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National Geographic : 2002 Mar
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phero,"to carry") in which wine was transported and the smaller, flat-bottomed amphorae to hold wine at the table. Greeks thought that terrible things-blindness or insanity-resulted from drinking undiluted wine. They always mixed it with water. And they brought water from the well or fountain house in a round jar called a hydria, with two horizontal handles for lifting and one vertical handle for pouring. They mixed the wine and water in a large bowl-a krater-much like a modern punch bowl. From the krater the diluted wine was dipped with a ladle, usually of metal, and decanted into a pitcher. Lastly the wine was poured from the pitcher into a one- or two handled drinking cup. We excavated examples of nearly every shape, most in such multiples that we assume they were cargo rather than tableware for the crew. Almost all seem to have been manufac tured on Chios, close to where they went to the sea bottom. I stopped diving regularly in 1984, turning over the bulk of the underwater work to a younger generation, but I continue to make inspection dives on most wrecks we excavate. On the day of my first dive on the wreck in 1999, Sam Lin, a new Texas A&M graduate student, and INA veteran Faith Hentschel uncovered in the upper area of the sloping seabed a marble disk about six inches in diameter. Other team members guessed that it was one of the ship's two ophthalmoi, or eyes. Eyes to give life to a ship or to help it see its way through the waves are common to many cultures from Portugal to India. It has long been known from Greek vase paintings that classical ships had such eyes. Those on mer chant vessels were sometimes depicted as simple circles, like the one we found, on either side of the hull near the prow. Although natu ralistic marble eyes had been excavated in the remains of sheds that once housed the famed Greek warships called triremes, most scholars assumed that the eyes on the bows of more modest merchantmen were simply painted on. Our marble eye, the first from an ancient wreck and the first associated with a merchant ship, suggests otherwise. When we studied the marble eye more care fully, we saw how it had been painted black with a pupil and an outer ring to delineate the iris, then fastened to the hull with a lead spike. At summer's end I accompanied Deborah and others of our team to the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, the port of Athens, to examine trireme eyes excavated in the ship sheds there. We found their centers to be identical to
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