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History's Hinge - 'Ain Jalut

[Solomon]

A coin representing Ptolemy the first (Soter).

 After the successful world premier in Berlin during summer 2006 with a total number of 450,000 visitors, the exhibition "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" is now moving on to Paris. Some 500 spectacular pieces discovered during Franck Goddio?s underwater excavations off the coast of Egypt will be presented at the Grand Palais from 9 December 2006 ? 16 March 2007 and retrace once more the history of Egypt from the last Pharaohs to Alexander the Great, from the Hellenic conquests to the Roman Empire, and from the Christian era to the rise of Islam.

Exhibition website in Paris

Portrayed as Aphrodite, goddess of love, rising from the waves. Black granite, 3rd century BC.
? Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation - Photo : Christoph Gerigk


The discovery of the colossal pink granite statue of hapy, God Of The Nile, At Heracleion. It Is Now Held By The Maritime Museum In Alexandria. Height 5.4 Meters, depth 90 centimeters, weight 6 tons. Early Ptolemaic period, 4th century BC .
? Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation - Photo : Christoph Gerigk

[Bart]

Egypt's Sunken Treasures

This statue of Egyptian god Hapi is part of the Bonn exhibition

   DW-WORLD.DE spoke to French marine archeologist Franck Goddio, who brought lost parts of the legendary port of Alexandria and the ancient cities of Heracleion and Canopus back to light.

   "Egypt's Sunken Treasures," an exhibition of artifacts unearthed during Goddio's excavations, went on show in Bonn on Thursday.

Goddio devoted himself to marine archeology in the 1980s

DW-WORLD.DE: After thousands of excursions to sunken cities and shipwrecks around the world, your living room must look like an adventurous place.

   Franck Goddio: Well, it's not an adventure. I would say it's a job, and we are doing this job very professionally. We plan each mission carefully and train our staff for that, and before starting, there is a lot of paperwork that has to be done.

Before you started to search for sunken treasures, you studied mathematics and worked as a financial consultant. How does that fit with archaeology?

   As a matter of fact, it does help. After 10 years in finance, I decided to take a one-year break. I looked at what at the time has been done in underwater archaeology, and I realized that there was a need for a privately funded independent institute that could work for governments and other institutions.  

You opened such an institute for underwater archaeology in Paris in 1985. Were you always sure that it would become a success story? 

   Maybe I was a little naive at the beginning. When I started to search for the sunken parts of Alexandria in 1984 the geophysical instruments that you need for missions like that didn't exist.  

But you did find ancient Alexandria in the end.

   But for Alexandria, it took years and years because we had to perform a four-year geophysical survey before we even had a detailed map that showed that there was something under the sediment. It's a bit like modern surgery. You use the scanner, and then afterwards, when you know where to search, you do the operation at the right place.   

Are you still thrilled by your work?

   It's very hard work because for months and months you only sail along straight lines in the harbor, towing instruments and registering data in order to create an electronic map. When you start to see the map, you get this feeling that there is something down there. And only then does it become thrilling.

Hundreds of artifacts are on show in Bonn

It seems that your work has little in common with an Indiana Jones adventure.

   Not at all, on the contrary I would say. My job is to prevent adventure. 

When you take artifacts from the ancient port of Alexandria, you put them in different colored baskets. Does the color mean something?
 
   The color is in fact no criteria, but you need these baskets in order to desalinate the artifacts. When you raise it from the sea, where the object has been for some 2,000 years, you have to remove the salt. For a small artifact, this can take a few days. For a very big artefact, like the statue of Hapi (editor's note: a more than five-meter or 16-feet high statue), we needed 18 months to remove the salt.   

What happens if you don't do that?

   The stone will disintegrate. Chemical reactions will make the stone weaker, until it finally disintegrates.  

This stele of the Ptolemy is also part of the exhibition

The exhibition in Bonn is showing 500 artifacts, most of them from Alexandria. What kind of feeling should the exhibition evoke in visitors? 

   We found all the artifacts right next to each other. They were on the same place for thousands of years and supplemented each other, they were literally living together. In the exhibition you can see that they speak to each other. 

Who owns the artifacts?

   They belong to Egypt of course. All artifacts that you see in the exhibit in Bonn will one day end up in a museum which will be built for them -- in Alexandria.     

"Egypt's Sunken Treasures" runs until Jan. 27, 2008 at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2433875,00.html

[Administration]

Ancient cities vanished into muddy morass
18 July 2001
From New Scientist Print Edition
Stephanie Pain

Two ancient cities that once stood at the mouth of the Nile vanished into a morass of liquid mud when the river burst its banks, according to an analysis of the sediments in Egypt's Abu Qir bay.

The research suggests that the cities sank into the bay when turbulent floodwaters transformed the soft, unstable ground beneath them into a soup of sediment.

The disappearance of these cities has been blamed on earthquakes, subsidence and rising sea levels. But Jean-Daniel Stanley, a coastal geoarchaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, blames the Nile.

"A powerful flood would bring a lot of water carrying a lot of sediment - enough to cause failure of the ground at the river mouth," says Stanley.

Prime location

The ruins of the two long lost Greek cities of Eastern Canopus and Herakleion were uncovered in 1999 and 2000 by marine archaeologist Franck Goddio of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology in Paris.

Hi-tech surveys of the seafloor revealed the substantial remains of Eastern Canopus 1.6 kilometres offshore and buried under five metres of mud. The city of Herakleion lies beneath seven metres of mud 5.4 kilometres from the shore.

Today the nearest branch of the Nile lies more than 20 kilometres to the east of Abu Qir bay. But the surveys show that both cities once stood at the mouth of a now-extinct branch of the Nile - where they could control incoming vessels and tax goods being shipped upriver. "You'd think the Greeks would have thought twice about building on low, soft sediment. But it was clearly profitable," says Stanley.

Excavations at the two sites indicate that both cities were damaged by earthquakes before they disappeared. But this doesn't explain why the land subsided so catastrophically beneath them, says Stanley.
Liquefied earth

Slumping caused by a quake would be widespread in the bay. Instead, it is restricted to the margins of the lost river. Cores taken at the site of Eastern Canopus show clear signs of liquefaction - a process that disrupts the normal layers of sediment. "As the ground turned to liquid some buildings would sink in, others would be pushed up," says Stanley. Collapse would be rapid.

Stanley has pinpointed the flood that did for Eastern Canopus. The discovery of two Arabic coins dating from the 730s suggests the city had not sunk by then. Written records of the highs and lows of the Nile note significant flooding in 741-742 AD, with the river rising a metre higher than the normal flood level. This was almost certainly the flood that buried Canopus, says Stanley.

Analysis of cores taken around Herakleion this spring should soon reveal whether it suffered the same fate. The youngest artefacts from the site date from the first century AD, suggesting that the city disappeared soon after.

As a city built on mud, Herakleion would have been vulnerable to subsidence during a big flood. "I'm not ruling out earthquakes," says Stanley. "But flooding would be a strong contender."

Journal reference: Nature (vol 412, p 293)

[Administration]

Colossal head of the Ptolemaic god Serapis in white marble (Christoph Gerigk, Hilti Foundation)

Submerged Cities off the Coast of Egypt
by Angela M.H. Schuster

An underwater archaeological survey of the Mediterranean just a few miles off Egypt's north coast has revealed the remains of two 2,500-year-old cities, possibly Menouthis and Herakleion, which served as trading hubs in the Late Dynastic Period. Divers, working under the direction of Franck Goddio of the Paris-based Institut Europ?en d'Arch?ologie Sous-Marine and archaeologists from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities have located well-preserved remains of houses; temples dedicated to the gods Isis, Serapis, and Osiris; port facilities; fallen monuments; statues; inscriptions; ceramics; and late Islamic and Byzantine jewelry and coins, all embedded in the sea floor less than 30 feet below the water's surface.


Divers recovered a hoard of Islamic and Byzantine coins. (Christoph Gerigk, Hilti Foundation)

Discovered 1.2 and 3.5 miles offshore from Aboukir, respectively, the two cities, which were founded sometime in the sixth or seventh century B.C., are known from ancient authors. Strabo, who visited Egypt in 26 B.C., described the geographic location of the cities and their opulent way of life. Herodotus, writing four centuries earlier, described the cities of the Nile Delta as looking like the islands of the Aegean set amid a marsh. The Greek historian specifically mentions Herakleion and its temple dedicated to Herakles. Herakleion had served as Egypt's principal commercial port until the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.

By the fifth century A.D., however, these cities along with the Hellenistic capital of Alexandria had been destroyed, toppled by a series of earthquakes and tidal waves that struck the Egyptian coast, centered, according to Stamford University geophysicist Amos Nur, on a nascent fault line that stretches from Sicily to Cairo. Written sources tell us some 23 earthquakes struck North Africa between the years A.D. 320 and 1303, a particularly severe one in the summer of A.D. 365. Over time the coastline dropped more than 20 feet, the cities along it collapsing and slipping beneath the waves, and gradually buried by silt depoisted by the Nile. The cities are located in what was once the Canopic Branch of the Nile which disappeared in the tectonic activity

[Administration]

Peguat ? Canopus (Ş?n-Stele) in hieroglyphs
Canopus, Egypt

Canopus (also: Canobus) was an Ancient Egyptian coastal town, located in the Nile Delta. Its site is in the eastern outskirts of modern-day Alexandria, around 25 kilometres from the centre of that city.

Canopus stood in the seventh Nomos (Menelaites, later Canopites after it), on the western bank at the mouth of the westernmost branch of the River Nile ? known as the Canopic or Heracleotic branch or -mouth. It was the principal port in Egypt for Greek trade before the foundation of Alexandria.

Its old Egyptian name was Pikuat; the Greeks called it Kanobos, or Kanopos, after a commander of a Greek fleet buried there.

