Underwater Archaeology in Turkey

The first recorded attempt at underwater archaeology was made in Lake Nemi near Rome in 1446. Divers were brought from Genoa to investigate rumours of sunken ships, and after combing the lake they returned with the fragment of a large statue. In 1555 a diver went down in a diving suit and carried out a further survey, bit it was not until the time of Mussolini that the ships and their contents were finally recovered by the rather drastic means of draining the lake.

In 1900 a diver gathering sponges off the little island of Andikithria in Southern Greece found a bronze arm. Further excavations resulted in the recovery of 36 statues, 31 fragments, and a marble horse, as well as numerous implements and utensils. In order to recover these, however, it was necessary to dive to a depth of over 54 metres. This made it impossible for a diver to make more than two dives of five minutes each per day, and even then three suffered from 'stroke' and one died.

Another chance discovery made by sponge divers in 1907 revealed the existence of a wreck off Tunis which yielded enough finds to fill 6 rooms of the Bardo Museum.

Rhodes amphora. Beginning of 2nd century A.D. Rhodes amphora. Beginning of 2nd century A.D.

As a result of the great advances made in diving technique after the Second World War a number of wrecks were found off the French and Italian coasts, but the first underwater plans were those made in the investigation of the submerged sections of ancient cities. Work of this kind was first carried out in the ancient city of Tyre, and revealed both the size of the old port and the ship-building techniques employed at that time. Work on other submerged cities in Israel, the Lebanon and Crete showed that ancient writers had often given wrong information, but it is the Russians who have given the greatest importance to this type of archaeology and who have succeed in excavating and drawing up plans of a number of ancient cities lying submerged in seas and lakes.

A great step forward in underwater archaeology was made in the excavation of the wreck of the Grand Conglobe off Marseille, which was carried out by the Director of the Marseille Museum and Cousteau. Here photographs were taken of the finds in their original position before removal, and work on the detailed plan of the wreck continued for several years.

As the time a diver can remain under water is severely limited new methods of drawing up plans had to be invented. One of these, which was employed on the wreck of the Spargi off Sardinia, consisted in lowering a grid square over the wreck. These squares were divided into yet smaller squares, thus enabling the necessary measurements to be taken quite easily. This was the method later employed at Bodrum and Yassiada in Turkey.

As for the actual salvage of sunken ships, the wreck of a ship that had sunk off Stockholm and whose existence had been known since at least 1628 was finally brought to the surface in 1956 in a perfect state of preservation, while another wreck, this time off Kyrenia in Cyprus, was recovered in 1967 and is now exhibited in a special temperature-controlled room in Kyrenia Castle.

In deep water sponge-fishers use a type of drag-net consisting of two wheels with a heavy chain between them that scrapes over the sea-bed and fills the net behind with sponges and other sea-growths. Very often amphorae are brought up in these nets and are usually broken up and thrown back into the sea. On one occasion, however, in August 1953, the fishers were amazed to find the bronze statue of a woman brought up in this way. This, too, would have been thrown back had it not been for Erhan Erbil, a fisher from Bodrum, who insisted on taking it to land.

Here it was examined by Prof. George Bean, who identified it as the goddess Demeter and dated it to the 4th century B.C. It was later taken to the Izmir Museum.

Interest in underwater archaeology was sparked off by this discovery, but it was not until 1958, when Peter Throckmorton, a New York reporter who came to Turkey to do a series of articles on the Bodrum sponge fishers, that further developments took place. Throckmorton's attention was immediately attracted by the ancient amphorae to be found in almost every home, and he decided to switch the subject of his inquiry to the question of sunken ships off the Turkish coast.

With the help of a local captain and a photographer from the Frogmen Club at Izmir they finally identified a number of ships that had been wrecked on the treacherous sandbanks at Yassiada near Bodrum. These included two wrecks, one Roman and the other Byzantine that had been protected from the depredation's of sea fauna and flora by a blanket of sand, and a few years later archaeological investigations were finally carried out on these ships.