for National Geographic News
Two cities that lay at the edge of the Mediterranean more than 1,200 years ago, Herakleion and Eastern Canopus, disappeared suddenly, swallowed by the sea. Now, an international team of scientists may have figured out the mystery of why it happened.
The researchers have concluded that the two cities collapsed when the land they were built on suddenly liquefied.
Until recently, the only evidence that they existed came from Greek mythology and the writings of ancient historians. Then, during expeditions in 1999 and 2000, a team of French marine archaeologists headed by Franck Goddio found the ruinsalmost completely intactburied on the seafloor of the Abu Qir Bay in Egypt.
Since then, there has been much speculation about why the cities disappeared so suddenly. Earthquakes, subsistence conditions, and a rise in sea level have all been suggested as possibilities.
"There are no written documents on how, when, or why these two cities went down," said Jean-Daniel Stanley, a geoarchaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Stanley and his colleagues at the Institut Européen d'Archéologie Sous-Marine in Paris (the European Institute of Marine Archaeology) argue that a major flood of the Nile in the middle of the eighth century A.D was to blame. The flood, they say, triggered the sinking of Eastern Canopus and Herakleion by turning the ground beneath the cities into liquefied mud.
The collapse was sudden and catastrophic, said Stanley. "We can tell," he said, "because in both places we've found gold and jewelry, which, if there had been time, people would have taken with them when fleeing."
Gateways to Egypt
Herakleion and East Canopus once stood at the mouth of the now-extinct Canopic branch of the Nile. Built sometime between the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., as the days of the Egyptian Pharaohs were coming to an end, the cities flourished as gateways to Egypt.
Herakleion was a port of entry to Egypt that grew wealthy collecting taxes on goods being shipped upriver.
Frozen in time below the waters were many temples and statues of gods and goddesses, also attesting to the cities' role as destinations for religious pilgrims.
Until the undersea discovery, historians knew about the cities only through myth and ancient literature. Menelaus, the king of Sparta and husband to Helen, over whom the Trojan War was fought, was said to have stayed in Herakleion following the ten-year war against Troy.
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