Antikythera wreck

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 distinctive only for what was found in her.

The Voyage

Her final voyage was a westbound passage across the Aegean with a cargo of bronze and marble statuary, glassware, decorative couches, coins of Rhodes and Pergamum, and a large brass-and-wood astronomical device that the subsequent centuries would call the Antikythera mechanism. She was crossing the Kythera Strait at the southern tip of the Peloponnese when she encountered the meltemi, the northerly Aegean summer wind that can rise to storm force in a single afternoon.

The Kythera Strait at her latitude narrows to roughly 40 kilometres between the island of Kythera and the mainland Greek coast. Antikythera, the small island at the strait's southern mouth, is a navigational hazard for any vessel caught in a meltemi without sea-room to run off; its north coast is a straight reef rising from deep water with essentially no shelter. She struck the north coast of Antikythera in the open sea with her cargo stowed and under sail; her crew had no time to jettison cargo or to work the ship off. She broke up on the rocks and slid down the shelf into fifty metres of water.

She has no identified survivors. Her crew, traditionally estimated at fifteen to twenty men, went down with her or were drowned in the surf trying to reach the rocks. The strategic nature of the loss, viewed from the Roman import economy that supplied her cargo, was minor; ships of this tonnage were lost in the Mediterranean every week of the sailing season. The evidential value of the loss is without parallel.

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.

The Legacy

The Antikythera mechanism has been the subject of continuous re-examination for 125 years. Between 2005 and 2008 the international Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, led by Tony Freeth and including the National Archaeological Museum, the University of Athens, and X-Tek Systems of the United Kingdom, conducted micro-CT scans of all 82 surviving fragments at a resolution capable of reading both the surviving Greek inscriptions and the internal gear trains.

The mechanism is an orrery: a mechanical calculator that simulated the celestial movements of the Sun, Moon, five known planets, the cycle of the Metonic calendar, the cycle of the Olympic Games, and the dates of upcoming lunar and solar eclipses. It is the single most sophisticated artifact surviving from the ancient world, a technology whose reappearance in Western Europe would not occur until the astronomical clocks of the fourteenth century, 1,400 years later. The mechanism demonstrates that Hellenistic Greek mathematics, astronomy, and mechanical engineering had reached a level that subsequent centuries had dismissed as impossible.

The wreck itself has been surveyed five further times: by Jacques Cousteau in 1953 and 1976, by a Greek-American expedition in 1953, by the Greek Archaeological Service in 2012, and continuously by the Antikythera Underwater Archaeological Expedition led by Brendan Foley of Lund University since 2014. The Foley expedition has recovered additional bronze statuary, an 86-kilo marble sphinx, iron-plate hull fragments, human skeletal remains (including the 2016 discovery of the partial skeleton now named "Pamphilos"), and a second unidentified bronze lump that may be a companion device to the mechanism.

She is the richest recoverable archaeological site in the ancient Mediterranean. The Greek Ministry of Culture declared the wreck a protected site in 2008 and has permitted annual excavation seasons under strict supervision. The Antikythera mechanism is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens; the bronze Youth of Antikythera is in the same collection; the amphorae and marbles are distributed between the Athens museum and the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus.

She is technically a wreck but her significance is not in her sinking. She is a library on the seabed. The 125 years between her discovery and the current excavation have yielded more information about the ancient Mediterranean than any other single archaeological site. She has not yet finished giving up her evidence.