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An archaeological mission has recovered a bronze signet ring engraved with the Lighthouse of Alexandria from the sunken harbour of Cleopatra's city. Egyptian officials say it is the first time the image of this Wonder of the Ancient World has appeared on a ring of this kind.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria has been gone for more than seven centuries. A series of earthquakes, including those of 1303 and 1323, brought down the tower that had guided ships towards the city for some sixteen hundred years. Its outline has now turned up on the seabed again, shrunk to the size of a ring.

A joint mission of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) and the General Administration of Underwater Antiquities, part of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has found a bronze signet ring with the Lighthouse engraved on it.

The announcement came from Hisham El-Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council, during a visit by Tourism and Antiquities Minister Sherif Fathy to the excavations in the Eastern Harbour of Alexandria, according to a statement from the ministry. The ring had been found a few days earlier on the royal island of Antirhodos, one of the palace districts of the ancient city, inside the great harbour known as the Portus Magnus.

El-Leithy says the design recalls images of the Lighthouse already known from some second-century AD coins. He considers the find exceptional because, in his words, it is the first time the Lighthouse has been found engraved on a signet ring.

A signet ring worked as a personal signature. A design was cut into its face so that, pressed into wax or soft clay, it left a raised impression, much like the stamp used for a wax seal on a letter. People used them to close correspondence, to seal amphorae (the large clay jars that carried wine, olive oil and other goods) and to validate documents. The statement does not say who wore this ring or what for. It gives neither its size nor its exact date.

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The island of kings

Antirhodos is a small island that now lies a few metres underwater, off the coast of modern Alexandria. In antiquity it was part of the Portus Magnus, the city’s great royal harbour, which was bounded on one side by Cape Lochias and on the other by the island of Pharos, where the Lighthouse itself stood. The Greek geographer Strabo, who visited Egypt in the late first century BC (between 29 and 25 BC), described it like this:

Below the inner palaces lies the harbour dug by hand and hidden from view, the private property of the kings, as is Antirrhodus, an island lying off the artificial harbour, which has a royal palace and a small port. It was given that name as a rival to Rhodes. […] To this headland Antony added a mole running still further into the harbour, and at its tip he built a royal lodge that he called the Timonium.

Strabo, Geography, XVII, 1, 9

The name means roughly “rival of Rhodes”, the island famous for its Colossus, another of the Seven Wonders. The passage also drops in a well-known figure: Mark Antony. After losing the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, he returned to Alexandria and, according to ancient accounts, withdrew from company in the manner of Timon, the Athenian misanthrope who was abandoned by his friends and ended up avoiding people altogether (the same Timon who inspired a Shakespeare play). Antony took his own life a year later.

These waters have been explored since 1992 by the French archaeologist Franck Goddio, president of the IEASM and visiting professor of maritime archaeology at the University of Oxford, working with the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The survey area covers about 400 hectares (roughly 1,000 acres), and much of what the team was looking for lay under the silt. So they began by mapping the seabed with electronic detectors before digging anywhere. The Hilti Foundation has funded the work since 1996.

On Antirhodos the team has documented the remains of a Ptolemaic palace, which has been linked to Cleopatra VII, and of a temple to the goddess Isis, the Iseum. Its findings were published by the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology. On the shore opposite, the team located Antony’s Timonium.

What the ring might tell us about the island

El-Leithy sees more in the ring than a curiosity. In his view, it could mean that the palace on Antirhodos that Strabo saw stayed in use until the second century AD for administrative purposes, perhaps including the running of the Lighthouse. It is a hypothesis, and the ministry’s statement words it conditionally.

Goddio’s team has a different timeline for the island’s temple. They say the Temple of Isis was destroyed around AD 50 by earthquakes and tsunamis, and that a pleasure barge found beside it in 2025 would have sunk in the same event. That vessel, a thalamegos (a boat with cabins, built for parties and processions), was presented as the first of its type ever located.

Other descriptions of the island, by contrast, speak of occupation lasting into the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla in the early third century, and of a final sinking in the fourth century, after the great earthquake of AD 365 that shook the eastern Mediterranean. The dates do not fully match, and the ring alone does not settle the question.

A lighthouse more than twice as tall as the Tower of Hercules

The building on the ring was enormous. Ancient sources put it at around 120 metres (about 394 feet), which is roughly the height of a 40-storey building today. That figure comes from the Greek author Achilles Tatius in the second century AD, as reported by the researcher Andrew Michael Chugg in the journal Ancient Egypt. For comparison, the Tower of Hercules in A Coruña, on Spain’s north-western coast, is the only Roman lighthouse still standing and still in service. It measures 55 metres (180 feet). It also dates from the same period as the coins to which the ring is compared, having been built in the late first or early second century AD.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria is considerably older. It was built between 297 and 284 BC under Ptolemy I, and its architect was Sostratus of Cnidus, who dedicated it, according to Strabo, for the safety of sailors. The geographer describes a tower of white marble, with many storeys and admirably built. The earthquakes of 1303 and 1323 destroyed it completely, and in 1477 the Qaitbay Fort was raised on the spot.

