The Day the Ground Turned to Water
Sometime in the mid-second century BC — no record survives to fix the year — an earthquake struck the western Nile delta hard enough to end a city. The damage at Heracleion was not structural in the ordinary sense. The walls did not crack from lateral force. The ground beneath them ceased to be solid.
The Temple of Amun-Gereb stood at the center of the city, the largest and holiest structure in Egypt’s principal Mediterranean port. Its columns were granite. Its entrance was flanked by colossal statues — a pharaoh, a queen, and a 5.4-meter figure of Hapy, the god of the Nile flood, carved from a single block of red granite and holding a tray of offerings against his chest. The temple’s foundations rested on waterlogged alluvial clay deposited over centuries by the Canopic branch of the Nile. When the earthquake hit, that clay underwent liquefaction — a geological process in which saturated sediment loses its structural integrity and behaves, temporarily, as a liquid. The ground did not shake the temple apart. It swallowed it.
The columns folded inward. The colossal Hapy toppled face-first into the south canal. Massive stone blocks from the temple roof crashed downward, some of them landing on the hull of a galley moored alongside the canal, driving the vessel through the water and pinning it to the harbor floor under meters of debris. A tidal wave followed the earthquake, pushing seawater inland across the already-collapsing delta surface. When the water settled, the religious and administrative heart of Heracleion — the building where pharaohs had been anointed as universal kings by the supreme god of Egypt — was rubble beneath the waterline.
The city did not die that day. Inhabitants clung to its diminishing remnants for another thousand years, through the Roman period and into the early centuries of Arab rule. But the ground kept sinking. The Mediterranean kept rising. The silt kept accumulating. By the 8th century AD, the last habitable fragment of Heracleion slipped beneath the surface of Aboukir Bay, and the city that had controlled access to the richest economy in the ancient world became a handful of ambiguous references in Greek texts that most scholars assumed were literary invention.
Heracleion existed twice — once as a port, and once as a myth. The Egyptians called it Thonis. The Greeks called it Heracleion. For two thousand years, historians debated whether they were the same place, different places, or places that had never existed at all. In 2000, a French archaeologist named Franck Goddio found the answer six and a half kilometers off the coast of Egypt, under ten meters of water and centuries of Nile silt. A single inscribed stone — a stele ordered by Pharaoh Nectanebo I around 380 BC, commanding that it be erected “in the city of Thonis” — was recovered from the ruins of the temple the Greeks knew as Heracleion’s. The two names belonged to one city. The debate was over. The excavation had barely begun. Twenty-five years later, Goddio estimates that only five percent of the site has been explored. The other ninety-five percent is still down there, sealed in clay, waiting.
Egypt’s Gateway to the Ancient World: Heracleion at Its Peak
The Obligatory Port — How One City Controlled All Trade Into Egypt
Egypt in the first millennium BC was the most productive agricultural economy in the ancient Mediterranean. The Nile’s annual flood cycle generated a surplus of grain, papyrus, linen, and gold that the rest of the world desired and traveled vast distances to obtain. The question was not whether foreign merchants would come to Egypt. The question was where they would be allowed to enter.
The answer, for roughly three centuries, was Heracleion.
The city occupied a cluster of islands and peninsulas at the Canopic mouth of the Nile — the westernmost of the river’s distributary channels, the one that carried the heaviest volume of water and the most direct route from the Mediterranean into the Egyptian interior. Every Greek merchant vessel bound for Egypt was required to pass through Thonis-Heracleion. The city functioned as a customs checkpoint on a civilizational scale: cargoes were inspected, taxes were levied, and the pharaoh’s officials controlled what entered and what left. The harbor was crisscrossed with canals and basins deep enough to accommodate seagoing vessels, and the concentration of more than 700 anchors recovered from the site — spanning four centuries of continuous use — testifies to the volume of traffic that passed through.
The city’s peak ran from the 6th to the 4th century BC, a period during which Egypt’s Late Period pharaohs used Heracleion’s customs revenue to finance temple construction, military campaigns, and the diplomatic maneuvering required to maintain independence against Persian, and later Macedonian, pressure. The founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 331 BC — just 32 kilometers to the southwest — did not destroy Heracleion overnight, but it redirected the flow of Mediterranean trade toward a newer, deeper, better-engineered harbor. Heracleion’s commercial importance diminished steadily across the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. The earthquake and liquefaction event of the mid-second century BC struck a city that was already in decline — still inhabited, still functioning as a religious center, but no longer the indispensable bottleneck it had been for three hundred years.
The Temple of Amun-Gereb and the Mysteries of Osiris
The Grand Temple of Amun-Gereb was the reason Heracleion mattered beyond commerce. Amun — the supreme god of the Egyptian pantheon during the Late Period — was worshipped here in a form specific to the delta, Amun-Gereb, whose cult was among the most powerful in Egypt. The temple complex occupied the center of the city, surrounded by canals that served as both transportation arteries and ritual waterways.
Pharaohs traveled to this temple to receive their divine authority. The ceremony was not symbolic. In Egyptian theology, the pharaoh’s legitimacy as ruler derived from his relationship with Amun, and the rites performed at the Heracleion temple constituted a formal transfer of divine sanction. Nectanebo I, the last native Egyptian pharaoh to rule a stable kingdom, made extensive additions to the temple in the early 4th century BC — additions whose fallen granite blocks Goddio’s team would recover from the south canal twenty-four centuries later, still bearing his cartouche.
The temple also hosted the annual Mysteries of Osiris, a ceremony performed during the month of Khoiak that celebrated the death and rebirth of the god of the underworld. Osiris was placed in a ceremonial barque and carried in a fluvial procession from the Temple of Amun through the city’s canals to his shrine in the nearby city of Canopus. The procession drew pilgrims from across Egypt and the Greek world. Sanctuaries dedicated to Osiris within the city were famous for miraculous healing — a reputation that sustained the city’s religious tourism long after its commercial dominance had faded.
The underwater investigation has confirmed the textual record in extraordinary detail. Wooden structures beneath the temple floor, dating to the 5th century BC, were found preserved by the anaerobic conditions of the seabed — the oxygen-free silt that destroyed the city also embalmed it. Silver ritual dishes for libations, gold jewelry, alabaster containers for sacred oils, and a gold-and-lapis-lazuli Djed pillar — the hieroglyphic symbol of stability and the backbone of Osiris — were recovered from the temple treasury in 2023, still arranged as if the last priest had set them down and stepped out of the room.
The Gods and the Myths: Herodotus, Heracles, and Helen of Troy
Where Heracles First Touched Egyptian Soil
The Greek name Heracleion means “city of Heracles,” and the mythology that anchored the name to the place was old enough to have been considered ancient history by the time Herodotus recorded it in the 5th century BC. Herodotus wrote that the demigod Heracles — the Greeks’ supreme hero, son of Zeus, strongest man who ever lived — first set foot in Egypt at this port, and that a great temple was built to mark the spot where his sandal touched the ground.
The identification was not arbitrary. The Egyptians had their own version of the story. The temple at Heracleion was dedicated to Khonsu, the son of Amun, whom the Greeks recognized as their own Heracles — a divine son of a supreme god, associated with strength and protection. The conflation was a working diplomatic arrangement: Egyptians and Greeks could worship at the same temple, addressing the same deity by different names, conducting their rituals in parallel without theological collision. The city itself was a bilingual institution, and its patron god was bilingual too.
Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC, added a different layer. He claimed that the Nile had once flooded catastrophically in the region governed by Prometheus, and that Heracles had tamed the river and restored its course. The city of Thonis, Diodorus wrote, stood at the point where the corrected Nile emptied into the sea. The myth explained the geography, and the geography confirmed the myth. For the Greeks, Heracleion was not just a port where they paid their taxes. It was the place where their greatest hero had demonstrated mastery over the most powerful river in the world.
Paris, Helen, and the Watchman at the Nile
Herodotus embedded Heracleion in an even more famous story. In his alternative version of the events preceding the Trojan War, Paris and Helen — fleeing Sparta after Paris had abducted (or eloped with) the wife of King Menelaus — were blown off course and landed at the Canopic mouth of the Nile. They sought shelter at the temple of Heracles, where Paris’s servants, sensing an opportunity or overcome by guilt, told the temple priests what their master had done.
The priests reported the matter to Thonis, the watchman or governor of the river mouth — the official after whom the Egyptians named the city. Thonis seized the travelers, confiscated their stolen treasure, and sent word to the pharaoh in Memphis. Helen was kept in Egypt. Paris was sent away empty-handed. In Herodotus’s telling, the Trojan War was fought over a woman who was never in Troy at all — she had been in Thonis the entire time, and the Greeks besieged the wrong city for ten years.
