Treasures of Sunken Egyptian Port Revealed
Jun 8 7:32am ET
go2net.com
By Alistair Lyon
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (Reuters) - Colossal statues, sunken ships, gold coins and jewelry are among the treasures newly uncovered by a French marine archaeologist in the submerged ancient city of Heracleion off the Egyptian coast.
"History is materializing in our hands," Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosni told a news conference in nearby Alexandria at which Franck Goddio presented the results of what he called a "very special year" of excavation.
Goddio announced the discovery of the city itself a year ago. The archaeologist believes Heracleion, recorded as a key port at the mouth of the Nile in ancient times, was destroyed by an earthquake or similar, sudden catastrophic event. The Frenchman has been documenting and mapping the antiquities discovered by his team of divers at the site four miles from the shores of Aboukir Bay with the help of advanced electronic technology.
Among the most remarkable is an intact black granite stele, or inscribed slab, almost identical to one found in 1899 that now reposes in Cairo's Egyptian Museum. Both feature an edict of Pharaoh Nektanebos the First (378-362 BC) imposing a 10 percent levy on Greek goods in favor of a temple to the goddess Neith.
The one found more than a century ago orders the stele to be erected in the town of Naukratis. That discovered by Goddio says it should be installed at "Heracleion-Thonis."
The perfectly preserved stele, 6-1/2 feet high, thus bolsters the case for identifying the ruined city as Egypt's Heracleion, once more the stuff of legend than history. It is not to be confused with a city of the same name on Crete.
MYTHIC ORIGINS
The Greek historian Diodor recounts how Heracles, the mythic son of the supreme god Zeus and known as Hercules in Latin, dammed a Nile flood, setting the river back in its course. Local people built him a temple and called the town Heracleion.
According to Herodotus, another Greek historian, Helen of Troy and her lover Paris fled to Heracleion to escape Helen's husband Menelaus, but were rebuffed by Thonis, the watchman at the entrance to the Nile who had moral qualms.
Ancient texts speak of the city as the port of entry to Egypt and major customs post at the mouth of the Nile before Alexandria itself was founded in 331 BC -- and before the Nile itself changed course.
Goddio showed an electronic image of the site with a deep blue stripe that he said indicated the old Nile river bed running next to the submerged city.
Goddio's team found three huge pink granite statues -- one of the Nile god Hapi, the others of an unidentified pharaoh and queen -- in pieces near the remains of some thick walls.
They lay on the seabed near a granite shrine, or naos, with hieroglyphics from the Ptolemaic era -- the last three centuries BC -- showing that it was the sanctuary in a temple to the supreme god Amun, apparently the great temple of Heracleion.
CATASTROPHIC FATE
Goddio believes a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, destroyed Heracleion, which would explain why none of the artifacts found date from later than the first century BC.
"During the electronic survey, we had evidence, a very strong nuclear resonance magnetic image, which shows there was some seismic fault right on the spot of Heracleion," he said.
"It was obvious that there was a lot of buried ruins and vestiges in that spot."
He said his team had been surprised to find that despite lying beneath the sea for centuries, remains such as a wall 150 meters (yards) long and 1.25 meters (yards) wide were very well preserved under a layer of sediment.
Divers had located other objects using a special acoustic device accurate to a centimeter (half an inch).
This had enabled them to uncover superb artifacts ranging from bronze vessels to gold coins and jewelry. Among the finest were a glazed Attic bowl and gold earrings, both from the fourth century BC, as well as an incense burner and hundreds of coins, mostly from the late pharaonic and Ptolemaic periods.
Ten closely bunched shipwrecks indicated the location of Heracleion's once-teeming harbor and its calamitous fate.
"Obviously this could have happened only because of a major tidal wave," Goddio said.
Goddio, who heads the Paris-based Institute of Underwater Archaeology, said a huge stone fragment, found not far from the temple, was one of 15 that made up one of the biggest stele ever found in Egypt, covered with hieroglyphics and Greek inscriptions from Cleopatra's time in the first century BC.
"It will take quite a lot of months to read and interpret this stele but it will most probably bring a lot of information about this period," he said.
Gaballa Ali Gaballa, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, described Goddio's discoveries as a "dream come true" and called for a comprehensive survey of Egypt's Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts to map antiquities and guide researchers. |
