National Geographic: Lost Ships of the Mediterranean (1999) Movie Script
They lived by wind and wave,
and knew these waters well.
Their people were lords of the sea.
Few built finer craft.
Few sailed faster... or farther.
But none of that could save this ship.
The sea would rise up and conceal
its fate for nearly an eternity.
Summer 1997.
The US Navy's nuclear submarine,
the NR-1 is on a mission
in the eastern Mediterranean.
The sub's advanced sonar detects
several large objects in deep water
that appear to be shipwrecks.
Though pressed for time,
the crew decides to take a quick look.
A rough set of coordinates
and a shadowy videotape
are recorded on the fly.
Later, the crew will send word
to a former naval officer-
who is also one of the greatest
undersea explorers in the world.
The man who discovered the Titanic,
the Bismarck,
and many other shipwrecks,
Robert Ballard is immediately intrigued.
The sheer number of ceramic jars
is impressive-
but their meaning escapes
this marine geologist.
Well, not being an archeologist,
all I could tell was
it's an ancient ship,
but I didn't know anything
more than that.
It lies at a forbidding
Is it worth investigating?
Ballard will seek the advice
of an expert.
Throughout the Mediterranean,
most shipwrecks have been discovered
in shallow water.
But this one was found nearly
opposite what was once a thriving
seaport: the city of Ashkelon.
On the southern coast of
present-day Israel,
Ashkelon's roots reach back
nearly 6,000 years.
Crusaders and Muslims
fought over this place.
Romans claimed it.
Babylonians destroyed it.
In the Bible, it was a stronghold
of the Philistines.
Its earliest known inhabitants
were the Canaanites.
Since 1985,
archeologist Lawrence Stager,
of Harvard University
has directed excavations here.
His knowledge of ancient pottery
is renowned.
In a tiny shard,
he can 'see' an entire artifact,
and pinpoint the culture
that produced it.
Oh, now this is great.
This is Cypro-Geometric III.
This is most probably
an import from Cyprus.
But things were not so clear
in the Navy's videotape.
Well, when I first looked at it,
I was a bit disappointed
that it was so fuzzy, and couldn't
really make out these jars very well.
Because that, of course, was the key
to determining the age of the shipwreck.
But it seemed to me
that they might be early,
and possibly even 9th, 8th,
These two-handled storage jars,
called amphoras,
were first used throughout
the Mediterranean
around 4,000 years ago.
Distinctive styles evolved
in various locales-
a boon for archeologists
who can use the jars
as 'signatures' of time and place.
But sometimes two amphoras
from vastly different eras
can be deceptively similar.
These might be
from the 5th Century A.D.
But Stager has a hunch
they're much older.
He tells Ballard that if this wreck
dates to the Iron Age,
as he suspects, it is the first of its
kind ever found in the Mediterranean.
It was a gamble but one that
I was at least confident enough
in that I would have put down
a good-sized bet.
More than money would be wagered.
In the summer of 1999, the
'Northern Horizon' sets out from Malta.
Ballard and Stager lead an expedition
to relocate and study
the mysterious wreck.
At stake is their conviction
that the combined strengths
of oceanography and archeology
can make history.
You know, when we found the Titanic,
we found the Bismarck,
we knew they existed.
They really were not a discovery.
They were a relocation.
These are true discoveries.
These are chapters of human history
we don't know about,
and I actually think
they are more important.
Still, this expedition begins
like any other.
Okay, ladies and gents!
Make sure your life jackets are right
before I shout you out
else I'll give you to Albert!
Safety training is mandatory
for everyone on board-
forty-nine scientists, engineers,
programmers,
ship's mates and graduate students.
When you jump in what's the correct
way to hold your life jacket?
Yeah, and your nose. Smashing.
Landlubber or seadog,
no one is exempt.
No one.
Larry!
Can't get it any tighter!
The Northern Horizon
has been transformed into
a floating research facility.
Over 55 tons of equipment were
shipped from the United States.
Several larger items have been
welded to the deck.
For nearly two decades,
Ballard has worked with an expert team
out of
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Martin Bowen and Andy Bowen have been
key members of many expeditions.
Inside, Stager's archeology team
has established its own 'headquarters'.
Hey, team, excuse me, I just got some
interesting information from Bob;
he just gave me the coordinates.
They're right on the ancient routes
that some have predicted between
the cedars of Lebanon and Egypt.
His team includes four
graduate students,
as well as an expert on ancient ships,
nautical archeologist
Shelley Wachsmann of
Texas A&M University.
These ships might have had
pretty wide beamy hulls and so forth?
Wachsmann: They seem from all the
iconography we have from this period
that the merchant ships were extremely
beamy and broad hulled.
Yeah.
If this dates to around 700 BC
this is the first ship ever found
that dates to that time period.
You have to remember that ships
tell the story of history.
I mean, there is nothing
that man ever made
that was not carried on a ship,
including the pyramids-
stone by stone, not in one shot!
And each one of these are
literally a time capsule.
They went down in one moment,
like that,
and everything they were carrying on
it at that one time
went down together,
and that tells us a story.
To reach the coordinates provided
by the Navy will take about five days.
This is the calm before the storm.
We are very relaxed now,
which is great.
People are charging their batteries,
getting sleep,
we just did the testing of the ship.
Everything's proceeding smoothly.
But once we get on site it'll kick in
to around the clock.
And you will see people break up
into three watches,
and there will always be a team
at work 24 hours a day.
Susan and Michael have the
most difficult schedule in some ways
because they work
from 12 noon to 4 p.m.
and then from
they have to sleep
and that's a tough time
to go to sleep
at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
But the reason they have to do
that is because at 12 midnight
they have to get back up
and work the 12 midnight
to 4 a.m. shift.
And go to the van.
Exactly.
And that's where everything
is happening?
Well it sounds like,
from what they said,
that the midnight to 4 a.m. shift
actually is a time
when a lot of things do happen.
On the Northern Horizon, 'navigation'
involves a Global Positioning System
and computer-controlled propulsion.
But a few thousand years ago,
a sea captain had to rely on
somewhat 'higher' powers.
The very heavens were his guide.
He probably spent a lifetime
committing constellations to memory,
observing the shifting angle
of the sun.
The special temper of each wind,
and the season of its coming.
The powerful currents
hidden beneath the waves.
All these may have been
the secrets of his trade.
Surely he watched for seabirds,
heralds of an approaching shore,
and for landmarks familiar
as a friendly face.
But the nearness of land
was not necessarily a comfort,
and he likely kept his ship
at quite a distance.
Well, generally the common wisdom
has it that,
for safety, the ancient mariners
hugged the coast.
But when you think about it,
the last thing an ancient mariner
ever wanted to see during a storm
was a quickly approaching the shore.
Plus there was piracy.
Piracy wasn't the type
that you see in the movies,
in the Caribbean where you're just
sailing around in the middle of nowhere
and suddenly another ship comes out.
Rather, they would watch from shore.
So you don't want to stay
too close to shore,
and if somebody comes out to attack,
you want to have that leeway
to get out of the way.
It's Day Five and nearly midnight when
the Northern Horizon arrives on site.
The coordinates provided by
the Navy are only approximate.
Margin of error might be
up to a kilometer.
Ballard's team deploys a deepwater
side-scan sonar.
The hope is it will pinpoint
the same pattern
of large objects detected by the Navy.
Slip his line, slip his line!
As the sonar is towed,
its fiber optic cable carries signals
to the 'Control Van',
nerve center of the expedition.
Sonar screens are not
inherently exciting.
As the first watch hunkers down,
everything starts to go wrong.
Okay, this course is going to
take us into deep water.
It already is increased.
The ship can't seem to stay on track,
and the sonar is pitched at an angle.
Pull up the winch.
The generator is not going
to survive a lot longer.
They have to shut
the generator off now.
This is the ship's?
Now. Yes, the ship's.
The ship has lost a generator.
Our speed over the ground is 5 knots.
Five knots? I'm shocked!
If there's a current like 4 knots,
we're not doing this site.
That could be a real showstopper
right there!
Unless the winch is rewired to
another source of power on board,
the expedition is dead in the water.
Time to improvise.
There's no way we can feed
any power from below
through the Scania circuit, right?
Because I have someone now
disconnecting the cables.
No estimated time on repairs.
Okay. Got the hand crank?
No...
Such are the risks of trying out
a brand new winch.
We're doing things we've
never done before.
But that's why we're here.
We're always pushing the envelope.
The challenge is always the desire
on the part of the scientists
to do things that have never
been done before
and the operator's side not wanting
to change anything, 'cause it works.
It's a miracle that's
the only guy that's a problem.
Power has been re-routed-
and the hunt is on.
That looks pretty good now.
Do you see something that you believe?
The sonar displays targets
as subtle smudges.
It takes a trained eye to tell
a shipwreck from a rock heap.
There dead ahead.
Zero three seven
It's on the screen now.
Just startin' to appear.
There's something comin' in
but it's on the right.
There's something there.
There's something there
You're certainly within
the range of Jason to see it.
It's about the right length;
it looks like it's maybe 30 meters.
It's roughly in the right place.
It smells right.
Within twelve hours,
the team locates three targets
that line up in a similar configuration
to the Navy's -
but offset by half a kilometer
from their coordinates.
Back to you, Larry.
I think we did it.
We did it.
Okay. The weather's nice.
I think we'll go to 'Phase Two'.
It's a conditional victory.
Until they actually
look at the targets,
they won't know
if they've hit pay dirt.
There's plenty of work ahead.
Better get something to eat below.
As one shift gives way to the next,
notions of time begin to blur.
Day 6.
The team prepares to launch
an extraordinary robot named Jason,
designed and built at Woods Hole -
and championed by a man
with a life-long dream.
Robert Ballard can't remember a time
he wasn't obsessed with the deep sea.
I mean my idol, as a kid-
perhaps still is... was Captain Nemo.
He first dove in a submarine in 1969.
Later, he was part of the
historic expedition
that discovered hydrothermal vents
and surprising life
forms on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
But he's always had
a healthy respect for the deep.
Diving in a small submarine
can be very dangerous.
Pressure is a funny thing
'cause you look out the window
and you can't see it.
But it's there and the slightest
mistake and the failure of your porthole
or anything would be
a catastrophic implosion -
just pfft - you'd just vanish.
Ballard began to think that remote-
controlled robots might be the answer.
The idea led to a prototype
called 'Jason Jr.',
rigged with four motors,
a thirty-meter tether,
and an electronic eye.
In 1986, on the Titanic, Jason Jr.
proved himself a nimble explorer.
Maneuvered by Martin Bowen
from within a submarine,
the little robot descended
the grand staircase
and danced beneath a chandelier.
That success launched a flurry
of innovation at Woods Hole.
By the 1990s, Jason had become
a technological wonder weighing
just over two tons.
In a sense, he remains
a work-in-progress-
forever refined and improved.
But even his standard features
are impressive.
Seven thrusters allow for
precision maneuvering underwater.
Titanium components can withstand
depths of 6000 meters.
Get it here and move
the whole thing back.
Jason's video, film and electronic
cameras can be remote-controlled
by an experienced pilot.
Likewise his articulated arm,
which can lift up to 15 kilos.
You know, right about here, Andy.
By about my foot.
To fire up such a complex machine
takes teamwork and time.
Jason won't be ready to launch
until well after dark.
It's a breathless moment
just before Jason hits the water.
If a single component leaks,
it could short-circuit
the entire electrical system.
Okay, pins released.
But tonight it's 'all systems go.'
Jason dives toward the most promising
of the three sonar targets.
And we're off.
Roger, make it slow.
You're 110 meters out to the target.
At the controls is pilot Will Sellers.
He adjusts Jason's buoyancy
by dropping ballast weights.
Amazing!
Jason's own forward-facing sonar
now scans the bottom.
A hundred and five meters.
Okay, it's off to the left.
Forty meters off to the left.
Is that it coming in?
That's it.
Let's see what we've got.
Lot of pits
That's just noise
There it is.
That's not geology.
There it is.
Whatever it is.
That's it ahead.
Off to the right slightly.
That's an anchor.
There's the chain.
Yup, there's the chain.
Follow that chain, Will, to the right.
Come right. That's the chain.
Metal chain, modern anchor.
This is no ancient ship.
So it's the other guy.
Yup. That's the Queen Victoria.
That was target AA, right?
Yeah so it means it's AC.
The brightest one is
gonna be the oldest.
Well, there you are.
Anyway it was a hit.
Okay, so we don't care about this guy.
We want to drive to AC as fast as
humanly you know, just head over there.
It'll take us a while, we'll go
have coffee and celebrate.
We've got a ship, the wrong one.
But it means we know
where the right one is.
Stager: My knees are weak.
From standing or the excitement?
And then the anchor
and then the chain.
Those apparently don't start
before 1820.
So we might have a Victorian ship,
we may not.
Who cares?
It's two hours transit to the next
most likely target - for some,
a very long two hours.
