[blam]

I wish he'd stop messing around with these 'modern' ship wrecks and work on some that sank when the Black Sea was still fresh water, 7,600+ years ago.

[blam]

GGG Ping.

[Pistolshot]

They might get a surprise. Who knows?

[rabscuttle385]

What about buildings and settlements at the bottom of the Black Sea?

[Red Badger]

Like Noah’s?...................

[johnny7]

I wish he'd stop messing around with these 'modern' ship wrecks and work on some that sank when the Black Sea was still fresh water, 7,600+ years ago.

Ditto... the 'dead-water' would mean that these oldest ships, ruins, artifacts... whatever... would be perfectly preserved.

[Redbob]

"...hope to have a better look into a time capsule of early human history."

A mere 900 years ago is hardly "early human history."

[SunkenCiv]

Ballard was sent to look for traces of Ryan and Pitman's Black Sea flood, and found this ship instead.

Ancient Wooden Ship Emerges Intact From Geographic's Black Sea Expedition
by Mary Jeanne Jacobsen and Barbara Moffet
Ballard's website

The discovery in September of the well-preserved ship confirms scientists' belief that the oxygen-deprived waters of the Black Sea below 656 feet (200 meters) provide an ideal environment for preserving ancient wooden vessels, making that sea a treasure-house for archaeologists. Shipwrecks in most other bodies of water usually are robbed of their wooden parts quickly by wood-boring organisms.

• 1,500-Year-Old Wooden Ship Is Found Off Coast of Turkey by John Noble Wilford
• Ancient Ship Found Off Turkey by Randolph E. Schmid
• Search for Ancient Habitations and Shipwrecks in the Black Sea

The late Willard Bascom was a mentor / idol of Robert Ballard. I saw this book at the library one day a few years ago, and as I read the prologue I realized who this guy was -- the prologue was quoted in a story about Ballard's finding of a Byzantine vessel in the anoxic (?) depths of the Black Sea. "It sits upright on the bottom, lightly covered by the sea dust of 2,500 years," he wrote. "The wave-smashed deckhouse and splintered bulwarks tell of the violence of its last struggle with the sea. A stub of a mast still remains."

Deep Water, Ancient Ships: The Treasure Vault of the Mediterranean by Willard Bascom

[SunkenCiv]

This is not that great a piece, but may be of interest to those who know less about Robert Ballard.

Robert Ballard
by Christopher Kemp

Since the 1970s, undersea explorer Robert Ballard has participated in more than 110 expeditions, searching for everything from sunken ships and buried treasures to the Loch Ness monster. He's found the wrecks of the RMS Titanic, the German battleship Bismarck and the American aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and explored sunken luxury liners including the Lusitania, the Andrea Doria and the Brittanic. And Ballard has been poking around for decades, racking up one successful expedition after another, in almost every ocean on Earth. A few he's crossed off his list are the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Black Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Sea of Cortez, Lake Ontario, Loch Ness, Amazon River and Kuban River (in Russia). After almost 40 years of exploration, he's running out of bodies of water to explore.

To the writer Kemp "almost every ocean on Earth" includes the Black Sea. : )

[SunkenCiv]

some earlier Ballard work:

Ancient Shipwrecks Discovered Off Coast of Israel
by The Associated Press

The pair of Phoenician cargo ships were found using an underwater robot and deep-water tracking equipment. The ships are almost perfectly preserved -- a result of the cold deep-sea waters and the relative absence of sediment at such depths. The contents of the ships indicate that they set sail from the Phoenician port of Tyre -- now a city in Lebanon -- about 750 B.C. Both vessels were transporting hundreds of amphorae, large ceramic containers filled with wine. Although the amphorae were found intact, the wine had seeped out and sand had filled them. The ships were headed either for Carthage -- in modern-day Tunisia -- or Egypt. The vessels are positioned upright about 1,500 feet deep on the ocean floor, about 30 miles off the shores of Israel. The route was not previously known as one used by Phoenician sailors.

Similar article.

Search for Phoenician Shipwrecks
from Biblical Archaeology Review

Two Phoenician shipwrecks were discovered this summer in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, about 30 miles from the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon. The two ships are the world's oldest known deep-sea wrecks. The longer craft, measuring about 60 feet, is the largest pre-classical vessel ever found. The ships, which were found sitting upright in about 1,500 feet of water, are believed to have capsized in a storm in about 750 B.C., after setting sail from the Phoenician port of Tyre. Their cargo of wine, housed in hundreds of large ceramic jugs called amphorae, was likely bound for Egypt or the Phoenician colony of Carthage. The artifacts that the team recovered -- 12 amphorae, crockery for food preparation, an incense stand for offerings to the weather gods and a wine decanter -- have allowed Stager to estimate not only the ships' point of origin, age and likely destination, but also the size of the crews (a half dozen sailors each) and their likely diet (fish stew).

Before the PLO destabilized Lebanon in the 1970s, National Geographic did a cover story on the Phoenicians and visited the site of ancient Tyre. There were still traditional fishermen then, and as they pulled their nets, they chanted "ell -- lee -- sah". The author was told, "If you ask them why they do it, they do not know." His source then attributed it to an ancient tradition, going back to the time when Elissa, princess of Tyre, left to found Carthage. I love that story, and don't care if it's true. How it could be disproved is beyond me. : )

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Blam.

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[SunkenCiv]

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