It’s easy to forget how much the environment and landscape of our world has changed over time. Lush forests have become deserts, lakes have become plains, and the coastline has changed, swallowing up entire cities beneath the waves.
That’s what must have happened to this as-of-yet-unnamed city recently discovered off the coast in Greece. While it doesn’t appear that any carbon dating has been done as of yet, archaeologists estimate that the city would have been inhabited around 2,500 B.C., based on the style and composition of fragments of pottery and tools found in the lost city.
To put that in perspective, archaeologists also put the building of the Pyramids in Egypt around this time, and the building of England’s enigmatic Stonehenge a bit later (2,400 to 2,200). Of course, all of these dates come with a bit of a margin of error, and new discoveries often change these dates by a few hundred years.
One of the most remarkable parts of this discovery is that a 12 acre city managed to hide beneath only one to three meters (about three to ten feet) of the highly traveled Aegean sea for so long. According to History.com, more than 6,000 artifacts have been recovered from the city so far, making it what lead project researcher Julien Beck aptly described as “an archaeologist’s paradise.”
Not much is known of this city, just yet. The ruins of towers show that it was well fortified, and the stone streets show that it had a somewhat organized layout, but the rest is still waiting ot be discovered. Hopefully in the coming months researchers will find more clues about the people who lived there, and what happened before it disappeared beneath the sea.