On good grounds, archaeologists did not regard such discoveries as evidence of any earlier monumental settlement in Alexandria but rather of a well-known Ptolemaic habit of borrowing pieces of religious art and architecture from temples that had been built throughout Egypt by earlier Pharaohs.19 Jean-Yves Empereur was very clear on this point:
The numerous products of the Pharaonic period – sphinxes, obelisks and papyrus columns [found underwater around Qait Bey] – do not make any significant difference to what we already know about the history of Alexandria and its foundation by Alexander the Great.20
Diving with Empereur
A research trip to Alexandria was easy to talk myself out of. Since what was known of its history was that it had no history before the end of the fourth century BC, there was obviously no good reason for me to go there. The ruins of the Pharos and of what looked like an extensive complex of buildings seaward of it had not been submerged in the period I was interested in – the end of the last Ice Age – but between the fourth century BC and the thirteenth century AD, most probably as a result of what geologists call ‘vertical tectonic subsidence’ caused by earthquakes.21 Besides, there is a complicated permissions ordeal which one must undergo if one wishes to dive at Alexandria involving the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of National Security, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the Police, Customs and the Navy. The whole process routinely takes a month …
So I’d pretty much quashed the idea before it took shape when I remembered that my good friend Robert Bauval was born in Alexandria and that several members of his large, globe-trotting family were still living there. On a whim I telephoned him – he lives just outside London – and asked him if he knew anything about Empereur and whether he thought it would be possible to fix up a day of unofficial diving with the French team.
Rob is reputed to have worked miracles in Alexandria, even from as far away as England. I therefore wasn’t too surprised when he called me back the next day and informed me that he had spoken to his great-aunt Fedora, who knew Empereur well; she in turn had put in a good word with the archaeologist. The upshot was that we would be allowed to dive at Qait Bey without formality, any time that suited us in the next few weeks.
Sleep of years
On 30 September 1999 Santha and I, hefting our gear, met up with Robert at the gatehouse to Qait Bey fort. He ushered us inside its medieval limestone walls, soothing the guard in Arabic, and led us to a yard where scuba tanks were laid out and a group of young archaeologists, the men muscular, with stubbly chins, the women tanned and serious, were donning wetsuits and checking gear.
Empereur, in his late forties, was older than the rest of his team. He was wearing a tropical linen jacket and a Panama hat and carrying a briefcase. ‘Excuse me,’ he now said as we shook hands, ‘but I have to rush off, so I won’t be diving with you today.’
‘No problem. I’m really very grateful to you for allowing us to do this at all at such short notice.’
Empereur shrugged: ‘My pleasure. I hope you enjoy yourselves.’ He introduced us to the other team members, then we shook hands again and he strode away.
Because it’s hard to take notes underwater, I normally document my dives on video. It was my intention to do so now, but as we were getting ready I was told that this would not be permitted. Santha, likewise, was asked to leave her three Nikonos 5s behind. Apparently it was something to do with an exclusive deal that had been signed with the French photo agency Sygma. Robert protested vociferously on our behalf and as a compromise it was ultimately agreed that Santha could use her cameras but that my video would not be allowed under any circumstances.
Once that was settled we were led down through a series of dank stone corridors with arrow-slits overlooking the sea until we emerged at the edge of the island – long since connected to the mainland by a causeway – on which Qait Bey stands. Here we put on our gear and tanks, jumped into the water with one of the archaeologists as our guide and descended at once into a submarine wonderland less than a dozen metres below us.
It may be the most beautiful ancient site I have ever had the privilege to explore. The visibility was poor, which added a kind of foggy glamour to the scene, and we had to criss-cross the ruin-field many times, over three lengthy dives, before I began to appreciate how vast and how heterogeneous it was. There were huge numbers of columns, some broken, some virtually intact, but all tumbled and fallen. There were Doric column bases surrounded by tumbled debris. Here and there one or two courses of a wall could be seen, rising up out of the murk. There were dozens of metre-wide hemispherical stones, hollowed inside, of a type that I had never encountered before in Egypt. There were several small sphinxes, one broken jaggedly in half, and large segments of more than one granite obelisk seemed to have been tossed about like matchsticks. There were also quarried granite blocks scattered everywhere. Most were in the 2–3 square metre range but some were much larger – 70 tonnes or more. A notable group of these behemoths, some a staggering 11 metres in length, lay in a line running south-west to north-east in the open waters just outside Qait Bey. When I researched the matter later I learnt that they were amongst the blocks that Empereur had identified as coming from the Pharos:
some of them are broken into two or even three pieces, which shows that they fell from quite a height. In view of the location the ancient writers give for the lighthouse, and taking into consideration the technical difficulty of moving such large objects, it is probable that these are parts of the Pharos itself which lie where they were flung by a particularly violent earthquake.22
There were exquisite moments when the sun broke through the clouds that lay over Alexandria that day and cast a beam of light down into some dark corner of the submerged ruins. Then the vanquished structures over which we were diving seemed to regather their former stature, like ghosts returning to flesh, before collapsing once again into their sleep of years.
Treasure of the sunken city
A few weeks later I still hadn’t been able to get the images of what I’d seen underwater off Qait Bey out of my mind, or quite rid myself of the feeling that I might have missed something important there. Without any particular objective I began to buy books about Alexandria and to acquaint myself better with the story of its past. Visiting Amazon.com one evening in mid-October, I found that someone was offering a second-hand copy of Alexandria – A History and a Guide written during the First World War and published in 1922 by the British novelist E. M. Forster.23 I bought it at once, for it is rumoured to be a fount of wisdom. Then I snapped up, in quick succession, The Library of Alexandria – Centre of the Ancient World, edited by Roy Macleod; Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria by Mostafa El-Abbadi; Philo’s Alexandria by Dorothy L. Sly; and The Vanished Library by Luciano Canfora.24
Oddly enough, Amazon’s search-engine couldn’t immediately find me anything when I entered the keyword Pharos. While I was thinking about what to search for next – maybe Seven Wonders of the ancient world? – I called up Jean-Yves Empereur’s name to see the complete list of his publications. I already owned his book Alexandria Rediscovered, which told the story of the underwater excavations at Qait Bey, but I hoped that he might have written other books about the region. He hadn’t and I found myself looking at Amazon’s sparse sales page for Alexandria Rediscovered.
There was one review, from a reader in Phoenix, Arizona. He wrote that he wished no disrespect to Dr Empereur; however, after seventeen years as an archaeological diver in Egypt, he could not agree that Empereur’s team had found the Pharos. What they had found was interesting, yes, important, yes, but it was definitely not the Pharos.
What was someone who’d worked for seventeen years as an archaeological diver in Egypt now doing in Phoenix, Arizona? And what did he know – or think he knew – about the Pharos? My instincts told me that there could be a story here, and although the reviewer did not give his name, there was an e-mail address. I sent him a message at once, explaining my interest
in the underwater ruins of Alexandria and asking him to elaborate on his views about the Pharos.
The next day, 17 October, I received this reply:
Mr Graham,
My name is Ashraf Bechai. I am the former leader of the Maritime Museum underwater team (1986/89). I am also a former diving engineer of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. You can find a little more about me on the Institute web page. I will be glad to help you with any question you have.
Sincerely, Ashraf Bechai,
Phoenix AZ, USA.
Attached was an extraordinary 23-page report titled Treasure of the Sunken City: The Truth About the Discovery of the Lighthouse.
Ashraf Bechai’s story
What came across in Ashraf’s Bechai’s angry and impassioned report was a sense, above all else, of intellectual outrage. In his view Jean-Yves Empereur and his team had been altogether too narrow-minded in their interpretation of what they had found underwater at Qait Bey:
During the last three years there have been many claims that the French marine-archaeological team that has been working underwater in the area of Qait Bey Fort has found the remains of a great building, identified by French and Egyptian archaeologists as the remains of the Pharos lighthouse.
