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By William J. Broad
The New York Times
New York, New York
January 16, 2003
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Scientists said yesterday that they had discovered the remains of a
2,400-year-old ship at the bottom of the Black Sea - the oldest shipwreck
ever found in the sea and a testament to its role as a vibrant crossroads of
ancient commerce.
The ship, laden with amphoras, the clay storage jars of antiquity,
apparently sank in about the fourth century B.C., the golden age of the
Greek city-states. One amphora held the bones of a six- to seven-foot-long
freshwater catfish that had been dried and cut into steaks, a popular food
in ancient Greece.
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Dwight Coleman, chief scientist of an expedition to the Black Sea, on the research ship Akademik with a jar recovered from an ancient shipwreck
Petar Petrov, Impact Press Group
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A team of American and Bulgarian scientists led by Dr. Robert D. Ballard,
the ocean explorer best known for discovering the Titanic, found the wreck
last summer. The vessel, he said in an interview, lies 275 feet down and
several miles from the Bulgarian coast, barely in sight of land.
Presumably, he said, the ship was sailing from a Black Sea colony to the
Greek mainland, heavy with trade goods. "The Greeks went into the Black
Sea for fish and gold," he said, adding that their own sea, the Aegean, "is
beautiful but sterile," lacking the nutrients to sustain a rich supply of
seafood.
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Radiocarbon studies by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on
Cape Cod dated the catfish bones to 488 to 228 B.C.
Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania
who analyzed the amphora's design, said it was typical of those made in
Sinop, Turkey, a thriving Greek settlement in the fourth century B.C.
Ancient writers reported that some of Greece's supply of the dried fish
steaks, called tarichos, came from the Black Sea region near the Crimea
(now part of Ukraine).
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Catfish bones were found in an amphora
Fredrik T. Hiebert, National Geographic Society
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Dr. Hiebert said the ship might have started its journey in Sinop, on the
sea's southern shore, then picked up the fish cargo on the northern shore at
the Crimean Peninsula (now Ukraine), where big catfish thrived in the
rivers. The scientists speculate that the ship then headed west before
sinking off present-day Bulgaria.
The artifacts, Dr. Ballard said, are giving historians their "first look at
an actual wreck from a key era of trade" known previously only through
written records.
He added that this summer his team would go back to the site to dig up the
wreck and learn more of its secrets.
The discovery was made public yesterday by the National Geographic Society,
which financed the expedition along with the Ocean Exploration Initiative of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Institute for
Exploration at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, where Dr. Ballard works.
The discovery expedition took place last July and early August as part of a
long program of Black Sea work by Dr. Ballard.
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The shipwreck was found several miles off Bulgaria
The New York Times
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Dwight F. Coleman of the Institute for Exploration served as the
expedition's chief scientist, focusing on targets identified the previous
season in a sonar survey. He said three Bulgarian team members in a
submersible equipped with bright lights spotted the wreck on Aug. 1, the
expedition's last day.
Amphoras were used to hold wine, olive oil, honey, fish and other products.
The explorers could see about two dozen of them in the gloom, and the
recovery of one from the ooze revealed deeper layers - characteristic of how
the jars were packed on ancient wooden ships. The recovered amphora was
about three feet high, a standard size.
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During this summer's program, the scientists hope to learn what else the
amphoras held and what lies beneath them - whether the ship's wooden hull,
tools, personal items or perhaps coins, which could help pinpoint the date
of the sinking.
The New York Times, New York, New York
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/science/16SHIP.html
For personal and academic use only.
BLACK SEA: ANCIENT SHIP PROVIDES EVIDENCE OF BLACK
SEA TRADE
Evidence of dried fish being shipped from as far away as the
Crimea in what is now Ukraine
By Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
Washington, D.C.
January 16, 2003
WASHINGTON - While classical Greece brings to mind great poets, architects
and sculptors, the people had to eat, too. Now undersea explorers have found
evidence of trade in one of the Greeks' most common foods, salted fish.
Ancient historians tell of the dried fish similar to salt cod, known as
tarichos (see note below), being imported in great quantities.
In apparent confirmation of those tales, the oldest shipwreck yet found in
the Black Sea is providing evidence of dried fish being shipped from as far
away as the Crimea in what is now Ukraine.
