The Ancients - Egypt's Lost Cities

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

What happens when an entire city disappears? Beneath the sands and wetlands of Egypt lie the remains of forgotten cities that once stood at the heart of one of the ancient world’s greatest civilisations.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Egyptologist Chris Naunton to uncover the story of Egypt’s lost cities. From the rediscovery of Tanis, the mysterious city immortalised by Indiana Jones, to ancient capitals like Memphis and Amarna, they explore what caused these cities to vanish. And how many more are still waiting to be found?MOREThe Silver PharaohsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyAlexandria: The Sunken CityListen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Imagine digging beneath the sands of Egypt and uncovering a forgotten world. A royal statue emerges from the earth, followed by golden masks, elaborate coffins, and towering temple walls covered in hieroglyphs. These are the remains of cities once at the heart of one of the greatest civilizations in history, places that were abandoned, buried, and undiscovered for centuries before being found again. In 1939, this was the experience of French archaeologist Pierre Montailles, who rediscovered the lost city of Tannis, the royal capital of Egypt's 21st and 22nd dynesies.

Buried beneath the Nile Delta, Tannis revealed stories of unknown kings, of immense wealth, and of a city that functioned as a great commercial hub long before the rise of trading behemoths like Alexandria. It would later become immortalized as the lost city from Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Tannis is just one of Egypt's lost cities, or formerly lost cities. From ancient capitals like Memphis and Amarna to settlements that still remain hidden beneath the sands, what happened to these once great urban centres? Why did they disappear? And what can their remains tell us about life in ancient Egypt? and also what cities, what capitals are still missing completely.

Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Egypt's lost cities. Our guest today is Egyptologist extraordinaire and friend of the show Chris Norton, the author of Searching for the Lost Tunes of Egypt. Hello, Chris. Great to have you back on the show. Great to be back. Thanks for having me, Tristan. Oh, you're more than welcome. And I think it's fair to say that Egypt has got its fair share of extraordinary ancient sites. And then you throw in lost cities on top, where does it end? There's just so much to talk about. Yes, you're right. It does have its fair share of ancient sites. I'm not exactly keeping track of the number of times I've been, but it's over 60 times now. As I always say to people, there's always something new. There's always something that I haven't seen before. Maybe one day that will come to an and I'll go and there won't there'll be a trip where I don't see something new. But honestly, there always is.

So yeah, so there's enough stuff there that we already know about very well. So you're quite right for me to throw in things that are still lost and yet to be found as maybe overdoing it. But for me, at least, the prospect of new discoveries keeps things super exciting. And why do you think the whole topic of lost cities is so compelling to so many people? Is it because we're all channeling an inner Indiana Jones wannabe desire? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I think for those of us who are interested in archaeology,

there's something very compelling about things being hidden or lost. So in some sense, not being there and then being there, being revealed and being discovered. And I think the proof of that is there are times when things that we've been searching for have been discovered and you somehow lose some of the sense of excitement after that point, you know. So I think actually there's something very much about that in Egypt as well. You know, the discovery of the Tomb of Teutankhamun gives us that archetypal discovery. There's something about the desert as well, which obviously is a big part of archaeology in Egypt. And the fact that the desert appears to be so empty provides the sort of greatest contrast between there being nothing

and there being not just something but potentially something amazing Tomb of King Tut being the obvious one but I guess if you're talking about cities and we know that the Egyptians lived in cities or a lot of them did even from the very earliest times you know the idea of discovering an entire city

I guess is exciting I think it's exciting I think so because we've done episodes in the past about you know lost tombs like the tomb of Alexander the Great or the tomb of Cleopatra you mentioned the discovery of Tutankarmon's tomb there I guess it's interesting comparing people going out on a sense of adventure to find a lost tomb, you know, a particular building in a particular area compared to a whole city that kind of blows your mind that a whole city could be lost for thousands of years, given how we think of cities today, you know, being sprawling with large stone buildings here, there and everywhere, a road system and so on.

Yeah, absolutely. I think in some ways tombs and, you know, forgive the sort of oblique. plug, but I've written about lost tombs in the past, and you and I have talked about lost teams, course a lot. And that book is called, by the way? It's called searching for the lost tombs of Egypt. Thank you very much, Tristan. You're very kind. That in some ways, I think, for me, at the time I was writing that, was the sort of obvious, to me it seemed obvious, exciting way into Egyptian archaeology. And that's partly because some of the most spectacular discoveries, probably, in fact, most of the most spectacular discoveries have been to do with tombs. And that's because, for the good reason that

they survive very well. They were generally tucked away in the desert where there's no life. They were intended to be repositories for the finest artifacts that Egyptian society produced and they were intended to stay there. That didn't happen very often, but when it does, it results in very spectacular discoveries. So tombs and tombs are the obvious thing to go for. Cities provide quite a nice counterpoint to that, I think, in that it says something about the history of archaeology, actually in Egypt, in that say 200 years ago, what people were principally interested in when they were digging things up was pretty objects. They were interested in inscribed objects that bore text in particular as well, because that was the time when the language was first being

studied and eventually deciphered. But they were otherwise, they were interested in pretty things, and tombs were great for that. And, I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but sort of a little way along in the process, people started to be more interested in where ordinary Egyptian people were living. And it took quite a long time for archaeology to catch up with that. And cities actually survived generally much less well, partly because the material of cities, all those things you mentioned, buildings, houses, administrative buildings, temples, royal palaces, where that applies, those were not intended to survive in the same way. And those buildings were sort of built, dismantled, demolished, rebuilt on a regular cycle over thousands of years.

