Treasures Recovered From Sunken Egyptian City

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.

Comments

Mysterious circumstances?

[Angst Badger]

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.

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you're all being manipulated

[cruelworld]

You do realize that this is all just promotional material for Disney's Atlantis movie?

Re:you're all being manipulated

[BlueUnderwear]

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...

Arch.: Nose pressed against the window vs Reality

[MasonMcD]

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!