Egypt's Lost Cities

What happens when an entire city disappears? Beneath the sands and wetlands of Egypt lie the remains of forgotten cities that once stood at the heart of one of the ancient world’s greatest civilisations. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Egyptologist Chris Naunton to uncover the story of Egypt’s lost cities. From the rediscovery of Tanis, the mysterious city immortalised by Indiana Jones, to ancient capitals like Memphis and Amarna, they explore what caused these cities to vanish. And how many more are still waiting to be found? MORE The Silver Pharaohs Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000647229067 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/05VW8V1dSMC6QBkekQoOn2?si=M2_fogxhSgirC2JtEziU2A Alexandria: The Sunken City Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000606928327 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2jEHu6GJ4gyR5Cj9eEMHc7?si=rajTAMnBSA6pvS-tCsTfZw Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:18Tristan Hughes?

  Imagine digging beneath the sands of Egypt and uncovering a forgotten world. A royal statue emerges from the earth, followed by golden masks, elaborate coffins and towering temple walls covered in hieroglyphs. These are the remains of cities once at the heart of one of the greatest civilizations in history, places that were abandoned, buried and undiscovered for centuries before being found again. In 1939, this was the experience of French archaeologist Pierre Montes, who rediscovered the lost city of Tanis, the royal capital of Egypt's 21st and 22nd dynasties.

• 2:02Tristan Hughes?

  Buried beneath the Nile Delta, Tanis revealed stories of unknown kings, of immense wealth and of a city that functioned as a great commercial hub long before the rise of trading behemoths like Alexandria. It would later become immortalised as the lost city from Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Tanis is just one of Egypt's lost cities or formerly lost cities. From ancient capitals like Memphis and Amarna to settlements that still remain hidden beneath the sands. What happened to these once great urban centres? Why did they disappear? And what can their remains tell us about life in ancient Egypt?

• 2:45Tristan Hughes?

  And also, what cities, what capitals are still missing completely? Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Egypt's lost cities. Our guest today is Egyptologist extraordinaire and friend of the show Chris Naunton, the author of Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt.

• 3:15Tristan Hughes?

  Hello, Chris. Great to have you back on the show.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Great to be back. Thanks for having me, Tristan.

• 3:20Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, you're more than welcome. And I think it's fair to say that Egypt has got its fair share of extraordinary ancient sites. And then you throw in lost cities on top. Where does it end? There's just so much to talk about.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Yes, you're right. It does have its fair share of ancient sites. I'm not exactly keeping track of the number of times I've been, but it's over 60 times now. As I always say to people, there's always something new. There's always something that I haven't seen before. Maybe one day that will come to an end and I'll go and there won't, there'll be a trip where I don't see something new. But honestly, there always is. So, yeah, so there's enough stuff there that we already know about very well. So you're quite right for me to throw in things that are still lost and yet to be found is maybe overdoing it. But for me at least, the prospect of new discoveries keeps things super exciting.

• 4:11Tristan Hughes?

  And why do you think the whole topic of lost cities is so compelling to so many people? Is it because we're all channeling an inner Indiana Jones wannabe desire?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, I think for those of us who are interested in archaeology, there's something very compelling about things being hidden or lost. So in some sense, not being there and then being there, being revealed and being discovered. And I think the proof of that is there are times when things that we've been searching for have been discovered and you somehow lose some of the sense of excitement after that point, you know? So I think actually there's something very much about that in Egypt as well. You know, the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun gives us that archetypal discovery. There's something about the desert as well, which obviously is a big part of archaeology in Egypt. And the fact that the desert appears to be so empty

• 5:09Speaker 03

  provides the sort of greatest contrast between there being nothing and there being not just something, but potentially something amazing. Tomb of King Tut being the obvious one. But I guess, you know, if you're talking about cities and we know that the Egyptians lived in cities, or a lot of them did, even from the very earliest times, you know, the idea of discovering an entire city, I guess, is exciting. I think it's exciting.

• 5:32Tristan Hughes?

  I think so because we've done episodes in the past about, you know, lost tombs, like the tomb of Alexander the Great or the tomb of Cleopatra. You mentioned the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb there. I guess it's interesting comparing people going out on a sense of adventure to find a lost tomb. You know, a particular building in a particular area compared to a whole city. That kind of blows your mind that a whole city could be lost for thousands of years, given how we think of cities today, you know, being sprawling with large stone buildings here, there and everywhere, a road system and so on.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I think in some ways tombs, and you know, forgive the sort of bleak plug, but I've written about lost tombs in the past and you and I have talked about lost tombs.

• 6:16Tristan Hughes?

  And that book is called, by the way?

• 6:17Speaker 03

  It's called Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt. Thank you very much, Tristan. You're very kind.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  That in some ways, I think for me at the time I was writing that was the sort of obvious, to me, it seemed obvious, exciting way into Egyptian archaeology. And that's partly because some of the most spectacular discoveries, probably in fact, most of the most spectacular discoveries have been to do with tombs. And that's because, for the good reason that they survive very well. They were generally tucked away in the desert where there's no life. They were intended to be repositories for the finest artefacts that Egyptian society produced and they were intended to stay there. That didn't happen very often, but when it does, it results in very spectacular discoveries. So tombs in some ways are the obvious thing to go for. Cities provide quite a nice counterpoint to that, I think, in that it says something about the history of archaeology, actually, in Egypt.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  In that, say, 200 years ago, what people were principally interested in when they were digging things up was pretty objects. They were interested in inscribed objects that bore text in particular as well, because that was the time when the language was first being studied and eventually deciphered. But they were otherwise, they were interested in pretty things and tombs were great for that. And I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but a sort of a little way along in the process, people started to be more interested in where ordinary Egyptian people were living. And it took quite a long time for archaeology to catch up with that. And cities actually survive generally much less well, partly because the, you know, the material of cities, all those things you mentioned, buildings, houses, you know, administrative buildings, temples,

• 7:51Speaker 03

  royal palaces, where that applies, those were not intended to survive in the same way. And those buildings were sort of built, dismantled, demolished, rebuilt on a regular cycle over thousands of years. So the material remains of those things generally doesn't survive quite so well or not in the same way anyway. The other thing is that cities, well, to put it around the other way, tombs were deliberately put in places where people were not living. They were put away from where people were living. Generally speaking, there are exceptions to that, but that's a general rule. Whereas of course, people lived in the same sorts of places that people live in today. So very often ancient towns and cities are in amongst, around, underneath, modern settlements.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  So we have been able to recover a good number of Egyptian settlements, including fully fledged cities and some of the most important. But just as with tombs, and you know, including some of what must have been the largest, most spectacular, most important tombs, which we haven't yet found, some of the most important spectacular cities have not yet been found either, and yet might still be there somewhere.