The story placed Heracleion at the intersection of Egyptian history and Greek mythology’s most consequential love story. Whether Herodotus believed it literally or deployed it as a parable about the consequences of violated hospitality, the effect was the same: a real port city was written into the foundational narrative of Western literature. When the city sank, the story survived. When the story was rediscovered, it led archaeologists back to the city.
The Sinking: How a City Disappears in Slow Motion
Liquefaction, Subsidence, and the Geology That Swallowed a Civilization
Heracleion was built on land that was never entirely land. The Nile delta is one of the most geologically unstable surfaces on Earth — a broad, flat apron of alluvial sediment deposited over millennia by a river that shifts its channels, builds new ground, and abandons old ground in cycles that no ancient engineering could predict or prevent. The city’s foundations rested on waterlogged clay — soft, compressible, and prone to catastrophic failure under seismic stress.
The process that destroyed Heracleion was not a single event but a cascade. The delta’s natural compaction — the slow settling of accumulated sediment under its own weight — caused the ground surface to sink gradually over centuries. Groundwater levels rose as the compaction progressed. Earthquakes in the seismically active eastern Mediterranean periodically shook the saturated clay, triggering episodes of liquefaction — moments when the ground temporarily lost all bearing capacity and behaved as a fluid. Buildings that had stood for centuries dropped through the surface they were standing on.
The archaeological evidence confirms this pattern. The positions of the colossal statues in the sediment indicate not gradual erosion but sudden toppling — the figures fell rapidly, landing face-down in orientations consistent with the instantaneous loss of foundation support. The distribution of collapsed building blocks across the site shows multiple episodes of catastrophic structural failure, concentrated in the areas closest to the temple complex where the heaviest structures imposed the greatest load on the weakest ground.
The mid-second century BC event was the most destructive, but it was not the last. Subsidence continued through the Roman period. The sea advanced. The silt accumulated. Residents who stayed adapted to a shrinking city — occupying higher ground, abandoning flooded districts, watching the waterline creep upward year by year. A few inhabitants persisted into the early centuries of Arab rule. By the end of the 8th century AD, the last fragment of habitable ground disappeared beneath Aboukir Bay. The Mediterranean closed over Heracleion the way the Nile silt had closed over its temples — slowly, patiently, and completely.
1,200 Years of Silence: From Port City to Footnote
The city that had controlled the entrance to Egypt for three centuries became, in the scholarly record, a collection of problems. Herodotus mentioned Heracleion. Strabo mentioned it. Diodorus mentioned it. But the references were brief, embedded in mythological narratives, and often contradictory about basic details like location and function. A separate set of Egyptian sources referred to a port called Thonis at the Canopic mouth of the Nile. For centuries, scholars debated whether Thonis and Heracleion were the same place, two adjacent cities, or fictions altogether.
The debate was never resolved on land because there was nothing on land to find. The coastline had moved. The Canopic branch of the Nile had silted up and ceased to function as a navigable channel. The ground where Heracleion once stood was now open water, seven kilometers from the nearest shore. The Nile silt that had destroyed the city also preserved it — burying the ruins under a protective layer of anaerobic clay that kept looters, weather, and saltwater corrosion at bay for twelve centuries. The city was not lost because it was forgotten. It was forgotten because it was lost — sealed beneath a surface that no one had reason to search.
The Discovery: Franck Goddio and the City Beneath Aboukir Bay
A Five-Year Search and a Nuclear Magnetometer
Franck Goddio did not stumble onto Heracleion. He hunted it. The French underwater archaeologist — born in 1947, trained in mathematics and statistics before turning to marine archaeology — had founded the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) in 1987. By 1992, his team was mapping the submerged eastern harbor of Alexandria, recovering artifacts from the Ptolemaic royal quarters and from Napoleon’s lost fleet, sunk by Admiral Nelson in Aboukir Bay in 1798.
In 1996, Goddio broadened the survey into the western portion of Aboukir Bay — a vast, murky expanse of shallow water where visibility rarely exceeded a meter and the seabed was an undifferentiated plain of silt. The team deployed technology that had never been used in underwater archaeology at this scale: a nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometer capable of detecting metallic and mineral anomalies beneath the sediment, multi-beam bathymetry to map the contours of the ocean floor, sidescan sonar to image surface features, and sub-bottom profilers to see through the clay. They moved across the survey area in parallel straight lines at regular intervals, building a picture of the seabed’s hidden topography one pass at a time.
