On a sun-kissed day late last May, crew members on the research vessel Princess Duda swung the arm of the ship’s winch over the side and dropped a cable into the sparkling Mediterranean waters four miles off the Egyptian coast. Just 30 feet down, scuba divers swam amid the silt-covered rubble of Herakleion, an ancient resort city with a sinful reputation that 2,000 years ago suddenly disappeared into the sea, like the mythological island of Atlantis.
Herakleion (pronounced her-ACK-leon) is no myth. These divers two years ago located its remarkably intact ruins two miles offshore from the Nile River delta in Aboukir Bay, 15 miles east of Alexandria. Now they were attaching the ship’s hoist cable to temple statues and inscribed stones they had retrieved from deep layers of silt during this year’s two-month excavation season. Raised to the surface, the artifacts sparkled in the sun’s warmth for the first time in 20 centuries.
Dozens of statues and inscribed monumental stones once decorously lined Herakleion’s stylish harbor and populated its elegant temples, greeting religious pilgrims and wealthy tourists more than 2,000 years ago. Now each time a recovered statue or portion of a broken statue broke the water’s surface, waiting deckhands, archeologists and other onlookers broke into a buzz of appreciative awe.
“It was more beautiful than I would have imagined,” Franck Goddio, the sometimes controversial leader of the expedition, says in his soft French accent. He is imagining the time when the delta reached out to where the Princess Duda now lay at anchor, and what ancient visitors saw as they drew up to Herakleion’s docks. “It must have looked like Venice, with all the canals, the harbor, the temple complex and the beautiful villas built along the canals.”
In the last four years in Aboukir Bay, Goddio and his divers, working with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, have discovered two legendary sunken cities, Herakleion and Canopus (kah-NO-pus). They are on the verge of finding a third, Menouthis (meh-NEW-thiss). All three cities previously were known mainly from what was recorded about them by classical Greek and Roman writers and early Christian texts.
The artifacts they are bringing up will help scholars shine a bright light into the dimly understood history of Egypt’s Greco-Roman era, the final 1,000 years of ancient Egypt’s 4,000-year epoch. The lost cities figured prominently in key events that propelled ethnic Greeks into a dynasty of pharaohs who ruled Egypt for 300 years and that later made Egypt a province of the Roman Empire. The tender roots of the early Christian church shot out through these delta towns, where the blood of pagans and Christians alike ran in the streets during the church’s formative struggles.
Everything Goddio finds belongs by law to Egypt, but he is negotiating with Zawi Hawass, head of the Egyptian antiquities council, to take the most spectacular treasures on a world tour, perhaps starting in 2005. As of now, Goddio is aiming at the Field Museum in Chicago as the exhibit’s only American venue.
Success of such a tour would seem assured, as Egyptiana from the Greco-Roman era has a special allure. Cleopatra is the most famous Egyptian of the era, which combines the exotic, oriental mysticism of an older Egypt with classical Greek and Roman sensibilities of beauty. Priceless as history, some of the Aboukir Bay artifacts may also become celebrated works of art–including the astonishingly sensual, headless statue of Aphrodite, sculpted by a nameless Egyptian master, found at Canopus.
Luxury and sensuality were, in fact, the hallmarks of Herakleion, Canopus and Menouthis. Each was home to important religious temples, and each played host to annual pagan festivals celebrated with Dionysian abandon. An annual procession carrying a statue of the God Osiris from Herakleion to Canopus by barge as a prayer for a successful rainy season attracted international tourists, as Rio does today at carnival time. People looking for a good time sailed in on ships from Greece and Rome and from Alexandria on resplendent barges.
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“Shamelessness,” wrote Strabo, a disapproving Greek geographer, referring to the behavior of inebriated festival celebrants he witnessed in 24 B.C. “Every day and every night is crowded with people on the boats who play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness, both men and women. . . .”
Ten years before Strabo visited, Cleopatra VII, who was to be Egypt’s last pharaoh, held court so often in Canopus on amorous holidays with Roman General Marc Antony that it caused a political furor in Rome. Antony’s enemies used propagandists like the poet Propertius to publicly vilify Cleopatra as “that whore Queen of Canopus, [the] city of vice,” accusing her of using Antony to gain power over Rome.
