Remains of an ancient ship with a cargo of glass broken for processing found off the coast of Israel

The find is reported in the Journal of Archeological Science Reports.

The wrecked medieval ship was found 70 meters off the coast of Israel in 2005. Scientists named it "Maagan Michael V", after the name of the nearest settlement Maagan Michael, or "Michael's pier". It is a kibbutz on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea next to the ruins of the ancient city of Caesarea, located 35 km south of Haifa.

The ship was marked with the letter B, since another ship had already been found here 20 years earlier, which sank around 400 BC. Radiocarbon dating has dated the Maagan Michael B between 640-740 AD. During this time, global political changes were taking place on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

Caesarea, off the coast of which the ship sank, was conquered by the Arabs in 640, after which it lost the status of metropolis and capital of one of the provinces of Byzantium. In the middle of the 7th century, the Arabs conquered the entire Byzantine Levant, as well as Egypt. Fast Arab sailing ships became for several centuries the basis of maritime transport in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, as well as in the Persian Gulf.

Researchers are still preparing to reconstruct the appearance of a merchant ship. So far, only some of its nodes and a length of about 25 m have been described. In addition to the fragments of the hull and equipment, underwater archaeologists have found 38 intact amphorae, as well as 870 shards of glass.

The glass scrap found in the wreckage opens up new pages of the maritime trade of Byzantium and the Umayyad Caliphate in the 7th-8th centuries. In the collection of glass fragments, archaeologists have identified fragments of glasses, bowls, flasks, bottles, lamps and other vessels. Among them are several fragments of glass bracelets, round fillings and mosaic tesserae.

There were also found pieces of damp glass and waste from glass production, including glass drops and glass fragments with a clay oven coating. All these were the raw materials for making glass according to the recipes used by Roman and then Arab masters until the 9th century.

According to scientists, the growth in demand for glass products in the late Byzantine and Umayyad periods prompted workshops in the Eastern Mediterranean to start working not only for the local market, but also for remote regions. Archaeologists have already found several sunken ships from the beginning of our era, which were carrying glass breakage. They also contained larger consignments of raw materials, up to 3 tons. The small volume of goods on the Maagan Michael B ship suggests that this could have been a private initiative of one of the crew members, scientists say.

Source: https://portal-kultura.ru/