I’ve wondered what Roman grain ships looked like and if any sunken ones have been found.
“I’ve wondered what Roman grain ships looked like and if any sunken ones have been found.”
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I don’t know how much of wood structures of anything would still be left to find at the bottom of the sea after two millennium.
Because of the standardized technique used some believe that the Nemi ships were actually standard grain ships minus their anti-ship worm lead armor with purpose built superstructures plopped on the deck.
They were large. There were only a few ports in the Med capable of handling them -- Egypt's, Rhodes, the Piraeus, and Portus. Lionel Casson quotes a surviving Roman-era account of the arrival of one of those huge grain boats at the Piraeus (some sort of problem, either with the ship, or a storm) and how the who city came down to rubberneck. It was a kind of turning of the tables, since a century or three earlier, after the conquest of Greece, the Romans had been so impressed by the never-used huge warship of one of the Greek/Macedonian kings of the Alexandrian successor state that they towed it to Rome as a trophy and a tourist attraction.