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Treasures Recovered From Sunken Egyptian City 62

Posted by Hemos from the my-childhood-love dept.
Markgor writes "Found an interesting article on the recovery of treasures from the sunken Egyptian city of Herakleion. The city, along with the cities of Canopus and Menouthis, sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea after a massive earthquake. The cities were only known through Greek tragedies, travel logs, and legends until last year when they were rediscovered." As a kid, I always wanted to be in archeology - things are different obviously. This city is interesting - I've seen shots of it found by using satellite photos of the seabed.
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Treasures Recovered From Sunken Egyptian City More

Treasures Recovered From Sunken Egyptian City

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  • Re:Plato? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Could this be the lost city of Atlantis?

    No, not Atlantis.

    The Atlantis legend was first written down, as far as we know, by Plato, who claimed that the story came from Egypt.

    However, these sunken cities are not ancient Egyptian cities, they are Greek cities that were built after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and most of the middle east and established Greek cities all over the middle east and Egypt - including Alexandria (partially sunken now) and this other sunken city, Herakleion. You can tell these are Greek cities in part because of their names: Alexandria = city of Alexander, Herakleion = Herakles, aka Hercules.

    These cities were built after Plato, and were sunk many centuries after Plato.

    So, no, nothing to do with Atlantis.

  • California now "claims ownership" [cnn.com] of all sunken treasure off its coast.

    Of course, they won't pay you anything to raise sunken stuff. They just want the booty. "Wow, great job, now fuck you and get your hands off of our gold." WTF?

    Is it any wonder that people see the government as a thief they want to keep guns pointed at?

  • Was the whole coverage by Disney? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's nothing short of unbelievable not seeing the word or idea "Atlantis" in any coverage by the media. I was watching the news 30min ago when I this aired, and of course, immediately the idea "Atlantis" and then the Disney movie came to my mind. And it seemed so obvious, since the city is near Alexandria, in the greek's area!!!

    I was amazed when that segment finished without even remotely relating the city to Atlantis. Then I come here and see this, and, once again, no mention of Atlantis, by whom, of ALL the news sources, but /.?

    I won't say anything here because I don't want attention to my post, but SOMEONE is trying to prevent this from appearing too obvious, that is, to make this "coincidence" beliable.

  • just in time (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey this article is just in time for The Walt "bought a 50 years copyright extension" Disney corporations release of Atlantis.

    Gee just coincidence right, archeologists knew about this city for years, but noone hears about it till Atlantis comes out.

    Bleh.
  • It's really supposed to be ironic and facetious, because it's perfectly legal to trade and copy CDs here in the States, too. Apparently a different set of laws applies to the Internet.

    --
    Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

  • Hemos, master of the profound. (Score:4)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @08:10PM (#165005) Homepage Journal
    "As a kid, I always wanted to be an archaeologist -

    things are different, obviously."

    A master wordsmith if ever there was one. :)

    --
    Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

  • Rumour has it that SETI@Lantis only sunk half-way.
  • no, it's coincidence only unless you believe in Providence.

    -l
  • No, I reckon they perpetrated this hoax to gain publicity :)

  • Mysterious circumstances? (Score:5)

    by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @09:20PM (#165009)
    The modern research centre, set to open later this year, commemorates the ancient Great Library at Alexandria, founded around 295 BC and destroyed under mysterious circumstances sometime in the first century BC.

    What "mysterious circumstances" are they talking about? The main facility was destroyed during one of the Roman civil wars, and the secondary facility, located in the temple of Serapis, was ransacked and burned by a mob of fanatical Christians. Moreover, all this happened in the closing years of the third century AD, not the first century BC.

    You'd think the author's hometown library had been burned to judge from this shoddy article.

    --

  • They will crumble in air and sunshine. (Score:3)

    by Accumulator ( 9389 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @05:34PM (#165010) Homepage

    This article has actually been posted twice.

    As someone stated in the earlier article [slashdot.org], the stone objects has been in the water for 2000 years, and when they come in contact with air, they will rapidly crumble. They have to desalinate them if they want to bring it up to the surface.

