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The ocean and the wood are not friends. Wooden boats lost at sea do not tend to survive very long. In warmer waters, worms form a delicious wooden meal, while iron corrodes and rustes quickly. When we recover wooden boats, it's usually because they've been buried under conditions protecting much of the hull or in cold, anoxic waters leaving no life. Although these hull-conserving environments are relatively rare, they can preserve a ship for orders of magnitude greater than it would have otherwise survived. In this case, he did it.
The BBC reports an astonishing discovery in the Black Sea: a 2,400-year-old Greek merchant vessel found intact at the bottom of the seabed. The Black Sea is a largely anoxic environment, as the upper and lower layers do not mix. The majority of life in the Black Sea lives at shallow depths and, when she dies, she sinks to the bottom. Bacteria that decompose the biological material in depth consume the available oxygen, while inter-layer water mixing is limited by the shallow depths of the straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.
Imagine that you have two deep puddles of water that are only connected by a shallow channel that allows the highest water in each pool to mix, and you have a (simplified) idea of how the sea Black and the Mediterranean exchange. When the water level in the Black Sea is too low, the connection with the Mediterranean can break completely. It has even been argued that the reconnection of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean could have caused catastrophic floods, at the root of some of the flood myths of the inhabitants of this region, although this theory is disputed.
Anyway, it's the unique anoxic conditions in the Black Sea that gave us this amazing discovery:
The ship was dated 400 BC and looks remarkably like a ship painted on the so-called Siren Vase, which depicts Ulysses attached to the mast as his men sail past the murderous Sirens. This may seem like the question of how this might be true, since the Odyssey and Illiad were a distant story for the Greeks of 400 BC.
Credit: Werner Forman / Getty Images
It's less of a problem than it may seem. While the events recounted in the Iliad and the Odyssey were supposed to have taken place well before the ship's navigation, it was not uncommon for stories to describe armor, weapons or styles modern clothing to tell mythological stories. In the time before photography or binding, it was much harder to create detailed representations of the old look. At the same time, historians investigate the historicity of events such as the Iliad by searching the text for anachronistic elements that refer to an older origin of the characters and areas that they describe. The historicity of the Iliad is a fascinating subject in its own right. And the drawings of Greek ships painted on their amphorae were found throughout the times and periods of shipbuilding, across the Minoan civilization and as far as the mythical Argo.
The ship would be in a safe place and will not deteriorate. The team found that she had not yet managed to investigate the cargo but hoped to return and do so.
Top Image Credit: Black Sea Map / EEF Expeditions.
Now read: Why did Roman Concrete endure thousands of years of pounding in seawater, while ours can not, beyond the Great Pyramid Destroyed
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