Hi there, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast.

Bonus episode, the Antiquethera shipwreck. During Easter Week in April of 1900, two ships from the island of Smy, named Efterpi and Kaliope were sailing along the waters between Kithara and Crete, its crew en route to North Africa in order to ply their trade as sponge divers, just as the harvesting season was about to begin. In the process of their crossing, the sky darkened, and the waves began to churn from the force of the strong winds that were rolling in. Fearing the awful power of a Mediterranean

storm, Captain Demetrios kantos ordered that they seek refuge around the shores of the nearby

island of Antikythera, less than a few hundred kilometers from Athens. The tempest soon subsided,

and some of the divers decided to get an early start at their collection along the coastline.

A commotion soon broke out as diver Ilias Stariatis frantically called out to the captain for assistance.

Contos followed Stariatis some 50 meters below the waters, and upon their return, the captain

brought aboard the arm of a life-sized bronze sculpture.

Rather than finding a bountiful harvest of sponges,

Kantos and his crew had discovered the remains of a ship that was destroyed at sea nearly 2,000 years before,

known thereafter as the Antiquetheira shipwreck.

This turned out to be one of the most important archaeological finds of the early 20th

century, providing a veritable treasure trove of artistic works all dating to the Hellenistic

period, including the famous Antikythera mechanism, the world's oldest known analog computer.

In antiquity, Antiquetheira was known as Aguilia, and for much of the Hellenistic

period it was a den for pirates. The Rhodian Navy was responsible for keeping them in check

for much of the third and second centuries, but the pirates of Igilia and the rest of the Mediterranean

were utterly destroyed in the naval campaigns of Pompey

the Great in 67 BC. It largely remained an unimportant region afterwards, but fell under control

of the modern state of Greece in the mid-19th century after passing through the hands of multiple

powers. Captain Contos and his team chose to contact the Greek authorities to alert them of their discovery,

though the exact timeline of events is something of a mystery.

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