Such scattered bits of anecdotal history of the lost cities survive in Greek, Roman and Egyptian texts, but until Goddio began mapping the floor of Aboukir Bay in 1997, there was virtually no physical evidence of their existence. Herakleion sank precipitously into the bay sometime around the time of Christ, and Canopus and Menouthis followed about 700 years later. Goddio located Canopus in 1999 and Herakleion in 2000 and has hauled up enough artifacts to fill a museum, but says there is far more left in the bay than he has recovered so far.
“I think we have 50 more years of excavation to do,” says Goddio, 55, as he gingerly guides the finely sculpted torso of a statue of a pharaoh’s son on the end of the hoist cable to the ship’s deck. Barefoot and wiry in his neatly pressed khaki shorts, blue button-down shirt and baseball cap pulled low over his deeply-tanned patrician face, he looks 15 years younger than his age and fit enough to have a crack at another 50 years.
Goddio is usually intensely serious and rarely smiles, but on this day his eyes sparkle and his face repeatedly crinkles into a dazzling grin as he shows off artifacts recovered this year from half a square mile of Herakleion’s watery ruins. In addition to the statues and inscribed monuments, there are objects used in the city’s daily life: cooking pots and serving vessels made of bronze and ceramics, pillows made of stone, elegant long-handled dippers used to pour libations in temple ceremonies, mirrors, ropes, coat hooks in the shape of duck heads, jugs, juglets, alabaster vases and clay oil lamps, their spouts blackened from everyday use.
There are exquisite gold rings, earrings and other jewelry, gold dinner plates, crumpled sheets of gold foil and fistfuls of gold coins. The divers found the jewelry and coins in the ruins of houses and scattered in Herakleion’s streets, as though dropped in panicky flight during the city’s sudden, mysterious end.
“People didn’t leave gold lying around 2,000 years ago any more than we would today,” says Jean-Daniel Stanley, a Smithsonian Institution geologist. “To find gold coins scattered in the streets shows that whatever happened to Herakleion, it happened very fast.” Stanley believes catastrophic flooding on the Nile delta was responsible for the calamity, while a competing theory, advanced by Stanford University geophysicist Amos Nur, blames earthquakes (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Goddio is sometimes criticized by academic archeologists as too flamboyant, apparently because several of his past projects, including shipwrecks in the Philippines and sunken palaces in Alexandria’s harbor, were made into popular television documentaries. In person, however, he is a quiet, studious man. Until 1984, Goddio, a statistician and mathematician by training, had been a successful, high-level financial consultant to the United Nations and to the governments of Laos and Saudi Arabia.
An amateur diver and boating enthusiast, he developed an interest in marine archeology while working for several years in the Far East. In 1984, he wangled an invitation to join an expedition that was starting an excavation in Aboukir Bay on Napoleon Bonaparte’s flagship, L’Orient, sunk by Lord Nelson’s British fleet in a great battle in 1798. On his very first day of diving, Goddio found L’Orient’s bronze rudder, and he was hooked. The next year, he founded the European Institute for Underwater Archeology to raise money to finance his expeditions.
Since then, he has found and excavated enough old ships in various parts of the world to assemble a polyglot armada of ancient vessels, including 11th, 13th, 15th and 16th Century Chinese junks and colonial sailing ships from Britain, Spain and France. In 1992, he went back to Egypt to search Alexandria’s harbor for the Ptolemies’ royal palace district.
Goddio loves to dive, but his greatest contribution to his projects may be the organizational skills he learned in business. He manages to run up to three major expeditions a year in different parts of the world. Before the first diver gets into the water, somebody has to spend weeks or months in libraries researching likely archeological sites, then organize boats, hire boat crews, bring in divers and underwater-detection technicians and sign up academic consultants and conservators to interpret and care for artifacts.
Early on, he saw the value in powerful new underwater-detection technologies, including nuclear resonance magnetometers, sidescanning sonar and echosounders used to locate the Titanic in 15,000 feet of water. He hired the Titanic expedition’s two geophysicists, Jean-Jacques Groussard and Gerard Schnepp, who also build magnetometers under license for the French navy.
