Ten years of dive logs from the submerged ruins of Alexandria, written in Mansoura.

How it started.

Tarek Ramadan served fifteen years in the Egyptian Navy's diving branch, including six years on submerged-archaeology liaison duty supporting institutional expeditions on the Alexandria coast between 2006 and 2012. He left the Navy in 2012 to set up an independent dive-charter business on the Alexandria coast, primarily working with the institutional expeditions as a contracted support diver. By 2015 Tarek had logged more than three hundred dives on the submerged sites and had become a working alongside-diver to most of the major institutional projects then active. The journal was the natural next step: a written record of what he and his contracted colleagues were seeing in real time, published more quickly than the institutional academic cycle and in plain enough language to be read by non-specialists.

The first issue went out in November 2016 to a list of forty-three subscribers — Tarek's professional contacts plus a small number of interested non-specialists who had heard of the journal through the Alexandria diving community. Issue One covered eleven field reports from the autumn 2016 season. By the end of the first year the bulletin was reaching three hundred subscribers and Tarek had been joined by Mahmoud el-Sherbini as the second editor. The cooperative was formally registered as Mansoura Marine Heritage S.A.E. in early 2017 to put the financial structure on a proper footing.

The four editors.

Tarek Ramadan — founder and lead dive editor. Born Mansoura 1974. Fifteen-year Navy diving career through 2012, then four years independent dive-charter operator before the journal. Specialist subjects: dive logistics, working alongside institutional expeditions, submerged-site safety protocols. Lead-dives most of the journal's own field reports and writes the editorial introduction to each monthly bulletin. Signs the conservation-protocol updates personally.

Mahmoud el-Sherbini — managing editor and photographic specialist. Born Alexandria 1981. Trained as an underwater documentary photographer at the Egyptian Maritime Academy (2003–07), then worked in commercial underwater photography across the Mediterranean before joining the journal in early 2017. Runs the photographic workflow from boat to bulletin, maintains the calibrated colour-reference cards, edits the photographic plates. Speaks Arabic, English and conversational French.

Iman Hosny — research editor. Born Damanhour 1988. Read maritime archaeology at the University of Alexandria (2006–10) and then a PhD at the University of Southampton in submerged-landscape archaeology (2010–15). Joined the journal in 2018 after returning to Egypt. Maintains the journal's working relationship with the institutional expeditions, writes the comparative essays that situate each field report against the institutional academic record, and signs off on attribution questions where the institutional record is the relevant authority.

Sabri al-Banna — junior dive editor. Born Mansoura 1995. Trained at the Egyptian Maritime Academy and joined the journal in 2022 after three seasons as a contract diver on the eastern harbour survey. Files the field reports from his own dives and the trainee diary that runs alongside the monthly bulletin. Currently working toward his lead-diver qualification, expected late 2026.

The administrator, Heba Ramadan (Tarek's sister), has handled subscriptions, accounting, the public correspondence inbox and the office Monday-Wednesday-Friday opening hours since 2017. Heba does not dive and does not write field reports; she runs the business side and corresponds with subscribers.

Cooperative governance.

The cooperative is governed by the four editors as an editorial board, with the administrator attending without voting rights. Major editorial decisions — admission of a new site to the active rotation, change to the dive-safety protocol, change to the conservation guidelines — require a three-of-four board vote. The lead-editor role rotates between Tarek and Iman every three years; Tarek holds the current term through December 2027. Mahmoud and Sabri do not yet hold the lead-editor role under the cooperative's internal seniority arrangement.

Funding and editorial independence.

Reader subscriptions covered approximately sixty-two percent of revenue in 2025. The Behaira Marine Heritage Foundation grant — paid annually since 2019 under a renewable five-year agreement and covering specifically the journal's contribution to the conservation-protocol documentation work — contributed twenty-four percent. The remaining fourteen percent came from two consultancy contracts that Tarek privately holds with non-archaeological marine clients (a port-engineering firm and a coastal infrastructure consultancy), both unrelated to submerged archaeology and both declared in the December transparency note. No institutional expedition, antiquities-trade entity, dive-tourism operator or advocacy organisation has funded the journal at any point in its ten-year history. Three sponsorship approaches have been declined since 2017, all from dive-tourism operators wanting to be associated with the journal's editorial brand.

The Behaira Marine Heritage Foundation is an Egyptian private foundation established in 2014 to support marine archaeological documentation in the Delta governorates; its grants are made on a documentary-output basis and carry no editorial conditions. The foundation's annual report (separate from the journal's) describes the grant as part of the foundation's broader marine-heritage programme.

The documentary stance.

The journal's editorial choice — articulated repeatedly in the editorial introductions — is to document what the institutional expeditions are working on, without becoming an institutional expedition ourselves. We log alongside-dives with the institutional teams' consent and write the alongside reports openly attributed. We do not undertake independent excavation, do not collect material from the seabed, and do not interpret material that the institutional teams have not yet published. The journal complements the institutional record; it does not substitute for it.

The position is occasionally a frustration to non-specialist readers who would like us to publish the latest discoveries before the institutional teams do; we hold to the position because the documentary record is the journal's only credibility, and because the institutional teams' permits from the Ministry of Antiquities give them the legal and ethical primacy on new material.

What we publish — and what we do not.

We publish field reports from our own dive seasons, alongside-dive reports from the institutional expeditions with their written consent, the monthly bulletin, the conservation-protocol document, the annual season summary, the dive-team-and-equipment file, and the financial transparency note. We publish photographs of submerged structures, finds in situ on the seabed, and the working dive team at sea. We do not publish previously undocumented finds, do not publish material in private collections, do not publish dive-locations precise enough to enable independent diving, and do not publish photographs of individuals (institutional divers or our own) without their explicit consent for the specific use.

The Mansoura office.

The office is the ground floor of a 1950s residential building on Sharia al-Hurriya, three blocks back from the Damietta-branch Nile corniche in the El-Madina district. The upstairs neighbours are a family dental clinic and a small tax-advisory firm. The office consists of three rooms: the reception room where visitors are received, the working room with the photographic workstation and the editorial cross-reference table, and the archive room with the journal's bound bulletins and the printed photographic plates from each season. Office hours Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10:00 to 14:00 Cairo time. Visiting researchers welcome by appointment; the journal hosts roughly fifteen visiting researchers a year, mostly maritime-archaeology MA and PhD students.

Visiting researchers and the office archive.

The Mansoura office hosts visiting researchers throughout the academic year — primarily PhD students working on submerged-archaeology thesis topics from European, Egyptian and East Asian universities, and occasional mid-career journalists researching long-form pieces on the Alexandria submerged sites. Approximately fifteen visiting researchers come through the office each year. The archive room holds the printed field-logbook archive since 2016 (the canonical primary source for every published report), the cooperative's bound bulletin archive, the cross-referenced photographic-plate folders organised by season, and a small library of regional maritime-archaeology reference works including the complete published Goddio Foundation expedition reports, the Empereur Centre d'Études publications, and Honor Frost's 1960s monographs which the journal acquired second-hand from a Cairo university disposal in 2018. Visiting researchers are welcome to use the archive during office hours and are asked only to log their visit in the office's visitor book.

Correspondence.

Write to [email protected] for any matter. Telephone Heba on +20 50 2284 615 during office hours. Postal correspondence to the Sharia al-Hurriya address; mark the envelope "editorial office, ground floor". The journal reads every message and replies; the response time is normally two working days for routine matters and longer for substantive dive-coordination questions which involve the relevant institutional contact.