National Geographic: Lost Ships of the Mediterranean (1999)

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National Geographic: Lost Ships of the Mediterranean (1999)

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They lived by wind and wave,

and knew these waters well.

Their people were lords of the sea.

Few built finer craft.

Few sailed faster... or farther.

But none of that could save this ship.

The sea would rise up and conceal

its fate for nearly an eternity.

Summer 1997.

The US Navy's nuclear submarine,

the NR-1 is on a mission

in the eastern Mediterranean.

The sub's advanced sonar detects

several large objects in deep water

that appear to be shipwrecks.

Though pressed for time,

the crew decides to take a quick look.

A rough set of coordinates

and a shadowy videotape

are recorded on the fly.

Later, the crew will send word

to a former naval officer-

who is also one of the greatest

undersea explorers in the world.

The man who discovered the Titanic,

the Bismarck,

and many other shipwrecks,

Robert Ballard is immediately intrigued.

The sheer number of ceramic jars

is impressive-

but their meaning escapes

this marine geologist.

Well, not being an archeologist,

all I could tell was

it's an ancient ship,

but I didn't know anything

more than that.

It lies at a forbidding

Is it worth investigating?

Ballard will seek the advice

of an expert.

Throughout the Mediterranean,

most shipwrecks have been discovered

in shallow water.

But this one was found nearly

opposite what was once a thriving

seaport: the city of Ashkelon.

On the southern coast of

present-day Israel,

Ashkelon's roots reach back

nearly 6,000 years.

Crusaders and Muslims

fought over this place.

Romans claimed it.

Babylonians destroyed it.

In the Bible, it was a stronghold

of the Philistines.

Its earliest known inhabitants

were the Canaanites.

Since 1985,

archeologist Lawrence Stager,

of Harvard University

has directed excavations here.

His knowledge of ancient pottery

is renowned.

In a tiny shard,

he can 'see' an entire artifact,

and pinpoint the culture

that produced it.

Oh, now this is great.

This is Cypro-Geometric III.

This is most probably

an import from Cyprus.

But things were not so clear

in the Navy's videotape.

Well, when I first looked at it,

I was a bit disappointed

that it was so fuzzy, and couldn't

really make out these jars very well.

Because that, of course, was the key

to determining the age of the shipwreck.

But it seemed to me

that they might be early,

and possibly even 9th, 8th,

These two-handled storage jars,

called amphoras,

were first used throughout

the Mediterranean

around 4,000 years ago.

Distinctive styles evolved

in various locales-

a boon for archeologists

who can use the jars

as 'signatures' of time and place.

But sometimes two amphoras

from vastly different eras

can be deceptively similar.

These might be

from the 5th Century A.D.

But Stager has a hunch

they're much older.

He tells Ballard that if this wreck

dates to the Iron Age,

as he suspects, it is the first of its

kind ever found in the Mediterranean.

It was a gamble but one that

I was at least confident enough

in that I would have put down

a good-sized bet.

More than money would be wagered.

In the summer of 1999, the

'Northern Horizon' sets out from Malta.

Ballard and Stager lead an expedition

to relocate and study

the mysterious wreck.

At stake is their conviction

that the combined strengths

of oceanography and archeology

can make history.

You know, when we found the Titanic,

we found the Bismarck,

we knew they existed.

They really were not a discovery.

They were a relocation.

These are true discoveries.

These are chapters of human history

we don't know about,

and I actually think

they are more important.

Still, this expedition begins

like any other.

Okay, ladies and gents!

Make sure your life jackets are right

before I shout you out

else I'll give you to Albert!

Safety training is mandatory

for everyone on board-

forty-nine scientists, engineers,

programmers,

ship's mates and graduate students.

When you jump in what's the correct

way to hold your life jacket?

Yeah, and your nose. Smashing.

Landlubber or seadog,

no one is exempt.

No one.

Larry!

Can't get it any tighter!

The Northern Horizon

has been transformed into

a floating research facility.

Over 55 tons of equipment were

shipped from the United States.

Several larger items have been

welded to the deck.

For nearly two decades,

Ballard has worked with an expert team

out of

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

Martin Bowen and Andy Bowen have been

key members of many expeditions.

Inside, Stager's archeology team

has established its own 'headquarters'.

Hey, team, excuse me, I just got some

interesting information from Bob;

he just gave me the coordinates.

They're right on the ancient routes

that some have predicted between

the cedars of Lebanon and Egypt.