The anomalies appeared within an area measuring 11 by 15 kilometers. Something massive was under there — too regular to be natural geology, too extensive to be a single shipwreck. In 2000, divers went down. Visibility was negligible. They worked by touch and by instrument readings, reaching into the silt and pulling out objects that had not seen light in over a thousand years.
The first major find was the colossal statue of Hapy — 5.4 meters of red granite, lying face-down in the sediment, the largest statue of an ancient Egyptian deity ever recovered. The 5-meter pharaoh followed, shattered into five fragments by the fall that had toppled it from the temple entrance. A Ptolemaic queen — dressed in the tunic of Isis, possibly Cleopatra II or Cleopatra III — emerged from the clay with her features intact. And then the stele.
The Stele That Solved a 2,000-Year-Old Debate
The Nectanebo I stele was carved from black diorite and inscribed with a royal decree imposing a ten-percent tax on Greek goods passing through the port. The text specified that the stele was to be erected “in the city of Thonis.” It was found in the ruins of the temple that Greek sources identified as the temple of Heracleion.
The inscription was nearly identical to a stele already held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — the Stele of Naukratis, which imposed the same tax and bore the same pharaoh’s cartouche. The Cairo stele had been found at Naukratis, the Greek trading colony in the delta. The Aboukir stele was its twin, placed in the Egyptian port that served as Naukratis’s counterpart. The two stones confirmed a system: Greek merchants entering Egypt paid their dues at Thonis-Heracleion, then proceeded upriver to Naukratis to conduct their trade. One stele sat in a museum on dry land. The other had been lying on the seabed for twenty-three centuries.
The inscription resolved the Thonis-Heracleion question definitively. One city, two names — Egyptian and Greek — serving two populations who knew the same harbor by different words. Goddio had not just found a city. He had closed a file that had been open since the Renaissance.
What the Seabed Holds: The Artifacts of a Drowned Civilization
The Colossal Hapy, the Pharaoh, and the Queen
The statues are what the public remembers. The photographs — a diver suspended in green water beside a granite face ten times the size of his own — became iconic when the discoveries were first publicized, and they remain the visual shorthand for everything Heracleion represents.
The Hapy statue is the single most important sculptural find from the site. At 5.4 meters, it is the largest known statue of a deity from ancient Egypt — larger than anything recovered from Karnak or Luxor. Hapy was the divine personification of the Nile’s annual inundation, the flood that deposited the fertile silt on which Egypt’s entire agricultural economy depended. His placement at the entrance to Heracleion was a theological statement and a practical one: the god of the flood guarded the port through which the flood’s wealth was exported to the world. The statue was carved from a single block of red granite, transported to the delta from the quarries at Aswan — 900 kilometers upriver — and erected with a precision that required engineering resources only a state could command.
The pharaoh and queen statues — both also red granite, both over five meters tall — flanked the temple entrance alongside the Hapy. Their positions in the sediment told the story of their fall: they had not eroded gradually into the water but had dropped suddenly, consistent with the liquefaction model. The queen’s statue, wearing the knotted garment of Isis, was found with her features largely undamaged — the silt that buried her had also shielded her from the abrasive action of sand and current that would have destroyed an exposed sculpture within centuries.
Seventy Shipwrecks, 700 Anchors, and a Ship Herodotus Described
The harbor of Heracleion contains the largest deposit of ancient shipwrecks ever found in a single location — approximately seventy vessels, spanning the 6th to the 2nd centuries BC. The ships sank at their moorings or in the canals, some crushed by falling temple masonry, others abandoned as the harbor silted up and the water receded or advanced. Alongside them, more than 700 anchors have been recovered — stone and lead, Egyptian and Greek, a material census of four centuries of continuous maritime traffic.
The most significant nautical discovery was the baris — a type of Nile riverboat that Herodotus described in detail in Book II of his Histories, explaining how Egyptian shipwrights built vessels from short planks of acacia wood, “like bricks,” stitching them together with long tenons. For centuries, scholars debated whether Herodotus’s description was accurate or fanciful. Between 2009 and 2011, Goddio’s team excavated a baris from the waters of Heracleion. The construction matched Herodotus’s account with startling precision — a flat-bottomed, flat-keeled vessel built from short acacia planks locked together with internal mortise-and-tenon joints, exactly as the historian had described twenty-five centuries earlier. The ship was not just an archaeological find. It was a confirmation that Herodotus, often dismissed as the “father of lies” by his critics, had been watching and recording with the accuracy of an engineer.