So the material remains of those things generally doesn't survive quite so well or not in the same way anyway. The other thing is that cities, well, to put it around the other way, tombs were deliberately put in places where people were not living. They were put away from where people were living. Generally speaking, there are exceptions to that, but that's a general rule. Whereas, of course, people lived in the same sorts of places that people live in today. So very often ancient towns and cities are in amongst around underneath modern settlements. So we have been able to recover a good number of Egyptian settlements, including fully-fledged cities and some of the most important. But just as with tombs, including some of what must have been the largest, most spectacular, most important tombs, which we haven't yet found,

some of the most important spectacular cities have not yet been found either and yet might still be there somewhere. Oh, very, very cool indeed. One day, Chris, you and I will go out to Alexandria with all the proper permissions or wherever. Either go for the Tomb of Alexander the Great or maybe we'll look for one of these lost cities. Of course, we'll do it above board though. Yes, we definitely should do that. We always say that and I think one day history hits should probably have the money to let us do it. Well, thank you, Chris.

One day. So it says that ancient Egypt, I mean, such fertile ground for lost cities. And Chris, is that because back in the heyday of ancient Egypt, all along the river Nile? Yes, there was important farmlands irrigated by the Nile. But was there settlement after settlement the further and further you went up the River Nile? Or city, dare I say. Yeah, essentially. I mean, in very general terms, the situation was not so different.

then, as you might think of it being now, in that much of the occupied, habitable part of Egypt is taken up by agricultural land in ancient times as now. And people are sort of evenly distributed, more or less evenly distributed about the agricultural, rural parts of Egypt in villages, but in, you know, also in larger settlements, towns, and there are, there were, there are still larger settlements. And of course, these days, some of those are very, very large. Cairo is one of the biggest cities in the world, about 20 million people these days. Alexandria is a city of 5 million or so people, something like that, probably a bit more by now.

So, of course, the population is much greater. The cities are much larger, much more populous now. But just in terms of that sort of basic spread of people, agricultural land, villages, towns and cities in ancient Egypt, it was broadly similar. and we're aware of the names of lots of these settlements and of the approximate locations, at least, of many of them, and some of them have been identified archaeologically and explored. Yeah, so we're talking about lost cities in ancient Egypt. What exactly do we mean?

Because I've got in my notes that there are two types of lost city. Yeah, so I suppose when I was first thinking about this, not very long ago, I thought to myself that, you know, there's more than one approach that you can take here. The starting point for this actually was similar to the starting point for the lost teams research, which is just that, you know, there are these cities which were aware existed, which have never been identified archaeologically. So what's the story? And is there something that unites all of these different things? And it struck me that in order to sort of take a run up at this subject, we need first to establish what we think we know was there. So the same

The same ancient source that gives us the most comprehensive list of Egyptian kings, the writer Manetho, also provides us with the list of cities because he tells us these kings were grouped into dynasties. And he often, he doesn't often add very much information at all. He gives us their names, the length of the rain, where he knew it, that kind of thing. But he also quite often tells us where they were ruling from. And it turns out that the capital city moved. So it is not the case that the capital city was in the same place. place throughout Egyptian history, it moved is maybe the wrong sort of notion. The capital city was in

one place and then for reasons of a change of dynasty or change of sort of strategy or changing political geography, the king came to be ruling from a different place. And those places are named in Manato. So straight away, we've got a list of a bunch of capital cities, again, some of which are known some aren't. We also know that from administrative documents which are abundant across the full span of Egyptian history, that the country was divided into administrative regions or districts called, we call them gnomes using a Greek word. And each of those had a capital, a regional capital, and those are also named. So again, we have a list not just of the national capital, the seat of the ruling King, but we have a list of these regional capitals as well. And then here and there, we might also

have scattered references to this or that city being relevant to such and such a person's life in such and such a way. And the records of those particular gnomes, those districts, are those ones preserved in like papyrus scroll as more administrative compared to like the writings of manethe? Or what should we be thinking of how these writings about the gnomes and so on, how they are preserved? Various, actually. I mean, in some cases we do have administrative records, yeah. So those would be principally on papyrus, and actually those sorts of things survive mostly from the later periods of Egyptian history. And we know, actually, that there were from time to time changes in the known boundaries and the known capitals also changes of the names of these cities.

So the sort of most comprehensive lists we have of those are from administrative records. but then if you take the sum total of Egyptian text, we get plenty of mentions of these places, sometimes in particular sequences that allow us to sort of see the geographic spread. They crop up in, the names could crop up in other contexts as well. So even though the reasons for the division were principally administrative, they also crop up in religious context as well.

So there were particular gods and goddesses associated with the various gnomes. The idea that Pharaoh was the ruler of the whole country and therefore the ruler of all of these gnomes might also be reason for these to be written down at a certain point. You know, Pharaoh's power extends from the first gnome of Upper Egypt all the way in the south to the very Mediterranean coast up in the whatever gnome right up there. You mentioned that all-important source of Manetho. And I love Manetha. I know you love Manetho as well. But shall we set the scene for when he is existing? Because he is around the time just after Alexander the Great, when the Greek pharaohs are starting to rule Egypt?