“I am so impressed by Franck and his work and the projects he undertakes,” says Susan Hendrickson. Though she is famous as a dinosaur prospector for having found Sue, the world’s most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil which now resides in the Field Museum, diving is Hendrickson’s main occupation. She has been an underwater prospector since she began diving on Caribbean shipwrecks for a living in the 1960s.
She met Goddio in 1991, when the Cuban government asked her to find a trustworthy marine archeologist who was expert in using modern detection technologies. The Cubans wanted somebody to pinpoint and map locations of more than 2,000 old shipwrecks off its coast. “People I trusted told me about Franck,” Hendrickson says, “so I called him, and he came to Cuba.” Now Hendrickson works with Goddio all over the world. Besides being one of his senior divers, she is his unofficial liaison with news media and museums in the English-speaking world.
Marine archeology is a field plagued by modern pirates and rogues who plunder treasures from shipwrecks, so in each country where he works, Goddio integrates local divers, experts and government officials into his team to assure an aboveboard, strict accounting of recovered artifacts. At the conclusion of a mission, he usually organizes international exhibitions to raise money to benefit the museums. Even when he is allowed to keep portions of the treasures he finds, Goddio donates his artifacts to museums.
He is financed by foundation grants, particularly from the Hilti Foundation, philanthropic arm of the international Swiss construction supply giant, Hilti AG, and by income from documentary-makers like the Discovery Channel.
Most academic archeologists get their funding from government grants, and some have been critical of Goddio and his work, citing his lack of academic credentials and accusing him of being a publicity hound.
There is no love lost, for example, between Goddio and French archeologist Jean-Yves Empereur, director of France’s National Center for Scientific Research, whose work is underwritten through government subsidies. In the 1990s, while Goddio searched for sunken palaces in Alexandria’s harbor, Empereur was on the other side of the harbor excavating what he says are the ruins of the city’s famous Pharos lighthouse. Empereur has dismissed Goddio with one word, “amateurish.”
But others say he has made valuable contributions to the field. Nur, the Stanford geophysicist and earthquake expert, says Goddio “may not be widely respected by some archeologists, but he is incredible, a real discoverer.” He compares Goddio to Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy 19th Century German businessman who taught himself archeology and then discovered two of Greece’s greatest ruins, ancient Troy and the royal tombs at Mycenae.
Goddio had known about Herakleion and the other lost cities since he heard rumors about them when he was diving in Aboukir Bay on the L’Orient, and says he had read everything he could find about them after that.
When he brought his crews to dive in Alexandria Harbor in 1992, he brought along Jean Yoyotte, an Egyptologist at the College of France, considered by many to be the world’s top authority on Greco-Roman Egypt. “There is a difference between an occasional discovery and a systematic search,” said Yoyotte. “Goddio’s method is the first time this sort of technology has been employed for scientific archeology.”
In 1997, Goddio began to employ his method on Aboukir Bay, putting Groussard and Schnepp to work criss-crossing 120 square kilometers of water, mapping the bottom of the bay as they went. Their detection gear doesn’t make pictures of objects on the bottom, but seeks out “anomalies,” magnetic presences or echo-located shapes that seem out of context with the natural seafloor.
“On our magnetometer scans,” said Schnepp, “we see the [seafloor] surface as flat, then we might see a projection upwards, then flat again. The upward projection might mean there is a wall or some other manmade artifact buried in the sediment.” When a lot of anomalies are detected in a concentrated area, Goddio and his divers go down for a look, equipped with long metal pokers.
“You just . . . start systematically poking through the silt,” said Goddio’s chief diver, Jean Claude Roubaud. “If you strike something that sounds like ‘tink-tink-ting,’ you’ve found a piece of stone, and you dig down to see if it is a manmade artifact.”
Soon after the mapping of the bay began in 1997, the divers found a motherlode of artifacts in the upper layers of sediment, but they turned out to be huge debris fields containing more of the wreckage of L’Orient, plus two other Napoleonic warships. It took two years to excavate the wrecks, but in 1999, far deeper in the sediment, the divers began to find sections of Canopus.
“Everywhere we dive in Aboukir,” says Hendrickson, “there is something manmade: Napoleon’s ships, Roman walls, pottery dating before the time of Christ, shipwrecks going back to the 8th Century B.C.”
