A puzzle of two names
For a long time scholars had two names for what might have been one place. Greek writers called a port near the Canopic mouth Heracleion, while Egyptian texts referred to a place called Thonis. Some argued that they were two separate towns, others that they were the same. Until the underwater site was found, there was no object that could settle the question. The stele of King Nectanebo I did that.
The stele
During the excavations in Abu Qir Bay a stele was found in 2001. It is made of dark stone, stands roughly two metres high and carries an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphic script. It is dated to the first year of Nectanebo I, who ruled Egypt for about eighteen years, from 380 to 362 BCE, as the founder of the 30th Dynasty. This was one of the last periods of Egyptian rule before foreign conquest.
The text is very close to a stele already known from Naukratis, the old Greek trading town in the Delta, which had been discovered in the late nineteenth century and is now in Cairo. The two stones seem to be copies of the same royal decree, set up in different places. Finding the second copy at Heraklion supported the view that the Egyptian name used in the decree, Thonis, applied to the city now lying under the bay.
What the decree says
The decree concerns taxation. In outline, it assigns a portion of the revenue from Greek trade to the temple of the goddess Neith at Sais, a major religious centre in the western Delta. The revenue came from goods brought in by Greeks, and from items produced at Naukratis. The share is generally described as a tenth, though readers should check translated editions for the exact wording and the goods listed.
The point is not simply financial. It shows that the Egyptian state organised foreign commerce through designated ports. Foreign merchants were allowed to trade, but they did so at fixed locations and under royal supervision, and part of the income went to temples. Such arrangements helped finance religious institutions, which were major employers and landowners.
Why this confirmed the double name
The decree names Thonis as the place where goods entered from the sea, in effect as a customs point at the mouth of the Nile. Because the stele was found in the sunken city, and because the Greek tradition places Heracleion in the same area, scholars concluded that the two names are the same city, one Egyptian and one Greek. Further inscriptions found since then are consistent with that conclusion. In ancient Egypt, as elsewhere, a site could hold different names in different languages, and a port that served both communities naturally did.
Context in the reign of Nectanebo I
Nectanebo I came to power after a period of rapid changes of ruler and was concerned with defending Egypt against Persian efforts to retake it. Persia had ruled Egypt in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE under the Achaemenids, and a Persian attempt around 373 BCE to invade the Delta was beaten back. The wider background is the long Greco-Persian conflict, in which Greeks served as mercenaries on both sides. Securing the Delta’s ports and funding the temples that supported his rule made sense for a king in this position. He also built extensively and is known from many monuments.
Compared with famous bilingual inscriptions such as the Rosetta Stone, the stele is monolingual, so it did not help decipherment, but it gave historians a text with precise information about the economy.
Limits of the evidence
It is worth keeping the conclusions modest. The stele shows the city’s name and a role in trade, but it does not give the size of the port or the volume of goods. The tax arrangement refers to a specific time, and conditions changed over the following centuries. A single inscription does not describe the entire economy, and modern studies of ancient economies tend to combine texts like this with pottery, coins and shipwreck evidence.
Why it matters
The stele turned an assumption into a documented fact and showed that the underwater site was not an anonymous ruin but a named Egyptian port. It also gave a rare glimpse of how a king, a temple and foreign merchants were linked by a written rule. For historians of Egypt and Greece alike, a find of this type is more informative than a large statue, because it records who paid what to whom.