• 9:02Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, very, very cool indeed. One day, Chris, you and I will go out to Alexandria with all the proper permissions, or ever either go for the tomb of Alexander the Great, or maybe we'll look for one of these lost cities. Of course, we'll do it above board, though.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yes, we definitely should do that. We always say that. And I think, you know, one day, history here should put up the money to let us do it.

• 9:24Tristan Hughes?

  Well, thank you, Chris.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  One day.

• 9:26Tristan Hughes?

  So it says, Ancient Egypt, and such fertile ground for lost cities. And Chris, is that because back in the heyday of ancient Egypt, all along the River Nile, yes, there was important farmlands irrigated by the Nile. But was there settlement after settlement the further and further you went up the River Nile? Or city, dare I say?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, essentially. I mean, in very general terms, the situation was not so different then as you might think of it being now, in that much of the occupied habitable parts of Egypt is taken up by agricultural land in ancient times as now. And people are sort of evenly distributed, more or less evenly distributed about the agricultural rural parts of Egypt in villages, but in, you know, but also in larger settlements, towns, and there are, there were, there are still larger settlements. And of course, these days, some

• 10:30Speaker 03

  of those are very, very large. Cairo is one of the biggest cities in the world, about 20 million people these days. Alexandria is a city of 5 million or so people, something like that, probably a bit more by now. So of course, the population is much greater. The cities are much, much larger, much more populous now. But just in terms of that sort of basic spread of people, agricultural land, villages, towns and cities in ancient Egypt, it was broadly similar. And we're aware of the names of lots of these settlements and of the approximate locations, at least of many of them. And some of them have been identified archaeologically and explored.

• 11:05Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. So when talking about lost cities in ancient Egypt, what exactly do we mean? Because I've got in my notes that there are two types of lost city.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I suppose when I was first thinking about this, not very long ago, I thought to myself that, you know, there's more than one approach that you can take here. The starting point for this actually was similar to the starting point for the lost tombs research, which is just that, you know, there are these cities which we're aware existed, which have never been identified archaeologically. So what's the story? And is there something, something that unites all of these different things? And it struck me that in order to sort of take a run up at this subject, we need first to establish what we think we know was there. So the same source, the same ancient source that gives

• 11:55Speaker 03

  us the most comprehensive list of Egyptian kings, the Rhytem and Aetho, also provides us with a list of cities, because he tells us these kings were grouped into dynasties. And he often, he doesn't often add very much information at all. He gives us their names, the length of the reign, where he knew it, that kind of thing. But he also quite often tells us where they were ruling from. And it turns out that the capital city moved. So it is not the case that the capital city was in the same place throughout Egyptian history. It moved is maybe the wrong, the wrong sort of notion. The capital city was in one place, and then for reasons of a change of dynasty, or change of sort of strategy, or changing political geography, the king came to be ruling from a different place.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  And those places are named in Menatho. So straight away, we've got a list of a bunch of capital cities, again, some of which are known, some aren't. We also know that from administrative documents, which are abundant across the full span of Egyptian history, that the country was divided into administrative regions or districts called, we call them gnomes, using a Greek word. And each of those had a capital, a regional capital, and those are also named. So again, we have a list, not just of the national capital, the seat of the ruling king, but we have a list of these regional capitals as well. And then here and there, we might also have, you know, scattered references to this or that city

• 13:23Speaker 03

  being relevant to such and such a person's life in such and such a way.

• 13:27Tristan Hughes?

  And the records of those particular gnomes, those districts, those districts, are those ones preserved in like papyrus scrolls more administrative compared to like the writings of Menatho? Or what should we be thinking of how these, you know, these writings about the gnomes and so on, how they are preserved?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Various, actually. I mean, in some cases, we do have administrative records. Yeah. So we, we, those would be principally on papyrus. And actually, those sorts of things survive mostly from the later periods of Egyptian history. And we know actually that there were from time to time, changes in the gnome boundaries and the gnome capitals, also changes of the names of these cities. So the sort of most comprehensive lists we have of those are from administrative records. But then if you take the sort of sum total of Egyptian texts, we get plenty of mentions of these places, sometimes in particular

• 14:25Speaker 03

  sequences that allow us to sort of see the geographic spread. And there are enough, they crop up in, the names could crop up in other contexts as well. So even though the reasons for the division were principally administrative, they also crop up in religious contexts as well. So there were particular gods and goddesses associated with the various gnomes. The idea that Pharaoh was the ruler of the whole country, and therefore the ruler of all of these gnomes, might also be reason for these to be written down at a certain point. You know, Pharaoh's power extends from the first gnome of Upper Egypt all the way in the south to the very Mediterranean coast up in there, the whatever gnome right up there.

