(while pressing right button Drag mouse or
press the direction on the photo)
During the
summers of 1977 through the Institute
of Nautical Archaelogy (INA) with
the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology
excavated a Medieval shipwreck at
Serce Limani, a natural harbour on
the southern Turkish Coast.
The ship had set sail in around 1025
A.D from the southern part of the
Syrian coast then ruled by the Fatimid
caliphs and was carrying a variety
of cargoes, including 3 tons of glass
cullet in the form of raw glass and
broken glassware. The glass cullet
waz seing transported to some small
glass factory located within the Byzantine
Empire, most probably in either the
Crimea or the lower Danube river region.
The ship, only 16 meters long and
propelled by two lateen sails, had
a flat bottom well designed for river
navigation.The hill, although not
well preserved, is an archaeological
document of great importance for the
history of naval architecture, since
it constitutes a very early example
of the employment of geometric formulae
in order to achive desired hull shape.
The Serce Limani shipwreck has yielded
what is presently the most closely-dated
single assemblage of Islamic ceramic,
metal and glass wares in existence.
This assemblage is making a major
constribution toward a more accurate
dating of similar artifacts from other
medieval Islamic sites and is already
revolutionizing our view of a major
period in Islamic history.
The display of the Serce Limani ship
and its contents within the building
designed and built for this pupose
by the Turkish Government has been
a joint project of the Bodrum Museum
of Underwater Archaeology and INA.
Additional exhibits devoted to he
ship's anchors and rigging and a scale
modelof the ship complete with her
rigging will be added in the near
future.
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