The Egyptian Reset Event - How The Flood Destroyed a Thriving Empire Overnight

[00:00:00]In the fifth century before Christ, the greatest historian the ancient world would ever produce sat down to write about a city. His name was Heroditus.

[00:00:11]He is called to this day [music] the father of history, the first man to systematically record the events of the world as investigation rather than myth.

[00:00:23]And in his writing, he [clears throat] described a magnificent Egyptian city, a great port. He said the obligatory gateway through which every ship arriving from the Greek world had to pass to enter Egypt. He wrote of a colossal temple built on the spot where the hero Heracles first set foot on Egyptian soil. And he wrote something else, something that connects this city to the most famous story in the entire ancient world. Heroditus recorded that Helen of Troy, the woman whose face, the legend says, launched a thousand ships, visited this city with the prince Paris before the war that would destroy Troy, before the wooden horse, before Achilles, before the fall of the greatest city of the age. The two of them, according to the father of history, passed through this Egyptian port. The city was named for a hero. It was visited, according to the ancient world's most careful chronicler, by the most famous woman in history. And for over a thousand years, the entire human race was absolutely certain that it had never existed at all. Heroditus was not the only one who wrote about it. Other giants of the ancient world recorded it too. The geographer Strao described it.

[00:01:44]The historian Diodoris described it.

[00:01:47]These were not fantasists spinning fairy tales. They were the most respected recorders of the ancient world, writing about a real place in specific terms across multiple centuries.

[00:02:00]And there was a strange complication in their accounts. Two names appeared. The Greeks called the city Heracleion after their hero. But the Egyptians had their own name for a great port city in the same region. They called [music] it Thonis. For generations, scholars puzzled over these two names, unable to determine whether the ancient writers were describing two separate cities or one single place known by different names to different peoples.

[00:02:31]The descriptions that survived were vivid. The city was crisscrossed with canals, the water forming a network of islands and harbors, so that the metropolis sat half on land and half on water.

[00:02:45]At its heart stood the temple of Ammun, the supreme god of Egypt. And that temple was not merely decorative. It played a central role in the rights of dynastic succession.

[00:02:57]This was a place where the legitimacy of pharaohs was sealed.

[00:03:02]Where power itself was made sacred. This was not a minor settlement. By every ancient account, this was one of the most important cities in the entire Mediterranean world, Egypt's Grand Emporium, its primary door to the sea, a religious center of the highest order.

[00:03:22]And yet, despite all of these detailed accounts, despite the testimony of the ancient world's greatest minds, one problem refused to go away. No one could find it century after century.

[00:03:37]Archaeologists dug through the sands of Egypt. They uncovered tombs. They uncovered pyramids. They uncovered temples that had been buried for thousands of years.

[00:03:49]Egypt gave up its secrets one after another to the patient work of the excavators.

[00:03:55]But of this great port city, this gateway of the ancient world, this place where pharaohs were crowned and Helen of Troy was said to have walked, there was nothing, not a ruin, not a foundation, not a single carved stone that could be pointed to and named. And slowly, inevitably, the conclusion settled over the scholarly world like dust.

[00:04:21]If a city that important had truly existed, something of it would remain.

[00:04:27]Something always remains since nothing did. The city must never have been real.

[00:04:33]It was literature, not history. A beautiful invention. The ancient writers, for all their brilliance, had simply been passing along a legend.

[00:04:45]The city was quietly filed away in the same drawer as Atlantis. A story humanity tells itself, lovely and untrue.

[00:04:54]But there is a problem with that conclusion, and it is a problem that should trouble anyone who thinks carefully about it.

[00:05:02]Cities do not simply cease to exist. A city can be conquered and its ruins remain. A city can be abandoned [music] and its skeleton remains.

[00:05:14]A city can burn and its blackened stones remain.

[00:05:19]In every case across all of history, something is left behind for the excavator to find.

[00:05:27]For a city to vanish so completely that the greatest civilization on earth forgets it ever stood. For every stone, every temple, every statue to disappear from the face of the land as though it had been erased would require something else entirely.

