Decoding the Heavens
Page 7
The shrivelled pieces of wood also allowed Throckmorton to estimate the original size of the planks used, from which he concluded that the ship was a heavily built merchant ship. It was perhaps 30 or 40 metres long and able to carry a hefty 300 tons of cargo, making it one of the larger vessels to sail the ancient Mediterranean. The characteristic arching sterns and gathered square sails of these ships are pictured on several manuscripts, pottery fragments and mosaics.
The objects the ship was carrying told his colleagues even more. As the original Greek archaeologists realised, dating the statues doesn’t help much in dating the ship. So the rest of the team focused on the more mundane items on board, largely ignored until that point by everyone except for Staïs – the pots, plates and jars that would have been part of everyday life for the crew. These weren’t as glamorous as the gleaming artworks, but such cheap, easily breakable items wouldn’t have lasted long on rough ocean crossings, and were therefore unlikely to have been more than a few years old when the ship sank. Amphoras carrying the ship’s provisions would probably have been picked up at the ship’s most recent ports of call, so might also give a clue to its final route.
By the 1950s there was plenty of smashed pottery from other digs for the experts to compare with the Antikythera finds. Much of it had been unearthed over the previous two decades in Athens’ famous Agora or marketplace. Athens was a centre of trade for the whole region, so goods and containers from across the Mediterranean found their way to the hubbub of its central market. The most helpful remains for the archaeologist are those from great disasters or celebrations – past events involving such dramatic destruction or growth that the buried remnants form recognisable layers in the ground. Correlating these layers to dated written records provides exact time markers against which to assess new finds.
One ancient event that’s squarely in the disaster category is when the great Roman general Cornelius Sulla smashed the city of Athens in 86 BC in the last years of the Roman republic. The pieces lay trampled beneath the feet of generations of Athenians until archaeologists such as Virginia Grace and Gladys Weinberg carefully brushed away the earth, revealing the horror and hunger that had been frozen there for 2,000 years.
The Romans had extended their grip east as far as the Asia Minor coast and Cornelius Sulla was on his way to deal with King Mithridates of Pontus, which is just south of the Black Sea. Mithridates had ambitions of greatness. After killing several of his brothers (and marrying his sister) to clear his way to the throne, he was intent on expanding his kingdom. Two years earlier, Mithridates had led the Greek cities in the region in a huge rebellion against Rome, involving the synchronised bloody slaughter of some 80,000 Roman citizens.
Now Sulla was on the warpath. With fiery hair and gleaming grey eyes he looked fearsome, and that fire burned just as strongly within him. He stopped off at Athens on the way to Asia Minor, because Mithridates had installed a puppet leader there called Aristion. Sulla laid siege to Athens for months, during which the starving citizens were reduced to eating grass and shoe leather, but Aristion danced on the ramparts. He and his jesters taunted Sulla, laughing at the general’s blotchy complexion and casting aspersions on the character of his wife Metella.
When his army finally made it into the city late one night through a poorly defended section of wall, Sulla was in no mood to be merciful. Driven on in the moonlight by their leader’s rage, the soldiers killed the cowering Athenians and left the shining city in pieces. As the Roman historian Plutarch later observed, the corpses were too many to count, the number of dead only being estimated from the amount of blood that flowed through the streets and out of the city gates.
The screams soon faded. But the dense layer of debris that archaeologists later uncovered in the Agora has become a key reference point for dating artefacts from the first century BC – not just from Athens but from Rome and the rest of the Hellenistic world.
Another easy-to-date layer in the Agora comes from the 20s and 10s BC. It consists of the remains from the vigorous burst of activity and construction in the city in the early years of the reign of Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first emperor. This was a new order: the style of the pots and jars is markedly different from those in the layer testifying to Sulla’s night of destruction. By comparing the two (and other dated layers in the Agora and elsewhere) archaeologists can work out how the designs of various jugs and jars changed over the years, and slot any new finds into that timeline.
