Bounty from the Oldest Shipwreck

By Richard Stengel

The Mediterranean yields a vessel sunk perhaps 3,400 years ago

"Metal biscuits with ears."

That surreal image, which might have come from a Magritte painting, was how a young Turkish sponge diver from a small Mediterranean village described some curious objects he had spotted lying near a sunken shipwreck. When George Bass, a nautical archaeologist who had been rummaging around the floors of the Mediterranean coast for 25 years, heard that description in the summer of 1982, he thought-he hoped-that he might be on to something.

That something turned out to be the earliest intact shipwreck ever recovered, a fully laden cargo vessel that had gone to its silent, watery grave perhaps 3,400 years ago, about the time King Tutankhamun was on the throne in Egypt. The discovery, announced in Washington last week by the National Geographic Society, which helped sponsor Bass's expedition, is located near the town of Kas, less than 100 yards off the jagged, arid southern Turkish coastline and more than 145 ft. below the surface. The excavation began in earnest last summer.

So far it has yielded a rich trove of Bronze Age artifacts, some of which are now at a museum in Bodrum, Turkey: 6,000 lbs. of copper ingots (the "biscuits"), a store of tin (which was combined with copper to make the bronze that gives the era its name), scattered pottery, gold objects, amphoras filled with glass beads, and some ivory from an elephant tusk and a hippopotamus tooth. Says Bass: "I can say without hesitation that this is the most exciting and important ancient shipwreck found in the Mediterranean."

The ship is about 65 ft. long, rigged for a single square sail. Thus far only some of the hull's planking and part of the vessel's keel, made of fir, have been unearthed from the sediment. Apparently, the ship foundered on the coast's treacherous rocks and went straight down, without splintering, thus retaining much of its cargo. Bass and his fellow archaeologists were able to date the ship from at least two clues: a delicate double-handled Greek cup, similar to those made between 1400 and 1350 B.C., and the copper ingots, with their characteristic handles, which resemble one drawn on an Egyptian tomb at Thebes dating from 1350 B.C. The nationality of the vessel is suggested by the discovery of a miniature seal, no larger than a button, with markings similar to those used by the Greek merchants who dominated the ancient Mediterranean trade routes. Bass speculates that the ill-starred voyage had picked up tin in Syria and sailed west to acquire copper in Cyprus before heading for either Greece or Turkey.

The mustachioed Bass, 52, who left the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 to found the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University, is a kind of underwater Indiana Jones, a wet-suit archaeologist who searches out clues to the past on the ocean bottom. The uncovering of the wreck may prove a boon to the nascent but growing field of nautical archaeology, of which Bass is a founding father. Since 1960, Bass has not only adapted the traditional archaeological surveying techniques to the seabed but also contributed to key technological advances, like an underwater "telephone booth" to help divers communicate.

It may have been the lack of such sophisticated technology that prevented the vessel from being plundered by renegade treasure hunters. In the past, Bass has located ancient wrecks only to find that they had been plucked clean by tourists or black marketeers. Because of the great depth of the new find-145 to 170 ft.-Bass's divers could make only two brief 20-to 25-min. trips per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The pressure was so disorienting, he recalls, it was like "working down there on three martinis each." Five more years will be needed to finish the job. In the meantime, a police patrol boat is maintaining tight security over the site.

The multitude of artifacts already examined are invaluable, not simply for their rarity but for what they will reveal about the seagoing life of the Mediterranean 34 centuries ago. Before the advent of marine archaeology, notes Bass, "we knew more about the safety pins and sewers of Athens than we did about the ships that made Athens great." The hull of this wreck, for example, tells much about shipbuilding techniques. Apparently the vessel was constructed by building the outer shell first, then adding ribs for reinforcement, the same method utilized 1,000 years later. Bass surmises that the wreck will disclose a great deal about the ships used in the Trojan War, though probably nothing about the face that launched them. The cache of nearly two dozen cobalt-blue glass ingots, about 7 in. in diameter, is the earliest ever found, and may prove that raw glass, later to be transformed into jewelry or goblets, was being shipped from Syria as early as the 15th century B.C. The unusual mixture of objects appears to be from three different ancient cultures, Mycenaean, Cypriot and Canaanite. "A mix of goods," says Bass, "that puzzles us no end."

But the bounty from what Dickens called the "awful, solemn, impenetrable blue" will bring light to an area of archaeology that has long been obscure. The age of the previous oldest hull was a thousand years younger than this one, and suggests that nautical technology in ancient times changed glacially. Says Bass: "These bones of the wreck push back our knowledge of Mediterranean shipbuilding by nearly a millennium." -By Richard Stengel. Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington