In many cities of antiquity, you can only walk with scuba diving. Archaeologists find the ruins of sunken cities less often than cities hidden underground. This is why the next discovery has become so valuable.
Italian and Tunisian scientists have discovered a huge amount of ruins underwater near the city of Nabeul in northeastern Tunisia. Research has shown that these are the remains of a city called Neapolis, which was almost completely washed off the face of the earth by a tsunami 1,700 years ago.
At the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, experts saw streets, monuments and about a hundred stone baths that were used to produce a product called garum. It is a fish sauce that was very popular in ancient Rome and ancient Greece.
Researchers believe that garum production and export was an important economic factor in the development of Neapolis.
The team notes that research in this region has been conducted since 2010, but only now, favorable weather conditions have made it possible to find the ancient city.
“This discovery allowed us to assert with confidence that Neapolis was an important center for the production of garum and salted fish, possibly the largest in all of Roman civilization. Probably, the noble people of Neapolis owed their wealth to the garum,”says the head of the research group Mounir Fantar.
The area of the ruins left from Neapolis is 20 hectares, according to the Science Alert portal.
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This city was founded in the 5th century BC; translated from Greek, the name means "new city". He several times passed into the possession of one or another state during the wars. Neapolis was considered an important city in the North African region, as it had direct access to the sea.
There are very few written records about Neapolis made by Roman historians, probably because the city did not always remain subordinate to the Empire (and during the Third Punic War in 149-146 BC it completely took the side of the Carthaginians). Therefore, archaeologists hope that the ruins will tell them more about the city.
According to researchers, on July 21, 365 AD, an earthquake occurred near Napolis, which caused a tsunami. This natural disaster was described in detail by the ancient Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Scientists believe that the echoes of this natural disaster also reached the Egyptian Alexandria, Sicily, Greece, and especially the island of Crete.
It is rather difficult to recreate the picture of the disaster, but the surviving records of that time suggest the following: the earthquake probably consisted of two aftershocks. The most powerful of them had a magnitude of 8 and "moved" Crete by ten meters.