Decoding the Heavens

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  This island has been given many names in its long history. The ancient Greeks called it Aigilia, which the handful of locals later morphed into Sijiljo, while passing sailors who spoke the Italian-based lingua franca of the Mediterranean called it Cerigotto. These days, however, it is known as Antikythera (pronounced with the accent on ‘kyth’, to rhyme with pith). A lozenge shape just three kilometres wide, Antikythera sits 40 kilometres south of Kythera – and right in the middle of the passageway between Cape Malea and Crete. Centuries ago, Antikythera was covered in lush greenery, but the inhabitants cut down the forest to build ships. They couldn’t have known the effect it would have. Without the tree roots to hold it in place the soil was gradually carried off by the incessant winds, leaving the island beautiful but barren.

  Stormwaters around this deadly shard of rock are not for the faint-hearted. The sea turns almost black and angry waves attack the rocks; any ship unlucky enough to find itself in the way is likely to be deftly dashed to pieces. But Kontos was a skilled skipper and he managed to guide his men to shelter in the island’s only harbour, a tiny cove on the northern coast called Potamos, where a handful of white houses are scattered like sugar cubes over the dark, rocky soil.

  After three days the winds died, the waters returned to a smooth, glistening blue and the divers’ thoughts turned to checking out what was beneath them. Always hoping to find late additions to their hard-earned haul, Kontos took one of the boats out around the sharp, rocky headland just to the east of the port, to a submarine shelf known by the locals as Pinakakia. He dropped anchor about 20 metres from the steep cliffs.

  Elias Stadiatis was the first diver into the water that morning. He sank down quickly to the sloping shelf 60 metres below, but reappeared just five minutes later, clearly agitated. His comrades hurriedly hauled him aboard and twisted off his hefty copper helmet.

  A huge mound of men, women and horses. Decaying, rotting. Must have come from a wrecked ship. Stadiatis breathlessly recounted what he had seen lying on the seabed. No part of the ship itself was visible – any wood exposed to the water would have long ago been devoured by shipworms. But its ghostly cargo was plain to see.

  Kontos pulled the dripping suit off his gabbling friend and donned it himself to investigate. After he had dropped through the cold water for a couple of minutes, a tumbled mass of figures, parallel to the shore and about 50 metres long, loomed out of the blue. They weren’t corpses but statues – corroded and encrusted with marine sediment, yet for the most part clearly recognisable. Some were marble, while the shafts of sunlight penetrated just deep enough to reveal that others had a green tint: the tell-tale sign of ancient bronze. As his boots sank into the slanting mud and his air hose snaked up through the water to the dim shadow of the boat suspended far above, Kontos struggled to keep his breathing steady. This wreck had been carrying treasure.

  He grabbed a bronze arm from one of the statues as proof of the find, attached it to his life line and headed triumphantly back to the surface.

  Sources differ about what happened next. The official Greek version is that Kontos ordered his men to measure and record the location of the wreck, before they finally sailed home to Symi. After enjoying the customary heroes’ welcome, Kontos informed the island’s elders of the find and asked them what to do. Full of patriotic pride, they recommended that he leave immediately to report the discovery to the Greek government in Athens.

  But perhaps they weren’t in such a rush. Peter Throckmorton, an American archaeologist, journalist and diver who was involved in excavations of several Mediterranean wreck sites in the 1950s and 60s, studied the Antikythera finds and interviewed people on Symi. Few who remembered the discovery were still alive, but stories of it were still eagerly told in the taverns along the seafront. According to Throckmorton, the locals’ story was that Kontos and his men first used ropes to lift whatever they could from the wreck site for themselves before the weather changed that autumn. He points out that there are rumours of many small bronze statues being sold in Alexandria between 1902 and 1910, and that the lead bars from the ship’s anchors have never been found. Lead would have been precious to the divers, for use as weights. When they could salvage nothing else with their tiny boats, the divers went to the Government in the hope of a reward.

