An ancient shipwreck found off the shore of Israel and loaded with cargo from all over the Mediterranean shows that traders from the West still came to port even after the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land, researchers say.
A surprise storm? An inexperienced captain? Whatever the reason, the merchant ship made from fir and walnut trees, and carrying containers with delights from far-off lands sank in the shallow waters off what is today the Israeli coastal community of Maagan Michael more than 1,200 years ago.
It was around the time the largely Christian Byzantine Empire was losing its grip on that area of the eastern Mediterranean region and Islamic rule was extending its reach.
Photo: Reuters
The shipwreck, dated to the seventh or eighth century, is evidence that trade persisted with the rest of the Mediterranean despite the religious divide, said Deborah Cvikel, a nautical archaeologist at the University of Haifa and director of the dig.
“The history books, they usually tell us that ... commerce almost stopped. There was no international commerce in the Mediterranean. We had mainly smaller vessels sailing along the coast doing cabotage,” she said.
However, this no longer seems to be the case.
“Here we have a large shipwreck, which we think the original ship was around 25 meters long, and ... laden with cargo from all over the Mediterranean,” she said.
Artifacts on deck show the ship had docked in Cyprus, Egypt, maybe Turkey and perhaps as far away as the North African coast.
The coast of Israel is abundant with ships that sank over the millennia. The wrecks are more accessible to study than elsewhere in the Mediterranean because the sea off Israel is shallow and the sandy bottom preserves artifacts.
A storm might shift the sands and expose a relic, which is what happened with the new discovery at Maagan Michael. Two amateur divers spotted a piece of wood sticking out from the bottom and reported it to authorities.
Eight excavation seasons later, Cvikel’s team has mapped out much of the wooden skeleton that remains.
Using underwater vacuum cleaners to clear out 1.5m of sand, they found more than 200 amphoras that still contained ingredients from the Mediterranean diet, such as fish sauce, and a variety of olives, dates and figs.
There were sailing tools such as ropes and personal items such as wooden combs, as well as animals, including the remains of beetles and six rats.
“You have to be very attentive because some of the remains, like fish bones or rat bones or olive pits, they are so tiny that it could be lost in a split second,” Cvikel said.
Some of the cargo bore symbols of the Christian Byzantine church and others had writing in Arabic.
Researchers said thay hope to find a hall to display the ship in its entirety to the public, otherwise they would cover it with sand and leave it at the sea bottom with the countless other wrecks.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS