The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce. The descendants of those roosters might well think—if they were capable of such profound thought—that their ancient forebears have a lot to answer for.

Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents an intriguingly blank canvas for the flavor palette of almost any cuisine. A generation of Britons is coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long after the time when most families had a few hens running around the yard that could be grabbed and turned into dinner, chicken remains a nostalgic, evocative dish for most Americans. When author Jack Canfield was looking for a metaphor for psychological comfort, he didn’t call it “Clam Chowder for the Soul.”

How did the chicken achieve such cultural and culinary dominance? It is all the more surprising in light of the belief by many archaeologists that chickens were first domesticated not for eating but for cockfighting. Until the advent of large-scale industrial production in the 20th century, the economic and nutritional contribution of chickens was modest. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond listed chickens among the “small domestic mammals and domestic birds and insects” that have been useful to humanity but unlike the horse or the ox did little—outside of legends—to change the course of history. Nonetheless, the chicken has inspired contributions to culture, art, cuisine, science and religion over the millennia. Chickens were, and still are, a sacred animal in some cultures. The prodigious and ever-watchful hen was a worldwide symbol of nurturance and fertility. Eggs hung in Egyptian temples to ensure a bountiful river flood. The lusty rooster (a.k.a. cock) was a universal signifier of virility—but also, in the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, a benign spirit that crowed at dawn to herald a turning point in the cosmic struggle between darkness and light. For the Romans, the chicken’s killer app was fortunetelling, especially during wartime. Chickens accompanied Roman armies, and their behavior was carefully observed before battle; a good appetite meant victory was likely. According to the writings of Cicero, when one contingent of birds refused to eat before a sea battle in 249 B.C., an angry consul threw them overboard. History records that he was defeated.

But one major religious tradition—ironically, the one that gave rise to matzo-ball soup and the Sunday chicken dinner—failed to imbue chickens with much religious significance. The Old Testament passages concerning ritual sacrifice reveal a distinct preference on the part of Yahweh for red meat over poultry. In Leviticus 5:7, a guilt offering of two turtledoves or pigeons is acceptable if the sinner in question is unable to afford a lamb, but in no instance does the Lord request a chicken. Matthew 23:37 contains a passage in which Jesus likens his care for the people of Jerusalem to a hen caring for her brood. This image, had it caught on, could have completely changed the course of Christian iconography, which has been dominated instead by depictions of the Good Shepherd. The rooster plays a small but crucial role in the Gospels in helping to fulfill the prophecy that Peter would deny Jesus “before the cock crows.” (In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I decreed that a figure of a rooster should be placed atop every church as a reminder of the incident—which is why many churches still have cockerel-shaped weather vanes.) There is no implication that the rooster did anything but mark the passage of the hours, but even this secondhand association with betrayal probably didn’t advance the cause of the chicken in Western culture. In contemporary American usage, the associations of “chicken” are with cowardice, neurotic anxiety (“The sky is falling!”) and ineffectual panic (“running around like a chicken without a head”).

The fact is that the male of the species can be quite a fierce animal, especially when bred and trained for fighting. Nature armed the rooster with a bony leg spur; humans have supplemented that feature with an arsenal of metal spurs and small knives strapped to the bird’s leg. Cockfighting is illegal in the United States—Louisiana was the last state to ban it, in 2008—and generally viewed by Americans as inhumane. But in the parts of the world where it is still practiced, legally or illegally, it has claims to being the world’s oldest continual sport. Artistic depictions of rooster combatants are scattered throughout the ancient world, such as in a first century A.D. mosaic adorning a house in Pompeii. The ancient Greek city of Pergamum established a cockfighting amphitheater to teach valor to future generations of soldiers.

The domesticated chicken has a genealogy as complicated as the Tudors, stretching back 7,000 to 10,000 years and involving, according to recent research, at least two wild progenitors and possibly more than one event of initial domestication. The earliest fossil bones identified as possibly belonging to chickens appear in sites from northeastern China dating to around 5400 B.C., but the birds’ wild ancestors never lived in those cold, dry plains. So if they really are chicken bones, they must have come from somewhere else, most likely Southeast Asia. The chicken’s wild progenitor is the red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, according to a theory advanced by Charles Darwin and recently confirmed by DNA analysis. The bird’s resemblance to modern chickens is manifest in the male’s red wattles and comb, the spur he uses to fight and his cock-a-doodle-doo mating call. The dun-colored females brood eggs and cluck just like barnyard chickens. In its habitat, which stretches from northeastern India to the Philippines, G. gallus browses on the forest floor for insects, seeds and fruit, and flies up to nest in the trees at night. That’s about as much flying as it can manage, a trait that had obvious appeal to humans seeking to capture and raise it. This would later help endear the chicken to Africans, whose native guinea fowls had an annoying habit of flying off into the forest when the spirit moved them.

But G. gallus is not the sole progenitor of the modern chicken. Scientists have identified three closely related species that might have bred with the red junglefowl. Precisely how much genetic material these other birds contributed to the DNA of domesticated chickens remains a matter of conjecture. Recent research suggests that modern chickens inherited at least one trait, their yellow skin, from the gray junglefowl of southern India. Did a domesticated breed of G. gallus spread initially from Southeast Asia, traveling either north to China or southwest to India? Or were there two separate heartlands of domestication: ancient India and Southeast Asia? Either scenario is possible, but probing more deeply into chicken origins is hindered by an inconclusive DNA trail. “Because domesticated and wild birds mixed over time, it’s really difficult to pinpoint,” says Michael Zody, a computational biologist who studies genetics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

The chicken’s real star turn came in 2004, when an international team of geneticists produced a complete map of the chicken genome. The chicken was the first domesticated animal, the first bird—and consequently, the first descendant of the dinosaurs—thus honored. The genome map provided an excellent opportunity to study how millennia of domestication can alter a species. In a project led by Sweden’s Uppsala University, Zody and his colleagues have been researching the differences between the red junglefowl and its barnyard descendants, including “layers” (breeds raised to produce prodigious amounts of eggs) and “broilers” (breeds that are plump and meaty). The researchers found important mutations in a gene designated TBC1D1, which regulates glucose metabolism. In the human genome, mutations in this gene have been associated with obesity, but it’s a positive trait in a creature destined for the dinner table. Another mutation that resulted from selective breeding is in the TSHR (thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor) gene. In wild animals this gene coordinates reproduction with day length, confining breeding to specific seasons. The mutation disabling this gene enables chickens to breed—and lay eggs—all year long.

Once chickens were domesticated, cultural contacts, trade, migration and territorial conquest resulted in their introduction, and reintroduction, to different regions around the world over several thousand years. Although inconclusive, evidence suggests that ground zero for the bird’s westward spread may have been the Indus Valley, where the city-states of the Harappan civilization carried on a lively trade with the Middle East more than 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists have recovered chicken bones from Lothal, once a great port on the west coast of India, raising the possibility that the birds could have been carried across to the Arabian Peninsula as cargo or provisions. By 2000 B.C., cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia refer to “the bird of Meluhha,” the likely place name for the Indus Valley. That may or may not have been a chicken; Professor Piotr Steinkeller, a specialist in ancient Near Eastern texts at Harvard, says that it was certainly “some exotic bird that was unknown to Mesopotamia.” He believes that references to the “royal bird of Meluhha”—a phrase that shows up in texts three centuries later—most likely refer to the chicken.

Chickens arrived in Egypt some 250 years later, as fighting birds and additions to exotic menageries. Artistic depictions of the bird adorned royal tombs. Yet it would be another 1,000 years before the bird became a popular commodity among ordinary Egyptians. It was in that era that Egyptians mastered the technique of artificial incubation, which freed hens to put their time to better use by laying more eggs. This was no easy matter. Most chicken eggs will hatch in three weeks, but only if the temperature is kept constant at around 99 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity stays close to 55 percent, increasing in the last few days of incubation. The eggs must also be turned three to five times a day, lest physical deformities result.

By Megan Gambino

Smithsonian.com, December 18, 2009

Andrew Lawler has written for newsletters, newspapers and magazines about topics such as astronomy and zoology. He has been a Washington reporter covering Capitol Hill and the White House and a Boston correspondent for a science magazine writing about universities. Currently, he is freelancing from his home in the woods of Maine.

What drew you to this story? Can you describe its genesis a bit?

It all began with a toilet. A Smithsonian editor asked me about the recent find of what one archaeologist claimed was a latrine at Qumran. Next thing I knew, I was bumping across the Judean hills in a jeep. But as with everything involving this site, there is no agreement on whether there was an indoor loo!

What was your favorite moment during your reporting?

Climbing around the rocks just above Qumran and tracing its little aqueduct, with the Dead Sea and the tourists far below, all was serenely quiet. It could have been two thousand years ago. I have a good job.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Perfectly pleasant and reasonable scholars can quickly lose their heads over Qumran. There is so much animosity among researchers about the scrolls and the place where they were found. I find such deep-seated animosity rare in most other areas of archaeology.

What do you hope readers take away from this story?

Qumran is a mirror. How we interpret it tells us so much about who we are, what we believe and how we navigate the intersection of science and faith.