But is it the Pharos?
I don’t see why we have to take it as they say without asking any questions. I don’t see why we’re expected to suspend our common sense just because this stuff is underwater and looks very spectacular on television.
Bechai pointed out that if the Pharos had indeed been more than 100 metres tall, as all historical sources maintain, then it must have been a truly enormous building. The Great Pyramid of Giza, for example, which is 150 metres tall, with a base area of more than 13 acres, weighs 6 million tonnes and consists of 21/2 million individual stone blocks.25 Since the building technology of the fourth century BC was, if anything, inferior to that of the third millennium BC, it is therefore unlikely that the lighthouse – with a reported height of 135 metres-could have had a base area of less than 12 acres or a weight of much less than 5 million tonnes. ‘Imagine how big the pile of stones that should remain from a building like that,’ suggested Bechai:
Could this great amount of stone just disappear? Vanish in the water? The truth is that this much stone would have created an island in the sea and all the statues, sphinxes and other ancient Egyptian artefacts that the French team have found intermingled with the blocks would have been buried forever under a great pile of rock.
Even if one supposes – against the evidence – that a far superior building technology existed in Alexandrian times than in the times of the Great Pyramid, and even if one reduces the height of the Pharos from 135 metres to 100 metres, it is still extremely unlikely that it could have been built with less than half a million individual stone blocks (as against the Pyramid’s 21/2 million blocks). But let us reduce it still further – to just 100,000 blocks, or even 50,000.
Yet Empereur writes: ‘As soon as one puts one’s head under the water around Qait Bey one begins to feel dizzy at the sight of the 3000 or so architectural blocks which carpet the sea-bed.’26 It was precisely this ‘dizzying’ spectacle of only 3000 blocks that bothered Bechai. If the ruins around Qait Bey were the remains of the lighthouse and associated structures, then 3000 blocks was nowhere near enough:
Three thousand blocks wouldn’t even build a large temple let alone a lighthouse 100 metres high! And many of the blocks in Empereur’s survey are scattered very far from Qait Bey. Some are almost a kilometre away. There is even one 75-ton granite block half a kilometre out to sea and 1.5 kilometres distant from Qait Bey. Are we supposed to believe that the earthquake was powerful enough to throw a 75-ton block as far as that?
Bechai also made another valid point. Ancient texts referring to the Pharos concurred that it had been built of blocks of ‘white stone’ – limestone – which is plentifully available locally. Yet the underwater ruin-field outside Qait Bey consists primarily of scattered granite blocks and other architectural elements, such as columns, also made out of granite – a much more intractable material that had to be brought to Alexandria from quarries almost 1000 kilometres to the south. Whilst admitting that limestone does have a much faster rate of erosion than granite, Bechai did not believe that the vast amount of limestone that would have been required for the Pharos could possibly all have eroded away. He concluded:
What we have at this site are scattered artefacts from different ages, different designs of blocks, columns and statues – not an indication of one thing but an indication of many things.
The giant blocks of Sidi Gaber
Before I was half-way through the report I realized that it pinpointed paradoxes and anomalies that I had completely missed during my dives with the French team. No doubt Empereur would have answers to all these questions but at this stage I had to admit that the questions themselves sounded reasonable.
As I read on I realized that Bechai was agitated about much more than just the problem of the Pharos. He wrote: ‘I have seen things underwater in Alexandria during the last 17 years that challenge all our knowledge of the history of this area.’ As an example he reported how in 1984 he had gone spear-fishing with some friends off-shore of Sidi Gaber, a district along Alexandria’s crowded Corniche, some 3 kilometres to the east of Qait Bey:
We were about two kilometres from shore, diving off a small boat. I remember that the visibility underwater was exceptionally good. We hadn’t been expecting that because there had been a storm a few days before which moved around a lot of the sand and silt on the bottom. Suddenly I saw hundreds of huge sandstone or limestone blocks laid out in three rows, each two courses high, that had been exposed on the sea-bed at a depth of about six to eight metres. The blocks appeared to be of identical dimensions – four metres wide by four metres long by two metres high. They were stacked up on an underwater ridge of some sort, because there was deeper water between them and the shore. All around there were hundreds more blocks of similar size that were heavily eroded, or damaged, or had fallen out of line.
