QANTIR, Egypt — This is a typical Nile Delta farming village, its simple mud-brick houses sitting along dirt roads amid the green carpeting of rice and corn fields.
Yet there's grandeur here--a vast, buried metropolis from millenniums ago that was discovered by German archeologists using cutting-edge imaging technology.
The exploration team believes the site is the long-lost capital of Ramses II, a mighty pharaoh who lived more than 3,200 years ago.
Working with magnetic imaging equipment used by geophysicists to search for oil, the archeologists have mapped an underground city they estimate spread over 12 square miles.
It "is so vast and so big that there are no words to describe it," said Edgar Pusch, head of the archeological team from the Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany. "Something like this has never been detected before in Egypt."
The computer plottings produced by the team show winding streets, structures that look like small houses, spacious buildings, palaces and a lake shore in ghostly white lines on black.
Among the marvels are a huge stable with attached royal chariot and arms factories.
"This stable is an amazing thing," Pusch said.
Covering nearly 185,000 square feet, the stable had six identical rows of halls connected to a vast courtyard. Each hall had 12 rooms, each 40 feet long. The floors sloped down to holes for collecting horse urine that Pusch speculates was used in dyeing cloth, softening leather and fertilizing vineyards.
Pusch said the stable held up to 460 horses, making it "the largest ever ancient stable."
West of the stable is the chariotry, where light, two-wheeled war chariots were manufactured and maintained. Numerous reliefs on temple and tomb walls show such chariots pulled by two horses and ridden by two soldiers. Ramses II himself was depicted riding one.
An arms assembly line is nearby. Pusch's team has dug up chariot parts, arrow shafts, flint arrowheads, javelin heads, daggers and bronze scales of body armor.
The scientists dug in only a few spots, then calculated the rest of a structure's outlines. "If we excavated all this, we would need a lifetime," Pusch said.
For the most part, the team relies on the magnetic images to look at the ancient city.
When small areas are excavated, they are filled back in so farming can resume. Pusch said the village cannot be quarantined as a historic site.