Once the dazzling capital of ancient Persia, Isfahan fell victim to neglect, but a new generation hopes to restore its lost luster

Resolving the dispute over authorship of the ancient manuscripts could have far-reaching implications for Christianity and Judaism

Israeli archaeologist yuval peleg halts his jeep where the jagged Judean hills peter out into a jumble of boulders. Before us, across the flat-calm Dead Sea, the sun rises over the mountains of Jordan. The heat on this spring morning is already intense. There are no trees or grass, just a few crumbling stone walls. It is a scene of silent desolation—until, that is, tourists in hats and visors pour out of shiny buses.

They have come to this harsh and remote site in the West Bank, known as Qumran, because this is where the most important religious texts in the Western world were found in 1947. The Dead Sea Scrolls—comprising more than 800 documents made of animal skin, papyrus and even forged copper—deepened our understanding of the Bible and shed light on the histories of Judaism and Christianity. Among the texts are parts of every book of the Hebrew canon—what Christians call the Old Testament—except the book of Esther. The scrolls also contain a collection of previously unknown hymns, prayers, commentaries, mystical formulas and the earliest version of the Ten Commandments. Most were written between 200 B.C. and the period prior to the failed Jewish revolt to gain political and religious independence from Rome that lasted from A.D. 66 to 70—predating by 8 to 11 centuries the oldest previously known Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible.

Tour guides shepherding the tourists through the modest desert ruins speak of the scrolls’ origin, a narrative that has been repeated almost since they were discovered more than 60 years ago. Qumran, the guides say, was home to a community of Jewish ascetics called the Essenes, who devoted their lives to writing and preserving sacred texts. They were hard at work by the time Jesus began preaching; ultimately they stored the scrolls in 11 caves before Romans destroyed their settlement in A.D. 68.

But hearing the dramatic recitation, Peleg, 40, rolls his eyes. “There is no connection to the Essenes at this site,” he tells me as a hawk circles above in the warming air. He says the scrolls had nothing to do with the settlement. Evidence for a religious community here, he says, is unconvincing. He believes, rather, that Jews fleeing the Roman rampage hurriedly stuffed the documents into the Qumran caves for safekeeping. After digging at the site for ten years, he also believes that Qumran was originally a fort designed to protect a growing Jewish population from threats to the east. Later, it was converted into a pottery factory to serve nearby towns like Jericho, he says.

Other scholars describe Qumran variously as a manor house, a perfume manufacturing center and even a tannery. Despite decades of excavations and careful analysis, there is no consensus about who lived there—and, consequently, no consensus about who actually wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“It’s an enigmatic and confusing site,” acknowledges Risa Levitt Kohn, who in 2007 curated an exhibit about the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego. She says the sheer breadth and age of the writings—during a period that intersects with the life of Jesus and the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem—make Qumran “a powder keg” among normally placid scholars. Qumran has prompted bitter feuds and even a recent criminal investigation.

Nobody doubts the scrolls’ authenticity, but the question of authorship has implications for understanding the history of both Judaism and Christianity. In 164 B.C., a group of Jewish dissidents, the Maccabees, overthrew the Seleucid Empire that then ruled Judea. The Maccabees established an independent kingdom and, in so doing, tossed out the priestly class that had controlled the temple in Jerusalem since the time of King Solomon. The turmoil led to the emergence of several rival sects, each one vying for dominance. If the Qumran texts were written by one such sect, the scrolls “help us to understand the forces that operated after the Maccabean Revolt and how various Jewish groups reacted to those forces,” says New York University professor of Jewish and Hebraic studies Lawrence Schiffman in his book Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. “While some sects were accommodating themselves to the new order in various ways, the Dead Sea group decided it had to leave Jerusalem altogether in order to continue its unique way of life.”

And if Qumran indeed housed religious ascetics who turned their backs on what they saw as Jerusalem’s decadence, then the Essenes may well represent a previously unknown link between Judaism and Christianity. “John the Baptizer, Jesus’ teacher, probably learned from the Qumran Essenes—though he was no Essene,” says James Charlesworth, a scrolls scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. Charlesworth adds that the scrolls “disclose the context of Jesus’ life and message.” Moreover, the beliefs and practices of the Qumran Essenes as described in the scrolls—vows of poverty, baptismal rituals and communal meals—mirror those of early Christians. As such, some see Qumran as the first Christian monastery, the cradle of an emerging faith.

But Peleg and others discount Qumran’s role in the history of the two religions. Norman Golb, a University of Chicago professor of Jewish history (and an academic rival of Schiffman), believes that once Galilee fell during the Jewish revolt, Jerusalem’s citizens knew that the conquest of their city was inevitable; they thus gathered up texts from libraries and personal collections and hid them throughout the Judean wilderness, including in the caves near the Dead Sea. If that’s the case, then Qumran was likely a secular—not a spiritual—site, and the scrolls reflect not just the views of a single dissident group of proto-Christians, but a wider tapestry of Jewish thought. “Further determination of the individual concepts and practices described in the scrolls can be best achieved not by forcing them to fit into the single sectarian bed of Essenism,” Golb argued in the journal Biblical Archaeologist.

One assumption that is now widely accepted is that the majority of the scrolls did not originate at Qumran. The earliest texts date to 300 B.C.—a century before Qumran even existed as a settlement—and the latest to a generation before the Romans destroyed the site in A.D. 68. A few scrolls are written in sophisticated Greek rather than a prosaic form of Aramaic or Hebrew that would be expected from a community of ascetics in the Judean desert. And why would such a community keep a list, etched in rare copper, of precious treasures of gold and silver—possibly from the Second Temple in Jerusalem—that had been secreted away? Nor does the word “Essene” appear in any of the scrolls.

Of course none of this rules out the possibility that Qumran was a religious community of scribes. Some scholars are not troubled that the Essenes are not explicitly mentioned in the scrolls, saying that the term for the sect is a foreign label. Schiffman believes they were a splinter group of priests known as the Sadducees. The notion that the scrolls are “a balanced collection of general Jewish texts” must be rejected, he writes in Biblical Archaeologist. “There is now too much evidence that the community that collected those scrolls emerged out of sectarian conflict and that [this] conflict sustained it throughout its existence.” Ultimately, however, the question of who wrote the scrolls is more likely to be resolved by archaeologists scrutinizing Qumran’s every physical remnant than by scholars poring over the texts.

The dead sea scrolls amazed scholars with their remarkable similarity to later versions. But there were also subtle differences. For instance, one scroll expands on the book of Genesis: in Chapter 12, when Abraham’s wife Sarah is taken by the Pharaoh, the scroll depicts Sarah’s beauty, describing her legs, face and hair. And in Chapter 13, when God commands Abraham to walk “through the land in the length,” the scroll adds a first-person account by Abraham of his journey. The Jewish Bible, as accepted today, was the product of a lengthy evolution; the scrolls offered important new insights into the process by which the text was edited during its formation.

The scrolls also set forth a series of detailed regulations that challenge the religious laws practiced by the priests in Jerusalem and espoused by other Jewish sects such as the Pharisees. Consequently, scholars of Judaism consider the scrolls to be a missing link between the period when religious laws were passed down orally and the Rabbinic era, beginning circa A.D. 200, when they were systematically recorded—eventually leading to the legal commentaries that became the Talmud.

For Christians as well, the scrolls are a source of profound insight. Jesus is not mentioned in the texts, but as Florida International University scholar Erik Larson has noted, the scrolls have “helped us understand better in what ways Jesus’ messages represented ideas that were current in the Judaism of his time and in what ways [they were] distinctive.” One scroll, for example, mentions a messianic figure who is called both the “Son of God” and the “Son of the Most High.” Many theologians had speculated that the phrase “Son of God” was adopted by early Christians after Jesus’ crucifixion, in contrast to the pagan worship of the Roman emperors. But the appearance of the phrase in the scrolls indicates the term was already in use when Jesus was preaching his gospel.

Whoever hid the scrolls from the Romans did a superb job. The texts at Qumran remained undiscovered for nearly two millennia. A few 19th-century European travelers examined what they assumed was an ancient fortress of no particular interest. Then, near it in 1947, a goat strayed into a cave, a Bedouin shepherd flung a stone into the dark cavern and the resulting clink against a pot prompted him to investigate. He emerged with the first of what would be about 15,000 fragments of some 850 scrolls secreted in the many caves that pock the cliffs rising above the Dead Sea.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War prevented a close examination of the Qumran ruins. But after a fragile peace set in, a bearded and bespectacled Dominican monk named Roland de Vaux started excavations of the site and nearby caves in 1951. His findings of spacious rooms, ritual baths and the remains of gardens stunned scholars and the public alike. He also unearthed scores of cylindrical jars, hundreds of ceramic plates and three inkwells in or near a room that he concluded had once contained high tables used by scribes.

Shortly before de Vaux began his work, a Polish scholar named Jozef Milik completed a translation of one scroll, “The Rule of the Community,” which lays out a set of strict regulations reminiscent of those followed by a sect of Jews mentioned in A.D. 77 by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder. He called the sect members Essenes, and wrote that they lived along the western shore of the Dead Sea “without women and renouncing love entirely, without money, and having for company only the palm trees.” Pliny’s contemporary, historian Flavius Josephus, also mentions the Essenes in his account of the Jewish War: “Whereas these men shun the pleasures as vice, they consider self-control and not succumbing to the passions virtue.” Based upon these references, de Vaux concluded that Qumran was an Essene community, complete with a refectory and a scriptorium—medieval terms for the places where monks dined and copied manuscripts.

