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.(Illustration copyright Jacques Rougerie Architect )

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. (Illustration copyright Jacques Rougerie Architect )

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. (Illustration copyright Jacques Rougerie Architect )

Twin sphinxes flank a statue of a priest of Isis amid fallen columns on Alexandria’s sunken island of Antirhodos in a photo from the late 1990s. The statue was raised in 1998 and became part of a traveling exhibition. Photograph by Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation)

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. (Photograph by Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation)

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. (Photograph by Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation )

Rich with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a reproduction of two granite blocks–found a third of a mile (500 meters) apart in the Bay of Alexandria–helped prove that the pieces originally formed a single tablet. (Photograph by Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation )

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)