Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hi brain Stuff. Lauren vog Obam here with a classic episode from our former host, Christian Sagar. So this one is about the ruins of a lost Roman city off the coast of northern Africa and evidence about what led to its loss. A plus a more fishy finding. Hey, brain Stuff Christian Sagar here. Archaeologists recently discovered more than fifty acres or twenty hectares of Roman ruins off the coast of northeastern Tunisia.
That's a small country on the northern tip of Africa and situated on the Mediterranean Sea. The discovery has researchers believing they may have finally found some convincing evidence that the city of Neopolis, not to be confused with the Italian city of the same name, that Neopolis was wiped out by a natural disaster about a thousand, six hundred
and fifty years ago. In addition to streets and monuments, researchers found about one hundred tanks that would have been used to produce a garam that's a fish based fermented condiment commonly consumed in ancient Rome. In an email, how Stuff Works, spoke to Carlos F. Nor Aenia, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He says that the discovery is important because it lends support to the theory that Tunisia Neopolis was submerged by a tsunami
in the fourth century. A d that's a useful reminder that environmental catastrophe is not only a phenomenon of the modern world. Scientists wrote in a study in the journal Nature that a tsunami was caused by an earthquake that
occurred in three sixty CE in Crete. There's no surefire way to know the extent of the quake, since measuring tools didn't exist at the time, but scientists believe two separate tremors happened in succession, and the larger one had a magnitude of eight point o on the Richter scale.
The resulting tsunami destroyed about fifty thousand homes and killed approximately five thousand people in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, and because the geological fault at the center of the earthquake was located off the coast of Crete, that Greek island was actually lifted up in certain areas by as much as thirty three feet or ten meters. Historian Omnianus Marcellinius recorded the event, and the newly found ruins reveal
that there's much more to the story. Nurena says. The discovery also illuminates the economy of Roman North Africa and provides further evidence for the popularity of garum in the Roman diet. The detail is significant. Garam was a big deal throughout the Roman Empire, and as Italian archaeologist Claudio Giardino has told NPR, it played a major role in
the society's economy. He says that according to the Roman writers, a good bottle of geram could cost something like five hundred dollars today, but that they also had garam for slaves that was extremely cheap, so it is comparable to a modern amenity like wine, for instance. The underwater findings of Neopolis and its abundant manufacturing materials indicate that the
city was a major historical hub. Neopolis, which means new city in Greek, was originally founded in the fifth century b c e. And various warring territories claimed ownership of it throughout its history. Experts believe that because the city failed to pledge allegiance to the Romans. There are very
few written records documenting the details of life there. That means the new discovery is that much more important to understanding the full history of the era y. Today's episode was written by Michelle Knstantinovski and produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain
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