Egypt's Sunken Treasures

Natural History, Dec, 2008 by Laurence A. Marschall

Egypt's Sunken Treasures

edited by Franck Goddio

with David Fabre; photography by Christoph Gerigk

Presetel, 2008; $49.95

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Sometime in the eighth century A.D. a series of great earthquakes and floods struck the Nile Delta. The city of Thonis (known to the Greeks as Heracleion) and the port of Canopus were totally submerged, along with the royal quarter of ancient Alexandria. Memories of those once-prosperous towns receded into legend. Although interest in identifying their ancient locations surged starting in the eighteenth century, it wasn't until the 1990s that a team of submarine geologists and scholar-divers, led by French archaeologist Franck Goddio, began serious underwater exploration. It is difficult to see more than a few feet through the muddy water of what is today Aboukir Bay, east of Alexandria, but persistence, as well as high-tech sonar and magnetic survey tools, enabled Goddio's team to systematically map the ancient sites and recover their treasures.

This hefty tome, first published in 2006 for the Berlin debut of an exhibition of the salvaged artifacts and now reissued in a revised and updated second edition, provides a dazzling record of a lost trove of Mediterranean civilization. Goddio's scholarly narration describes the difficulty of the work and the historic results of the expeditions. The text, though, is secondary to the studio-lit photos, which display hundreds of charms and amulets, statues, and pottery vessels, representing both Egyptian and Roman cultures. Items range in size from small gold coins and earrings to a pair of almost perfectly preserved red-granite statues over fifteen feet tall. One spectacular relic--a stone chapel called the Naos of the Decades--has been reunited: its walls with its base and pyramidal top. But the most impressive images are of divers dramatically lit by underwater spotlights; they emerge like time travelers from the murky gloom, carrying up treasures that no one has seen for 1,300 years.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.