• 15:09Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned that all important source of Menatho. And I love Menatho. I know you love Menatho as well. But shall we set the scene for when he is existing? Because he is around the time just after Alexander the Great, when the Greek pharaohs are starting to rule Egypt?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, we think so. We think he was probably ruling in the time of the second or third Ptolemy. We can't be absolutely sure about this. We have his texts, his text survives in what are called epitomes, which are these later, I'm sure you'll know, copies. So we don't have a kind of original version of his text. And the epitomes that we have, there are three main ones, vary in the details. So it's clear that they can't all be faithful to Menatho's original name. And by the way, these epitomes are all from at least minimum kind of four, five centuries after his time. So, you know, they may have been copied direct

• 16:07Speaker 03

  from an original source, but, you know, very possibly actually sort of a Chinese whispers, you know, lots and lots of edits down the line version. But anyway, there's a sort of scattering of little fragments of evidence that suggests that he was an Egyptian priest, possibly the chief priest of the sun god Ra, Heliopolis, in around the early Ptolemaic. So we think, yes, that he was, he was writing his history, which ends with the last, ends pretty much with, it brings us up to the time of Alexander the Great, as if that was the end of history. And, and, you know, it was the end of events from a time not very long before Menatho himself was around. We also think, well, we're sort of deducing

• 16:49Speaker 03

  a little bit here. If we're right in thinking that he was writing in the early Ptolemaic, then it may be that the reason he was writing was that Ptolemies at that time were trying to establish Egypt as one of the most important parts of the post Alexander empire, and establishing themselves as the rightful rulers. So it was kind of in the Ptolemy's interests for there to be a great history of Egypt written at this time, to show what a marvelous place it was, and what a marvelous place it was to rule. You know, that's in the Ptolemy's interests. And another guy, in fact, a guy called Barosos, had written a similar history of the Near East around, around the same time. And it's possible, it's thought that this was a sort of response to it. You know, you think the Near East is so great with

• 17:31Speaker 03

  your marvelous history. Well, just you wait. Egypt has a great history too.

• 17:36Tristan Hughes?

  Barosus is another great one. Barosus, Menatho, all these people, Megasthenes, all these writers who deserved their time in the spotlight alongside the likes of Homer and Tacitus. But that's for another day, Chris.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Another episode.

• 17:49Tristan Hughes?

  But of course, he's a key source for learning about these cities, many of which, you know, and people going out and then finding these cities and others which are yet to be found. Geographically speaking,

• 18:00Tristan Hughes?

  The majority of these lost cities, I mean whereabouts are they situated in Egypt?

• 18:07Speaker 03

  So one of the things that's very striking about about Menathos history, even if you just pull out the location of the capital city for each of his dynasties, by the way, Menathos is the historian who gives us that idea of splitting the kings into these these groupings, which he called dynasties, first person in history to use that word in that way to describe a line of rulers. Even if you just take the capital city from each of his 30 dynasties, there are 30 altogether, you can see the capital city moving around and it moves around quite a lot. So if you think of Memphis as being the place that it returns to most often, Memphis is, I don't know, 10, 15 kilometres south of where Cairo is now. So in a very approximately the same place as Cairo.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  The crucial thing about both those locations being that they're at the junction of the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta, they're at the point where the river splits. So to put a capital city there is a clever idea in that you've got ready access via the river to the Nile Valley and all of the rest of Egypt, south of that point, and via the various branches of the Nile to all the different parts of the Delta and to the Mediterranean beyond. So Memphis is most often the capital city, but we see it move, according to Menathos, as far south as Aswan, which is more or less the frontier of Egypt with with everything that's further south. And we know that in other times it moved almost all the way to the north eastern corner,

• 19:36Speaker 03

  if you like, of the Delta at Tanis. We also know, although this is Menathos that gives us this information, but we know that after the time of Alexander the Great, the capital city moves to Alexandria in the north western Delta on the coast. So at various times it's in different places in between. So it's really almost anywhere in the whole of the country.

• 19:55Tristan Hughes?

  Because it seems like the list of cities that we're going to cover, we're going to focus in a few in particular. A lot of them do seem to be focused either at that place where the branches of the Nile come together and form the River Nile, or in the area between there and the Mediterranean Sea, so the Nile Delta. So it does feel quite rich, that particular area, Chris. You know, for pharaohs, for kings and queens founding their cities for various purposes along one of those branches of the River Nile.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah. It's very often said, isn't it, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile? And I think most of the time when we have that phrase in mind, the phrase comes from Herodotus, if I remember rightly, we're thinking of the Nile as watering the land, providing water that allows things to grow and fertilising silt to allow crops to grow abundantly. And if it wasn't for the Nile, then, you know, that part of the country, that part of the world, that part of North East Africa would be pretty much uninhabitable. So in that sense, that is what makes the Nile most important. But it's also the the principal means of transport through the country. And it's also therefore the principal means of communication as well.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  And as I say, Egypt would be, is uninhabitable in the parts of the country where the river doesn't reach. So you've kind of got to be on the river, either in the Nile Valley, or more likely and more often in history, as you suggest, in the Delta. And there might be two main reasons for that, actually, that the Delta is the richest part of the country, it's the most productive agriculturally. So, I mean, just looking at a satellite image of Egypt shows this very well, you will know, Tristan, I'm sure, very well, that in the Nile Valley, you've just got three, maybe

• 21:49Speaker 03

  more kilometres worth of agricultural land either side of the river for that full span of whatever it is, 500, 600 kilometres from Aswan up to Cairo. But then when the river splits, creating, if you see it in a in a map or in a satellite image, that kind of fan shape north of the Delta head, region of Memphis and Cairo, up to the Mediterranean coast, the whole of that area is very fertile agriculturally. So the the greater part of the population, even though the the Delta looks like it's only the very sort of top part of the country, the northernmost part, it's the most populous and it's the richest.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  The other thing is that in from a sort of strategic point of view, particularly from the first millennium onwards, Egypt has very much got its eyes, or pharaohs got his eyes, on territory and other people, kingdoms, empires, to the north, one way or another. So from the time of Ramses II onwards, a little bit earlier perhaps, they're very much focused on the Levant and the north and east, which is territory they control in what's now Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and also their enemies at this sort of edge of that territory. By the time you get to Alexander the Great, of course, Egypt is a part of this much wider Mediterranean empire of his.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  So again, it makes sense for his capital city to be at that end of Egypt. So it's much less common for capital cities to be in the south. There were things of interest to the south of Egypt, but maybe not so much. So strategically, it's not a great idea to be too far away from the action in the Delta and the Mediterranean.

