Roughly 7 kilometres off the coast of modern Egypt, beneath the shallow waters of the Bay of Aboukir, lies a city that most of the world has forgotten existed. Known in antiquity as Thonis-Heracleion, it was for centuries the largest port on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, the gateway through which merchants, mercenaries, and pilgrims passed before reaching the Nile delta. Then, sometime around the second century BC, a catastrophic combination of rising sea levels, earthquakes, and tidal waves triggered a process of land liquefaction that swallowed a 110-square-kilometre section of the Nile delta whole, taking the city with it. It was rediscovered only in 2000 by French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio and his team at the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) . In September 2023, that same team announced its most remarkable finds yet: the treasury of a great temple, a previously unknown Greek shrine, and objects that had lain undisturbed beneath layers of hard clay for more than two millennia.
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