The Famous Lost Cities of Antiquity: The History of Large Settlements in Ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Middle East that Suddenly Disappeared by Charles River Editors
English | November 24, 2022 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B0BNCM9YB7 | 195 pages | EPUB | 4.21 Mb
One of the primary reasons why modern scholars know so much about Egyptian history is due to many monuments found up and down the Nile. Although some of the tombs built on the west bank of the Nile River have suffered a fair amount of wind damage and all of the great monuments have endured the ravages of time, they are amazingly well-preserved, thanks both to Egypt’s arid climate and good workmanship. The Egyptian monument builders were truly a class above their contemporaries in terms of their trade, which was helped by the fact that they worked with the more permanent materials of sandstone and limestone, unlike Mesopotamian builders who were forced to primarily work with mud and brick.
Throughout the millennia since the pharaohs ruled Egypt, peasants have routinely used remnants of ancient monuments for new housing structures, implements, and even fertilizer, and the situation is even more pronounced closer to the Mediterranean coast. Cities that once were major ports where the various branches of the Nile River flowed into the Mediterranean are now miles off the coastline, under hundreds of feet of water.
The existence of these cities was known thanks to Egyptian and Greek historical sources, but their locations could never be positively identified until the advent of modern marine technology. In 1996, adventurer and scholar Franck Goddio identified what he believed was a major site just off the Mediterranean coastline in the Abu Qir Bay, east of Alexandria. It turned out Goddio had discovered the ancient city of Heracleion, which was part of a larger metropolitan area that included the cities of Canopus and Naucratis. Although there is still much work to be done, the discovery has already yielded vital information about Heracleion’s importance as a center of trade and religion from the 7th century BCE until the 8th century CE.
For a period of just under 100 years, the city of Mari in northern Mesopotamia-eastern Syria was one of the most, if not the most, important cities in the Near East. Founded by semi-nomadic Amorite tribes, Mari was gradually transformed over the span of centuries from a sleepy stop along the Euphrates River to the premier power in Near East during the early 2nd millennium BCE. It remained a relatively obscure city for quite some time, overshadowed by more powerful dynasties and city-states in Akkad and Ur until its kings took advantage of the collapse of the Ur III Dynasty and the return to the process of competing city-states that so often marked interregnum periods throughout ancient Mesopotamian history. If it were not for some very fortunate events and circumstances, the modern world might never have known about Mari.
Ubar and its location continued to fascinate people around the world, and it seemed as though its secrets would remain hidden beneath the Arabian sands until the 1980s, when a photojournalist named Nicholas Clapp became interested in the city. Clapp eventually turned his interest into a full-time endeavor to find Ubar and put together a team of adventurers and archaeologists, receiving funding from a number of different sources. Working backwards from the few scant historical and geographical accounts that portray Ubar as a prosperous city or kingdom in the centuries before Islam, Clapp and his team narrowed their search to a location on the edge of the Arabian Desert in the Dhofar region of Oman. It is there that they believed they found Ubar, which appeared to be a productive, wealthy, and growing city from the early 1st millennium BCE until as late as the 6th century BCE. Clapp received great fame for his discovery and recorded his journey in a book, even as some historians remained convinced that he had not actually discovered Ubar. In fact, some continue to believe that Ubar was a purely mythical place, even as others are convinced that it was a large, historical kingdom that remains lost.
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