Cleopatra's gems rise from the deep

London Times ^ | 5/11/06 | Roger Boyes

[wagglebee]

Franck Goddio shows off one of the sculptures he found (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Cleopatra's gems rise from the deep

By Roger Boyes

Hundreds of priceless finds will shed light on 1,500 years of Ancient Egyptian history

THE lost world of Cleopatra’s palaces has been dug out of the muddy Mediterranean sea bed by a man dubbed the Underwater Indiana Jones.

The results of Franck Goddio’s excavations, comprising 500 priceless finds that shed light on 1,500 years of ancient history, will be put on public view today for the first time.

President Mubarak of Egypt will open the exhibition in Berlin, and it will later transfer to Paris and London and eventually to a specially prepared site in Egypt.

“It was an astonishing feeling to find and handle beautiful objects that have been touched by Cleopatra,” said M Goddio, a 58-year-old Frenchman who abandoned a career as a financial consultant to pursue his passion for maritime archaeology.

For the past 12 years he has been excavating the sunken harbour of Alexandria, the legendary lost city of Heracleion and the religious centre of Canopus.

Floods, earthquakes and erosion swallowed up these once-vibrant communities. Although some of the recovered fragments have been shown, they have never been put together in a single comprehensive collection.

The Goddio team discovered 5.4m (18ft) red granite statues of an Egyptian king, queen and the fertility god Hapi, as well as thousands of smaller statues of gods and rulers, masks of pharaohs, gold and stone jewellery, and an intact black slab pronouncing import duties on Greek products.

One of the most significant discoveries was the fragment of a shrine, the Naos of the Decades, which made it possible for M Goddio to reconstruct the first astrological calendar in the world.

Among the treasures is a sphinx bearing the face of Ptolemy XII, the father of Cleopatra, a reminder that parts of the royal quarter with its temples, palaces and gardens were in Alexandria’s eastern harbour, where Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Cleopatra stayed.

Working from 19th-century maps and the results of an early excavation by Prince Omar Tousson, M Goddio set about testing theories about the geography of the sunken harbour area.

What emerged was a picture of a remarkably well-designed metropolis divided by grand canals.

“We showed the designs to port engineers who told us that they couldn’t have done a better job,” he said. “It was not only an act of brilliant engineering it was also beautiful to look at.”

The port was developed by Ptolemy II, in 300BC.

Using magnetic resonance machines and sonars, M Goddio fished out the relics. Each fragment had to be freed from the effects of the seawater in an onboard laboratory.

The statues were descaled, chemically and electronically tested, and then restored.

M Goddio was initially regarded with suspicion by university archaeologists because he trained as a mathematician and came late to the profession.

But his passionate, slightly buccaneering manner has helped to attract sponsorship in a way that no academic archaeological team could have hoped to collect.

His high-tech explorations cost about €1 million (£680,000) a month, and tens of thousands of diving hours have been dedicated to excavating a few hundred metres of the ancient sites. The total area is thought to be about a square kilometre. He does not welcome comparisons with the maverick Indiana Jones. “I am not an adventurer,” he said yesterday. “My role is to avoid adventure since it is expensive, it wastes time and does not lead to a job well done.”

The exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a converted Kaiser-era palace near the former Berlin Wall, will be open until September 4.

[wagglebee]

This is an amazing find!

[wagglebee]

GGG Ping!

[nothingnew]

Blam, you might be interested in this.

FMCDH(BITS)

[bannie]

W*O*W

Won't they please bring it to Bakersfield???

[Lil'freeper]

“We showed the designs to port engineers who told us that they couldn’t have done a better job,” he said. “It was not only an act of brilliant engineering it was also beautiful to look at.”

I love these GGG threads because I read statements like that and marvel at human ingenuity. When I was teaching, I ran across a very consistent bias in my teenage students that people who live in other countries in vastly different cultures, or people who lived in ages past are inherently less intelligent than "we" are. Yet they, as is the case with many adults, cannot do simple arithmetic without the use of their calculators. Give them four sticks and some string and they would be unable to devise a way to stake out a geometrically square foundation on the ground. I could, and I could probably survey out a fairly straight 'Roman road'. But I know I couldn't build a pyramid or an Incan wall or make a likeness of someone out of stone. So props to those who did and whose works have stood the eons - they put our modern world in perspective.

[ryan71]

If you ever saw the water in Alexandria, you wouldn't want to dive in it.

