Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PAįounded 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.Ĭriss-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. The British Museum exhibition opens with the reassembled Hapy.
#ANCIENT CITIES UNDER WATER SERIES#
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.
#ANCIENT CITIES UNDER WATER PROFESSIONAL#
The same was true if you were a Carian mercenary, an educated Greek, a professional sailor, or a member of the Pharaonic court. 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.Īnd 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. Unlike Babylon, Pompeii or mystical Atlantis, few people today have heard of Thonis-Heracleion. And now, more than a millennium after it was first submerged, Hapy’s city is returning to the surface once again. The home in question was Thonis-Heracleion. “Discovering a whole city, which was home to thousands and thousands of people over more than a thousand years … Well, that’s something else.” “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. Around these pieces lay other treasures: the ruins of temples, shards of pottery, precious jewellery, coins, oil lamps, processional barges and busts. They continued searching, and eventually unearthed six more. It was a piece of Hapy, salt-encrusted but intact. 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.