Field Notes

012

Sunken Cities

Two ancient ports found off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast

In pharaonic and Greco-Roman times, legendary cities guarded the mouth of the Nile, until unknown catastrophes dragged them into the sea. Two thousand years later, history is escaping its watery tomb.

Underwater archaeologists believe they have found the ancient city of Herakleion, named for the Greek god Herakles, near Egypt’s bustling fishing port of Aboukir, about 15 miles east of Alexandria.

Franck Goddio, head of the Paris-based Institute for Underwater Archaeology, plans to return to Egypt this fall to confirm his identification of the site as ancient Herakleion, the site of a famous Temple of Herakles. Even if he is wrong, however, his joint European-Egyptian team has done something remarkable.

“We have an intact city, frozen in time,” Goddio said. “This city is absolutely untouched. You can see everything remains as it was.”

The underwater archaeologists found ruins of houses, temples and the infrastructure of a port about 4 miles offshore. Colossal broken granite statues lie beneath 20 feet of water, sharing the seabed with stone heads of pharaohs and scattered bronze coins. A red granite sarcophagus and an intact shrine with inscriptions have also been found among the well-preserved ruins.

Goddio’s team made these discoveries last spring while wrapping up underwater excavations across the bay at the site of Menouthis, another ancient city claimed by the sea.

These finds cap four years of extensive surveys of the Bay of Aboukir, which lies at the mouth of the Canopic branch of the Nile, one of the river’s seven ancient outlets to the Mediterranean. The team has scoured the sea floor using sidescan sonar, magnetometers and sub-bottom seismic profiling. Without such technology, the ancient ruins would have remained hidden under a thick blanket of sediment.

Menouthis yielded an impressive cache of archaeological treasures—gold coins, jewelry and statues of gods. But it is the completely unexpected discovery of a lost city that is now making waves.

“It’s like when archaeologists found the tomb of Tutankhamun,” Goddio said. “Here we’ve found not a tomb but a whole city.”

According to Manfred Clauss, a professor of ancient history at Germany’s Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, it is important to find entire ancient cities, rather than just statuary or isolated ruins. “Every building, every current find, adds to our knowledge,” he said.

Ancient texts tell us that three cities once fronted the Bay of Aboukir: Canopus, its suburb Menouthis, and Herakleion. The Greek historian Herodotus mentions that he visited these cities in 450 B.C.—more than a century before Alexander the Great swept into Egypt and founded nearby Alexandria. The Greek geographer Strabo (c. 63 B.C.–21 A.D.) praised the luxury of life in these cities, whereas the playwright Seneca (c. 5 B.C.–65 A.D.) sternly condemned them for moral corruption.

Greek mythology explains the region’s place names: Sparta’s King Menelaus, husband of the beautiful but unfaithful Helen, visited Egypt after the Trojan War. His helmsman, Canopus, was bitten by a viper and transformed into a god. Canopus and his wife, Menouthis, were then 013immortalized by having cities named after them.

“We know about these cities from classical writing. But now we’ve got evidence that they existed,” said Gaballa Ali Gaballa, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. “You read about these things for so long that you stop believing them. Then you finally find something—it’s a dream come true.”

History tells us little of Herakleion. It was a commercial port on the Mediterranean as early as the New Kingdom period (after 1550 B.C.). With the founding of Alexandria in the fourth century B.C., however, Herakleion lost some of its economic importance.

More is known of Menouthis, a holy city that became known for its religious cults. Pilgrims around the Mediterranean journeyed to Menouthis to worship in temples dedicated to the Egyptian gods Osiris, Isis and Serapis.

The Temple of Isis was Menouthis’s most celebrated structure. In the fourth century A.D., however, it was destroyed by Christians, who then built a basilica and two sanctuaries over the site.

Goddio’s team discovered Menouthis a little over a mile off Aboukir’s western shore. Beneath the waters were numerous buildings, monuments and statues (most of them linked to Isis). One massive building is 180 feet long, with walls six feet thick.

The marine archaeologists found a 20-inch-long head of Serapis, which probably belonged to a statue that guarded a temple. They also found jewelry, marble canopic jars (burial containers for the body’s soft tissue), a sphinx head, a headless stone torso of the goddess Isis, and gold coins from the Byzantine and the Islamic periods.

Although the discovery of two sunken cities is an archaeological coup d’etat, it raises a new question: What happened to them?

The American geophysicist Amos Nur, a Stanford University professor who was recruited to study the finds, believes he knows the answer to that question. “From the nature of the collapse of buildings, columns and statues in Alexandria and Menouthis, and the new site, which is perhaps Herakleion, it’s pretty clear the damage was most likely caused by earthquakes,” he said.

Yet exactly when, and why, these cities crumbled and slipped beneath the waves remains shrouded in mystery.

014

Ancient Rome Revealed

In 2,700 square feet of map!

Researchers at the Stanford Graphics Laboratory are working feverishly on an immensely complicated jigsaw puzzle—a huge marble map of Rome from the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 A.D.).

The extremely detailed map, called the Severan Plan for short, shows streets, alleyways, buildings and even interior plans of private houses (see the 3-foot-long fragment above). Originally 60 feet wide and 45 feet high, the colossal carte took up an entire interior wall of the office of the census taker of Imperial Rome, just outside the Roman Forum. After the fall of Rome, some of the map’s marble was quarried and used in other buildings, while the remaining fragments fell to the ground. Many of the pieces were preserved under the rubble of the collapsed building, though the wall that actually supported the map remained standing (below).

