To veteran-sleuths and skeptics alike, Atlantis is a well-worn—arguably worn-out—name. Across centuries, it has come to embody humanity’s pull to seductive, elusive histories and the instinctual desire to digest the unknown whole. Atlantis was the promise of a city, tucked into a pocket of inaccessible reality; a city swallowed by the ocean, its stories untold and its gods forgotten. To this day, Atlantis has not made itself known. A lost Alexandria has. To most scholars, it remained a thing of legend; texts delineated an ancient city, mapped its canals and the theology that defined it. Wasting away under the Alexandrian currents, this city was unfound for the better half of three millennia; it was only after decades of screening Egypt’s Abu Qir Bay that French archeologist Franck Goddio and his team witnessed a divine sight: a massive structure, a face in the depths. Unbeknownst to them at the time, they had made one of humanity’s most alluring finds to date; about 3.5 kilometers off the coast of Alexandria, was an underwater metropolis with upwards of sixty four ships and seven-hundred anchors. Between the gold, the gods, the colossal statues standing … Continue reading Egypt’s Atlantis: the City of Heracleion