His team includes four

graduate students,

as well as an expert on ancient ships,

nautical archeologist

Shelley Wachsmann of

Texas A&M University.

These ships might have had

pretty wide beamy hulls and so forth?

Wachsmann: They seem from all the

iconography we have from this period

that the merchant ships were extremely

beamy and broad hulled.

Yeah.

If this dates to around 700 BC

this is the first ship ever found

that dates to that time period.

You have to remember that ships

tell the story of history.

I mean, there is nothing

that man ever made

that was not carried on a ship,

including the pyramids-

stone by stone, not in one sh*t!

And each one of these are

literally a time capsule.

They went down in one moment,

like that,

and everything they were carrying on

it at that one time

went down together,

and that tells us a story.

To reach the coordinates provided

by the Navy will take about five days.

This is the calm before the storm.

We are very relaxed now,

which is great.

People are charging their batteries,

getting sleep,

we just did the testing of the ship.

Everything's proceeding smoothly.

But once we get on site it'll kick in

to around the clock.

And you will see people break up

into three watches,

and there will always be a team

at work 24 hours a day.

Susan and Michael have the

most difficult schedule in some ways

because they work

from 12 noon to 4 p.m.

and then from

they have to sleep

and that's a tough time

to go to sleep

at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

But the reason they have to do

that is because at 12 midnight

they have to get back up

and work the 12 midnight

to 4 a.m. shift.

And go to the van.

Exactly.

And that's where everything

is happening?

Well it sounds like,

from what they said,

that the midnight to 4 a.m. shift

actually is a time

when a lot of things do happen.

On the Northern Horizon, 'navigation'

involves a Global Positioning System

and computer-controlled propulsion.

But a few thousand years ago,

a sea captain had to rely on

somewhat 'higher' powers.

The very heavens were his guide.

He probably spent a lifetime

committing constellations to memory,

observing the shifting angle

of the sun.

The special temper of each wind,

and the season of its coming.

The powerful currents

hidden beneath the waves.

All these may have been

the secrets of his trade.

Surely he watched for seabirds,

heralds of an approaching shore,

and for landmarks familiar

as a friendly face.

But the nearness of land

was not necessarily a comfort,

and he likely kept his ship

at quite a distance.

Well, generally the common wisdom

has it that,

for safety, the ancient mariners

hugged the coast.

But when you think about it,

the last thing an ancient mariner

ever wanted to see during a storm

was a quickly approaching the shore.

Plus there was piracy.

Piracy wasn't the type

that you see in the movies,

in the Caribbean where you're just

sailing around in the middle of nowhere

and suddenly another ship comes out.

Rather, they would watch from shore.

So you don't want to stay

too close to shore,

and if somebody comes out to att*ck,

you want to have that leeway

to get out of the way.

It's Day Five and nearly midnight when

the Northern Horizon arrives on site.

The coordinates provided by

the Navy are only approximate.

Margin of error might be

up to a kilometer.

Ballard's team deploys a deepwater

side-scan sonar.

The hope is it will pinpoint

the same pattern

of large objects detected by the Navy.

Slip his line, slip his line!

As the sonar is towed,

its fiber optic cable carries signals

to the 'Control Van',

nerve center of the expedition.

Sonar screens are not

inherently exciting.

As the first watch hunkers down,

everything starts to go wrong.

Okay, this course is going to

take us into deep water.

It already is increased.

The ship can't seem to stay on track,

and the sonar is pitched at an angle.

Pull up the winch.

The generator is not going

to survive a lot longer.

They have to shut

the generator off now.

This is the ship's?

Now. Yes, the ship's.

The ship has lost a generator.

Our speed over the ground is 5 knots.

Five knots? I'm shocked!

If there's a current like 4 knots,

we're not doing this site.

That could be a real showstopper

right there!

Unless the winch is rewired to

another source of power on board,

the expedition is dead in the water.

Time to improvise.

There's no way we can feed

any power from below

through the Scania circuit, right?

Because I have someone now

disconnecting the cables.

No estimated time on repairs.

Okay. Got the hand crank?

No...

Such are the risks of trying out

a brand new winch.

We're doing things we've

never done before.

But that's why we're here.

We're always pushing the envelope.

The challenge is always the desire

on the part of the scientists

to do things that have never

been done before

and the operator's side not wanting

to change anything, 'cause it works.

It's a miracle that's

the only guy that's a problem.

Power has been re-routed-

and the hunt is on.

