Swallowed By The Sea: Ancient Egypt's Greatest Lost City

Beneath the Mediterranean,

forgotten for millennia,

an entire city lies buried.

A snapshot frozen in time.

Heracleion,

a major city, a great port,

and one of the most significant in all of Egypt.

Yet, this real-life Atlantis

seems to have disappeared in an instant...

..leaving few clues that it ever existed.

Now it's finally revealing its secrets.

Incredible artefacts...

perfectly preserved beneath the sea

are at last allowing us to tell the extraordinary story

of this mighty city.

This is... So beautiful. ..a masterpiece. It is indeed.

Spectacular finds open a unique window

into the time of the Pharaohs and reveal this lost city

as one of the most important in Egyptian history.

2,500 years ago, the Ancient Egyptian city of Heracleion

stood here on the mouth of the River Nile.

Now it lies submerged off Egypt's Mediterranean coastline.

I'm leaving modern Egypt behind and travelling 6km offshore

to where the ancient shoreline used to be.

It's remarkable to think that this sea was once land

and that all around me was once a legendary port.

This is the place that Helen of Troy and her lover, Paris,

visited before the Trojan War.

It's where the god Heracles first set foot in Egypt.

But for centuries the city lay forgotten,

thought to be nothing more than a myth.

Until it was rediscovered 13 years ago

by French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio.

THEY CONVERSE IN FRENCH

On the bottom of the sea bed, Franck discovered a city wall...

..and behind it the remains of a vast Ancient Egyptian temple...

..with ornate stone columns.

We have here one of the columns of the temple.

It's made from limestone

and it's absolutely huge!

But the temple was just the beginning.

Lying beneath the sea are walls,

stone structures, ancient inscriptions.

Bronzes, ceremonial vessels, gold, jewels and coins.

And the largest collection of ancient shipwrecks ever discovered.

The city of Heracleion was no myth.

As an archaeologist, I've worked all over the world,

but I've never had the opportunity to have access

to such a fascinating site as Heracleion.

Only now is the excavation

unravelling the mystery of this remarkable place.

An entire city, temples, houses,

public buildings untouched for millennia.

It's a unique window into Ancient Egypt

at a crucial time in its history.

We rarely get the opportunity to study a site

that extended for such a long period of time.

Heracleion existed for over 1,000 years,

it was occupied from the late-Pharaonic period, the end of the great pharaohs,

through to the arrival of Alexander, the Hellenistic period.

And I'm interested to know what the role of this port city was

and the role it played in the lives of the people of Egypt.

Franck and his team

are painstakingly mapping and surveying the whole site.

Heracleion was built on islands

and fractured with waterways and harbours.

How big you think it was overall? Overall, we have a city of 1.8km by 1.2km.

Oh, OK. It's a huge city.

So Heracleion must've been a significant city,

but what made this city so important?

A clue may lie in the number of temples discovered here.

We have evidence of a huge ancient temple here.

We have also a small temple here,

which is a temple to Khonsou Tut.

We have another temple, a sanctuary I would say,

a sanctuary to Osiris here.

That's incredible! So where is this modern boat situated in this space?

We are just anchored here, sitting on top of the Temple of Amun.

With so many temples, Heracleion was clearly a place

of religious importance.

And sitting in a narrow waterway,

the team have uncovered something unique.

Do you want me to hold it while you do a check? Thank you.

Damien Robinson from Oxford University

is part of the excavation team.

And the compass being a critical bit of kit,

visibility not been fantastic.

Sacred artefacts have been found throughout this narrow stretch.

And alongside, something even more precious.

OK, so I'm going to go for a bit of a wander.

RESPIRATOR NOISE

Lying on the sea bed, still perfectly preserved,

is an exquisite vessel.

Long and sleek, it is carefully crafted.

It's made of sycamore, a high-quality wood,

and surrounded by ritual objects.

We could say that the ship sank

somewhere in the late-4th century BC.

So this is giving us a nice snapshot

of the things that are happening in Heracleion at this time.

The shape of the boat and the quality of the wood

suggest that this is something startling, a sacred barge.

