MARINA, Egypt – Today, it’s a sprawl of luxury vacation homes where Egypt’s wealthy play on the white beaches of the Mediterranean coast.

But 2,000 years ago, this was a thriving Greco-Roman port city, boasting villas of merchants grown rich on the wheat and olive trade.

The ancient city, known as Leukaspis or Antiphrae, was hidden for centuries after it was nearly wiped out by a fourth-century tsunami that devastated the region.

More recently, it was nearly buried under the modern resort of Marina in a development craze that turned this coast into the summer playground for Egypt’s elite.

Nearly 25 years after its discovery, Egyptian authorities are preparing to open ancient Leukaspis’ tombs, villas and city streets to visitors – a rare example of a Classical-era city in a country better known for its pyramids and Pharaonic temples.

“Visitors can go to understand how people lived back then, how they built their graves, lived in villas or traded in the main agora (square),” said Ahmed Amin, the local inspector for the antiquities department.

Chinese engineers began cutting into the sandy coast to build roads for the new resort in 1986 when they struck the ancient tombs and houses of a town founded in the second century B.C.

The ancient city yielded its secrets in a much more gradual fashion to a team of Polish archaeologists excavating the site through the 1990s.

A portrait emerged of a prosperous port town, with up to 15,000 residents at its height, exporting grains, livestock, wine and olives to the rest of the Mediterranean.

Merchants lived in elegant two-story villas set along zigzagging streets with pillared courtyards flanked by living and prayer rooms.

Rainwater collected from roofs ran down special hollowed-out pillars into channels under the floor leading to the family cisterns. Waste disappeared into a sophisticated sewer system.

Visitors will also be able to climb down the steep shafts of the rock-cut tombs to the deeply buried burial chambers of the city’s necropolis.

Egyptian government interest in the site rose in the last few years, part of a renewed focus on developing the country’s Classical past.