Day 7. 5 a.m. Jason
is back in action.
The Control Van is flooded with
anticipation, exhaustion, and adrenaline.
That must be it. That bright spot.
The bright spot, it's it.
That's it.
Magic.
Brightest thing on the screen.
That's gotta be the big one.
That's the mother lode.
The mother of all ships.
Eighty meters.
Remember that movie
when the alien is being tracked?
And it's coming towards you?
'The alien is approaching our cabin,
captain.' 45 meters.
And closing...
Eighteen meters... There she blows!
All right!
Look at that!
Fantastic!
There we are!
Oh, yeah.
Now we can see that
they're not Byzantine,
that's 8th Century.
That's...
It's now your problem, Larry.
It's a problem I like.
This is the first iron age ship that's
ever been found in the Mediterranean.
All right!
And it's the biggest one.
I mean, there's nothing bigger.
Look at the corks.
Are they corked?
No, no.
There's something in them.
They can't sediment that way.
But they can't sediment that way,
unless they've been excavated.
I don't think so.
You can't fill them that way.
Look at those thing, still stacked.
And cooking pots too.
We didn't see those... Oh my.
Those are absolutely
perfect 8th Century.
I was nervous that
we were gonna relocate it,
and then when I saw those amphoras,
I stopped looking at the ship
at that point,
and I'm looking at Larry, 'cause
he's the one who knows what we have.
And then when you saw that big smile
that we got the ship we wanted-
as far as I was concerned the cruise
was over.
Look at that.
It's the anchor.
The stone anchor!
More than a night to remember.
It was ecstasy.
I haven't been so happy about an
archeological discovery in years,
maybe a lifetime.
Look at that, you can see the ridges
on the high neck.
You know, when you have those kind of
moments you never forget them,
and this was mine.
For me, something that was incredibly
evocative were the two cooking pots
with, you know, maybe the last supper
in them before the ship went down.
Yeah, I do think about people
who went down.
Like a messenger from the future,
Jason sheds light on a vessel
that set sail around the time Homer
is said to have written the Odyssey...
when the Greeks began to celebrate
the Olympic games...
and a pair of twin brothers,
according to legend,
founded a city called Rome.
The archeologists need a detailed,
overall view,
but Jason's lights can't
illuminate the entire wreck.
To map the site, the robot moves over
the ship in small increments
and takes some 800 electronic
close-ups.
On-board computers help merge
these images
into a black-and-white
high-resolution 'photomosaic.'
It speaks volumes about the world's
oldest deep-sea shipwreck.
Some 300 amphoras preserve the shape
of a long-vanished hull.
About 18 meters long,
it was heading west when it sank.
A stone anchor marks the bow,
cooking pots the stern.
All this, plus the style
of the amphoras
suggests it may be
a Phoenician merchant ship,
broad in the beam,
with a curved horse-head bow.
Such ships are known from Assyrian carvings,
and from a detailed description
in the Bible, in the book of Ezekiel.
Of the Phoenicians, little tangible
has been unearthed.
They lived along the eastern shore
of the Mediterranean
from before 1200 BC
through the Roman period.
But their real domain was the sea.
The greatest maritime merchants
of the ancient world,
they traded with Pharaohs,
Greeks, and Romans,
and left traces of colonies
as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar.
Their rich purple dye was much prized,
as were their cedars of Lebanon.
It was the Phoenicians
who provided lumber and expertise
when Solomon built his temple
in Jerusalem.
Their skill at carving wood and ivory
was unrivaled.
Sadly, only shreds of
Phoenician literature survive.
But their simple alphabet
was widely adopted,
and would evolve into
the Roman alphabet we use today.
Still, it was as seafarers that the
Phoenicians most impressed the world.
A Greek historian claims
they first circumnavigated Africa.
Others believe
they even reached England.
It's as if the Phoenicians
entrusted all their secrets to the sea.
Until now.
Day 8.
The team drops a rig called
an 'elevator' to the bottom.
Later, it will raise precious cargo
to the surface.
So, there are the pots right there.
Today's goal is 'retrieval'.
With hundreds of amphoras
to choose from,
the two lone cooking pots
are top priority.
It won't be easy.
Pilot Matt Heintz is first
to test Jason's new 'hand'-
nicknamed 'Deep Spank' by the team.
You get it just like that,
and hold it like that,
so the weight's sitting on that.
Okay, we'll see if we can
nudge it under there.
And avoid the handles.
Yeah.
They're not up to
taking weight like that.
No one is quite sure
how the pot will hold up.
First time that one's been moved
in 2,700 years.
Yeah? I think it's the food's ready.
It's lost. Okay, we gotta recover
and change out.
For now, 'Deep Spank' disappoints.
It was a new modification
that didn't work.
Engineering on the fly.
It's back to an old die-hard.
Scoops in underneath
and then you close down on top.
We call it the cowcatcher. It works.
Within hours,
Jason is back on the bottom,
with a priceless cooking pot
in his 'cowcatcher.'
Now this is archeology.
Quick and beautiful.
That dog can hunt!
It's a triumph of technology
each time Jason deposits
an artifact in the elevator.
But it also means
the wreck site has been altered.
Careful records must be kept.
Archeology is a destructive science.
It's like tearing pages out of a book.
Once you've removed something,
if you haven't recorded it
you've lost it forever.
Work continues until
the elevator is full.
Then begins a slow ascent that
will bridge nearly thirty centuries.
There it is right here.
Bob, we made a mistake.
We shouldn't have put
both cooking pots in one load
since there are only two of them.
Yeah.
Is that the right place?
Is that the right place?
The center!
Okay, undo yours.
Let him just come straight up.
Take the slack off
Don't tilt it.
Just stop it when it starts to swing.
Okay, don't pull hard guys.
Let him try to get it vertical first!
Oh those beautiful cooking pots.
Ha Ha. Oh they're so glorious.
Okay, watch the guys.
Make sure the objects don't
come down on anything hard.
Thank god they're here!
I'll tell you, I was really happy
to see those cooking pots arrive.
The amphoras, we've got more of.
What would they cook in that?
What kind of meal.
That's the one you'd
do your one pot stew in.
It isn't as though you made
one thing here and one thing there.
Just throw it all in.
Refrigerator soup.
My wife's mother calls it.
Whatever is at the end of the week
in the refrigerator.
Well, this is in beautiful shape.
There's something special about
touching something
that has been untouched by humans
for almost 3000 years old,
I mean, to the time of Homer.
Wow. That's, that's pretty far back.
Here comes the pot,
so don't jump up, Dan.