“The ancient material is very, very important because it is undisturbed and not decontextualized,” says Susan Walker, a specialist in Greek and Roman antiquity at the British Museum. Old cities on land rarely yield pristine archeological evidence of their early history, because succeeding generations of city occupants continually alter, tear down, build over or carry away what earlier generations built up. But the Aboukir Bay ruins are more like those of Pompeii, the Roman city buried by volcanic ash in a mighty eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. and excavated 1,900 years later, frozen in the moment it perished.
The lost city artifacts, Walker says, should spark more interest and scholarship in Egypt’s Greco-Roman era, the least studied era of Egyptian antiquity. Most archeologists have concentrated on the much more ancient ruins in the pharonic cities like Memphis and Thebes hundreds of miles from Aboukir Bay. “They haven’t been as interested in looking at the era when Egypt was ruled by foreigners,” Walker says.
In the 7th Century B.C., Egypt was already 3,000 years old, a great but tired empire, when it began to hire mercenary Greek armies to do its fighting. The Greek soldiers began settling in the sparsely populated delta region, along a main branch of the river known as the Canopic Mouth. The name came from a delta town near the coast, Canopus, where tradesmen made canopic jars for the viscera of the mummified dead.
Trying to limit the spread of Greek settlements, the Egyptians let the Greeks establish a self-contained trading colony called Naukratis, 40 miles inland along the Canopic Mouth. Out on the coast, not far from Canopus, a small village was turned into a customs port to collect duties from arriving and departing Greek ships.
The Egyptians called the village Thonis, but the Greeks called it Herakleion. In Greek mythology, Herakleion was the place saved from the Nile’s flooding waters by the god Hercules (Herakles in Greek). Grateful residents erected a huge temple to Hercules in the town. In the myth of Helen of Troy, the fugitive, shipwrecked Helen and her lover/kidnapper Paris supposedly found refuge in the Herakleion temple.
Herodotus, a Greek historian who visited Egypt in 450 B.C., was struck by the beauty of the towns along the Canopic Mouth. “When the Nile inundates the country, the cities alone are seen above its surface, very like the islands of the Aegean Sea,” Herodotus wrote. Citing the mythic visit by Helen to Herakleion, he noted with amazement, “On that shore stood a temple of Herakles, which remains to this day.”
Indeed, for the next 450 years, until Herakleion disappeared, the temple would continue to be improved and embellished because of the rising influence of Greece in Egypt. In 332 B.C., the weakened Egyptians, under the thumb of invading Persians, welcomed Alexander the Great, a young Macedonian military genius who had become king of the Greeks, as their liberator and made him their pharaoh. Alexander founded a new city on the rocky coast near Herakleion, naming it Alexandria after himself, and made it Egypt’s capital and principal seaport.
When Alexander died nine years later, his greatest general, Ptolemy, installed himself as the new pharaoh, and his descendants ruled for the next 300 years as the Ptolemaic dynasty. The Ptolemies built up Alexandria until it was the biggest (600,000 people), wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city in the antiquarian world. They dug a network of canals from Alexandria out to Canopus and Herakleion, and those two cities flourished as wealthy suburbs.
Though they were ethnic Greeks, the Ptolemies carefully legitimized their role as kings and queens by adopting the Egyptians’ religion, merging the pantheon of Grecian gods with those of the Egyptians. In Canopus, for example, the Ptolemies took a huge Egyptian temple to the god Osiris, renamed it the Serapeum and dedicated it to Serapis, a supreme god invented by Ptolemy I and suitable for worship by Greeks and Egyptians alike. To legitimately take the Egyptian throne, every new Ptolemaic king and queen first had to be blessed at the temple in Canopus.
The end for the Ptolemies and for Egypt as an independent kingdom came in 31 B.C., when Octavian, the powerful adopted son of the slain Roman emperor Julius Caesar, landed at Canopus with his legions. He soon defeated his rival, Marc Antony, and Antony’s love, Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic pharaoh.
Rome drained the wealth of Egypt for hundreds of years, but Alexandria and its wealthy suburbs continued to flourish. Herakleion had disappeared, but the Romans built Menouthis along the Canopic Mouth. The city was built around a new temple dedicated to the cult of the goddess Isis, and it attracted pilgrims from as far away as northern Europe and India, especially childless women, as a night spent in the temple was believed to cure infertility.
