[HN Gopher] Divers recover Phoenician shipwreck that sank 2.6k y...
___________________________________________________________________
Divers recover Phoenician shipwreck that sank 2.6k years ago off
coast of Spain
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 202 points
Date : 2025-01-16 20:25 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| A good book to read more or less related to this shipwreck:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Made-West-History/dp/059372...
| behnamoh wrote:
| How did people come up with alphabet? Phoenicians were one of the
| first to invent this technology, but I assume language existed
| way before that? How did that happen? Like, how did people agree
| on saying certain things to mean specific things? Starting from
| the mind of the first humans who didn't have language, how did we
| get to where we had language and it was so ubiquitous that even
| ancient civilizations like Phoenicians put it in writing?
| detourdog wrote:
| Realize that any successful language came from a close family
| with repeative daily tasks. To be successful they would need
| common terms to cooperate.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| This is basically unknown.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
| gostsamo wrote:
| try to recreate reality and a limited but repeatable form. roar
| like a lion, sing like a bird. remove everything that a thing
| looks like in order to leave what it is. break it into
| components and try to recompose them in new ways. general
| principals of intelligence, I'd say.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > but I assume language existed way before that
|
| Way, way, way older.
|
| Writing is an _incredibly_ novel development. There are still
| today linguistic communities without writing, although they 're
| becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world
| until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have
| it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
|
| It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for
| accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural
| civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia
| and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but
| logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either
| meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically
| Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as
| abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
| yread wrote:
| > the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many
| pre-Columbian civilisations.
|
| No need to go that far, the Slavs didn't write down their
| languages until ~800s.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
| defrost wrote:
| > No need to go that far ..
|
| Seems relative .. I _literally_ grew up on Aboriginal land
| in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual
| kids that had non English speaking parents.
|
| Most are _still_ not writing in their own language.
|
| What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals
| of the town I now live in.
|
| Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs
| from a few hundred years past.
| mattclarkdotnet wrote:
| Perthite Brit here. I'm hugely curious about the
| situation before the Europeans came. Was there really no
| writing? Were there really no boats? It's all so murky
| because the history was literally not written by the
| aboriginal communities. But has a story been passed down?
| defrost wrote:
| No writing _but_ a lot of drawing and oral transmission
| .. spending a few hours on a sand drawing while reciting
| a story that changes little across generations is another
| kind of map (and features in a massive tome on historic
| maps).
|
| No "boats" ala coracles or oak keel ships but
| (regionally) plenty of canoes ..
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Canoes isn't set on the
| Swan River.
|
| Perth, of course, once had many lakes and swampy wetlands
| before all the market garden bore went in and drainage
| ditches.
|
| > But has a story been passed down?
|
| Many, all over. DM from up where I grew up touched up
| pretty old paintings and told stories:
| https://magabala.com.au/products/yorro-yorro
|
| There were|are a _lot_ of language areas each with
| stories of their own: https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
| mattclarkdotnet wrote:
| Thank you for this. I'm lucky to live near Galup (Lake
| Monger). It's wonderful but I'm always reminded how much
| has been lost of the original wetlands.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| 1492 is nearer than the 800s
| yread wrote:
| I didn't mean far in time or space, I meant culturally.
| These people knew writing (in Latin) just not for their
| language. They had agriculture, domesticated animals,
| feudal society, some of them were already Christian,
| their language was very similar to English conceptually
| so their concepts would be similar to ours (well at least
| mine)
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> Writing is an incredibly novel development._
|
| Stating this as fact is misleading. Lack of evidence isn't
| proof of absence.
|
| Humanity in its current form has existed for 300,000 years.
| The idea that writing spontaneously emerged 13,000 years ago,
| independently in multiple locations all over the world,
| coincidentally right after glaciers melted and sea levels
| rose 300-900 feet, reshaping the world's geography, is --at
| best-- an assumption, not a certainty.
| stevage wrote:
| We have many artefacts dating 20 to 50,000 years old. They
| don't have writing on them. It's strong evidence.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Except writing didn't emerge 13,000 years ago but 5000 for
| writing and 9000 for proto-writing.
|
| It also wasn't discovered simultaneously. China is 3000
| years ago, and Maya 2300 years ago. Sumerian or Egyptian
| were close to same time which probably means they were
| connected.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Also, writing didn't just spontaneously appear at random
| locations. It emerged in the most highly developed
| societies of the time, which had cities, agriculture,
| irrigation, sophisticated central governments, and so on.
