Egypt's Lost Cities

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A royal statue emerges from the earth, followed by golden masks, elaborate coffins, and towering temple walls covered in high riglifts. These are the remains of cities once at the heart of one of the greatest civilizations in history, places that were abandoned, buried, and undiscovered for centuries before being found again.

In 1939, this was the experience of French archaeologist Pierre Montet, who rediscovered the lost city of tennis. The royal capital of Egypt's 21st and 22nd dynasties buried beneath the Nile Delta, tennis revealed stories of unknown kings of immense wealth and of a city that functioned as a great commercial hub long before the rise of trading behemoths like Alexandria.

It would later become immortalized as the lost city from Indiana Jones, radars of the lost dark. But tennis is just one of Egypt's lost cities, or formally lost cities. From ancient capitals like Memphis and Amarna, to settlements that still remain hidden beneath

“the sands, what happened to these once great urban centers?”

Why did they disappear? And what can their remains tell us about life in ancient Egypt? And also, what cities, what capitals, are still missing completely? Welcome to the ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and this is the story of Egypt's lost cities.

Our guest today is Egyptologist extraordinaire and friend of the show, Chris Norton, the author of "Searching for the Lost Two" of Egypt. Hello Chris, great to be back on the show. Great to be back. Thanks for having me, Tristan.

Oh, you're more than welcome, and I think it's fair to say that Egypt has got its fair share of extraordinary ancient sites, and then you throw in lost cities on top. Where does it end? There's just so much to talk about. Yes, you're right, it does have its fair share of ancient sites.

I'm not exactly keeping track of the number of times I've been, but it's over 60 times now.

As I always say to people, there's always something new.

There's always something that I haven't seen before. Maybe one day that will come to an end and I'll go and they'll be a trick where I don't see something new. But honestly, there always is. So yeah, so there's enough stuff there that we already know about very well.

So you're quite right for me to throw in things that are still lost and yet to be found as maybe overdoing it. But for me, at least, the prospect of new discoveries keeps things super exciting.

“And why do you think the whole topic of lost cities is so compelling to so many people?”

Is it because we're all channeling and in Indiana Jones want to be desire? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I think for those of us who are interested in archaeology, there's something

So in some sense, not being there and then being revealed and being discovered.

“And I think the proof of that is there are times when things that we've been searching”

for have been discovered and you somehow lose some of the sense of excitement after that point, you know. So I think actually there's something very much about that in Egypt as well, you know, the discovery of the 250-tonkeman gives us that archetypal discovery. There's something about the desert as well, which obviously is a big part of archaeology

in Egypt and the fact that the desert appears to be so empty, provides the sort of greatest contrast between their being nothing and their being not just something but potentially

something amazing, two-move-king type being the obvious one.

But I guess, you know, if you're talking about cities and we know that the Egyptians lived in cities or a lot of them did, even from the very earliest times, you know, the idea of discovering an entire city, I guess, is exciting. I think it's exciting.

“I think so because we've done episodes in the past about, you know, lost tomes that the”

tomb of Alexander the Great or the tomb of Cleopatra, you mentioned the discovery of two-tonkeman's tomb there. I guess it's interesting comparing people going out in a sense of adventure to find a lost tomb, you know, a particular building in a particular area compared to a whole city that kind of blows your mind that the whole city could be lost for thousands of years.

Given how we think of cities today, you know, being sprawling with large stone buildings here, there and everywhere, a road system and so on. Yeah, absolutely. I think, in some ways, tomes, and, you know, forgive that sort of a bleak plug, but I've written about lost tomes in the past and you and I have talked about lost tomes.

And that was called, by the way. I was coordinating for the lost tomes of Egypt, thank you very much, Tristan, you were a kind.

“That, in some ways, I think, for me at the time I was writing that was the sort of obvious,”

to me, it seemed obvious, exciting way into Egyptian archaeology, and that's partly because some of the most spectacular discoveries are probably the most of the most spectacular discoveries that have been to do with tomes, and that's because for the good reason that they survived very well, they were generally tucked away in the desert where there's no life they were intended to be repositories for the finest artifacts that Egyptian society produced and they were

intended to stay there. That didn't happen very often, but when it does, it results in very spectacular discoveries. The tomes in some ways are the obvious things to go for. Cities provide quite a nice counterpoint to that, I think, in that, is there something about the history of archaeology actually in Egypt in that, say, 200 years ago, what people were principally interested in when they

were digging things up, was pretty objects. They were interested in inscribed objects that bore text in particular as well, because because that was the time when the language was

first being studied and eventually deciphered, but they were otherwise they were interested

in pretty things, and things were great for that. I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but sort of a little way along in the process, people started to be more interested in where ordinary Egyptian people were living, and it took quite a long time for archaeology to catch up with that, and cities actually survived generally much less well, partly because the material of cities, all those things you mentioned, buildings, houses, administrative buildings,

temples, royal palaces, where that applies, those were not intended to survive in the same way, and those buildings were sort of built dismantled, demolished, rebuilt on a regular cycle over thousands of years. So the material remains of those things generally doesn't survive quite so well or not in the same way anyway. The other thing is that cities were to put it around the other way. Tumes were deliberately put in places where people were not living,

they were put away from where people were living, generally speaking, there were exceptions to that, but that's a general rule. Whereas, of course, people lived in the same sorts of places that people live in today. So very often ancient towns and cities are in amongst around underneath modern settlements. So we have been able to recover a good number of

