The ill-fated trading ship has spent 2,400 years at the bottom of the Black Sea.
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This ancient Greek ship is the oldest intact shipwreck ever discovered
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Incredible discovery. It would be fitting if several of the world's shipping magnates could get together to fund its recovery and preservation in the way Bezos funded Apollo engine recovery.
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"It’s an interesting validation of a long-standing habit among archaeologists who study ancient ships: looking to ancient art for clues about how the ships were designed and built."
It's always an exciting moment (with sighs of relief) for scientists when evidence from one source is corroborated by another. Kudos to them for the discovery. Are there any theories as to what caused the ship to sink?
It's always an exciting moment (with sighs of relief) for scientists when evidence from one source is corroborated by another. Kudos to them for the discovery. Are there any theories as to what caused the ship to sink?
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I had no idea the Black Sea was that deep, or that it had an anoxic zone down there. Also super cool how close it matches the vase artwork.
Wish there was more photos available of it.
Wish there was more photos available of it.
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The Black Sea is probably a well filled archaeological treasure trove waiting to be tapped. I hope the scientist get most of it first, not the black market robbers.
Would be interesting to see if it will be possible to approve or disapprove the "Deluge theory", about the a possible chain of events leading to a major flooding, or not, after the last Ice Age.
Would be interesting to see if it will be possible to approve or disapprove the "Deluge theory", about the a possible chain of events leading to a major flooding, or not, after the last Ice Age.
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Was disappointed at the lack of photos but looks like there aren't any at other sites, either. Is this the project?
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Putrid Polecat
Ars Tribunus Militum
There's something to be said for leaving it down there. I have visions of it being brought up, put in a museum, then destroyed in a war or fire. At that depth it'll be preserved another 2000 years.
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Please please please have some amazingly well-preserved ancient surprise like the Antikythera mechanism...
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In something that well preserved there is surely going to be a trove of information. I sincerely hope there is a recovery effort, and that they are able to preserve the wreck in-tact as much as possible. So much to study.
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Or worse disposed of after running out of funding as many museum ships have been.
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If we bring artifacts up at least we can document/examine them and learn more about the era. This isn't like the environment, where the purpose of preservation is to ensure that future generations have access to the same natural resources that we do.
Leaving artifacts on the seafloor for the sole reason of preservation doesn't help anyone.
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Bob Ballard was exploring in the Black sea an found a ship that was extremely old and it too was completely intact with even the mast sticking up. He proposed making the black sea anoxic zone a maritime museum. I guarantee that if you bring the ship too the surface it will never last another 2400 years. Preservation in situ is definitely the best approach for long term stability of the artifacts. Bezos, Musk, et al could set up submarine tourist operations....
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Ah, so you believe some magical technology from the future and a magical change in human nature will occur to make recovery later suddenly much better than recovery now?
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Maybe this boat has some claim to be more intact than older wrecked ships. But the 14th century BCE Urlubrunun shipwreck was well enough preserved for both the construction of the ship and its cargo to be understood. There is nothing about its mortise and tenon construction that would suggest that it was a recent invention. Perhaps the Iliad is the oldest written record that includes a description of large scale military use of ships. The Greek attackers sailed to Troy by ship in the 12th or 13th century BCE. The location of Troy suggests it played a role in maritime commerce between the Aegean and Black Seas. The history of Troy goes back to 3000 BCE. The kind of woodworking technology needed for bronze age wagons suggest that the construction techniques needed for the Urlubrunun ship could already have existed by 3000 BCE.
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Well no one's going to see it where it is now, so that seems like a reason for recovery, not against it.
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On the vague chance you aren't already, check out Clickspring's ongoing reproduction of the Antikythera mechanism. Aside from the artisanship of the work, he explains a lot of the why and wherefore of the design as he goes.
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The Uluburun shipwreck was widely scattered, with the wooden debris covering 8 vertical meters of seabed and 250 square meters of surface area for a ship that was 15 meters long and 5 meters wide. As described in a doctoral dissertation about the wreck, all that was recovered were "a handful of disarticulated ship fragments".
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Leave it where it is till the technology exists where it can be preserved effectively.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
How are we going to get the technology if we never try to recover and preserve artifacts? Necessity is the mother of all invention. Preservation technology has improved a lot in the last 30 years primarily because of the need to better preserve artifacts. Without the need the technology wouldn't have improved. It isn't just the technology has improved but the techniques involved in the recovery and preservation have as well. All that came about by doing and learning (and a bit of failing).
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We probably can preserve this effectively. The work on Mary Rose and Vasa has shown how to preserve wood (and in the case of Vasa includes some lessons in what not to do), while the preservation of the turret of the Monitor has provided experience with metal and multi-material artifacts. If the ship was at a depth where it could be dived on, I would argue against raising it, but there's no way to study its internals in its current location.
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It's awesome that it has been preserved that well, very cool indeed.
I live on reclaimed land just east of Amsterdam (Netherlands) on what essentially is the bottom of what used to be the south edge of the South Sea. East Indies Trading Company ships used to sail just outside of where my bedroom window now is. The area was pretty shallow, reaching only 8 meters deep at best and sand banks were often a problem.
