Kyrenia ship

unknown

Greek merchant, Cyprus, the pine-resin hull Location: off Kyrenia, northern Cyprus · Coordinates: 35.34°N 33.33°E · Casualties: unknown · Survivors: unknown · Depth: 30 m · Cause: unknown · possibly piracy — Sank approximately one nautical mile off the Cypriot coast in the late fourth century BC, carrying a commercial cargo from Rhodes and Samos. Evidence of the cargo having been cut loose and thrown overboard before sinking has led archaeologists to suspect a pirate attack. No trace of the crew was found. · Fate: excavated · preserved · Type: merchantman · Greek · Tonnage: ~25 tons · Crew: 4 · Flag: Hellenistic Greece Greek merchant ship, late fourth century BC, carrying 400 amphorae of Rhodian wine and a deck cargo of almonds. Rediscovered in 1965 by the Cypriot diver Andreas Cariolou and excavated through the late 1960s: the hull was 75 percent intact after two and a half thousand years, the best-preserved classical vessel ever recovered. Now displayed in Kyrenia Castle, her timbers still smelling faintly of pine resin. Thousands of millstones and iron spikes in the hold suggest she was carrying builders' supplies as well as wine. The Vessel The Kyrenia ship was a Greek merchant vessel of the late Classical period, built of Aleppo pine at a Mediterranean shipyard sometime around 389 BC and lost off the north coast of Cyprus approximately a century later, around 294 BC. She was approximately 14 metres in length and 4.3 metres in beam, a modest single-masted square-rigged trader of the kind that carried the everyday commerce of the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean. Her hull was constructed by the shell-first method universal to Greek shipbuilding of the period: edge-joined planking assembled first with mortise-and-tenon joints, the internal framing inserted afterwards. By the time of her loss she had been sailing for close to eighty years, an extraordinarily long service life that had required her hull to be sheathed in lead plates to slow the progress of teredo worm and repeated re-caulking. Four separate lead-sheathing campaigns are identifiable in the archaeological record of her timbers. The ship was, in the terms of her final voyage, an old working boat, still profitable but past any reasonable expectation of further decades at sea. Her home port cannot be established with certainty. The ceramic typology of her cargo amphorae points to Rhodes, Samos, and the Cypriot coast as her regular trading circuit, and her captain on the final voyage was almost certainly operating out of Rhodes or a nearby Dodecanese port. Her crew on the last voyage numbered four, a standard complement for a Hellenistic coaster of her s The Disaster The specific cause of the Kyrenia ship's sinking is unresolved and has been the subject of sustained archaeological debate since her excavation in 1968-1969. Two theories have dominated the scholarship. The first theory, advanced by Michael Katzev, the American archaeologist who led the excavation, is that the ship was attacked by pirates. Katzev identified eight iron spearheads embedded in the hull timbers near the waterline, and noted the complete absence of personal valuables and ship's cash from the wreck site. The interpretation is that pirates boarded the Kyrenia ship off the Cypriot coast, killed or captured her crew, stripped the ship of valuables, and then scuttled the vessel. The second theory, favoured by subsequent researchers including the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, is that the ship was simply too old and foundered in a storm. The four successive lead-sheathing campaigns on her hull attest to progressive structural deterioration; an eighty-year-old wooden hull in the Mediterranean was, by any reasonable standard, approaching the end of its serviceable life. The iron spearheads may have been part of the crew's own defensive weapons rather than evidence of attack. The Kyrenia ship sank in approximately 30 metres of water off the north coast of Cyprus, about 1.5 kilometres off the harbour of Kyrenia, at some point around 294 BC. The four crewmen are presumed to have either drowned with the ship or been taken captive by pirates if the Katzev theory is correct.