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

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

possibly the chief priest of the son God Ra at Heliopolis, in around the early Ptolemaic. So we think, yes, that he was writing his history, which ends with the last, it brings us up to the time of Alexander the Great, as if that was the end of history. and, you know, it was the end of events from a time not very long before Manetha himself was around. We also think, well, we're sort of deducing a little bit here.

If we're right in thinking that he was writing in the early Ptolemaic, then it may be that the reason he was writing was that Ptolemy's at that time were trying to establish Egypt as one of the most important parts of the post-Alexander empire and establishing themselves as the rightful rulers. So it was kind of in the Ptolemy's interests for there to be a great history of Egypt written at this time to show what a marvelous place it was and what a marvelous place it was to Rourke. You know, that's in the Ptolemy's interest. And another guy, in fact, a guy called Barossos had written a similar history of the Near East around the same time. And it's possible, it's thought that this was a sort of response to it.

You know, you think the Near East is so great with your marvelous history. Well, just you wait. Egypt has a great history too. Berossus is another great one, Barossus Manetho, all these people who, Magasanaes, all these writers who deserve their time

in the spotlight alongside the likes of Homer and Tacitus. But that's for another day, Chris. But of course, he's a key source for learning about these cities, many of which, you know, and people going out and then finding these cities and others which are yet to be found.

Geographically speaking, the majority of these lost cities, I mean, whereabouts are they situated? in Egypt. So one of the things that's very striking about, about Manato's history, even if you just pull out the location of the capital city for each of his dynasties, by the way, Manetho is the historian who gives us that idea of splitting the kings into these groupings, which he called dynasties, first person in history, to use that word in that way to describe a line of rulers. Even if you just

take the capital city from each of his 30 dynasties, there are 30 altogether, you can see the capital city moving around and it moves around quite a lot. So if you think of Memphis as being the place that it returns to most often, Memphis is, I don't know, 10, 15 kilometers south of where Cairo is now. So in a very approximately the same place as Cairo, the crucial thing about both those locations being that they're at the junction of the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta, there at the point where the river splits. So to put a capital city there is a clever idea in that you've got ready access via the river to the Nile Valley and all of the rest of Egypt south of that point

and via the various branches of the Nile to all the different parts of the Delta and to the Mediterranean beyond. So Memphis is most often the capital city, but we see it move according to Manetho as far south as Aswan, which is more or less the frontier of Egypt with everything that's further south. and we know that in other times it moved almost all the way to the northeastern corner, if you like, of the Delta at Tannis. We also know, although this is Manetha that gives us this information,

but we know that after the time of Vantana, the Great, the capital city moves to Alexandria in the northwestern delta on the coast. So at various times it's in different places in between. So it's really almost anywhere in the whole of the country. Because it seems like the list of cities that we're going to cover, We're going to focus in a few in particular. A lot of them do seem to be focused either at that place where the branches of the Nile come together and form the River Nile or in the area between there and the Mediterranean Sea.

So the Nile Delta. So it does feel quite rich that particular area, Chris, for pharaohs, for kings and queens, founding their cities for various purposes along one of those branches of the River Nile. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. He's very often said, isn't it, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile. And I think most of the time, when we have that phrase in mind, a phrase comes from Herodotus, if I remember rightly, we're thinking of the Nile as watering the land, providing water that allows things to grow and fertilizing silt to allow crops to grow abundantly. And if it wasn't for the Nile, then, you know, that part of the country, that far of the world, that part of North East Africa would be pretty much uninhabit. So in that sense, that is what makes the Nile most important. But it's also the principal means of transport through the country. And it's also therefore the principal means of communication as well. And as I say, Egypt would be, is uninhabitable in the parts of the country where the river doesn't reach.

So you've kind of got to be on the river either in the Nile Valley or more likely and more often in history. as you suggest, in the Delta. And there might be two main reasons for that, actually. The Delta is the richest part of the country. It's the most productive agriculturally. So, I mean, just looking at a satellite image of Egypt shows this very well. You will know, Tristan, I'm sure, very well. In the NAR Valley, you've just got three maybe more kilometers worth

of agricultural land either side of the river for that full span of whatever it is, five, six hundred kilometers from Aswan up to Cairo. But then when the river splits, creating, if you see it in a map or on a satellite image, that kind of fan shape north of the Delta Head, region of Memphis in Cairo, up to the Mediterranean coast,

the whole of that area is very fertile agriculturally. So the greater part of the population, even though the delta looks like it's only the very sort of top part of the country, the northernmost part. It's the most populous and it's the richest. The other thing is that from a sort of strategic point of view, particularly from the first millennium onwards,

Egypt has very much got its eyes or pharaoh's got his eyes on territory and other people, kingdoms, empires, to the north one way or another. So from the time of Ramsey's the second on onwards, a little bit earlier perhaps. They're very much focused on the Levant and the north and east, which is territory they control in what's now, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and also their enemies at this sort of edge of that territory. By the time you get to Alexander the Great, of course, Egypt is a part of this much wider Mediterranean empire of his. So again, it makes

sense for his capital city to be at that end of Egypt. So it's much less common for capital cities to be in the south, there were things of interest to the south of Egypt, but maybe not so much. So strategically it's not a great idea to be too far away from the action in the Delta and the Mediterranean. No, of course, and obviously one of the exceptions will be Thebes, Monday-Luxa, weren't they, in the Valley of the Kings, and how important that was at a time. But we are going to focus on a few examples of these cities, and we're going to try and do them chronologically as well, Chris,arkening back, first of all, to Manetho.

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

he's clear that there is this moment, First King, First Dynasty, we assume that this is probably the moment at which the country came to be unified under a single ruler probably as a result of some military activity or following some military activity. And so the capital city is in this, and this is absolutely one of these cities which has not been identified archaeologically, or not with any certainty, we deduce that it is in the region of the famous cemetery site of Abidos.

There was a settlement at Abidos, but a small one, and it is principally a cemetery site. And as I mentioned earlier, generally speaking, the Egyptians kept cemeteries and tombs away from the settlements where people were living. there would have been small communities of people in and around the cemeteries to service them to be building tombs whatever but generally speaking people don't live there but abydos although it is an important cemetery site throughout egyptian history it was a royal burial place in the first and second dynasties and in the 19th century the very late 19th century started with a frenchman called emil ameleno followed in short order by the english excavator for lindus petrie

excavations were carried out in the cemeteries out towards the desert edge towards where the low desert reaches the foothills and becomes the high desert and they found there the tombs that appear to belong to the kings of the first dynasty and some of the second so if the tombs are there we assume probably that the capital city of those kings was nearby also and then we have mentions of this city which survived into later times times as being in the eighth gnome, the eighth administrative district. So perhaps it's just worth saying that the Egyptians

divided, there were two sets of gnomes, these administrative districts, one for the Nile Valley and then one for the Delta. And they were numbered. So in the Nile Valley, they were numbered in sequence from south to north. So the gnome of Aswan, which is the southernmost city, is the first gnome. the second is in the region of Hieracompleis, Thebes is in the third, I think,

and so on and so on. It's a little bit more complicated in the delta because the delta is not linear in that same way, but still they're numbered. So this is in the eighth gnome, if I remember rightly. So eight along working south to north, and that's the same gnome that Abidos is in.

So we can narrow down the location of this to this general area, and it's a rural area of Egypt today, there aren't too many major settlements in the area, in the region. There are one or two archaeological sites, including settlement sites, which could be the remains of this very first capital city of Egypt. Which is such a great search title, searching for Egypt's first capital or something. Yeah, isn't it?

Yeah, isn't it? I mean, if you could prove it, if you could prove that this was the place where somebody, and we do have names, we're just not absolutely clear about the sequence of events and what happened and what's kind of myth and what was reality. But it seems very likely that there was a point at which there

was a ruler under whom Egypt came to be unified for the first time and under whom Egypt as a country came into being. And this was the seat of that ruler. So, I mean, if we could prove that regardless of what survives, and I think, sadly, I think the likelihood is that

we're not about to sort of uncover the palace or anything like that. But if we could just say that this was the spot and that would be a very significant thing. And Chris, I'm just looking at the Abidos location now. And first of, I know we're talking about the Nile Delta and a lot being up there, but of course this is much further south than the Nile Delta. And just seeing it on Google Maps,

you're mentioning that kind of thin line of green fertile lands either side of the Nile, like three kilometers or so, and then having the site, yes, literally right on the edge of that agricultural land, and thinking, yes, there's a Royal Cemetery site, Where could the city itself have been? And what would have happened to it? The fact that, you know, visibly, potentially you've got little bits of it surviving, but so much of it has disappeared, has gone.

Yeah, and I think actually that allows us to say something about the way that archaeology has survived in Egypt. You know, we talked earlier about the fact that there's very much a bias in favour of certain types of site, particularly tombs. The other type of site that survives best is temples. and in both cases those monuments were built of durable materials often, if not always, often, particularly stone. Stone survives one way or another it survives. So tombs that are rock cut, for example, you know, you can't move them. You know, they stay where they are.

They can be robbed, of course. They can be vandalized. They can fall into ruin for natural reasons. But very often they survive. In terms of temples built of cut stone, those stone blocks often are reused. but it's quite rare that the stone from a temple is comprehensively removed, or to flip that round a little bit, we have very many instances of temples which have survived.

In some cases, I mean, almost intact, you know, and those, of course, are the temples that we know best today. But even in cases where what must have been very large and very important temples, one thinks, for example, of the major temple at Sias, capital city of the 26th Dynasty, which was almost completely vanished. It hasn't vanished completely. There was still some whacking great stones there. There's nothing almost by comparison with what there would have been,

but still there's something. In the case of this, Thinnis, if even a handful of blocks from a major temple, and it's a reasonable assumption that there was a major stone temple, if not at the time of the early dynastic, the first kings, then later in, and we know the city did survive into later times. Then for one reason or other, they've gone completely. And that we can't explain at the moment. One day, it might be possible to do a sort of comprehensive subsurface survey of the whole of the country, and it may yet turn things up. I mean, there's no question that there will be stone that we haven't yet looked at in various places.

And, you know, and of course, if you were to do that survey in the area of the eighth gnome, there's a strong chance that we could identify that as the very first capital city. Gosh. Well, let's move on chronologically from that first dynasty to the next lost city that I have in my notes. But Chris, the city I've got next doesn't feel much like a lost city because, I mean, we've mentioned it a few times already. So you've got to explain this to me. Why is Memphis the next one on our list? Yeah, okay, good question.

So when I was starting out doing this, you know, I came up with this great long list of cities and a bit like with the lost teams as well, a great big long list of kings, whose teams do we know about which are the ones that are missing? And just as with lost teams where in some cases you can say, you can say, well, that's probably missing because of that. We're not going to find it.

And then that narrows down your list even further to the ones that we can't explain, you know, why they're missing. And the case of cities, in some cases, as with this that we've just been talking about, it really is absolutely missing. We really don't know beyond saying it was somewhere in this region. We really don't know where it was. In other cases, we know where the city was at certain points, but we're missing some part of it or some aspect of it.

So the situation in Memphis is that in Memphis is the location to which the capital city moved after Thys and we don't exactly know when. It seems likely that it was realized that this was a better place strategically. So most probably this was the capital city of those early Ferris because that's where they came from. That's where they lived. Why move? That's where their home is. But there comes a realization at a certain point that it would actually be better if we're going to boss everyone in the country around. We'd better be somewhere better than this. And Memphis is a better place. Memphis has sort of hinted at early. then remains a very, very important settlement and on and off the capital city right down into

Roman times, it remains a very important and populous place. And just a reminder, quick reminder, the location is between where all the branches begin and the main river Nile Valley, kind of that nice area. Approximately, yeah. It's a little way south of the point where the river splits, but not very far. If nothing else, we would know approximately where it was, because just as with this, we know where the cemeteries were. So the pyramid fields of Sukhara, Giza, Darshore, Abarouache, Abu Ghurab, one or two other sites, which are ranged in a line up on the desert just a little way to the west of the extent of cultivated land

in that area. Those are all cemeteries of Memphis. It's just that at various different times for various different reasons that the king or other people chose to be buried in a slightly different location, but you could see them in some ways as one continuous, enormous cemetery site. So Memphis has to be there somewhere, and the remains have been found, substantial remains, particularly for the New Kingdom and later, but not nearly so much from before that time. And as I was sort of mentioning earlier, cities are generally, they have been harder to get at, if you like. They don't preserve so well. Buildings are made of mud brick, which even if it survives survives in a kind of a jumble of mud, difficult to define a little bit off-putting by comparison

with pretty coffins or statues or whatever. They are also very often underneath things that are difficult to go through, such as fields or towns and cities. In the 1980s, some excavations were carried out in the area of Memphis, which identified the levels going back as far as the Middle kingdom, but not, but they didn't really find very much before that. So, so what, you know, Manetho tells us that the first palace is built in that area during the first, first dynasty, and it seems clear that there is a move, at least a partial move northwards in by the second dynasty, if not later and certainly by the time of the third dynasty, the capital city seems to have been established there. Manato says this and all our evidence points that way as well. And yet

the settlement's missing. And this actually, and we now think is explained by, And another very interesting sort of window on how Egyptian archaeology works, we now think, you mentioned the importance of the river earlier, that the river Nile has moved. In fact, we know it's moved. So again, if you look at a map or a satellite image, you'll see the Nile running more or less in a straight line from south to north. What you might not expect is that it is capable of,

and indeed has over centuries, from moving hundreds of metres either to the west or to the east, for various reasons. And if you know your sort of riverine geography, you'll know that rivers change shape and they are capable of doing this. So when that's happened in the ancient past, the ancients have been forced to adapt

by moving the sort of center of the city as the river has moved so that things like harbors can be right on the edge and all the other infrastructure that needs to be right by the water can move. It also means in some cases most likely that the river has in fact swallowed things up.

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

was quite a long way further west from where those New Kingdom levels are at the remains of the New Kingdom Temple time for M-Cases 2nd. So archaeologists were looking not quite in the right place for a long time and in fact, as luck would have it, the spot that they now think

is most likely is the sort of place to look for those early levels is underneath a load of buildings, a road and a load of buildings, including the Museum at Sakara, ironically enough. So it may well be I mean, it's got to be there somewhere, but it may well be that you'd have to dig up the road and the museum in order to be sure. So when we talk about the lost city of Memphis, we're talking about, is it, the original city, the old kingdom Memphis, the Memphis of more than 4,000 years ago. I didn't quite clock that.

Yeah, well, I mean, actually, the other thing to say, without wanting to go on for too long about it, would be actually that I think, thinking about sort of different aspects of Egyptian archaeology, I'm very interested in the history of archaeology. and the way that people understood and encountered ancient Egypt two centuries ago before we had anything like the material evidence and the understanding that we have now. And lots of the earliest travellers who were going to Egypt with their classical texts in their hands, their Herodotuses and their Strabo's and their Manathos and this kind of thing, were very much hoping and expecting to see spectacular places. And Memphis would have been foremost among them.