• 23:31Tristan Hughes?

  No, of course. And obviously, one of the exceptions will be Thebes, Monde Luxor, when they're in the Valley of the Kings and how important that was at this time. But we are going to focus on a few examples of these cities and we're going to try and do them chronologically as well, Chris, harkening back first of all to Menathos. And this particular city that he says was the capital right at the beginning. Yeah. I hope I pronounce this correctly, Tennesse.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  You and I, with our English accents, are probably, will probably be laughed at by the ancient Egyptians, but but Tennesse or Tennesse, or this, it's written both ways, this or Tennesse. Yeah, according to Menathos was the capital city at the beginning of the first dynasty. And he's very clear, even though his, the sort of information he provides is very scant, he's clear that there is this moment, first king, first dynasty, we assume that this is probably the moment at which the country came to be unified under a single ruler, probably as a result of some military activity or following some military activity. And so the capital city is in this, and this is absolutely one of these cities which has not been identified archaeologically or not with any certainty.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  We deduce that it is in the region of the famous cemetery site of Abydos. There was a settlement at Abydos, but a small one. And it is principally a cemetery site. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, generally speaking, the Egyptians kept cemeteries and tombs away from from from the settlements where people were living. There would have been small communities of people in and around the cemeteries to service them, to be building tombs, whatever, but generally speaking, people don't live there. But Abydos, although it is an important cemetery site throughout Egyptian history, it was a royal burial place in the first and second dynasties.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  And in the 19th century, the very late 19th century, starting with a Frenchman called Emil Amelino, followed in short order by the English excavator Flinders Petrie. Excavations were carried out in the cemeteries out towards the desert edge, towards where the low desert reaches the foothills and becomes the high desert. And they found there the tombs that appear to belong to the kings of the first dynasty and some of the second. So if the tombs are there, we assume probably that the capital city of those kings was nearby also. And then we have mentions of this city which survived into later times as being in the

• 26:12Speaker 03

  eighth gnome, the eighth administrative district. And so perhaps it's just worth saying that the Egyptians divided, there were two sets of gnomes, these administrative districts, one in the Nile, one for the Nile Valley, and then one for the Delta. And they were numbered, so in the Nile Valley, they were numbered in sequence from south to north. So the gnome of Aswan, which is the southernmost city, is the first gnome. The second is in the region of Hierarchopolis, Thebes is in the third, I think, and so on and so on. It's a little bit more complicated in the Delta because the Delta's not linear in that same way, but still they're numbered. So this is in the eighth gnome, if I remember rightly.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  So you sort of eight along, working south to north, and that's the same gnome that Abydos is in. So we can narrow down the location of this to this general area. And it's a rural area of Egypt today. There aren't too many major settlements in the area, in the region. There are one or two archaeological sites, including settlement sites, which could be the remains of this very first capital city of Egypt.

• 27:24Tristan Hughes?

  Just such a great search title, like Searching for Egypt's First Capital or something.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, isn't it? Yeah, isn't it? I mean, if you could prove it, if you could prove that this was the place where somebody, and we do, we do have names, we're just not absolutely clear about the sequence of events and what happened and what's what's kind of myth and what was reality. But it seems very likely that there was a point at which there was a ruler under whom Egypt came to be unified for the first time and, you know, and under whom Egypt as a country came into being. And this was the seat of that of that ruler. So, I mean, if we could prove that, regardless of what survives, and I think sadly, I think the likelihood is that, you know, we're not, we're not about to sort of uncover the palace or anything like that. But if we could just say that this was the spot, then that would be a very significant thing.

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• 29:39Tristan Hughes?

  Chris, I'm just looking at the Abydos location now. And first off, I know we're talking about the Nile Delta and a lot being up there. But of course, this is much further south than the Nile Delta. And just seeing it on Google Maps, you're mentioning that kind of thin line of green fertile lands either side of the Nile, like three kilometres or so. And then having the site, yes, literally right on the edge of that agricultural land. And thinking, yes, there's a royal cemetery site. Where could the city itself have been? And what would have happened to it? The fact that, you know, visibly, potentially you've got little bits surviving, but so much of it has disappeared, has gone.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think actually that allows us to say something about the way that archaeology has survived in Egypt. You know, we talked earlier about the fact that there's a, there's very much a bias in favour of certain types of site, particularly tombs. The other type of site that survives best is temples. And in both cases, those monuments were built of durable materials, often, if not always, often, particularly stone. Stone survives, one way or another, it survives. So tombs that are rock cut, for example, you know, you can't move them. You know, they stay where they are. They can be robbed, of course, they can be vandalised, they can, they can, they can fall into ruin for, for natural reasons, but they, very often they survive.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  In terms of temples built of cut stone, those stone blocks often are reused, but it's quite rare that the stone from a temple is comprehensively removed. Or, or to flip that round a little bit, we have very many instances of temples which have survived. In some cases, I mean, almost intact, you know, and those of course are the temples that we know best today. But even in cases where what must have been very large and very important temples, one thinks, for example, of the major temple at Sais, capital city of the 26th dynasty, which was almost completely vanished. It hasn't vanished completely. There was still some whacking great stones there.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  There's nothing, nothing almost by comparison with what there would have been, but still there's something. In the case of this, Thetis, if even a handful of blocks from, from a major temple, and it's a reasonable assumption that there was a major stone temple, if not at the time of the early dynastic, the first kings, then, then in later, and we know the city did survive until later times, then for one reason or other, they've gone completely. And that we can't explain at the moment. One day it might be possible to do a sort of comprehensive subsurface survey of the whole of the country and it may yet turn things up. And it's no question that there will be stone that we haven't yet looked at in, in various places.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, and of course, if you were to do that survey in the area of the, the eighth gnome, the strong chance that we could identify that as the very first capital city.

