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Diving on a Sunken City
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Volume 52 Number 2, March/April 1999
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by Jean-Yves Empereur
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When Egyptian cinematographer Asma el-Bakri decided to make a documentary
about ancient Alexandria in March 1994, she wanted to film the fallen
columns and sculptures that lay beneath the waters surrounding the
fifteenth-century Ottoman fort of Qaitbay. It was here, after all, that the
famous Pharos of Alexandria, the Seventh Wonder of the Ancient World, once
stood. Built between 285 and 280 B.C. at the eastern end of the island of
Pharos, which gave the lighthouse its name, the Pharos guided sailors until
it tumbled into the city's eastern harbor during an earthquake sometime
between A.D. 1303 and 1349. I joined her team as team as scientific
adviser.
The day we began filming, there wasn't a ripple on the sea, the wind was
from the south, and visibility was unusually good. From the surface we
could see hundreds of objects strewn across the sea floor only 24 feet
below. During filming, el-Bakri noticed that silting caused by a
breakwater of concrete blocks built to protect the Mamluk fort was
threatening to bury the little-known underwater site. Her cries of
indignation reached Cairo, and the authorities asked me to add an
investigation of the seabed to the rescue digs I was already conducting in
the city center. I reassembled the team of archaeologist-divers with whom I
had worked on previous expeditions, adding architects, geologists, and
photographers from the Center for Alexandrian Studies. Egyptologists
Jean-Pierre Corteggiani and Georges Soukiassian also joined the project.
In the early stages of our work, half a dozen columns with capitals in the
form of papyrus stalks caught our attention. Some of them bore the
cartouche of Ramses II, who ruled Egypt nine centuries before the founding
of Alexandria in 332-331 B.C. We also discovered fragments of three
obelisks belonging to Seti I, Ramses II's father. Two are made of calcite
and appear to be a pair. On them, the pharaoh is depicted bringing
offerings to the deities at Heliopolis, the ancient city of the sun-god,
six miles south of Cairo, which, during the New Kingdom (1570-1085 B.C.),
was the capital of Lower Egypt. The third is made of red Aswan granite. On
two of its sides Seti is represented as a mythological animal with an erect
forked tail, canine body, and anteater head, often used to represent Seth,
the Egyptian god of chaos and confusion. On the other two sides the pharaoh
is depicted as a sphinx seated before a deity.
In the five years since we began diving in the area of the Pharos we have
discovered a colossal statue of a pharaoh as well as more than 25 sphinxes,
hundreds of columns, and thousands of architectural blocks. If all goes
well, the splendors of this submerged site may one day be accessible to
all archaeology enthusiasts. The city is considering plans to turn the
harbor site into an underwater archaeological park where visitors could
explore the seabed in glass-bottomed boats or on guided diving tours. While
there are many sphinxes and obelisks to be found on land in Egypt, viewing
such objects in situ, as fish dart between ancient blocks, is a memorable
experience.
Jean-Yves Empereur is director of the Center for Alexandrian Studies, which he founded in 1990. This article is based on his book, Alexandria
Rediscovered (New York: George Braziller, 1998).

© 1999 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/9903/abstracts/alexandria.html |