Egyptian settlements, including fully-fledged cities, and some of the most important, but just as

with Tumes, including some of what must have been the largest, most spectacular, most important teams, which we haven't yet found. Some of the most important spectacular cities have not yet been found either, and yet might still be there somewhere. Oh, very, very cool indeed. One day, Chris, you and I will go out to Alexandria with all the proper permissions, or ever, either go for the team of Alexander the Great, or maybe we'll look for one of these lost cities, of course, we'll

do it above both, though. Yes, we definitely should do that. We always say that, and I think, you know, one day, history, it should probably the money, the lettuce do it. Well, thank you, Chris. One day. So it says our engineered, such fertile ground for lost cities, and Chris, is that because

lands, irrigated by the now, but what was their settlement after settlement, the further and further

“you went up the river now? Or city, yeah, I say. Yeah, essentially, I mean, in very general terms,”

the situation was not so different then, as you might think of it being now, in that much of the occupied habitable part of Egypt, is taken up by agricultural land in ancient times as now, and people are sort of evenly distributed, more or less evenly distributed about, about the agricultural rural parts of Egypt in villages, but in, you know, also in larger settlements, towns, and there there are, there were, there are still larger settlements, and of course, these

days, some of those aren't very, very large Cairo, is one of the biggest cities in the world,

about 20 million people, these days, Alexandria is a city of 5 million or so people, something like that,

probably a bit more by now. So, of course, the population is much greater, the cities are much, much larger, much more populous now, but it just in terms of that sort of basic spread of people, agricultural land, villages, towns, and cities in ancient Egypt, it was broadly similar, and we're aware of the names of lots of these settlements, and of the approximate locations at least of many of them, and some of them have been identified archaeologically and unexplored.

“Yes, so we're talking about lost cities in ancient Egypt. What exactly do we mean?”

Because I've got to my notes that there are two types of lost city. Yeah, so I suppose, when I was first thinking about this, not very long ago, I thought to myself that, you know, there's more than one approach that you can take here. The starting point for this actually was similar to the starting point for the lost troops research, which is just that, you know, there are these cities which we're aware existed,

which have never been identified archaeologically. So what's the story? And is there something

something that unites all of these different things? And it struck me that, in order to sort of take a run-up at this subject, we need first to establish what we think we know was there. So the same source that, the same ancient source that gives us the most comprehensive list of

“Egyptian kings that write them a naitho, also provides us with the list of cities, because he tells”

us, these kings were grouped into, into dynasties, and he often, he doesn't, often, and very much information to all he gives us their names, the length of the rain, where he knew it, that kind of thing. But he also quite often tells us where they were ruling from, and it turns out that the capital city moved. So it is not the case that the capital city was in the same place throughout Egyptian history. It moved, it's maybe the wrong,

the wrong sort of notion. The capital city was in one place, and then for reasons of a change of dynasty, or change of sort of strategy, or changing political geography, the king came to be ruling from a different place. And those places are named in Manitho. So straight away, we've got a list of a bunch of capital cities, again, some of which are known, some aren't. We also know that from administrative documents, which are abandoned

across the full span of Egyptian history, that the country was divided into an administrative regions, or districts called, we call them known, using a Greek word. And each of those had a capital, a regional capital, and those are also named. So again, we have a list not just of the national capital, the seat of the ruling king, but we have a list of these regional capsules as well. And then here and there, we might also have a, you know, scattered references to this or that

city being relevant to such and such a person's life in such and such a way. And the records of those particular names, those districts, those districts are those ones preserved in like papyrus, scrolls, more administrative compared to like the writings of Manitho, or what should we be thinking of how these, these writings about the names and so on, how they are preserved. Various, actually. I mean, in some cases, we do have administrative records, yeah. So we,

we, those would be principally on papyrus, and actually those, those sorts of things survive mostly from the later periods of Egyptian history. And we know, actually, that they were from time to time, changes in the, the known boundaries and the known capitals, also changes of the names of these cities. So the sort of most comprehensive lists we have of those are from administrative records, but then if you take the sort of some total of, of Egyptian texts, we get plenty of mentions

of of these places, sometimes in particular sequences that allow us to sort of see the geographic spread. And there were enough, they, they crop up in, the names got crop up in other contexts as well.

they also crop up in religious context as well. So there were particular gods and goddesses associated with the various nodes. The idea that Pharaoh was the ruler of the whole country and therefore the ruler of all of these names might also be reason for these to be written down as a certain point.

You know, Pharaoh's power extends from the first to no move, upper Egypt all the way in

this out to the very Mediterranean coast up in the, the whatever known right up there. You mentioned that it all important source of Minetho. And I love Minetho. I know you love Minetho as well, but shall we set the scene for when he is existing because he is around the time just after

“Alexander the Great when the Greek Pharaoh is starting to rule Egypt?”