When it was pumped dry in the 1970's, they found a host of shipwrecks but most were in very bad shape. At least one, a bark from the 1600's still resembles a boat. It was lucky enough to be covered in mud relatively quickly, locking the oxygen out. Some, if not most, are little more than darkened, boat-shaped blotches in the soil. They've been covered up and marked as monuments and for future research.
See the shipwreck map at http://www.verganeschepen.nl/
edit: For those interested, most of the markers on the map will have some info and photos if you click on them. Only in Dutch, sadly but Google translate does a decent job.
I live on reclaimed land just east of Amsterdam (Netherlands) on what essentially is the bottom of what used to be the south edge of the South Sea. East Indies Trading Company ships used to sail just outside of where my bedroom window now is. The area was pretty shallow, reaching only 8 meters deep at best and sand banks were often a problem.
When it was pumped dry in the 1970's, they found a host of shipwrecks but most were in very bad shape. At least one, a bark from the 1600's still resembles a boat. It was lucky enough to be covered in mud relatively quickly, locking the oxygen out. Some, if not most, are little more than darkened, boat-shaped blotches in the soil. They've been covered up and marked as monuments and for future research.
See the shipwreck map at http://www.verganeschepen.nl/
edit: For those interested, most of the markers on the map will have some info and photos if you click on them. Only in Dutch, sadly but Google translate does a decent job.
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It wouldn't be the first time. Recall Clarke's Third Law about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and there's your "magical technology from the future". And human nature does change.
Compare what Cope, Marsh, and others did during the (in)famous Bone Wars era of paleontology, where all they seemed to care about was the (big) bones and establishing precedence when naming a new species. A lot of potentially valuable data was lost, because the techniques for examining the surrounding matrix with e.g. ultraviolet, x-ray fluorescence, and other techniques for remnants of soft tissue didn't exist then. As it is, plenty of those bone specimens are still wrapped in their plaster jackets gathering dust in some museum storeroom.
Expanding on that: I'm glad Cope, Marsh, etc. did recover a number of different dinosaur species -- that pushed the field of paleontology forward -- but they could have still done that while restraining their enthusiasm a bit. At times they were a bit reckless.
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I don't think black market robbers have the ability to go get stuff 5,000-7,000 ft underwater. That requires quite a chunk of funding and it's not an easy operation. It's not like breaking into a tomb at ground level. Anyone who has the skills to pull this off is probably on the list of people to contract the work out.
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7,000 foot deep shipwreck? Oh man you just -know- there's a epic or legendary weapon in a chest somewhere....
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It might work for this particular wreck, assuming no one else gets to it in secret; but it's sadly not a universal approach. Many Laserdiscs are already rotting, and it's only going to get worse with time. That's why the team working on the Domesday Duplicator has been taking the approach of backing up everything they can now and worrying about how to decode it later; if they leave Laserdiscs where they are until the technology to capture them has been perfected, then the LDs will be far too degraded to recover.
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The counterpoint to that is how much attention would have been paid to using those techniques in archeological excavations if there hadn't been prior excavations to draw attention to the need for those techniques? One doesn't know how good their techniques are without testing them, and insisting on waiting for perfect techniques means never excavating anything because you can't know what will come later. In ideal situations, like the Windover site, part of the site can be excavated and part left for future preservation. That's rarely possible because you can't really lift half a ship and it's extremely hard to excavate half of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
We know how to use PEG to preserve submerged wood. We know about the sulfur problems that come from organics preserved in anaerobic environments. We've learned not to use iron or steel bolts to hold wrecks together because of the sulfur. We can use glycol to preserve fabrics and small artifacts. We have reducing solutions to preserve metals. The techniques are there and they are effective. The concerns are more on the logistical side to my view - raising a ship from that deep will be extremely difficult, and we don't know what the cargo is, so any effort to raise it will need to have a lot of supplies on hand to be able to preserve whatever types of materials may be in the ship.
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I'd by far prefer a treasury of manuscripts of long lost greek literature, ship manifest and such.
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That photo is fascinating; I always understood that the bulk of the trading ships in Hellenic Greece were round ships, but that almost looks like a hemiolia or an akatos….that would make the ship part of the luxury trade and their cargo more valuable than the usual run-of-the-mill stuff like lumber or wheat. If that's the case, I'm awful curious to know what they were carrying, and from where.
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And if this ship would be preserved by those nations I would agree but it's in the black sea and I don't trust the current governments of the nations that would be responsible to provide the kind of funding that the Mary Rose and Vasa received.
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Any corpses hiding inside the ship? Would they be as well preserved as the ship?
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And if we leave it there, how much do you think it will last before being ravaged by treasure hunters now that they know that it's somewhere down there ?.
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Perhaps the captain was lashed to the mast listening to his iPod rather than steering, as suggested by the vase?
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I am more impressed by the use of the term "ill-fated" in the subhead, which is correctly used in this case, as that's exactly how the people of the time would have seen the sinking. In Homer, Fate is separate even from the will of Zeus.
Nowadays the phrase tends to be used without actually invoking the deity to which even the Gods of Homer have to submit.
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