That looks pretty good now.

Do you see something that you believe?

The sonar displays targets

as subtle smudges.

It takes a trained eye to tell

a shipwreck from a rock heap.

There dead ahead.

Zero three seven

It's on the screen now.

Just startin' to appear.

There's something comin' in

but it's on the right.

There's something there.

There's something there

You're certainly within

the range of Jason to see it.

It's about the right length;

it looks like it's maybe 30 meters.

It's roughly in the right place.

It smells right.

Within twelve hours,

the team locates three targets

that line up in a similar configuration

to the Navy's -

but offset by half a kilometer

from their coordinates.

Back to you, Larry.

I think we did it.

We did it.

Okay. The weather's nice.

I think we'll go to 'Phase Two'.

It's a conditional victory.

Until they actually

look at the targets,

they won't know

if they've hit pay dirt.

There's plenty of work ahead.

Better get something to eat below.

As one shift gives way to the next,

notions of time begin to blur.

Day 6.

The team prepares to launch

an extraordinary robot named Jason,

designed and built at Woods Hole -

and championed by a man

with a life-long dream.

Robert Ballard can't remember a time

he wasn't obsessed with the deep sea.

I mean my idol, as a kid-

perhaps still is... was Captain Nemo.

He first dove in a submarine in 1969.

Later, he was part of the

historic expedition

that discovered hydrothermal vents

and surprising life

forms on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

But he's always had

a healthy respect for the deep.

Diving in a small submarine

can be very dangerous.

Pressure is a funny thing

'cause you look out the window

and you can't see it.

But it's there and the slightest

mistake and the failure of your porthole

or anything would be

a catastrophic implosion -

just pfft - you'd just vanish.

Ballard began to think that remote-

controlled robots might be the answer.

The idea led to a prototype

called 'Jason Jr.',

rigged with four motors,

a thirty-meter tether,

and an electronic eye.

In 1986, on the Titanic, Jason Jr.

proved himself a nimble explorer.

Maneuvered by Martin Bowen

from within a submarine,

the little robot descended

the grand staircase

and danced beneath a chandelier.

That success launched a flurry

of innovation at Woods Hole.

By the 1990s, Jason had become

a technological wonder weighing

just over two tons.

In a sense, he remains

a work-in-progress-

forever refined and improved.

But even his standard features

are impressive.

Seven thrusters allow for

precision maneuvering underwater.

Titanium components can withstand

depths of 6000 meters.

Get it here and move

the whole thing back.

Jason's video, film and electronic

cameras can be remote-controlled

by an experienced pilot.

Likewise his articulated arm,

which can lift up to 15 kilos.

You know, right about here, Andy.

By about my foot.

To fire up such a complex machine

takes teamwork and time.

Jason won't be ready to launch

until well after dark.

It's a breathless moment

just before Jason hits the water.

If a single component leaks,

it could short-circuit

the entire electrical system.

Okay, pins released.

But tonight it's 'all systems go.'

Jason dives toward the most promising

of the three sonar targets.

And we're off.

Roger, make it slow.

You're 110 meters out to the target.

At the controls is pilot Will Sellers.

He adjusts Jason's buoyancy

by dropping ballast weights.

Amazing!

Jason's own forward-facing sonar

now scans the bottom.

A hundred and five meters.

Okay, it's off to the left.

Forty meters off to the left.

Is that it coming in?

That's it.

Let's see what we've got.

Lot of pits

That's just noise

There it is.

That's not geology.

There it is.

Whatever it is.

That's it ahead.

Off to the right slightly.

That's an anchor.

There's the chain.

Yup, there's the chain.

Follow that chain, Will, to the right.

Come right. That's the chain.

Metal chain, modern anchor.

This is no ancient ship.

So it's the other guy.

Yup. That's the Queen Victoria.

That was target AA, right?

Yeah so it means it's AC.

The brightest one is

gonna be the oldest.

Well, there you are.

Anyway it was a hit.

Okay, so we don't care about this guy.

We want to drive to AC as fast as

humanly you know, just head over there.

It'll take us a while, we'll go

have coffee and celebrate.

We've got a ship, the wrong one.

But it means we know

where the right one is.

Stager: My knees are weak.

From standing or the excitement?

And then the anchor

and then the chain.

Those apparently don't start

before 1820.

So we might have a Victorian ship,

we may not.

Who cares?

It's two hours transit to the next

most likely target - for some,

a very long two hours.