In 2023, Goddio’s team discovered a Greek sanctuary to Aphrodite east of the Amun temple — a precinct containing imported bronze and ceramic objects, including a delicate duck-shaped bronze pourer dating to the 4th century BC. The sanctuary’s existence pushed back the timeline of permanent Greek religious presence at Heracleion, confirming that Greeks were not just passing through as traders but had begun establishing their own sacred spaces within the Egyptian port, worshipping their own gods alongside the pharaohs’ Amun.
Heracleion Today: A City That Cannot Be Visited
Five Percent Excavated, Ninety-Five Percent Waiting
Goddio’s own estimate — repeated in interviews, press releases, and exhibition catalogues over two decades — is that approximately five percent of Heracleion has been excavated. The remaining ninety-five percent lies beneath the seabed of Aboukir Bay, sealed under meters of compacted Nile silt, in conditions that have preserved organic materials — wood, rope, leather — that would have disintegrated within decades on dry land.
The annual IEASM missions continue in collaboration with Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Each season produces new finds. The 2023 mission alone yielded the Aphrodite sanctuary, the temple treasury with its silver ritual dishes and gold jewelry, and the well-preserved wooden substructures beneath the temple floor. The pace is deliberate. Goddio has described his methodology as “learning as much as we can by touching as little as we can and leaving it for future technology” — a philosophy that prioritizes documentation over extraction and treats the seabed as a time capsule rather than a quarry.
The artifacts that have been recovered are distributed across Egyptian institutions. The colossal statues and major finds are held by the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria, and the National Museum of Alexandria. The 2016 British Museum exhibition Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds — organized in partnership with Goddio and the Hilti Foundation, which has funded IEASM’s research since 1996 — displayed more than 200 objects from the underwater excavations and drew record attendance. The exhibition traveled to Paris, Zurich, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, introducing Heracleion to audiences who had never heard the name of a city that had once controlled the entrance to the most powerful civilization on Earth.
The Atlas Entry — Why You Cannot Dive Here and What That Means
Heracleion cannot be visited. The site is a protected underwater archaeological zone under the jurisdiction of Egypt’s antiquities authority. There are no tourist dives, no glass-bottom boat tours, no submersible excursions. The ruins are too fragile, the excavation too active, and the legal protections too strict. The nearest accessible point of reference is Alexandria itself — 32 kilometers to the southwest — where the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the city’s archaeological museums display artifacts from the site.
The inaccessibility is not a failure of tourism infrastructure. It is a consequence of scale. Heracleion is not a shipwreck or a single temple that can be enclosed in a viewing platform. It is an entire city — harbors, canals, temples, residential districts, a commercial waterfront — spread across a research area of 165 square kilometers, most of it still uncharted. The site is less like Pompeii — frozen in a single catastrophic moment — and more like a civilization’s filing cabinet, opened one drawer at a time across decades of painstaking work.
What Heracleion offers instead of a visit is something rarer: a city whose story is still being written. Every other ancient site in this index — every ruin, every memorial, every abandoned town — is a place whose history is essentially complete. The events happened. The buildings fell. The scholars published their findings. Heracleion is the exception. Its greatest discoveries are almost certainly ahead of it, sealed in the clay that the Nile spent three millennia depositing and that Goddio’s team has spent twenty-five years learning to read. Ninety-five percent of the city is still in the ground. The ground is under the sea. The sea is patient. So is the archaeology.
The city that controlled access to Egypt — the port where Heracles set foot, where Helen was detained, where pharaohs were crowned, where the Mysteries of Osiris processed through candlelit canals — lies in darkness at the bottom of Aboukir Bay, seven kilometers from a coastline it once dominated. The statues are still down there. The ships are still down there. The streets are still down there. And the five percent that has surfaced has already forced the rewriting of textbooks on Greek-Egyptian contact, ancient naval architecture, and the geological history of the Nile delta. The other ninety-five percent is a question the Mediterranean is holding in its mouth, waiting to be asked.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Heracleion and where is it located?
