Shipwrecks Under Istanbul

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig

76 43 11 years ago

paganel• 11 years ago

That’s when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from around 6000 B.C. It was previously unknown that anyone had lived on the site of the old city before around 1300 B.C. (...) In the Stone Age, the water level of the Bosporus was far lower than it is now; there’s a chance that the people who left those prints might have been able to walk from Anatolia to Europe.

That part is really interesting. For those HN-ers not interested in those times, there is the "Black Sea deluge hypothesis" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis) which says something like this:

The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BC due to waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosporus strait

gerbal• 11 years ago

Doggerland[1] and Sundaland[2] were also above the sea at that point. I wonder if there were neolithic cities, the precursors to Uruk, that are lost beneath the sea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland

gkya10• 11 years ago

I'm a Turkish citizen, Istanbulite, now 23 years old. I have happened to witness all of this in person in this city. I wear two identities, if I can say so, one is that I'm from the bosphorus, Bogazici, and the other is that I belong to the near east. This sort of findings delight me a lot. It proves that at the end of the day the human is to measure, that he be the one to be measured, and that after tens of thousands of years all we have been able to do is better tools, nothing more. Regarding the Erdogan and the rest, he's just the tip of the iceberg. The Turkish have been miserable all the time, and recently more, because, as a turkish proverb proceeds to say, the feet became the head. If it wasn't him to be made so powerful by the crowd of angry ignorant fundamentalists, it would be someone else. In this country of genocides, now one is active against the population of reasonables.

afsina9• 11 years ago

What makes you the "reasonable" and others "ignorant fundamentalists" again? The hubris of elitism has never ceased to amaze me.

acqq10• 11 years ago

"Fundamentalist" as in "religious fundamentalist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_fundamentalism

Compare their goals to then successful work of Ataturk in 20th century in Turkey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk's_Reforms

reitanqild2• 11 years ago

"ignorant fundamentalists" exists.

Stop and observe an you might see them as well: Religious, Atheists, Europeans, Africans etc.

Some of them have managed to make more harm than others and Turkey -just like my home country, has a recent history (last 120 years) of killing parts of its own population just being different.

gkya10• 11 years ago

That what makes me reasonable is that I think when I have to decide, and I do so in a dialectical manner looking for the objective truth, instead of referring myself to dogmas for justifying my subjective view of the world.

Now if you'll defend those who chop off heads, make genocides, defend past genocides, steal money while looking religious, oppress the minorities, disable education facilities, polarize the people, lie shamelessly for their own benefit, blow-up monuments of our past, force their views on others, commit massacres in the name of their beliefs, disrupt anybody else, homogenate the minorities, kill languages and cultures for national-fascist wills, kill innocent people for political benefits, accept bribes, become corrupt... then I don't know what can I do for you.

The aggressiveness of ignorance never ceased to amaze me.

gkya10• 11 years ago

To the downvoters of the above-post: Stop downvoting this guy. His critique fair and correct, he has a solid point. And he's helped me elaborate my point better. And somewhere in this thread you lot will see that we eventually agree on a lot of points. What's wrong with you? I want to think that the HN crowd is an educated one.

tragomaskhalos• 11 years ago

What shines through very clearly is, on the one hand, the dignity and professionalism of your fellow citizens involved in the preservation work (and the strict laws protecting archeological finds are also something to be very proud of), and, on the other, the boorishness of Erdogan. That's politicians for you though :(

srean• 11 years ago

Eloquently put.

kirk21• 11 years ago

"Byzantine shipwrecks found during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus held up work for years."

Why does it have to take that long to dig up these ships and start the works?

gkya10• 11 years ago

Man, it's tedious work to unearth those stuff. One cannot use big shovels and machines, sometimes you have to work with fingertips and painting-brushes. And the so-called old-city (what I hate to call Fatih) is, I mean whenever you dig a hole you find something. By my school there is the constructions site for another entrance to the already-existent metro station, and it is still not completed after maybe two years. And all they wanted was to dig down a single storey entrance that then linked to the one that already was there. Then they found some 2500 yrs-old Byzantine sarcophagi, and, you may guess the rest...

prawn• 11 years ago

Only part way through, but what an incredible story, both from the perspective of the historical findings and the modern progress in transport for locals.

leaveyou• 11 years ago

The ridiculous lack of pictures in this article makes Jules Verne books feel like albums.

Shipwrecks Under Istanbul

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