Day 7. 5 a.m. Jason

is back in action.

The Control Van is flooded with

anticipation, exhaustion, and adrenaline.

That must be it. That bright spot.

The bright spot, it's it.

That's it.

Magic.

Brightest thing on the screen.

That's gotta be the big one.

That's the mother lode.

The mother of all ships.

Eighty meters.

Remember that movie

when the alien is being tracked?

And it's coming towards you?

'The alien is approaching our cabin,

captain.' 45 meters.

And closing...

Eighteen meters... There she blows!

All right!

Look at that!

Fantastic!

There we are!

Oh, yeah.

Now we can see that

they're not Byzantine,

that's 8th Century.

That's...

It's now your problem, Larry.

It's a problem I like.

This is the first iron age ship that's

ever been found in the Mediterranean.

All right!

And it's the biggest one.

I mean, there's nothing bigger.

Look at the corks.

Are they corked?

No, no.

There's something in them.

They can't sediment that way.

But they can't sediment that way,

unless they've been excavated.

I don't think so.

You can't fill them that way.

Look at those thing, still stacked.

And cooking pots too.

We didn't see those... Oh my.

Those are absolutely

perfect 8th Century.

I was nervous that

we were gonna relocate it,

and then when I saw those amphoras,

I stopped looking at the ship

at that point,

and I'm looking at Larry, 'cause

he's the one who knows what we have.

And then when you saw that big smile

that we got the ship we wanted-

as far as I was concerned the cruise

was over.

Look at that.

It's the anchor.

The stone anchor!

More than a night to remember.

It was ecstasy.

I haven't been so happy about an

archeological discovery in years,

maybe a lifetime.

Look at that, you can see the ridges

on the high neck.

You know, when you have those kind of

moments you never forget them,

and this was mine.

For me, something that was incredibly

evocative were the two cooking pots

with, you know, maybe the last supper

in them before the ship went down.

Yeah, I do think about people

who went down.

Like a messenger from the future,

Jason sheds light on a vessel

that set sail around the time Homer

is said to have written the Odyssey...

when the Greeks began to celebrate

the Olympic games...

and a pair of twin brothers,

according to legend,

founded a city called Rome.

The archeologists need a detailed,

overall view,

but Jason's lights can't

illuminate the entire wreck.

To map the site, the robot moves over

the ship in small increments

and takes some 800 electronic

close-ups.

On-board computers help merge

these images

into a black-and-white

high-resolution 'photomosaic.'

It speaks volumes about the world's

oldest deep-sea shipwreck.

Some 300 amphoras preserve the shape

of a long-vanished hull.

About 18 meters long,

it was heading west when it sank.

A stone anchor marks the bow,

cooking pots the stern.

All this, plus the style

of the amphoras

suggests it may be

a Phoenician merchant ship,

broad in the beam,

with a curved horse-head bow.

Such ships are known from Assyrian carvings,

and from a detailed description

in the Bible, in the book of Ezekiel.

Of the Phoenicians, little tangible

has been unearthed.

They lived along the eastern shore

of the Mediterranean

from before 1200 BC

through the Roman period.

But their real domain was the sea.

The greatest maritime merchants

of the ancient world,

they traded with Pharaohs,

Greeks, and Romans,

and left traces of colonies

as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar.

Their rich purple dye was much prized,

as were their cedars of Lebanon.

It was the Phoenicians

who provided lumber and expertise

when Solomon built his temple

in Jerusalem.

Their skill at carving wood and ivory

was unrivaled.

Sadly, only shreds of

Phoenician literature survive.

But their simple alphabet

was widely adopted,

and would evolve into

the Roman alphabet we use today.

Still, it was as seafarers that the

Phoenicians most impressed the world.

A Greek historian claims

they first circumnavigated Africa.

Others believe

they even reached England.

It's as if the Phoenicians

entrusted all their secrets to the sea.

Until now.

Day 8.

The team drops a rig called

an 'elevator' to the bottom.

Later, it will raise precious cargo

to the surface.

So, there are the pots right there.

Today's goal is 'retrieval'.

With hundreds of amphoras

to choose from,

the two lone cooking pots

are top priority.

It won't be easy.

Pilot Matt Heintz is first

to test Jason's new 'hand'-

nicknamed 'Deep Spank' by the team.

You get it just like that,

and hold it like that,

so the weight's sitting on that.

Okay, we'll see if we can

nudge it under there.

And avoid the handles.

