This seems to be a familiar scene of a ruined urban landscape: abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, piles of garbage, and discarded bottles lying around.
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Ruined harbor area. (Photo: AP) |
The scene remains intact from over 1,500 years ago. Engineers discovered this ruin of the ancient Roman harbor while digging a subway line underground in Istanbul, Turkey.
Like other historical cities from the Roman era, Istanbul is home to many important archaeological sites. However, the ancient harbor discovered last year in the Yenikapi suburb is on an entirely different scale: it has become the largest archaeological discovery in the history of Istanbul.
Archaeologists have named it “Theodosius Harbor“, after the Roman and Byzantine emperor who died in 395. They hope to gain deeper insights into the ancient trading life of the city once known as Constantinople, the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires.
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Dr. Cemal Pulak |
So far, 17 archaeologists, 3 architects, and about 350 workers have uncovered a church, a city gate, and 8 sunken ships.
Dr. Cemal Pulak from Texas A&M University believes these ships capsized during a major storm. He noted that the wooden ships fill a gap in the history of shipbuilding due to the combination of old and new techniques used in their construction.
The harbor area is vast. Surrounding it, workers have found numerous fragments of pottery and animal bones. All of these are waste, such as a broken pottery shard discarded by sailors from their ship or animal bones thrown into the harbor by a nearby slaughterhouse.
Thousands of artifacts have also been dredged up from the depths of the Bosporus Sea. Only a small portion of these are of museum and research value; the rest will be buried again.
These relics also help researchers understand how ancient traders transported wine and olive oil in jars and how they were shipped.
M.T