It's such an important part of so many of the great stories, particularly from the later periods of time of Alexander the Great, for example. We know that he was in Memphis. They were expecting to see great things. And for a long time, you know, it wasn't clear where Memphis was. And those early travellers were tripped over by the fact that it doesn't survive in a monumental way like some other places do. So that, you know, those travellers would have been aware that there were spectacular monuments in other places. But in the sort of approximate location where they'd expect to find Memphis,

So they were sort of scratching the heads and looking around and going, where is it? Well, let's move on to the next one that I got in my list. And this is quite the corker of a lost city. Only for a brief period of time, but for that religious zealot, heretic. Akanaten, the city, Chris, of Amarna. Yeah, this will be a lot of people's favourite. I guess it's a favourite of mine in lots of ways. I suppose we should say at the outset, it's not lost.

It's not missing anymore. You can go and see it today. Yes, you can. We know where it was. It was missing in more than one sense, though. And again, for me, I think the value in this story is in helping to understand something about, you know, the way archaeology has been preserved and how we've been able to say what we can about ancient Egypt as a result of archaeology. We talked about how Manetho gives us these lists of capital cities. And that could be a sort of starting point.

We've also just mentioned how early travellers were, you know, were bringing along a. accounts like that of Stravo describing what Egypt was like. Amarna, as you say, was the short-lived capital city of the heretic pharaoh Akanaten. He rolled there with his, famously with his wife, Nefertiti, for a period of probably not much more than 10 years or so. But all the sources that would have been available to early Egyptologists were completely silent on this. No mention of Akanaten, no mention of his capital city, no mention of the fact that he uprooted a popular of 30 to 50,000 people from wherever they'd been living before to this new place, which he built in a strategically daft place in the middle of nowhere in Middle Egypt,

on the Nile, but still far away from the main cult centres, far away from transport routes into the Delta and beyond, not well supplied with resources, not even well supplied with water, it seems. But he did all of that very deliberately because, without going into too much detail here. He was wanting to make a break with everything that had gone before. So he was very deliberately seeking out a brand new sort of virgin site. And the site was first noticed by early travellers. It crops up, or one monument at the site crops up in the drawings of a man called Sicard, a French, I think he was a priest. The Napoleonic expedition visited the site and noted that there was some archaeology, and they sort of sketched.

out the approximate locations of the ruins and they did seem to have noticed that there was a road running through the center of them which we now would call the royal road. But they didn't understand what this was and it wasn't until the 1820s when the English Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson was shown to the rock-cut tombs which are at the eastern edge of the city that he realized that there was something very unusual going on in that you got hieroglyphic inscriptions so clearly something ancient Egypt but the style of the art was very different. the content of the scenes is very different. These were clearly rock cartoons, but the decoration was very unusual. He also noticed that there seemed to be a conspicuous absence of royal names, even though the scenes that he was seeing seemed to involve somebody who very much seemed to fit the model of a pharaoh,

their name was missing. Eventually, of course, he was able to establish that in some rare occasions that name was preserved and it was the name of Akanatn, and slowly people began to piece this together. what has become, we sort of skipped to present day, what's become so important about a mana is that because it was built in one go,

it was designed and planned in a single phase, you know, we're going to build a complete capital city in one go, and they did it. Aconaten, there are inscriptions where Akanon tells us that this is what he's going to do, and the archaeology shows that he really did it. We estimate on the basis of the city, and we have all the major buildings that you'd expect,

houses for people of all different social classes from the smallest right up to royal palaces. Then we have temples, we have administrative buildings, we have craftsmen's workshops, etc, etc. We have roads, have a network of roads across the desert, we have cemeteries, including a royal cemetery, blah, blah, blah. All of that was done in an incredibly short space of time. And then the city was abandoned once, soon after Ackanatenaten died. And because he was considered to be a heretic more or less immediately, and the whole project was considered to be something taboo, it was not only abandoned, but it was comprehensively abandoned, and it was almost as though nobody was allowed to go there ever again. So unlike almost any other archaeological

site anywhere in the world, where generally speaking, you know, you have lots of different phases of occupation over time, which make for a sort of complicated mixture of layers that you have to untangle and work your way back down through. In this case, you've got a single occupation. And because it was abandoned, it survived incredibly well. So it is the single best site we have from ancient Egypt for the study of a city. So there's a kind of irony here, and it's an irony that plays out across lots of Akanan's story. But he was deliberately forgotten because he was a heretic. And that is why we knew nothing about him until his city was rediscovered. But once it was rediscovered, it proved to be, well, not only one of the great stories,

the ancient world. His story is one of the great stories from the ancient world, but also his city is, as I say, is the best we have. So back to that sort of idea of yours from the very beginning of there being sort of nothing, or apparently being something hidden and then something being revealed, this is maybe the best example we have. Lost and then found. Yes. And what a great snapshot into that particular period of time. Chris, in our chronology, if we've gone from Thinness to Or Tinnis to kind of Old Kingdom, Memphis, down to Amarna and the New Kingdom. So, We're about 3,000 years ago now in the story. If we go now to our next site.

And this is one actually we've mentioned in the past when we covered the story of the silver pharaohs. The city of Tannis. Yeah. That many people may well think, oh, I've heard that name before as a lost city if they've watched Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes. Yeah. There's lots of, lots and lots of layers to this story, actually. Yeah, so it's the name that's given to the Great Lost City, as you say, in Indiana Jones.