Though he died in 1971 before publishing a comprehensive report, de Vaux’s picture of Qumran as a religious community was widely accepted among his academic colleagues. (Much of his Qumran material remains locked up in private collections in Jerusalem and Paris, out of reach of most scholars.) By the 1980s, however, new data from other sites began casting doubt on his theory. “The old views have been outstripped by more recent discoveries,” says Golb.

For example, we now know that Qumran was not the remote place it is today. Two millennia ago, there was a thriving commercial trade in the region; numerous settlements dotted the shore, while ships plied the sea. Springs and runoff from the steep hills were carefully engineered to provide water for drinking and agriculture, and date palms and plants produced valuable resins used in perfume. And while the heavily salinated sea lacked fish, it provided salt and bitumen, the substance used in ancient times to seal boats and mortar bricks. Far from being a lonely and distant community of religious nonconformists, Qumran was a valuable piece of real estate—a day’s donkey ride to Jerusalem, a two-hour walk to Jericho and a stroll to docks and settlements along the sea.

And a closer look at de Vaux’s Qumran findings raises questions about his picture of a community that disdained luxuries and even money. He uncovered more than 1,200 coins—nearly half of which were silver—as well as evidence of hewn stone columns, glass vessels, glass beads and other fine goods. Some of it likely comes from later Roman occupation, but Belgian husband-and-wife archaeologists Robert Donceel and Pauline Donceel-Voute believe that most of the accumulated wealth indicates that Qumran was an estate—perhaps owned by a rich Jerusalem patrician—that produced perfume. The massive fortified tower, they say, was a common feature of villas during a conflict-prone era in Judea. And they note that Jericho and Ein Gedi (a settlement nearly 20 miles south of Qumran) were known throughout the Roman world as producers of the balsam resin used as a perfume base. In a cave near Qumran, Israeli researchers found in 1988 a small round bottle that, according to lab analyses, contained the remains of resin. De Vaux claimed that similar bottles found at Qumran were ink­wells. But they might just as well have been vials of perfume.

Other theories abound. Some think Qumran was a modest trading center. British archaeologist David Stacey believes it was a tannery and that the jars found by de Vaux were for the collection of urine necessary for scouring skins. He argues that Qumran’s location was ideal for a tannery—between potential markets like Jericho and Ein Gedi.

For his part, Peleg believes Qumran went through several distinct stages. As the morning heat mounts, he leads me up a steep ridge above the site, where a channel hewn into the rock brought water into the settlement. From our high perch, he points out the foundations of a massive tower that once commanded a fine view of the sea to the east toward today’s Jordan. “Qumran was a military post around 100 B.C.,” he says. “We are one day from Jerusalem, and it fortified the northeast shore of the Dead Sea.” Other forts from this era are scattered among the rocky crags above the sea. This was a period when the Nabateans—the eastern rivals of Rome—threatened Judea. But Peleg says that once the Romans conquered the region, in 63 B.C., there was no further need for such bases. He believes out-of-work Judean soldiers and local families may have turned the military encampment to peaceful purposes, building a modest aqueduct that emptied into deep rectangular pools so that fine clay for making pots could settle. “Not every pool with steps is a ritual bath,” he points out. He thinks the former soldiers built eight kilns to produce pottery for the markets of Ein Gedi and Jericho, grew dates and possibly made perfume—until the Romans leveled the place during the Jewish insurrection.

But Peleg’s view has won few adherents. “It’s more interpretation than data,” says Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who shares de Vaux’s view that the site was a religious community. She says that some archaeologists—by refusing to acknowledge evidence that residents of Qumran hid the scrolls—are inclined to leap to conclusions since their research relies solely on the ambiguous, physical remains at the site.

Even jurisdiction over Qumran is a source of contention. The site is located on the West Bank, where Palestinians and some Israeli archaeologists say that Peleg’s excavations are illegal under international law.

The Qumran controversy took a bizarre turn last March, when Golb’s son, Raphael, was arrested on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. In a statement, the New York District Attorney’s office says that Raphael “engaged in a systematic scheme on the Internet, using dozens of Internet aliases, in order to influence and affect debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in order to harass Dead Sea Scrolls scholars” who disputed his father’s findings. The alleged target was Golb’s old rival, Schiffman. For his part, Raphael Golb entered a plea of not guilty on July 8, 2009. The case has been adjourned until January 27.

About the only thing that the adversaries seem to agree on is that money is at the root of the problem. Popular books with new theories about Qumran sell, says Schiffman. Golb notes that the traditional view of Qumran is more likely to attract tourists to the site.

Some scholars seek a middle ground. Robert Cargill, an archaeologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, envisions Qumran as a fort that later sheltered a group producing not only scrolls but an income through tanning or pottery making. It was a settlement, he says, “that wanted to be self-reliant—the question is just how Jewish and just how devout they were.”

Efforts at compromise have hardly quelled the conflicting theories. Perhaps, as French archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Humbert suggests, Qumran scholars are shaped by their personal experience as well as by their research. “One sees what one wants to see,” says Humbert, whether it’s a monastery, a fort, a tannery or a manor house.

But the debate matters little to the thousands of visitors who flock to the Holy Land. For them, Qumran remains the place where a modern-day miracle occurred—the unlikely discovery of sacred texts, saved from destruction to enlighten future generations about the word of God. As I climb into Peleg’s jeep for the quick trip back to Jerusalem, new crowds of tourists are exiting the buses.

Andrew Lawler, who lives in rural Maine, wrote about the Iranian city of Isfahan in the April 2009 issue of Smithsonian.

Discovering the grandeur of the monument built 3,400 years ago

“Heya hup!” Deep in a muddy pit, a dozen workers wrestle with Egypt’s fearsome lion goddess, struggling to raise her into the sunlight for the first time in more than 3,000 years. She is Sekhmet—”the one who is powerful”—the embodiment of the fiery eye of the sun god Ra, but now she is caked in dirt and bound by thick rope. As the workers heave her out of the pit and onto a wooden track, the sand shifts and the six-foot-tall granite statue threatens to topple. A half-dozen men in ankle-length robes grab the taut ropes, again shout the Arabic equivalent of “heave, ho!” and steady her just in time.

Within the hour, the seated Sekhmet is once again imperious: her breath creates the desert wind, her anger feeds on disease and war, and her power protects mighty pharaohs. Or did. This long-buried statue is one of 730—one for every day and night of the year—that guarded a vast collection of gates, colonnades, courts and halls built by the great Egyptian king Amenhotep III, who reigned over Egypt for 38 years in the 14th century B.C., at the height of peace and prosperity. In its day, “The House of Millions of Years” was the largest and most impressive temple complex in the world. But it was no match for earthquakes, fires, floods or Amenhotep III’s successors, who scavenged stone blocks and statues for their own temples. Much of the site, near the Valley of the Kings along the west bank of the Nile River, is covered with sugar cane.

Hourig Sourouzian, an Armenian archaeologist, is directing the effort to rescue the long-neglected site and its many statues. “They didn’t deserve this treatment!” she says as a worker hoses off the mud and salt coating a Sekhmet lined up with a dozen similar statues in the bright sun.

Egyptologists had long assumed that all that remained of the temple complex were the imposing Colossi of Memnon, two seated statues of Amenhotep III at the entrance to his temple, and some stones and fragments of statuary. Sourouzian had been working at a neighboring temple, Merentptah, from which she would visit the Amenhotep complex. “I was always interested in the fragmented statuary of the site and dreamed about seeing them reconstructed instead of lying in vegetation, water and junk,” she recalls. Then, in 1996, a brush fire swept over the area, charring the stones and fragments and making them more vulnerable to cracking and erosion. When Sourouzian and her husband, German archaeologist Rainier Stadelmann, surveyed the damage, she says, “It was terrible and depressing, and we swore to take action.”

First, she convinced the World Monuments Fund in 1998 to designate the temple one of the world’s “100 Most Endangered Sites” and fund the initial conservation area of the shattered fragments aboveground. During the course of that effort, Sourouzian began to suspect that there was more to be found underground. By 2000, however, the money had run out, and she and Stadelmann reluctantly began to wrap up their work. But a wealthy French woman who had attended a lecture by Sourouzian in Paris agreed to fund a more ambitious excavation. Within a year, the team began to uncover their first statues, and the archaeologists realized that many treasures still lay beneath the dirt.

Born in Baghdad to parents of Armenian descent, Sourouzian grew up in Beirut and studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. Sent to Karnak by the Louvre, she became one of the leading authorities on Egyptian royal statuary. “She’s probably the best Egyptian art historian of our time,” says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University. Now, along with Stadelmann, who once headed the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, Sourouzian orchestrates a team of two dozen specialists from around the world—including French, Swiss, German, Spanish and Japanese researchers—and as many as 400 local workers.

What began modestly has become one of the most ambitious projects Egypt has seen in decades, bringing to light a triumph of engineering and art that once dwarfed even the massive Karnak and Luxor temples across the Nile. Amenhotep III called the complex “a fortress of eternity out of good white sandstone—worked with gold throughout. Its floors were purified with silver, all of its doorways were of electrum,” an alloy of gold and silver.