The only known surviving visual record of the area is a famous mosaic mural from a ruin in Palestrina, Italy, about 25 miles east of Rome, which depicts the coastal environs around Alexandria during Roman times. In the upriver portions it shows hunters going after wildlife. At the urban seashore, it depicts the wild Canopic lifestyle–people partying on barges, soldiers drinking at a canalside tavern and couples canoodling under ivy-covered, trellised archways.
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The great festivals sponsored by the pagan temple priests and the bawdy merrymaking that accompanied them were roundly condemned by a new religion, Christianity, that was migrating into Egypt and the rest of the empire from Jerusalem. At first the Christians were so few in number that their abhorrence of pagan rites meant little. But in 312 A.D., a new Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, declared his personal faith in the Christian God, and legions of citizens of the empire began joining the church.
By 391 A.D., angry mobs of Christians, stirred by the call from local bishops to erase the stain of paganism in their midst, descended on Canopus and attacked the Serapeum. Driving out the priests and priestesses, the rioters smashed the pagan icons–great sculptural works of art accumulated for centuries–and soldiers hauled away the building stone by stone. The site was converted into a Christian convent. In 414 A.D., Christian mobs attacked and destroyed the Isis temple in Menouthis, building a church on its site.
By then, the Roman empire was in serious decline. In 642 A.D. Arab armies marched peacefully into Alexandria, and the Islamic era began. Roughly 100 years later, another catastrophic event brought Canopus and Menouthis to their final doom as they, too, sank mysteriously into the Bay of Aboukir.
“It’s very strange,” Goddio said last May as the Princess Duda lay at anchor over the ruins of Herakleion. “We know so much about the activity of these people, but we never knew the actual places before. The entire city [Herakleion] is down there intact. We have it all, the streets, the old river course, canals, docks, temples and houses.”
Divers have identified the huge temple that thrilled Herodotus 2,450 years ago, and they are finding spectacular pagan idols inside, including a 19-foot-tall, six-ton granite statue of Hapi, the Greco-Egyptian god of flooding and abundance. “It is one of the biggest statues of a god ever found in Egypt,” says Goddio. “Not a single piece of it is missing.”
Statues of similar size have been recovered from the temple representing the savagely murderous Ptolemy VIII, who ruled Egypt from 147 B.C. to 116 B.C., and one of his queens, Cleopatra III. The statues of Ptolemy VIII and his wife fascinate historians because, though they were Greek, they are carved in the style of pre-Ptolemaic, traditional pharaonic art, as is much of the art and architecture that Goddio is recovering from the lost cities.
“It shows us that the Ptolemies spent a lot of money advertising loudly to their subjects that they were Egyptian kings and queens by building their cities and monuments to look Egyptian,” says the British Museum’s Walker of the Aboukir Bay ruins.
Most scholars until now have assumed that, being Greek elites with refined tastes, the Ptolemies would have built their cities more along classical Greek lines. Egyptologists, Walker says, used to scoff at Hollywood epics showing Cleopatra surrounding herself with the oriental pomp of far earlier dynasties than the Ptolemies. “What Goddio is finding,” says Walker, “is giving us a picture of Ptolemaic Egypt that is closer to Hollywood’s vision than we thought it was. Alexandria looked a great deal more Egyptian than we had believed.”
The statuary from Herakleion is fairly intact, but the Canopus artifacts are battered and shattered, befitting its turbulent history during the Christian era. Broken pieces of statues were found in ruins of buildings in Canopus that scholars still can’t identify.
The sensuous artistry of one broken black-granite statue so stunned people aboard the Princess Duda that they broke into applause as Goddio’s crew pulled it out of the water from the ruins of Canopus in 2000 (the year as published has been corrected in this text). “She was sculpted by an Egyptian artist, because Greek sculptors never worked with that stone,” says Yoyette, who believes the statue is of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. “Her posture is the typical Egyptian one, standing with one foot forward, hands held straight to the side. . . . It is so beautiful, it must have been ordered by a king. She isn’t known yet to the rest of the world, but she will be.”
