Qualla: Bajo de la Campana Phoenician Shipwreck

Bajo de la Campana Phoenician Shipwreck: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nanosanchez, Public domain. Sixty-four elephant tusks came up from the seabed off Cartagena, and at least eleven of them still carried prayers. Cut into the ivory, in the angular letters of the Phoenician alphabet, were pleas to the goddess Ashtart and the god Eshmun, declarations of piety and requests for a blessing. Other tusks bore men's names, most likely the merchants who supplied them. These were carved by hands that expected the ivory to end its voyage in a temple, laid before a god as an offering. Instead it ended on the floor of the Mediterranean, where a trading ship went down more than 2,600 years ago and lay undisturbed until divers found it by accident in the 1950s.

Image: Nanosanchez | Public domain

Bajo de la Campana Phoenician Shipwreck: The Shoal of the Bell

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felipe Ortega, CC BY-SA 2.0. The wreck rests at the Bajo de la Campana, the shoal of the bell, a submerged reef roughly 20 miles northeast of Cartagena and just offshore from the long sandbar of La Manga del Mar Menor. Spanish inspections in 1972 and 1988 concluded that scattered finds here belonged to three...

Image: Felipe Ortega | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bajo de la Campana Phoenician Shipwreck: The Last Voyage

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jamie Heath, CC BY 2.0. The ship set out near the end of the seventh century BC, most likely from a Phoenician port along the south coast of Spain, heading east with more than four tons of cargo. When it reached Cabo de Palos, the rocky point where the Spanish coast bends northward, a hard easterly wind...

Image: Jamie Heath | CC BY 2.0

Bajo de la Campana Phoenician Shipwreck: Cargo From a Dozen Shores

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jamie Heath, CC BY 2.0. The hold was a map of the ancient Mediterranean. There was more than a ton of lead ore from southeastern Spain, 154 tin ingots from the northwestern Mediterranean, thirteen copper ingots traced to at least eight different regions from southern Iberia to Sardinia and Cyprus, and 1...

Image: Jamie Heath | CC BY 2.0

Bajo de la Campana Phoenician Shipwreck: Names Cut in Ivory

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jamie Heath, CC BY 2.0. The finds that linger longest are the personal ones. Beyond the inscribed tusks came an ivory knife handle carved with quiet elegance, double-ended boxwood combs, decorated ostrich eggs, an alabaster jar, and a bronze fitting shaped like a forearm holding a stylized lotus blossom...

Image: Jamie Heath | CC BY 2.0