  Either way, at some point Kontos and Stadiatis, with the bronze arm in tow, went to see a Professor A. Ikonomu, an archaeologist at the University of Athens who came originally from Symi. On 6 November 1900 he took them to the office of the Minister of Education, Spyridon Staïs.

  It was good timing. No archaeological survey of a wreck had ever been undertaken, in Greece or elsewhere, but the Government, led by Georgios Theotokis’s New Party, had just begun to realise the potential of raising ancient riches from the seabed. Sixteen years earlier it had funded a survey to look for remains from the greatest sea-battle in Greek history, when the fleet of the Persian king Xerxes was crushed by the Greek navy in the straits of Salamis in 480 BC.

  A few noteworthy items had previously been recovered from the sea, including a bronze chest protector found in Pylos harbour in southern Greece, ancient timbers and two life-size marble statues at Piraeus, Athens’ port, and an inscribed lead anchor from the harbour at Symi. All had been discovered by chance, either by sponge divers or dragged up in fishermen’s nets.

  So it was quite a bold move when in 1884 the Archaeological Society of Athens, with the Government’s backing, decided to go out and actively search for submerged artefacts. Modern Greece was a young, relatively insecure country, having escaped Turkish rule only in 1830, and the Government cannily thought that recovering the remains of past glories would do wonders for national pride. Unfortunately the society didn’t know of any wreck sites to explore, so after much pondering it chose the straits of Salamis as its expedition site. In the frenzied battle there nearly 2,400 years before, the Greeks had lost 40 triremes (wooden warships, named after the three rows of oarsmen on each side), while the Persians lost a whopping 200. The sea floor was surely strewn with their remains.

  It was a much harder mission than the archaeologists had bargained for. The water was only 20 metres deep, but bad weather meant the hired divers could only work twelve days out of the month that had been scheduled. Even on calmer days the choppy sea stirred up mud from the bottom so the divers couldn’t see what they were doing. And in any case there was so much seaweed and clay everywhere it was impossible to tell what lay beneath. For a cost of precisely 1548.50 drachmas (worth around £8,000 today), the team came back with a few fragments of amphoras, a nearly intact vase and a wooden plank that broke as it was being brought up to the surface.

  In a dejected report to the Archaeological Society later that year, Christos Tsoundas, who had supervised the expedition, described it as a ‘complete failure’. Looking back, however, that was a little harsh. For the first time in history a professional archaeologist had led a team of divers, taken rough measurements, recorded what was found and reported back. The idea of underwater archaeological surveys carried out by the state had taken root, even if the disappointing outcome meant that no other projects were attempted for the next few years.

  The expedition also caused a fair amount of excitement in the press at the time (before the final haul was known, at least) and it may have been the memory of this that encouraged Kontos and his elders to reveal their find at Antikythera to the Government. Officials at the education ministry initially met Kontos’s claims with disbelief. No sunken ship had ever been found in Greek waters and the divers’ story seemed too good to be true. But the evidence of the bronze arm, and the potential value of the find, won them over. This project promised to yield everything that the Salamis mission had failed to. According to Kontos’s account, a wreck had already been located and the divers had already established that it contained treasures to be salvaged. If it had bronze statues on board, the ship was surely close to 2,000 years old, for no such artefacts were made after Greek civilisation fragmented in the
early centuries AD, and any that survived (unless buried somewhere or out of reach at the bottom of the sea) were soon melted down as scrap metal.

  If the Government would provide the necessary equipment to winch the sunken objects up from the seabed, Kontos told the minister Staïs, his men would dive for them – provided they were paid the full value of whatever they recovered. Slightly nervously, Staïs agreed to Kontos’s terms, as long as an official archaeologist was on board to oversee the project. Professor Ikonomu was appointed and Kontos handed over the arm.

  Staïs moved fast. Once the location of the wreck got out, looting was a strong possibility. And perhaps Kontos would change his mind. So within a few days a navy transport ship called the Mykale took Ikonomu to Antikythera, accompanied by Kontos, the divers and the oarsmen, in their two little fishing boats. After being slightly delayed by bad weather, they all arrived at the wreck site on 24 November. The divers – Elias Stadiatis, Kyriakos and Georg Mundiadis, Johann Pilliu, Giorgios Kritikos and Basilios Katzaras – began their work.

