3D visualization of the Lighthouse of Alexandria on Pharos island, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. (© bbsferrari - stock.adobe.com)
In A Nutshell
- Giant Stones Surfaced: A June 2025 campaign led by France’s CNRS lifted about 20 blocks, among the largest at the site, from Alexandria’s harbor, including pieces of the lighthouse’s monumental doorway and parts of a previously unknown Egyptian-style pylon.
- A Model Built To Be Tested: Researchers are adding scans of the new blocks to more than 100 already digitized underwater, then checking reconstruction ideas against the stones, ancient coins and medieval descriptions.
- Most Of The Building Is Gone: CEAlex estimates the surviving underwater stone is less than 10% of the original lighthouse, so the blocks can help settle details like the doorway but not the tower’s full appearance.
If you’ve seen the Lighthouse of Alexandria pictured as a finished, familiar tower, that confident image hides how much about it is still debated. In June 2025, a team led by France’s National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, raised some of the site’s largest blocks from the Mediterranean seabed. The project’s announcement that summer put the count at 22, whiel a report from the project’s partners in May 2026 put it at 19. Either way, the stones give researchers new measurements, not a complete architectural answer.
What Did Archaeologists Actually Bring Up?
Doorway pieces, among other finds. CNRS archaeologist and architect Isabelle Hairy directed the science. The work was carried out by the Centre for Alexandrian Studies (CEAlex), an Alexandria-based research unit run by CNRS and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, under the authority of Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. A crane and barge paid for in part by the French documentary company GEDEON Programmes hoisted the stones.
The haul included lintels (the heavy beams that span the top of a doorway) and the upright stones that support them. The 2025 announcement put those doorway pieces at 70 to 80 metric tons, or roughly 154,000 to 176,000 pounds. The 2026 release says some blocks weighed up to 50 tonnes. Both releases also list a threshold, large stone slabs and pieces of a previously unknown monument: a pylon, or monumental gateway, that the project describes as Egyptian in style but built with Greek technique.
That mix matters. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says the Qaitbay Fort site has yielded more than 3,000 architectural pieces, from statues to columns and their capitals, as well as three shipwrecks of which only the cargo survives. The fort is a medieval citadel built in 1477; Hairy has written that tradition puts the lighthouse beneath its keep, while underwater excavations place it about a dozen meters (roughly 40 feet) to the northwest. The ministry adds that in 1167, under Saladin, objects were thrown into the harbor to hinder a Crusader invasion from Cyprus. So not every stone on the seabed came from the lighthouse; CEAlex notes that some belong to other buildings.
How Can Researchers Rebuild A Ruin From So Little?
By testing ideas rather than treating a digital model as certain. According to the 2025 announcement, scans of the new blocks will join those of more than 100 others recorded on the seabed during the previous 10 years. Volunteer engineers from La Fondation Dassault Systèmes will then reposition each block virtually and use simulations to test ideas about how the lighthouse was built and how it collapsed.
The scanning method has a long track record at the site. A 2019 paper in the International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences reports that CEAlex began a 3D photogrammetry program in 2009 and 2010 to help virtually reassemble broken artifacts. Photogrammetry stitches many overlapping photographs into precise 3D models. In 2013 and 2014, the team refined its methods for photographing the underwater site, producing 3D models of statues and architectural pieces and a digital surface map that covered roughly half the site by 2016.
The current effort, CEAlex’s Pharos project, launched in 2023 with support from La Fondation Dassault Systèmes. It brings together historians, numismatists (coin experts), archaeologists and architects. They are gathering ancient descriptions, images and coins that show the lighthouse so they can compare them with the stones. According to the 2026 release, the raised pieces are among about 5,000 blocks recorded underwater over three decades. The release also says the team considers medieval Arabic-language texts the most precise descriptions of the lighthouse’s architecture.
The limitation is serious. CEAlex estimates the underwater remains amount to about 7,000 metric tons of stone, less than 10% of the original building, and some of those blocks came from other structures.
Why Is The Lighthouse So Hard To Picture?
Because it changed over the centuries. According to CEAlex, Ptolemy I started construction and Ptolemy II completed it in the early third century BCE. Those dates, though, come from texts compiled centuries later: a fourth-century CE chronology and a 10th-century Greek lexicon. The 2026 release describes the structure as 103 meters tall, or about 338 feet, and says it withstood 18 earthquakes.
Coins minted under Roman emperors show the lighthouse in three sections topped by a statue. Medieval accounts describe a ramp leading to the entrance and a domed structure at the top, regarded as the tallest mosque in the Muslim world; CEAlex says the dome was rebuilt several times. Even where the fire burned is unsettled. CEAlex says its position is still open to debate, partly because a large statue stood at the summit. CEAlex links the lighthouse’s abandonment to the tsunami of August 8, 1303. A restoration ordered in 1304 never happened, and the ruin was quarried for stone.
The “Seven Wonders” label is complicated, too. Geologist Michael Denis Higgins, author of a book on the ancient wonders, writes in The Ancient Near East Today that the lighthouse was left off Antipater of Sidon’s late-second-century BCE list. It joined the canonical list only during the European Renaissance.
What Can The Stones Actually Settle?
Something narrower, but useful. The doorway pieces could help pin down the size of the entrance, how the lintels sat on their uprights and what loads such enormous blocks could carry. Questions like these bear on how the lighthouse was built, which the engineers plan to test in simulations. In May 2026, the project’s partners said every hypothesis was being tested in a digital model and that a full virtual reconstruction would be revealed soon. A France Télévisions press kit for a documentary on the project, scheduled to air Nov. 5 on France 5, describes that reconstruction as complete.
The blocks cannot replace the more than 90% of the building that’s missing, or sort out every neighboring monument. Their value lies in forcing each proposed doorway, interior space and structural joint to fit measured stone. That turns the Lighthouse of Alexandria from a confident picture into architecture researchers can test.