The discovery, off the coast of Bulgaria, was announced this week by
undersea explorer Robert Ballard of the Institute for Exploration in Mystic,
Conn. Ballard is best known for finding the remains of the Titanic and other
famed shipwrecks.
In the new discovery, all that remains of the ancient ship is its cargo of
amphorae, large clay jars used in antiquity as shipping containers for a
variety of goods.
An amphora removed from the site was found to contain fish bones, believed
to be from fish being shipped to Greece from Crimea on the north coast of
the Black Sea (now Ukraine), said Dwight Coleman, the institute's chief
scientist for the expedition, which was co-sponsored by the National
Geographic Society with help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
The amphora, over three feet tall, is of a type made at the time in the area
around the city of Sinop on the south coast of the Black Sea, in what is now
Turkey.
Trading in fish from the Crimea (Ukraine) means sailing halfway across the
Black Sea, through the straits of Bosporus and Sea of Marmara and across
the Aegean Sea to Greece hundreds of miles away.
Coleman said the sunken vessel probably started from Sinop with its
amphorae, sailed north to the Crimea to collect the cargo of fish and then
headed along the coast toward Greece, but sank before reaching that goal.
Dried fish was a popular food in ancient Greece, used by the army and the
general population, explained Fredrik Hiebert, an archaeologist from the
University of Pennsylvania.
Hiebert said many dishes at that time were served with garum, a sauce made
from fermented fish such as anchovies. When he heard that the amphora
contained fish bones, Hiebert said, he assumed they were from anchovies.
But the bones were 4 to 5 inches long, much too large for an anchovy.
Instead, they turned out to be bones from a type of freshwater catfish
caught in the Crimea area and rivers flowing into the nearby Azov Sea, one
of the major fishing grounds of antiquity, Hiebert said. Greek colonies are
known to have existed in Crimea at that time.
Cut marks on the bones showed the fish had been cut into a size commonly
used at the time for drying as steaks, known as tarichos in ancient Greece.
Classical historians such as the Greek Strabo have described fish steaks
that came from the Black Sea, Hiebert noted.
Radiocarbon dating placed the vessel between the third and fifth century
B.C., the institute's Coleman said.
"It is the oldest ship found in the Black Sea, but there is evidence of
earlier sailing there. It's only time until an older shipwreck is found,"
Hiebert said. He said the amphora was surprisingly large, "sort of
industrial strength," and also contained some olive pits and resin. That may
be an indication it was an olive or olive oil container - the resin seals in
the oil - that was being reused to transport dried fish, he said.
The Black Sea is unique in that its deepest regions have no oxygen in the
water, a condition that can help preserve ancient wood. While the wreck
described this week was in a shallower area and the wood had been eaten
away, researchers hope to find ancient vessels intact in deeper regions.
Older shipwrecks have been found in the Mediterranean, but the Black Sea
has been little explored in modern times because of political disputes going
back centuries. Only since the end of the Soviet Union have western
scientists dived extensively there.
This ship was found with the assistance of a Bulgarian submersible, and
Ballard said further exploration is planned next year with a new submarine.
Ballard has been studying the Black Sea since 1997 and previously discovered
evidence that settlements existed off the Turkish Coast in shallow areas
that were at one time above sea level.
Some have suggested that the rising of the sea inundating these settlements
may have given birth to the great flood stories in many cultures of the
region.
NOTE From ArtUkraine.com: Information from an expert on Ukraine.
Tarikhos is not cod. It's dried & salted fish, all right, but it comes from
the giant cat-fish, called "Som" in Ukrainian. It's a fresh-water fish,
which was prevalent in Ukrainian rivers from Danube to Kuban'.
The fish reached amazing size - normally 10 to 12 feet in length,
probably the largest freshwater fish anywhere. Alas, "Som" was
heavily fished for 3,000 years at least and is almost extinct by now.
But still, I remember a "Som"caught in a tributary to Dnister, in my
grandpa's village. I was about 5 years old at the time, but I was
tremendously impressed by it. It was (they said) three meters long,
much bigger than I was at the time (and even now, I guess!).
I had nightmares about that fish, for the longest time. The last one was
a year ago, or so. Now, after this story, I will - probably - have
nightmares again.
It will be interesting to find out what's in the other amphorae in that
shiwreck. I will bet that some contained honey! Lubomyr
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