According to the myth, Hercules had to complete 12 heroic labors in order to be cleared of guilt and become immortal. A recent discovery picks up on the story, long after the Greek and Roman stories ended, to tell us a new version of its afterlife.
At the bottom of the Aegean Sea lay a likeness of the demigod of power – who, the story goes, strangled a lion, beheaded a nine-headed underwater serpent, and captured a man-eating boar. Or at least his head was.
A team of experts searching for a shipwreck off the coast of Greece, an excavation that took place from May 23 to June 15, has recovered the marble head of a Hercules statue from ancient Rome about 2,000 years old, according to researchers.
“Two thousand years is a very long time, but if you think in generations — generations of 25 years — that makes 80 generations,” said Professor Baumer. “That’s very close.”
Its connection to ancient civilization fascinates researchers, he added: “This is what is fascinating in archaeology. You come into direct contact with people.”
The discovery of the site was accidental. Antikythera is an island between mainland Greece and Crete, whose name means “anti-Kythera”, or the opposite of a nearby island of that name. The Greek divers who found the shipwreck more than a century ago were harvesting sponges and initially thought they had come across corpses at the bottom of the sea, but later realized they’d found sculptures, Baumer said.
Since then, the Antikythera site has yielded artifacts that have provided insight into ancient Roman history, economy, technology and art. Researchers speculate that a device previously discovered there, named after the island, may have been used for navigation and astronomy; it has even been called “the first computer” by some researchers.
Getting to those items has proven to be a daunting task.
Considered one of the richest shipwrecks, the Antikythera was hidden under boulders weighing a whopping 8.5 tons and believed to have settled there during an earthquake sometime after the shipwreck – but shortly enough after that to help preserve the artifacts . Ropes attached to pressurized airbags, such as underwater balloons, were used to lift the rocks and expose areas of the wreckage that had been blocked.
Hidden there was the gigantic head thought to represent the mythical hero, as if he had been felled by the curse of the jealous goddess Hera, who would have made his life difficult from birth.
The twice-life-sized head of a male bearded figure is covered in marine deposits that are being cleaned up so that the piece can be restored. The head likely completes another ancient statue found in 1900: “Herakles of Antikythera,” which currently stands headless at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Mr. Baumer said. (Herakles, or Heracles, is the Greek name for Hercules.)
Four hours before divers encountered the marble head, Professor Baumer left the site to head back to Athens. He and a colleague stopped driving to see photos of the statue.
He celebrated not only the thrill of the discovery, but also what it meant for future research. Knowing the underwater spot where the artifact was found gave explorers a better idea of the shipwreck’s layout, because previous excavators hadn’t documented where they found the statue’s body, he said.
Experts are using 3D maps to digitally document what the wreck looks like before artifacts are removed, said Elisa Costa, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Venice who is part of the effort. Her mapping captured every layer exposed as the boulders were lifted, and she said she would continue to document the space around the site, which team members believe could help explain the wreckage.
“It’s very exciting to be a part of this important excavation project that began 120 years ago,” she said. “It’s really unbelievable.”
Swiss watchmaker Hublot created the balloon system that lifted the sunken boulders especially for this project. For next year’s dig, the company is designing robots that can do some of the work of divers, Professor Baumer said, allowing the human divers to do more of the analytical work.
Due to the depths they are exploring, divers can spend only 30 minutes near the wreck (after a 15 minute descent) before slowly having to resurface to get air. Water pressure puts five times more resistance on the divers’ movements than people on land experience, Professor Baumer said. For safety, the divers never go down alone.
Every item excavated from the Antikythera shipwreck will be studied in an effort to piece together the story of the crew and the wreck, said Carlo Beltrame, a professor of archeology at the University of Venice. As a maritime archaeologist, he will use the discoveries to figure out the type of ship that sunk and its likely route.
Part of its role is to study the social and economic conditions of the time, around 60 BC. And he already has questions.
“What type of ship was this?” Professor Beltrame said. “What were the aspects of the ship’s traffic? Life aboard the ship?”
Details such as the size of the wooden planks used to build the ship have led Professor Beltrame to surmise that this was likely a large ship, he said. Teeth found in the wreckage this year may introduce researchers to the people who may have been on board. If bones or other human remains are found, they can help determine the gender and ages of the passengers and crew.
Brendan Foley, a former researcher at the site and professor of archeology at Lund University in Sweden, said there could be more life-size sculptures from the wreck, which he theorizes were made around 65 BC, when “this huge ship in the cliff collapsed and sank on the escarpment.” He said he predicted the existence of some of the latest archaeological treasures, including the head of “Herakles,” from other discoveries in 2017.
In the early 1900s, divers found six bronze arms and a fragment of what was later called the Antikythera Mechanism. In 2017, they found a seventh arm and another piece of equipment, which they believe may have been used to track astronomical movements.
At the end of the project in 2025, the team aims to publish its findings on the ‘Back to Antikythera’. But they believe there will be more to be found in the shipwreck. It is possible that, deep in the water, more mythical creatures are waiting for their story to be told.