  • Underwater safari (Score:4)

    by Accumulator ( 9389 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @05:49PM (#165011) Homepage

    If they don't desalinate them, they will crumble to dust in just a few years. The alternative is to just let them lie in the water. But since they have held 2000 years in the water already, it can't hurt with some thousand years more ;)

    They bring it up to the surface for they scientists and tourists watch them and study them. But I've got a much better idea: Underwater Safari!

    Wouldn't it be amazing floating round in a large, complete, 2000 year old city, which was a famous port, and legendary from antic history? They could use small submarines with large windows we could see through.

    And the best part is that it will be saved from the hands of the evil scientists ;) They should have learned from the early 20th century archaelogy-methods.

  • I don't get it. What would you want them to do with the stuff they found?
  • Well.

    When statues made of stone, which is a porous material, lay underwater for centuries they are bound to absorb some of the minerals in the water. Being an art and cs major, I spent many of my classes learning about our ancient works of art and where they came from.

    Many objects found underwater, such as bronze and stone sculptures, become covered in salt, organic materials, etc. If you put a rock in salt water for a week when you take it out and let it dry in the air it will have a patina/covering of salt residue on it.

    This desalinization treatment more than likely progresses the work of art through a process that removes the salt from inside the stone. This will take out the excess minerals and allow us to see the actual stone as it was carved.

    The term desalinization refers to removing salt from any material, not just water. In case anybody was wondering.

    -Scott

    Scott Ruttencutter

  • Re:Desalinization treatment? (Score:3)

    by MsWillow ( 17812 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @08:47PM (#165014) Homepage Journal
    Several have answered the "how" part already, but as for the "why" ...

    Common stones used for statues were sandstone, limestone and marble, all of which are rather porous. Leaving them soak for a few thousand years in water will likely dissolve some of the stone, leaving it rather fragile.

    To keep these treasures from further damage, they must be carefully cleaned, and likely then they'd need to be further stabilised in some fashion. In lapidary work, a clear liquid epoxy is commonly used - I have no idea what might be used here.
  • This city is interesting - I've seen shots of it found by using satellite photos of the seabed.

    And you didn't tell anyone!?

    :)

    --

  • Interestingly enough, in the Disney movie 'Mulan', some of the scenes included the names of the animators, rendered into archaic forms of the chinese pictographs.
    (I read this somewhere on the web - one of those sites that have Disney 'Easter Eggs' - I've never personally seen Mulan...)

    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo


    MMDC.NET [mmdc.net]

  • you're all being manipulated (Score:5)

    by cruelworld ( 21187 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @05:16PM (#165017)
    You do realize that this is all just promotional material for Disney's Atlantis movie?

  • Only if Plato had a crystal ball. (Score:4)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @07:01PM (#165018) Homepage Journal
    According to the article, the city was sunk about 1200 years ago, ca. 800 CE. Plato was born in 427 BCE and died in 347 BCE. This puts Plato's career almost as far back from the sinking of the city as the sinking of the city is from now.
  • Instead of sending these subs filled with humans (big insurance risk, plus as others have noted, the subs can't get close, and visibility is limited), what if you set up "simulator" pods, that look like the interior of a sub, with "infinite distance" projection systems, and place small remote-controlled subs with video cameras feeding the image back to the projector. Add proper lights, etc to keep the tourist entertained, maybe even pipe in sound. Make the subs wired back to a support raft/barge (using some communication cable/link system - 100baseT ethernet would work fine), not radio (doesn't work that well under water).

    Heck, this could be done as cheap or as expensive as you want - on the cheap end you could build these machines out of sewer pipe and such (don't believe me? Look up "radio controlled submarine howto" on google), or as expensive as using one of the various underwater exploration systems out there...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • I don't see why anyone would be happy about a flood.
  • Maybe they had just seen Cleopatra. I just watched it last night, and they blamed the burning of Alexandria's library on Julius Caesar's troops. That didn't seem correct to me, but I really couldn't remember & had no way of looking it up at the time, so I'd forgotten it until just now. If you're correct though, and it was destroyed some three or four hundred years later, then the [very famous] movie is spreading incorrect information, and that could be where the reporter got it. *shrug*

  • The magic of the Baltic (Score:4)

    by Gorimek ( 61128 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @06:49PM (#165022) Homepage
    As the know-it-all showoff I am...

    my particular area was medieval/postmedieval Northern European shipwrecks

    But that's one of the most interesting parts of the field. The Baltic sea has too little salt for most ocean life, and too much salt for most lake life. In particular, nothing that eats sunken wood can live there. So the Baltic is pretty much the only place in the world to find ancient ships. Most of them aren't even discovered yet, much less taken ashore.