Yeah.

They're not up to

taking weight like that.

No one is quite sure

how the pot will hold up.

First time that one's been moved

in 2,700 years.

Yeah? I think it's the food's ready.

It's lost. Okay, we gotta recover

and change out.

For now, 'Deep Spank' disappoints.

It was a new modification

that didn't work.

Engineering on the fly.

It's back to an old die-hard.

Scoops in underneath

and then you close down on top.

We call it the cowcatcher. It works.

Within hours,

Jason is back on the bottom,

with a priceless cooking pot

in his 'cowcatcher.'

Now this is archeology.

Quick and beautiful.

That dog can hunt!

It's a triumph of technology

each time Jason deposits

an artifact in the elevator.

But it also means

the wreck site has been altered.

Careful records must be kept.

Archeology is a destructive science.

It's like tearing pages out of a book.

Once you've removed something,

if you haven't recorded it

you've lost it forever.

Work continues until

the elevator is full.

Then begins a slow ascent that

will bridge nearly thirty centuries.

There it is right here.

Bob, we made a mistake.

We shouldn't have put

both cooking pots in one load

since there are only two of them.

Yeah.

Is that the right place?

Is that the right place?

The center!

Okay, undo yours.

Let him just come straight up.

Take the slack off

Don't tilt it.

Just stop it when it starts to swing.

Okay, don't pull hard guys.

Let him try to get it vertical first!

Oh those beautiful cooking pots.

Ha Ha. Oh they're so glorious.

Okay, watch the guys.

Make sure the objects don't

come down on anything hard.

Thank god they're here!

I'll tell you, I was really happy

to see those cooking pots arrive.

The amphoras, we've got more of.

What would they cook in that?

What kind of meal.

That's the one you'd

do your one pot stew in.

It isn't as though you made

one thing here and one thing there.

Just throw it all in.

Refrigerator soup.

My wife's mother calls it.

Whatever is at the end of the week

in the refrigerator.

Well, this is in beautiful shape.

There's something special about

touching something

that has been untouched by humans

for almost 3000 years old,

I mean, to the time of Homer.

Wow. That's, that's pretty far back.

Here comes the pot,

so don't jump up, Dan.

Two years after

scrutinizing a fuzzy video,

Stager finally enjoys

a close encounter.

Few little sea creatures

attached to it.

Well, my great wish came true that

it was 8th Century

and not something Byzantine.

You know the other possibility

for it was that it could date,

oh, maybe 1100, 1200 years later.

In which case we have lots of wrecks

and lots of material from that period.

But you rarely if ever find this

on land complete.

Even if they're more or less complete

they've all been shattered

and you have to put them together

to make up the whole.

But out here, a whole shipload

of them intact.

It's marvelous.

Bathed in a solution

of fresh and salt water,

the artifacts are now the concern

of conservator Dennis Piechota,

his son James and assistant conservator

Catherine Giangrande.

Sampled and sifted for future analysis,

sediments might yield traces of a meal,

or fragments of the ship's hull.

I'm getting 7.2 millimeters.

Preservation of this pot

will take months,

but its digital doppelganger

is ready for study.

It's equally possible the amphoras

contained olive oil or wine.

I think I'm almost at the bottom...

Then Giangrande spots

the residue of tree resin,

used for sealing amphoras of wine.

It's as fine a discovery as any

to toast.

Not a bad millennium.

Terrific wine.

The superb condition of the amphoras

leads Ballard

to a theory about the fate

of the ship that carried them.

The ship is not busted up.

There's very few amphoras

that were broken.

So it wasn't like they were

tossed around and flipped around.

They were swamped.

You know, when you get in trouble

you tend to run with the sea,

hoping you can outrun the storm

and get away from it,

but you can then have

a very powerful wave come over

the stern and just swamp you.

We call 'em rogue waves.

I've been in two of them in my life.

We took one head on-

right over the bridge,

took off the ridge, took off

the mast, all but sank us.

So my first expedition,

I almost went down in a storm!

Understanding the wreck site

has also consumed the

computational energies of the team.

So we've got the map crunched.

Using data collected by a sensor

on Jason, Dana Yoerger

has produced a three-dimensional map.

It shows the wreck is sitting in an

oval depression nearly two meters deep,

and helps explain something

that's been puzzling Ballard.

'Cause you know one of the thing

we've been,

the problem is the amphoras

are full of mud.

And you figure out,

how could they be full of mud?

