It is nice to read about the progress of
underwater excavations at the Egyptian site of Heracleion. It is in the
news again as Oxford
University is also diving at the site (see my earlier post: Heracleion, an ancient Greek port in Egypt) and presenting a few
interesting pictures.
For the Oxford Centre
for Maritime Archaeology it is a unique opportunity to partake in this project
and divers have recovered many important ancient landmarks at the mouth of the Nile . There are, for instance, more than five meters tall
statues that were hauled to the surface, not counting the hundreds of smaller
statues that were retrieved from the sea floor. So far a monumental statue of
goddess Isis and a massive head of the god Serapis have been removed. Art
treasures like jewelry, coins and ceramics have also be recovered and testify
of the glorious past of Heracleion, named according to Diodorus after Heracles because he
stopped the flood of the Nile.
Work in this murky
water is pretty difficult but very promising. The article published in The
Oxford Times adequately states that “it
can appear that someone emptied the contents of the Museum
of Cairo on the bottom of the
Mediterranean, while the images of building foundations appear akin to an
underwater Pompeii
As mentioned in my
earlier post (Heracleion, ancient Greek port in Egypt), the remains of 64 ships have been
found, but also over 700 anchors. At present the archaeological team is
focussing on what they call Shipwreck 43, a 24-meter long vessel that has been dated
between 785 and 480 BC and is one of eight belonging to the same size. This is
a flat-bottomed vessel, ideal to operate in shallow waters.
The article in the Oxford
Times mentions further that a major exhibition will be held in Germany next year and hopefully will come to the
UK
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