A sonar scan reveals the pile of amphorae found on the seafloor.Ferentinos et. al.
Posted on 11/11/2023 9:28:13 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Researchers exploring the waters off the Greek Island of Kefallinia have unearthed one of the largest Roman-era shipwrecks ever found.
As Julia Buckley reports for CNN, a team from Greece's University of Patras located the remains of the ship, as well as its cargo of 6,000 amphorae—ceramic jugs used for shipping—while conducting a sonar scan of the area. The 110-foot-long vessel, newly detailed in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was situated at a depth of 197 feet.
According to the paper, the "Fiscardo" wreck (named after a nearby fishing port) was one of several identified during cultural heritage surveys undertaken in the region between 2013 and 2014...
The vessel is among the four largest Roman shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean Sea to date; experts think the ship is the largest ever unearthed in the eastern Mediterranean.
Based on the type of amphorae found in the Fiscardo ship's cargo, the team dates the wreck to sometime between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D... Four other major Roman wrecks are scattered across the surrounding sea...
...Over the summer, researchers in Cyprus discovered the first "undisturbed" Roman shipwreck ever found in that nation. Located off the coast of Protaras, the ship probably carried oil or wine and came from the Roman provinces of Syria and Cilicia.
And last month, Greek archaeologists identified five new shipwrecks off the island of Kasos, including one dated to the end of the fourth century B.C. and another from the first century B.C. A third ship was dated to the later Byzantine period, while the remaining two were linked with the Greek War of Independence, which took place during the 1820s.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
A sonar scan reveals the pile of amphorae found on the seafloor.Ferentinos et. al.
I had saved an article text and link about this on a work machine, found a different one here from home. Two web searches with this as the site turned up no earlier topic.
(Ionian Aquarium, Kefalonia)Biggest ever Roman shipwreck found in the eastern Mediterranean
Julia Buckley | CNN | December 17, 2019
A Woman?
Huh?
It's amazing that they found this with seabed sonar scans and you can see the cluster of amphorae so clearly. It's astonishing that the cargo would remain so tightly clustered together in only 197 feet of water for so long.
I always thought amphorae were used to transport liquid cargo (oil, wine). The article says they may have carried wine, olive oil, nuts, wheat or barley.
The article got me thinking about Roman merchant ships, propulsion, life on board and what it must have been like to survive (or die) in a gale in the Med and a shipwreck. The "World History Encyclopedia" site has an article on Roman Shipbuilding & Navigation. Here are a couple of interesting passages...
The Romans were not traditionally sailors but mostly land-based people who learned to build ships from the people that they conquered, namely the Carthaginians (and their Phoenician predecessors), the Greeks and the Egyptians. There are a few surviving written documents that provide descriptions and representations of ancient Roman ships concerning the masts, sails and rigging.How do you suppose trade was conducted? Were written orders carried by ships to other ports? Were empty ships plying the waters making opportunistic stops hoping to pick up cargo? Were some ships just going back and forth between Port A and Port B carrying the same cargos all the time? It's hard to imagine this without modern electronic communications. Of course, it was all written orders until the advent of radio only a hundred years ago.Merchant ships were built to transport lots of cargo over long distances and at a reasonable cost, therefore speed and maneuverability were not a priority. They had a length to breadth ratio of the underwater hull of about 3:1 (6:1 or 7:1 for warships), double planking and a ballast for added stability. Unlike warships, their V-shaped hull was deep underwater meaning that they could not sail too close to the coast. They usually had two huge side rudders (or steering oars) located off the stern and controlled by a small tiller bar connected to a system of cables. They had from one to three masts with large square sails and a small triangular sail called the supparum at the bow.
The Roman merchant ship's cargo capacity usually was between 100 to 150 tons (150 tons being the capacity of a ship carrying 3,000 amphorae). The smallest ships had a capacity of 70 tons while the largest could have a capacity of 600 tons for a length of 150 feet. Cargo included agricultural goods (e.g. grain from Egypt's Nile valley, wine, oil, etc.), raw materials (iron bars, copper, lead ingots, marble, and granite) and other goods. Just like warships, merchant ships also used oarsmen.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, no ships of the cargo-carrying capacity of Roman ships were built until the 16th century AD.
Think Monty Python’s Life of Brian. “No No A Roman.”
Double Huh?
See post 7.
Given the problems with hogging and sagging, and the ship building techniques at that time, that’s pretty close to maximum length of a Roman-era vessel. Since everything is intact, I wonder if hogging in heavy seas with a full load didn’t sink her. She would have just filled with water and sunk to the bottom almost intact.
Those were cut as single pieces about 100 miles east of the Nile, transported to the river somehow, floated on barges to Alexandria and then shipped to Ostia, barged again up the Tiber and trundled to the Pantheon. Each column weighs 60 tons.
The Romans probably used a trussing system as was originally used in the USS Constitution, as they built ships to carry cargo in the 100s of tons. It would have been nice if the search for that lost Malaysian airliner would have been expanded to the northwestern Indian Ocean and turned up the possible India trade vessels the Romans built and used.
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:^)
Thanks. Good info!
I was looking at the Med & Black Sea Roman trade routes and was wondering about pirates.
A lot of the archival scholarship on Roman maritime history was written by ninnies. :^) The Romans moved large stone objects from Egypt by sea. They were so large, that had they tried to move them by land, they’d still be working on it.
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I particularly like “meaning that they could not sail too close to the coast” — the best preserved ancient wrecks are probably down on the abyssal plain, but most ships that foundered hit reefs or rocks which are disproportionately found near the coast. The dolts who write, “ancient sailors hugged the coastline” just simply don’t know what they’re talking about.
Thanks for that excerpt, it’s great. :^)
Ship building was already in decline - the Greek Syracusia is believed to have been 180 feet long. No comparable ship like it was built until the 18th century
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