Divers Excavate Greek Shipwreck Dubbed “Ancient Titanic”
The History Channel - The shipwreck lies on the bottom of the Aegean Sea, near the island of Antikythera in southern Greece. A group of sponge divers originally discovered the wreck in 1900 and brought up a number of its treasures--including an ancient mechanical device later found to be the world’s first known “computer”--before abandoning their efforts. This week, an international team of divers and archaeologists completed another excavation of the 2,000-year-old Antikythera shipwreck, turning up a number of remarkable new finds.
In the spring of 1900, a group of Greek sponge divers were returning from North Africa when they were blown off course during a storm and forced to take shelter near the small island of Antikythera, located between Crete and Kythera in the Aegean Sea. While looking for clams for a meal, one of the divers discovered the remains of an ancient shipwreck, some 55 meters beneath the surface.
Subsequent excavations of the site yielded an astonishing haul, including bronze and marble statues, jewelry, furniture and glassware. Most notably, the divers recovered the fragments of an ancient mechanical device that would be dubbed the “Antikythera Mechanism.” Until the late 1950s, it lay in the National Museum in Athens, mistakenly identified as an astrolabe, a primitive instrument used to tell time and make astronomical measurements. But thanks to scholarly research, it is now thought to be an ancient “computer,” built to calculate the movements of stars and planets in order to predict astronomical events such as eclipses.