The recently liberated Sekhmet statue is one of 72 of the goddess that Sourouzian and her team have discovered. They’ve also found two huge statues of Amenhotep III, each flanked by a smaller one of Queen Tye and a menagerie of sacred animals, including an alabaster hippopotamus. The project is giving Egyptologists a fresh look at the mysterious temple culture that dominated ancient life here, in which hordes of priests conducted rituals, made offerings and administered the intricate rites designed to ensure the eternal well-being of the dead pharaoh.

Amenhotep III was succeeded by one of the first known monotheists

Not long after Amenhotep III died, in 1353 B.C., masons entered his mortuary temple and methodically chiseled out every mention of Amun, the god said to have fathered the great pharaoh. Astonishingly, the order to commit this blasphemy came from the king’s own son. Crowned Amenhotep IV, he changed his name to Akhenaten in his fifth year on the throne and focused his energies on promoting a single god, Aten, the sun disk. Together with his beautiful queen Nefertiti, he built a new capital, Akhetaten (today known as Amarna), banned representations of several deities and set about destroying all inscriptions and images of Amun, from the Nile Delta to today’s Sudan.

Akhenaten’s attempt to suppress one god and advance another in a culture that reveled in a complex pantheon of ever-changing deities did not endure. Yet no other pharaoh—save perhaps his son, the boy king Tutankhamen, who quickly reversed his father’s campaign—has so captured the modern imagination. Agatha Christie wrote a play and Philip Glass composed an opera named after Akhenaten, and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz penned the novel Dweller in Truth about the heretic king who dared to overturn a religious system that was older than Islam is today. The ancient Egyptian set of beliefs, with its focus on death and the afterlife and with deities who can change their species, remains alien and mysterious to most Westerners.

Early Egyptologists saw in Akhenaten’s approach the first stirring of the great monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to come. “Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship,” wrote Flinders Petrie, a British archaeologist who dug at Akhenaten’s capital in the early 1890s. Sigmund Freud even argued that Moses was an Egyptian priest who spread the religion of Aten. There is, of course, no evidence linking the cult of Aten to today’s monotheisic beliefs, and no archaeological evidence of Hebrew tribes appears until two centuries after the pharaoh’s death. Nor do scholars agree on what accounted for Akhenaten’s beliefs. “As a result,” says Egyptologist Betsy Bryan at Johns Hopkins University, “people tend to allow their fantasies to run wild.”

But Akhenaten’s faith can at least be traced to the time of Amenhotep III, who named a royal boat as well as a Theban palace after Aten. (The name “aten” had simply been a word meaning “sun” until Amenhotep III’s father elevated Aten to the status of a deity.) Amenhotep III’s primary devotion, however, was to Amun-Ra, a combination of Thebes’ deity Amun and the northern Egyptian sun god Ra. According to an inscription describing the pharaoh’s conception, Amun disguised himself as Thutmose IV and entered the queen’s bedchamber. The god’s alluring aroma woke her, “and then the majesty of this god did all that he desired with her.” By claiming Amun as his father, Amenhotep III “tried to show himself as close to a god as any pharaoh before him,” says Bryan.

While Amenhotep III accepted the traditional view that all gods are aspects of the same divine essence, there are hints that a theological split was already in the offing. Bryan notes that some inscriptions from the pharaoh’s mortuary temple mention only Aten.

Other Egyptologists point out that Akhenaten tolerated other gods and seems to have had it in just for Amun. Some believe that in erasing Amun, Akhenaten may have wanted to bring more order to a confusing pantheon. Others think he was battling the political power of a wealthy priesthood. And then there are more psychoanalytic interpretations—that he either worshiped his father as Aten or rebelled against his father’s devotion to Amun. Ray Johnson of the University of Chicago sees a link between the sculptures and friezes of Amenhotep III’s reign and the naturalistic art of Akhenaten’s time, and he and others suggest that father and son shared the throne for some years before the father’s death at around age 50. “We don’t get motivations” in the surviving texts, says John Baines of Oxford University. “It’s very unwise to think we know enough to be sure.”

Still, Akhenaten’s eradication of Amun’s name and images throughout Egypt “has all the signs of a true extremist,” says Bryan. In any case, his vision didn’t survive him. After Akhenaten’s death, masons again entered Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple. They recarved Amun’s name, and while they were at it, they erased all mention of Akhenaten.

Anthropologist Amber VanDerwarker is unraveling the mysteries of the ancient Olmec by figuring out what they ate

Starting around 1200 B.C., in southern Mexico, the Olmec created what most scholars agree was the first New World civilization, building large cities with monumental architecture, carving reliefs of animal gods, and trading raw materials and finished goods across hundreds of miles. The later Maya and Aztec left behind copious evidence of their culture in the form of monuments, paintings and engraved writings. But few clues about Olmec society, which collapsed around 400 B.C., have survived in the damp lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s why Amber VanDerwarker is bent at her microscope, poring over 3,000-year-old fish bones and burned plant matter. A 33-year-old anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, she is sifting through the meagerest traces of the Olmec’s world to focus on what ordinary people planted, hunted and ate—intriguing new evidence of how, when and why civilization emerged in the New World. Unlike her predecessors, who focused on dramatic but mysterious remains such as the massive stone heads made by the Olmec in their major cities, she believes that the best way to understand this ancient civilization is to carefully examine the mundane habits of those who lived outside the bustling cities.

“She is part of a new guard that is beginning to ask more fundamental questions about how people lived in the past,” says colleague Philip Arnold of Loyola University in Chicago. “Amber offers a perspective that was clearly missing—a focus on the day-to-day activities of people.”

VanDerwarker has long had a knack for the telling detail. Growing up mostly in Virginia—her father was an Air Force technician, her mother a bookkeeper—Amber wanted to be a novelist. She still writes poetry on the side. At the University of Oklahoma, she changed career tracks after taking a course in cultural anthropology. Conducting fieldwork at Cahokia in Illinois, the largest site associated with the Mound Builders of North America, she saw that though it offered little in the way of dramatic artifacts, the site was rich in the remains of daily life. Between 1999 and 2002, while she was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she examined plant and bone remains that Arnold and another archaeologist uncovered from two small sites in the volcanic Tuxtla region that was on the outskirts of Olmec territory but north of the city centers. “I hit pay dirt,” VanDerwarker recalls.

Amber VanDerwarker (taking notes on an excavation unit at the site of Tres Zapotes, in southern Veracruz, Mexico) discovered the menu of Olmec rank and file. - Benito Venegas, Courtesy of Christopher Pool

What they found suggests that the Olmecs differed from early peoples in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, where the growth of urban centers was closely tied to a single grain—wheat, barley and rice, respectively—and central powers coordinated vast networks of fields and farmers. Most researchers had assumed that it was the cultivation of maize that made the Olmec prosper.

On the contrary, say VanDerwarker and her colleagues, who identified an astonishing array of foods in the Olmec diet—from deer, ocelots, rabbits and turtles to beans, avocados and tree fruits. For several centuries, because the Olmec lived with what she calls “an abundance of resources,” they even managed plots of fruit trees. Animals drawn to such forest gardens would have been easy to hunt. (The Olmecs focused on maize cultivation only in their civilization’s later years.)

In her recent book, Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World, VanDerwarker provides solid data to back up the contention that the Olmec were pursuing a way of life radically different from the first civilizations in Africa and Asia. But she is not without her critics. Some scholars of Mesoamerica, noting that VanDerwarker’s work is mostly in the Olmec hinterlands, say it sheds little light on how those nearer the culture’s core lived. VanDerwarker responds that “understanding past societies does not mean just looking at the elites, at pretty monuments, at temples and altars.” For her, the key to the Olmec is how they lived in villages and hamlets far from cities. “We certainly can’t understand our own society,” she says, “by narrowing our focus to Donald TrumpParis Hilton.” or

Two thousand years ago, it was the capital of a powerful trading empire. Now archaeologists are piecing together a more complete picture of Jordan’s compelling rock city

“Donkey, horse or camel?” The question from my Bedouin guide reminds me of a rental car agent asking, “Economy, full-size or SUV?” I choose economy, and we canter on our donkeys through the steep valleys that surround Petra, in Jordan, as the rock changes from red to ocher to orange and back to red. Two millennia ago our now deserted track was a well-engineered caravan route, bustling with itinerant traders on foot, Roman soldiers on horseback and rich merchants on camels.

Directly ahead is a sheer cliff lined with elegant carvings reminiscent of Greek and Roman temples, a surreal vision in this remote mountain valley surrounded by desert. This is the back door to Petra, whose very name means rock in Greek. In its heyday, which began in the first century B.C. and lasted for about 400 years, Petra was one of the world’s wealthiest, most eclectic and most remarkable cities. That was when the Nabatean people carved the most impressive of their monumental structures directly into the soft red stone. The facades were all that remained when 19th-century travelers arrived here and concluded that Petra was an eerie and puzzling city of tombs.

Now, however, archaeologists are discovering that ancient Petra was a sprawling city of lush gardens and pleasant fountains, enormous temples and luxurious Roman-style villas. An ingenious water supply system allowed Petrans not just to drink and bathe, but to grow wheat, cultivate fruit, make wine and stroll in the shade of tall trees. During the centuries just before and after Christ, Petra was the Middle East’s premier emporium, a magnet for caravans traveling the roads from Egypt, Arabia and the Levant. And scholars now know that Petra thrived for nearly 1,000 years, far longer than previously suspected.

