Mylonas Lecture in Classical Art and Archaeology: "The Kyrenia Ship and the Goods of its Crew"

The Kyrenia ship, so named when it was discovered in 1964 largely intact one mile north of the northern Cypriot town of Kyrenia, is the best preserved small Greek merchant ship ever found.  Its cargo included 400 amphoras, most from Rhodes along with some from Knidos, Samos, Paros, and Cyprus, 45 sizeable unused millstones, iron ingots, nearly 10,000 almonds, a consignment of oak planks and logs—and 109 whole and fragmentary vessels that comprised the goods of the crew.  It is these goods that allow us a glimpse of life on board for the ship's crews.  They tell us of something about the crew's character, the place and date of the ship's final departure, the routes of earlier voyages—and even reveal the ship's beginnings before it became a Greek merchantman. 

Professor Andrea M. Berlin is the James R Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology at Boston University.  She has been excavating in the eastern Mediterranean for over thirty years, working on projects from Troy in Turkey to Coptos in southern Egypt to Paestum, in Italy.  Her specialty is the Near East from the time of Alexander the Great through the Roman era, about which she has written four books and over fifty articles.  She is especially interested in studying the realities of daily life, and in exploring the intersection of politics and cultural change in antiquity. 

The event is co-sponsored by The Hellenic Government-Karakas Foundation Professorship in Greek Studies at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis,The Departments of Classics and Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Classical Club of St. Louis.