A Maryland deep-sea salvage company has discovered the deepest ancient shipwreck ever found: a 2,300-year-old Greek trading vessel sunk nearly 2 miles under the Mediterranean.
The find, by Hanover-based Nauticos Corp., may upend long-held theories of how ancient mariners navigated the open seas and provide clues to environmental changes during the last two millenniums. Details of the discovery will be published Monday in Archaeology, the magazine of the Archaeology Institute of America.
Nauticos is no stranger to unusual missions. While its primary business is contract work for the Navy, the company has sent a team of engineers and remote-control robots to the Titanic to film a Discovery Channel documentary. The company also is hunting for the remains of Amelia Earhart, who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific on her round-the-world flying attempt in 1937.
The Greek wreck was found by accident, during a mission for the Israeli government to find a submarine that disappeared mysteriously in 1968.
While sweeping the eastern Mediterranean sea bottom with sonar for the sub, company General Manager Tom Dettweiler and his crew picked up an unusual signal. Dettweiler ordered the crew to send down a remote-control robot to check it out.
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“They called me back sounding really disappointed and said, `It’s this really old ship,'” recalls Dettweiler. The crew spotted hundreds of amphoras–large clay jugs commonly used by ancient traders to transport wine, olive oil and other commodities–on the sea floor.
As soon as he heard that, Dettweiler said, “I got pretty excited.”
The wreck is nearly 300 miles off the coast of Corsica, in water about 10,000 feet deep. Ancient shipwrecks, he knew, were unusual in waters so deep and so far from land. He told the crew: “Send those pictures over.”
Modern wrecks in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, where the sea floor is much deeper, have been found even farther down. The Titanic, for example, sits 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic. The German battleship Bismarck, sunk during World War II, lies even deeper, at 16,000 feet, Dettweiler said.
When the Nauticos team returned to Maryland, they sent their video to oceanographer Brett Phaneuf at the Institute of Nautical Archeology at Texas A&M University.
To estimate the shipwreck’s age, Phaneuf and his colleagues studied the amphoras–“the 50-gallon drums of the antiquities,” whose size and shape depend on when and where they were made.
They counted six types of wine amphoras among the estimated 2,500 jugs on the seabed.
Their appearance, Phaneuf said, suggests that they came from the Greek islands of Rhodes and Kos and were made around the 2nd and 3rd Centuries B.C.
Scientists have found evidence of four other ships on the sea floor in the area.
And there’s some evidence, he said, to suggest there could be as many as a dozen more. The discovery was made by Nauticos in May 1999, but it was kept secret until the company finished salvaging the Israeli submarine.
While it wasn’t unheard of for ancient mariners to navigate open waters, most scholars have assumed sailors rarely did.
“The preference was to stay near the coast as much as possible,” said Anthony Papalas, a historian at East Carolina University who specializes in ancient Greek maritime history.
Warships, Papalas said, often weren’t built to carry enough supplies for long voyages. Trading vessels preferred to take a more circuitous route rather than risk an open-sea voyage.
But the discovery of this new wreck more than 300 miles from the nearest land adds weight to the notion that open-sea crossings between the busy trading ports in ancient Greece might have been more common.
“We’d always believed that ships hugged the coast and stayed in sight of the land,” Phaneuf said.
“This is the nail in the coffin on that theory. These ships are as far as you can possibly get from any shore. They didn’t get there by accident.”
A related discovery could offer a gold mine for research: a large metal cauldron wedged upright on the ocean floor.
The container has been collecting sediment for 2,000 years. If scientists could take a core sample, Phaneuf said, they might be able to piece together how the atmosphere and sea have changed.
Scholars at Texas A&M hope to raise money so they can go back and excavate some of the wrecks in the area.
What excites them is that, unlike ancient wrecks in shallower waters, these ships haven’t been disturbed by nature or man.
But getting back won’t be easy. The waters are too deep for divers, so excavation will require expensive robots. Still, archeologists and Dettweiler and his colleagues at Nauticos, who hope to make a documentary of the effort, are excited about what surprises might lie in the sands.
“You can’t guess what else could be down there,” Dettweiler said.
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