The Lighthouse of Alexandria: Divers Are Still Pulling Its Pieces Out of the Harbor

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, known in antiquity as the Pharos after the small island it stood on, was completed sometime around 280 to 247 BC under the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt following Alexander the Great’s death. Ancient estimates put its height at roughly 135 meters, tall enough that it ranked among the tallest human-made structures anywhere in the world for centuries, and it was counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the only one of the seven built primarily for a practical, ongoing function rather than as a tomb, temple, or monument.

Its light, produced by fire at the top reflected outward through mirrors, was reportedly visible from many nautical miles out to sea, guiding ships into Alexandria’s busy harbor for well over a millennium. That functional lifespan ended gradually rather than in one dramatic collapse. A series of earthquakes struck the eastern Mediterranean between the 10th and 14th centuries AD, progressively damaging the structure until it finally collapsed into the harbor waters surrounding the site, leaving no standing remains above the surface by the time later medieval travelers described only ruins.

What survived went unexamined by modern archaeology for centuries, sitting submerged in Alexandria’s eastern harbor near the Qaitbay Citadel, a fortress later built partly from the lighthouse’s own recovered stone. Systematic underwater investigation began only in 1994, when French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur, founder of the Centre d’Études Alexandrines, led a team that mapped and cataloged the submerged debris field in detail. Divers documented more than 3,500 individual architectural pieces scattered across the harbor floor, including colossal granite blocks weighing up to 60 tons, sphinxes, obelisks, and monumental statues of Ptolemy II and his wife Arsinoe, physical evidence of the lighthouse’s original scale that no surviving text had fully conveyed.

The underwater work has continued in phases since Empereur’s original survey, with recovery and conservation efforts recovering individual blocks from the seabed periodically, including a batch of massive stones raised in 2025 as part of ongoing plans some Egyptian officials have floated to eventually reconstruct portions of the lighthouse using recovered original material. Whether or not a physical reconstruction ever proceeds, the underwater site itself, still being surveyed more than three decades after Empereur’s team first went looking, remains one of the most extensive archaeological records of any of the ancient world’s Seven Wonders, recovered piece by piece from the harbor it once guarded ships into.