Sunken treasures, sunken myths

When the discovery of the two ancient cities of Heracleion and East Canopus under the waters of the Bay of Abu Qir was announced in the summer of 2000, attention was stirred worldwide. Rushdi Said finds the new interpretation for their disappearance flawed
The cities of Heracleion and East Canopus are back in the news with the publication of a new interpretation of their disappearance some 1,250 years ago. Rather than attributing the catastrophe to the action of earthquakes, as originally reported, it suggests to their disappearance being caused by a strong Nile flood, which caused river bank failures and the consequent destruction. As I will show in this article, this interpretation is flawed.
It has long been known that the ruins of cities which apparently disappeared in historic times are preserved in the seabed off Alexandria. These ruins were the subject of the studies of scholars as early as the 1860s. Among the first, and certainly the most valuable, was carried out by Mahmoud El-Falaki, who devoted a good part of his work on the Graeco-Roman history of Alexandria to the results of his exploration of the ruins under the waters of its eastern port. El-Falaki's work, Memoire sur l'antique Alexandrie, published in 1872, represents a pioneering scientific endeavour based on fieldwork which entailed mapping, the sinking of wells on land and the carrying out of "soundings" in the sea. This work, now close to 130 years old, can still be considered one of the most dependable ever written on the history of ancient Alexandria.
Much effort has been devoted since the publication of this work to salvaging the wealth of offshore archaeological remains, but the ruins which lay on the bed of the seas off Alexandria remained beyond the reach of scientists. They were left undocumented, and meanwhile subjected to occasional plunder by amateur dredgers and divers. We owe a great deal to Franck Goddio and his able team from the European Institute of Submarine Archaeology for the systematic work they have undertaken over the past decade to change this picture. This team, working with sophisticated methods and techniques under the auspices of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, has added to our knowledge of submarine sites in Alexandria's eastern port. It has also discovered new sites. The discovery of the ruins of the long-lost cities of Heracleion and East Canopus in Abu Qir bay made headlines when announced in the summer of 2000.
These two cities were built in the 7th or 6th century BC, and were the main ports of the thriving trade network of the eastern Mediterranean until the building of Alexandria some 300 years later. Thereafter, they continued to play a smaller role in that trade until their disappearance in the middle of the 8th century AD. The ports seem to have been built at or near the mouth of the Canopic branch of the Nile Delta, which ran over the embankment that separated Lake Idku from lake Abu Qir (now totally dried up) to its confluence with Abu Qir bay. The two cities were found at a depth of 6 to 7 metres below sea level on a submarine embankment which extends in an east-west direction from a point which lies some one and a half kilometres west of the Abu Qir headland.
The recent submarine archaeological survey recovered the infrastructure of the two ports, well- preserved houses, temples and giant statues of Egyptian and Greek gods. It also recovered many artifacts, the most interesting of which were coins minted from 724 to 743 AD during the Islamic period. The presence of these coins shows the two cities must have been above sea level at least until that time, and that their disappearance must have occurred shortly afterwards.
The discovery of the two cities was introduced to the scientific community during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December 2000. At that meeting, the idea was advanced that they were submerged as a result of earthquakes which sealed their fate. The ruins of the city were attributed to two or three large historical earthquakes and/ or subsidence and liquefaction of Nile Delta sediments. Questions regarding the location of the faults responsible for these quakes and the causes of the subsidence of the region or the silting up of the Delta branch which the authors assumed to have existed at the time of the disappearance of the cities, went unanswered.
Less than a year later, in an article which appeared in the 19 July 2001 issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, the idea that earthquakes were responsible for the disappearance of the two cities was discarded because "no earthquake activity was recorded in Egypt during this period." Instead, the disappearance of the cities was ascribed to a riverbank failure in the Canopic region, triggered by the high flood of the year 741-42 AD. The article received wide attention, and the scenario of the two cities washed out by a gigantic Nile flood some 1,250 years ago made headline news in many newspapers and broadcasting stations across the world.
The scenario was taken for granted, despite the fact that it was impossible. One simple fact had been overlooked: there was no river extending to these two cities at the time of their disappearance. The Canopic branch, along whose banks the two cities had been built, had dried up to a trickle and ceased to reach the bay some 200 years earlier. This information seems to have escaped the attention of the authors of the article, who believed the Canopic branch of the Nile continued to flow into the bay until the second millennium AD.
It is not clear how they came to this conclusion, since they gave no reference to validate their claim. I have a hunch that they followed my early views on the subject, which I published in my work on the Nile in 1981. In that work, I erred in assuming that the Canopic branch had a similar history to the Pelusiac branch, which is known to have silted up in the early years of the second millennium. I am now convinced that the Canopic followed a different path, and that it silted up gradually during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. When the Arab armies came to Egypt in the middle of the 7th century, the Canopic was a small canal which did not reach Abu Qir bay. No wonder there is not a single mention of this branch of the river in any of the treatises left by Arab historians. Prince Omar Tousson, in his 1922 classic Memoire sur les anciennes branches du Nil, authenticated and documented this view (pp.195-196).
Even if we accept the authors' belief that the Canopic branch of the Nile was still active at the time of the disappearance of the cities of East Canopus and Heracleion, it would be difficult to conceive that their destruction could have been brought about so suddenly. In the first place, there is no mention of such a cataclysmic event in any of the history books covering this period. Neither is there any mention of the destruction of any other city along the entire Nile by this forceful flood. In the second place, it is difficult to classify the flood of 741-42 AD among the destructive floods that posed danger or caused fear in the hearts of the people. For those who know about the Nile and the history of its use, the 741-42 flood was an above-normal flood which must have represented a welcome event. Prior to the introduction of the system of perennial irrigation in the 19th century, the lowlands of the river's flood plain were left fallow during the flood season, ready to receive the waters of the flood, including those which were above normal. Floods such as that of 741-42 were received with joy because they led to a larger acreage of arable land.
The floods which were dreaded in those days were those disastrous inundations which lasted long after the date they were supposed to recede, and those which reached at least one metre higher than that of the year 741-42. Only at that height would the flood reach the level of the ground upon which most if not all the towns and villages of Egypt were built. Typical examples of these high and dangerous floods are those that were common during the 14th century AD. These were the floods singled out by the historians who dwelled at length on describing their devastating effects.
I am certain that the wealth of data gathered by the submarine archaeological expedition during its many seasons in Abu Qir will provide ample material for the unravelling of the real reasons for the submergence of the two port cities. It is essential that the data be made available to those experts who know about the history of the Nile and the use of its waters.
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