What did it look like on the outside? Old images help. Chugg points out that coins minted in Roman Alexandria, such as those of Domitian (AD 94) and Antoninus Pius (AD 142), show the Lighthouse with a statue on top and with figures of Tritons (men with fish tails who blow a conch shell) at the corners of the first level. According to El-Leithy, the ring follows a similar scheme.

The remains of the Lighthouse itself lie at the other end of the harbour, beside the Qaitbay Fort. A separate team works there: the Centre for Alexandrian Studies, within the PHAROS project coordinated by France’s national research agency, the CNRS. In 2025 it lifted 22 large blocks out of the water to scan them and rebuild the structure digitally.

Four sites in one season

This year’s campaign focuses on four places in the Eastern Harbour. Goddio listed them during the minister’s visit: the Temple of Isis, the palace and western hill of Antirhodos, the remains of an obelisk, and the Timonium, which the statement calls “Antony’s palace”.

The recovered objects include pottery spanning about eight centuries, from the fourth century BC, when Alexander the Great founded the city, to the fourth century AD. There are everyday pieces, such as tableware, amphorae, jars, flasks and oil lamps, along with fragments of glass. Fathy stressed the value of the work, which demands highly specialised technical and field experience because of the difficulty of digging underwater, and said each discovery helps us understand the city’s history better.

When the season in the Eastern Harbour ends, the mission will move to Abu Qir Bay, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) east of Alexandria, where Goddio’s team is exploring the sunken cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion.

Whether the ring really is the first of its kind depends on how “signet ring” is defined. Chugg himself mentions a Roman seal of blue glass in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that shows the Lighthouse with its statues, and a Byzantine carved gemstone in the British Museum with a tower crowned by a human figure. Neither is a ring, or at least neither is described as one, and El-Leithy’s claim refers to rings. We will have to wait for the object to be published to see how it compares.

Its exact date, its size, whether it carries any inscription and who owned it are all still unknown. It is also unclear whether the seal belonged to someone connected with running the Lighthouse, as El-Leithy’s hypothesis suggests, or to an ordinary harbour dweller who wanted to carry the symbol of his city on his finger.

A version of this article is also available in Spanish: Léelo en español

ALEXANDRIA, La. (KALB) - An expansion will take place in the next two years for the Coca-Cola facility in Alexandria.

Multiple members from local officials, state goverment and regional leaders represented the company and the growth that will take place in the city.

“It’ll be a hub for all of our other facilities, to Shreveport, Monroe, Lake Charles, to build orders here, and we’ll ship them out every day to those other locations,” said Scott McCallister, West Region Vice President for Coca-Cola.

Collaboration took place for months for everyone involved. Understanding which paths pushed for growth and made the most sense was the goal during the planning.

Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy noticed its importance and made sure this happened for the city.

“That gives me the opportunity to point out how great it is to see, not only the keeping of something as significant as Coke, but to see that Coca-Cola will now expand those operations,” he said. “That’s a real testament of their belief in this community, and the workforce of this community, and in every way, a vote of confidence for Alexandria and our community.”

The topic that leaders want the public to know is the numbers behind the project. $106 million was invested into the expansion. In addition to that, 36 acres of land were bought to help build a larger facility in the near future.

Economy was a word that was used strongly at the meeting, with the chance to add up to 50 new job openings with the completion of the project.

“There’s always a need for more growth in Alexandria, also in Rapides Parish and Central Louisiana,” said Mark Cowart, Coca-Cola Sales Center Manager. “We saw the opportunity when our expansion came along. 50-plus potential associate jobs in the future, so we saw that right away, and we’re always looking at opportunities to grow.”

Groundbreaking will take place in February 2027, and the new facility is expected to be finished by October 2028.

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The site in Alexandria, La., a major expansion of the Trump administration’s busiest deportation hub, will streamline and accelerate removals.

By Miriam Jordan

Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent.

Published Oct. 1, 2026

A 528-bed facility for immigrant children and families is expected to open soon at a Louisiana airfield, according to local officials and advocacy groups, a major expansion of the Trump administration’s busiest deportation hub.

Fashioned from renovated Air Force barracks at England Airpark, home to the Alexandria International Airport, the site will house people as they await removal from the United States.

Local officials who toured the facility in Alexandria, La., last week said it would open within two to three weeks. In addition to the barracks, they reported seeing prefabricated structures that will hold immigrants. Intake, medical and other personnel were already on site, they said.

The new facility will more than double the number of immigrants that can be held on the airport’s premises. Currently, adult men slated for deportation are confined in a 400-bed facility on the tarmac.

Roughly 30 percent of all deportation flights from the United States leave from Alexandria. From January through August, 579 flights departed from the airport, putting it on pace to surpass 657 flights in all of 2025 and 357 in 2024, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit that tracks the flights.

The detention expansion would add to a huge statewide system. Louisiana already hosts a sprawling network of at least nine immigration detention centers, primarily operated by private, for-profit prison corporations under federal contracts.