Pavlopetri
Pavlopetri is a small island across the beach next to the village Viglafia in Laconia in Peloponnese, Greece . Between the island and the shore is an ancient city, submerged a few meters below the surface, with an age of about 5000 years.
It has been discovered in 1967 by Nicholas Flemming and mapped in 1968 by a team at the University of Cambridge.
It is a city with excellent layout, well designed streets, two-storey houses surrounded by gardens and a complex water management system, as shown by the channels and gutters. Located only four feet below the sea surface. It is a submerged ancient Greek city, which comes straight from the heroic age of Homer.In the heart of the city, there was a square about 40 meters long and 20meters wide, and most homes had twelve rooms. Among the buildings, often built into the walls are stone-built tombs for babies while an organized cemetery is just outside the city.
In Paulopetri, as called from the next village, Greek and foreign archaeologists working intensively in recent years, but only in 2011 the ancient city was fully mapped digitally -with a margin of error of less than three centimeters- and then "rebuilt" in three dimensions with the help of modern technology. The three-dimensional model of the sunken city, created by the University of Nottingham, presented even a while ago in a documentary by BBC.
The team has so far identified dozens of buildings, six major roads and even religious shrines and tombs. The survey results also demonstrate that the city was the center of a thriving textile industry. Between 2000 and 1100 BC and the port city flourished reaching its maximum size in the period from 1700 to 1500 BC, while the abandonment took nearly a century before the end of the first millennium BC. At that time it covered about 20 acres as shown by surveys.
The name is still unknown, however, and so the political regime. Nevertheless, archaeologists believe that it was a commercial or political satellite of the Minoan civilization and during the last few centuries of its existence probably functioned as a port of the Mycenaean world. Around 1200 BC, indeed, a time associated with the War of Troy would be a thriving town with about 2,000 inhabitants.
The remains of hundreds of huge jars,called 'pithos' in Greek, used for storage and transport of various products such as olive oil, wine, dyes, perfumes and even gnomes scattered around the seabed. A large building also had a large depot for imported food, which as evidenced by the types of vessels came from throughout the region of the Aegean and Minoan Crete. The archaeologists have also discovered fragments of everyday items such as cooking pots and ornate drinking vessels, possibly for esteemed guests or offerings to the gods. In some cases, the townspeople were making copies of these vessels copying the style of Crete and the Greek mainland factor own products pottery.
10-The city finally sunk beneath the waves during a series of earthquakes in the region, so that the land declined relative to sea level. But the information that archaeologists managed to acquire through research, give us a detailed picture of how a city of the Bronze Age was.
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