Here are the fruits of a union between two declining cultures in cities that were backwaters of the human spirit, and the exhibition is a sad illustration of why archaeologists should beware of hyperbole. Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion are currently being excavated by divers and underwater archaeology sounds exciting. It is exciting – if you are there. But looking at the rescued objects in a museum once the barnacles are scraped off is another matter.

Here, they have to speak for themselves. But this exhibition patronises with Indiana Jones-style nonsense. A film and photographs, eerie lighting and obtrusive sound effects crank up the volume. Yet many of the wonders are not that wondrous. There are some unadorned stone boxes, and a lot of oxidised bronze ladles. As for the revelatory evidence of complex contacts between ancient Egypt and Greece that the exhibition promises, there is just an eyeful of a wine amphora and a damaged Greek perfume bottle.

There are a couple of very obvious problems with talking up these two submerged cities as if they were revelatory. One is that the art of Egypt has been collected since ancient times – later objects in the show are connected with the Roman emperor Hadrian, who created his own Egyptian temple in his villa at Tivoli. Western museums have been filled with Egyptian marvels for centuries, not least the British Museum, with its colossal head of Ramses II and the multilingual Rosetta Stone. New discoveries are more likely to add detail than change the overall picture of Egypt established by generations of archaeologists.....

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