16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

55 Zadar, Croatia | 26 September – 1 October 2021 Franck Goddio, Alexander Belov & David Honoré (with contributions by Catherine Grataloup, Patrice Sandrin and Arnaud Roy) Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) with support of the Hilti Foundation Shipwreck 5 from Thonis-Heracleion, Egypt The site of Thonis-Heracleion located in the Nile’s Delta probably contains more than a hundred of ancient ships most of which date to the Late (664–332 BC) and Ptolemaic (332–31 BC) Periods. Shipwreck 5 was excavated by IEASM in 2019. The ceramic evidence and small finds from the ship allows dating it to the first half of the 4 th century BC. It is possible that the ship took fire and sank during a military conflict. Approximately one half of its original hull was preserved and was depos- ited inside a larger and earlier ship of a ‘baris’ type. The preserved portion of the hull makes 7 by 3 meters while the original length of the ship may be estimated at 14-15 m. The hull’s remains were in good state of preservation and included a section of a keel, a short section of a fore/ afterfoot, 23 strakes of the planking, two stringers and 26 frames. The ship was constructed mainly of coniferous wood species. The keel was almost square in section and had modest dimensions. It had no rabbet and was scarfed to the end- posts. The planking was assembled with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints and the frames were nailed to the planking with double-clenched iron nails driven through wooden pegs. Ship 5 belonged to a typical shell-based construction with primary strength of the hull provided by planking with its dense distribution of M&T joints of considerable size. Some frames and stringers were fabricated from reused planks. In the bilge area many remains of ropes were discovered. The ship was either transporting the ropes or it was involved in mooring procedures within the harbour. The particular interest of Ship 5 is that it had no ligatures in its construction. Latter feature was quite characteristic of archaic Greek shipbuilding preceding the Graeco-Roman type of construction relying on M&T joints, the latter best attested by the Kyrenia shipwreck from Cyprus (295-285 BC).

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