  At the wreck site, the cliffs of Antikythera drop vertically to about 50 metres below the sea’s surface. Then there’s a shelf of sandy mud, on which the ancient ship came to rest, which slopes gently down to about 60 metres before dropping off again to deeper water. Ikonomu and Kontos had agreed a plan of action. Light objects from the sunken cargo were to be attached to ropes and raised using winches attached to the divers’ own boats, and heavier ones were to be lifted with the sturdier hoist of the Mykale. But in that first run, the sea was still pretty rough. Swells from the north punched against the cliffs and it became clear that the Mykale was too large to get safely close to the rocks. Kontos, eager to prove the truth of the find and not one to be deterred by a little inclement weather, sent his men down anyway. In the three hours before the worsening storm forced them to stop they brought up a bronze head of a bearded man, the bronze arm of a boxer, a bronze sword, two small marble statues (both missing their heads), a beautifully crafted marble foot and several fragments of bronze and marble statues, as well as bronze bowls, clay dishes and other pottery.

  Returning to Athens to be replaced by a smaller craft, the Mykale took these rewards home in triumph. Staïs must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when he realised that his investment had been a wise one after all. The divers really had stumbled upon the biggest hoard of ancient Greek bronzes ever found. The story became front-page news and, as the Government had hoped, all of Greece (but especially Athens) was set alight by a collective and patriotic excitement. After centuries of having their treasures looted by everyone from the Romans to the British, some antiquities were finally making it back home.

  The navy assigned a more manoeuvrable ship, the steam schooner Syros, to the Antikythera mission and she arrived at the wreck site in time for the divers to start work again on 4 December 1900.

  The conditions they faced were treacherous. Top of the list of difficulties was the unwieldy suit, which was not designed for the hard physical work of digging and lifting statues. To make matters worse the waters around Antikythera are cold and prone to sudden currents, as well as frequent gales and storms. The salvage expedition lasted ten months, until September 1901, yet the weather prevented the divers from working even a quarter of those days. For the rest, they had to sit out the storms on their tiny boats.

  But the biggest challenge of all was the depth of the wreck, which was to push the divers to their limit. At about 60 metres down the site was well out of reach of any navy in the world at that time. Even by 1925, for example, just 20 US navy divers were qualified to dive to 30 metres. For Kontos’s men to reach the wreck at all with the equipment they had, let alone do heavy work down there, was an incredible achievement. It’s likely that no one but the Mediterranean’s most daring sponge divers – who practically grew up in the water and depended for their livelihoods on going deeper than anyone else – could have managed it.

  Although the divers at Antikythera had no comprehension of the diving tables or decompression stops used for safe diving today, or of what the depth was doing to their bodies, they at least realised that limiting the time they spent on the bottom reduced their chances of dying. They limited their submersions to five minutes on the bottom, twice a day, coming up reasonably slowly (meaning that between them, the six men could only work a total of an hour on the bottom each day). But even with the best intentions their diving suits were hard to control, especially when ascending. A diver had to carefully monitor the amount of air in his suit by balancing the air he vented with the intake from the valve in his helmet. If he miscalculated and allowed in too much air it would expand within the suit as he rose, carrying him helplessly ever faster towards the surface, and a sure case of the bends.

  There was also a second depth-related danger to contend with – nitrogen narcosis. Well known to most scuba divers, it is a mysterious alteration of consciousness thought to be caused by the effect of high nitrogen pressure on nerve transmission. The French diver-explorer Jacques Cousteau famously described it as ‘the rapture of the deep’, because it feels as if you are giddily drunk. It gets worse the deeper you go, kicking in at around 30 metres and getting progressively more serious – budding scuba enthusiasts are taught to remember that it’s like having one martini for every 10 metres below 20 metres. The effects reverse as soon as you ascend, but the impaired judgement they cause means that some divers never surface. The rapture makes them feel invulnerable and affected divers have been known to throw away their masks or swim far down to their deaths.

