As a major new exhibition opens at the British Museum, Charlotte Higgins travels to the Nile Delta to meet the archaeologists uncovering the spellbinding secrets of ancient Naukratis Near the tiny farming villages of Rashwan and Abu Mishfa in the Nile Delta – the kind of villages where you might see a girl tugging on the harness of a recalcitrant water buffalo as she leads it out to graze, or a mule-drawn cart loaded with animal feed – is a scrappy lake, the haunt of innumerable egrets. Under this lake, and surrounding fields and houses, lie the remains of Naukratis, a city established by Greeks as a trading port in around 620BC. It is here that a British Museum excavation is under way, and some of the archaeologists’ most intriguing discoveries in the city – which you might think of as a kind of Hong Kong of the ancient world – are about to form part of a major exhibition. It takes an effort of imagination to conjure this place back to its ancient flourishing before its abandonment in the seventh century. But once it was a city with perhaps 16,000 inhabitants, full of temples to gods such as Hera, Aphrodite and the Dioskouroi (Castor and Pollux), and dominated by a vast sanctuary dedicated to the Egyptian deity Amun-Ra, from which a sphinx-lined avenue led to the Canopic branch of the Nile, which long ago flowed here. Continue reading...
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