Antikythera Wreck
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. 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.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →