Classical Greek wreck (5th century BC)
classical greek wreck (5th century BC)
This page contains additional material and images for Chapter 3 of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.
In 1998 Dr George Bass invited me to join a team from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology preparing to excavate a classical Greek shipwreck off the headland of Tektaş Burnu in western Turkey. The project – directed by Bass in 1999 with Deborah Carlson as assistant director, and directed by Carlson for two seasons after that - was the first INA excavation of a wreck from the 5th century BC, the ‘Golden Age’ of classical Greece, and promised to shed new light on seafaring and trade at this formative period of history. I was made an adjunct professor of INA for the project and carried out over 100 dives at the site, as well as writing the article for the journal Antiquity reproduced below. You can read Deborah Carlson’s detailed report on the excavation in the 2003 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology and see many photos of the wreck and artefacts on the Institute of Nautical Archaeology website.
A bridge between the classical focus of my work in the Mediterranean to that date and my more recent investigation of historic wrecks off south-west Britain is HMS Colossus, a ship-of-the-line that sank in the Scilly Isles off Cornwall after her return from the Battle of the Nile in 1798. On board were eight crates containing more than 1200 ancient Greek vases – part of the collection of Sir William Hamilton, whose earlier consignment formed the basis of the vase collecton in the British Museum today. After the discovery of the wreck in 1972 more than 30,000 sherds were sent to the British Museum, where painstaking restoration has resulted in a number of the vases being correlated with drawings made by Johan Tischein in Naples for Hamilton’s catalogue. One of those vases is shown below, a krater dated to about the time of the Tektaş wreck, and other fragments can be seen in the British Museum’s online gallery here.
Another of the adjunct professors at Tektaş was Dr Bill Murray, Professor of Greek History at the University of South Florida and author of The Age of Titans: the Rise and Fall of the Great Hellenistic Navies (Oxford University Press, 2011). In my chapter I discuss ancient bronze rams and how underwater discoveries are greatly illuminating our understanding of this aspect of naval warfare, including a large number from the 241 BC Battle of the Egadi Islands off Sicily between the Romans and the Carthaginians – discovered in deep water since 2005 by RPM Nautical Foundation from the M/V Hercules, with Bill Murray as project archaeologist. You can read about their work and see many photos here.
I am very grateful to Dr Deborah Carlson and Dr Rebecca Ingram of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology for permission to publish the two photos of the wreck included in the book.
Click on the images to enlarge:
This article reporting on the first season of excavation in 1999 appeared in Antiquity 74 (283)(2000): 19-20.
I took this photo of the Artemision Bronze and the photo in the banner of this page during a visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens in February 2023, while I was writing this chapter. Found by hard-hat divers in 1926 in a wreck off Cape Artemision in the island of Euboea, it probably represents Zeus but might be Poseidon - the right hand held either a thunderbolt or a trident. It dates from the mid-5th century BC but the wreck was from the 2nd century BC, possibly of a ship transporting looted art back to Italy following the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC. Because most bronze sculpture was melted down in later periods for the metal, bronze works such as this from the classical Greek period are very rare and most of them come from the sea - the last great repository of undiscovered works of art from antiquity and an exciting prospect for archaeologists as developing technology allows more extensive deep-sea investigation in the Mediterranean.
Illustration from Volume 1 of Sir William Hamilton’s second catalogue of vases (Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases mostly of pure Greek workmanship discovered in Sepulchres in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, 1791), showing a ‘sepulchre’ being opened probably in the Naples area. The woman on the right is almost certainly Lady Emma Hamilton, Admiral Nelson’s lover. Graves such as this in central Italy, often with valuable goods, were the source of most of the intact Greek vases that fill museums today - the western Greeks marketed them among the Etruscans to such an extent that antiquarians up to the time of Hamilton mistakenly thought of them as ‘Etruscan’ vases.
A red-figure bell krater from Hamilton’s collection in the wreck of HMS Colossus, reconstructed from more than 330 fragments collected at the site in 1972-5. It shows a mythological scene with the god Hephaestus to the right, two maenads to the left and a satyr in the centre. It was made in Attica - the region of Athens - about 440-430 BC, so is very close in date to the Tektaş wreck. British Museum 2000,1101.31 (© Trustees of the British Museum).
The ‘Siren Vase’, a red-figure stamnos made in Attica showing a scene from Homer’s Odyssey in which the hero is tied to the mast of his ship to stop him from being tempted by the Sirens. It dates from about 480-470 BC, so perhaps half a century before the Tektaş wreck, but is important for showing the ophthalmos or eye closely reminiscent of the ones found in the wreck. This vase is thought to have been from a grave in Vulci, an Etruscan city north of Rome, and was acquired in 1843 from Alexandrine Bonaparte, sister-in-law of Napoleon I. British Museum 1843,1103.31 (© Trustees of the British Museum).