Hidden City Found Beneath Alexandria

[Ian Nottingham]

Hidden City Found Beneath Alexandria
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

posted: 24 July 2007 04:32 pm ET


The legendary city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great as he swept through Egypt in his quest to conquer the known world.
Now scientists have discovered hidden underwater traces of a city that existed at Alexandria at least seven centuries before Alexander the Great arrived, findings hinted at in Homer's Odyssey and that could shed light on the ancient world.
Alexandria was founded in Egypt on the shores of the Mediterranean in 332 B.C. to immortalize Alexander the Great. The city was renowned for its library, once the largest in the world, as well as its lighthouse at the island of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Alexandria was known to have developed from a settlement known as Rhakotis, or Râ-Kedet, vaguely alluded to as a modest fishing village of little significance by some historians. Seven rod-shaped samples of dirt gathered from the seafloor of Alexandria's harbor now suggest there may have been a flourishing urban center there as far back at 1000 B.C.
Coastal geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and his colleagues used vibrating hollow tubes to gently extract three-inch-wide rods of sediment 6 to 18 feet long (2 to 5.5 meters) from up to 20 feet (6.5 meters) underwater.
Collecting these samples underwater proved challenging. "Alexandria now is home to as many as 4 million people, and we were in the unfortunate position of having to deal with their discharge—human waste, municipal waste, industrial waste—which got released into the harbor," Stanley said. "It's not funny, but you have to sort of laugh."
Ceramic shards, high levels of lead that was likely used in construction, building stones imported from elsewhere in Egypt and organic material likely coming from sewage were detected in the sediment. These all suggest the presence of a significant settlement well before Alexander the Great came. The results are detailed in the August issue of the journal GSA Today.
"Alexandria was built on top of an existing, and perhaps quite important, settlement, maybe one that was minimized in importance because we can't see it now," Stanley told LiveScience. "Nothing really concrete about Rhakotis has been discovered until now."
Alexander the Great likely chose this area for Alexandria since it had a bay to protect a harbor against fierce winter storms in the Mediterranean. "There are very few places in the Egyptian Mediterranean coast where the coastline is not smooth," Stanley said. "This would have been the best place to establish a harbor."
Stanley added this bay was even noted in Homer's epic Odyssey: "Now in the surging sea an island lies, Pharos they call it. By it there lies a bay with a good anchorage, from which they send the trim ships off to sea."
This area might have been a haven throughout ancient times for the Greeks, Minoans, Phoenicians and others. Future research could shed light on the life of mariners at this settlement before Alexander came. "Virtually nothing is known of the people who would have lived there," Stanley said.

http://www.livescience.com/history/070724_before_alexandria.html

[Ian Nottingham]

Scientists have uncovered remnants of an ancient city beneath Alexandria that existed at least seven centuries before Alexander the Great arrived. Credit: National Archaeologic Museum, Naples, Italy

[Ian Nottingham]

Underwater study provides evidence of much older city
 Large community predated Alexandria




_{REUTERS
Two Egyptian fisherman try their luck in the calm sea of Alexandria harbor on October 2, 2001, as the Alexandria Library appears shining in the background. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a $200 million project, sponsored by the UN cultural body UNESCO, is an imposing cylindrical structure that stands like a huge shining beacon on the shores of Alexandria’s coastline.[/}sub]

CAIRO (AP) – Alexander the Great founded Alexandria to immortalize his name on his way to conquer the world, but this may not have been the first city on the famed site of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. A Smithsonian team has now uncovered the first underwater evidence pointing to an urban settlement dating back seven centuries before Alexander showed up in 331 BC. The city he founded, Alexandria, has long been a source of intrigue and wonder, renowned for its library, once the largest in the world, and the 396-foot (119-meter) lighthouse on the island of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But little was known about the site in pre-Alexander times, other than that a fishing village by the name of Rhakotis was located there. Coastal geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History said the work by him and his colleagues suggested there had been a much larger community than had previously been believed. The discoveries, reported in the August issue of GSA Today, the journal of the Geological Society of America, came by accident when his team drilled underwater in Alexandria’s harbor, Stanley said. Their project was part of a 2007 Smithsonian-funded study of the subsiding Nile Delta and involved extracting 3-inch-wide sticks of core sediment some 18 feet long (5.5 meters), from up to 20 feet (6.5 meters) under the seabed. Egypt’s antiquities department and a French offshore group were involved in the project. The goal was to understand what happened to cause later structures, from the Greek and Roman eras, to become submerged. “One of the ways you do this is by taking sediment cores and examining core structures,” he told The Associated Press by phone from Washington. “This often happens in science. We were not searching for an ancient city,” said Stanley, who has been working in the Delta region for 20 years. When his team opened the cores, what they saw were “little ceramic fragments that were indicative of human activity.” But there was no immediate cause for excitement. Then, more and more rock fragments, ceramic shards from Middle and Upper Egypt, a lot of organic matter plant matter and heavy minerals were found. All the materials were found by radiocarbon dating to be from around 1000 BC. The scientists then analyzed concentration of lead isotopes found in the cores and saw that they too matched the dates of around 3,000 years ago. “This was proof that there was significant metallurgy and human activity going on back 1,000 years BC,” Stanley said. “Alexandria did not just grow out from a barren desert, but was built atop an active town. We had five well-defined components that fit – and we had the story. And the story was that Alexander the Great did not come first to set up Alexandria, there was already something there.” Stanley could not say how big the community was, only that it appeared more developed than the small fishing village long believed to be at the site.

Mohamed Abdel-Maqsud, an Alexandria expert from Egypt’s Council of Antiquities, was cautious and said the work on uncovering Rhakotis was only in the early stages. “We can’t give a wealth of information out now, we are still working,” Maqsud said. “There are signs of a flourishing settlement, going back to Pharaonic times, but it’s too early to say anything about it.” Stanley hopes that a study of Rhakotis may one day prove as inspiring as other recent offshore discoveries – such as finds by marine archaeologists of the 2,500-year-old ruins of the cities of Herakleion, Canopus and Menouthis, Pharaonic cities built on different parts of the coast near present-day Alexandria. “There is an awful lot more of history to know,” Stanley said, adding that geologists would have to drill more intensely on land, around the shores, and in Alexandria itself to shed more light on the ancient world. “I’m sure they will find artifacts of Rhakotis someday,” he said. “And we will know more about the people who lived there.”
 
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