Our donkeys slow as we approach Petra’s largest free-standing building, the Great Temple. Unlike the hollowed-out caves in the cliffs surrounding the site, this complex stood on solid ground and covered an area more than twice the size of a football field. My guide, Suleiman Mohammad, points to a cloud of dust on one side of the temple, where I find Martha Sharp Joukowsky deep in a pit with a dozen workers. The Brown University archaeologist—known as “Dottora (doctor) Marta” to three generations of Bedouin workers—has spent the past 15 years excavating and partially restoring the Great Temple complex. Constructed during the first century B.C. and the first century A.D., it included a 600-seat theater, a triple colonnade, an enormous paved courtyard and vaulted rooms underneath. Artifacts found at the site—from tiny Nabatean coins to chunks of statues—number in the hundreds of thousands.

As I climb down into the trench, it feels as if I’m entering a battlefield. Amid the heat and the dust, Joukowsky is commanding the excavators like a general, an impression reinforced by her khaki clothes and the gold insignias on the bill of her baseball cap. “Yalla, yalla!” she yells happily at the Bedouin workers in dig-Arabic. “Get to work, get to work!” This is Joukowsky’s last season—at age 70, she’s preparing to retire—and she has no time to waste. They’ve just stumbled on a bathing area built in the second and third centuries a.d., and the discovery is complicating her plans to wrap up the season’s research. A worker hands her a piece of Roman glass and a tiny pottery rosette. She pauses to admire them, sets them aside for cataloging, then continues barking at the diggers as they pass rubber buckets filled with dirt out of the trench. It is nearing midafternoon, the sun is scorching, the dust choking and the workday almost over. “I wanted to finish this two days ago, but I’m still stuck in this mess,” Joukowsky says in mock exasperation, pointing to dark piles of cinders from wood and other fuel burned to heat the bath water of Petra’s elite. “I’m ending my career in a heap of ash.”

A church used until the seventh century A.D. and excavated in the 1990s (Lamb Medallion from Byzantine floor mosai) contained papyrus scrolls that attest to Petra’s longevity. Lindsay Hebberd / Corbis

Earlier archaeologists considered the Great Temple an unsalvageable pile of stones, but Joukowsky proved otherwise by attacking the project with a vigor she likely inherited from her parents. Her father, a Unitarian minister, and mother, a social worker, left Massachusetts to spend the years before, during and after World War II rescuing and resettling thousands of Jews and anti-Nazi dissidents. When the Gestapo shut down their operation in Prague, the couple barely escaped arrest. While they moved through war-ravaged Europe, their young daughter Martha lived with friends in the United States. Even after the war, her parents remained committed social activists. “They would be in Darfur were they here now,” Joukowsky says. “Maybe as a result, I chose to concentrate on the past—I really find more comfort in the past than in the present.”

She took up archaeology with gusto, working for three decades at various sites in the Near East and publishing the widely-used A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology, among other books. But Petra is her most ambitious project. Beginning in the early 1990s, she assembled a loyal team of Bedouin, students from Brown and donors from around the world and orchestrated the Herculean task of carefully mapping the site, raising fallen columns and walls and preserving the ancient culture’s artifacts.

When she began her work, Petra was little more than an exotic tourist destination in a country too poor to finance excavations. Archaeologists had largely ignored the site—on the fringe of the Roman Empire—and only 2 percent of the ancient city had been uncovered. Since then, Joukowsky’s team, along with a Swiss team and another American effort, have laid bare what once was the political, religious and social heart of the metropolis, putting to rest forever the idea that this was merely a city of tombs.

One of the few entryways into Petra is a narrow passage, the Siq, at the end of which Petrans carved elaborate monuments into the soft rock. – Lonely Planet Images

No one knows where the Nabateans came from. Around 400 B.C., the Arab tribe swept into the mountainous region nestled between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas and the Mediterranean Sea. At first, they lived simple nomadic lives, eking out a living with flocks of sheep and goats and perhaps small-scale agriculture. They left little for future archaeologists—not even broken pottery.

The Nabateans developed a writing system—ultimately the basis of written Arabic—though the inscriptions they left in Petra and elsewhere are mostly names of people and places and are not particularly revealing of their beliefs, history or daily lives. Scholars have had to use Greek and Roman sources to fill in the picture. Greeks in the decades after Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C. complained about Nabateans plundering ships and camel caravans. Scholars believe that such raids whetted the Nabateans’ appetite for wealth. Eventually, instead of attacking caravans, the raiders began guarding them—for a price. By the second century B.C., Nabateans dominated the incense trade from southern Arabia. Within several decades, they had assembled a mercantile empire stretching for hundreds of miles. The people who a few generations earlier had been nomads were now producing eggshell-thin pottery, among the finest in the ancient world, as well as grand architecture.

By 100 B.C., the tribe had a king, vast wealth and a rapidly expanding capital city. Camels lumbered into Petra with boxes of frankincense and myrrh from Oman, sacks of spices from India and bolts of cloth from Syria. Such wealth would have attracted raiders, but Petra’s mountains and high walls protected the traders once they arrived in the city. The Siq, a twisting 1,000-yard-long canyon that in places is just wide enough for two camels to pass, made the eastern part of the city impregnable. Today it serves as Petra’s main entryway. It may be the most dramatic entrance to an urban space ever devised. In ancient times, though, the primary entrance into Petra was likely the road by which I came by donkey.

Writing early in the first century A.D., the Greek historian Strabo reported that while foreigners in Petra are “frequently engaged in litigation,” the locals “had never any dispute among themselves, and lived together in perfect harmony.” Dubious as that may sound, we do know that the Nabateans were unusual in the ancient world for their abhorrence of slavery, for the prominent role women played in political life and for an egalitarian approach to governing. Joukowsky suggests that the large theater in the Great Temple that she partially restored may have been used for council meetings accommodating hundreds of citizens.

Strabo, however, scorns the Nabateans as poor soldiers and as “hucksters and merchants” who are “fond of accumulating property” through the trade of gold, silver, incense, brass, iron, saffron, sculpture, paintings and purple garments. And they took their prosperity seriously: he notes that those merchants whose income dropped may have been fined by the government. All that wealth eventually caught the attention of Rome, a major consumer of incense for religious rites and spices for medicinal purposes and food preparation. Rome annexed Nabatea in A.D. 106, apparently without a fight.

In its prime, Petra was one of the most lavish cities in history—more Las Vegas than Athens. Accustomed to tents, the early Nabateans had no significant building traditions, so with their sudden disposable income they drew on styles ranging from Greek to Egyptian to Mesopotamian to Indian—hence the columns at the Great Temple topped with Asian elephant heads. “They borrowed from everybody,” says Christopher A. Tuttle, a Brown graduate student working with Joukowsky.

One of Petra’s mysteries is why the Nabateans plowed so much of their wealth into carving their remarkable facades and caves, which lasted long after the city’s free-standing buildings collapsed from earthquakes and neglect. The soft stone cliffs made it possible to hollow out caves and sculpt elaborate porticoes, which the Nabateans painted, presumably in garish colors. Some caves, Tuttle says, were tombs—more than 800 have been identified—and others were places for family members to gather periodically for a meal memorializing the dead; still others were used for escaping the summer’s heat.

At its peak, Petra’s population was about 30,000, an astonishing density made possible in the arid climate by clever engineering. Petrans carved channels through solid rock, gathering winter rains into hundreds of vast cisterns for use in the dry summers. Many are still used today by the Bedouin. Tuttle leads me up the hill above the temple and points out one such cistern, a massive hand-hewn affair that could hold a small beach cottage. Channels dug into the rock on either side of the canyon, then covered with stone, sent water hurtling to cisterns near the center of town. “There are abundant springs of water both for domestic purposes and for watering gardens,” Strabo wrote circa A.D. 22. Steep hillsides were converted to terraced vineyards, and irrigated orchards provided fresh fruits, probably pomegranates, figs and dates.

Traders from Egypt and Greece traveled the city’s main road, once spectacularly colonnaded. – Gil Giuglio / Hemis / Corbis

The pricier real estate was on the hill behind the temple, well above the hubbub of the main thoroughfare and with sweeping views to the north and south. Tuttle points out piles of rubble that once were free-standing houses, shops and neighborhood temples. A Swiss team recently uncovered, near the crest, an impressive Roman-style villa complete with an elaborate bath, an olive press and frescoes in the style of Pompeii. At the base of the hill, adjacent to the Great Temple, Leigh-Ann Bedal, a former student of Joukowsky’s now at Pennsylvania State University in Erie, uncovered the remains of a large garden. Complete with pools, shade trees, bridges and a lavish pavilion, the lush space—possibly a public park—is thought to have been unique in the southern part of the Middle East. It resembles the private ornamental gardens built to the north in Judea by Herod the Great, who lived until 4 B.C. Herod’s mother, in fact, was Nabatean, and he spent his early years in Petra.

By the fourth century A.D., Petra was entering its decline. Joukowsky takes me on a tour of the newfound spa, which includes marble-lined walls and floors, lead pipes and odd-shaped stalls that might have been toilets, all indications of prosperity. But the growing sea trade to the south had sucked away business, while rival caravan cities to the north such as Palmyra challenged Petra’s dominance by land. Then, on May 19, A.D. 363, a massive earthquake and a powerful aftershock rumbled through the area. A Jerusalem bishop noted in a letter that “nearly half” of Petra was destroyed by the seismic shock.