Two years after
scrutinizing a fuzzy video,
Stager finally enjoys
a close encounter.
Few little sea creatures
attached to it.
Well, my great wish came true that
it was 8th Century
and not something Byzantine.
You know the other possibility
for it was that it could date,
oh, maybe 1100, 1200 years later.
In which case we have lots of wrecks
and lots of material from that period.
But you rarely if ever find this
on land complete.
Even if they're more or less complete
they've all been shattered
and you have to put them together
to make up the whole.
But out here, a whole shipload
of them intact.
It's marvelous.
Bathed in a solution
of fresh and salt water,
the artifacts are now the concern
of conservator Dennis Piechota,
his son James and assistant conservator
Catherine Giangrande.
Sampled and sifted for future analysis,
sediments might yield traces of a meal,
or fragments of the ship's hull.
I'm getting 7.2 millimeters.
Preservation of this pot
will take months,
but its digital doppelganger
is ready for study.
It's equally possible the amphoras
contained olive oil or wine.
I think I'm almost at the bottom...
Then Giangrande spots
the residue of tree resin,
used for sealing amphoras of wine.
It's as fine a discovery as any
to toast.
Not a bad millennium.
Terrific wine.
The superb condition of the amphoras
leads Ballard
to a theory about the fate
of the ship that carried them.
The ship is not busted up.
There's very few amphoras
that were broken.
So it wasn't like they were
tossed around and flipped around.
They were swamped.
You know, when you get in trouble
you tend to run with the sea,
hoping you can outrun the storm
and get away from it,
but you can then have
a very powerful wave come over
the stern and just swamp you.
We call 'em rogue waves.
I've been in two of them in my life.
We took one head on-
right over the bridge,
took off the ridge, took off
the mast, all but sank us.
So my first expedition,
I almost went down in a storm!
Understanding the wreck site
has also consumed the
computational energies of the team.
So we've got the map crunched.
Using data collected by a sensor
on Jason, Dana Yoerger
has produced a three-dimensional map.
It shows the wreck is sitting in an
oval depression nearly two meters deep,
and helps explain something
that's been puzzling Ballard.
'Cause you know one of the thing
we've been,
the problem is the amphoras
are full of mud.
And you figure out,
how could they be full of mud?
But what you've done is,
it was buried.
When the ship was swamped,
it probably sank to the bottom
like a weight, and buried
much of its hull in the soft mud.
In time, wood-boring organisms
ate away any exposed hull or mast.
The amphoras' unbaked clay stoppers
simply dissolved.
As wine escaped,
water and sediments poured in.
Over the centuries, deep-water currents
scoured the surrounding sea floor,
excavating the wreck,
and laying bare its amphoras.
So much revealed in so few days.
The team has earned a bit of fun.
Feet were still a little apart.
I don't know, about an 8,
something like that...
Ballard: Time to get all the children
out of the water and get back to work.
Day 9.
The team heads for the coordinates
of the third sonar target.
Three two seven...
Three two seven
and a hundred ninety one meters.
The expedition leaders have been
keeping nearly 24-hour shifts.
But there's no sign of fatigue
when a target appears on Jason's sonar.
Down 75 on the range.
That's a 55-gallon drum.
That was a decoy.
They always drop drums
to throw people off their trail.
Let's, uh, go back to 400, just do
a simple turn and see what you've got.
As Jason rotates, he picks up
something far more promising.
It's trash
Straight ahead.
Okay. There it is!
It's amphoras! Yes!
All right!
It's the same.
The same!
It's a fleet!
It's another bunch of them.
It's the same guys.
They had a bad day.
Look at that.
That wine company went bankrupt.
It's exactly the same. 8th Century.
Same guy caught the same storm,
heading the same direction.
This one is more laid out,
more spread out.
More scattered.
Bonus!
Definitely!
A survey reveals a ship early similar
in size and shape to the first wreck,
facing west,
and carrying the same cargo.
But here, more small personal items
seem to be exposed.
Ah, Now, there's a bowl.
There's a dish or something.
These could help confirm
the homeport of the crew.
Zoom down, zoom.
Keep going. Focus stop.
Boy have we got some work to do!
For the next few days,
Jason's busy as a bee.
Oh, that's a beauty, a little cooking pot...
This is terrific.
I thought this thing was too big to be
a bowl and it's actually a moratorium
and it's for grinding different kinds
of spices and herbs
and putting it in the stew.
Great!
It's swinging. Don't go overboard.
Now we're getting slightly
different sizes.
Yeah, this one looks like about
a gallon more than that one.
I'm not an archeologist
and Larry's not an oceanographer,
but maybe our students can be
half archeology, half oceanography.
Are these the ones you want
or should we put them back
and get some different ones?
I think we like these!
You've got people
who wanna study shipwrecks
and people who wanna build stuff
to study shipwrecks coming together.
And of course the technologies
that are available
lend themselves beautifully to this.
Let me look at that. See this?
Looks like a candlestick holder.
Yeah, well,
you're looking at it upside down.
See, actually the way this
would stand, Bob, is like that.
This is most likely a little chalice
for burning incense,
incense to the protectors,
the protective deities of the sailors.
They may well have held it this way,
added their incense,
and others would be raising
their arms like this,
to Baal - Baal Hadad or Baal Zafon,
the Baal of the North.
Day 14.
Jason's final load yields a distinctly
Phoenician 'calling card'.
So that's the clincher.
We've been looking for something
really decisive - well that's it.
That cinches is for a Phoenician ship,
a Phoenician crew,
Phoenician origins for this cargo.
This wine decanter, with its fanciful
wide lip, is uniquely Phoenician.
It crowns the final act of a drama
that began nearly 3000 years ago.
They may well have set sail
from the great city of Tire,
two ships laden with fine wine
from the hinterland.
Their destination?
Perhaps the Egypt of the Pharaohs.
Or their wine-thirsty compatriots in
the newly founded colony of Carthage.
To bless their journey, they would
have performed age-old rituals,
invoking the gods and perfuming
the air to attract their favor.
For a time, they may have felt
protected by divine grace.
A gentle sea guided
the rhythm of their days.
Then suddenly it seemed
their gods abandoned them.
And no prayer,
no offering could win them back.
For those who waited on the home
shore, there was no end to this voyage.
No matter how hard they prayed,
the ships would never reappear
on their horizon.
The fate of their loved ones
would remain a mystery.
Yet centuries later,
two modern-day explorers have raised
their story from the depths,
and added a new chapter
to our understanding of the past.
As future expeditions are planned,
the promise of deep-sea archeology
seems brighter than ever.
For who knows how much history
lies hidden on the bottom,
just waiting to be discovered?
and knew these waters well.
Their people were lords of the sea.
Few built finer craft.
Few sailed faster... or farther.
But none of that could save this ship.
The sea would rise up and conceal
its fate for nearly an eternity.
Summer 1997.
The US Navy's nuclear submarine,
the NR-1 is on a mission
in the eastern Mediterranean.
The sub's advanced sonar detects
several large objects in deep water
that appear to be shipwrecks.
Though pressed for time,
the crew decides to take a quick look.
A rough set of coordinates
and a shadowy videotape
are recorded on the fly.
Later, the crew will send word
to a former naval officer-
who is also one of the greatest
undersea explorers in the world.
The man who discovered the Titanic,
the Bismarck,
and many other shipwrecks,
Robert Ballard is immediately intrigued.
The sheer number of ceramic jars
is impressive-
but their meaning escapes
this marine geologist.
Well, not being an archeologist,
all I could tell was
it's an ancient ship,
but I didn't know anything
more than that.
It lies at a forbidding
Is it worth investigating?
Ballard will seek the advice
of an expert.
Throughout the Mediterranean,
most shipwrecks have been discovered
in shallow water.
But this one was found nearly
opposite what was once a thriving
seaport: the city of Ashkelon.
On the southern coast of
present-day Israel,
Ashkelon's roots reach back
nearly 6,000 years.
Crusaders and Muslims
fought over this place.
Romans claimed it.
Babylonians destroyed it.
In the Bible, it was a stronghold
of the Philistines.
Its earliest known inhabitants
were the Canaanites.
Since 1985,
archeologist Lawrence Stager,
of Harvard University
has directed excavations here.
His knowledge of ancient pottery
is renowned.
In a tiny shard,
he can 'see' an entire artifact,
and pinpoint the culture
that produced it.
Oh, now this is great.
This is Cypro-Geometric III.
This is most probably
an import from Cyprus.
But things were not so clear
in the Navy's videotape.
Well, when I first looked at it,
I was a bit disappointed
that it was so fuzzy, and couldn't
really make out these jars very well.
Because that, of course, was the key
to determining the age of the shipwreck.
But it seemed to me
that they might be early,
and possibly even 9th, 8th,
These two-handled storage jars,
called amphoras,
were first used throughout
the Mediterranean
around 4,000 years ago.
Distinctive styles evolved
in various locales-
a boon for archeologists
who can use the jars
as 'signatures' of time and place.
But sometimes two amphoras
from vastly different eras
can be deceptively similar.
These might be
from the 5th Century A.D.
But Stager has a hunch
they're much older.
He tells Ballard that if this wreck
dates to the Iron Age,
as he suspects, it is the first of its
kind ever found in the Mediterranean.
It was a gamble but one that
I was at least confident enough
in that I would have put down
a good-sized bet.
More than money would be wagered.
In the summer of 1999, the
'Northern Horizon' sets out from Malta.
Ballard and Stager lead an expedition
to relocate and study
the mysterious wreck.
At stake is their conviction
that the combined strengths
of oceanography and archeology
can make history.
You know, when we found the Titanic,
we found the Bismarck,
we knew they existed.
They really were not a discovery.
They were a relocation.
These are true discoveries.
These are chapters of human history
we don't know about,
and I actually think
they are more important.
Still, this expedition begins
like any other.
Okay, ladies and gents!
Make sure your life jackets are right
before I shout you out
else I'll give you to Albert!
Safety training is mandatory
for everyone on board-
forty-nine scientists, engineers,
programmers,
ship's mates and graduate students.
When you jump in what's the correct
way to hold your life jacket?
Yeah, and your nose. Smashing.
Landlubber or seadog,
no one is exempt.
No one.
Larry!
Can't get it any tighter!
The Northern Horizon
has been transformed into
a floating research facility.
Over 55 tons of equipment were
shipped from the United States.
Several larger items have been
welded to the deck.
For nearly two decades,
Ballard has worked with an expert team
out of
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Martin Bowen and Andy Bowen have been
key members of many expeditions.
Inside, Stager's archeology team
has established its own 'headquarters'.
Hey, team, excuse me, I just got some
interesting information from Bob;
he just gave me the coordinates.
They're right on the ancient routes
that some have predicted between
the cedars of Lebanon and Egypt.
His team includes four
graduate students,
as well as an expert on ancient ships,
nautical archeologist
Shelley Wachsmann of
Texas A&M University.
These ships might have had
pretty wide beamy hulls and so forth?
Wachsmann: They seem from all the
iconography we have from this period
that the merchant ships were extremely
beamy and broad hulled.
Yeah.
If this dates to around 700 BC
this is the first ship ever found
that dates to that time period.
You have to remember that ships
tell the story of history.
I mean, there is nothing
that man ever made
that was not carried on a ship,
including the pyramids-
stone by stone, not in one shot!
And each one of these are
literally a time capsule.
They went down in one moment,
like that,
and everything they were carrying on
it at that one time
went down together,
and that tells us a story.
To reach the coordinates provided
by the Navy will take about five days.
This is the calm before the storm.
We are very relaxed now,
which is great.
People are charging their batteries,
getting sleep,
we just did the testing of the ship.
Everything's proceeding smoothly.
But once we get on site it'll kick in
to around the clock.
And you will see people break up
into three watches,
and there will always be a team
at work 24 hours a day.
Susan and Michael have the
most difficult schedule in some ways
because they work
from 12 noon to 4 p.m.
and then from
they have to sleep
and that's a tough time
to go to sleep
at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
But the reason they have to do
that is because at 12 midnight
they have to get back up
and work the 12 midnight
to 4 a.m. shift.
And go to the van.
Exactly.
And that's where everything
is happening?
Well it sounds like,
from what they said,
that the midnight to 4 a.m. shift
actually is a time
when a lot of things do happen.
On the Northern Horizon, 'navigation'
involves a Global Positioning System
and computer-controlled propulsion.
But a few thousand years ago,
a sea captain had to rely on
somewhat 'higher' powers.
The very heavens were his guide.
He probably spent a lifetime
committing constellations to memory,
observing the shifting angle
of the sun.
The special temper of each wind,
and the season of its coming.
The powerful currents
hidden beneath the waves.
All these may have been
the secrets of his trade.
Surely he watched for seabirds,
heralds of an approaching shore,
and for landmarks familiar
as a friendly face.
But the nearness of land
was not necessarily a comfort,
and he likely kept his ship
at quite a distance.
Well, generally the common wisdom
has it that,
for safety, the ancient mariners
hugged the coast.