From an archeologist’s standpoint, the most valuable artifacts are engraved stele, monumental stones that commemorate ancient events and give proof of dates, places and people’s activities. The most remarkable of these objects recovered so far is a stele installed at the Herakleion port in 380 B.C., establishing a 10 percent tax on all incoming and outgoing Greek cargoes. It is identical to one found in the ruins of Naukratis along the long-ago dried-up bed of the Canopic Mouth in 1890.
At other times of the year, the water can be too choppy for the mapping operations and the dive boats, or seasonal winds blow outflow from the Nile into Aboukir Bay, making visibility in the water, already murky, impossible.
Weather conditions limit the mapping and diving work on the bay to barely two months in the spring. Objects portable enough to be raised are taken to the surface, catalogued and put in storage. Objects that are in danger of deteriorating are stabilized. Anything made of stone, for example, is permeated with salt after centuries under the seawater. If the salt isn’t removed before the stone dries out, it will form pustules on the exterior, shattering and flaking the carved surface. So conservators immerse all stone objects in tanks of fresh water, and the salt leaches out, a process that takes weeks or months, depending on the object’s size.
Bigger objects and objects left untouched because of lack of time to do careful excavation are simply left underwater. They are safe there, as the Egyptian Navy severely restricts access to the bay. Goddio says many tantalizing mysteries have been left in the water to be explored in other diving seasons. In Herakleion, divers have been lifting sections of collapsed temple walls, and they have found human bones in two locations, apparently victims crushed in the destruction of the city.
The biggest mystery, of course, is what happened to cause the cities to sink into the bay. Stanford’s Nur, an expert on earthquakes, and the Smithsonian’s Stanley, who has devoted his career to studying river deltas around the world, have been working with Goddio to find possible answers.
The two men agree that all three cities sank almost instantly, though Canopus and Menouthis may have sunk in a series of disasters over many decades, with portions of the cities plunging into the sea at different times. After that, the two men’s opinions diverge.
“I like the theory of earthquakes,” says Nur, “because we have independent evidence from historical records and geological evidence that there had been powerful earthquakes in that area in the 8th, 4th and possibly 3rd Centuries A.D. Earthquakes would have toppled the buildings in an instant, so that would explain finding all the jewelry and coins lying around in the ruins [of Herakleion].”
Stanley, who has been taking deep core samples from the bottom of the bay, believes the destruction was not caused by earthquakes but by the unusual dynamics between the buildup of river delta systems and very rare, extraordinarily destructive megafloods. “In deltas, river branches migrate back and forth, and in major floods, they can top their banks and shift directions,” he notes. “And that is where these cities were built, along the Canopic branch of the Nile in the delta region.” Centuries could pass without the river threatening the real estate, but eventually a totally irregular, monster flood comes along, inundating even the highest ground.
“Sudden flooding, with roiling, turbulent water and millions of tons of sediment, could cause the substrate under these cities to fail and liquefy into soft, oozy mud,” says Stanley. The combined weight of the water, sediment and the cities themselves would cause the cities to simply slump into the sea.
What caused the horrors that destroyed the lost cities may never be known for certain. The remarkable preservation of their ruins for so many centuries, however, will be a tremendous boon to modern scholars.
“These discoveries are so huge to Egyptologists who have interest in Greek, Roman and Byzantine times,” Yoyotte says. “From now on, everybody who is studying the geography and history of these times will have to come here.”
A few of the best objects, including the black granite Aphrodite, will go on temporary display in a small museum attached to a new international library being opened this fall in Alexandria. The volume of what Goddio’s crews are recovering is so large, however, they will need their own museum, also planned for Alexandria.
To help Egypt raise funds for the new museum, Goddio is creating a 15,000-square-foot exhibition of the most spectacular artifacts from Aboukir Bay, lining up one museum each in France, Germany, Portugal and the United States. Last year he visited the Field Museum to see its installation of an international touring exhibit on the life of Cleopatra, which featured artifacts his divers had recovered from Alexandria’s harbor. He likes the Field, both from his experience there and his association with Hendrickson, who has a strong relationship with the museum, making it the front-runner to get the lost-cities exhibit.
“That should be an extremely successful exhibition,” says Walker, who designed and put together the Cleopatra exhibit. “How could it not be? The objects they have found are of incredible interest historically and esthetically, and they come together with such a simple, strong, wonderfully appealing storyline. Ancient lost cities found under the seas. Amazing new treasures. It’s magic.”