• 32:41Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh. Well, let's move on chronologically from that first dynasty to the next lost city that I have on, in my notes. But Chris, the city I've got next doesn't feel much like a lost city because, I mean, we've mentioned it a few times already, so you've got to explain this to me. Why is Memphis the next one on our list?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. Good question. So when I was starting out doing this, you know, I came up with this great long list of cities and a bit like with the lost teams as well, great big long list of kings, whose teams do we know about, which are the ones that are missing? And just as with lost tombs where in some cases you can say, you can say, well, that's probably missing because of that, we're not going to find it. And that, then that narrows down your list even further to the ones that we can't explain, you know, why they're missing. And the case of cities, in some cases, as with this, that we've just been talking about, it really is absolutely missing. We really don't know beyond saying it was somewhere in this region. We really don't know where it was. In other cases, we know where the city was at certain points, but we're missing some

• 33:48Speaker 03

  part of it or some aspect of it. So the situation in Memphis is that, and Memphis is the, is the location to which the capital city moved after this, and we don't exactly know when. It seems likely that it was realised that this was a better place strategically. So most probably this was the capital city of those early pharaohs, because that's where they came from. That's where they lived, you know? Why move? That's where their home is. But there comes a realisation at a certain point that it would actually be better if we're going to boss everyone in the country around, we, we better be somewhere better than this and Memphis is a better place. Memphis, as I'm sort of hinted at earlier, then remains a very, very important settlement

• 34:30Speaker 03

  and on and off the capital city, right down into Roman times, it remains a very important and populous place.

• 34:36Tristan Hughes?

  And as a reminder, quick reminder, the location is between where all the branches begin and the main river Nile Valley, kind of that nice area.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Approximately, yeah. It's a little way, it's a little way south of the point of where the river splits, but not very far. If nothing else, we would know approximately where it was because just as with this, we know where the cemeteries were. So the pyramid fields of Saqqara, Giza, Darshur, Abiroash, Abu Ghurub, one or two other sites, which are ranged in a line up on the desert, just a little way to the west of the extent of cultivated land in that area. Those are all cemeteries of Memphis. It's just that at various different times, for various different reasons, the, the king or other people chose to be buried in a slightly different location, but there, you could

• 35:29Speaker 03

  see them in some ways as one continuous, enormous cemetery site. So Memphis has to be there somewhere. And the remains have been found, substantial remains, particularly for the New Kingdom and later, but not nearly so much from before that time. And as I was sort of mentioning earlier, cities are generally, they have been harder to, to get at, if you like. They don't preserve so well. Buildings are made of mud brick, which even if it survives, survives in a kind of a jumble of mud, difficult to define, a little bit off putting by comparison with, you know, pretty coffins or statues or whatever. They're also very often underneath things that are difficult to go through, such as

• 36:14Speaker 03

  fields or, or towns and cities. In the 1980s, some excavations were carried out in, in the area of Memphis, which identified the levels going back as far as the Middle Kingdom, but not, but they didn't really find very much before that. So, so what, you know, Meneitho tells us that the first palace is built in that area during the first, first dynasty. And it seems clear that there is a move, at least a partial move northwards in, by the second dynasty, if not later. And certainly by the time of the third dynasty, the capital city seems to have been established there. Meneitho says this and all our evidence points that way as well. And yet the settlement's missing. And this actually, and we now think is explained by, and what is a very, another very interesting sort of window on how Egyptian archaeology works.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  We now think, you mentioned the importance of the river earlier, that the river Nile has moved. In fact, we know it's moved. So again, if you look at, if you look at a map or a satellite image, you'll see that the Nile running more or less in a straight line from south to north. What you might not expect is that it, it is capable of, and indeed has over centuries, from moving hundreds of metres either to the west or to the east for various reasons. And, you know, if you know your sort of riverine geography, you'll know that rivers change shape and they, they are capable of doing this. So when that's happened in the ancient past, the ancients have been forced to adapt by moving the sort of centre of the city as the river has moved, so that things like

• 37:42Speaker 03

  harbours can, can be right on the edge and all the other infrastructure that needs to be right by the water can move. It also means in some cases, most likely that the river has in fact swallowed things up. So where the river has moved towards pre-existing buildings or whatever, they may well have been destroyed. And we now think that this may in some way explain why we don't have those early levels for Memphis. They were detached, if you like, from where the later phases of Memphis were because the river moved quite dramatically from west to east. And so the original city, we think, was quite a long way further west from where those New Kingdom levels are, the remains of the New Kingdom temple, time from around 1700 to 1702.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  So archaeologists were looking not quite in the right place for a long time. And in fact, as luck would have it, the spot that they now think is most likely is the sort of place to look for those early levels is underneath a load of buildings, a road and a load of buildings, including the museum at Saqqara, ironically enough. So it may well be, I mean, it's got to be there somewhere, but it may well be that you'd have to dig up the road and the museum in order to be sure.

• 38:54Tristan Hughes?

  So when we talk about the lost city of Memphis, we're talking about, is it the original city, the old kingdom Memphis, the Memphis of more than 4,000 years ago? I didn't quite clock that.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, actually, the other thing to say without wanting to go on for too long about it would be actually that I think, thinking about our sort of different aspects of Egyptian archaeology, I'm very interested in the history of archaeology and the way that people understood and encountered ancient Egypt two centuries ago, before we had, you know, anything like the material evidence and the understanding that we have now. And lots of the earliest travellers who were going to Egypt with their classical texts in their hands, their Herodotuses and their Stravos and their Manethos and this kind of thing, were very much hoping and expecting to see spectacular places and Memphis would have been foremost among them. It's such an important part of so many of the great stories, particularly from the later periods of time of Alexander the Great, for example, we know that he was in Memphis.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  They were expecting to see great things. And for a long time, you know, it wasn't clear where Memphis was and those early travellers were tripped over by the fact that it doesn't survive in a monumental way like some other places do. So that, you know, those travellers would have been aware that there were spectacular monuments in other places, but in the sort of approximate location where they'd expect to find Memphis, they were sort of scratching their heads and looking around and going, where is it?

• 40:18Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's move on to the next one that I got in my list. And this is quite the corker of a lost city, only for a brief period of time, but for that religious zealot, heretic Akhenaten, the city, Chris, of Amarna.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, this will be a lot of people's favourite, I guess. It's a favourite of mine in lots of ways. I suppose we should say at the outset, it's not lost, it's not missing anymore.

• 40:45Tristan Hughes?

  You can go and see it today.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Yes, you can. We know where it was. It was missing in more than one sense though. And again, for me, I think the value in this story is in, is in helping to understand something about, you know, the way archaeology has been preserved and how we've been able to say what we can about ancient Egypt as a result of archaeology. We talked about how Manetho gives us these lists of capital cities and that could be a sort of starting point. We've also just mentioned how early travellers were, you know, were bringing along accounts like that of Strabo, describing what Egypt was like. Amarna, as you say, was the short-lived capital city of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. He ruled there with his, famously with his wife, Nefertiti, for a period of probably not much more than 10 years or so.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  But all the sources that would have been available to early Egyptologists were completely silent on this. No mention of Akhenaten, no mention of his capital city, no mention of the fact that he uprooted a population of 30,000 to 50,000 people from wherever they'd been living before to this new place, which he built in a strategically daft place in the middle of nowhere in, in Middle Egypt, on the Nile, but still far away from the main cult centres, far away from transport routes into the delta and beyond, not well supplied with resources, not even well supplied with, with water, it seems. But he did all of that very deliberately because, without going into too much detail here, he was wanting to make a break with everything that had gone before.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  So he didn't, he was very deliberately seeking out a brand new sort of virgin site. And the site was first noticed by early travellers. It crops up or one, one monument at the site crops up in the drawings of a man called Sicard, a French, I think he was a priest. The Napoleonic expedition visited the site and noted that there was some archaeology but, and they sort of sketched out the approximate locations of the ruins. And they did seem to have noticed that there was a road running through the centre of them, which we now would call the royal road. But they didn't understand what this was. And it wasn't until the 1820s, when the English Egyptologist, John Gardner Wilkinson,

• 42:58Speaker 03

  was shown to the rock cut tombs, which are at the eastern edge of the city, that he realised that there was something very unusual going on in that you've got hieroglyphic inscriptions. So clearly something ancient Egypt, but the style of the art was very different. The content of the scenes is very different. These were clearly rock cut tombs, but the decoration was very unusual. He also noticed that there seemed to be a conspicuous absence of royal names, even though the scenes that he was seeing seemed to involve somebody who very much seemed to fit the, the model of, of a pharaoh, the name was missing. Eventually, of course, he was able to establish that in some rare occasions, that name is preserved and it was the name of Akhenaten. And slowly people began to piece this together.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  What has become, we sort of skipped to the present day, what's become so important about Amarna is that because it was, it was built in one, in one go, it was designed and planned in a single phase, you know, we're going to build a complete capital city, capital city in one go. And they did it. Akhenaten, there are inscriptions where Akhenaten tells us that this is what he's going to do and the archaeology shows that he really did it. We estimate on the basis of the, of the city and we have all the major buildings that you'd expect, houses for people of all different social classes, from the smallest right up to royal palaces. Then we have temples, we have administrative buildings, we have craftsmen's workshops, et cetera, et cetera. We have roads, have a network of roads across the desert. We have cemeteries, including a royal cemetery, blah, blah, blah.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  All of that was, was, was done in an incredibly short space of time. And then the city was abandoned once, soon after Akhenaten died. And because he was considered to be a heretic more or less immediately, and the whole project was considered to be something taboo, it was not only abandoned, but it was comprehensively abandoned. And it was almost as though nobody was allowed to go there ever again. So unlike almost any other archaeological site anywhere in the world, where generally speaking, you know, you have lots of different phases of occupation over time, which make for a sort of complicated mixture of layers that you have to untangle and work your way back down through.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  In this case, you've got a single occupation and because it was abandoned, it survived incredibly well. So it is the single best site we have from ancient Egypt for the study of a city. So there's a kind of irony here and it's an irony that plays out across lots of Akhenaten's story, but you know, he was deliberately forgotten because he was a heretic. And that is, that is why we knew nothing about him until his city was rediscovered. But once it was rediscovered, it proved to be, well, not only one of the great stories from the ancient world, his story is one of the great stories from the ancient world, but, but also his city is, as I say, is the best we have. So back to that sort of idea of yours from the very beginning of there being sort of

• 45:48Speaker 03

  nothing or apparently being something hidden and then something being revealed. This is maybe the best example we have.

• 45:54Tristan Hughes?

  Lost and then found.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:56Tristan Hughes?

  And what a great snapshot into that particular period of time.

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• 47:28Tristan Hughes?

  Chris, in our chronology, if we've gone from Thynis to, or Tinis, to kind of Old Kingdom, Memphis, down to Amarna and the New Kingdom. So we're about 3,000 years ago now in the story. If we go now to our next site, and this is one actually we've, we've mentioned in the past when we covered the story of the Silver Pharaohs, the city of Tanis.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:52Tristan Hughes?

  That many people may well think, oh, I've heard that name before as a lost city, if they've watched Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, there's lots of, lots and lots of layers to this story, actually. Yeah. So it's the name that's given to the great lost city, as you say, in Indiana Jones. There's not a lot about Tanis in Raiders of the Lost Ark that has bears much relation to the history or archaeology in Egypt, I'm afraid. And actually, confession time, I don't really know the film very well, actually.

• 48:26Tristan Hughes?

