Heracleion was once believed to be nothing more than a myth, a legend set far beneath the blue ocean. Ten years after divers stumbled upon its treasures deep beneath the ocean, archaeologists have produced a scientific rendering of what life in the city may have looked like.

Some 1,200 years ago, Thonis-Heracleion, disappeared under the Mediterranean ocean, and the site was found when a survey was conducted of the Egyptian shore. The remains of 64 ships have been discovered, 16 foot statutes have been found and brought back to the surface along with slabs of stone with both Greek and Ancient Egyptian inscriptions.

The city is believed to have been a trade route from Greece entering Egypt, an idea that is cemented with the findings of gold coins and bronze weights. Dr Damian Robinson, director of the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the Univeristy of Oxford said:

It is a major city we are excavating. The site has amazing preservation. We are now starting to look at some of the more interesting areas within it to try to understand life there. We are getting a rich picture of things like the trade that was going on there and the nature of the maritime economy in the Egyptian late period. There were things were coming in from Greece and the Phoenicians. We have hundreds of small statues of gods and we are trying to find where the temples to these gods were in the city. The ships are really interesting as it is the biggest number of ancient ships found in one place and we have found over 700 ancient anchors so far.

The city now lies on the Bay of Aboukir. Dr Frank Goddio was the first person to rediscover the lost city when searching for French warships that had sank in the area in the 18 century battle of the Nile. He says that the research is still in its early days, and a couple of hundred more years are needed to fully uncover the secrets of Thonis-Heracleion.

[Source: The Telegraph]