Yeah, we think so. We think he was probably ruling in the time of the second or third totally. We can't be absolutely sure about this. We have his text. His text survives in what are called epitomies, which are these later. I'm sure you'll know copies. So we don't have a kind of

original version of his text. And the epitomies that we have, there are three main ones,

very in the details. So it's clear that they can't all be faithful to Minetho's original length. And by the way, these epitomies are all from at least minimum kind of four, five centuries after his time. So, you know, they may have been copied direct from an original source, but, you know, very possibly actually sort of a Chinese whispers, you know, lots and lots of edits down the line version. But anyway, there's a sort of scattering of little fragments of evidence that suggests

that he was an Egyptian priest, possibly the chief priest of the Sun God Rai Heliopolis, in around the early Tolomeg. So we think, yes, that he was he was writing his history, which ends with the last, but ends pretty much with the brings us up to the time of Alexander the Great, as if that was the end of history. And, you know, it was the end of events from a time not very long before Minetho himself was around. We also think, well, we sort of deducing a little bit here,

if we're right in thinking that he was writing in the early Tolomeg, then it may be that the reason he was writing was that Tolomeg is at that time, we're trying to establish Egypt as one of the

“most important parts of that post Alexander Empire, and establishing themselves as the right”

for rulers. So it was kind of in the Tolomeg's interests for there to be a great history of Egypt, written at this time to show what a marvelous place it was and what a marvelous place it was to rule, you know, that's in the Tolomeg's interests. And another guy in fact, a guy called Barossos had written a similar history of the Near East around around the same time. And it's possible, it's thought that this was a sort of response to it, you know, you think the Near East is so great

with your marvellous history, well, just you wait in Egypt, that's great history too. Barossos is another great one, Barossos Meneetho, all these people who may gas their knees, all these writers who deserve their time in the spotlight alongside the likes of Homer and Tacitus. But that's for another day. But of course, he's a key source for learning about these cities, many of which, you know, and people going out and then finding these cities and others

which I yet to be found geographically speaking, the majority of these lost cities. I mean, whereabouts are they situated in Egypt? So one of the things that's very striking about about Meneetho's history, even if you just pull out the location of the capital city for each of his densities, by the way, Meneetho is the historian who gives us that idea of splitting

the kings into these groupings, which he called densities, first person in history, to use that word,

in that way, to describe a line of rulers. Even if you just take the capital city from each of his 30 densities that were 30 altogether, you can see the capital city moving around and it moves around quite a lot. So if you think of Meneetho as being the place that it returns to most often, Meneetho's, I don't know, 10, 15 kilometers south of where Cairo is now. So in a very approximately

“the same place as Cairo, the crucial thing about both those locations being that they're at the”

junction of the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta, they're at the point where the river splits. So to put a capital city there is a clever idea in that you've got ready access via the river to the Nile Valley and every, all of the rest of Egypt south of that point, and via the various branches of the Nile to all the different parts of the Delta and to the Mediterranean beyond. So Meneetho's most often the capital city, but we see it move according to Meneetho as far as south as S1, which is

more or less the frontier of Egypt with everything that's further south, and we know that in other times it moves almost all the way to the northeastern corner, if you like, if the Delta

after the time has gone to the great the capital city moves to Alexandria in the northwestern Delta on the coast. So at various times it's in different places in between, so it's really almost anywhere in the whole of the country. Because it seems like the list of cities that we're going to cover, we're going to focus in a few in particular. A lot of them do seem to be focused either at that place where the branches of the Nile come together and form the river Nile, or in the area

between there and the Mediterranean Sea, so the Nile Delta. So it does feel quite rich that particular area, Chris, you know, for pharaohs, for kings and queens, founding their cities, for various purposes, along one of those branches of the river Nile. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he's very often said

“isn't it that Egypt, just the gift of the Nile, and I think most of the time, when we have that phrase”

in mind, phrase comes from Herodotus. We're thinking of the Nile as watering the land, providing water that allows things to grow and fertilizing silts to allow crops to grow abundantly. And if it wasn't for the Nile, then, you know, that part of the country, that part of the world, that part of North Africa would be pretty much uninhabitable. So in that sense,

that is what makes the Nile most important. But it's also the principle means of transport through

the country, and it's also therefore the principle means of communication as well. And as I say, Egypt would be is uninhabitable in the parts of the country where the river doesn't reach. So you've kind of got to be on the river either in the Nile Valley, or more likely and more often in history, as you suggest, in the Delta. And there might be two main reasons for that, actually. The Delta

“is the richest part of the country. It's the most productive agriculturally. So, I mean,”

just looking at a satellite image of Egypt shows this very well, you will know, just an I'm sure, very well. But in the Nile Valley, you've just got three, maybe more kilometers, worth of agricultural land either side of the river for that full span of whatever it is, five, six hundred kilometers from S1 up to Cairo. But then when the river splits, creating, if you see it in a map or an satellite image, that kind of fan shape, north of the Delta

head, region of Memphis and Cairo, up to the Mediterranean coast, the whole of that area is very fertile agriculturally. So the greater part of the population, even though the Delta looks like it's only the very sort of top part of the country, the northernmost part, it's the most populous and it's the richest. The other thing is that in from a sort of strategic point

“of view, particularly from the First Millennium onwards, Egypt has very much got its eyes,”

or furrows, got his eyes on territory and other people, kingdoms, empires, to the north,

one way or another. So from the time of Ramses, the second one onwards, a little bit earlier perhaps.

