Decoding the Heavens

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  The statues that had been recovered so far were transported back to Athens and put on public display at the National Archaeological Museum. Eroded or not, crowds flocked from far and wide to see such treasures from their nation’s past, while the newspapers reported on every detail of the unfolding adventure.

  Back at Antikythera, however, the storms, the punishing depth and gruelling regime of work were taking their toll, and the divers were beginning to suffer from exhaustion. By February, according to an account of the finds published in 1903 by John Svoronos, one of the country’s most senior archaeologists, the men were often emerging from the water ‘half-dead’.

  The mood soured as the pace of discoveries slowed. Then the divers announced a further problem: part of the wreck, they said, was obscured by enormous boulders. After some discussion the archaeologists worked out that these must be rocks from the cliff above, dislodged at some time by an earthquake, and soon devised a strategy for shifting them.

  They instructed the divers to dig tunnels underneath the boulders, then twine strong ropes around them several times, an arduous task that took more than 20 dives for each boulder. The other end of the rope was attached to the sturdy Mykale (brought out again from Athens for the task), which then steamed at full power towards the open sea. Once dislodged from the wreck, the boulders were to be released from the ropes, rolled down the slope and into the depths below.

  It was a risky strategy, described by a jumpy Lykudis as ‘one instant of large and probably justified fear!’ If the rope snapped, the sudden shock might be enough to capsize the Mykale. Or worse, if the boulder remained entangled in the rope, its weight might drag the ship down with it. To avert the latter fate, several of the crew gathered around the rope where it was tied to the ship, ready with hatchets. Fortunately, their services weren’t required and several boulders were successfully dispatched over the underwater cliff.

  But then the minister Staïs, who was visiting, had a startling thought. What if the ‘boulders’ were actually colossal statues, so overgrown and corroded that the befuddled divers, working in the dim light of the wreck site, had failed to recognise them? He ordered the next boulder to be brought to the surface – at considerable further risk to the ship. After some tense moments there was cheering from the decks as it heaved into view through the clear water. It was a huge, muscular Hercules, complete with club and lionskin – eroded but still recognisable as similar in style to the world-famous Farnese Hercules, kept in the Naples Museum. Presumably, they preferred not to dwell on the statues that had already been rolled forever out of reach.

  At this point the ill and exhausted divers demanded a month’s break, at least until Easter. At first, Staïs encouraged them to continue for a few days more by promising to increase their reward, but eventually they were beyond persuasion and went on strike.

  They donned their suits again in April, with ten divers instead of the previous six, but the easily recoverable objects had already been brought up, so in the first week the returns were meagre. Then tragedy struck. One of the divers, Giorgios Kritikos, surfaced too fast and died of the bends, leaving his family without a pension. Accounts from the time pass over this inconvenience with few details about what happened or even any detectable regret at his passing beyond its effect on the work at hand. Indeed, Staïs’s response seems to have been to threaten to hire Italian divers who he thought would be more efficient.

  He never acted on these words though, and the long-suffering Symiotes worked on into summer. As the months passed, the team was increasingly troubled by a seasonal wind that affects the area, called the melteme. Coming in from the north-east, it can whip up a harsh storm in minutes. The wreck site was completely exposed and it became harder and harder to work there. Every loose object had been removed from the wreck and the divers had begun to dig into the layers of sea growth underneath, but with little success. Then two more divers were seriously paralysed by the bends and work was finally suspended at the end of September 1901.

  Those involved were reluctant to stop, believing that many more statues remained embedded there, especially as the bodies of many of the salvaged heads, feet and hands had not yet been found. From time to time the Government tried to hire foreign crews to continue the work, but these efforts failed because the divers wanted to keep some of the salvaged artefacts, which was forbidden by Greek law.

  According to the official report of the Archaeological Society, the Greek government paid the ‘conscientious citizens of Symi’ – those who survived at least – a small fortune of 150,000 drachmas (equivalent to nearly half a million pounds today) as their reward, while the society paid them a bonus of another 500 drachmas each. The report proudly noted that the quality of the salvaged artefacts had exceeded all expectations.

  It was a great success. The first ever archaeological survey of a wreck had yielded treasures far beyond what anyone had imagined. But the project was very different to anything that archaeologists might recognise today. There was no attempt to study the items from the wreck in context or to learn anything about the ship itself or the way of life on board. It was purely a salvage operation. None of the archaeologists would have dreamed of getting into the water themselves and they treated the divers as nothing more than hired labour. At no point, for example, did they ask them how the wreck and its contents were arranged.

  Similarly, the finds were treated very differently to how they might be today. They were taken to the National Museum in Athens, under the supervision of the museum’s director Valerios Staïs (Spyridon’s nephew). But there was no effort to definitively catalogue the fragments and artefacts. Some were placed on public display, but most were put straight into a rather jumbled storage. Inside the museum, a pretty open courtyard became the eerie resting place for heaps of marble statues, horribly disfigured by the action over the centuries of hungry sea creatures – everything from date mussels to marine bacteria. Men, women and horses were missing faces, heads or limbs, and their smooth, sculpted surfaces had been grossly eaten away, leaving sad, pitted shadows of the artist’s original intent. Indeed, the crew members of the Mykale were so moved by one statue that was raised, of a beautiful but eroded young man, that they called it ‘the ghost of Praxitelian Hermes’.