Scholars long assumed the catastrophe marked the end of the city, but archaeologists have found abundant evidence that Petra remained inhabited, and even prospered, for another three centuries or so. Almost 100 years after the earthquake, local Christians built a basilica now famed for its beautiful and intact mosaics of animals—including the camel, which made Petra’s wealth possible—just across the main street from the Great Temple. Some 150 scrolls—discovered when the church was excavated in 1993—reveal a vibrant community well into the seventh century A.D., after which the church and, apparently, most of the city was finally abandoned.

Forgotten for a millennium in its desert fastness, Petra reemerged in the 19th century as an exotic destination for Western travelers. The first, Swiss adventurer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, visited in 1812 when it was still dangerous to be a foreign Christian deep within the Ottoman Empire. Disguised as a Persian pilgrim, he marveled at Petra’s wonders but could not linger, since his curiosity aroused the suspicions of his local guides. “Great must have been the opulence of a city which could dedicate such monuments to the memory of its rulers,” he wrote. “Future travelers may visit the spot under the protection of an armed force; the inhabitants will become more accustomed to the researches of strangers, and then antiquities…will then be found to rank among the most curious remains of ancient art.”

Petra has lately fulfilled that prophesy. It is now Jordan’s top tourist destination, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Hollywood’s Indiana Jones sought the Holy Grail in one of Petra’s caves in a 1989 film, dramatizing the site for a worldwide audience. The 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel made mass tourism possible. Foreigners began coming to Petra, and devout Jews began making pilgrimages to nearby Jebel Haroun, which, according to tradition, is the site of the prophet Aaron’s tomb. The nearby village of Wadi Musa has been transformed from a straggling collection of run-down mud-brick houses into a boomtown of hotels (the Cleopetra) and stores (the Indiana Jones Gift Shop). Petra is also a top contender in an international contest to name the New Seven Wonders of the World. Candidates were nominated by a panel of experts, and winners will be chosen by votes. (You can vote online at new7wonders.com.) Winners are scheduled to be announced next month.

Despite all the publicity and the parade of tourists, much of Petra remains untouched by archaeologists, hidden under thick layers of debris and sand built up over the centuries. No one has found the sites of the busy marketplaces that must have dotted Petra. And although local inscriptions indicate that the Nabateans worshiped a main god, sometimes called Dushara, and a main goddess, the Nabateans’ religion otherwise remains mysterious.

So while the work by Joukowsky’s team has revealed much about ancient Petra, it will be up to a new generation of researchers like Tuttle to tackle the many rubble piles—and mysteries—that still dot the city’s landscape. “We really know next to nothing about the Nabateans,” says Tuttle as he surveys the forbidding landscape. “I hope to spend most of my professional life here.”

Tuttle and his colleagues will be assisted by Bedouin skilled in uncovering and reassembling the past. Bedouins lived in Nabatean caves for at least a century, until the 1980s when the government pressured most to move to a concrete settlement outside the ancient city to make way for visitors who come to explore the site. My guide, Suleiman Mohammad—who worked at the Great Temple before switching to the more lucrative tourist trade and who married a Swiss tourist—tells me he is grateful to have so many foreign visitors. But not all Bedouin are so lucky, he says. In the harsh country outside Petra, he points to a group far out in the desert: “They have no shoes, wear tattered clothes, and just have goats—there are no tourists out there!”

Suleiman invited the excavation team and me to dinner at his home that night. He greeted us warmly, and we climbed to the roof to enjoy the sunset. The red sun softens the ugly concrete village. Returning downstairs, we sat on cushions and ate from a large platter of traditional maglouba, clumping the rice into lumps with our hands and relishing the warm chicken. It was Thursday night, the start of the Arab weekend, and after dinner a young American and a Bedouin arm-wrestled to great laughter and shouting. Outside, the large waning moon rose and, far below, the red rock of Petra turned to silver in the soft desert night.

Andrew Lawler wrote about the archaeology of Alexandria in the April issue of Smithsonian. He avoids riding camels.

Andrew Lawler, author of “Raising Alexandria” talks about the hidden history of Egypt’s fabled seaside capital

* By Amy Crawford

You say that Jean Yves Empereur looks like a literary figure from Forster’s day. In your last story for us you described Egyptologist Otto Schaden as a neo-Victorian. Does archaeology draw these characters, or are you drawn to them as a writer?
Both. But archaeology doesn’t draw people who want to live comfortable lives in suburbs and stay home and commute to work every day. These are people who do tend to be eccentrics. Or mavericks.

It also sounds as if they’d like to live in the past.
Yes, although with Empereur it was interesting. Many archeologists come across as 21st century scientists who are completely focused on getting data. But Empereur is not only a good modern archaeologist, he also had an amazing feel for the cultural history. That’s what struck me: he’s somebody who feels very passionate not just about ancient Alexandria and the glory that it once was, but he also appreciates the more recent past and the way the city has transformed over the millennia.

In his book Alexandria: Jewel of Egypt, he writes not just about ancient Alexandria but also about the literary figures and the role that they played in the last century in making Alexandria the kind of city it is, a city of the mind that was created by poets and writers who descended on the place. Most of them were colonials in the sense that they were French, Greek or British. The Egyptian story has been less told, although there are a couple of good novels from the Egyptian perspective, which are often forgotten.

For you, did Alexandria feel markedly different from other ancient cities—more cosmopolitan, perhaps?
Well, I have to be a little personal. I read The Alexandria Quartet in my 20s, and I completely fell in love with Lawrence Durrell’s mesmerizing vision of a diverse, polyglot, exciting Mediterranean city with a rich past that is almost invisible. Unlike Rome, it’s not a place where you go and see monuments; you have to use your imagination. I was interested in writing this story because I had been drawn to Durrell’s novels and had a fascination with the library and the Pharos when I was much younger. It was a great chance to go and get a feel for this place that exists so much in the mind but is still a real, thriving cosmopolitan city.

Was Alexandria what you had expected?
It was more than I expected. The city felt inhabited by so many layers, so many ghosts from so many eras, and yet was also a thoroughly modern Egyptian city. So it was an unusual combination of past, present and future. It’s all very rich. I spent a lot of time simply walking the streets, walking around without focusing too much on maps or guidebooks, just wandering because I know in Forster’s book he and others have talked about the value of simply wandering the streets of Alexandria. You can really get a feel for the different kinds of architecture and the different eras.

Did you come across anything interesting in your wanderings?
I went to the area around Pompey’s Pillar, which is one of the only places where ancient Alexandria still exists. Down the street there are these magnificent catacombs. You go down this spiral stair, down and down, deep under the earth, and there are these enormous caverns where early Christians buried their dead. There are maybe a few schoolchildren, but really not very many other people. It gives such a feel for what is literally under the surface in Alexandria. Up above, you have an overcrowded, somewhat decaying old port city that at the same time is becoming more prosperous, and there are a lot of new buildings going up now. But underneath the surface, there’s an amazing history that has not gotten that much attention, in contrast to Rome or Athens. Alexandria ranks among the most important cities of the ancient world, and yet its past has been largely ignored.

Did you discover anything unexpected?
One evening I met up with a Greek archaeologist named Harry Tzalas—he didn’t make it into the story—who has been doing some diving for ancient shipwrecks and ship anchors in the waters near Alexandria. We wound up going to this boat club, and downstairs were these beautiful long sculls which were used in the early Olympics. Up until the 1920s, Greece actually had rowing teams funded and made up of Alexandrian Greeks, because it was a very prosperous community then. That was yet another layer of history.

Will Empereur be successful in drawing international tourists?
He has big plans, but whether or not they can find the funding is up in the air. Tourists in Egypt have been to Luxor, Aswan, Giza, places that have some of the most magnificent ruins in the world. Alexandria is unluckily sited near to them. I think Empereur really does feel passionately about the city, and he wants to build museums to share that passion. Most archeologists either don’t care about tourism or they find it mildly annoying at best. But Empereur really wants to put Alexandria on the map.

You’ve seen all those other ruins—how did Alexandria compare for you?
Having been to those other ancient places in Egypt, the feeling of Alexandria was more evocative of the ancient world than anywhere else. It is a seaport, and you see ships coming in and out. It’s a very lively and active city, as no doubt it was 2000 years ago. You can’t say the same for places like Luxor, which are beautiful but lack the color and the feeling of liveliness which once pervaded them. I liked Alexandria because there were fewer tourists. And nobody was trying to hawk you anything.

More than 2,000 years after Alexander the Great founded Alexandria, archaeologists are discovering its fabled remains

There’s no sign of the grand marbled metropolis founded by Alexander the Great on the busy streets of this congested Egyptian city of five million, where honking cars spouting exhaust whiz by shabby concrete buildings. But climb down a rickety ladder a few blocks from Alexandria’s harbor, and the legendary city suddenly looms into view.

Down here, standing on wooden planks stretching across a vast underground chamber, the French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur points out Corinthian capitals, Egyptian lotus-shaped columns and solid Roman bases holding up elegant stone arches. He picks his way across the planks in this ancient cistern, which is three stories deep and so elaborately constructed that it seems more like a cathedral than a water supply system. The cistern was built more than a thousand years ago with pieces of already-ancient temples and churches. Beneath him, one French and one Egyptian worker are examining the stonework with flashlights. Water drips, echoing. “We supposed old Alexandria was destroyed,” Empereur says, his voice bouncing off the damp smooth walls, “only to realize that when you walk on the sidewalks, it is just below your feet.”