But when you think about it,
the last thing an ancient mariner
ever wanted to see during a storm
was a quickly approaching the shore.
Plus there was piracy.
Piracy wasn't the type
that you see in the movies,
in the Caribbean where you're just
sailing around in the middle of nowhere
and suddenly another ship comes out.
Rather, they would watch from shore.
So you don't want to stay
too close to shore,
and if somebody comes out to attack,
you want to have that leeway
to get out of the way.
It's Day Five and nearly midnight when
the Northern Horizon arrives on site.
The coordinates provided by
the Navy are only approximate.
Margin of error might be
up to a kilometer.
Ballard's team deploys a deepwater
side-scan sonar.
The hope is it will pinpoint
the same pattern
of large objects detected by the Navy.
Slip his line, slip his line!
As the sonar is towed,
its fiber optic cable carries signals
to the 'Control Van',
nerve center of the expedition.
Sonar screens are not
inherently exciting.
As the first watch hunkers down,
everything starts to go wrong.
Okay, this course is going to
take us into deep water.
It already is increased.
The ship can't seem to stay on track,
and the sonar is pitched at an angle.
Pull up the winch.
The generator is not going
to survive a lot longer.
They have to shut
the generator off now.
This is the ship's?
Now. Yes, the ship's.
The ship has lost a generator.
Our speed over the ground is 5 knots.
Five knots? I'm shocked!
If there's a current like 4 knots,
we're not doing this site.
That could be a real showstopper
right there!
Unless the winch is rewired to
another source of power on board,
the expedition is dead in the water.
Time to improvise.
There's no way we can feed
any power from below
through the Scania circuit, right?
Because I have someone now
disconnecting the cables.
No estimated time on repairs.
Okay. Got the hand crank?
No...
Such are the risks of trying out
a brand new winch.
We're doing things we've
never done before.
But that's why we're here.
We're always pushing the envelope.
The challenge is always the desire
on the part of the scientists
to do things that have never
been done before
and the operator's side not wanting
to change anything, 'cause it works.
It's a miracle that's
the only guy that's a problem.
Power has been re-routed-
and the hunt is on.
That looks pretty good now.
Do you see something that you believe?
The sonar displays targets
as subtle smudges.
It takes a trained eye to tell
a shipwreck from a rock heap.
There dead ahead.
Zero three seven
It's on the screen now.
Just startin' to appear.
There's something comin' in
but it's on the right.
There's something there.
There's something there
You're certainly within
the range of Jason to see it.
It's about the right length;
it looks like it's maybe 30 meters.
It's roughly in the right place.
It smells right.
Within twelve hours,
the team locates three targets
that line up in a similar configuration
to the Navy's -
but offset by half a kilometer
from their coordinates.
Back to you, Larry.
I think we did it.
We did it.
Okay. The weather's nice.
I think we'll go to 'Phase Two'.
It's a conditional victory.
Until they actually
look at the targets,
they won't know
if they've hit pay dirt.
There's plenty of work ahead.
Better get something to eat below.
As one shift gives way to the next,
notions of time begin to blur.
Day 6.
The team prepares to launch
an extraordinary robot named Jason,
designed and built at Woods Hole -
and championed by a man
with a life-long dream.
Robert Ballard can't remember a time
he wasn't obsessed with the deep sea.
I mean my idol, as a kid-
perhaps still is... was Captain Nemo.
He first dove in a submarine in 1969.
Later, he was part of the
historic expedition
that discovered hydrothermal vents
and surprising life
forms on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
But he's always had
a healthy respect for the deep.
Diving in a small submarine
can be very dangerous.
Pressure is a funny thing
'cause you look out the window
and you can't see it.
But it's there and the slightest
mistake and the failure of your porthole
or anything would be
a catastrophic implosion -
just pfft - you'd just vanish.
Ballard began to think that remote-
controlled robots might be the answer.
The idea led to a prototype
called 'Jason Jr.',
rigged with four motors,
a thirty-meter tether,
and an electronic eye.
In 1986, on the Titanic, Jason Jr.
proved himself a nimble explorer.
Maneuvered by Martin Bowen
from within a submarine,
the little robot descended
the grand staircase
and danced beneath a chandelier.
That success launched a flurry
of innovation at Woods Hole.
By the 1990s, Jason had become
a technological wonder weighing
just over two tons.
In a sense, he remains
a work-in-progress-
forever refined and improved.
But even his standard features
are impressive.
Seven thrusters allow for
precision maneuvering underwater.
Titanium components can withstand
depths of 6000 meters.
Get it here and move
the whole thing back.
Jason's video, film and electronic
cameras can be remote-controlled
by an experienced pilot.
Likewise his articulated arm,
which can lift up to 15 kilos.
You know, right about here, Andy.
By about my foot.
To fire up such a complex machine
takes teamwork and time.
Jason won't be ready to launch
until well after dark.
It's a breathless moment
just before Jason hits the water.
If a single component leaks,
it could short-circuit
the entire electrical system.
Okay, pins released.
But tonight it's 'all systems go.'
Jason dives toward the most promising
of the three sonar targets.
And we're off.
Roger, make it slow.
You're 110 meters out to the target.
At the controls is pilot Will Sellers.
He adjusts Jason's buoyancy
by dropping ballast weights.
Amazing!
Jason's own forward-facing sonar
now scans the bottom.
A hundred and five meters.
Okay, it's off to the left.
Forty meters off to the left.
Is that it coming in?
That's it.
Let's see what we've got.
Lot of pits
That's just noise
There it is.
That's not geology.
There it is.
Whatever it is.
That's it ahead.
Off to the right slightly.
That's an anchor.
There's the chain.
Yup, there's the chain.
Follow that chain, Will, to the right.
Come right. That's the chain.
Metal chain, modern anchor.
This is no ancient ship.
So it's the other guy.
Yup. That's the Queen Victoria.
That was target AA, right?
Yeah so it means it's AC.
The brightest one is
gonna be the oldest.
Well, there you are.
Anyway it was a hit.
Okay, so we don't care about this guy.
We want to drive to AC as fast as
humanly you know, just head over there.
It'll take us a while, we'll go
have coffee and celebrate.
We've got a ship, the wrong one.
But it means we know
where the right one is.
Stager: My knees are weak.
From standing or the excitement?
And then the anchor
and then the chain.
Those apparently don't start
before 1820.
So we might have a Victorian ship,
we may not.
Who cares?
It's two hours transit to the next
most likely target - for some,
a very long two hours.
Day 7. 5 a.m. Jason
is back in action.
