New discoveries made in ancient shipyard

ANTALYA

Associate Professor Hakan Öniz, who discovered the world's largest and oldest shipyard from the Bronze Age on Dana Island off the coast of the southern province of Mersin’s Silifke district in 2015, announced that they have found new artifacts in the shipyard.

Öniz, Akdeniz University (AÜ) Head of the Preservation and Restoration of Underwater Cultural Heritage Department and Director of Kemer Underwater Archaeology Research and Application Center, said that they had so far found a total of 294 ancient boatyards during their studies, adding that 300 ships were also built in the shipyard on Dana Island during the same era.

He noted that they discovered new findings indicating that lifeboats and other small boats were made with a special construction behind the place where these large ships were produced. These findings of Öniz were published as an article in an international scientific journal.

Stating that they carried out a study on diving bans off the coast of Silifke in 2015, Öniz stated that during this study, they found nearly 100 boatyards on Dana Island, Öniz said, “These are ramps that can be easily taken from sea to land for new ship construction or ship maintenance. It is an amazing thing to find 100 ramps from archaeological periods. In 2016, with the permission of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, we initiated works on these 100 ship ramps on Dana Island, and we found 274 ship ramps during the studies we carried out in 2016-2017. This means that you can build 274 ships at the same time, and we know that in ancient times a ship was built in six months. In this context, the construction of 500-600 warships in one year was so important that it could change the entire balance in the Mediterranean.”

Stating that the number of boatyards found with the support of the Ministry increased to 294, and explained their historical importance as follows:

“A magnificent shipyard, large enough to produce approximately 300 ships, was unearthed with all its infrastructure, not only the boatyards, but also workshops, prayer areas, security towers, a castle structure and many similar archaeological infrastructures. Such a shipyard changed history in the Mediterranean 2500-3000 years ago and made great steps in maritime history. What is this? For example, the Salamis Naval Battles took place in the 5th century B.C. The battles that have been the subject of many Hollywood movies, such as the ‘300 Spartans’ movie, took place in Athens, in front of Piraeus. These were the wars between the Persian fleet and the Athenians, that is, the Greek fleet. We know that the Persians were a land-based society, while Cilicians were a mariner society because they had no other choice. The majority of Persian ships were built on the Cilician coast. We think that this shipyard is where most of the Persian ships were built. We think that the ships of Antony and Cleopatra were built in this region, too.”

Explaining that they know that the famous General Antigo had a shipyard here during the Hellenistic period and that ships built on Dana Island were used in many naval battles during the Hellenistic period, Öniz said, “Later, the famous Cilician pirates are seen. We can say that the majority of the ships of the Cilician pirates, who plundered 500 settlements in Greece with approximately 1000 ships in the first century B.C. and even challenged the Roman Empire for a while, were built on Dana Island. We have archaeological evidence for this. Our recently published article shows that in addition to large ships, the lifeboats and other small boats behind these ships are also built with a special construction in another place.”

Öniz also noted that their work on Dana Island dates back to the Paleolithic period.

“In other words, we found stone tools on Dana that we know were used between 8,000 and 10,000 B.C. Of course, Dana Island was not a shipyard at that time. The stone tools were probably used by people who transitioned from a hunting society to an agricultural society. But archaeological evidence shows us that Dana Island served as a shipyard, especially since the Late Bronze Age. It is the largest and oldest untouched shipyard in the world,” he said.

Öniz said that the cedar trees growing in the Taurus Mountains, just across from Dana Island, were used in ship construction.