Spanish archaeologists have succeeded in extracting a 2,600-year-old shipwreck from waters off the country’s southeastern coast, two decades after the relic’s initial discovery, officials said.
The ancient Phoenician shipwreck dates back to the 7th century BCE. It was discovered in 1994 off the coast of Murcia, in southeastern Spain, near the town of Mazarrón, according to Spanish Ministry of Culture.
Now called Mazarrón II, this wreck was one of two wrecks located in this same general area. The first, called Mazarrón I, was initially located in 1993, taken out of the water in June 1995 and exhibited at the Spanish National Museum of Underwater Archeology in 2005 after undergoing years of conservation treatments, the museum said.
Spanish National Museum of Underwater Archeology
Mazarrón II is of particular interest to archaeologists and researchers because it is one of the few Phoenician-era shipwrecks discovered largely intact, said Carlos de Juan, director of the excavation project: in a video shared by the University of Valencia. The university partnered with the regional Ministry of Culture of Murcia to carry out the excavation.
A team of 14 specialists worked with de Juan to remove the wreck from the sea in less than two months, with the project starting on September 13 and ending on November 7. Video shows divers carrying fragments of wood from the wreck to the surface in pieces.
Phoenicia was an ancient civilization located along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, in what is now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, which existed between 1500 and 300 BCE. The Phoenicians prospered for a time on trade and developed an alphabet that formed the basis for those later produced by ancient Greece and Rome, many traces of the civilization were considered lost until the 20th century.
Artifacts like Mazarrón II can help shed light on Phoenician culture, de Juan said. He noted in his comments at the University of Valencia that little is still known about Phoenician shipbuilding, despite the wealth of information about ships built nearby in the Mediterranean by the ancient Greeks.
“Therefore, this wreck constitutes a very important contribution to this field of study,” de Juan said. He noted that the elements of Mazarrón II are similar to building designs seen in the cultures of the surrounding region, but that some are distinctive and mysterious, at least for the moment.
Each piece of the wreck was transferred to a laboratory at the Underwater Archeology Museum in southern Spain. The lab will work carefully to preserve his remains, in a process that will likely take several more years.