THE ALEXANDRIA TSUNAMI TRAGEDY: The Wave That Left Ships on the Rooftops | Full Documentary

On Thursday, 21 July AD 365, a tsunami struck Alexandria, the city of Cleopatra and of the great Lighthouse, and left ships on the roofs of its houses. But it did not begin with a wave. A little after sunrise, the sea went out, faster and farther than any tide anyone had ever seen, until the ships in the harbour lay on their sides in the mud and the floor of the sea lay open to the sun. Crowds walked out onto the wet sand to gather the stranded fish.

About an hour earlier, as the night was ending, one of the strongest earthquakes in the history of the Mediterranean had struck off the island of Crete, more than six hundred kilometres away. In a single movement, it lifted the western end of Crete nine metres out of the sea. The wave it raised crossed the Mediterranean in every direction, from Sicily and the Adriatic to the Nile Delta. When it came back into Alexandria, it carried ships over the quays and onto the houses. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that many thousands of people drowned.

But the most haunting thing about the tsunami of AD 365 is not the destruction. It is that the lesson was already written. Eight hundred years earlier, the Athenian historian Thucydides had described a sea that drew back and returned in a huge wave, named the earthquake as its cause, and written down who was lost: those who could not run up to the higher ground in time. His history was studied in Alexandria for centuries. And yet, for generations afterwards, the city marked the anniversary by lighting lamps in every street and giving thanks. It remembered the day, but not the rule.

In this documentary you will discover:
• why the greatest port of the ancient world needed a lighthouse just to be found from the sea
• why the ancient stories of tsunamis spoke of angry gods instead of telling people where to run
• how one earthquake lifted a whole coast of Crete into the air
• what happened, minute by minute, on the morning of 21 July 365
• why so many people walked toward the sea instead of away from it
• how a monk and a bishop became legends for holding back the sea, and what a Roman soldier found years later, far from the shore
• why one seismologist doubted that the wave destroyed Alexandria at all, and what archaeologists found in 2024 under a garden of the city
• why, after sixteen centuries, Alexandria is finally preparing for the day the sea goes out again

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