| mmooss wrote:
| Is that necessarily true? Likely we know much more about
| the most highly developed societies so that's where we
| would more likely discover ancient writing.
| lazide wrote:
| If you have no records, then we fundamentally cannot know
| about it yes?
|
| Literally lost to history.
| mmooss wrote:
| Though I'm not sure of the point in the parent comment,
| here's a story about how discovery of writing works:
|
| _Beowulf_ is the greatest discovery in the history of
| English. It 's the earliest epic poem in any Germanic
| language, and by itself it is about 10% of known Old
| English poetry. The date of the story's creation is
| unknown, with estimates ranging from 6th-8th century CE.
| The manuscript we have today is thought to have been
| written (not printed, of course) in the south of England,
| maybe between the 10th and 12th centuries CE. And at some
| point after that, the story and manuscript were lost to
| time.
|
| The physical document reappeared from oblivion, sometime
| before 1563 in the collection of Laurence Nowell. Nowell,
| unfortunately, didn't know (or didn't reveal) what they
| had. The document was there, but _Beowulf_ the story and
| that manuscript were still lost.
|
| And that continued to be the situation for over two
| hundred years, as the manuscript passed through at least
| two more hands, and still _Beowulf_ was lost to time. In
| 1731 the manuscript was caught in a fire (!). Almost, it
| was forever consigned to oblivion before it was even
| discovered, but the fire only charred it around the
| edges, costing us a few words here and there, and drying
| the very old pages to make them even more fragile. Many
| other manuscripts were lost.
|
| Finally, around 1790, Danish scholar Grimur Thorkelin
| read it and realized what he had. (Thorkelin then sat on
| it for another 25 years before finally publishing in
| 1815!)
|
| Are there records we haven't discovered? Yes. Are they
| lost to history? Not yet.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| What are you suggesting? That there are undiscovered
| caches of writing from ancient hunter-gatherers?
| mmooss wrote:
| I'm saying the GP's claimed causal relationship between
| advanced civilization and writing might result from
| advancement causing more evidence to survive. Certainly
| there are undiscovered caches, of course.
|
| Plenty of people lived in agricultural civilizations that
| were not the "most highly developed societies". Also, I'm
| not sure hunter-gatherers couldn't develop writing,
| though I know theories and could imagine reasons either
| way. How do you tell your compatriots, coming in the next
| few weeks, where the good food is?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| We have plenty of artifacts and paintings from hunter-
| gatherers, but no evidence at all of writing.
|
| Meanwhile, we have mountains of evidence of writing from
| the advanced, settled Bronze-Age civilizations.
|
| We can't be sure that nobody ever scribbled some symbol
| down before the invention of agriculture, but we know it
| can't have been common.
| empath75 wrote:
| And they can actually trace the development of writing in
| Mesopotamia all the way back to impressions of tokens on
| clay balls used for keeping track of IOUs.
| mmooss wrote:
| > There are still today linguistic communities without
| writing, although they're becoming much rarer.
|
| From a 1969 study of preindustrial societies (though I'm not
| sure if they are all contemporary or if some are historical):
| 39.2%: No writing 37.1%: Pictures only 23.7%:
| Writing
|
| It's from a somewhat famous data set in its field: George P.
| Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS).
| _Ethnology_ (1969)
| mseepgood wrote:
| People come up with new things all the time. It happens in this
| very moment, all around the world. I don't see how this is
| astonishing.
| naasking wrote:
| Unknown, but I'd hazard a guess that old cave art that depicts
| animals and sizes probably had sounds associated with them too.
| Humans like to tell stories, so probably cave art had oral
| history of some kind, and pictures probably became
| progressively more precise to handle progressively more complex
| stories, maybe about seasons, places, counting to keep track of
| things, etc.
| alganet wrote:
| That is a sound idea, but it makes more sense for hieroglyphs
| and ideograms.
|
| My guess for phoenicia is that their alphabet comes from
| numbers (or maybe other smaller individual set of symbols)
| borrowed from another culture, but I wouldn't be able to
| determine from who or where.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Phoenicians did not invent their alphabet, they inherited
| an older alphabet.
|
| Nevertheless they had a very important role in spreading the
| alphabetic writing system to many other populations, which was
| a consequence of their travels and commercial relations with
| everybody around the Mediterranean and even farther away.
