A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (8 page)

By the end of the excavation in 2001 a total of 208 amphoras had been recovered from the wreck, many of them intact. In addition, there was a fascinating array of smaller pottery types, several in multiples of twelve or thirteen indicating that they too had been cargo – painted table amphoras, two-handled cups, one-handled bowls and dish-shaped oil lamps. The table amphoras, cups and bowls formed
a ‘service' for drinking wine, suggesting that they were being transported alongside the wine amphoras to be sold together. The shapes of the pottery were closely paralleled by finds from the nearby island of Chios, including the contents of a grave of the fifth century
BC
studied by British archaeologist Professor Sir John Boardman in the 1950s. By contrast, four items of black-slipped ware from Attica, the territory of Athens – two cups of different shapes, a small jug called an ‘askos' and a salt-cellar – may have been for use by the crew, as their numbers seem too small to have been cargo. If they had been picked up in the port of Athens at Piraeus then they may be evidence that the ship was on a round trip and was herself Attic rather than Ionian in origin, and returning with a cargo of wine and Chiot fine ware destined for Athens.

Other finds included cooking pots, fire-blackened on the base from use; a beautiful turned-stone alabastron, almost certainly from Egypt and for perfume or massage oil; and two small square gaming pieces of bone. Unique finds were two marble ‘
ophthalmoi
', decorative ship's eyes attached to the hull near the bow, and the lead-filled wooden stocks of five anchors, representing a transition between stone stocks of earlier anchors and cast lead stocks used from the fourth century
BC
onwards. Little remained of the hull, but there was enough in the surviving wood fragments and copper fastenings to show that it had been built in the ancient shell-first technique, with the planks edge-joined by mortice-and-tenon and small half-frames slotted in afterwards – a labour-intensive technique in which the hull was built up by eye rather than from a ‘kit' of pre-formed frames, with the joinery of the planks rather than the frames giving strength to the hull.

I had recognised the amphoras in the first photographs taken of the site as being of likely fifth century
BC
date from explorations by my team off south-east Sicily in the 1980s – described in the next chapter – in which we had discovered the remains of a wreck from the sixth century
BC
containing amphoras from ancient Corinth. The conical, nearly globular shape was a direct descendant of the ‘Canaanite jars' of the late Bronze Age seen at the Uluburun wreck, with the classical Greek amphoras having a capacity of about 25 litres and slight variations in shape reflecting the date and the region where they were manufactured. Two of the amphoras were of a distinctive shape with a bulbous neck from the island of Chios, datable from other finds contexts to 440–430
BC
and giving the narrowest date range for the
wreck. The Mendean amphora proved to be one of ten, nine of which were filled with pine resin – used to pitch the interior of amphoras to make them impervious, and in demand in wine-producing areas where resin was not locally available. Two of the amphoras, one Mendean and one Chiot, were filled with bones from beef, most probably the remains of salted meat that was being transported for use by the crew.

The bulk of the cargo was made up of 196 amphoras similar in shape to wine amphoras from the nearby island of Samos but of uncertain origin; they were pitched internally, at this period meaning that they were intended for wine, and many were found with adhering grape seeds. The breakthrough came with the discovery that one of the amphoras was stamped on the neck with the letters
EPY
, identical to the letters on silver coins from the coastal city of Erythrae some 25 kilometres north-east of the wreck. Several years earlier on a study tour of Turkey I had explored the ruins of Erythrae, including the temple to Athena Polias excavated by the Turkish archaeologist Ekrem Akurgal from 1964. The temple originated in the eighth century
BC
but had been rebuilt in the late sixth century, and it was fascinating to think that it would have been in use at the time of the wreck and visible to the sailors when they put into the harbour to load up with wine amphoras before setting out on their final voyage.

Erythrae was mentioned by the fifth-century
BC
historian Herodotus and the second-century
AD
travel writer Pausanias, and St Augustine in the
City of God
devotes a chapter to the Erythraean Sibyl – one of the great prophetesses of the ancient world, second only to the Sibyl at Cumae in Italy, and painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome because it was believed that she had predicted the coming of Christ. The city had been under Persian domination in the sixth century
BC
, then sent ships to help Athens in the 490s and in 478 joined the Delian League, from which it revolted in 452
BC
– only to be brought back into line by Athens, as revealed by an inscription on a stone block from Athens in the British Museum containing a decree imposing a democratic constitution on Erythrae. Another source of information in Athens is the tribute lists, fragmentary inscriptions found on the Acropolis in which Erythae is listed among the cities of Ionia paying tribute in silver to Athens at the time of the wreck. The tribute – 9 talents annually, over 230 kilograms – was a large sum, and the taxation in Erythrae needed to pay it may have been a factor behind an increase in export wine production evidenced in the wreck.

Erythraean wine was held in high regard in antiquity, for example by the philosopher and botanist Theophrastus in the fourth century
BC
– it was a wine that, ‘if first drunk, there is no satisfaction in others' – and rather than being a modest coastal trader, the ship may have been destined for Athens itself. With the drinking of high-quality wine permeating society, it is possible to see the ship and its cargo connected not only to the historical events of the time but also to the day-to-day lives of the people who created them – to Pericles and the other statesmen of the Athenian Assembly, to the masons and sculptors shaping the stone on the Acropolis, to the citizen-soldiers in the triremes and the people thronging the Panathenaic festival and the theatres, and to the gatherings in the symposia where Socrates and the other great thinkers of the day drank wine as they pondered the questions of philosophy and the ideal state.

The peace that allowed the Tekta
ş
ship to sail unhindered in the Aegean and maritime trade to flourish would not have been possible without the naval victory against the Persians at Salamis in 480
BC
. In September of that year a Persian army under Xerxes invaded Attica, sacking Athens and destroying temples on the Acropolis, but only a few days later the Athenian fleet met and defeated the Persians off the small island of Salamis 2 kilometres from the port of Piraeus. The key to their victory was the trireme, a swift, agile galley with about 180 oarsmen and tipped with a bronze ram that was rowed at high speed into an enemy vessel to disable or sink it. Herodotus claimed that the Athenians had 380 triremes; according to the playwright Aeschylus, who actually fought in the battle, it was 310. The trireme can be compared to the Spitfire in the Battle of Britain in 1940: both combined beauty and functionality, both took the war to the enemy while their mother-city burnt, and both attained near-mythic status afterwards as symbols of strength and endurance in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

Naval battles in antiquity are difficult to study archaeologically because they often took place over water too deep to dive and many of the disabled ships would have remained afloat or dispersed as flotsam. Until 1980 the only evidence for bronze rams was the monument erected by the first Roman emperor Augustus following his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium off Greece in 31
BC
, in which carved slots show where thirty-five rams were
displayed. That changed with the discovery of a magnificent bronze ram of the early second century
BC
off Athlit in Israel, recovered by the Center for Maritime Studies at Haifa University. The ram weighs 465 kilograms – making it one of the largest bronze castings known from antiquity – and is of a distinctive shape, with three horizontal fins reinforcing a vertical ramming head, an evolution from earlier spike-shaped rams seen in vase paintings that would have risked being embedded in enemy ships. Timber fragments found inside the Athlit ram showed that the prow of the vessel had been reinforced to withstand the shock of impact, with all of the energy of the oarsmen being focused on that point as they drove the vessel at high speed into the enemy.

Since 2005 more rams have been discovered in the first extensive seabed investigation at the site of a major naval engagement in antiquity, the Battle of the Egadi Islands off western Sicily – where the Romans defeated the Carthaginians in 241
BC
, ending the First Punic War and resulting in Rome taking over the former Carthaginian territory in Sicily and Sardinia. Under the instigation of Sebastiano Tusa, Soprintendente del Mare in Sicily, a survey was initiated using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) in an area 75–80 metres deep where a fisherman had dragged up a bronze ram several years previously. Since then, twenty-five rams have been recovered, along with forty bronze helmets, lead sling bullets and many wine amphoras, thought to have been destined for the Carthaginian garrison on Sicily. Study by Dr William Murray and an international team has shown that the rams are similar in shape to the Athlit ram and must have come from among the eighty ships that the historian Polybius recorded as being sunk in the battle. Several had Roman markings and one had an inscription in Punic, the language of the Carthaginians, referring to their main god: ‘May this ram be directed against a ship with the wrath of Ba'al, who makes it possible to reach the mark; may this go and strike the hewn shield in the centre.'

The ruins of Carthage in Tunisia provide evidence for the galleys themselves, in the dimensions of shipsheds surrounding the circular war-harbour that were excavated by Henry Hurst of the UNESCO ‘Save Carthage' mission – a project in which I participated in the early 1990s, leading a team of divers from Cambridge University to investigate the offshore remains. Reconstructing the detailed appearance of triremes in the fifth century
BC
, including the vexed question of
how the three-tiered oar system worked, has rested on the study of ship depictions in Greek art and led in 1990 to the full-scale replica
Olympias
being built at Piraeas and taken for sea-trials. The image of that beautiful ship sweeping across the Saronic Gulf over the site of the Battle of Salamis, with its three banks of oars on either side, its single mast and the projecting bronze ram at the bow, was very much in my mind as I dived on the wreck at Tekta
ş
, imagining the warships that would have been at sea at the time and that continued to be used until the end of classical antiquity, with the ram making ships weapons in their own right – rather than platforms for infantry action – in a way that was not to be seen again until the advent of naval guns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Tekta
ş
wreck dates to the time of one of the greatest architectural achievements in history, the construction of the Temple of Athena Parthenos on the Acropolis in Athens. Built between 447 and 438
BC
, with the sculptures completed by 432
BC
, it was overseen by two of the individuals who define the era, the statesman Pericles and the sculptor Pheidias. Pericles, called ‘the first citizen of Athens' by the historian Thucydides, led the city for more than thirty years and was responsible for the transformation of the Delian League – the alliance of city-states after the Persian Wars – into an Athenian hegemony, bringing unprecedented prosperity and the tribute needed to pay for a temple conceived as a thanksgiving for the victory over the Persians. Made of marble from Mount Pentelicus in northern Attica, it was built on the ruins left when the Persians occupied Athens in 480–79
BC
. In Pericles' scheme, it was to be a place where history was preserved, not swept away – column drums from a previous temple destroyed by the Persians were incorporated into the outer wall of the Acropolis, and fortifications from the time of the Mycenaean citadel were left visible where they can still be seen today.

Pheidias was responsible for the sculptures, comprising the triangular pediments at either end of the temple, the rectangular panels called ‘metopes' on the entablature above the columns and the continuous frieze that ran around the outside of the cella, the inner chamber of the temple – with the pediments showing the birth of Athena and the battle between Athena and Poseidon for control of Athens, the metopes mythical battles that served as an allegory for the Persian Wars and the frieze a procession, probably of the Panathenaic festival.
The sculptures are celebrated for their quality and attention to detail that would have been invisible to viewers far below. They survived in place for much of the subsequent history of the building, including its transformation into a church by the Byzantines in the sixth century
AD
and a mosque by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, only to be damaged in 1687 when the Venetians besieged Athens and a shell landed in a powder magazine kept by the Ottomans inside the Parthenon, destroying the cella and bringing down the sculpture on the south side of the temple. Both the Venetians and the Ottomans further damaged the building, and by the time that the British Ambassador to Constantinople, Lord Elgin, sought permission in 1801 from the Ottomans to remove the remaining sculptures, perhaps only half of the originals remained. Today about half of those are in the British Museum and half in Athens, with the Acropolis Museum containing places for the ‘Elgin Marbles' should the decision be taken by the British Government to return them to Greece.