  Every so often part of a statue was saved where it had been buried in the sand. One legless horse had a well-preserved body, and around a hole where the head would have fitted was a carved strip showing an eagle, helmet, Galatian shield and axe. Elsewhere a crouching boy, perfect on his right side with neatly cropped hair and eyes gazing upward, had suffered his left arm and leg being munched away to stumps.

  The most valuable finds, though, were the bronzes. They were mostly in pieces, but the fragments, despite the metal on the surface having been corroded by electrochemical reactions with the seawater, had generally retained their original shape. Even so, most of the smaller pieces were thrown into crates and left in the courtyard, where museum workers would occasionally sift through them to look for bits that might fit the larger statues as they were reconstructed.

  The big prize of the haul was a bronze of a naked young man, the beautiful Hermes or Apollo already mentioned. Nicknamed the ‘Antikythera Youth’, he stands calmly, nearly two metres tall, his right arm stretched out as if holding something. Although found in more than 20 pieces the statue was reconstructed in the early 1900s (then taken apart and reassembled again in the 1950s, with a slightly different posture) and its languid grace now presides over a central hall in the Athens museum.

  Another colourful find was the portrait head of an elderly man, perhaps a philosopher, with piercing features, bushy beard and tousled hair. Plenty of other smaller bronzes were also found, in various poses, often decorated with eyes, nipples and genitals made of stone. One statuette of a naked young man was attached to a rotating base, presumably so that his slender form might be viewed from different angles.

  Aside from the statues, many vessels and other small objects made out of clay, glas
s and metal were recovered. There were piles of amphoras (two-handled jars with pointed bottoms used for transporting supplies) of various sizes and shapes, one of them with olive pits still inside, as well as jugs, flagons, kettles, lamps, glass pots, bottles and a silver wine jar. A golden earring in the form of a baby holding a lyre was found alongside bronze bedsteads engraved with busts of a woman and a lion. And there were pieces of timber from the ship itself, as well as broken tiles from the galley roof.

  The treasures from the Antikythera wreck still take up a large part of Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. Since their discovery many other ancient wrecks have yielded precious finds, such as the first-century BC galley loaded with marble pillars discovered in 1907 off the coast of Mahdia, Tunisia, and a Greek ship from around 0 AD found at Cape Artemision with some of the finest ancient bronze statues known, from the classical height of the art in the fifth century BC. Other wrecks have been more scientifically excavated than Antikythera was, and can therefore tell us much more about the way of life on board, such as a Bronze Age ship which sank off Turkey’s Cape Gelidonya carrying a cargo of copper ingots from Cyprus. But although many of the treasures from Antikythera have since been matched or even eclipsed, the ship from which they came retains its well-deserved place in history as the first wreck ever to be explored by an archaeological expedition, and the courageous efforts of the sponge divers remain as awe-inspiring today as they were in the 1900s.

  That, though, is only the beginning of the Antikythera story. As the salvaged objects from the wreck arrived back in Athens, busy museum staff struggled to cope with the huge influx of artefacts, as they tried to piece together the larger statues and vases. So nobody noticed a formless, corroded lump of bronze and wood lying in one of the courtyard crates. But as the wood dried and shrivelled over the next few months, the secrets inside could contain themselves no longer. The lump cracked open to reveal traces of gearwheels embedded in the newly exposed surfaces, along with some faint inscriptions in ancient Greek.

  2

  An Impossible Find

  To the antiquities brought up from the bottom of the sea at Antikythera belongs a completely strange instrument, whose purpose and use are unknown . . . It is nevertheless very similar to the gear wheel system of a simple modern clock.

  — PERICLES REDIADIS

  ONE HUNDRED MILLION years ago reptiles ruled a fiery Earth. Dinosaurs terrorised the land, while flippered icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs patrolled the oceans and pterosaurs fought with fast-evolving birds for domination of the skies.

  All around them, the planet’s crust was punctured by unusually violent volcanic activity. In fact, many believe that climate change caused by the flames eventually contributed to the dinosaurs’ destruction, clearing the way for the rise of mammals. The impact of the giant eruptions was just as great beneath the sea. The mid-ocean ridge – an underwater mountain range formed where the Earth’s tectonic plates join – was forced open by the strong currents in the hot mantle beneath. Seawater crept down into the cracks and mixed with the molten rock, dissolving minerals from it before being ejected from hot springs that burst up through the ocean floor; the pressure at such depth keeping the water liquid despite temperatures of hundreds of degrees.

  The huge scale of this activity enriched the oceans with calcium, which plankton use to build their intricate skeletons of calcium carbonate. As millions of generations of plankton lived and died, more calcium carbonate was deposited in the oceans than ever before, forming the extensive beds of chalk (the White Cliffs of Dover included) from which this period, the Cretaceous, got its name (creta is Latin for ‘chalk’).