Back in the Athens storeroom, pottery experts Roger Edwards and Henry Robinson investigated the Greek and Roman crockery from the Antikythera wreck. They agreed that both dated from soon after the Sulla layer, perhaps between 86 and around 50 BC. Surprisingly, none of the pots were from Athens itself, one of the obvious places that the Antikythera ship could have sailed from. Instead, they came from exotic eastern cities on the Asia Minor coast (in what is now Turkey), including wine jugs from Pitane, Pergamon and Chios, and an Aladdin-style oil lamp from Ephesus.
Meanwhile, their colleague Gladys Weinberg studied the glass plates and bowls. Weinberg was a striking, athletic woman who had worked in the secret service and as a journalist, but her excavations at Athens and Corinth had also made her an expert in ancient glassware. She saw immediately that the glass items from the wreck were very different from the pottery – they were luxury pieces of the highest quality and beautifully preserved. Rather than having been used by the crew, they were probably part of the cargo. ‘Looking at them, in their pristine, almost flawless condition,’ she wrote, ‘one thinks it impossible that they could have been found on the sea bottom, and how they survived seems a mystery.’ Like the Antikythera mechanism, each of the glasses had become covered in a hard crust of limestone that protected them while they were under the sea, but was subsequently removed by museum staff. Such a coating damages the surface of pottery and of marble statues, but it can’t find a grip on smoothly polished glass and can be easily chipped off to reveal the original beauty beneath.
Among the finds was an elegant blue-green bowl carved with an understated floral design that would grace the most exclusive of today’s shop windows, as well as a set of mosaic dishes in which stripes of rose, purple, green, yellow and aquamarine glass have been coiled into tiny spirals and melted together with breathtaking attention to detail. Many of the pieces were unique or the earliest of their kind to be found, so in this case the flow of knowledge was reversed: the dating of the wreck became an important reference point for setting the chronology of other similar glass vessels.
The most precise information about the wreck, however, came from Virginia Grace, who squeezed her answers out of the ship’s amphoras. Rounded vessels with handles at the top, amphoras have a narrow neck that can be stoppered and a pointed base that serves as a grip when pouring. They were used for all sorts of foodstuff, such as grain, olives, wine, even pickled fish, and were everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean – archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of them. Private homes and shops had dedicated stands for them, while in warehouses they were leant against the wall or dug into the sand, and on ships they were stacked tightly against the sides of the hold, often several layers high.
The archaeologists overseeing the original salvage operation didn’t know what to make of the jars when the sponge divers first pulled them up to the surface and deposited them, dripping, on to the deck of the Syros. They were so bemused about the presence of so many different kinds of amphoras alongside the precious statues that the ship’s captain teased them by suggesting that the owner of the Antikythera ship, clearly not satisified with raiding temples and agoras, must also have looted pottery markets and grocers’ stores in every port he visited.
But the tall, delicate ‘Miss Grace’ was a world authority on the subject. Except for when she fled Athens for Cyprus during the Second World War, she worked in a huge marble and limestone building that had been reconstructed, columns and all, in the Agora. She had studied thousands of amphoras and her basement was full
of them, of all sizes and shapes, painstakingly glued together from fragments. In Grace’s careful hands each reconstructed jar revealed a story it had been waiting to tell for millennia. The length of a neck, the slope of a shoulder, the sag of a belly . . . these subtle differences in design spoke volumes to her of the place and time from which each individual piece originated.
An angular profile and round handles identified most of the Antikythera jars as coming from Rhodes, while a slim body and slightly careless manufacture suggested they were made in the first century BC, just after Sulla’s rampage in Athens. Earlier amphoras were more precisely made, whereas Rhodian jars from the new order Augustan deposit at Athens were even shoddier (production standards on Rhodes understandably slipped somewhat after the Roman general Cassius sacked the island in 43 BC).