They're very much focused on the Levant and the north and east, which is territory they control in what's now Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and also their enemies at this sort of edge of that territory. By the time you get to Alexander the Great, of course Egypt is a part of this much wider Mediterranean empire of here. So again, it makes sense for his capital city to be at that end of Egypt. So it's much less common for capital cities to be in the south. There were things of interest

to the south of Egypt, but maybe not so much. So strategically it's not a great idea to be too far away from the action in the Delta and the Mediterranean. Of course, and obviously one of the exceptions will be thieves among Deloxa when they're in the Valley of the Kings and how I'm watching that was at its time. But we are going to focus on a few examples of these cities. And we're going to try

and do them chronologically as well, Chris, arching back first of all to Manetho. And this particular

city that he says was the capital right at the beginning. Yeah, I hope I pronounce this correctly. Tinnice. Yeah. You and I with our English accents are probably, we'll probably be laughed at by the ancient Egyptians. But tinnice or tinnice, or this it's written both ways, this or tinnice. Yeah, according to Manetho was the capital city at the beginning of the first dynasty. And he's very clear, even though he's the sort of information he provides, this is very

scanned. He's clear that there is this moment, first king first dynasty, we assume that this is probably the moment at which the country came to be unified under a single rule that probably is a result of some military activity or following some military activity. And the so the capital city is in

or not with any certainty. We deduce that it is in the region of the famous cemetery site of Abidos. There was a settlement at Abidos, but a small one and it is principally a cemetery site. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, generally speaking, the Egyptians kept cemeteries in teams away from from from the settlements where people were living. There would have been small communities of people in and around the cemeteries to service them to be building teams, whatever, but generally speaking,

“people don't live there. But Abidos, although it is an important cemetery site, but throughout”

Egyptian history, it was a royal burial place in the first and second dynasties. And in the 19th

century, the very late 19th century, started with a Frenchman called Emil Amelino, a followed in short order by the English excavator fleeing this peatree. Excavations were carried out in the cemeteries out towards the desert edge, towards where the low desert reaches the foot hills and becomes the high desert. And they found there the teams that appear to belong to the kings of the first dynasties and some of the second. So if the teams are there, we assume probably

that the capital city of those kings was nearby also. And then we have mentions of this city which survived into later times as being in the eighth known, the eighth administrative district. And so perhaps it was just where saying that the Egyptians divided, there were two sets of knowns, these administrative districts, one in the night, one for the Nile Valley, and then one for the delta. And they were numbered. So in the Nile Valley, they were numbered in sequence from south

to north. So the gnome of S1, which is the southernmost city, is the first gnome, the second is in

“the region of higher complex, thebes is in the third, I think. And so on and so on. It's a little”

bit more complicated than the delta because the delta is not linear in that same way, but still they're numbered. So this is in the eighth gnome, if I remember rightly, so sort of eight along working south to north. And that's the same gnome that habitus is in. So we can narrow down the location of this to this general area and it's a rural area of Egypt today. There aren't too many major settlements in the area in the region. There are one or two archaeological sites, including settlement

sites, which could be the remains of this very first capital city of Egypt, just such a great search

title, searching for Egypt's first capital. Yeah, isn't it? Yeah, isn't it? I mean, if you could prove it, if you could prove that this was the place where somebody, and we do have names, we just absolutely clear about the sequence of events and what happened and what's kind of myth and what was reality. But it seems very likely that there was a point in which there was a ruler under whom Egypt came to be unified for the first time in, you know, and under whom Egypt as a

country came into being. And this was the seat of that of that ruler. So I mean, if we could

“prove that regardless of what survives, and I think sadly, I think they're likely, you're just”

that, you know, we're not about to sort of uncover the palace or anything like that. But if we could just say that this was the spot, and that would be a very significant thing. [MUSIC] Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark Myths, Mysteries, and the paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling. And me, Anthony Delaney, we are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

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Naldelton lobbying up there, but of course this is much further south than the Naldelton.

And just seeing it on Google Maps that you mentioned that kind of thin line of green fertile lands, like the side of the Nal, like three kilometers or so. And then having the site, yes, literally right on the edge of that agricultural land. And thinking, yes, there's a row of cemetery site, where could the city itself have been? And what would have happened to it, the fact that, you know, visibly, potentially you've got little bits of it, but so much of it has disappeared, has gone.

“Yeah, and I think actually that allows us to say something about the way that archaeologists”

survived in Egypt. You know, we talked earlier about the fact that there's a, there's very much a bias in favor of certain types of site, particularly tombs, the other type of site that survives, best is temples. And in both cases, those monuments were built of durable materials,

often, if not always, often. Particularly stone, stone survives, one way or another survives.

So tombs that are rock cart, for example, you know, you can't move them. You know, they stay where they are, they can be robbed, of course. They can be vandalized. They can, they can fall into ruin for natural reasons, but they very often they survive. In terms of temples built of cut stone, those stone blocks often are reused, but it's quite rare that the stone from a temple is comprehensively removed or the foot that round a little bit. We have very many instances of

temples which have survived. In some cases, I mean almost intact, you know, and those, of course, are the temples that we know best today, but even in cases where what must have been very large and

“very important temples, one thing, for example, if the major temple at size capital city of the”

2060, which it's almost completely vanished. It hasn't vanished completely. There was still some whacking great stones there. It's nothing, nothing, almost by comparison with what they would have been, but still there's something. In the case of this, thinness, if even a handful of blocks from a major temple and it's a reasonable assumption that there was a major stone temple, if not at the time

of the early dynasty, the first kings then then later, and we know the city did survive until

later times. Then for one reason or other, they've gone completely, and that we can't explain at the moment. One day it might be possible to do a sort of comprehensive subsurface survey of the whole of the country and it may yet turn things up. There's no question that there will be stone that we haven't yet looked at in various places. And, you know, and of course, if you were to do that survey in the area of the 8th Nome, the strong chance that we could identify that as the very first capital city. Gosh.