There's not a lot about Tannis and Raiders of the Lost Ark that has bears much relation to the history or archaeology in Egypt, I'm afraid. And actually, confession time, I don't really know the film very well. Spoken like a true Egyptologist. I know. I know. I should probably get over myself and watch it. Maybe we'll have a watch along or something at some point.

But anyway, but even without that, it's a multi-layered story. So maybe the simplest way of talking about it is to say what we know about it now at this point. And perhaps actually we should lean on Manetho here as well because he's helpful. Tannis was one of the capital cities, according to Manetho. It was the capital city in the 21st dynasty and in the 23rd. This is the period after the New Kingdom, after the Valley of the Kings has been abandoned. And in fact, although Manetho didn't really have a grip on this, we now understand that the country was split into two for much of the period that's covered by his 21st-25th dynasties.

So Tannis was certainly an important city. If you take Minato at face value from the 21st dynasty onwards, and indeed that's backed up in the archaeology. So again, the Napoleonic expedition visited the site. So there was an awareness from early on that there were monumental remains. There was a scatter of monumental statuary and other stone at the site. It was clearly a lot of mudbrick. It was clearly, you know, you didn't have to be an expert to understand that there was something significant here.

And it was excavated, I guess the first scientific excavations that were undertaken at the site. Well, it depends on what you call scientific. Mariette had a go in the middle of the 19th century. Fendez Petrie had a rather more considered go, perhaps, again, towards the end of the 19th century, 1883 to four. And from the early 20th century onwards, it became the subject of a very long-running and comprehensive surveying an excavation project led by a series of French directors. Pierre Monti, as you will know, and as listeners who have heard, our Silver Ferris episode, will know, discovered the royal tombs of pharaohs of the 21st and 22nd dynasties at the site, well, from 1939 onwards. So there's no question that this was an important site. In Monta's time, though,

there was a question around the significance of Tannis. So that word Tannis is a Greek form of the name. The earlier Egyptian would be Charnet, something like that, so a sort of Greek corruption of that earlier Egyptian name. A big research question around this time, first half of the 20th century, was the whereabouts of the very well attested in texts, very well-known capital city of Ramesses II, which was named after him. It was named Per Ramesses, the house of Ramesses, the city of Ramesses, if you like. And much of the temple that had been preserved at Tannis and uncovered by excavators, although much of it was sort of lying around, much of that material bore the name of Ramesses II. So initially the conclusion was that not only is this

Tannis Manathos capital city of the 21st and 23rd dynasties, probably the king seemed to have been buried there. But it was also probably was, where Per Ramessesi was probably just changed its name at a certain point after Ramesses was, you know, it was long dead or whatever. But in actual fact, we now understand that that's not the case in the 1970s, a site about 30 kilometers away close to a village called Cantia where there was also a scatter much, much smaller, but a scatter of monumental stonework still surviving.

A non-invasive survey showed that beneath the surface of the agricultural land, you've never know from just looking at it. There was a very substantial ancient city, and eventually that led to the discovery that in fact Cantia was the location of Piramacy. So Tannis was nearby, but it was about 30 kilometres away. So the question then is,

so what's all that stonework of Ramesses II? which appears to belong to a temple of his, doing 30 kilometers away from his capital city. Eventually, we realized that paramacy had been built, and again, this is about to something we've touched on earlier, it was very deliberately built on a branch of the Nile leading out towards the north and east, towards Egypt's territory in the Levant.

And that river channel had naturally started to dry up in the later New Kingdom, which meant that the whole city was unviable any longer. So at a certain point, we can't know exactly when, but at a certain point, the people in the local area realize that if we're going to have a capital city or a strategic center in this area, we are going to have to move. So where can we move to? Well, the nearest branch of the river is 30 kilometers approximately to the north. that branch is named after the city of Tannis,

the Tannitic branch. And so what they did was rather than build a brand new temple with newly quarried stone at that site, they just thought, you know what, it's only 30 kilometers, why don't we just move the stone? Interesting. That's what they did. So this is why I say you've got sort of multiple layers.

TANIS was an important capital city. It probably wasn't recognized for being that until the excavation work was underway. But even after that, it was still believed to be not only the Tannis of the 21st and 23rd dynasties, but Pyrramacy of Rememises the second, we now know that's not the case. That was elsewhere.

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

show at least the outline of buildings. And that led in the media to this idea that Tannis was being discovered for the first time. And in actual fact, that's not the case. We knew where it was a couple of centuries ago. So it's a lost city in the sense of Chris? Well, it isn't really now, actually. It's just a city that serves to illustrate how something can be lost. So if you think Tannis was lost and then it was found, Paramacy was lost and then we thought we'd found it, but actually we hadn't, it was in the wrong place. So it's just a way of illustrating that, the way archaeology's played out. And the last place in our list is when we go to the time of the Ptolemy's post-Alexander

the Great and a city that once again people think, well, I can go there today, how is that lost? But as we know, there are still so many parts of this city that are lost either beneath modern buildings or the sea today. And this is, of course, Alexandria. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So again, you're right. Sorry if people feel disappointed at home. We know where it was. But exactly as you say, we know where it was. But beyond that, we are really, as you will know very well, Tristan, we're really struggling when it comes to the detail of where individual things were. And I think this is, therefore, maybe this single best illustration we have of a city which is extraordinarily well attested in texts and will feel

