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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