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Lost Egyptian cities discovered beneath the sea
FROM SAM KILEY IN ALEXANDRIA
TWO cities where ancient religions collided with Christianity and that were lost to the sea 1,200 years ago re-emerged over the weekend after their discovery was announced by Franck Goddio, a French underwater explorer.
Until now they had been known only through Greek mythology, local legends and a handful of early histories.
The discovery of what are believed to be the cities of Herakleion and Canopus and its suburb Menouthis, off the Egyptian coast close to Alexandria, was hailed by archaeologists as among the most important finds of the past two decades in the relatively new field of sub-aqua exploration of ancient sites.
"These are intact. Frozen in time and totally untouched. In Canopus we have found monumental statues and other structures. Around them are enormous amounts of gold coins and of ceramics," said M Goddio, who pioneered electronic techniques for scanning the seabed for anomalies that revealed the cities buried beneath 5ft of sand and silt.
The life of the cities appears to have been brought to an end by an earthquake. The shaking of the earth caused by a fault that runs northwest from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean may have been partly responsible for the flooding of the cities.
Professor Amos Nur, of Stanford University, a geophysicist. said: "It is possible that a tidal wave caused by an earthquake could have flooded the cities, but there is also the simple explanation of subsidence over time, given the sand and silt on which the cities were built."
The finds made over the past two years, unveiled on Saturday, show constant inhabitation from about 1500BC to the early years of Islam in the eighth century AD in the three cities.
Among the most important finds were two large fragments of black stone from the "Naos of the Decades", a 4th-century BC shrine which Professor Jean Yoyotte, of the Collège de France, said had originated in Saft to the east of the Nile delta but was transferred to Canopus between the first and second centuries AD.
Christians determined to stamp out pagan beliefs in the area during the 6th century AD smashed the naos and scattered its pieces. One part, a pyramid block discovered by Sonnini de Manoncourt in 1777 on land at Abukir, is in the Louvre in Paris.
M Goddio's find adds to earlier discoveries of fragments of the naos, giving an almost complete picture of the complex hieroglyphics which sorted and arranged the 36 "decades", ten-day periods defined by the appearance and disappearance of stars called the "decans", which in turn were used to count the night hours.
Inscriptions on the black slabs define the influence that each decade has on animal behaviour and human communities; they are still used by astrologers. "They are the most ancient known documents bearing witness to the origins of classical astrology," Professor Yoyotte said.
M Goddio's search for the cities began in ancient literature and myth. Greek mythology tells the story of Menelaus, king of Sparta, who stopped in Herakleion during his return from Troy with Helen. His helmsman Canopus was bitten by a viper and subsequently transformed into a god. Canopus and his wife Menouthis were immortalised by the two cities that bore their names.
The three sites, between a mile and a half and four miles offshore in about 30ft of water, were found by M Goddio and his team on board the research ship the Princess Duda. Herakleion, once a customs port where commerce flourished until the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 331BC, was found in its entirety. Its port and the foundations of many houses have been found intact.
On Saturday M Goddio brought a 4th-century BC headless statue of the goddess Isis to the surface. The work, described by Professor Manfred Clauss, an expert on the period, as a masterpiece, was so finely worked and sensual that it drew spontaneous applause from those who saw it.
"There is enough work at the three sites already excavated for us all and many others for the next 50 years," Professor Gaballa Ali Gaballa, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities, said.
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