The statue of an Isis priest holding an Osiris jar. It was found on the sunken island of Antirhodos in the ancient harbor of Alexandria. The statue is made from black granite. © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation, photo: Christoph Gerigk

With all its lost grandeur, Alexandria has long held poets and writers in thrall, from E. M. Forster, author of a 1922 guide to the city’s vanished charms, to the British novelist Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet, published in the late 1950s, is a bittersweet paean to the haunted city. But archaeologists have tended to give Alexandria the cold shoulder, preferring the more accessible temples of Greece and the rich tombs along the Nile. “There is nothing to hope for at Alexandria,” the English excavator D. G. Hogarth cautioned after a fruitless dig in the 1890s. “You classical archaeologists, who have found so much in Greece or in Asia Minor, forget this city.”

Hogarth was spectacularly wrong. Empereur and other scientists are now uncovering astonishing artifacts and rediscovering the architectural sublimity, economic muscle and intellectual dominance of an urban center that ranked second only to ancient Rome. What may be the world’s oldest surviving university complex has come to light, along with one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Pharos, the 440-foot-high lighthouse that guided ships safely into the Great Harbour for nearly two millennia. And researchers in wet suits probing the harbor floor are mapping the old quays and the fabled royal quarter, including, just possibly, the palace of that most beguiling of all Alexandrians, Cleopatra. The discoveries are transforming vague legends about Alexandria into proof of its profound influence on the ancient world.

“I’m not interested in mysteries, but in evidence,” Empereur says later in his comfortable study lined with 19th-century prints. Wearing a yellow ascot and tweed jacket, he seems a literary figure from Forster’s day. But his Center for Alexandrian Studies, located in a drab modern high-rise, bustles with graduate students clacking on computers and diligently cataloging artifacts in the small laboratory.

Empereur first visited Alexandria more than 30 years ago while teaching linguistics in Cairo. “It was a sleepy town then,” he recalls. “Sugar and meat were rationed, it was a war economy; there was no money for building.” Only when the city’s fortunes revived in the early 1990s and Alexandria began sprouting new office and apartment buildings did archaeologists realize how much of the ancient city lay undiscovered below 19th-century constructions. By then Empereur was an archaeologist with long experience digging in Greece; he watched in horror as developers hauled away old columns and potsherds and dumped them in nearby Lake Mariout. “I realized we were in a new period—a time to rescue what we could.”

A diver uses a differential underwater GPS to locate the exact position of a sphinx representing Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII.© Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation, photo: Jérôme Delafosse

The forgotten cisterns of Alexandria were in particular danger of being filled in by new construction. During ancient times, a canal from the Nile diverted floodwater from the great river to fill a network of hundreds, if not thousands, of underground chambers, which were expanded, rebuilt and renovated. Most were built after the fourth century, and their engineers made liberal use of the magnificent stone columns and blocks from aboveground ruins.

Few cities in the ancient or medieval world could boast of such a sophisticated water system. “Underneath the streets and houses, the whole city is hollow,” reported Flemish traveler Guillebert de Lannoy in 1422. The granite-and-marble Alexandria that the poets thought long gone still survives, and Empereur hopes to open a visitors center for one of the cisterns to show something of Alexandria’s former glory.

The Alexandria of Alexandrias

At the order of the brash general who conquered half of Asia, Alexandria—like Athena out of Zeus’ head—leapt nearly full grown into existence. On an April day in 331 B.C., on his way to an oracle in the Egyptian desert before he set off to subdue Persia, Alexander envisioned a metropolis linking Greece and Egypt. Avoiding the treacherous mouth of the Nile, with its shifting currents and unstable shoreline, he chose a site 20 miles west of the great river, on a narrow spit of land between the sea and a lake. He paced out the city limits of his vision: ten miles of walls and a grid pattern of streets, some as wide as 100 feet. The canal dug to the Nile provided both fresh water and transport to Egypt’s rich interior, with its endless supply of grain, fruit, stone and skilled laborers. For nearly a millennium, Alexandria was the Mediterranean’s bustling center of trade.

A marble head depicting the Roman princess Antonia Minor, mother of Emperor Claudius.© Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation, photo: Christoph Gerigk

But less than a decade after he founded it, Alexander’s namesake became his tomb. Following Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323 B.C., his canny general Ptolemy—who had been granted control of Egypt—stole the dead conqueror’s body before it reached Macedonia, Alexander’s birthplace. Ptolemy built a lavish structure around the corpse, thereby ensuring his own legitimacy and creating one of the world’s first major tourist attractions.

Ptolemy, already rich from his Asian conquests and now controlling Egypt’s vast wealth, embarked on one of the most astonishing building sprees in history. The Pharos, soaring more than 40 stories above the harbor and lit at night (no one knows exactly how), served the purpose of guiding ships to safety, but it also told arriving merchants and politicians that this was a place to be reckoned with. The city’s wealth and power were underscored by the temples, wide colonnaded streets, public baths, massive gymnasium and, of course, Alexander’s tomb.

Though schooled in war, Ptolemy proved to be a great patron of intellectual life. He founded the Mouseion, a research institute with lecture halls, laboratories and guest rooms for visiting scholars. Archimedes and Euclid worked on mathematics and physics problems here, and it was also here that the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos determined that the sun was the center of the solar system.

Ptolemy’s son added Alexandria’s famous library to the Mouseion complex. The first chief of the library, Eratosthenes, measured the earth’s circumference to an accuracy within a few hundred miles. The library contained an unparalleled collection of scrolls thanks to a government edict mandating that foreign ships hand over scrolls for copying.

And the ships arrived from all directions. Some sailing on the monsoon winds imported silks and spices from the western coast of India via the Red Sea; the valuable cargo was then taken overland to the Mediterranean for transport to Alexandria. One ship alone in the third century B.C. carried 60 cases of aromatic plants, 100 tons of elephant tusks and 135 tons of ebony in a single voyage. Theaters, bordellos, villas and warehouses sprang up. Ptolemy granted Jews their own neighborhood, near the royal quarter, while Greeks, Phoenicians, Nabateans, Arabs and Nubians rubbed shoulders on the quays and in the marketplaces.

The go-go era of the Ptolemies ended with the death, in 30 B.C., of the last Ptolemy ruler, Cleopatra. Like her ancestors, she ruled Egypt from the royal quarter fronting the harbor. Rome turned Egypt into a colony after her death, and Alexandria became its funnel for grain. Violence between pagans and Christians, and among the many Christian sects, scarred the city in the early Christian period.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, Alexandria’s 40-story lighthouse, the Pharos, dated from c. 283 B.C. It fell into ruin in the 1300s.PoodlesRock / Corbis

When Arab conquerors arrived in the seventh century A.D., they built a new capital at Cairo. But Alexandria’s commercial and intellectual life continued until medieval times. The Arab traveler Ibn Battuta rhapsodized in 1326 that “Alexandria is a jewel of manifest brilliance, and a virgin decked out with glittering ornaments” where “every wonder is displayed for all eyes to see, and there all rare things arrive.” Soon after, however, the canal from Alexandria to the Nile filled in, and the battered Pharos tumbled into the sea.

By the time Napoleon landed at Alexandria as a first stop on his ill-fated campaign to subdue Egypt, in 1798, only a few ancient monuments and columns were still standing. Two decades later, Egypt’s brutal and progressive new ruler—Mohammad Ali—chose Alexandria as his link to the expanding West. European-style squares were laid out, the port grew, the canal reopened.

For more than a century, Alexandria boomed as a trade center, and it served as Egypt’s capital whenever the Cairo court fled the summer heat. Greek, Jewish and Syrian communities existed alongside European enclaves. The British—Egypt’s new colonial rulers—as well as the French and Italians built fashionable mansions and frequented the cafés on the trendy corniche along the harbor. Though Egyptians succeeded in throwing off colonial rule, independence would prove to be Alexandria’s undoing. When President Nasser—himself an Alexandrian—rose to power in the 1950s, the government turned its back on a city that seemed almost foreign. The international community fled, and Alexandria slipped once again into obscurity.

The First Skyscraper

The rediscovery of ancient Alexandria began 14 years ago, when Empereur went for a swim. He had joined an Egyptian documentary film crew that wanted to work underwater near the 15th-century fort of Qait Bey, now a museum and tourist site. The Egyptian Navy had raised a massive statue from the area in the 1960s, and Empereur and the film crew thought the waters would be worth exploring. Most scholars believed that the Pharos had stood nearby, and that some of the huge stone blocks that make up the fortress may have come from its ruins.

No one knows exactly what the Pharos looked like. Literary references and sketches from ancient times describe a structure that rose from a vast rectangular base—itself a virtual skyscraper—topped by a smaller octagonal section, then a cylindrical section, culminating in a huge statue, probably of Poseidon or Zeus. Scholars say the Pharos, completed about 283 B.C., dwarfed all other human structures of its era. It survived an astonishing 17 centuries before collapsing in the mid-1300s.

It was a calm spring day when Empereur and cinematographer Asma el-Bakri, carrying a bulky 35-millimeter camera, slipped beneath the waters near the fort, which had been seldom explored because the military had put the area off limits. Empereur was stunned as he swam amid hundreds of building stones and shapes that looked like statues and columns. The sight, he recalls, made him dizzy.

