| By
Michele Kambas
NICOSIA
(Reuters) - Explorers seeking a missing submarine stumbled
upon what may be the deepest ancient shipwreck ever found,
a vessel that plied the Mediterranean between the reigns
of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra.
Officials
from the Nauticos Corp, a deep ocean exploration firm based
in Maryland in the United States, said they had found the
ancient wreck while sonar searching for the Dakar, an Israeli
submarine that disappeared on its maiden voyage about 30
years ago.
Instead
they spotted a rare find -- a Greek vessel that archaeologists
say is more than 2,000 years old -- resting at a depth of
more than 3,000 meters (yards) on what is known as the Herodotus
Abyssal Plain.
``Archaeologists
are estimating its date somewhere between 200 and 300 BC,
so that would be somewhere between the time of Alexander
the Great and Cleopatra,'' David Jourdan, president of Nauticos,
told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Tuesday.
The
remains include what are believed to be intact wine jars
from the Greek island of Kos. The vessel was apparently
plying a trade route from the Greek islands to Alexandria,
Egypt, when it sank some 200 miles (320 km) away from Cyprus.
The
discovery adds to a growing body of evidence challenging
theories that sailors in antiquity never ventured into open
seas, choosing instead to say close to the coastline, according
to an article in the March/April edition of Archaeology,
published by the Archaeological Institute of America.
Information
Analysed
The
ship's remains were discovered in early 1999 but kept secret
until video footage of the site was analyzed and the Dakar
was found.
Jourdan
said explorers and archaeologists planned to return to the
site and were pursuing various options for its funding.
Archaeologists
believe that with closer scrutiny, they can date the vessel
to within a 20 to 40 year period, he said.
``What
we would like to do is return to the site with the full
archaeological team, study the wreck, which we have already
videoed, in much more detail and under the guidance of archaeologists
retrieve some artifacts that are there,'' he said.
Four
other wrecks are believed to lie in the same area.
``I
suspect that if we continue to search along this route we
will find many more of them which would really add to the
body of knowledge about the trade route of that time,''
he said.
Video
footage taken by Nauticos and analyzed by the Institute
of Nautical Archaeology (INA) at Texas A&M University
showed up to 2,500 amphorae, or clay storage jars.
Judging
by the amphora design, the predominant cargo appears to
be from Kos, with a few amphorae from Rhodes.
According
to the article in Archaeology, an unusual feature on the
wreck is an intact metal cauldron that has been collecting
sediment for more than 2,000 years and is, essentially,
the world's oldest and longest continually deployed sediment
trap.
Oceanographers
at Texas A&M University were exploring the possibility
of obtaining a core sample of the sediment, which might
offer information into changes in the Mediterranean Sea
over the past two millennia.
|