A few of the Antikythera jars had double-barrelled handles (with a figure-of-eight cross-section, as in a double-barrelled shotgun), suggesting they were made in Kos – probably filled originally with Koan wine, the region’s best. Grace dated them against debris found on the nearby island of Delos, with bloody disasters again providing the necessary timeline. The style of the Koan jars from the wreck resembled that between fragments trampled to the ground when Mithridates’ soldiers attacked Delos during the rebellion against the Romans in 88 BC, and remnants of a pirate raid that destroyed what was left of the luckless island in 69 BC.
None of the experts found any objects from Athens, or from anywhere else on the Greek mainland for that matter – everything originated from Asia Minor or the eastern Aegean islands of Kos and Rhodes. In a joint paper finally published in 1965 they concluded that the ship must have started her journey somewhere on the Asia Minor coast between 86 and around 60 BC. Once loaded to the brim with statues she must have sailed west towards Rome, stopping at the trading ports of Rhodes and perhaps Kos to pick up essential supplies on the way.
The sturdy vessel then headed west past Crete and through the channel between Crete and Cape Malea, where the jagged rocks of Antikythera cut short her journey. Otherwise the captain’s plan would have been to hug the coast up the western coast of mainland Greece and hop across the Adriatic Sea to Brindisi or Tarentum on the heel of Italy. Then he would have sailed her south around the toe, either all the way around Sicily or through the Messina strait, before the final run north up the west coast of Italy towards Rome.
It has been suggested that her cargo belonged to Sulla himself; goods looted from the Asia Minor cities after his war against King Mithridates. No stranger to confrontation at home as well as abroad, Sulla marched his armies through Rome twice, then briefly enjoyed the absolute power of a dictator, before he unexpectedly resigned to spend what remained of his old age partying among the actors, musicians and dancers that he loved. Though he willingly relinquished his dictatorship after a couple of years, he set an ominous precedent in the transformation of Rome from a democracy to an empire, as this was the first time the republic had been led by one man.
After forcing a weakened Mithridates back to his homeland in 84 BC, Sulla had cut a devastating trail through Asia Minor. He ravaged the cities there with infamous bloodthirstiness and greed, then shipped the booty home, among other things to pay for a huge triumphal parade that helped to cement his popularity with the people of Rome. The Antikythera ship might have belonged to him, or to one of the generals later installed to rule the territories there and extract the crippling taxes that paid for Rome’s excesses.
The Syrian satirist Lucian, who travelled around the Roman Empire in the second century AD, even wrote about a particular ship full of Sulla’s loot that sank off Cape Malea. He mentioned it in a story he told about a painting by the famed Greek artist Zeuxis (a striking fantasy that depicted a female centaur nursing a pair of infant centaur twins), because the ship was supposedly carrying this artwork when it sank. It’s likely, however, that this ship would have sailed from Athens, because Lucian says that is where a copy of the painting was held. So, although commentators have sometimes tried to link the two, it probably wasn’t the wreck found at Antikythera.
Although it is tempting to try to identify the Antikythera wreck with a particular ship described in the written accounts that have survived through the centuries, the chances of a match are tiny. Countless ships were lost in the area at around this time, and the vast majority were never recorded and will always remain nameless. Historians estimate that what with the treacherous waters along this route as well as pirates (who infested the sea around Antikythera) and the greedy overloading of ships, as many as 5 per cent of the booty extracted from the eastern Mediterranean ended up at the bottom of the ocean. We know from more recent experience that even in the most favourable conditions carrying such heavy cargo is hazardous. When Lord Elgin took the Parthenon marbles to London in 1803, one of his ships was wrecked off the coast of Kythera. And a French steamer carrying a bronze statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps – the diplomat responsible for the construction of the Suez Canal – to Egypt for the canal’s grand opening in 1869 almost sank when the massive figure shifted in the hold.