[00:05:46]It would require a force capable of taking not part of a city, but all of it.

[00:05:52]At once, in the year 2000, a diver descended into the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt.

[00:06:00]And 30 ft below the surface in the dim green light, he found the answer to a mystery that was 2,000 years old.

[00:06:10]The man who found it was named Frank Godio, and he had been searching for 8 years.

[00:06:16]Gaudio was an underwater archaeologist, a member of a rare profession that hunts not in the desert or the jungle, but beneath the sea, where the majority of the ancient world's coastlines now lie drowned.

[00:06:30]In 1992, working with Egyptian authorities, he had begun a systematic survey of Ibukia Bay, a stretch of Mediterranean water near the great city of Alexandria.

[00:06:43]It was slow, painstaking work, mapping the featureless seafloor foot [music] by foot, reading the faint magnetic signatures of buried objects, searching [music] for something that most of the academic world was certain did not exist.

[00:06:58]For 8 years, the bay gave up little. And then [music] in the year 2000, roughly 6 km from the modern shore, [music] beneath only about 10 m of water, the instruments detected something enormous.

[00:07:13]The city was there. It had not been lost in the pages of ancient literature. It had been [music] lost beneath the sea the entire time. For more than a thousand years, a great metropolis of the ancient world [music] had lain in the dark just a few kilometers from a coastline where modern people swam and fished and sailed and no one had known it was there.

[00:07:38]What Godio's team began to raise from the seafloor [music] was breathtaking.

[00:07:43]Colossal statues of red granite, some standing over 5 m tall, [music] emerged from the silt. A statue of a tomic pharaoh broken into [music] five great fragments, was lifted piece by piece back into the sunlight it had not seen in over a millennium.

[00:08:01]The team [music] located the temple of Ammon Dereb, the very temple the ancient texts had described. The place where dynastic power was consecrated.

[00:08:12]They found the small delicate things too. Coins, ceramics, [music] jewelry, the ordinary objects of daily life, lying exactly where they had fallen when the city died.

[00:08:24]They found dozens of ancient shipwrecks, vessels that had gone down in the harbor [music] and stayed there through the fall of Rome, the rise of Islam, the whole sweep of the medieval and modern worlds. And then they found the object that resolved a debate 2,000 years old. Among the ruins, the divers recovered a stale, a stone slab carved with inscriptions.

[00:08:49]And those inscriptions proved at last and beyond any doubt that Thonis and Heracleion had never been two cities.

[00:08:58]They were one and the same place.

[00:09:02]The Egyptians called it Thonis. The Greeks called it Heracleion. The scholars who had spent centuries arguing over two cities had been arguing over two names for a single drowned metropolis. A mystery that had outlasted empires was settled by a single stone lifted from the bottom of the sea. The state of preservation was almost unreal.

[00:09:26]Because the water was [music] relatively shallow and because the city had been sealed beneath protective silt, the layout of the metropolis survived nearly intact.

[00:09:37]streets, buildings, the channels of the old canals.

[00:09:42]An entire submerged mosaic of a lost world frozen in place, waiting in the dark.

[00:09:49]Divers could swim through the actual geography of a city that Heroditus had described, moving through the same harbors where Greek ships had once docked to enter Egypt. But here is the detail that reframes the entire discovery. The number that should stop you cold.

[00:10:07]God has estimated that only about 5% of the city has been uncovered. 5%.

[00:10:15]The site spraws across an area measuring roughly 6 mi by 9 mi.

[00:10:21]Everything found so far, the colossal statues, [music] the temple, the shipwrecks, the stale that solved the ancient riddle, all of it has come from a small fraction of the whole.

[00:10:33]95% of an entire ancient metropolis still lies out there beneath the Mediterranean, unexavated, unseen, holding whatever else it holds in the silence and the dark.

[00:10:48]The discovery of Thonis Heracleion did not close the [music] mystery. In one sense, it cracked it wide open because now the archaeologists faced a question the ancient texts had never even thought to ask.

[00:11:02]The city was real. The city was found.

[00:11:07]But the city was at the bottom of the sea. What force takes an entire metropolis, its temples, its statues, its streets, its harbors, and drags all of it beneath the water so completely that the world forgets it ever stood.

[00:11:25]The answer, when the geologist finally assembled it, is more disturbing than any single catastrophe.

[00:11:33]Because the city was not destroyed by one event, it was killed by a sequence of them. Each one compounding the last over centuries.

[00:11:43]It begins with earthquakes. The southeastern Mediterranean, where the Nile spills into the sea, sits in a geologically restless zone. And when powerful earthquakes struck the region, they triggered a phenomenon that is one of the most terrifying processes in all of geology. It is called soil liquefaction. Understand what this actually means because it is the heart of the entire story. The ground beneath Thonis Heraclean was not solid bedrock.

[00:12:12]It was the soft water saturated sediment of the Nile Delta. Clay and silt and sand packed with water. Under normal conditions, that ground held firm enough to build a city upon. But when a strong enough earthquake shakes water saturated sediment, the ground underos a sudden catastrophic transformation.

[00:12:33]In an instant, the solid earth loses all its strength and behaves like a liquid.

[00:12:38]Soil that a moment before could support the weight of a temple simply turns to slurry.

[00:12:45]Now picture the consequence.

[00:12:48]The temples of Thonis Heracleion were built of massive stone, enormous, heavy, meant to stand for eternity as monuments to the gods. When the ground beneath them liquefied, [music] those colossal weights had nothing to rest on.

[00:13:05]The heaviest, proudest structures in the city, the very symbols of permanence, sank straight down into ground that had ceased to be ground. They were pulled under by their own mass, swallowed by earth that had become sea. And the earthquakes brought companions.

[00:13:22]Tidal waves followed the tremors, surging in from the Mediterranean to inundate what remained.

[00:13:29]And beneath all of it, running slower, but never stopping. Two vast forces worked across the centuries. The land of the delta was slowly subsiding, sinking millimeter by millimeter into the basin, and the level of the sea itself was rising, as it had been since the end of the last ice age. The city was being attacked from below and from above at the same time. The ground dropping, the water climbing, the two of them closing on the metropolis like a vice.

[00:14:03]This is why nothing remained on land for the archaeologist to find. This is the answer to the mystery that made the world call the city a myth.

[00:14:13]Thonis Heracleion did not fall into ruin. It did not crumble slowly under the sun where its stones could be cataloged by later generations.

[00:14:24]It was swallowed. The ground opened beneath it and took the whole city down into the dark in a process so complete that the surface of the world simply closed over the wound and showed nothing. And this is the thought that should stay with you, offered not as a claim, but as a question worth sitting with. If a single mechanism, the liquefaction of saturated coastal ground, could erase a metropolis this important, this thoroughly, that the greatest minds of the ancient world were dismissed as myth makers for a thousand years, then how many other cities lie beneath how many other seas? How much of what we have filed away as legend, as fable, as the pleasant invention of ancient imaginations is simply history that we have not yet looked beneath the water to find because that is the real lesson of Thonis Heraclean and it is an uncomfortable one. The ancient writers were not lying.

[00:15:28]Heroditus wrote down the truth plainly and in detail. Strobo wrote it. Diodoris wrote it. They told us the city was real and they told us where it stood and for,200 years we decided that we knew better than the eyewitnesses of the ancient world. We took their careful record and we called it fantasy because the physical proof was inconveniently located beneath the sea and we had not yet thought to look there.

[00:16:00]Helen of Troy, if there is any truth in her story at all, may have walked the streets that divers now swim through in the green Mediterranean dark. The temple where pharaohs were made, legitimate, still stands down there in fragments.

[00:16:18]95% of it never touched by modern hands.

[00:16:23]For 12 centuries, we called it a myth.

[00:16:26]The ancient historians had written it down plainly and we decided we knew better. Then a diver went down 30 ft and found the myth waiting in the dark exactly where they said it would be. It makes you wonder what else we have quietly filed away as legend. Not because the evidence was ever disproven, but simply because we have not yet looked beneath the water.