  • Similar, but not the same (Score:4)

    by mduell ( 72367 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @05:15PM (#165023)
    This story [slashdot.org] from a few days ago is very similar, but a different source and different info.

    Wouldnt an UPDATE be more appropriate?

    Mark Duell

  • Re:you're all being manipulated (Score:5)

    by BlueUnderwear ( 73957 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @10:08PM (#165024)
    Reminds of Jurassic Park. A year before the movie came out, suddenly all pop-science magazines started to feature articles about dinosaurs, serious theories about their extinction, crackpot theories about their extinction, that they were ancestors of the birds etc. At the time, I wondered why this sudden frenzy about this subject. A year later, at the cinema, I understood...

  • Just thought I would let you know that this is a link to that horrendous fucking image of some complete looser's asshole, in case you don't want to see it - I know I sure never want to see it again.

  • From the article:

    The stelae and three statues were to be taken to the government antiquities laboratory in Alexandria for desalinization treatment before being sent on an international tour at the end of 2003

    Does anyone know how you desalinate stone objects like statues? And why it is necessary?

    steveha

  • So the Baltic is pretty much the only place in the world to find ancient ships

    Nahh. You can find wood from shipwrecks almost anywhere the current leaves the sediment alone. Anything below the sediment layer is anoxic for the most part, and preserves the wreck.

    The program I was in was known for their work on Bronze Age ships in the Mediterranean. A little bit of wood was found under the sediment, primarily because it was 120-190 ft. down.

    And we've found entire vessels in the polders (the drained Zuider Zee), and they were in dirt. :)


  • Called the "Sea of Galilee boat." One of my professors, Shelley Wachsman, was involved in that one, and wrote a book [amazon.com].

    The substance was increasing molecular weights of Polyethelene Glycol (PEG) which is basically a wax, and substitutes itself for the water that is lost in waterlogged wood when brought to the surface.

    Ironically, the less deteriorated the wood, the harder it is to get PEG to penetrate, which is why something like the Swedish vessel the Vasa is still being treated: it was in too good a shape.


  • Well. I was wondering when something like this might roll along my way.

    I was an underwater archaeologist in a past incarnation. While it makes for fabulous cocktail conversation, and I wouldn't be the same person had I not pursued it, archaeology is a bit like the larger picture of academics as viewed by the corporate married with children set (which I am now among):

    looks great and romantic and carefree on paper, but the reality is there are fiefdoms and unchecked politics to deal with, and every month in the field is two years in a blinky fluorescent 8 X 8 lab room.

    Unless you love the subject (my particular area was medieval/postmedieval Northern European shipwrecks. How's that for obscure?), and I mean love in the "religious exctasy...hold me down before I evanesce" sort of dedication, your interest becomes a soul-crushing, only-eating-mac-and-cheese-this-month (or "how far can stretch $500"), no-personal-life grind, particularly if it involves endless graduate school. I have friends still pursuing a Master's after 7 years.

    bleah. Though I'd like to be a dig bum for a summer again!


  • How about a link, Hemos?
  • Let me guess -- most of the hieroglyphics were just product placements, right? "Hey, Egyptian scholars, Tutankamen drinks Pepsi-cola!"