  Cousteau’s diving colleague Frédéric Dumas described the effects of nitrogen narcosis at 70 metres, just a little deeper than the divers at Antikythera had to reach, in Cousteau’s 1953 book The Silent World:

  My body doesn’t feel weak but I keep panting. The damned rope doesn’t hang straight. It slants off into the yellow soup. I am anxious about that line, but I feel really wonderful. I am drunk and carefree. My ears buzz and my mouth tastes bitter. I have forgotten Jacques and the people in the boats. My eyes are tired. I lower on down, trying to think about the bottom but I can’t. I am going to sleep, but I can’t fall asleep in such dizziness.

  That was in 1943, when scuba-diving gear had just been invented by Cousteau, together with émile Gagnan, an expert in industrial gas equipment in Paris. Gagnan had been working on a demand valve to feed cooking gas into car engines. The Second World War had caused petrol shortages and everyone was trying to work out how to run cars on the fumes of burning charcoal and natural gas. Feeding compressed air into a diver’s mouthpiece on demand turned out to be a similar problem.

  By lowering themselves down a rope and signing their names on boards attached at various measured depths, Cousteau and Dumas wanted to see just how deep it was possible to go. Subsequent dives down to 100 metres set what is still sometimes called the ‘theoretical limit’ for diving with compressed air. It’s more than a theoretical barrier, though. When the fearless experimenters tried to extend the limit with a 130-metre rope, their close friend Maurice Fargues was first to descend. At first all seemed to be going well, but after a few minutes his signals to the surface stopped. Cousteau and Dumas dragged him up by his lifeline; when he appeared beneath them they were horrified to see his body limp and his mouthpiece hanging from his chest. Twelve hours of desperate and exhausting resuscitation proved unsuccessful. When they later pulled up the marker rope, they found Fargues’s illegible signature on the very lowest board.

  For Kontos and his men in 1900 the exertion of hauling statues and artefacts, and attaching them to the winch line of the boat above, caused them to breathe heavily, making the effects of nitrogen narcosis even worse than normal for the depth they were at. Their helmets trapped the carbon dioxide they breathed out (unlike scuba gear, which releases the air you exhale into the water), befuddling them even more. Visibility was a problem, too, as the mud and sand floated up from the bottom in clouds as soon as the divers moved anything.

  Yet throughout the
winter the sponge fishers dived again and again and brought up find after find, while the archaeologists on board, dressed smartly as always in dapper suits, looked on. And despite the vile conditions the divers worked carefully – often taking several days to dig and clean around an object before easing it from the slippery mud. The supervising archaeologist George Byzandinos (who had taken over from Ikonomu) concluded that the fragments being brought up had broken thousands of years earlier, not in the salvage process. He even praised the divers for showing as great an interest in the preservation of the antiquities as any ‘inspired fan of the old art’.

  By Christmas their haul included plenty of marble statues, mostly of men or horses, another bronze sword, a bronze lyre, a colossal marble bull and various fragments of bronze furniture, including a throne. And there was the most exciting find so far: a beautifully worked bronze statue, perhaps of Hermes or Apollo. Although broken into several pieces it was quite well preserved and was hailed as one of the finest bronze statues to survive from antiquity. Perhaps it was even the work of one of the great fourth-century classical sculptors, Lysippus or Praxiteles, the archaeologists speculated excitedly. There was one statue that got away, though. The body of a large horse tore itself loose from its chains just as it reached the surface and crashed back into the sea, falling down the cliff into the deeper water beyond the divers’ reach.

  The statues piled up on deck and although the bronzes had survived pretty well, most of the marbles were terribly eroded. Emm. Lykudis, one of the archaeologists present, described the scene in his diary entry for 7–10 February 1901:

  The sea has affected them in a terrible way. Most of them are now transformed into shapeless sea-rocks, and they have the appearance of tremendous sea shells . . . But under the transformation and destruction that the sea has carried out, one suspects the old glory, believes one can still recognise the beautiful lines.