[wagglebee]

It's gotten a little better recently, but I remember about 20 years ago when most children couldn't tell time on anything other than a digital clock and small children couldn't tie their shoes because of velcro.

We rely on computers for everything today, but the mathematical equations for the atomic bomb, jet aircraft and much of the space program was done with slide rulers. As you pointed out, we have the most advanced engineering programs imaginable today, yet nobody has been able to produce a reasonable theory of how the pyramids were constructed.

[No2much3]

I always felt very proud of my father who worked on the Space Programs of the 60-70's. He did his work on a slide rule because computer time was so limited. It was not until the engineers felt they had the formulas correct that they ran the full launch process through the computers. Dad would spend weeks making sure the input code was correct, then it would take weeks for the computer to do the processing. When there was a problem all the engineers would pull out their slide rules. It was not until about 1975 when dad came home with a TI Calculator the size of a paperback book which could take the Square root to three decimal places plus having trig fuctions. Us kids were not allowed to "play" with it, meaning we couldn't do our math homework on it!

[ntnychik]

Amazing to realize that our great space program was run by engineers with slide rules. My Dad retired from his engineering job at the age of 80. Although he had kept up with the times and used the computer for his work, when he cleaned out his desk, the souvenir he kept was his trusty old 40's era slide rule. Some of the young guys at work had never seen one.

[lakey]

Thanks for this post.

Last year, I read "The October Horse" and thought one of the most interesting parts was the author's description of Cato's gruesome suicide.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Waggs. I'd seen it, saved it, and just couldn't seem to get around to it. :')

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
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[SunkenCiv]

a Blast from the Past, as a sort of sidebar:

Cleopatra's Signature Discovered
by Rossella Lorenzi
October 3, 2000
Discovery.com News

The handwriting of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra has emerged from a Greek papyrus stored for more than a century in a mummy casing in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, Germany, a Dutch scholar claimed yesterday. "Cleopatra's signature can be found in just one word: 'genestho,' which means 'Make it so!' It is the formula for the royal authorization, and had to be added by the ruler's own hand," said Peter Van Minnen, a Dutch Academy research fellow in religious studies at the University of Groningen... Van Minnen insists the document he discovered is an original. The main text was the work of a secretary, while the subscription "genestho," written in a different hand, was signed by the queen herself. Moreover, at the top of the page, the Alexandrian office where the text was received added a note about the date they received it, around 33 B.C... "The text dates from 33 B.C. and clearly shows how Cleopatra tried to strengthen Canidius' allegiance to her. He is allowed to export (tax-free) Egyptian wheat up to 10,000 sacks and to import wine to Egypt up to 5,000 amphorae," said Van Minnen.

[nmh]

Wow!

[nmh]

Any more pictures?

[metesky]

President Mubarak of Egypt will open the exhibition in Berlin, and it will later transfer to Paris and London and eventually to a specially prepared site in Egypt.

No exhibition in Greece? After all the Ptolemys were Greek, IIRC.

[wagglebee]

My father is in corporate finance and has always like gadgets. I remember in about 1973 when he got his first calculator and IIRC it cost over $500 which was a ton of money at that time. And then in 77 or 78 when the Radio Shack TRS 80 computers came out and they cost more than most cars did at the time. But he still has his slide rules in his desk somewhere, I doubt they even make them anymore and I'm certain that almost nobody under the age of 50 would have the slightest idea how to use them.

[Vision]

But was the horse found?

[blam]

"It was not until about 1975 when dad came home with a TI Calculator the size of a paperback book which could take the Square root to three decimal places plus having trig fuctions. "

That's the year I left 'silicon valley' and went to work for TI. Something most people don't know:

"Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was a notable American electrical engineer who co-won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. He invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at Texas Instruments (TI) at about six months before Robert Noyce made the same invention at Fairchild Semiconductor."

[Pablo64]

I can really relate to your post. My dad also worked on the space program in the 60's. I remember him showing me how to do simple multiplication on his "slipstick" (what they used to call their slide rules). I doubt I could do that anymore. I was visiting my parents in AZ last month and was looking through some old stuff and found dad's slide rule. It brought back memories of watching the launces of many of the Apollo missions.

[jimtorr]

........almost nobody under the age of 50 would have the slightest idea how to use them.

I took an advanced mathematics course in high school in 1971. One of the subjects was slide rules and related computational aids that were about to be relegated to the dust bin.

I still have the slide rule I bought for the class in storage someplace, and the big CRC mathematics & chemical reference book that went with it. I doubt that I remember how to use it.