But after coming out of the water, he and el-Bakri watched in horror as a barge crane lowered 20-ton concrete blocks into the waters just off Qait Bey to reinforce the breakwater near where they had been filming. El-Bakri pestered government officials until they agreed to halt the work, but not before some 3,600 tons of concrete had been unloaded, crushing many artifacts. Thanks to el-Bakri’s intervention, Empereur—who had experience examining Greek shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea—found himself back in diving gear, conducting a detailed survey of thousands of relics.

One column had a diameter of 7.5 feet. Corinthian capitals, obelisks and huge stone sphinxes littered the seafloor. Curiously, half a dozen columns carved in the Egyptian style had markings dating back to Ramses II, nearly a millennium before Alexandria was founded. The Greek rulers who built Alexandria had taken ancient Egyptian monuments from along the Nile to provide gravitas for their nouveau riche city. Empereur and his team also found a colossal statue, obviously of a pharaoh, similar to one the Egyptian Navy had raised in 1961. He believes the pair represent Ptolemy I and his wife, Berenice I, presiding over a nominally Greek city. With their bases, the statues would have stood 40 feet tall.

The 1400s Qait Bey fort was likely built from the rubble of Alexandria’s 40-story lighthouse.Picture Contact / Alamy

Over the years, Empereur and his co-workers have photographed, mapped and cataloged more than 3,300 surviving pieces on the seafloor, including many columns, 30 sphinxes and five obelisks. He estimates that another 2,000 objects still need cataloging. Most will remain safely underwater, Egyptian officials say.

Underwater Palaces

Franck Goddio is an urbane diver who travels the world examining shipwrecks, from a French slave ship to a Spanish galleon. He and Empereur are rivals—there are rumors of legal disputes between them and neither man will discuss the other—and in the early 1990s Goddio began to work on the other side of Alexandria’s harbor, opposite the fortress. He discovered columns, statues, sphinxes and ceramics associated with the Ptolemies’ royal quarter—possibly even the palace of Cleopatra herself. In 2008, Goddio and his team located the remains of a monumental structure, 328 feet long and 230 feet wide, as well as a finger from a bronze statue that Goddio estimates would have stood 13 feet tall.

Perhaps most significant, he has found that much of ancient Alexandria sank beneath the waves and remains remarkably intact. Using sophisticated sonar instruments and global positioning equipment, and working with scuba divers, Goddio has discerned the outline of the old port’s shoreline. The new maps reveal foundations of wharves, storehouses and temples as well as the royal palaces that formed the core of the city, now buried under Alexandrian sand. Radiocarbon dating of wooden planks and other excavated material shows evidence of human activity from the fourth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. At a recent meeting of scholars at Oxford University, the detailed topographical map Goddio projected of the harbor floor drew gasps. “A ghost from the past is being brought back to life,” he proclaimed.

But how had the city sunk? Working with Goddio, geologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History examined dozens of drilled cores of sediment from the harbor depths. He determined that the edge of the ancient city had slid into the sea over the course of centuries because of a deadly combination of earthquakes, a tsunami and slow subsidence.

On August 21, in A.D. 365, the sea suddenly drained out of the harbor, ships keeled over, fish flopped in the sand. Townspeople wandered into the weirdly emptied space. Then, a massive tsunami surged into the city, flinging water and ships over the tops of Alexandria’s houses, according to a contemporaneous description by Ammianus Marcellinus based on eyewitness accounts. That disaster, which may have killed 50,000 people in Alexandria alone, ushered in a two-century period of seismic activity and rising sea levels that radically altered the Egyptian coastline.

Ongoing investigation of sediment cores, conducted by Stanley and his colleagues, has shed new light on the chronology of human settlement here. “We’re finding,” he says, “that at some point, back to 3,000 years ago, there is no question that this area was occupied.”

The Lecture Circuit

Early Christians threatened Alexandria’s scholarly culture; they viewed pagan philosophers and learning with suspicion, if not enmity. Shortly after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, in A.D. 380, theological schools sprang up around the Mediterranean to counter pagan influence. Christian mobs played some part in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; the exact causes and dates of assaults on the library are still hotly disputed. And in A.D. 415, Christian monks kidnapped and tortured to death the female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, long considered the last of the great pagan intellects. Most historians assumed that Alexandria’s learned glow dimmed as the new religion gained power.

Yet now there is evidence that intellectual life in Alexandria not only continued after Hypatia’s death but flourished more than a century later, apparently for Christian and pagan scholars alike. Less than a mile from the sunken remnants of the royal quarters, in the middle of Alexandria’s busy, modern downtown, Polish excavators have uncovered 20 lecture halls dating to the late fifth or sixth century A.D.—the first physical remains of a major center of le

One warm November day, Grzegorz Majcherek, of Warsaw University, directs a power shovel that is expanding an earthen ramp into a pit. A stocky man in sunglasses, he is probing the only major piece of undeveloped land within the ancient city’s walls. Its survival is the product of happenstance. Napoleon’s troops built a fort here in 1798, which was enlarged by the British and used by Egyptian forces until the late 1950s. During the past dozen years, Majcherek has been uncovering Roman villas, complete with colorful mosaics, which offer the first glimpses into everyday, private life in ancient Alexandria.

As the shovel bites into the crumbly soil, showering the air with fine dust, Majcherek points out a row of rectangular halls. Each has a separate entrance into the street and horseshoe-shaped stone bleachers. The neat rows of rooms lie on a portico between the Greek theater and the Roman baths. Majcherek estimates that the halls, which he and his team have excavated in the past few years, were built about A.D. 500. “We believe they were used for higher education—and the level of education was very high,” he says. Texts in other archives show that professors were paid with public money and were forbidden to teach on their own except on their day off. And they also show that the Christian administration tolerated pagan philosophers—at least once Christianity was clearly dominant. “A century had passed since Hypatia, and we’re in a new era,” Majcherek explains, pausing to redirect the excavators in rudimentary Arabic. “The hegemony of the church is now uncontested.”

What astonishes many historians is the complex’s institutional nature. “In all the periods before,” says New York University’s Raffaella Cribiore, “teachers used whatever place they could”—their own homes, those of wealthy patrons, city halls or rooms at the public baths. But the complex in Alexandria provides the first glimpse of what would become the modern university, a place set aside solely for learning. Though similarly impressive structures may have existed in that era in Antioch, Constantinople, Beirut or Rome, they were destroyed or have yet to be discovered.

The complex may have played a role in keeping the Alexandrian tradition of learning alive. Majcherek speculates that the lecture halls drew refugees from the Athens Academy, which closed in A.D. 529, and other pagan institutions that lost their sponsors as Christianity gained adherents and patrons.

Arab forces under the new banner of Islam took control of the city a century later, and there is evidence that the halls were used after the takeover. But within a few decades, a brain drain began. Money and power shifted to the east. Welcomed in Damascus and Baghdad by the ruling caliphs, many Alexandrian scholars moved to cities where new prosperity and a reverence for the classics kept Greek learning alive. That scholarly flame, so bright for a millennium in Alexandria, burned in the East until medieval Europe began to draw on the knowledge of the ancients.

The Future of the Past?

The recent spate of finds would no doubt embarrass Hogarth, who at the end of the 19th century dug close to the lecture-hall site—just not deep enough. But mysteries remain. The site of Alexander’s tomb—knowledge of which appears to have vanished in the late Roman period—is still a matter of speculation, as is the great library’s exact location. Even so, ancient Alexandria’s remains are perhaps being destroyed faster than they’re being discovered, because of real estate development. Since 1997, Empereur has undertaken 12 “rescue digs,” in which archaeologists are given a limited period of time to salvage what they can before the bulldozers move in for new construction. There is not enough time and money to do more, Empereur says; “It’s a pity.” He echoes what the Greek poet Constantine Cafavy wrote nearly a century ago: “Say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.”

Passing a new gaudy high-rise, Empereur cannot conceal his disdain. He says that the developer, fearful that striking archaeological treasures would delay construction, used his political connections to avoid salvage excavations. “That place had not been built on since antiquity. It may have been the site of one of the world’s largest gymnasiums.” Such a building would have been not just a sports complex but also a meeting place for intellectual pursuits.

For two years, Empereur examined an extensive necropolis, or burial ground, until the ancient catacombs were demolished to make way for a thoroughfare. What a shame, he says, that the ruins were not preserved, if only as a tourist attraction, with admission fees supporting the research work.

Like archaeologists of old, today’s visitors to Egypt typically ignore Alexandria in favor of the pyramids of Giza and the temples of Luxor. But Empereur is seeking funding for his cistern museum, while the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities envisions a series of transparent underwater tunnels in Alexandria’s harbor to show off the sunken city. The dusty Greco-Roman Museum is getting a much-needed overhaul, and a museum to display early mosaics is in the works. A sparkling new library and spruced-up parks give parts of the city a prosperous air.

Yet even on a sunny day along the curving seaside corniche, there is a melancholy atmosphere. Through wars, earthquakes, a tsunami, depressions and revolutions, Alexandria remakes itself but can’t quite shake its past. Cafavy imagined ancient music echoing down Alexandria’s streets and wrote: “This city will always pursue you.”