  The superhot springs also carried dissolved sulphides of iron, copper, zinc and nickel. These precipitated out as dark solids as soon as they hit the cold seawater, forming angry black plumes of undersea smoke, which formed deposits of ore on the seabed wherever they settled. Normally these deposits were recycled back into the mantle beneath – the rock of the deep ocean bed is denser than the continental crust that forms the land and shallow seas of our planet, so when tectonic plates clash and the oceanic crust meets the continental crust, it’s the oceanic rock that gets pushed down. On occasion, however, a piece of this ancient seabed peeled away and landed on top of a piece of continental crust, where over time it was forced up into the mountains.

  And so a piece of oceanic crust from the ancient sea that separated Europe and Africa in the Cretaceous now forms the picturesque Troodos Mountains of Cyprus. Jump forward to just 5,000 years ago: the dinosaurs are long gone and people have inherited the gifts of the Earth. The islanders of Cyprus have learned how to smelt copper from the rich stores of blue-black sulphide ore they find in the forested slopes, using it to make tools, jewellery and weapons. Later they will make a fortune selling copper to traders – Phoenician, Greek, then Roman, who will carry ingots of this valuable metal far across the Mediterranean Sea to Greece, Italy, Asia Minor and Egypt.

  The mountains of Cyprus are young upstarts, however, compared to the wise old rocks of Cornwall, south-west England. The granite of Cornwall cooled during the Devonian period, around 400 million years ago, when the first fish evolved legs with which to crawl on to the land, and the first ammonites and trilobites colonised the sea. Before the granite completely solidified, hot magma bubbled from below and forced itself up into vertical fissures in the cooler rock. The minerals in the magma crystallised as they cooled, leaving behind lodes of colourfully named and valuable ores, including wolframite, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, galena and especially cassiterite – an oxide of tin.

  Jump forward again and, as with Cyprus, traders from all over the Mediterranean come to Cornwall to purchase the smelted tin. They collect it at the tiny rocky island that will one day be called St Michael’s Mount and carry it back to France, where they load it on to horses and travel overland for 30 days until they reach the mouth of the Rhone, where ships will continue the journey to the sea.

  Although copper was at first widely used for weapons and utensils, it was quite soft and easily dented. A copper axe would not keep its edge for very long and a copper shield would soon wear down against sharpened stones. Then, probably in several different places at several different times, someone realised that adding a small proportion of tin to the copper, around 10 per cent, made it stronger and harder. It also lowered the melting point of the new metal, giving smiths more time to cast it as it cooled. Knowledge of this new alloy – bronze – spread around the world, ushering in the Bronze Age, which in the Mediterranean began around 2500 BC.

  Advanced metalworking techniques were developed and complex networks of trade, supported largely by the markets in copper and tin, stretched from Africa and Asia Minor to the north of Europe. The glint of bronze was everywhere and the people of the Mediterranean were richer than ever before.

  It didn’t last. Somewhere around 1200 BC everything collapsed. Why this happened is one of the most controversial questions in ancient history – theories put forward include economic decline, climate change, earthquakes and invasion – it may even have been a combination of all of these. Whatever the cause, trade stopped, kingdoms fell apart, skills such as navigation, metalworking and literacy were lost and the region was plunged into a dark age from which very few records survive. Without the trade networks to unite copper and tin, bronze was hard to get hold of, so iron – though not as strong or beautiful as its rosier cousin – became the metal of choice for weapons and other implements.

  By Homer’s time, around the eighth century BC, Greek civilisation was pulling itself out of the darkness, with the rediscovery of old skills and the rise of city states such as Athens and Sparta. By this time craftsmen had worked out how to add carbon to iron to make steel, which is much harder than wrought iron. But bronze was still prized – objects made of it were never discarded, but melted down and used again and again over generations. A dagger that lost its point might become beads or a bangle, then be sold and recycled into a cooking pot or a bedstead su
itable for a royal household, then reincarnated as a chariot wheel or a statue, a knife, an axe or a spearhead.

  At some point, however, a piece of worn out bronze was melted down and recycled not into any of these items, but into the delicate gear work of a complicated scientific mechanism. And because of a quirk of fate – a ship in the wrong place at the wrong time – this particular mechanism was never melted down. Instead, it sank 60 metres to the sea bed off Antikythera and lay there until Captain Kontos and his divers retrieved it at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Bronze fares a lot better than many other metals when languishing for long periods under the sea. Seawater is a soup of charged ions – mainly hydrogen and oxygen from the water and sodium and chloride from the salt, but there are others floating around too, such as sulphate and carbonate. These ions do their best to attack any material they come into contact with. Iron, for example, oxidises completely in contact with sea water, losing its original form and eventually taking on the consistency of chocolate.

  Copper, on the other hand, is relatively unreactive. The ions in the seawater strip electrons from any exposed copper atoms, forming positively-charged copper ions that each react with a negatively charged chloride ion to form copper chloride. Similarly, tin reacts with oxygen ions to form tin oxide. Certain marine bacteria do their bit too; their idea of a satisfying meal is to combine sulphate ions in the sea water with metal ions to form tin and copper sulphide, releasing chemical energy in the process. But the damage is limited. These new compounds form a thin layer on the surface of any bronze object that is left in the sea, which protects it from further corrosion.