In the mid-16th century, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese began to gather the known fragments in an effort to piece the map together. Fragments of the map continue to be found even today, though the 1,163 pieces now recovered represent only about 15 percent of the original map.

Fitting together so many fragments, all with edges that have become worn over the millennia, with no perfect fits, is a task the Stanford researchers thought could be done best by a computer. In April 1999, the Stanford Graphics Laboratory team of James Davis, Natasha Gelfand, Leo Guibas, Dave Koller, Marc Levoy and Nicolas Scapel, along with Stanford classics professor Jennifer Trimble, set up shop in the basement of the Museum of Roman Civilization, just outside Rome, and began scanning each fragment. To get three-dimensional scans, each piece had to be scanned several times from different angles, stretching a project they had hoped would take two weeks into a month of round-the-clock work.

The team is now back at Stanford, where the researchers are trying to identify matches and fit them together. Fortunately, most of the fragments are of the same general part of the map, including portions of the Colosseum and the Imperial Palaces of the Palatine. After the computer finishes analyzing the scans, workers in Rome will test the results by trying to fit the actual pieces together.

015

Practice Makes Perfect

Revealing a bear-killer’s private playground

Last July Italian archaeologists excavating the villa of the Roman emperor Commodus (180–192 A.D.) unearthed what they believe are the remains of a private gladiatorial arena.

Commodus, son of the stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius, was one of Rome’s most notorious rulers. Like Caligula, he was famous for throwing wild orgies and persecuting his political enemies. He was also a colossal egoist, renaming the months of the year after his own titles and proclaiming himself the incarnation of Hercules. But Commodus’s most-talked about idiosyncrasy was his fondness for gladiatorial games.

In the last two years of his reign, the emperor shocked the citizens of Rome by insisting that he be allowed to compete in animal hunts and gladiatorial matches at the Colosseum. Although the film Gladiator depicts him as effete and cowardly, Commodus was a skilled swordsman and archer. One typical day, the ancient historian Cassius Dio reports, “[Commodus] killed 100 bears all by himself, shooting down on them from the railing of the balustrade.”

Probably some of Commodus’s skills were honed in the large oval area that archaeologists have discovered adjoining his villa, which lies just outside of Rome. “It’s quite possible that this was Commodus’s personal arena,” Rita Paris, the director of the excavation team told the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero. “The building is connected with the private part of his residence.”

Unfortunately, the emperor’s diligence in the practice ring couldn’t save him from an early grave. When Commodus’s delusions began to interfere with matters of state, the Roman senate arranged to have him poisoned and strangled. His assassin, ironically enough, was a young gladiator named Narcissus.

015

What Do You Know About the Carthaginians?

1) Who were the Carthaginians?

a) Etruscans from Italy
b) Berbers from North Africa
c) Celts from Iberia
d) Phoenicians from the Levant

2) In ancient times, the Carthaginians were famous for

a) dye manufacturing
b) seafaring
c) military prowess
d) all of the above

3) In the third century B.C., Carthage controlled

a) most of Asia Minor
b) North Africa and much of Sicily
c) the Peloponnesian peninsula
d) Egypt and the Near East

4) One surviving example of Carthaginian literature is

a) The Conquests of Radovan
b) Garo’s Tractate on Agriculture
c) The Periplus of Hanno
d) Lessing’s Principles of Engagement

5) How did the Carthaginians appease their gods?

a) by fasting
b) by swearing vows of poverty
c) by offering infants and young children
d) by drinking their enemies’ blood

6) Carthage’s sacred precinct is known as

a) the Ritualarium
b) the Tophet
c) the Adyton
d) the Sanctorum

7) The Roman senator Cato coined the phrase “Carthago delenda est,” meaning

a) Carthage weakens!
b) Carthage stirs once more!
c) Carthage must be destroyed!
d) Carthage is our brother!

8) Hannibal fought his most celebrated battles during

a) the First Punic War
b) the Second Punic War
c) the Third Punic War
d) the Macedonian Wars

9) How did Hannibal of Carthage die?

a) he committed suicide
b) he was stepped on by an elephant
c) he froze to death crossing the Alps
d) he was assassinated by the Romans

Answers

(1)d (2)d (3)b (4)c (5)c (6)b (7)c (8)b (9)a. For more on ancient Carthage, see David Soren, “‘Carthage Must be Destroyed’,” But Must It Be Forgotten?” p.16.

014

OddiFacts

Dr. Spock He’s Not

The second-century B.C. physician Demastes, like other educated Greeks, thought that the human fetus developed from the male sperm. Demastes, however, took the idea further, developing a mathematical theory of the development of human infants. In a normal nine-month pregnancy, the sperm turns to foam (after 6 days), blood (after 15 days) and flesh (after 27 days). After 45 days, this fleshy creature begins to take shape. The baby moves at 90 days and is born at 250 days.

“It’s really a form of cooking,” says Holt Parker, a classics professor at the University of Cincinnati who translated Demastes’s text. Four paragraphs of Demastes’s The Care of Pregnant Women are quoted in an 11th-century A.D. manuscript, recently re-discovered in a library in Florence, Italy. This is all we know of Demastes, other than a reference to his discussion of babies‘ diets by his contemporary Ceranus.

Sunken Cities
Two ancient ports found off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast