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.