The Control Van is flooded with
anticipation, exhaustion, and adrenaline.
That must be it. That bright spot.
The bright spot, it's it.
That's it.
Magic.
Brightest thing on the screen.
That's gotta be the big one.
That's the mother lode.
The mother of all ships.
Eighty meters.
Remember that movie
when the alien is being tracked?
And it's coming towards you?
'The alien is approaching our cabin,
captain.' 45 meters.
And closing...
Eighteen meters... There she blows!
All right!
Look at that!
Fantastic!
There we are!
Oh, yeah.
Now we can see that
they're not Byzantine,
that's 8th Century.
That's...
It's now your problem, Larry.
It's a problem I like.
This is the first iron age ship that's
ever been found in the Mediterranean.
All right!
And it's the biggest one.
I mean, there's nothing bigger.
Look at the corks.
Are they corked?
No, no.
There's something in them.
They can't sediment that way.
But they can't sediment that way,
unless they've been excavated.
I don't think so.
You can't fill them that way.
Look at those thing, still stacked.
And cooking pots too.
We didn't see those... Oh my.
Those are absolutely
perfect 8th Century.
I was nervous that
we were gonna relocate it,
and then when I saw those amphoras,
I stopped looking at the ship
at that point,
and I'm looking at Larry, 'cause
he's the one who knows what we have.
And then when you saw that big smile
that we got the ship we wanted-
as far as I was concerned the cruise
was over.
Look at that.
It's the anchor.
The stone anchor!
More than a night to remember.
It was ecstasy.
I haven't been so happy about an
archeological discovery in years,
maybe a lifetime.
Look at that, you can see the ridges
on the high neck.
You know, when you have those kind of
moments you never forget them,
and this was mine.
For me, something that was incredibly
evocative were the two cooking pots
with, you know, maybe the last supper
in them before the ship went down.
Yeah, I do think about people
who went down.
Like a messenger from the future,
Jason sheds light on a vessel
that set sail around the time Homer
is said to have written the Odyssey...
when the Greeks began to celebrate
the Olympic games...
and a pair of twin brothers,
according to legend,
founded a city called Rome.
The archeologists need a detailed,
overall view,
but Jason's lights can't
illuminate the entire wreck.
To map the site, the robot moves over
the ship in small increments
and takes some 800 electronic
close-ups.
On-board computers help merge
these images
into a black-and-white
high-resolution 'photomosaic.'
It speaks volumes about the world's
oldest deep-sea shipwreck.
Some 300 amphoras preserve the shape
of a long-vanished hull.
About 18 meters long,
it was heading west when it sank.
A stone anchor marks the bow,
cooking pots the stern.
All this, plus the style
of the amphoras
suggests it may be
a Phoenician merchant ship,
broad in the beam,
with a curved horse-head bow.
Such ships are known from Assyrian carvings,
and from a detailed description
in the Bible, in the book of Ezekiel.
Of the Phoenicians, little tangible
has been unearthed.
They lived along the eastern shore
of the Mediterranean
from before 1200 BC
through the Roman period.
But their real domain was the sea.
The greatest maritime merchants
of the ancient world,
they traded with Pharaohs,
Greeks, and Romans,
and left traces of colonies
as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar.
Their rich purple dye was much prized,
as were their cedars of Lebanon.
It was the Phoenicians
who provided lumber and expertise
when Solomon built his temple
in Jerusalem.
Their skill at carving wood and ivory
was unrivaled.
Sadly, only shreds of
Phoenician literature survive.
But their simple alphabet
was widely adopted,
and would evolve into
the Roman alphabet we use today.
Still, it was as seafarers that the
Phoenicians most impressed the world.
A Greek historian claims
they first circumnavigated Africa.
Others believe
they even reached England.
It's as if the Phoenicians
entrusted all their secrets to the sea.
Until now.
Day 8.
The team drops a rig called
an 'elevator' to the bottom.
Later, it will raise precious cargo
to the surface.
So, there are the pots right there.
Today's goal is 'retrieval'.
With hundreds of amphoras
to choose from,
the two lone cooking pots
are top priority.
It won't be easy.
Pilot Matt Heintz is first
to test Jason's new 'hand'-
nicknamed 'Deep Spank' by the team.
You get it just like that,
and hold it like that,
so the weight's sitting on that.
Okay, we'll see if we can
nudge it under there.
And avoid the handles.
Yeah.
They're not up to
taking weight like that.
No one is quite sure
how the pot will hold up.
First time that one's been moved
in 2,700 years.
Yeah? I think it's the food's ready.
It's lost. Okay, we gotta recover
and change out.
For now, 'Deep Spank' disappoints.
It was a new modification
that didn't work.
Engineering on the fly.
It's back to an old die-hard.
Scoops in underneath
and then you close down on top.
We call it the cowcatcher. It works.
Within hours,
Jason is back on the bottom,
with a priceless cooking pot
in his 'cowcatcher.'
Now this is archeology.
Quick and beautiful.
That dog can hunt!
It's a triumph of technology
each time Jason deposits
an artifact in the elevator.
But it also means
the wreck site has been altered.
Careful records must be kept.
Archeology is a destructive science.
It's like tearing pages out of a book.
Once you've removed something,
if you haven't recorded it
you've lost it forever.
Work continues until
the elevator is full.
Then begins a slow ascent that
will bridge nearly thirty centuries.
There it is right here.
Bob, we made a mistake.
We shouldn't have put
both cooking pots in one load
since there are only two of them.
Yeah.
Is that the right place?
Is that the right place?
The center!
Okay, undo yours.
Let him just come straight up.
Take the slack off
Don't tilt it.
Just stop it when it starts to swing.
Okay, don't pull hard guys.
Let him try to get it vertical first!
Oh those beautiful cooking pots.
Ha Ha. Oh they're so glorious.
Okay, watch the guys.
Make sure the objects don't
come down on anything hard.
Thank god they're here!
I'll tell you, I was really happy
to see those cooking pots arrive.
The amphoras, we've got more of.
What would they cook in that?
What kind of meal.
That's the one you'd
do your one pot stew in.
It isn't as though you made
one thing here and one thing there.
Just throw it all in.
Refrigerator soup.
My wife's mother calls it.
Whatever is at the end of the week
in the refrigerator.
Well, this is in beautiful shape.
There's something special about
touching something
that has been untouched by humans
for almost 3000 years old,
I mean, to the time of Homer.
Wow. That's, that's pretty far back.
Here comes the pot,
so don't jump up, Dan.
Two years after
scrutinizing a fuzzy video,
Stager finally enjoys
a close encounter.