|
| Because of this, the ancestry of the majority of the alphabetic
| systems, even of some far away in South Asia can be traced back
| to the Phoenician alphabet.
|
| Because of the importance of the commerce with Phoenicians and
| because of the many Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician
| language has also been spoken by many non-Phoenicians. This had
| as a consequence a simplification of the pronunciation of the
| Phoenician language, because for most foreigners it was
| difficult to pronounce some of the sounds specific to the
| Semitic languages.
|
| The result of this simplification in pronunciation was that the
| number of letters of the Phoenician alphabet has been reduced
| to 22 letters from the 27 letters of the older North-Semitic
| alphabet inherited by the Phoenicians, because some of the
| sounds that were written with different letters in the older
| alphabet have evolved towards an identical pronunciation, so
| eventually the redundant letters from each pair with the same
| pronunciation have been dropped.
|
| 22 letters is a too small number for most languages, which has
| forced those who have adapted the Phoenician alphabet to other
| languages to add supplemental letters, like in the Greek
| alphabet, then in the Latin alphabet.
|
| The small number of letters has created problems also for the
| writing of other Semitic languages, like Aramaic, Hebrew and
| Arabic, which did not have the simplified pronunciation of
| Phoenician. The older North-Semitic alphabet from which the
| Phoenician alphabet had been derived would have been perfect
| for such Semitic languages, but by the time when writing has
| spread from the Phoenicians to their Semitic neighbors the
| older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, exactly in the same
| way (and probably for the same reasons) as the Mycenaean
| writing had been forgotten in Greece (i.e. toward the end of
| the 2nd millennium BC there have been a few centuries of "Dark
| Ages" when much prior knowledge had been lost, after the
| destruction of many cities).
|
| Because the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, the
| Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters derived from the Phoenician
| alphabet through the Aramaic alphabet, despite the fact that
| this number was not enough to write all the consonants of
| ancient Hebrew. One Hebrew letter has now 2 variants
| distinguished with diacritic marks, i.e. "shin" and "sin",
| because originally it was used to write 2 different sounds, one
| of which no longer existed in Phoenician (modern Hebrew has
| lost that sound, so now "sin" and "samekh" are pronounced in
| the same way).
|
| Writing has been invented independently in many places around
| the world, but in almost all writing systems the written
| symbols have been used to denote either syllables or words.
|
| The Egyptian writing system and the alphabetic writing systems,
| all of which have been derived from the Egyptian writing
| system, are the exception.
|
| A subset of the symbols of the Egyptian writing system was used
| to denote single consonants, while the remainder were used to
| denote multiple consonants, regardless of which vowels were
| pronounced together with the consonants.
|
| The ancient Semitic alphabet has simplified the Egyptian
| writing system by retaining only the symbols that denote a
| single consonant. The ancient Semitic alphabet has retained
| thus the principle of writing only the consonants, and it has
| also inherited from the Egyptians the direction of writing from
| right to left, which has been preserved in the Hebrew and
| Arabic writing systems. Besides changing the meaning of some
| Phoenician letters from consonants to vowels, developing thus
| the first alphabetic writing system in the restricted meaning
| of the term "alphabet", i.e. with an approximately one-to-one
| mapping between all phonemes and letters, not only between
| consonants and letters, the Greeks have reversed the writing
| direction and this has been inherited in the other European
| writing systems.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You might be confusing language (a natural human skill which we
| evolved) and writing (a technology invented by humans, within
| the last 5-10 thousand years - very roughly).
|
| As far as I'm aware, there no evidence that modern humans ever
| existed without language. And other recent hominid species that
| until recently co-existed with our ancestors probably had
| language too.
|
| So probably there was never a human without language. Any non-
| lingual ancestor of ours was not human and probably pre-dates
| humans.
|
| As for writing, to be reductionist, it is essentially
| arbitrary.
| WalterBright wrote:
| We co-evolved with language - the evidence is our adaptations
| to control over the voicebox, tongue, lips, etc.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Yes, that is what I meant though in retrospect I see I
| didn't make that entirely clear. What I meant was that
| language and vocalizations go way, way back than any
| ancestor remotely human-like.
|
| Where you draw the line between mere "vocalizations" and
| "language" is a pretty open question, IMO.
| cladopa wrote:
| Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the same
| alphabet could be used for different languages.
|
| They did not agreed on using certain sounds for specific
| things. They already did that on their own languages, each with
| their specific sounds. What the Phoenician Alphabet did was
| transcribing those sounds that already existed to a writing
| system that was common.
