The site of the Antikythera Wreck holds the remains of a Greek trading or cargo ship dating from the First Century B.C.E. it is located on the east side of the Greek island of Antikythera near Crete at the crossroads of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.
A ship of the Time.
The wreck was discovered in the spring of 1900 by a group of Greek sponge divers on their way to Tunisia who took shelter from a storm near the island and decided to look for sponges while they waited for calmer conditions. One of the divers discovered the wreck at depths reported between 40 and 50 meters.
In November of the same year, the captain of the sponge boat informed Greek officials about what they had found and the navy dispatched two ships to support recovery efforts, which lasted until 1902. That excavation revealed a wealth of discoveries that today are housed in Greece’s National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
The statue of Odysseus, the Antikythera wreck.
These included three life-size marble horsers, jewelry, coins, glassware, and hundreds of works of art, including a seven-foot-tall “colossus” statue of Herakles.
More than 70 years later, Jacques Cousteau was invited to explore the wreck. His team recovered hundreds more artifacts plus the remains of four people. His television program “diving for Roman Plunder” popularized the wreck for a new generation.
Head of the ‘Philosopher’ from the Antikythera shipwreck, dated to 250-240 B.C.E. National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
'Youth’ of Antikythera (Ephebe) bronze statue from the Antikythera wreck.
The most surprising discovery, however, was an unassuming lump of bronze recovered during the first excavation that was later found to be a complex set of interlocking gears capable of predicting the movement of the sun, moon, and several planets, as well as the timing of solar and lunar eclipses years into the future. The 'Antikythera Mechanism’ is believed to be an early computer used to plan important events including religious rituals, the early Olympic games, and Agricultural activities.
The artifacts recovered from the Antikythera Wreck make it one of the most important finds in modern archaeology. The Antikythera Mechanism alone has changed our views of the limits of ancient technology, since it predates anything else approaching its level of sophistication by more than one thousand years. Despite the wealth and diversity of discoveries at Antikythera, the wreck site has remained largely unexplored, partly because of its location and the shape of the seafloor on which it rests.