    --

  • My S.O. is an archaeologist too, she loves it. Right now she's leading an excavation of a Mayan household group in Belize, Central America, and yeah we get a kick out of those kinds of movies too :). She's in graduate school right now and going for her PhD (kind of a requirement in that field), only 6 more years to go! It kinda sucks that she has to be down there for 2 or 3 months at a time during the summer, but I try and go down and visit for a week or so at least if I can. Archaeology is actually very interesting and gives you quite a different perspective on things (at least it did for me).
  • The article states that "An earthquake 1,200 years ago sent the ancient port city of Herakleion crashing to the Mediterranean floor." That would place the event at roughly 800 AD, which can't possibly be the case. It didn't seem to be a typo either, since they gave this figure twice in the article.
  • This reminds me of a boat I saw when I visited the Sea of Galilee, it was about two thousand years old or so, uncovered from the mud when the Sea (Lake really.) was in a low dry spell. They treated it for 8 years and only recently was it uncovered for the public. They impregnated the wood with some kind of much more stable compound since it would've fallen apart very quickly otherwise, but while they were doing so it was unviewable by anybody for years...

    I'm too lazy to find my archaeology notes, or any web site. I'm sure it's mentioned out there somewhere so if you find something post a link.
  • The soon-to-be-opened Alexandria library is being considered as a permanent home for the Herakleion discoveries.

    So i guess this means that now Egyptians won't have to go to the British Museum to study their culture

  • Do you think Disney Payed off these guys to wait for ATLANTIS?
  • If any sunken city is nominated as Atlantis it should be this one:

    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010514/lf/cuba_t reasure_dc_1.html [yahoo.com]

    2000 Feet under water.
  • Could this be the lost city of Atlantis? Damn, it would be even cooler if Indiana Jones had found it. Seriously, though, this is really cool. It must've been very intriguing to track something like this down, and this discovery will undoubtedly make up the minds of a few kids considering their future carrers.

    --
    \/\/
    OO
    \_/=\_/
    | \o/ | I am not a sig
    ||

    --
    < )
    ( \
    X

  • Wouldn't it be amazing floating round in a large, complete, 2000 year old city, which was a famous port, and legendary from antic history?

    Haha! I wish I could have taken antic history in school, it would have been far more, um, amusing.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • We read about these sunken cities so often it makes me wonder, how fast can a coastal patch of earth rise or sink?

    I remember from geology lessons some figures in the range of centimeters per century for northern Italy. Any geologists here?

  • Re:Desalinization treatment? (Score:4)

    by Spackler ( 223562 ) on Friday June 08, 2001 @05:34PM (#165042) Journal
    Does anyone know how you desalinate stone objects like statues?

    In the past, the most common way to clean and desalinate stone was to immerse it in a tank of water for a period of weeks or months. This process can cause considerable damage because it loosens friable stone and pigment from the stone surface. A better method was developed in the 1960s, by which a clay poultice (magnesium silicate and deionized water) is used to suspend a thin layer of water over the surface of the sculpture, like a cosmetic mudpack, sucking out both dirt and salts. This treatment minimizes the contact with water and also does less harm to the fragile surface of the sculpture.

    And why it is necessary?

    Because french fries tastes better with a little 2000 year old salt on it, and this was the only place to find it!
  • I can't help but wonder how many other cities are known through history that could be found with today's technology. And I don't mean Atlantis (that's a cliché by now), but rather cities like Tartessos.

    --
    Death to Vermin.

  • I wonder what kind of precautions they're taking against looting at this site.

    It must be difficult to police a 1 square mile area of sea 6 miles from shore, and prevent looters from making off with stuff. Now that the site has been found, there's sure to be treasure hunters after relics they can sell.

  • Re:Mysterious circumstances? (Score:3)

    by corvi42 ( 235814 ) on Saturday June 09, 2001 @03:58AM (#165045) Homepage Journal
    Shhhhh...
    That's just what they want you to believe. Really it was destroyed by aliens to destroy the esotericly encoded spaceship designs contained in the ancient books there.

    Narf!

  • I am looking at the pictures and I am wondering why they don't look like they have been at the bottom of the ocean for hundreds of years. They look better than ones on dry land. I am not making a claim about any sort of conspiracy or anything. It's just that they look damn good for being through an earthquake and hundreds of years in the sea.
  • The city of atlantis was actully believed to have been found a while ago. I believe the island that they conider this to be is the island of crete in the agean sea. No magical machines or anything, but they were defentaly far ahead of their time.
  • um.. are you aware of how shallow the surrounding water is in SF? Apparently not. Think before you troll please.


