N/A (open sea)
About
A storm drove this Greek-built ship onto rocks near Mahdia around 80-70 BCE while it hauled looted Athenian art to Italy, spoils from Sulla's sack of the city in 86 BCE. Its hold carried more than sixty marble columns weighing some 200 tons combined, together with bronze statues including a herm signed by the sculptor Boethos of Chalcedon. Salvage divers recovered the wreck's contents between 1907 and 1913, and most of the finds now fill galleries at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis. The cargo shows how thoroughly Rome's elite were draining Greece's art markets a generation after Sulla's legions marched through Athens.
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.
Sources
Nearby
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