  Spoken like a true Egyptologist.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  I know. Yeah, I know. I know. I should probably get over myself and watch it. Maybe we'll have a watch along or something at some point. But anyway, but even without that, it's a multi-layered story. So maybe the simplest way of, of talking about it is to say what we know about it now at this point. And perhaps actually, we, we should lean on Menatho here as well, because, because he's helpful. Tanis was one of the capital cities, according to Menatho, it was the capital city in the 21st dynasty and in the 23rd. This is the period after the New Kingdom, after the Valley of the Kings has been abandoned. And in fact, although Menatho didn't really have a grip on

• 49:10Speaker 03

  this, we now understand that the country was split into two for much of the period that's covered by his 21st to 25th dynasties. So Tanis was certainly an important city. If you take Menatho at face value, from the 21st dynasty onwards, and indeed, that's backed up in the archaeology. So again, the Napoleonic expedition visited the site. So there was an awareness from early on that there were monumental remains. There's a scatter of monumental statuary and other stone at the site. It was clearly a lot of mud brick. It was clearly, you know, you didn't have to be an expert to understand that there was something significant here. And it was excavated, I guess, the first scientific excavations that were undertaken at the site.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Well, depends on what you, what you call scientific. Mariette had a go in the middle of the 19th century. Flinders Petrie had a rather more considered go, perhaps, again, towards the end of the 19th century, 1883 to 4. And from the early 20th century onwards, it became the subject of a very long-running and comprehensive survey and excavation project led by a series of French directors. Pierre Monte, as, as you will know, and as listeners who've heard our Silver Pharaohs episode will know, discovered the royal tombs of pharaohs of the 21st and 22nd dynasties at the site, well, from 1939 onwards. So there's no question that this was an important site. In Monte's time, though, there was a question around the significance

• 50:39Speaker 03

  of Tanis. So that word Tanis is, is a Greek form of the name. The earlier Egyptian would be Channet, something like that. So a sort of Greek corruption of that earlier Egyptian name. A big research question around this time, first half of the 20th century, was the whereabouts of the, the very well attested in texts, very well-known capital city of Ramses II, which was named after him. It was named Per Ramses, the house of Ramses, the city of Ramses, if you like. And much of the temple that had been preserved at Tanis and uncovered by, by excavators, although much of it was sort of lying around, much of that material bore the name of Ramses II.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  So initially, the conclusion was that not only is this Tanis, Menatho's capital city of the 21st and 23rd dynasty, probably the 22nd, the kings seem to have been buried there. But it was, it also probably was, was Per Ramses, probably just changed its name at a certain point after Ramses was, you know, was long dead, or whatever. But in actual fact, we now understand that that's not the case. In the 1970s, a site about 30 kilometres away, close to a village called Kantia, where there was also a scatter, much, much smaller, but a scatter of monumental stonework still surviving. A non-invasive survey showed that beneath the surface of the agricultural land,

• 52:01Speaker 03

  you'd never know from just looking at it, there was a very substantial ancient city. And eventually, that led to the discovery that in fact Kantia was the location of Per Ramses. So Tanis was nearby, but it was about 30 kilometres away. So the question then is, so what's all that stonework of Ramses II, which appears to belong to a temple of his, doing 30 kilometres away from his capital city? Eventually, we realised that Per Ramses had been built, and again, this is perhaps something we've touched on earlier, it was very deliberately built on a branch of the Nile, leading out towards the north and east, towards Egypt's territory in, in the Levant. And that

• 52:41Speaker 03

  river channel had naturally started to dry up in the later New Kingdom, which meant that the whole city was unviable any, any longer. So at a certain point, we can't know exactly when, but at a certain point, the, the people in the local area realised that if we're going to have a, a capital city or a strategic centre in this area, we are going to have to move. So where can we move to? Well, the nearest branch of the river is 30 kilometres approximately to the north. That branch is named after the, the city of Tanis, the Tanitic branch. And so what they did was rather than build a brand new temple with newly quarried stone at that site, they just thought,

• 53:24Speaker 03

  you know what, it's only 30 kilometres, why don't we just move the stone?

• 53:27Tristan Hughes?

  Interesting.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  That's what they did. So this is why I say you've got sort of multiple layers. Tanis was an important capital city. It probably wasn't recognised for, for being that until the excavation work was underway. But even after that, it was still believed to be not only the Tanis of the 21st and 23rd dynasties, but Per Ramses of Ramses II. We now know that's not, that's not the case. That was elsewhere. I also feel, I have to mention as well, that a few years ago, some non-invasive survey work, satellite imaging work in particular was done at Tanis, which revealed much of the archaeology, which is still yet to be excavated. So the, the temple area in the centre of the city has been excavated. Quite a lot of the settlement has also been dug,

• 54:12Speaker 03

  but by no means all. It's much too big for that. But these non-invasive surveys were able to show at least the outline of, of buildings. And that led in the media to this idea that Tanis was being discovered for the first time. And in actual fact, that's not the case. We knew where it was a couple of centuries ago.

• 54:30Tristan Hughes?

  So it's a lost city in the sense of, Chris?

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Well, it isn't really now, actually. It's just a city that serves to illustrate how something can be lost. So if you think Tanis was lost and then it was found, Per Ramses was lost and then we thought we'd found it, but actually we hadn't, it was in the wrong place, you know. So it's just a way of illustrating that, the way archaeology's played out.

• 54:54Tristan Hughes?

