29 - 08 - 2001.  SOA

This morning special care was taken to drop Millawanda’s anchor within 20 meters of the column wreck, so that even the men were able to find it without too much difficulty. All today’s dives were devoted to cleaning and exposing the marble cargo mound and nearest amphoras, so no pretty pictures yet. But we are hoping to get some good photos tomorrow, conditions permitting, especially now that this 45m site is turning out to be far richer than we expected. While the millstone and church wreck yielded only sparse pottery remains, even today’s superficial weeding of the column wreck revealed a number of new intact amphoras, a cup, a bowl, and an iron anchor. Not that stone by itself is anything to complain about. Stone carriers including column wrecks make up about 2 percent of all reported ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks, so the fact that we have 3 stone carriers in such close proximity is quite incredible. And it is hard not to be impressed by those eight magnificent column drums, which, if piled up and placed on what appears to be the base (?), would rise almost 9 meters.

People today don’t often think about columns; at least, not the kind that hold the roof up. In Greco-Roman times, however, a column was a very serious and storied thing. For a start it had to belong to a particular order - Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Pergamene, to name a few - the relative proportions of which were precisely mathematically defined. Yet the inspiration behind these proportions was typically romantic. The Roman architectural writer Vitruvius (IV.c.1.7-9) tells us that Ionic columns were inspired by "feminine slenderness," and that the Corinthian order "imitates the slight figure of a virgin." Without the capital we can’t yet say exactly which order we have on our shipwreck. One thing’s for sure, if this column shaft was inspired by the form of a maiden, at 1.75m diameter she was one hell of a fat mama.

Our assumptions about this wreck are going to be tested over the coming days. For a start, the date. It is based on the presence of a Lamboglia 2 type amphora concreted to the marble. However, a Byzantine amphora is also concreted to the marble, and other nearby pottery that may or may not belong to our shipwreck has yet to be closely examined. In the end we favor the first century BC date suggested by the Lamboglia amphora as a more likely context for the kind of architecture implied by such a large and magnificent column. During the Hellenistic and Early Imperial Periods, colossal marble temples, monuments, and public buildings proliferated in Asia Minor, epitomized by such vast complexes as the Great Altar of Pergamon, the temple of Apollo at Didyma, and the Artemision, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. From the time of Julius Caesar, Roman patronage also spurred the building programs of Asian cities, including the enhancement of existing structures, and reconstruction after earthquakes (then, as now, an all-to-common event in western Anatolia). Monumental columns were a standard feature of nearly all major public buildings during this period.

Once we clean the marble enough to take precise measurements, it is not out of the question that we will be able to identify the structure for which this column and the other marble pieces were intended, even if it’s on the other side of the Mediterranean. The possibilities are interesting. If the column was ordered for a new building under construction, was it normal for such items to be shipped piece-meal in whatever ships were available? We would certainly like to learn more about the logistics of constructing the largest temples with their forests of over-sized columns (120 at Didyma, 127 at the Artemision). 

Finally, we would like to know more about the condition of marble building material when it was shipped. The columns and other marble pieces on the church wreck were clearly in a finished state, but this was not the norm in earlier centuries, when the archaeological evidence suggests that architectural marble typically did not receive its finishing touches until the last moment (for example, some of the fluting of the columns of the temple of Artemis at Sardis is unfinished, and was clearly left for the final phase of construction). Thus we were initially excited to read in earlier INA survey reports that the column drums from this shipwreck were ‘fluted’. However, we didn’t see any fluting today, and can only conclude that the diver who reported this phenomenon was affected by depth-induced nitrogen narcosis. Hopefully the impartial evidence of the camera will soon clear up the mystery of the tiny floating elephant that was also seen down there this morning...