Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 280, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1913 — ART MARVELS FROM THE SEA [ARTICLE]

ART MARVELS FROM THE SEA

Ancient and Valuable Relics Removed From Sunken Ship Off Tunisian Coast. Paris.—News has been received of an archaeological find of the greatest interest. At Madhia, on the Tunisian coast, five or six years ago some Greek sponge fishers noticed a strange, mass of wreckage lying at a depth of 130 feet to the north of Madhia lighthouse. Amid a jumble of timbers lay splendid marble columns, bronze statuettes, a superb life-sized boy’s figure and other treasures, which they succeeded in bringing to the surfacb. It has now been ascertained that the sunken ship was a vessel of about 400 tons, 100 feet long and 25 feet broad. She was laden with an extraordinary, heterogeneous cargo, not only blocks of marble, but bases and capitals for columns, effigies, statues, furniture, tiles, leaden piping, lamps, amphorae, etc. Am6ng the fragments were found figures of a demigod and a maiden and faun which correspond almost exactly with those upon what is known as the Borghese vase dug up in Rome and now in the Louvre. The bottom of the hold contains about sixty columns of bluish white marble thirteen feet high, which were probably one of the causes of the wreck of an evidently too heavily freighted ship. All the inscriptions deciphered relate to Attica and personages of the middle fourth century B. C., and it might have been thpught that the vessel dated from that period but for the Boethus statue and a lamp of a pattern only introduced into Attica at the end of the second century B. C. Some writing on lead ingots also is in the Latin of that epoch and experts have concluded so far that the vessel was loaded in Attica for Rome and' probably the cargo was the spoil after the taking of Athens by Sulla in 86 B. C.