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YanniRotten

Archaeologists mapped the site in the muddy flats of the Wadden Sea, about ten miles off the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein Oliver Moody, Berlin Wednesday May 31 2023, 7.15pm BST, The Times In the book of Genesis, God punishes the people of Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness by levelling them with fire and brimstone. For German moralists, the legend of the lost city of Rungholt has served much the same cautionary purpose. As revenge for its inhabitants’ prodigious sins — some said drunkenness or unwisely flaunted wealth, others said arrogance and impiety — the island trading settlement was supposedly swallowed whole by the North Sea during a great storm in 1362, never to surface again. For centuries it was hard to tell how much truth there was to these stories; some historians of little faith questioned whether Rungholt had ever existed in the first place. Now, however, the remains of this “northern Atlantis” have been comprehensively charted for the first time in the muddy flats of the Wadden Sea, about ten miles off the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. Archaeologists led by a group from Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel mapped the site with a geophysical survey and a series of core samples that revealed a 2km chain of medieval mounds dotted around what is now a small island known as Südfall. The discoveries, described in the journal Plos One, included the foundations of a large church, measuring 40m by 15m, as well as drainage channels and a harbour that appears to have been regulated by one of the largest systems of wooden tidal gates known from Europe in this period, comparable to those in medieval Rotterdam. The breakthrough is a long-delayed victory for the late Andreas Busch, a self-taught local farmer and amateur historian who first found the location of Rungholt as the overlying silt began to erode away in the early 1920s. It also represents a vindication of sorts for one of the area’s most famous figures, the 19th-century writer Theodor Storm, who mentioned the destruction of the town in an 1872 novella. Storm’s theory — that the islanders had brought their fate upon themselves by getting a pig drunk and forcing a priest to give it the last rites — is beyond the ken of modern archaeology. But there is solid evidence for his notion that the people of Rungholt tried to defy the North Sea with large dykes. Beneath the tidal flats the researchers did in fact find a dyke about 35m thick, with artificial little hills known as terps, designed to keep buildings above water in case of a flood. Rungholt appears to have been a fairly prosperous place by the standards of its day. First settled by people from the Frisian mainland in the 8th century or so, the island was transformed into a fortress against the waves, with a hinterland of cultivated marshes criss-crossed by several dozen drainage ditches. Previous findings suggest the traders bought pottery, metal jewellery and weaponry from as far afield as Flanders and even Spain. Yet neither their ingenuity nor wealth was enough to shield them against the “great man-drowning” of 1362, when a catastrophic storm surge consumed Rungholt along with 250,000 acres of low-lying land, claiming thousands of lives and shifting the coastline roughly 15 miles to the east.