have transformed our understanding not just of
Thonis-Heracleion, but of the nature of Egypt and its interactions with the Hellenic world at
the time. “Some of these objects are completely unique, of great historical or artistic
importance,” Masson-Berghoff told the Guardian. “They push us to think anew.”

The Decree of Sais, for example – a magnificent black stele that stands two metres high and
is carved with perfectly preserved hieroglyphics from the early fourth century BC – was
unearthed on the site of a temple to supreme god of the Egyptians, Amun-Gereb, at Thonis-
Heracleion. The stele reveals some of the intricacies of contemporary taxation in Egypt:
“His Majesty [Pharaoh Nectanebo I] decreed: Let there be given one-tenth of the gold, of the
silver, of the timber, of the processed wood and of all things coming from the sea of the
Hau-Nebut [the Mediterranean] … to become divine offerings to my mother Neith,” reads
its edict.

But the stele has done more than flesh out our understanding of ancient Egyptian tariffs. Its
discovery has also helped solve a long-running mystery: by comparing it to other inscribed
monuments, experts were able to determine that Thonis and Heracleion were not, as
previously believed, two different towns, but rather one single city known by both its
Egyptian and Greek name respectively.

The interplay between Pharaonic and Greek societies in Thonis-Heracleion is a constant

feature of the city’s remnants: Hellenic helmets were nestled in the seabed alongside their
Egyptian counterparts, as were Cypriot statuettes and incense burners, Athenian perfume
bottles, and ancient anchors from Greek ships.

Nowhere was this cross-cultural pollination more evident than in the realm of religion,
particularly during the rise of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, where a succession of foreign-
born rulers sought to justify their power in the eyes of the Egyptian people by
demonstrating their affinity with Pharaonic traditions.

One object recovered from the water is a 2,000-year-old stone figurine of Cleopatra III: a
Ptolemaic queen, but depicted as the Egyptian goddess Isis and sculpted in a style that
combines both local and Hellenic aesthetics.

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Among the most beguiling of Thonis-Heracleion’s remains are the artefacts associated with
the city at play. The annual celebration of the Mysteries of Osiris, marked all over ancient
Egypt, involved the preparation – in the secrecy of the temples – of two figures of Osiris, god
of the underworld and resurrection: one made of soil and barley, the other of expensive
materials including ground-up semi-precious stones.

In Thonis-Heracleion, the former was placed in a granite tank and nurtured with Nile water
until it germinated. It was then placed in a papyrus barge alongside 33 other vessels; the
whole flotilla was illuminated by 365 oil lamps – one for each day of the year – and
eventually sailed down to the nearby settlement of Canopus. As well as an 11-metre
sycamore vessel that would have been used in this procession, archaeologists have
unearthed several small lead replicas of the papyrus boats, thrown into the water as votive
offerings by onlookers.

These finds offer a rare glimpse into the practice of ancient ritual, rather than just the
liturgical representation of it. In Masson-Berghoff’s words, they provide a connection to the
“materiality” of religion in Thonis-Heracleion. That’s important because, while the items
dredged up so far from the bottom of Abu Qir bay tell a remarkable story of a city that could
have vanished completely from our consciousness, it is, for now at least, very much a
selective story. Those working on it today are well aware of its holes.

“My hope is that future discoveries will enable us to shed more light on the lives of ordinary
people,” says Masson-Berghoff, who points out that while we know more than ever about
Thonis-Heracleion’s rulers and priests, it is much harder to picture the mudbrick homes and
daily lives of those who served them and kept the busy port operating smoothly.

Today, 95% of the area’s urban footprint remains to be explored; perhaps there are objects
yet to be found that can enrich our understanding of how cargo unloaders, cleaners and
cloth-sewers experienced their city. “What we know now is just a fraction,” observes Franck
Goddio, director of the ongoing excavations. “We are still at the very beginning of our
search.”

By the second century BC, Thonis-Heracleion’s era of pomp and prestige was already fading.
Further along the coast, the new metropolis of Alexandria was rapidly establishing itself as
Egypt’s preeminent port, while the hybrid foundation of land and water upon which
Thonis-Heracleion was built had begun to feel less secure. It wasn’t a single natural disaster
– an earthquake, tsunami, rising sea levels, or subsidence – that doomed the city, but rather
a combination of them all.

At the end of the century, probably after a severe flood, the central island – already sagging
under the weight of the main temple buildings – succumbed to liquefaction. In what must
have been a terrifying experience, the hard clay soil turned to liquid in moments and the
buildings atop it collapsed swiftly into the water. The supply of pottery and coins into
Thonis-Heracleion appears to have ended at this point; a few hardy residents clung on to
their homes throughout the Roman period and even into the beginning of Arab rule, but the
last vestiges of the city sunk below the sea at the end of the eighth century.

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At a time of looming ecological catastrophe, it is perhaps unsurprising that we should find

the tale of Thonis-Heracleion so fascinating. Its rediscovery is a testament to advanced
technology and human ingenuity, but the city’s fate – and the eerily inanimate memories of
a long-forgotten urban life left behind – are a reminder of how fragile many of our own
contemporary cities are.

Venice, arguably Thonis-Heracleion’s closest modern cousin owing to its siting on a lagoon
and its famed network of waterways, is sinking; Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline remains
one of the places on earth most vulnerable to rising sea levels, and even the most optimistic
projections of global temperature increases could still displace millions in the region from
their homes.

Hapy’s reawakening from the seabed, a millennium in the making, is a unique window to
our urban past. The struggle continues to ensure he and his city are not also a vision of our
future.

The Egyptians: A Radical Story, by Jack Shenker, is published by Allen Lane (£15.99); buy it
for £11.19 here. Sunken Cities, an exhibition of artefacts found at Thonis-Heracleion and
Canopus, is at the British Museum until 27 November 2016

Please share your stories of other ‘lost cities’ throughout history in the comments below. Follow
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Topics
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