Well, let's move on chronologically from that first dynasty to the next loss city that I have on in my nose. But Chris, the city I've got next doesn't feel much like a loss city, because we've mentioned it a few times already, so you've got to explain this to me. Why is Memphis the next one on our list? Yeah, okay, good question. So when I was starting out doing this, you know, I came up with this great long list of cities and a bit like with the lost teams as well, a great

big long list of kings, whose teams do we know about, which are ones that are missing. And just as with lost teams where in some cases you can say, well, that's probably missing because of that, we're not going to find it. And then that narrows down your list, even further to the ones that we can't explain on me, you know, why are they missing? And the case of cities, in some cases, as with this that we've just been talking about, it really is absolutely missing. We really don't know

beyond saying it was in somewhere in this region. We really don't know what. In other cases, we know where the city was at certain points, but we're missing some part of it, or some aspect of it. So the situation in Memphis is that a Memphis is the location to which the capsule city moved after this, and we don't exactly know when. It seems likely that it was realized that this was a better place strategically. So most probably this was the capital city of those early

ferrets because that's where they came from. That's where they lived, you know, why move? That's where their home is. But there comes a realization at a certain point that it would actually be better if we're going to boss everyone in the country around with better BU, somewhere better than this, and Memphis is a good place. Memphis is sort of hinted at earlier, then remains a very,

“very important settlement, and on and off the capital city, right down into Roman times,”

it remains a very important and popular place. And as a reminder, quick reminder, the location is between where all the branches begin and the main river of Niagara Valley, kind of that nice area.

splits, but not very far. If nothing else, we would know approximately where it was, because just

“as with this, we know where the symmetries were. So the pyramid fields of Sikara, Giza, Dasha,”

Abarawash, Abagurov, one or two other sites, which are ranged in the line up on the desert, just a little way to the west of the extent of the cultivated land in that area. Those are all symmetries of Memphis. It's just that it varies different times for various different reasons that the king or other people chose to be buried in a slightly different location, but you can see them in some ways as one continuous enormous symmetry side. So Memphis has to be there somewhere,

and the remains have been found, substantial remains, particularly for the new kingdom and later, but not nearly so much from before that time. And as I was sort of mentioning earlier, cities are generally, they have been harder to to get at, if you like. They don't preserve so well, buildings are made of mud brick, which even if it survives, survives in a kind of a

“jumble of mud, difficult to define, a little bit off-putting by comparison with, you know,”

pretty coffins or statues or whatever. They're also very often underneath things that are difficult to go through such as fields or towns and cities. In the 1980s, some expressions were carried out in the area of Memphis, which identified the levels going back as far as the middle kingdom, but not, but they didn't really find very much before that. So what, you know,

Monet tells us that the first palace is built in the area during the first, first dynasty,

and it seems clear that there is a move, at least a partial move northwards, by the second dynasty, if not later in certainly, by the time the third dynasty, the capital city seems to have been established there, and they throw us as this, and all our evidence points that way as well. And yet the settlement's missing. And this, actually, we now think is explained by, and what is a very, another very interesting sort of window on how Egyptian archaeology works. We now think,

you mentioned the importance of the river earlier, that the river Nile has moved. In fact, we know it's moved. So again, if you look at, if you look at a map or a satellite image, you'll see that the Nile running more or less in the straight line from south to north. What you might not expect is that it, it is capable of, and indeed has over centuries, from moving hundreds of meters, either to the west or to the east, for various reasons. And, you know, if you know,

you're sort of riverine geography, you'll know that rivers change shape, and they are capable of doing this. So when that's happened in the ancient past, the ancients have been forced to adapt by moving the sort of center of the city, as the river has moved, so that things like harbours can be right on the edge and all the other infrastructure that needs to be right by the water can move. It also means, in some cases, most likely, that the river has, in fact, swallowed things up.

So whether river has moved towards pre-existing buildings or whatever, they know how well well have been destroyed. And we now think that this may, in some way, explain why we don't have those early levels for Memphis. They were detached, if you like, from where the later phases of Memphis were, because the river moved quite dramatically from west to east. And so the original city we think was quite a long way for the west, from where those new kingdom levels out,

the remains of the new kingdom temple time parameters for the second. So archaeologists were looking

not quite in the right place for a long time. And, in fact, as luck would have it, the spot that they now think is most likely as this sort of place to look for those early levels is underneath a load of buildings, a road and a load of buildings, including the museum of Skara, ironically enough. So it may well be, I mean, it's got to be there somewhere, but it may well be that you'd have to dig up the road and the museum in order to be sure. So when we talk about the loss city of Memphis,

we're talking about, is it the original city, the old kingdom Memphis, the Memphis, more than 4,000 years ago? I didn't quite clock that. Yeah, I mean, actually the other thing to say

“without wanting to go on for too long about it would be actually that I think thinking about”

a sort of different aspects of Egyptian archaeology. I'm very interested in the history of archaeology. And the way that people understood and encountered ancient Egypt's two centuries ago before we had, you know, anything like the material evidence and the understanding that we have now. And lots of the earliest travelers who were going to Egypt with their classical texts in their hands, their herodotuses and their strawberries and their minathos and this kind of thing were very

much hoping and expecting to seize spectacular places and Memphis would have been foremost among them. It's such an important part of so many of the great stories, particularly from the late period of

to see great things. And for a long time for it, you know, it wasn't clear where Memphis was and

those early travelers were tripped over by the fact that it doesn't survive in a monumental way, like some other places do, so that, you know, those travelers would have been aware that there were a spectacular monument in other places. But in the sort of approximate location where they'd

“expect to find Memphis, there was sort of scratching the heads and looking around and going, where is it?”

