When the ancient Greek philosopher, geographer and historian Strabo visited Alexandria around 29-25 BC, he wrote that the Egyptians liked to use royal barges for luxurious and decadent festival excursions, travelling along canals while filled with revellers dancing with abandon to the music of flutes.
Strabo’s descriptions were once considered exaggerated, but now scuba divers believe they have discovered one of these 2,000-year-old Egyptian pleasure barges, in the port of Antirhodos on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Antirhodos was an island in Alexandria’s eastern harbour Portus Magnus, designed for military vessels and also the site of a royal palace.
The eminent French maritime archaeologist Franck Goddio, who discovered the lost city of Thonis-Heracleion in Aboukir Bay in 2000 and later Canopus, has been leading the excavation of Portus Magnus with his team from the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology (IEASM).
He has now revealed the discovery of the well-preserved wood of the royal party boat, known as a thalamagos, in Portus Magnus.
The 28m of timbers excavated correspond to a boat that was originally 35m long and had an unusually wide beam of around 7m, designed to accommodate a lavishly decorated central pavilion.
The vessel also featured a flat-bottomed hull with a hard chine (where the sides meet the bottom) at the bow and a rounded turn at the stern. It appears to have been built to be propelled not by sail but using only oars.
Greek graffiti written on the central carling, a plank laid under the deck, has been dated to the first half of the 1st century AD when Egypt was under Roman occupation, and reinforces the hypothesis that the boat had been built earlier in Alexandria.
The thalamagoi floating palaces were built for the Ptolemies, the Macedonian Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years until around 30 BC. Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic pharaoh, had used one to show Julius Caesar the sights of Alexandria in 47 BC.
“This intriguing shipwreck could have been used along the canals in Alexandria as Strabo described, but as it was also found very close to our excavations on the temple of Isis on Antirhodos Island, it could well have sunk during the catastrophic destruction of this temple around 50 AD,” suggests Goddio, referring to the devastating earthquake that occurred at this time.
He believes that the barge might have belonged to the temple of Isis, fulfilling a ritual purpose during a naval ceremony in which a procession celebrating the sea goddess encountered a richly decorated navigium vessel representing her solar barque.
“This vessel was performing a yearly ritual voyage of the goddess from the Portus Magnus of Alexandria to the sanctuary of Osiris at Canopus alongside the Canopic Channel,” says Goddio. The scientific results of his excavations of the temple of Isis have been published recently by the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology.
Also on Divernet: Franck Goddio: Messages From The Past