This group of blocks has been seen on and off by fishermen and divers over at least 25 years and there is still no proper explanation for it. I have never been so lucky with the visibility there again, nor the same bottom conditions, and despite many subsequent attempts to relocate the site I have so far failed to do so.
Another interesting site, one that Bechai hadn’t seen himself, was the so-called Kinessa, an Arabic word meaning ‘church’ or ‘temple’:
If you have lived in the wonderful city of Alexandria long enough and had connection with fishermen who do commercial net fishing then you must have heard about ‘A1 Kinessa’. Some say that it is out in the open sea about one kilometre to the north of Qait Bey and that when an east wind blows and the waters are clear you can sometimes see what look like the remains of a building underwater. Others claim it is much further north – perhaps as much as five kilometres out from shore. Three different people told me very specifically that it is five kilometres north to north-west of Qait Bey. Before reaching it the sea-bed slopes down to 40 metres where the bottom is sandy with a few patches of rock; then you pass an area of rocky pinnacles, some as much as 20 metres high jutting out of another sandy bed; then the bottom profile rises up sharply from 40 metres to just 18 metres in depth creating a smooth-sided, flat-topped hill five kilometres from shore in the middle of nowhere. That is where they say the Kinessa is.
Mystery of the sea
After I had read Ashraf Bechai’s report I began to correspond with him about specific points by e-mail, and in due course we agreed that we would dive together to try to relocate the Sidi Gaber blocks and the Kinessa during the summer of 2000. Although his home was now in Phoenix, Arizona, where he ran a business, he told me that he still returned to Alexandria for at least three months every year and would be happy to work with me there so long as I could extract the necessary permits from the authorities.
There were other travels
to do in the meantime. On one trip, I don’t remember where, I took E. M. Forster’s Alexandria – A History and a Guide with me as airplane reading. In it I was intrigued to learn that Forster had drawn attention to a report published in 1910 by the French archaeologist Gaston Jondet and entitled Les Ports submerges de l’ancienne île de Pharos.27 According to Jondet, Forster said, someone had built a series of huge megalithic walls and causeways some distance off the coast of Alexandria beyond the island of Pharos that were now submerged to a depth of up to 8 metres beneath the sea. The character of these constructions, he judged, was ‘prehistoric’.28 Summarizing reactions to the discovery, Forster wrote:
Theosophists, with more zeal than probability, have annexed it to the vanished civilization of Atlantis; M. Jondet inclines to the theory that it may be Minoan-built by the maritime power of Crete. If Egyptian in origin, perhaps the work of Rameses II (B.C. 1300) … The construction … gives no hint as to nationality or date. It cannot be as late as Alexander the Great or we should have records. It is the oldest work in the district and also the most romantic for to its antiquity is added the mystery of the sea.29
I wondered how many archaeologists today shared Forster’s view about the antiquity and romance of the prehistoric harbour. I knew for sure that Jean-Yves Empereur did not. His on-the-record opinion, in full accord with the mainstream scholarly view, was that before Alexander’s arrival ‘the only inhabitants of the area must have been a few fishermen and perhaps also a garrison stationed here to guard the approaches to the Delta’.30 But if so, then who had built the much older and now submerged harbour – if it was indeed a harbour? And how did it fit in, if at all, with the megalithic blocks underwater at Sidi Gaber, or the elusive Kinessa that fishermen said appeared and disappeared beneath the sparkling waves – now you see it, now you don’t – like the Sea King’s castle?