Art and Exhibition Hall - Exhibitions - Egypt’s Sunken Treasures

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	EGYPT'S SUNKEN TREASURES

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Egypt’s Sunken Treasures
5 April 2007 to 27 January 2008
An exhibition of the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
in collaboration Franck Goddio and the Hilti Arts & Culture GmbH.

The accomplishment of this unequalled
scientific realisation was made possible
thanks to contributions from the Hilti Foundation.

EGYPT'S TREASURES
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Egypt's Sunken Treasures presents a spectacular collection of artefacts recovered from the seabed off the coast of Alexandria and in Aboukir Bay. Lost from view for more than a thousand years, they were brought to light as part of an ongoing series of expeditions first launched in 1992 by the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology headed by Franck Goddio in co-operation with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Franck Goddio's expeditions and this exhibition are supported by the Hilti Foundation.

Thanks to Franck Goddio's excavations important parts of a lost world have resurfaced, among them the ancient city of Thonis-Heracleion, the eastern reaches of Canopus as well as the sunken part of the Great Port of Alexandria and the city's legendary royal quarter. The finds shed new light on the history of those cities and on the history of Egypt as a whole over a period of almost 1500 years: from the last pharaonic dynasties in the Canopic region to the rise of the Ptolemies after the death of Alexander the Great, followed by Roman control, the advent of Christianity in Byzantine late antiquity and, finally, the dawn of the Islamic era.

Famous for its temples, especially those of the god-king Osiris, Canopus was the site where the goddess Isis was believed to have found the fourteenth and last part of Osiris's savaged body. According to Egyptian mythology Osiris was murdered and his dismembered body scattered all over Egypt by his jealous brother Seth. Isis, so legend has it, assembled the scattered pieces and placed them in a vase at Canopus. Osiris, who also summoned the annual floods, is often represented in the shape of a 'canopic' vase with a stopper in the shape of a crowned head. In Roman times the port city was notorious for its dissoluteness and debauchery. In the Christian era an important monastery was erected on the site of the ancient temples. Gold jewellery, precious stones, crucifixes, a wedding ring and numerous official seals from the monastery bear testimony to this period. Canopus was claimed by the sea at some point in the 8th century; and indeed there are no finds that can be dated any later than the 8th-century Umayyad coins recovered from the seabed at the site of the vanished city.

Links
Franck Goddio, official Homepage

exhibition stops
aegyptens-versunkene-schaetze.org
Grand Palais, Paris
09.12.2006 - 16.03.2007
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
13.05. - 04.09.2006

Among the most spectacular exhibits is the so-called 'Naos of the Decades' engraved with the earliest known astrological calendar. A fragment of this unique shrine was discovered in the Bay of Aboukir in the 18th century. It was taken to Paris, where it became part of the Louvre's permanent collection. The exhibition in Bonn brings together all known fragments of the 'Naos of the Decades', reuniting the Paris fragment with a loan from the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria and the sections recently discovered by Franck Goddio.

Until its rediscovery in 2000, the city of Thonis-Heracleion appeared to have vanished without a trace, its name expunged from human memory - only a few references in ancient texts and a handful of inscriptions testified to its existence. Thonis-Heracleion was a vibrant city with a large Greek community many centuries before Alexander the Great came to Egypt. Before the foundation of Alexandria the city was one of the biggest commercial hubs in the Mediterranean. Its geographical position at the mouth of the Nile allowed it to control the incoming trading ships before they went further upriver to Naukratis.

Archaeological excavations on a large temple - since identified as dedicated to Amun-Gereb or Heracles - and in the sunken city itself have yielded thousands of objects that shed light on the character and topography of Thonis-Heracleion and its environs. The exhibition provides the visitor with a glimpse into the daily life of the ancient city and presents some of the most important finds. Among these are colossal statues of a king, a queen and the god Hapi, god of fertility, abundance and the annual life-giving Nile flood. Hewn from red granite, they bear eloquent testimony to the significance of the temple they once adorned. Beautifully crafted statues of gods and kings, numerous bronze statuettes of deities and ritual items complete the picture. The discovery of a monolithic red granite shrine dedicated to the god Amon-Gereb proved that the remains found on the seabed really were those of the lost city of Thonis-Heracleion. What's more, the discovery of a completely undamaged black granite stele from the time of Pharaoh Nectanebo I put an end to the debate of whether the names Thonis and Heracleion mentioned in ancient texts referred to one and the same city: Thonis was the Egyptian name for the city that the Greeks called Heracleion.

Named after its founder, Alexander the Great, and seat of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, the city of Alexandria was one of the greatest cities of the Hellenistic world. Second only to Rome in size and wealth, the city's streets were lined with large temples, palaces, colonnades and statues. The fabled 130-meter high lighthouse on the island of Pharos, then the tallest building on earth, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. World-famous too was the library with its priceless collection of almost half a million papyrus scrolls. The city's magnificent royal quarter with its temples, palaces and parks, which had formed the backdrop to Cleopatra's dalliance with Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, lay in the immediate vicinity of the harbour. Historians and archaeologists have long sought to locate the site of the historical Portus Magnus (Great Port or Eastern Harbour) and the splendid buildings surrounding it.
It took Franck Goddio and his team twelve years of painstaking research and excavation to piece together a viable map of the legendary Great Port. His underwater explorations brought to light important archaeological material that testified to the overwhelming splendour of the sunken royal quarter. Among the finds are sculptural masterpieces such as the black granite statue of a priest of Isis holding Osiris-Canopus and a sphinx believed to represent Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII. Numerous architectural fragments with inscriptions as well as pottery, jewellery and coins testify to the luxury that once characterised the famous city.

All three cities were important religious, scientific and economic centres of the ancient world. They flourished in a period of Egyptian history that bore the imprint of conquests by foreign cultures. Egypt's adoption and adaptation of religious and cultural ideas from Greece and Rome had direct impact on many areas of daily life. The cult of the god Serapis is one example for the fusion of Greek and Egyptian deities and the rapprochement of different cultures. The exhibition presents an almost 60 cm tall marble head of the god found during excavations in Canopus; and ancient texts do indeed testify to the existence of an important Serapis temple in Canopus. Also on show are a number of statues of Ptolemaic queens in the guise of the goddess Isis wearing Egyptian clothes and Greek hairstyles.

The cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion and the harbour quarter of Alexandria shared the same tragic fate: following a devastating natural disaster all three sank to the bottom of the sea where they lay for more than a thousand years untouched and unrecognised. The exhibition Egypt's Sunken Treasures restores them to the light of day without, however, stripping them of their mystique.

Project Manager
Susanne Kleine

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