very familiar to people and yet although we know roughly where these things were and you think about buildings that are so celebrated like the museum on the famous library the lighthouse one of the great ancient wonders of the world you and i have talked about the tomb of Alexander the great before the Tomb of Cleopatra, those are both almost certainly there. None of these things survive. Strabo probably provides us with the single best description we have of the city and the sort of relative positions of various buildings. But up until fairly recently, we were really in the dark about where these were, at least

relative to where things are in modern Alexandria. short of saying, well, there's not really very much looking we can do anymore because modern Alexandria overlies such a large area, all of what must have been ancient Alexandria and a great deal more around as the city has spread out. And we were really sort of in the dark about exactly where things were. But of course the great revelation of the last couple of decades has been that much of the monumental part of the city, the most famous part of the city, in actual fact, was probably close enough to the coast, as Straubo says, that it would have been destroyed most probably not later than the tsunami that we know occurred in, I think it was the fourth century AD. but of course under-water archaeology, which is still ongoing, in that area, I mean also elsewhere along the coast, but in the Great Harbor Alexandria has been uncovering the monumental remains of some of those buildings, sadly not preserved to the extent that we can really say very much about their form, but we now know that that is the story of what happened to a lot of those buildings.

Having said that, it doesn't solve the problem of where, for example, the tomb of Alexander-Gray or the Tomb of Cleopatra were. It's still possible, I think, that certainly the Tomb of Alexander may have been further inland, perhaps might have survived the tsunami, and yet is underneath the modern city might possibly still survive.

And again, thinking back to that sort of magic, high-tech survey that we might be able to do in the future that looks beneath the ground, we may be able to see surviving parts of that. Who knows? Who knows indeed? And as you say, this underwater, archaeology, discovering all these buildings and a little bit more by more being discovered

and news articles being made when they announced them, like Frank Godio and his team, I've got here, I will mention it because we're in that area of the woods quickly, how there's this other lost ancient Egyptian city of Tonis Heraclayon, which they think it's like the gateway of Egypt, which was right by Alexandria, which is now completely submerged and they are, so that is a lost city actually submerged beneath the Mediterranean. Yeah, there were at least three very sizable settlements in that, in the sort of area of the kind of western edge of Abukir Bay, which is along the coastline eastwards from Alexandria. Yeah, that whole area would have been incredibly rich in ancient times. It's the location of this settlement, sort of mini kind of

city of Nicopolis as well, which hasn't been identified. Yeah, and the underwater archaeology that they've been able to do is absolutely a revelation. I mean, I think those two things our understanding now of the movement of the river and our understanding of just how much was swallowed up by the Mediterranean, those two things have completely transformed our understanding of of archaeology in Egypt generally, particularly cities

and also how things have survived or not. I mean, that's transformed in my lifetime. I mean, pretty old now, I suppose, but... You are absolutely not. This has been so much fun. And I feel we're going to just scratch the surface, Chris, because it feels like there are still cities which haven't been discovered, which may be uncovered in the coming years.

I mean, what do you think the future holds for Egypt's lost cities? I think the chances that there will be discoveries are very high, actually. Well, I'm certain. I mean, this also plays into another sort of pet subject of mine, which is lost monuments or the idea of things being lost and found and then lost again. There are places in the Nile Valley out of the way, places that have escaped archaeology. And actually it's been in my mind just as we've been talking that

I think something else that maybe of interest of people at home maybe is that, okay, we know the river move now. We know that's a thing. We know that that had an impact. We know as I've said that it means that we might be looking in the wrong place for things, as is the case with Memphis. We know also that it may have swallowed things up. And then we know about everything along the coast. But even though we know those things, it's not as simple is just then going, oh, well, right, okay, well, we better just do a comprehensive survey of all riverine locations and all coastal locations. And so, you know, we realized these things a few years ago and now

we know everything. Not at all. You know, we've realized these things, but archaeology, as you will know, is a very slow process and it's very, it's always struggling for funding. So the possibilities, if funding can be found, for looking in places along the Nile Valley and along the coast, for some of these places that we know about, Strabo gives us absolutely loads of names of places along the coast and right the way through the Delta and up into what's now Sudan. And a lot of those places have never been identified. And it may well be that resources, technology allow us to find some of those things in the future. I think it's, I bet at least £5. Something exciting will be found.

Last but certainly not least, I want to happily and freely promote your book again on the tombs, which is called Chris? It's called searching for the lost tombs of Egypt. And that's everything from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra to many, many others too? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it is. I like to think a good way into what archaeology in Egypt is. Chris, it just goes to me to say,

thank you so much for coming back on the show. Pleasure as always. Well, there you go. There was the wonderful Dr. Chris Norton returning to the show to talk through the story of Egypt's Lost Cities. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like more with Chris, where we've got a few

episodes that we've recorded with him over the years. We'll put a link straight away to our episode we did with him all about the silver pharaohs of Sussanese and so on, their tombs that were discovered at Tannis in the mid-20th century, but we'll also put a link to the story of the sunken city of Alexandria and our interview with the underwater archaeologist Frank Goddio from a few years back where he explains how there is so much still to find of ancient Alexandria beneath the waterline. So we'll put links to those episodes in the show notes. Now, if you've been enjoying the ancients recently, please make sure that you're following the show on either Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us to be doing

us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.