Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Christian Sager 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 nor Ania, 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 five c e 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 Marcellinus recorded the event, and the newly found ruins reveal
that there's much more to the story. Norina 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 gerum could cost something like five hundred dollars today, but that they also had garam for slaves that was extremely cheap, so it is operable 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. Today's episode was
written by Michelle Konstantinovski and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com.