Well, let's move on to the next one that I got in my list. And this is quite the corker of Lost City. Only for a brief period of time, but for that religious, zealot, heretic, Aconatin, the city, Chris of Amarna. Yeah, this will be a lot of people's favorite. I guess it's a favorite of mine in lots of ways. I suppose we should say at the outset, it's not lost.

It's not missing anymore. You can go into it today. Yes, you can. We know where it was.

It was missing in more than one sense though. And again, for me, I think the value in this story is in is in helping to understand something about, you know, the way archaeology has been preserved and how we've been able to say what we count about. Ancient Egypt as a result of archaeology. We talked about how Monatho gives us these lists of capital cities. And that could be a sort of starting point. We've also just mentioned how early travelers were, you know, were bringing along

accounts like that of Strava, were describing what Egypt was like. Amarna, as you say, was the short live capital city of the heretic ferret Aconatin. He rolled there with his famously with his wife Nefertiti for a period of probably not much more than 10 years or so. But all the sources that would have been available to early Egyptologists were completely silent on this. No mention of Aconatin, no mention of his capital city, no mention of the fact that he uprooted

a population of 30 to 50,000 people from wherever they've been living before to this new place, which he built in a strategically daft place in the middle of nowhere and in middle Egypt. On the Nile, but still far away from the main cult centres, far away from transport routes into the Delta and beyond. Not well supplied with resources, not even well supplied with water at scenes. But he did all of that very deliberately because without going into too much detail here,

he was wanting to make a break with everything that had gone before. So he didn't, he was very

deliberately seeking out a brand new sort of virgin site. And the site was first noticed by early

travelers. It crops up or one monument at the site, crops up in the drawings of the man called

“sickard, a French. I think he was a priest. The Napoleonic expedition visited the site and noted”

that there was some archaeology, but and they sort of sketched out the approximate locations of the ruins and they did seem to have noticed that there was a road running through the centre of them, which we now would call the royal road. But they didn't understand what this was and it wasn't until the 1820s, when the English Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson was shown to the rock captooms, which are at the eastern edge of the city, that he realized that there was something very

unusual going on in that you got higher-glyphic inscriptions, so clearly something ancient Egypt, but the style of the art was very different, the content of the scenes is very different. These were clearly rock cut teams, but the decoration was very unusual. He also noticed that there seemed to be a conspicuous absence of royal names, even though the scenes that he was seeing, seemed to involve somebody who very much seemed to fit the model of a ferro, their name was missing.

Eventually, of course, he was able to establish that in some rare occasions that name was preserved and it was the name of Akanan, and slowly people began to piece this together. What has become,

“we sort of skipped a present day, what has become so important about Amarna is that because it was built”

in one go, it was designed and planned in a single phase, you know, we're going to build a complete capital city in one go, and they did it. Akanan, their inscriptions were Akanan tells us that this is what he's going to do, and the archaeology shows that he really did it. We estimate on the basis of the, of the city and we have all the major buildings that he'd expect, houses for people of all different social classes from the smallest riot to royal palaces, then we have 10 pools, we have

administrative buildings, we have craftsman's workshops, such etc. We have roads, have a network of roads across the desert, we have symmetries including a royal cemetery, blah, blah, blah. All of that was was done in a creatively short space of time, and then the city was abandoned once a soon after Akanan died, and because he was considered to be a heretic more or less immediately, and the whole project was considered to be something to do, it was not only abandoned, but it was comprehensively abandoned,

and it was almost as though nobody was allowed to go there ever again. So unlike almost any other

different phases of occupation over time, which make for a sort of complicated mixture of layers

“that you have to untangle and work your way back down through, in this case you've got a single”

occupation, and because it was abandoned, it survived incredibly well, so it is the single best site we have from ancient Egypt for the study of a city, so there's a kind of irony here, and it's an irony that plays out across lots of Akanan story, but you know, he was deliberately forgotten because he was a heretic, and that is why we knew nothing about him until his city was rediscovered, but once it was rediscovered, it proved to be, well, not only one of the great stories

from the ancient world, his stories one of the great stories from the ancient world, but also his

city, as I say, is the best we have. So back to that sort of idea of yours from the very beginning

“of they're being sort of nothing, or apparently being something hidden, and then something being”

revealed, this is maybe the best example we have, and lost and then found. Yes, and what a great snapshot in that particular period of time. Well, look no further than the award-winning after dark myths, misdeeds, and the paranormal, with me, Maddie Pelling, and me and Needalame, we are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

From Tudor Executioners, an ancient Egyptian death rituals to which trials and folklore

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“Chris, in our chronology, if you're going from thinnest to autonist to kind of old kingdom”

Memphis down to Amarna and the New Kingdom. So we're about 3,000 years ago now in the story, if we go now to our next site. And this is one actually we've mentioned in the past when we covered the story of the silver pharaohs, the city of tennis. Yeah, that many people may well think, oh, I've heard that name before was a loss city. If they've watched Indiana Jones, the readers of the Lost Ark. Yes, yeah, there's lots of lots and lots of layers to this story,

actually. Yeah, so it's the name that's given to the great loss city, as you say, in Indiana Jones, there's not a lot about tennis in Raiders of the Lost Ark that has bears much relation to the history or archaeology in Egypt on the freight and actually confession time. I don't really know the film very well. Spoken like a true Egyptologist. I know, I know, I know, I know. I should probably get over myself and watch it. Maybe we'll ever watch along as something at some

point. But anyway, but even without that, it's a multi-layered story. So maybe the simplest way of talking about it is to say what we know about it now at this point. And perhaps actually, we should lean on the Nathan here as well, because he's helpful. Tennis was one of the capital cities, according to my naithos, the capital city, in the 21st dynasty and in the 23rd. This is the period after the New Kingdom,

after the Valley of the Kings has been abandoned. And in fact, although my naithos didn't really have a grip on this, we now understand that the countries were split into two, for much of the period that's covered by his 21st, 21st, 21st, 21st, 21st. So Tennis was certainly an importance city. If you take my naithos at face value from the 21st dynasty onwards. And indeed, that's backed up in the archaeology. So again, the Napoleonic expedition visited the site.

