An Italian cultural heritage outfit has announced the recovery of a Roman battering ram from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
The ram, or rostrum, made up the prow of a Roman warship. It was used in the Battle of the Aegates, the team stated, a naval battle between Rome and Carthage that marked the end of the first Punic War in 241 BCE, after 23 years of conflict between the two empires.
The discovery of the rostrum, announced by Sicily’s Department of Cultural Heritage’s Superintendence of the Sea, was recovered by divers with the Society for the Documentation of Submerged Sites. The recovery team also used the research vessel Hercules to aid in the rostrum’s identification and recovery.
The dive team found the rostrum on the seabed at a depth of about 262 feet (80 meters). The artifact was recovered from a stretch of the Mediterranean between Levanzo and Favignana, small islands just west of Sicily, where archaeological surveys have been conducted over the last 20 years. According to LiveScience, the ram is now on land in Favignana, and initial study of the artifact has revealed an ornamental relief of a helmet and feathers.
Since the early 2000s, 27 rostra have been found, according to the team’s social media post. The rostra were used for—you guessed it—ramming enemy ships, with the goal of punching holes in them, ultimately sinking them. Other ancient wartime artifacts have also been identified in the team’s surveys, including 30 Roman helmets, two swords, and a relatively common find in Mediterranean archaeology, plenty of amphorae.
The Mediterranean Sea near Sicily and Tunisia was a popular maritime corridor during the Roman Empire—or at least it seems so based on recent archaeological findings. Last year, a UNESCO-coordinated mission found three shipwrecks off the treacherous Keith Reef between Sicily and Tunisia, one of which was dated to between 200 BCE and 100 BCE. That research team also studied three Roman wrecks off the Italian coast, two of which were 1st-century merchant vessels and one of which dated to the 1st-century BCE.
The recently recovered rostrum is older than those wrecks, however, and is a remarkably vivid window into an ancient battle, and the fierce naval conflicts that shaped the ancient world. The Battle of the Aegates saw most of the Carthaginian fleet sunk or captured, and resulted in Roman supremacy on the Mediterranean. All told, there were three Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, which resulted in the destruction of Carthage.