But what you've done is,

it was buried.

When the ship was swamped,

it probably sank to the bottom

like a weight, and buried

much of its hull in the soft mud.

In time, wood-boring organisms

ate away any exposed hull or mast.

The amphoras' unbaked clay stoppers

simply dissolved.

As wine escaped,

water and sediments poured in.

Over the centuries, deep-water currents

scoured the surrounding sea floor,

excavating the wreck,

and laying bare its amphoras.

So much revealed in so few days.

The team has earned a bit of fun.

Feet were still a little apart.

I don't know, about an 8,

something like that...

Ballard: Time to get all the children

out of the water and get back to work.

Day 9.

The team heads for the coordinates

of the third sonar target.

Three two seven...

Three two seven

and a hundred ninety one meters.

The expedition leaders have been

keeping nearly 24-hour shifts.

But there's no sign of fatigue

when a target appears on Jason's sonar.

Down 75 on the range.

That's a 55-gallon drum.

That was a decoy.

They always drop drums

to throw people off their trail.

Let's, uh, go back to 400, just do

a simple turn and see what you've got.

As Jason rotates, he picks up

something far more promising.

It's trash

Straight ahead.

Okay. There it is!

It's amphoras! Yes!

All right!

It's the same.

The same!

It's a fleet!

It's another bunch of them.

It's the same guys.

They had a bad day.

Look at that.

That wine company went bankrupt.

It's exactly the same. 8th Century.

Same guy caught the same storm,

heading the same direction.

This one is more laid out,

more spread out.

More scattered.

Bonus!

Definitely!

A survey reveals a ship early similar

in size and shape to the first wreck,

facing west,

and carrying the same cargo.

But here, more small personal items

seem to be exposed.

Ah, Now, there's a bowl.

There's a dish or something.

These could help confirm

the homeport of the crew.

Zoom down, zoom.

Keep going. Focus stop.

Boy have we got some work to do!

For the next few days,

Jason's busy as a bee.

Oh, that's a beauty, a little cooking pot...

This is terrific.

I thought this thing was too big to be

a bowl and it's actually a moratorium

and it's for grinding different kinds

of spices and herbs

and putting it in the stew.

Great!

It's swinging. Don't go overboard.

Now we're getting slightly

different sizes.

Yeah, this one looks like about

a gallon more than that one.

I'm not an archeologist

and Larry's not an oceanographer,

but maybe our students can be

half archeology, half oceanography.

Are these the ones you want

or should we put them back

and get some different ones?

I think we like these!

You've got people

who wanna study shipwrecks

and people who wanna build stuff

to study shipwrecks coming together.

And of course the technologies

that are available

lend themselves beautifully to this.

Let me look at that. See this?

Looks like a candlestick holder.

Yeah, well,

you're looking at it upside down.

See, actually the way this

would stand, Bob, is like that.

This is most likely a little chalice

for burning incense,

incense to the protectors,

the protective deities of the sailors.

They may well have held it this way,

added their incense,

and others would be raising

their arms like this,

to Baal - Baal Hadad or Baal Zafon,

the Baal of the North.

Day 14.

Jason's final load yields a distinctly

Phoenician 'calling card'.

So that's the clincher.

We've been looking for something

really decisive - well that's it.

That cinches is for a Phoenician ship,

a Phoenician crew,

Phoenician origins for this cargo.

This wine decanter, with its fanciful

wide lip, is uniquely Phoenician.

It crowns the final act of a drama

that began nearly 3000 years ago.

They may well have set sail

from the great city of Tire,

two ships laden with fine wine

from the hinterland.

Their destination?

Perhaps the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

Or their wine-thirsty compatriots in

the newly founded colony of Carthage.

To bless their journey, they would

have performed age-old rituals,

invoking the gods and perfuming

the air to attract their favor.

For a time, they may have felt

protected by divine grace.

A gentle sea guided

the rhythm of their days.

Then suddenly it seemed

their gods abandoned them.

And no prayer,

no offering could win them back.

For those who waited on the home

shore, there was no end to this voyage.

No matter how hard they prayed,

the ships would never reappear

on their horizon.

The fate of their loved ones

would remain a mystery.

Yet centuries later,

two modern-day explorers have raised

their story from the depths,

and added a new chapter

to our understanding of the past.

As future expeditions are planned,

the promise of deep-sea archeology

seems brighter than ever.

For who knows how much history

lies hidden on the bottom,

just waiting to be discovered?
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