Italy’s cultural heritage agency announced the recovery of a Roman battering ram from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
The ram or lectern formed the prow of a Roman warship. The team said it was used at the Battle of Emmen, a naval battle between Rome and Carthage that marked the end of the First Punic War in 241 B.C., after a 23-year-old war between the two empires. years of conflict.
The discovery of the lectern was announced by the Marine Surveillance Service of Sicily’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage and discovered by divers from the Association for the Documentation of Underwater Sites. The recovery team also used a research vessel Hercules Helps with podium identification and recovery.
The diving team discovered the rostrum at a depth of about 262 feet (80 meters). The artifact was discovered in the Mediterranean between Levanzo and Favignana, two small islands in western Sicily where archaeological surveys have been conducted for the past 20 years. According to LiveScience, the ram is now on land in Favignana, and initial research on the artifact revealed decorative reliefs of a helmet and feathers.
Since the early 2000s, 27 beaks have been discovered, according to a social media post by the team. You guessed it, lecterns were used to ram enemy ships with the intention of punching holes in them and ultimately sinking them. The team’s investigation also uncovered other ancient wartime artifacts, including 30 Roman helmets, two swords, and a relatively common find in Mediterranean archeology – a large number of amphorae.
The Mediterranean Sea near Sicily and Tunisia was a popular maritime corridor during the Roman Empire – or at least that’s what recent archaeological finds suggest. Last year, a UNESCO-coordinated mission discovered three shipwrecks, including one dating to between 200 BC and 100 BC, near the treacherous Keith Reef between Sicily and Tunisia. The team also studied three Roman shipwrecks off the coast of Italy, two of which were first-century merchant ships and one dating to the first century BC.
However, the recently restored pulpit is older than those shipwrecks and is a very vivid window into ancient warfare and the fierce naval conflicts that shaped the ancient world. The Battle of Emmen saw much of the Carthaginian fleet sunk or captured, and led to Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean. There were three Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, which ultimately led to the destruction of Carthage.