|
| The Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet but they used it so
| much that developed it a lot. They used it for communication as
| a Lingua Franca for commerce in the Mediterranean.
|
| It actually became a language on its own. They will use a
| native word from the native language of some particular good or
| commodity and then everybody around the Mediterranean Sea will
| use that written name and sound for referring to that thing.
|
| It was extremely useful, so people used it more and more
| creating over time latin and greek scripts.
| gwervc wrote:
| > Actually, the alphabet invention was precisely that the
| same alphabet could be used for different languages.
|
| No. Multiple languages were written with the same alphabet
| because of the borrowing of that technology by speakers of
| other languages, not because it was designed as such.
|
| Actually the process of borrowing is fondamental to the
| emergence of alphabets: the three biggest (by corpus size)
| logographic scripts all gave birth to more phonetic scripts
| across language boundaries. That happened with hieroglyphics
| (the case we are discussing), but also with Sumerian
| cuneiform > Akkadian writing and Chinese characters >
| Japanese kanas.
| p3rls wrote:
| We have the notes from a zoom meeting between the priests
| of Ba'al and some early Phoenician scribes when they were
| designing the alphabet and outside of sacrificing children
| they were actually really concerned about accessibility
| standards
| WalterBright wrote:
| We're currently evolving back to pictograms.
| ocschwar wrote:
| The Phoenician alphabet started as the Proto-Sinaitic script.
| For context, if you're trying to write things down in the
| Sinai, you're logging the wares carried by caravans going back
| and forth from Egypt to the Phoenician heartland and back. You
| don't need the full range of hieroglyphs, so you don't need the
| training of an Egyptian priest. So you start with a reduced
| list of symbols.
|
| Someone in this position started using those symbols to
| register the sounds of the Semitic languages, and the rest is
| literally history.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Man's first words were: awk grep ping biff ip
| yum du curl sed
| kedarkhand wrote:
| and don't the most important of them all, neofetch, it is
| posited that they used it for colorful displays to attract
| mates. How successful it was, we do not know ;)
| kstrauser wrote:
| Written with ed, of course.
| quesera wrote:
| > _awk grep ping biff ip yum du curl sed_
|
| Not to offend anyone, but ip yum and curl are neologisms
| introduced in later translations.
|
| Wars have been fought over this disagreement!
| mmooss wrote:
| Here is a good history, by an expert, of how writing evolved
| from a counting system to a full written language:
|
| https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
| dghughes wrote:
| Canaanite workers who went to Egypt to work in the mines saw
| these picture things used on walls. They had an idea to use it
| only instead of a picture per word the just used them for
| sounds. The Ox Head they saw they used for their Aleph sound.
| It was adjusted and rotated a bit then later on rotated again
| until we get our modern letter A.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Egyptian hieroglyphs were used sometimes to represent 1-3
| consonants, rather than words or ideas.
|
| Egyptian Hieratic script simplified the forms down for
| writing with ink.
|
| Canaanites simplified it further by tossing all the
| ideograms, logograms and multi-consonant symbols to create an
| abjad.
|
| The Greeks added the first vowels to create a true alphabet.
| noneeeed wrote:
| There is a decent BBC documentary "The Secret History of
| Writing" which is all about the origins of writing. If you are
| interested in how it developed in all its different forms it's
| worth a watch.
| Loughla wrote:
| This is only tangentially related, but if you like history and
| ship wrecks and live near Kansas City, go to the Steamboat Arabia
| museum.
|
| They're digging up a steamboat that sunk, and they found after
| the river changed its course. It's super cool. When we went the
| last time we were driving across the states, one of the guys
| actually doing the excavating was there. He gave our kids a
| guided tour and talked about all the exhibits with them. It was
| super cool.
| xandrius wrote:
| Cool indeed but 1856CE is not quite as incredible as 300BCE.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What was in the 1856 wreck has rewritten the history of
| commerce on the Mississippi.
| Munksgaard wrote:
| You'll never guess what happened next!
| adolph wrote:
| This is the one weird trick that museums use to pull in
| donor dollars.
| joseppudev wrote:
| did it rewrite the slave trade part as well or did that
| remain as it is written?
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| Look around Wikipedia, you find a little more info re
| slavery and this ship. Kansas and Missouri were on the
| violent border with a mixture of pro and anti-slavery
| views, even as the geographical boundary of allowed
| slavery separated "the south". The museum website says
| there's clothing on the ship that has a pro-slavery mark,
| to be sent to some store. The ship at one time was
| boarded by pro-slavery forces who found hidden guns that
| were being shipped to abolitionists. It does not appear
| they sent slaves on it en mass.
|
| There were plenty of people who were pro slavery in those
| days. Mixed all across the US, read Mark Twain. There
| were plenty of people against it.
|
| More to the point, I wonder if the museum addresses this.
| I'm going to guess only in a small way, having lived half
| my life in the south. Maybe someone with actual knowlege
| can comment instead of web search "experts" like me.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| It's not a competition.
| timeon wrote:
| Yeah but the one from 19th century seems bit random for
| this thread.
| rUsHeYaFuBu wrote:
| Loughla did state: "only tangentially related"
| coffeecantcode wrote:
| Agreed, it is a very cool museum. Go early on a weekend morning
| in the spring and hit the market while it's bustling, love that
| part of the city.
| jbarrow wrote:
| Loved the one in Kansas City! There are some great,
| thematically-similar museums in other countries as well, if you
| ever find yourself there:
|
| - the Vasa in Stockholm, Sweden is a ship dredged from the
| harbor and stabilized, sank in 1628
|
| - the Mary Rose in Portsmouth, England is a Tudor ship that
| sank in 1545 that was raised and stabilized
|
| In both cases a ton of work was done to stabilize and preserve
| the remains of the ships that is, imo, almost more interesting
| than the ship itself.
| gandalfian wrote:
| Honestly I wouldn't rush to see the Mary Rose unless you are
| extremely interested. It's a little anticlimactic as a
| viewing experience.
| viewtransform wrote:
| The Vasa Museum , Stockholm, Sweden ( Ultra 4K )
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9NQUULR-UE
| c0brac0bra wrote:
| Go and see it while you can! Its lease ends in 2026 I think its
| future is uncertain.
| martyvis wrote:
| FYI 2600 and 2.6k use the same number of characters.
| Bootvis wrote:
| It doesn't mean the same though, 2.6k implies somewhere between
| 2550 and 2650 years ago and 2600 an exact number of years.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 2600 only has 2 significant digits. It's not an exact number.
| defanor wrote:
| Unless the precision (resolution) is known (stated), it is
| unclear whether the trailing zeroes are significant or not,
| one may only guess (while such a guess looks reasonable in
| this case). A convention for writing that unambiguously is
| to avoid insignificant trailing zeroes: e.g., writing it as
| 26e2 or 2.6e3. Then the written number carries along its
| precision.
| golol wrote:
| Doesn't writing out the trailing zeroes mean that you clain
| 4 significant digits? At least in the physics context.
| busyant wrote:
| I think there are a few conventions for expressing sig
| digits.
|
| Where I was taught...
|
| 2600 has 2 sd
|
| 2600. Has 4 sd
|
| 2.6e3 has 2sd
|
| 2.60e3 has 3 sd
|
| Edit. If I had been in charge of setting sd rules, I
| would've said ...
|
| 2600 has 4 sd
|
| 260? Has 3 sd
|
| 26?? Has 2 sd
|
| The fact zeros are overloaded (they can be placeholders
| or they can actually mean 0) is confusing to students.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| This reminds me of Andrew Scott Waugh, who surveyed the
| height of Mount Everest. He was sure his method was
| accurate to the nearest foot but he measured the height of
| the mountain at exactly 29,000 feet.
|
| Since he thought people would assume it was a rounded
| figure, he reported it as 29,002. And is therefore known as
| the man who first put 2 feet on the top of Everest.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm pre coffee so go easy. How do I write the exact number
| 2600 if 2600 isn't an exact number?
| zamadatix wrote:
| In contexts significant figures might be relevant, a bar
| over the last 0 or a decimal point at the end are the
| easiest methods of saying "no really, these 0s are the
| real deal". Though you have other options like scientific
| notation, an explicit uncertainty bound, or natural
| language context too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signif
| icant_figures#Ways_to_de...
| zos_kia wrote:
| That is intriguing I had never seen xk used in that sense. Is
| that a common convention?
| rvba wrote:
| Popular in finance. Often you dont need the details.
| timeon wrote:
| I would guess that sentence: "that sank 2600 years ago" would
| imply that we are not talking about exact date. But more
| explicit word like: "that sank _about_ 2600 years ago " would
| help.
|
| Using different number formatting instead of word or sign (~)
| is still implicit and not explicit.
