At Tyre, divers go back down to the sunken ruins that survived the strikes
The ancient harbour works and submerged structures off Tyre came through the recent military strikes in southern Lebanon intact, and this week divers resumed the slow work of exploring and recording them. It is a small story with a long tail. Tyre was the Phoenician city that seeded Carthage and Cadiz, sat on an island until Alexander built a causeway out to it in 332 BC, and has been continuously inhabited since; much of what is left of its two ancient harbours is now under water, silted, and known only in fragments. The archaeology is therefore unusually vulnerable — not to bombing alone but to the interruption of everything that keeps a site legible: survey seasons, funding, divers who know the ground, the local institutions that hold the records. That the ruins survived is a fact about ordnance. That people went back down this week is a fact about whether the place will still be understood in twenty years.
