Shipwrecks Proving Historic Mediterranean Sea Routes

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Archaeologists have long believed ancient mariners were excessively cautious when sailing the Mediterranean, staying close to the coast at all times to avoid the risk of tumultuous mid-sea storms and hidden reefs. But this view has been changed by an exhaustive underwater archaeological survey undertaken by the United Nations agency UNESCO has found evidence to suggest ancient sailors were far more daring than had previously been suspected.

This evidence comes in the form of 24 shipwrecks spotted by the UNESCO survey along a popular north-to-south sea route that cuts through the heart of the Mediterranean, with one of the wrecks dating back to the first century AD. The latter ship was found off the coastline of Tunisia in North Africa, and has been officially identified as a first-century Roman merchant vessel .

According to Alison Faynot, the UNESCO archaeologist who led the new survey, the discovery of these two dozen wrecked vessels shows that merchant ships carrying valuable cargoes of olive oil and wine were frequently sailing across the Mediterranean in past centuries, far back into antiquity. It seems the potential profits from the lucrative trade in such items was enough to convince them to undertake such voyages, despite knowing they were sailing across extremely dangerous waters.

It is possible to navigate the Mediterranean Sea using terrestrial landmarks. Seaborne travelers moving from Europe to Africa to the Near East could complete round-trip journeys without venturing out into more treacherous waters, and it has always been assumed that this is what they did in the distant past.

But this was only an assumption, and it was one that UNESCO underwater archaeologists were eager to challenge.

Older Mediterranean civilisations that were based along coastal regions might well have been active for millennia before ancient Greece and Rome. Rising sea levels might have covered up or hidden the true antiquity of sea trade.

Just surfacing from memory is something about a fresco or mosaic remaining in a mansion from one of those abandoned Mediterranean civilizations. It seems the historian crowd looked at the pictured ships and instantly dismissed them as artistic interpretations; but some decades later a shipwright or similar person looked at the pictured ships and said, [i]"No, actually, those are real ships because this detail and that structure and this other feature and .