Antikythera wreck

unknown

Roman merchantman, the Aegean, a computer Location: Off Point Glyphadia, Antikythera, Greece · Coordinates: 35.86°N 23.30°E · Casualties: unknown · Survivors: unknown · Depth: 50 m · Cause: foundered — Struck a cliff on the rocky north coast of Antikythera in a storm while sailing from the eastern Aegean toward Italy, likely with a luxury cargo destined for a Roman patron. She broke up and sank in approximately fifty metres of water. No surviving testimony; the wreck was lost for two millennia. · Fate: excavated · ongoing · Type: merchantman · Roman · Tonnage: ~300 tons (estimated) · Flag: Roman Republic Roman merchantman, returning from the eastern Aegean toward Italy. Struck a cliff on the north coast of Antikythera and sank in fifty metres of water. Rediscovered by sponge divers in 1900, the cargo yielded bronze masterpieces, marble statuary, and a single corroded lump of gears: the oldest surviving analog computer in human history, an astronomical calculator two millennia ahead of anything found since. The Vessel The Antikythera wreck is the preserved cargo of a Roman merchant galley that foundered on the north coast of the island of Antikythera, between Crete and Kythera, in the first century BC. Her hull is so poorly preserved that her precise dimensions cannot be reconstructed, but the scale of her cargo and the radiocarbon-dated hull timbers indicate a vessel of roughly 40 metres length and 300 tons cargo capacity. She was among the largest merchant ships operating in the eastern Mediterranean of her period. She was almost certainly a dedicated naves longae cargo carrier rather than a passenger-carrying liner: her hold was packed with the high-value luxury cargo characteristic of the Rhodian and Delian late-Hellenistic trade. The dating evidence from coin finds in her cargo places her final voyage at approximately 65 to 50 BC, with the modern consensus settling on 60 BC plus or minus ten years. Her captain and crew are entirely unknown; no personal items beyond anonymous bronze oil lamps and a cluster of amphora stoppers have been identified with individuals. The ship's port of origin has been reconstructed by archaeologists from her cargo as most probably Rhodes, with a ultimate destination of an Italian port, probably Ostia or Puteoli. The Rhodian-to-Italian trade was the principal artery of Roman luxury imports in the generation between the Mithridatic Wars and the Augustan settlement; the Antikythera was one more of the hundreds of ships that died in that trade. She is distinc The Disaster The wreck was discovered by a crew of Symi sponge divers working the Antikythera coast in April 1900. The master diver Elias Stadiatis, breathing from a surface-supplied suit at 45 metres, signalled to the surface that he had seen a heap of naked bodies and horses' heads. The captain, Dimitrios Kondos, descended himself and recovered a bronze arm. The divers' report was initially treated as a superstitious account until a bronze statuette was brought up in a basket that afternoon. Greek naval authorities reached the site within weeks. The 1900-1901 naval salvage, conducted with hard-hat divers from the warship Mykali under professor Alexander Oikonomos, recovered the majority of the cargo visible on the seabed: four life-size bronze statues (including the Antikythera Youth), thirty-seven marble sculptures, 150 amphorae, the coins of Pergamum, and approximately fifty corroded bronze lumps whose significance would not be understood for another century. Two divers died during the salvage from the bends; compressed-air diving protocols did not yet exist. The bronze lumps were inventoried and transferred to the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, where they were forgotten in a storage cabinet. In 1902 the archaeologist Valerios Stais was cataloguing the collection when he noticed a gear wheel visible inside the largest lump. The object contained gears. It was, impossibly for a Greek artefact of 60 BC, a mechanical computing device.