ALEXANDRIA, Egypt – Colossal statues, sunken ships, gold coins and jewellery are among the treasures newly uncovered by a French marine archaeologist in the submerged ancient city of Heracleion off the Egyptian coast. Franck Goddio presented the results of what he called a „very special year“ of excavation at a news conference in nearby Alexandria. He announced the discovery of the city itself a year ago. The archaeologist believes Heracleion, recorded as a key port at the mouth of the Nile in ancient times, was destroyed by an earthquake or similar, sudden catastrophic event.

The Frenchman has been documenting and mapping the antiquities discovered by his team of divers with the help of advanced electronic technology.

Among the most remarkable is an intact black granite stele, or inscribed slab, almost identical to one found in 1899 that now reposes in Cairo‘s Egyptian Museum. Both feature an edict of Pharaoh Nektanebos the First (378-362 BC). The one discovered by Goddio says it should be installed at „Heracleion-Thonis“. The perfectly preserved stele, 195 cm high, thus bolsters the case for identifying the ruined city as Egypt‘s Heracleion, once more the stuff of legend than history. It is not to be confused with a city of the same name on Crete.

MYTHIC ORIGINS

The Greek historian Diodor recounts how Heracles, the mythic son of the supreme god Zeus and known as Hercules in Latin, dammed a Nile flood, setting the river back in its course. Local people built him a temple and called the town Heracleion. According to Herodotus, another Greek historian, Helen of Troy and her lover Paris fled to Heracleion to escape Helen‘s husband Menelaus, but were rebuffed by Thonis, the watchman at the entrance to the Nile who had moral qualms. Ancient texts speak of the city as the port of entry to Egypt and major customs post at the mouth of the Nile before Alexandria itself was founded in 331 BC — and before the Nile itself changed course. Goddio showed an electronic image of the site with a deep blue stripe that he said indicated the old Nile river bed running next to the submerged city. Goddio‘s team found three huge pink granite statues in pieces near the remains of some thick walls. They lay on the seabed near a granite shrine, or naos, with hieroglyphics from the Ptolemaic era, showing that it was the sanctuary in a temple to the supreme god Amun, apparently the great temple of Heracleion.

CATASTROPHIC FATE

Goddio believes a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, destroyed Heracleion, which would explain why none of the artefacts found date from later than the first century BC. He said his team had been surprised to find that despite lying beneath the sea for centuries, remains such as a wall 150 metres long and 1.25 metres wide were very well preserved under a layer of sediment.

Divers had located other objects using a special acoustic device accurate to a centimetre. This had enabled them to uncover superb artefacts ranging from bronze vessels to gold coins and jewellery. Ten closely bunched shipwrecks indicated the location of Heracleion‘s once-teeming harbour and its calamitous fate. Goddio, who heads the Paris-based Institute of Underwater Archaeology, said a huge stone fragment, found not far from the temple, was one of 15 that made up one of the biggest steles ever found in Egypt, covered with hieroglyphics and Greek inscriptions from Cleopatra‘s time in the first century BC.

ALISTAIR LYON, REUTERS