Heracleion, also known by its Egyptian name Thonis, was an ancient port city located at the Canopic mouth of the Nile, approximately 32 kilometers northeast of Alexandria. The city served as Egypt’s principal Mediterranean port from roughly the 6th to the 4th century BC, controlling all Greek maritime trade entering the country. Its ruins now lie in Aboukir Bay, approximately 6.5 kilometers off the modern Egyptian coastline, at a depth of about ten meters beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.
How was Heracleion discovered?
French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio and his team at the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) discovered the submerged ruins in 2000 after a search that began in 1996. The team used advanced geophysical survey technology — including a nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometer, multi-beam bathymetry, sidescan sonar, and sub-bottom profilers — to detect anomalies beneath the seabed of Aboukir Bay. Prior to the discovery, no physical trace of the city had ever been found, and its existence was known only from fragmentary references in ancient Greek texts.
Why did Heracleion sink?
Heracleion sank due to a combination of geological factors acting over centuries. The city was built on the Nile delta’s alluvial clay, which is prone to natural compaction and subsidence. Earthquakes in the seismically active eastern Mediterranean triggered episodes of soil liquefaction — a process in which waterlogged sediment loses its bearing capacity and behaves as a liquid. A catastrophic event in the mid-second century BC collapsed the main temple and caused widespread structural failure. Progressive subsidence, rising sea levels, and continued sedimentation gradually submerged the remaining city over the following centuries, with the last habitable areas disappearing beneath the sea by the 8th century AD.
What are the most important artifacts found at Heracleion?
The most significant discoveries include a 5.4-meter red granite statue of the god Hapy — the largest ancient Egyptian deity statue ever recovered — colossal statues of a pharaoh and a Ptolemaic queen, the Nectanebo I stele that proved Thonis and Heracleion were the same city, approximately seventy ancient shipwrecks (the largest deposit ever found at one site), more than 700 anchors, a baris ship matching Herodotus’s description of Egyptian boatbuilding, gold coins and jewelry, silver ritual instruments, a Greek sanctuary to Aphrodite discovered in 2023, and extensive remains of the Temple of Amun-Gereb.
Can you visit or dive at Heracleion?
No. The underwater site is a protected archaeological zone under the jurisdiction of Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. There are no public diving, tourist boat, or submersible access programs. The ruins are too fragile and the excavation too active to permit visitor access. Artifacts from the site can be viewed at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria. The 2016 British Museum exhibition Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds displayed more than 200 objects from the underwater excavations.
How much of Heracleion has been excavated?
As of 2025, Franck Goddio estimates that approximately five percent of the city has been excavated. The site covers a research area of 11 by 15 kilometers within Aboukir Bay, and annual missions by the IEASM in collaboration with Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities continue to produce new discoveries each season. The protective layer of Nile silt that buried the city has also preserved it — creating anaerobic conditions that have kept wood, textiles, and other organic materials intact for over a millennium.
Sources
* [Thonis-Heracleion: From Legend to Reality] — Franck Goddio, European Institute for Underwater Archaeology / Hilti Foundation (ongoing research documentation)
* [Underwater Archaeology in the Canopic Region: The Topography and Excavation of Heracleion-Thonis and East Canopus (1996–2006)] — Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology, Oxford University Press (2007)
* [Egypt’s Sunken Treasures] — Franck Goddio and Manfred Clauss (eds.), Prestel Publishing (2006)
* [The Histories, Book II] — Herodotus (5th century BC), translated by A.D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library
* [Bibliotheca Historica] — Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC), translated by C.H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library
* [Geographica, Book XVII] — Strabo (1st century BC/AD), translated by H.L. Jones, Loeb Classical Library
* [Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds] — British Museum exhibition catalogue, edited by Aurelia Masson-Berghoff, Thames and Hudson (2016)
* [Ship 17: A Baris from Thonis-Heracleion] — Alexander Belov, Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology Monograph (2019)
* [New Discoveries at Thonis-Heracleion: 2023 Mission Report] — European Institute for Underwater Archaeology / Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (2023)
* [The Geology of the Nile Delta: Subsidence, Sedimentation, and Coastal Change] — Jean-Daniel Stanley and Andrew G. Warne, Journal of Coastal Research (1993)
* [Multiple Disasters Sank This Ancient Egyptian Port City] — Coffee or Die Magazine (2021)
* [The Hunt: The Legendary Sunken City of Thonis-Heracleion] — Artnet News (2024)
