Egypt's Lost Cities

The Ancients

This episode of The Ancients explores the mysterious disappearance and rediscovery of ancient Egyptian cities, from Tanis to Memphis and Ama

Key takeaways

• Ancient cities like Tanis and Memphis were once thriving hubs of commerce, religion, and governance but were eventually abandoned and buried beneath desert sands and wetlands.
• Unlike tombs, which are often preserved due to deliberate isolation in the desert, cities face greater challenges in preservation because they were rebuilt or repurposed over millennia.

Main topics

• Rediscovery of Tanis
• The fate of ancient Egyptian capitals like Memphis and Amarna

Notable quotes

"The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun 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."

Conclusion

While many ancient Egyptian cities have been unearthed, countless others remain hidden

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Imagine digging beneath the sands of Egypt and uncovering a forgotten world. A royal statue emerges from the earth, followed by golden masks, elaborate coffins and towering temple walls covered in hieroglyphs. 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. Speaker 1 (1:12) In 1939, this was the experience of French archaeologist Pierre Montaigne, who rediscovered the lost city of Tanis, the royal capital of Egypt's 21st and 22nd dynasties. Buried beneath the Nile Delta, Tanis 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, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Tanis is just one of Egypt's lost cities, or formerly 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, Speaker 1 (2:11) 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 Naunton, the author of Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt. Speaker 1 (2:40) Hello, Chris. Great to have you 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. Speaker 1 (3:08) 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 there'll be a trip 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. Speaker 1 (3:36) Ed, why do you think the whole topic of lost cities is so compelling to so many people? Is it because we're all channeling an inner Indiana Jones wannabe desire? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I think for those of us who are interested in archaeology, there's something very compelling about things being hidden or lost. So in some sense, not being there and then being there, being revealed and being discovered. 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. I think actually there's something very much about that in Egypt as well. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun 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. Speaker 1 (4:34) provides the sort of greatest contrast between there being nothing and there being not just something but potentially something amazing, Tomb of King Tut 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 lost tombs like the tomb of Alexander the Great or the tomb of Cleopatra. You mentioned the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb there. I guess it's interesting comparing people going out on a sense of adventure to find a lost tomb, a particular building in a particular area compared to a whole city. Speaker 1 (5:19) That kind of blows your mind that a 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 tombs, and, you know, forgive the sort of oblique plug, but I've written about lost tombs in the past and you and I have talked about lost tombs. And that book is called, by the way? It's called Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt. Thank you very much, Tristan. You're very kind. Speaker 1 (5:49) 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, probably in fact, most of the most spectacular discoveries have been to do with tombs. And that's because for the good reason that they survive 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. So tombs and tummies are the obvious thing to go for. Cities provide quite a nice counterpoint to that, I think, in that it says something about the history of archaeology, actually, in Egypt. Speaker 1 (6:35) 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 that was the time when the language was first being studied and eventually deciphered. But otherwise they were interested in pretty things, and tombs 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. Speaker 1 (7:02) And it took quite a long time for archaeology to catch up with that. And cities actually survive 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. Speaker 1 (7:31) 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, well, to put it around the other way, tombs were deliberately put in places where people were not living. They were put away from where people were living. Generally speaking, there are exceptions to that, but that's the 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. Speaker 1 (8:00) 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 tombs and, you know, including some of what must have been the largest, most spectacular, most important tombs, 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. Speaker 1 (8:28) Oh, very, very cool indeed. One day, Chris, you and I will go out to Alexandria with all the proper permissions or wherever, either go for the tomb of Alexander the Great or maybe we'll look for one of these lost cities. Of course, we'll do it above board though. Yes, we definitely should do that. We always say that. And I think, you know, one day history hits should put up the money to let us do it. Well, thank you, Chris. One day. So it says that ancient Egypt owned such fertile ground. Speaker 1 (8:55) for lost cities. And Chris, is that because back in the heyday of ancient Egypt, all along the River Nile, yes, there was important farmlands irrigated by the Nile, but was there settlement after settlement the further and further you went up the River Nile? Or city, dare 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 the agricultural, rural parts of Egypt in villages, but also in larger settlements, towns. And there were, there are still. Speaker 1 (9:53) larger settlements and of course these days some of those are very very large. Cairo is one of the biggest cities in the world about 20 million people these days Alexandria is a city of five 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 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 Speaker 1 (10:21) 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 explored. Yeah, so when talking about lost cities in ancient Egypt, what exactly do we mean? Because I've got in 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 there's more than one approach that you can take here. Speaker 1 (10:48) The starting point for this actually was similar to the starting point for the Lost Tombs research, which is just that there are these cities which we're aware existed, which have never been identified archaeologically. So what's the story? And is there 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. The same ancient source that gives us the most comprehensive list of Egyptian kings, the writer Manetho, also provides us with a list of cities because he tells us these kings were grouped into dynasties. He doesn't often add very much information at all. He gives us their names, the length of the reign, 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. Speaker 1 (11:44) So it is not the case that the capital city was in the same place throughout Egyptian history. It moved is maybe 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 Manetho. 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 abundant across the full span of Egyptian history, that the country was divided into administrative regions or districts called, we call them gnomes using a Greek word. And each of those had a capital, a regional capital, and those are also named. So again... Speaker 1 (12:37) We have a list not just of the national capital, the seat of the ruling king, but we have a list of these regional capitals as well. And then here and there, we might also have 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 gnomes, those districts, are those ones preserved in papyrus scrolls more administrative compared to the writings of Manetho? Or what should we be thinking of how these... Speaker 1 (13:06) These writings about the gnomes and so on, how they're preserved? Various, actually. In some cases, we do have administrative records, yeah. Those would be principally on papyrus, and actually those sorts of things survive mostly from the later periods of Egyptian history. We know, actually, that there were, from time to time, changes in the gnome boundaries and the gnome capitals, also changes of the names of these cities. Speaker 1 (13:35) Most comprehensive lists we have of those are from administrative records. But then if you take the sort of sum total of Egyptian texts, we get plenty of mentions of these places, sometimes in particular sequences that allow us to sort of see the geographic spread. There are enough, they crop up in, the names could crop up in other contexts as well. So even though... The reasons for the division were principally administrative. They also crop up in religious context as well. So there were particular gods and goddesses associated with the various gnomes. The idea that Pharaoh was the ruler of the whole country and therefore the ruler of all of these gnomes might also be reason for these to be written down at a certain point. You know, Pharaoh's power extends from the first gnome of Upper Egypt all the way in the south to the very Mediterranean coast up in there. Speaker 1 (14:32) whatever gnome right up there. You mentioned that all-important source of Manetho. And I love Manetho. I know you love Manetho 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 pharaohs are starting to rule Egypt. Yeah, we think so. We think he was probably ruling in the time of the second or third Ptolemy. We can't be absolutely sure about this. We have his text. His text survives in what are called epitomes, 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 epitomes that we have, there are three main ones, vary in the details. So it's clear that they can't all be faithful to Manetho's original. And then, by the way, these epitomes are all from at least... Speaker 1 (15:26) minimum kind of four or 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 Ra at Heliopolis in around the early Ptolemaic. So we think, yes, that he was writing his history, which ends pretty much with the time of Alexander the Great, as if