‘The unknown town now had a name… All that day “Naukratis” rang in my mind, and I sprang over the mounds with that splendid exultation of a new discovery, long wished for and well found.’ The prospect of discovering ancient cities, lost for centuries in the depths of jungles or deserts, was part of the original lure (and original sin) of archaeology. One fine example came in 1885, when William Matthew Flinders Petrie revealed the ancient Greek enclave Naukratis in Egypt’s western delta, not far from Alexandria. Petrie recounts his discovery in Ten Years’ Digging in Egypt, a book that charts a mind-boggling decade of discoveries – a streak of one pyramid or ancient city per year on average. The copy in our library is ragged and tattered, and the text on the spine has worn down to Ten Years igging in Egypt – a reading that some might find only too reflective of the colonial setting in which the book originated.
To locals, of course, places such as Naukratis were rarely unknown as such – after all, Petrie was drawn to the site because dealers in Cairo were offering him Greek artefacts said to have been dug up by peasants at the unnamed site. But it was up to the archaeologists to reveal whether the scattered remains measured up, how they were originally organised in the landscape, and what they contributed to the bigger picture of the history of humanity.
Even earlier, the German scholar Ulrich Jasper Seetzen successfully put the Decapolis city Gerasa back on the map, as it were, in 1806. His contribution included proving, using inscriptions found at the site, that this was the ancient city associated with a famous episode recounted in the Bible. The gospels provide three accounts of Jesus performing a miracle in the Gerasa region, when he exorcised the demons possessing a man. These demons were driven out of the man and sent into thousands of pigs, who are said to have drowned themselves thereafter in the Sea of Galilee. In turn, Gerasa, whose true location was lost for over a millennium, was assumed to be situated close to the Sea of Galilee, with the Bible providing the direct source for this setting. Seetzen’s breakthrough revealed that the city was more distant than the circumstances of the miracle might suggest, as it lay some 60km to the south of the Sea. By solving the riddle and relocating Gerasa correctly on the map, Seetzen not only improved our knowledge of ancient geography, but also made it possible to assess critically this narrative from the Bible.
