Antikythera Ephebe bronze statue, National Archaeological Museum Athens · Wikimedia Commons

Antikythera Wreck

ShipwreckAchaea · Off Antikythera island, GreeceBuilt 60 BCE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

This merchant ship went down off Antikythera around 60 BCE carrying a plundered cargo of Greek art bound for Rome. Divers recovered 36 marble statues, bronze figures including the Antikythera Youth, and the corroded gears of the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical calculator centuries ahead of its time. In 2016, archaeologists Brendan Foley, Theotokis Theodoulou, and Alex Tourtas recovered a partial human skeleton from the wreck — a skull fragment, arm bones, ribs, and two femurs — nicknaming him Pamphilos after a name scratched on a wine cup found nearby; it was the first skeleton pulled from an ancient shipwreck since ancient-DNA testing became possible. The wreck lay at 55 meters and yielded finds still studied today.

What happened here

A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.

In ancient writing

Cicero, De re publica 1.21–22
A geared bronze sphere brought back from Syracuse that reproduces the motions of sun, moon and planets on one turn of a handle — the closest thing in any surviving text to the mechanism found in this wreck.