The shipwreck happened somewhere between 80 and 50 BCE.
The ship turned out to be over 50 meters and the wreckage strewn across 300 meters. They used diving suits, just as those were emerging technology. When they realized the haul was bigger than they thought, the navy sent a second ship. They brought up bronze and marble statues, and pottery. He offered to have his divers bring up the treasure in exchange for pay equal to the value of the plunder and the Greek government sent a ship to help winch up the treasures. They went to the Greek government in Athens, thinking they might get a reward for the find, where Professor Ikonomu took them to meet with the Minister of Education, Spyriodon, Stais. They recorded the location and returned home. They brought back a few smaller artifacts like a bronze arm - as proof of their find, noting the seabed was littered with statues that looked like corpses. They dove down and after hearing stories from the previous archaeological expedition, knew they were on to something. They were off the coast of Antikythera, another Greek island that has been inhabited since the 4th or 5th millennia BCE, which had been a base for Cilician pirates from the 4th to 1st centuries BCE and at the time the southern most point in Greece. Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his team of sponge divers are sailing home from a successful run to the Symi island, just as they’d done for thousands of years, when someone spots something. The sponges were still harvested from the floor of the sea rather than made from synthetic petroleum products. They carved out a life in the sea, grew food and citrus, drank well, made head scarfs, and despite the waning Ottomon rule, practiced Orthodox Christianity. Proud of their Greek heritage, the people of the island didn’t really care what world power claimed their lands. Kalymnos had grown to nearly 1,000 souls. Archaeologist Charles Newton had excavated a Temple of Apollo on the island in the 1850s just before he’d then gone to Turkey to excavate one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, built by Mausolus - such a grand tomb that we still call buildings that are tombs mausoleums in his honor, to this day.īut 1900 was the dawn of a new age. The people of Kalymnos have been ruled by various Greek city states, the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, Venetians, and still in 1900, the Ottomans. Some 2,600 years after Homer, diving for sponges was still very much alive and well in the area. Great divers could stay on the floor of the sea for up to 5 minutes. They would sail boats with glass bottoms looking for sponges and then dive into the water, long before humans discovered diving equipment, carrying a weight, cut the sponge and toss it into a net. And many likely came from places like the Greek island of Kalymnos, where people have harvested and cultivated sponges in the ocean since that time. Hephaestus cleaned his hands with one - much as you and I do today.Īristotle, Plato, the Romans, even Jesus Christ all discussed cleaning with sponges. Homer wrote about using Sponges as far back as the 7th century BCE, in the Odyssey. Two types of sponges are soft and can be used to hold water that can then be squeezed out or used to clean. Fossil records go back over 500 million years and they are found throughout the world.
Sponges are some 8,000 species of animals that grow in the sea that lack tissues and organs.