We can still get a little closer to the last days of the Antikythera ship, however, thanks to Frédéric Dumas and Jacques Cousteau, who finally returned to the site of the wreck in 1976. By this time Cousteau’s books and films about the wonders of the sea had made him famous throughout the world. They were back with their ship Calypso in the Mediterranean, working with the authorities in Greece to visit a number of ancient wreck sites, and Cousteau wanted to make a film about Antikythera. The two Frenchmen were confident from their previous visit that the wreck still contained secrets for the taking.
They stationed Calypso immediately above the wreck. Two anchors were dropped on her seaward side and three heavy nylon lines looped over rocks on the shore. The hope was that in this treacherous location the web of ropes would hold the ship tightly in place and save her from being bashed against the rocks if a storm suddenly rose. It was a long way from the trials of Kontos and his men. This team of divers had the latest scuba gear, with sleek black and yellow wetsuits and airtanks in matching cases, not to mention suction-powered digging equipment and powerful floodlights to aid their work. But, as ever, they had to be careful of the bends. Each diver could only dive twice a day, with 20 minutes on the bottom each time. He paid for this pleasure with a lonely half-hour decompression stop on the way back up, clinging to the bottom of Calypso’s keel three metres below the surface.
Most of the time that didn’t include Cousteau himself. The film shows him proudly emerging from the water, but staff at the Athens museum now scoff that he didn’t actually dive, but ‘only turned up for the cameras’. Maybe that’s fair enough, as Cousteau and Dumas were in their sixties by then. Dumas was always the dreamier of the two, noticing how the sunlight scattered on the water, or making friends with the octopuses who made their homes inside sunken amphoras. The force of nature that was Cousteau was much more interested in the PR side of things, at which he was extremely accomplished. He referred to all his documentaries, including the Antikythera film, as ‘advertising’. What he was advertising – the sea, the wreck, himself – wasn’t clear. Perhaps it didn’t really matter.
After meticulously photographing and mapping every square metre of the wreck site, the team of divers set about digging through each section in turn. It was clearly a much more scientific survey than the original salvage expedition in 1900. The divers recorded the position of everything they found before placing it in a basket or tying it to a rope to be raised to the surface. However, some of the techniques they used might cause today’s archaeologists to gulp. The team’s prized weapon was a more powerful version of the suction pipe that Dumas had used in 1953. Like a souped-up vacuum cleaner, it devoured whatever came into its path – water, silt, artefacts – and sucked it up to the surface, where it was spewed out into a basket strainer that hung off the side of the boat. Every so often the men on deck (as in 1900, there were no women on board) would sift through the bask
et looking for fragments of value – often in rather smaller pieces than when they had been dragged from their resting places on the seabed. This time, though, the archaeologists wore skimpy swimming trunks rather than smart suits.
Progress was slow, and the team didn’t unearth any of the big statues they had hoped for – perhaps the sponge fishers really did get them all, or they were buried deeper than the vacuum pipe could suck, or perhaps the forming sedimentary rock had already engulfed them. The divers were also on the lookout for any missing pieces of the Antikythera mechanism, but had no luck there either. Still, the expedition was rewarded with an array of evocative objects, including another oil lamp, a pristine marble finger and thumb, and a rather more battered hand and foot. Then came an ornate gold cap that once served as the setting for a precious stone, some giant bronze ship nails, and the magnificent Spartan-style crest of a bronze helmet. Cousteau was especially pleased with two bronze statuettes on rotating bases. One was a boxer, his strong right arm stretched forwards, the other a rather camp young man with hands raised above his elbows and hips provocatively swayed. Then came the most chilling find so far. A human skull.
It’s actually quite rare to find human remains in wrecks – sailors tend to struggle and swim before they drown, so their bodies get carried off in the current, then eaten or swept up on shores far away from the site of the original disaster. This unfortunate must have been trapped inside the ship as it went down – a crewman snoozing after a night on the Koan wine perhaps, or a captured pirate confined to the hold.
The bits and pieces were all taken back to the Athens museum and recorded on Cousteau’s film, but like the sponge divers’ haul they were never properly catalogued or displayed and the finds have never been formally published.