How Odysseus traveled

There have been many depictions of the familiar story of Odysseus and the Sirens. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus (or Ulysses), following the advice of the sorcerer Circe, stopped his crew’s ears with beeswax so they’d be deaf to the sweet song of the Sirens, creatures half-woman and half-bird who lured sailors to destruction. He himself wanted to hear the song, but he had the crew tie him to the mast so he could not steer the ship off its course.

One such detailed depiction can be seen on the red-figure vase below, dated c. 475 B.C.

Amazingly, a ship which looks just like the one on the vase has been found by archaeologists using a ROV (remote operated vehicle) at the bottom of the Black Sea, off the Bulgarian coast.

The 23-meter vessel is thought to be a Greek merchant ship dating back more than 2.400 years. It is being hailed as officially the world’s oldest known intact shipwreck. The rudder, rowing benches and even the contents of its hold have been preserved  because at that depth the Black Sea water is anoxic, or free of oxygen. Lying more than 2,000m below the surface, it is also beyond the reach of modern divers.

The Anglo-Bulgarian team that discovered it used two underwater robotic explorers to map out a 3-D image of the ship and they took a sample to carbon-date its age. The vessel is thought to be one of many trading between the Mediterranean and Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast. As yet the ship’s cargo remains unknown and the team say they need more funding if they are to return to the site.

“A ship surviving intact from the classical world, lying in over 2km of water, is something I would never have believed possible,” said Professor Jon Adams, the principal investigator with the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (MAP), the team that made the find. “This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and seafaring in the ancient world.”

Described as the most extensive underwater archaeology exploration to date, the Black Sea MAP (Maritime Archaeology Project) not only discovered or rediscovered a total of 67 shipwrecks from the Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Era found on the bottom of the Black Sea in Bulgaria’s section, but it also explored the once flooded coast with its submerged prehistoric settlements, and even offered insights into the hypothesis that the Black Sea was the site of the Biblical Deluge.