There are images of these ceremonial vessels throughout Egypt,

but to find the real boat is incredibly rare.

This is the only ritual barge from this period ever to be uncovered.

It's a spectacular find.

Ancient writings describe an important Egyptian ceremony

celebrating the resurrection of the god Osiris.

Now seen for the first time,

this could be one of the very barges that led that procession.

And the fact that we've found a ship in an archaeological context

gives us much more understanding of what the vessel looked like and how it was built.

But, importantly, it's also the artefacts that are associated with this boat.

And all around the vessel, you find individual groups of ritual offerings.

And these are things that have been given by individuals,

people like you and me, who care about their religion

and who are offering up goods to the gods.

And for me that's what's really incredibly fascinating about this ship.

They've been excavating in the area around it

and this is one of the places

where ritual deposits are placed within...the water.

Here we can see one of my colleagues excavating.

He's carefully cutting into the clay

to gently remove the different layers of clay

to reveal the artefacts beneath.

So, as we can see, the excavation of what looks to me

like one of those small offering-type plates.

The simple bowl reveals one individual's act of worship

made on this very spot over 2,000 years ago.

Offerings would perhaps have been put on the bowl

and then slid gently into the water.

It's craftily made, carved out of stone.

So this is an example of everyday ritual,

a thing that the people of Heracleion would have done,

but it's really a beautiful piece.

Other finds brought up from the deep

show what kinds of offerings these individuals would have made.

Now in this spot there's a lot of bones. Oh, you've got...a tooth.

A burnt tooth by the looks of it.

Do you think these are burnt? Or it could be that it's taken...

because when it's in this deeper level, in the anaerobic level, the soil becomes quite dark.

OK. I'm sure that's what you're experiencing when you're excavating,

so sometimes they get discoloured by the context. So...

But that looks burnt.

Food may have been burnt, sacrificed,

then slipped into the waters of the sacred River Nile

on offering plates like this one.

Look at that. It's absolutely being grown over. Indeed.

Now, this is on a clay layer

with...these bone-like elements closely nearby.

Yeah.

And alongside the humble offerings, preserved for millennia,

are objects of extraordinary wealth.

Rich and poor alike offering their gifts to the gods.

'The finds in this remarkable city

'are giving us a unique insight into Egyptian religious practice.'

So it's over here? Yes.

'And here at the excavations laboratory in Alexandria

'are further clues to the importance of Heracleion

'in Egypt's sacred life.'

Ladles. Bronzes ladles with...

the end in the form of a duck. Yes.

An extraordinary number of these ladles, 70 in all,

have been found lying on the sea bed close to the temple.

In Heracleion, we found more of those ladles

than all ladles that were found in Egypt.

In all sites of Egypt.

It's overwhelming. It is. OK, thank you.

These are important ritual implements

used by the priest to purify offerings,

ladling water from the sacred River Nile.

And the finds include an astonishing array of rarely seen votive objects

given as a prayer to the gods.

Those are lead models of the barge of Osiris.

I've never actually seen votive boats, but I've seen images of them.

Images. And here we have them. Yeah.

And you can see this barge here. Oh, yes! You see the papyrus.

It represents a barge made of papyrus. You can see the striations.

And there was a throne here, there was a steering house here.

So you can steer. And here this part. So, sorry,

you're saying that they're deliberately destroying them?

Absolutely, to make offerings to the gods.

These boats were beautifully crafted,

but they, just like the animal bones, were sacrificed.

Who was making the offerings? Who was depositing these objects?

Obviously, the big objects were offerings from the priest. Right.

The inhabitants of the city, they were making small offerings.

Votive objects are the physical embodiments of prayers...

Miniature ways.

..their form representing the content of the prayer or the person who made it.

A small votive anchor. An anchor! A nice one.

This ancient anchor could be the prayer of a sailor.

A small elephant, to the god.

And this beautiful elephant the offering of a soldier.

Yes, Ptolemies had a big reliance upon elephants for their warfare.

So strange. Yes.

As well as the humble objects left by workers,

sailors and now soldiers,

there are incredibly fine pieces

fashioned at great cost by expert craftsmen.