  And the last place in our list is when we go to the time of the Ptolemies, post Alexander the Great, and a city that once again, people think, well, I can go there today. How is that lost? But as we know, there are still so many parts of this city that are lost either beneath modern buildings or the sea today. And this is of course Alexandria.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So again, you're right. Sorry if people feel disappointed at home. You know, we know where it was. But exactly as you say, we know where it was. But beyond that, we are really, as you will know very well, Tristan, we're really struggling when it comes to the detail of where individual things were. And I think this is therefore maybe the single best illustration we have of a city which is extraordinarily well attested in texts, and will feel very familiar to people. And yet, although we know roughly where these things were, and you think about buildings that are so celebrated, like the Museon, the, the famous

• 55:58Speaker 03

  library, the lighthouse, one of the great ancient wonders of the world, you and I have talked about the, the tomb of Alexander the Great before, the tomb of Cleopatra, those are both almost certainly there. None of these things survive. Strabo probably provides us with the, the single best description we have of the city and the sort of relative positions of various buildings. But up until fairly recently, we were really in the dark about where these were, at least relative to where things are in, in modern Alexandria. Short of saying, well, there's not really very much looking we can do anymore because

• 56:38Speaker 03

  modern Alexandria overlies such a large area, all of what must have been ancient Alexandria and a great deal more around as the city has spread out. And we were really sort of in the dark about exactly, exactly where things were. But of course, the great revelation of, of the last couple of decades has been that much of the monumental part of the city, the most famous part of the city, in actual fact, was probably close enough to the coast, as Strabo says, that it would have been destroyed most probably not later than the tsunami that we know occurred in, I think it was the fourth century AD.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  But of course, underwater archaeology, which is still ongoing in that area, I mean, also elsewhere along the coast, but, but in the great harbour Alexandria, has been uncovering the monumental remains of some of those buildings. Sadly, not preserved to the extent that we can really say very much about their form. But we now know that that is the story of what happened to a lot of those buildings. Having said that, it doesn't solve the problem of where, for example, the tomb of Alexander the Great or the tomb of Cleopatra were. It's still possible, I think, that certainly the tomb of Alexander may, may have been further inland, perhaps might have survived the tsunami and yet is underneath the modern city, might possibly still survive.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  And again, thinking back to that sort of magic, high-tech survey that we might be able to do in the future that looks beneath the, the ground, we may be able to see surviving parts of that, who knows?

• 58:17Tristan Hughes?

  Who knows, indeed. And as you say, this underwater archaeology, you know, discovering all these buildings and little bit more by more being discovered and news articles being made when they announce them, like Franck Godiot and his team, I've got here, I, I will mention it because we're in that area of the woods quickly, how there's this other lost ancient Egyptian city of Tonis Heraklion.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:38Tristan Hughes?

  Which they think is almost like the gateway of Egypt, which was right by Alexandria, which is now completely submerged and they are, so that is a lost city actually submerged beneath the Mediterranean.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, there were at least three very sizable settlements in that, in the sort of area of the kind of western edge of Abu Ghraib Bay, which is, which is along the coastline eastwards from Alexandria. Yeah, that whole area would have been incredibly rich in ancient times. It's the location of this settlement, sort of mini kind of city of Nicosas as well, which hasn't, hasn't been identified. Yeah, and the underwater archaeology that they've been able to do is absolutely a revelation. I mean, I think those two things, our understanding now of the movement of the river and our understanding of just how much was swallowed up by the Mediterranean, those two things have completely transformed our understanding of, of archaeology in Egypt generally, particularly

• 59:31Speaker 03

  cities, and also how things have survived or not. I mean, that's transformed in, in my lifetime, I mean, pretty old now, I suppose, but.

• 59:40Tristan Hughes?

  You are absolutely not. This has been so much fun and, and I feel we've only just scratched the surface, Chris, because it feels like there are still cities which haven't been discovered, which may be uncovered in the coming years. I mean, what do you think the future holds for Egypt's lost cities?

• 59:57Speaker 03

  I think the chances that, that there will be discoveries are very high, actually. Well, I'm certain, I mean, this also plays into another sort of pet subject of mine, which is lost monuments or, or the idea of things being lost and found and then lost again. There are places in the Nile Valley, out of the way places that have escaped archaeology. And actually, it's been in my mind, just as we've been talking, that, you know, I think something else that maybe of interest to people at home maybe is that, okay, we know the river moved now, we know that's a thing, we know that that had an impact, we know as, as I've said, that, you know, it means that we might be looking in the wrong place for things, as is the case with Memphis, we know also that it may have swallowed things up, and then we know about everything along the coast.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  But even though we know those things, it's not as simple as just then going, oh, well, right, okay, well, we'd better just do a comprehensive survey of all riverine locations and all coastal locations. And so, you know, we realised these things a few years ago and now we know everything. Not at all, you know, we've realised these things, but archaeology, as you all know, is a very slow process and is very, is always struggling for funding. So the possibilities, if funding can be found, for looking in places along the Nile Valley and along the coast, for some of these places that we know about, Strabo gives us absolutely loads of names of, of places along the coast and right the way through the delta and up into what's now Sudan. And a lot of those places have never been identified and it may well be that resources,

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  technology allow us to find some of those things in the future. I think, I think it's, I bet at least five pounds.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Something exciting will be found.

• 1:01:36Tristan Hughes?

  Last but certainly not least, I want to happily and freely promote your book again on the, the tombs, which is called, Chris?

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  It's called Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt.

• 1:01:48Tristan Hughes?

  And that's everything from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra to many, many others too.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it is. A good, I think, I like to think a good way into what archaeology in Egypt is.

• 1:01:57Tristan Hughes?

  Chris, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for coming back on the show.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Pleasure as always.

• 1:02:06Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was the wonderful Dr Chris Norton returning to the show to talk through the story of Egypt's lost cities. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like more with Chris, well, we've got a few episodes that we've recorded with him over the years, we'll put a link straight away to our episode we did with him all about the silver pharaohs of Susanese and so on, their tombs that were discovered at Tanis in the mid 20th century. But we'll also put a link to the story of the sunken city of Alexandria and our interview with the underwater archaeologist Franck Godiot from a few years back, where he explains how there is so much still to find of ancient Alexandria beneath the waterline.

• 1:02:51Tristan Hughes?

  So we'll put links to those episodes in the show notes. Now, if you've been enjoying the ancients recently, please make sure that you're following the show on either Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us, you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me, I'll see you in the next episode.