World's first underwater museum

A proposed underwater museum in Alexandria, Egypt, came closer to reality when the UN established a committee to aid the design process with the Egyptian government

Shown with a 2008 illustration of the proposed underwater museum, the Bay of Alexandria once contained Cleopatra's island palace and the Pharos of Alexandria lighthouse , one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Both of them were done in centuries ago by earthquakes. 

The proposed museum's underwater facility (at bottom in architect Jacques Rougerie's conception) will be difficult and expensive to build and is the focus of the just launched two-year feasibility study. But planners believe that the benefits of plunging visitors into the historical context of the objects--on the sunken island that once held Cleopatra's palace--will be worth the trouble.

The marble head of Roman princess Antonia Minor, mother of Emperor Claudius, rests on sand at the now sunken site of Cleopatra's Alexandria, Egypt, palace in 1998. Behind the head is a toppled statue of a Ptolemaic, or Greco-Egyptian, king in the guise of Hermes-Thoth, messenger of the gods.

An eroded sphinx, shown in 1998, isn't much more than a silhouette in the Bay of Alexandria's dusky waters. Visitors to the proposed underwater museum should be able to view these artifacts in situ, despite the current cloudiness. 

As part of a project to identify and preserve artifacts in the Bay of Alexandria, divers raise a 4-foot-tall (1.5-meter-tall), granite, first-century A.D. statue of a priest of Isis from in 1998. (AP Photo)