    ________________________________________________ __
  • Virtually no one volunteers to dig up all of these treasures. Virtually no one donates the gear and supplies necessary to recover these treasures. It's impossible to recover them in this world for "free."

    So which is better? To leave them buried? What about all of those grave robbers that come from Egypt and surrounding areas? The "capitalists" do not only come from Europe.

    So yes, to remain somewhat honest, it some MUST be sold. It is better to be sold and held privately than to be taken in secret or left to rot over time. But not ALL of it will be held privately anyway...

    This is the lesser of the other evils.
  • I can't help but wonder how many other cities are known through history that could be found with today's technology.

    Yeah, and can today's technology submerge cities like Buffalo and Toledo?

  • Hmmm. I'm thinking about going into the field myself, actually. D'you have any good dirt on the grad program at ECU?
  • Hapi, the god of flooding.

    Is that irony [irony.com] or what?
  • .... is an archaelogist, and we just had a laugh at The Mummy Returns last week. Sorry, I had a drink.
  • What I was trying to say was: we two agreed afterwards that films like that (and games like Tomb Raider, obviously) are among the reasons why she keeps getting reactions like "Wow, cool!" whenever she tells people what she's doing. Reality is much more - ahem - dry and dusty. But it was fun having a real-time translator for all those hieroglyphs by my side.
  • Haha, no, it was more random, like names of well known gods and places floating around. One thing that struck her was that the leader of Anubis' army (probably the 'man' himself) had some hieroglyphic on his forehead that was supposed to say IMHOTEP (only it was misspelled, which is even funnier considering all the rendering time that went into that scene compared to the little amount of time that would have been necessary for proofreading).

    To the effect of something like "You are my ultimate adversary! I hate you so much I even had your name tattooed on my face."; scaary guys, eh?

    Another error in the movie was that although all the palaces they had to visit on their trail were historical, they were built in utterly nonrelated epochs of time, so lining them up like in the movie would actually make no sense at all...
  • Please mod the parent up; I'm not trying to be a Usian basher, but this does deserve +2: insightful, at least.
  • While I agree in theory that leaving history where it is has a certain appeal - underwater safari's are really lousy by nature. Having been on Egypt's very popular Sinbad Submarine in Hurghada, Red Sea - I can say it was nearly the most boring hour we spent in the place - not as bad as the video-bus-from-hell, but hardly the introduction to the beauty of the underwater I was hoping would inspire the fiancee to join me for Scuba. Underwater visability is usually only a few meters, and submarines can't get all that close, so you're left with a very mediocre view which rarely lives up to the professional photographs advertising the trip - just watch the video from the hotel lobby (it loops constantly) - and save the trouble. If you really want to see something learn Scuba, at 6 to 10 meters this stuff is trivial to access. I would imagine Egypt will be quick to embrace this find as yet-another-reason to come to Egypt - Tourism is the second source of cash in Egypt (Foriegn Remittances being first). They will likely put the originals in museums in Cairo and create duplicates for scuba divers.
  • Isn't it becoming more and more typical of America in recent years that the first thing we do when we discover something new or unique is milk it for all the cash that it's worth? What more are we doing than plundering someone else's ancient treasure? It's really no better behavior than Imperialist Europe demonstrated in its reign of terror over most of the world from the discovery of the Western Hemisphere to the middle of the 20th century.

    Why is it that the first thing that they do upon finding this wonderful relic of the past is take the treasures to, undoubtedly, sell them to the highest bidding museum? This just disgusts me. Thank God that Egyptians have some strict laws about where things discovered in their country can and can't go.

  • This is the lesser of the other evils.

    However, as Ralph Nader supporters were fond of saying: "The lesser of two evils is still evil."

  • I know at some parts of the ocean there are little to no currents. If these artifacts are in one of these places, that might explain it. Or...they could have been just "lucky" not to be affected by the environment...heh

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