Few little sea creatures
attached to it.
Well, my great wish came true that
it was 8th Century
and not something Byzantine.
You know the other possibility
for it was that it could date,
oh, maybe 1100, 1200 years later.
In which case we have lots of wrecks
and lots of material from that period.
But you rarely if ever find this
on land complete.
Even if they're more or less complete
they've all been shattered
and you have to put them together
to make up the whole.
But out here, a whole shipload
of them intact.
It's marvelous.
Bathed in a solution
of fresh and salt water,
the artifacts are now the concern
of conservator Dennis Piechota,
his son James and assistant conservator
Catherine Giangrande.
Sampled and sifted for future analysis,
sediments might yield traces of a meal,
or fragments of the ship's hull.
I'm getting 7.2 millimeters.
Preservation of this pot
will take months,
but its digital doppelganger
is ready for study.
It's equally possible the amphoras
contained olive oil or wine.
I think I'm almost at the bottom...
Then Giangrande spots
the residue of tree resin,
used for sealing amphoras of wine.
It's as fine a discovery as any
to toast.
Not a bad millennium.
Terrific wine.
The superb condition of the amphoras
leads Ballard
to a theory about the fate
of the ship that carried them.
The ship is not busted up.
There's very few amphoras
that were broken.
So it wasn't like they were
tossed around and flipped around.
They were swamped.
You know, when you get in trouble
you tend to run with the sea,
hoping you can outrun the storm
and get away from it,
but you can then have
a very powerful wave come over
the stern and just swamp you.
We call 'em rogue waves.
I've been in two of them in my life.
We took one head on-
right over the bridge,
took off the ridge, took off
the mast, all but sank us.
So my first expedition,
I almost went down in a storm!
Understanding the wreck site
has also consumed the
computational energies of the team.
So we've got the map crunched.
Using data collected by a sensor
on Jason, Dana Yoerger
has produced a three-dimensional map.
It shows the wreck is sitting in an
oval depression nearly two meters deep,
and helps explain something
that's been puzzling Ballard.
'Cause you know one of the thing
we've been,
the problem is the amphoras
are full of mud.
And you figure out,
how could they be full of mud?
But what you've done is,
it was buried.
When the ship was swamped,
it probably sank to the bottom
like a weight, and buried
much of its hull in the soft mud.
In time, wood-boring organisms
ate away any exposed hull or mast.
The amphoras' unbaked clay stoppers
simply dissolved.
As wine escaped,
water and sediments poured in.
Over the centuries, deep-water currents
scoured the surrounding sea floor,
excavating the wreck,
and laying bare its amphoras.
So much revealed in so few days.
The team has earned a bit of fun.
Feet were still a little apart.
I don't know, about an 8,
something like that...
Ballard: Time to get all the children
out of the water and get back to work.
Day 9.
The team heads for the coordinates
of the third sonar target.
Three two seven...
Three two seven
and a hundred ninety one meters.
The expedition leaders have been
keeping nearly 24-hour shifts.
But there's no sign of fatigue
when a target appears on Jason's sonar.
Down 75 on the range.
That's a 55-gallon drum.
That was a decoy.
They always drop drums
to throw people off their trail.
Let's, uh, go back to 400, just do
a simple turn and see what you've got.
As Jason rotates, he picks up
something far more promising.
It's trash
Straight ahead.
Okay. There it is!
It's amphoras! Yes!
All right!
It's the same.
The same!
It's a fleet!
It's another bunch of them.
It's the same guys.
They had a bad day.
Look at that.
That wine company went bankrupt.
It's exactly the same. 8th Century.
Same guy caught the same storm,
heading the same direction.
This one is more laid out,
more spread out.
More scattered.
Bonus!
Definitely!
A survey reveals a ship early similar
in size and shape to the first wreck,
facing west,
and carrying the same cargo.
But here, more small personal items
seem to be exposed.
Ah, Now, there's a bowl.
There's a dish or something.
These could help confirm
the homeport of the crew.
Zoom down, zoom.
Keep going. Focus stop.
Boy have we got some work to do!
For the next few days,
Jason's busy as a bee.
Oh, that's a beauty, a little cooking pot...
This is terrific.
I thought this thing was too big to be
a bowl and it's actually a moratorium
and it's for grinding different kinds
of spices and herbs
and putting it in the stew.
Great!
It's swinging. Don't go overboard.
Now we're getting slightly
different sizes.
Yeah, this one looks like about
a gallon more than that one.
I'm not an archeologist
and Larry's not an oceanographer,
but maybe our students can be
half archeology, half oceanography.
Are these the ones you want
or should we put them back
and get some different ones?
I think we like these!
You've got people
who wanna study shipwrecks
and people who wanna build stuff
to study shipwrecks coming together.
And of course the technologies
that are available
lend themselves beautifully to this.
Let me look at that. See this?
Looks like a candlestick holder.
Yeah, well,
you're looking at it upside down.
See, actually the way this
would stand, Bob, is like that.
This is most likely a little chalice
for burning incense,
incense to the protectors,
the protective deities of the sailors.
They may well have held it this way,
added their incense,
and others would be raising
their arms like this,
to Baal - Baal Hadad or Baal Zafon,
the Baal of the North.
Day 14.
Jason's final load yields a distinctly
Phoenician 'calling card'.
So that's the clincher.
We've been looking for something
really decisive - well that's it.
That cinches is for a Phoenician ship,
a Phoenician crew,
Phoenician origins for this cargo.
This wine decanter, with its fanciful
wide lip, is uniquely Phoenician.
It crowns the final act of a drama
that began nearly 3000 years ago.
They may well have set sail
from the great city of Tire,
two ships laden with fine wine
from the hinterland.
Their destination?
Perhaps the Egypt of the Pharaohs.
Or their wine-thirsty compatriots in
the newly founded colony of Carthage.
To bless their journey, they would
have performed age-old rituals,
invoking the gods and perfuming
the air to attract their favor.
For a time, they may have felt
protected by divine grace.
A gentle sea guided
the rhythm of their days.
Then suddenly it seemed
their gods abandoned them.
And no prayer,
no offering could win them back.
For those who waited on the home
shore, there was no end to this voyage.
No matter how hard they prayed,
the ships would never reappear
on their horizon.
The fate of their loved ones
would remain a mystery.
Yet centuries later,
two modern-day explorers have raised
their story from the depths,
and added a new chapter
to our understanding of the past.
As future expeditions are planned,
the promise of deep-sea archeology
seems brighter than ever.
For who knows how much history
lies hidden on the bottom,
just waiting to be discovered?