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.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
RSS