So there was an awareness from early on that there were monumental remains. There was a scatter of monumental statue in other stone at the site. It was clearly a lot of mud break. It was clearly, you know, you didn't have to be an expert to understand that there was something significant here.

well, depends on when we call scientific. Marriette had a go in the middle of the 19th century, Linda Speechry had a rather more considered go perhaps, again towards the end of the 19th century, 1883 to four. And from the early 20th century onwards, it became the subject of a very long running and comprehensive survey, an excavation project led by a series of French directors. Pierre Montet, as you will know in this listening to her sort of fairy's episode one,

now discovered the royal tombs of Pharaohs of the 21st and 20 secondedisties at the site,

“well, from 1939 onwards. There's no question that this was an important site.”

In Montet's time though, there was a question around the significance of tannies. So that word tannies is that is a Greek form of the name. The early Egyptian would be charnet, something like that, so it's sort of Greek corruption of that early Egyptian name. A big research question around this

time, first off the 20th century, was the whereabouts of the very well-attested in texts,

very well-known capital city of Ramsey's The Second, which was named after him. It was named Paramases, The House of Ramsey's, The City of Ramsey's, if you like. And much of the temple that had been preserved at Tannies, and uncovered by excavators, although much of it was sort of lying around, much of that material bore the name of Ramsey's The Second, so initially the conclusion was that not only is this Tannies' Manaito's capital city of the 21st and the 21st, and the 23rd

“dynasty, probably the 22nd, the king seemed to have been buried there, but it was also probably”

was where Paramases was probably just changed its name at a certain point after Ramsey's was, you know, as long dead, or whatever. But in actual fact, we now understand that that's not the case in the 1970s, a site about a 30-kilometers away close to the village called Cantia, where there was also a scatter, much, much smaller, but a scatter of monumental stonework, still surviving. A non-invasive survey showed that beneath the surface of the agricultural land,

you'd never know from just looking at it, there was a very substantial ancient city,

and eventually that led to the discovery that in fact Cantia was the location of piramacy. So Tannies was nearby, but it was about 30-kilometers away, so the question then is, "So what's all that stonework of Ramsey's The Second?" which appears to belong to a temple of his, doing 30-kilometers away from his capital city. Eventually, we realized that piramacy had been built, and again, this is perhaps something we've touched on earlier, it was very deliberately built

on a branch of the Nile, leading out towards the north and east, towards Egypt's territory in in the Lvant. And that river channel had naturally started to dry up in the later New Kingdom, which meant that the whole city was unviable any longer. So at a certain point, we can't know exactly when, but at a certain point, the people in the local area realize that if we're going to have a capital city or a strategic centre in this area, we are going to have to move. So where can we move

to? Well, the nearest branch of the river is 30-kilometers approximately to the north. That branch is named after the the city of Tannies, the Tannitic branch. And so what they did was rather than build a brand new temple with newly quarried stone at that site, they just thought, you know what,

“it's only 30-kilometers, why don't we just move this stone? Interesting, that's what they did.”

So this is why I say you've got sort of multiple layers, Tannies was an important capital city. It probably wasn't recognized for being that until the excavation was on the way, but even after that, it was still believed to be not only the Tannice of the 21st and 22nd of the

their dentists, but piramacy of remixes is second, we now know that's not the case. That was elsewhere.

I also feel I have to mention as well that a few years ago, some non-invasive survey work, Sessla imaging work in particular was done at Tanish, which revealed much of the archaeology, which is still yet to be excavated. So the temple area in the centre of the city has been excavated. Quite a lot of the settlement has also been dug, but by no means all is much too big for that. But these non-invasive surveys were able to show at least the outline of buildings.

And that led in the media to this idea that Tanish was being discovered for the first time. And in actual fact, that's not the case. We knew where it was, a couple of centuries ago. So it's a lost city in the sense of Chris. Well, it isn't really now, or actually, it's just a city that serves to illustrate how something can be lost. So if you think Tanish was lost and then it was found,

piramacy was lost, and then we thought we'd found it, but actually we hadn't, it was in the wrong place.

And the last place in our list is when we go to the time of the Tollamese post, Alexander the Great,

“and a city that once again, people think, well, I can go there today. How is that lost?”

But as we know, there are still so many parts of this city that are lost either beneath modern buildings, or the sea today, and this is, of course, Alexandria. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So again, you're right. Sorry, people feel disappointed at home. You know, we know where it was. But exactly, as you say, we know where it was, but beyond that, we are really, as you will know, very well, Justin. We're really struggling when it comes

to the detail of where individual things were. And I think this is, therefore, maybe this

single best illustration we have of a city which is extraordinarily well-attested in text.

And it will feel very familiar to people. And yet, although we know roughly where these things were, and you think about buildings that are so celebrated like the Museum of the Famous Library, the lighthouse, one of the great ancient wonders of the world. You and I have talked about the two mechanics under the Great before the team of clear patrera, those of both almost certainly there. None of these things survive. Strabo probably provides us with the, the single best

description we have of the city and the sort of relative positions of various buildings. But up until fairly recently, we were really in the dark about where these were at least relative

to where things are in modern Alexandria. Short of saying, well, there's not really very much

looking we can do anymore because modern Alexandria overlays such a large area, all of what must have been ancient Alexandria and a great deal more around as the city has spread out. And we were really sort of in the dark about exactly exactly where things were. But of course, the great revelation of the last couple of decades has been that much of the monumental part of the city, the most famous part of the city, in actual fact, was probably close enough to the coast. As Strabo says,

that it would have been destroyed, most probably not later than the tsunami that we know occurred

“in, I think it was the fourth century AD. But of course, under water archaeology, which is still”

ongoing in that area, I mean, also elsewhere along the coast, but within the great harbour Alexandria has been uncovering the monumental remains of some of those buildings. Sadly, not preserved to the extent that we can really say very much about their form. But we now know that that is the story of what happened to a lot of those buildings. Having said that, it doesn't solve the problem of where, for example, the two palisans of the Great or the two Flippatra were.

It's still possible, I think, that the certainly the two palisans of the May have been further inland, perhaps might have survived the tsunami, and yet is underneath the modern city, might possibly still survive. And again, thinking back to that sort of magic, high tech survey that we might be able to do in the future that looks beneath the ground, we may be able to see surviving parts of that, who knows? Who knows? Indeed, and as you say,

this underwater archaeology, no discovering all of these buildings and little bit more by more being discovered and news SARS-CoVs being made when they announced them that front godio and his team, I've got here, I will mention it because we're in that area of the woods quickly. How there's this other lost-ench intergyptian city of Tonys Hiraklayon, which they think is sort of the gateway of Egypt, which is right by Alexandria, which is now completely

submerged, and they are. So that is a lost city actually submerged beneath the Mediterranean. Yeah, there were at least three very sizeable settlements in that, in the sort of area of the kind of western edge of Abukiabe, which is, which is a long-licose line eastwards from Alexandria. Yeah, that whole area would have been incredibly rich in ancient times. It's the location of this settlement, sort of mini kind of city of Nicopolis as well, which hasn't, hasn't been identified.

Yeah, and the underwater archaeology that they've been able to do is absolutely a revelation.

“I mean, I think those two things are understanding now with the movement of the river”

and are understanding of just how much was swallowed up by the Mediterranean. Those two things have completely transformed our understanding of archaeology in Egypt, generally, particular cities, and also how things have survived or not. I mean, that's transformed in my lifetime. I mean, a pretty old now, I suppose. But you are absolutely not. This has been so much fun. And I feel we're going to just scratch

the surface, Chris, because it feels like there are still cities which haven't been discovered,

Egypt's lost cities? I think the chances that there will be discoveries of are very high, actually.

Well, I'm certain. I mean, this also plays into another sort of pet subjects of mine, which is lost monuments, or the idea of things being lost and found, and then lost again. There are places in the Nile Valley out of the way places that have escaped archaeology. And actually, it's been in my mind just as we've been talking about, you know,

“I think something else that maybe of interest to people at home, maybe is that, okay,”

we know the river move now. We know that's a thing. We know that that had an impact. We know as I've said that, you know, it means that we might be looking in the wrong place for things, as is the case with Memphis. We know also that it may have swallowed things up. And then we know about everything along the coast. But even though we know those things, it's not as simple as just then going, "Oh, well, right. Okay. Well, we better just do a

comprehensive survey of all river iron locations and all coastal locations." And so, you know, we realize these things a few years ago, and now we know everything. Not at all, you know, we've realized these things, but archaeology, as you all know, is a very slow process, and it's

very, there's always struggling for funding. So the possibilities, if funding can be found,

for looking in places along the Nio Valley and along the coast, for some of these places that we know about, Strabo gives us absolutely loads of names of places along the coast and right the way through the Delta and up into what's now so down. And a lot of those places have never been identified, and it may well be that resources, technology allow us to find some of those things in the future.

“I think it's, I bet at least five pounds. Something exciting what we've heard.”

Last but certainly not least, I want to happily and freely promote your book again on the the tombs, which is called Chris. It's called Searching for the Lost tombs of Egypt, and that's said everything from Alexander the Great to clear Patrick to many many others too. Yeah, absolutely. Yes it is. A good, I think a like to think a good way into what archaeology in Egypt is. Chris, it just goes me to say thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Pleasure as always. Well, there you go. There was the wonderful doctor, Chris Norton

returning to the show to talk through the story of E. Chips Lost Cities. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

“Thank you so much for listening. If you like more with Chris, while we got a few episodes that”

we recorded with him over the years, we'll put a link straight away to our episode we did with him all about the silver pharaohs of susanies and so on. There are tombs that were discovered at Tannis in the mid-20th century, but we'll also put a link to the story of the sunken city of Alexandria and our interview with the underwater archaeologist of Franca Gordio from a few years back where he explains how there is so much still to find of ancient Alexandria beneath the waterline.

So we'll put links to those episodes in a show. Now if you've been enjoying the ancient recently, please make sure that you're following the show on either Spotify or wherever you get to your podcast. That really helps us to be doing us a big favor. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, where we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to history hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with the new release every week.

Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me, I'll see you in the next episode.