Pre-hellenistic history

Early Egyptological excavations some 2 or 3 km from the area known today as Abu Qir have revealed extensive traces of the city with its quays, and granite monuments with the name of Ramesses II, but they may have been brought in for the adornment of the place at a later date.

The exact date of the foundation of Canopus is unknown, but Herodotus refers to it as an ancient port. Homeric myth claims that it was founded by Menelaus, and named after Canopus, the pilot of his ship, who died there after being bitten by a serpent. Homer describes how Menelaus built a monument to his memory on the shore, around which the town later grew up.

The real origin of the name Canopus is said to be Ancient Egyptian Kah Nub = "golden floor", referring likely to the profits made by merchants trading through the port. There is unlikely to be any connection with "canopy".

A temple to Osiris was built by Pharaoh Ptolemy The Good (the third ruler of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty), but, according to Herodotus, very near to Canopus was an older shrine, a temple of Heracles that served as an asylum for fugitive slaves (the Decree shows that Heracles here stands for Amun). Osiris was worshipped at Canopus under a peculiar form: that of a vase with a human head. Through an old misunderstanding, the name "canopic jars" was applied by early Egyptologists to the vases with human and animal heads in which the internal organs were placed by the Egyptians after embalming.

Macedonian- Hellenistic Canopus

In Ptolemy The Good' ninth regnal year (239 BC), a great assembly of priests at Canopus passed an honorific decree (the "Decree of Canopus") that, inter alia, conferred various new titles on the king and his consort, Berenice. Two examples of this decree are known, inscribed in Egyptian (in both hieroglyphic and Macedonian Syllable scripts) and in Greek, and they were second only to the more famous Rosetta Stone in providing the key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian language. The trilingual decrees for the Three-Stela Series are: Ptolemy III, Ptolemy IV, Ptolemy V, the Decree of Canopus(also named the "Ş?n Stele"), the Decree of Memphis (Ptolemy IV) and the famous "Stele of Rosetta" (Decree of Memphis (Ptolemy V)), the Rosetta Stone, (grandfather, son and grandson). The documents are trilingual as a result of the Macedonian domination of Egypt that followed Alexander the Great's ascendency to the role of pharaoh and the existing Greek minority. (At Rosetta Stone topic can be found the listing of the 3-Stone Series. It includes 6 separate, and "named" stelae (plural of stela/stele), and some partials.)

In Roman times, the town was notorious for its dissoluteness. Juvenal's Satire VI referred to the "debauchery" that prevailed there.

[Baja Bush Pilot]

The legendary city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great as he swept through Egypt in his quest to conquer the known world.

Now scientists have discovered hidden underwater traces of a city that existed at Alexandria at least seven centuries before Alexander the Great arrived, findings hinted at in Homer's Odyssey and which could shed light on the ancient world.

Alexandria was founded in Egypt on the shores of the Mediterranean in 332 B.C. to immortalize Alexander the Great. 
The city was renowned for its library, once the largest in the world, as well as its lighthouse at the island of Pharos, one of the "Seven Wonders" of the ancient world.  Alexandria was known to have developed from a settlement known as Rhakotis, or R�-Kedet, vaguely alluded to as a modest fishing village of little significance by some historians.

Seven rod-shaped samples of dirt gathered from the seafloor of Alexandria's harbor now suggest there may have been a flourishing urban center there as far back at 1000 B.C.  Coastal geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and his colleagues used vibrating hollow tubes to gently extract three-inch-wide rods of sediment 6 to 18 feet long (2 to 5.5 meters) from up to 20 feet (6.5 meters) underwater.

Collecting these samples underwater proved challenging.

"Alexandria now is home to as many as 4 million people, and we were in the unfortunate position of having to deal with their discharge � human waste, municipal waste, industrial waste � which got released into the harbor," Stanley said. "It's not funny, but you have to sort of laugh."  Ceramic shards, high levels of lead that was likely used in construction, building stones imported from elsewhere in Egypt and organic material likely coming from sewage were detected in the sediment.

These all suggest the presence of a significant settlement well before Alexander the Great came. The results are detailed in the August issue of the journal GSA Today.

"Alexandria was built on top of an existing, and perhaps quite important, settlement, maybe one that was minimized in importance because we can't see it now," Stanley told LiveScience. "Nothing really concrete about Rhakotis has been discovered until now."

Alexander the Great likely chose this area for Alexandria since it had a bay to protect a harbor against fierce winter storms in the Mediterranean.  "There are very few places in the Egyptian Mediterranean coast where the coastline is not smooth," Stanley said. "This would have been the best place to establish a harbor."

Stanley added this bay was even noted in Homer's epic Odyssey: "Now in the surging sea an island lies, Pharos they call it. By it there lies a bay with a good anchorage, from which they send the trim ships off to sea."  This area might have been a haven throughout ancient times for the Greeks, Minoans, Phoenicians and others. Future research could shed light on the life of mariners at this settlement before Alexander came.

"Virtually nothing is known of the people who would have lived there," Stanley said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290799,00.html