| stevage wrote:
| Has the advantage that you can't confuse it with 2600BCE.
| ramenbytes wrote:
| Could use the electronics convention and save a character: 2k6
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| Phoenicia will rise again
| numbsafari wrote:
| Bring on the Sea Peoples (maybe)
| mythrwy wrote:
| Different set of people (although they both traveled on the
| sea).
| c0redump wrote:
| The sea peoples likely came from around the Mediterranean,
| but primarily were Nuragic people from modern-day Sardinia
| nothrowaways wrote:
| MPGA
| shpx wrote:
| Preserved ancient shipwrecks are why I don't believe when people
| say some material "degrades in X years".
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In most waters, wood will be consumed by various life forms
| fairly quickly. No ancient shipwrecks are found there.
|
| The exceptions include the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the deep
| ocean.
|
| Don't know what saved this old boat though.
| userbinator wrote:
| Of course the Titanic has been continuously rusting away too,
| along with being eaten by bacteria.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| In water yes, but ancient shipwrecks are found all over the
| place because they've been buried under sediment. That is the
| case with this one, you'll notice in the article that they
| say, "the sand protection is leaving", which I take to mean
| that while it was discovered in 1993, it was covered up with
| sand and so protected from issues such as water movement,
| sun, and life forms. The sand is now eroding away and leaving
| the ship unprotected, hence the move, hence the article.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_of_shipwrecks
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Thanks. I wasn't aware of this!
| LtdJorge wrote:
| It was also protected with a metallic coffin when
| discovered in the 90s
| mongol wrote:
| In Stockholm there now is, in addition to the well known Vasa
| museum, a museum about wrecks. It is called Vrak (Wreck) and
| is about wrecks in the Baltic Sea mainly. It is more of the
| interactive kind, no big wrecks on display, but smaller
| artifacts and audio/video/VR and so on. Interesting for those
| curious about the subject.
| mmooss wrote:
| The extreme lack of ancient shipwrecks should convince you that
| those materials do degrade, almost every time.
| doctorplop wrote:
| Sometimes sediments (sand, mud) protect the wooden wreck from
| decay. Once the wreck is moved, it becomes a race against time
| to prevent decay. The way that museum wrecks like the Wasa in
| Stockholm are preserved is by drying every wooden piece and
| saturating them with plastic resin. This process is slow and
| labour intensive: the article mentions that preparing the
| Spanish wreck for display will take four years.
|
| The archeology museum in Arles, France displays a conserved
| Roman river barge which was conserved in this fashion, see
| their Youtube documentary [0] There are many more known river
| barges at the bottom of the Rhone, but these are best preserved
| by leaving them where they are.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUBvSkdJ4Ig
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Loggers used to sink logs in water to keep them from rotting.
| Keeping wood wet is a pretty good preservative.
|
| What gets to wood is critters. A lot of sea creatures will
| nibble away at it. On land, it's insects and fungus and the
| like. Tidal action will also scour away exposed wood.
| quesera wrote:
| > _Preserved ancient shipwrecks_
|
| See also "bog people".
|
| But the results of such extreme anomalies do not extrapolate
| reliably to the general case.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| > They spent 560 hours diving at the wreck site to make detailed
| diagrams of its many cracks and fissures.
|
| I feel a bit jealous of them, me being in tech, doing hard work
| like this to preserve the history of humanity.
| fritzo wrote:
| Diving with a little compressor tube looks fun. I used to clean
| my dad's pool that way, as a kid.
| dghughes wrote:
| "The wreck will be conserved, protected and eventually
| reassembled".
|
| I wonder if Phoenicians labelled the parts of ships like their
| fellow Carthaginians (Chanani)? Or is this a Carthaginian ship
| but it's referred to as Phoenician?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Fun-fact that the ship was found on a beach that is near the
| Spanish city called "Cartagena".
| ocschwar wrote:
| Many of the cities in the region have Carthaginian names.
| It's a little surreal to see them when you speak Hebrew:
|
| Cadiz: "boundary" - the city that guarded access to Britain.
| Malaga: "Queen City". Cartagena. Barcelona ("barkel" -
| blessing)
| marcusverus wrote:
| Fun fact #2: that city was founded by Hasdrubal Barca, father
| of Hannibal Barca!
| rsynnott wrote:
| "Carthaginian" is more or less a subset of "Phoenician".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Which is why the adjective associated with Carthage is
| "Punic".
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