In 50 BCE Cicero Bragged About Ordering These Luxury Dishes—Divers Just Found a 2,100-Year-Old Shipwreck Packed With Them

Adrasan 122-Form Rhosus Tableware Wreck • Behbeit El-Hagar Ramesses II Colossi • Tongeren Censored Well Tablets & İkiztepe Surgery

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Active Site: 1. Adrasan 2,100-Yr Rhosus Tableware Wreck (Türkiye) State: Raw-Clay Casing Sealed (0%) Locus: 122 Forms of Eastern Sigillata A ("Rhosica Vasa")
Drag to rotate the 3D discovery • Click buttons 1–4 below to switch between the 4 breakthrough models!
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Cicero's "Rhosica Vasa": How Raw Clay Protected a 2,100-Year-Old Luxury Dishware Shipwreck

In 50 BCE, while serving as Roman governor of Cilicia in southern Anatolia, the famous orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a letter to his wealthy friend Atticus (Epistulae ad Atticum 6.1.13). When Atticus asked him to send home fine ceramic tableware from the port of Rhosus (modern Arsuz, Hatay Province), Cicero boasted that Rhosus dishes were so exquisite he used them to serve vegetarian banquets to guests who normally expected solid gold or silver plate.

Now, an underwater team led by Prof. Hakan Öniz (Akdeniz University) diving 138 to 180 feet (42–55 meters) down off Adrasan in Antalya, Türkiye, has excavated a 2,100-year-old merchant vessel loaded with thousands of those exact Rhosus plates, bowls, and platters across 122 distinct forms and sizes:

  • The Ancient Raw-Clay Packing Secret: Why didn't thousands of fragile ceramic dishes shatter when the ship hit the seabed? Before departure, Rhosus dockworkers stacked the bowls in tight columns and encased the entire stacks in thick raw, unfired clay. The soft clay absorbed the impact of the sinking and formed an airtight cocoon that preserved even the glossy red-slip finish for two millennia!
  • Dated by Coins of Antioch: Bronze coins minted in nearby Antioch in the 1st century BCE were found in the sand beside the cargo, pinning the voyage right to the lifetime of Cicero.

Ramesses II's Twin Colossi, Belgium's Burned Well Tablets & İkiztepe's 5,000-Yr Brain Surgery

Click tabs 2, 3, and 4 in the 3D studio above to inspect three more headline discoveries from 2026:

  • 2. A Villager's Carved Block Leads to Two Colossal Statues of Ramesses II (Behbeit El-Hagar, Egypt): In October 2026, a resident near the Nile Delta temple ruins of Behbeit El-Hagar spotted a carved granite block near his house. Excavations uncovered two colossal royal statues—including a massive granite head bearing Ramesses II's Horus name on its back pillar, brought to the temple nearly 900 years after the pharaoh's reign!
  • 3. Roman Wooden Tablets Thrown Into a Well So Nobody Could Ever Read Them (Tongeren, Belgium): Rediscovered in museum storage by Else Hartoch and deciphered by Prof. Markus Scholz and Prof. Jürgen Blänsdorf, 85 fragments of Roman wooden wax tablets from ancient Atuatuca Tungrorum had been deliberately burned and dumped down a deep well in antiquity so their political and financial secrets would be erased forever—only for modern RTI imaging to read the stylus scratches in the charred wood!
  • 4. The 5,000-Year-Old Cranial Surgery Skull from İkiztepe Höyüğü (Samsun, Türkiye): Exhibited at the Samsun Museum alongside the sand-grain Amisos Mosaic, this Early Bronze Age human skull (~3000 BCE) preserves intentional cranial trepanation surgery with smoothed bone edges proving the patient survived the operation.

2026 Mediterranean & European Archaeological Breakthroughs Matrix

3D Model Tab & Discovery Site Date & Context Diagnostic Artifacts & Forensics Historical Breakthrough
1. Adrasan Shipwreck (Antalya, Türkiye) ~1st C. BCE • 42–55m Depth Thousands of Rhosus Dishes (122 Forms) in Raw Clay Physical cargo of the luxury tableware praised by Cicero in 50 BCE
2. Behbeit El-Hagar (Gharbia, Egypt) 19th Dynasty Statue in Late/Ptolemaic Site 2 Colossal Statues + Ramesses II Horus Name Pillar Villager's report uncovered two royal colossi reused 900 years later
3. Tongeren / Atuatuca (Belgium) Roman Imperial Provincial Era 85 Charred & Cracked Wooden Wax Tablet Fragments Burned and dumped in a well to destroy records; read via RTI imaging
4. İkiztepe Höyüğü (Samsun, Türkiye) ~3000 BCE (Early Bronze Age) Trephined Human Cranium With Osteoblastic Healing One of Anatolia's earliest surviving cranial neurosurgeries

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I switch between the 4 different 3D models in the studio above?

Click any of the four buttons beneath the 3D viewport—🍽️ 1. Cicero’s Rhosus Wreck, 👑 2. Ramesses II Colossi (Egypt), 🪵 3. Tongeren Secret Well Tablets, or 🧠 4. İkiztepe 5,000-Yr Surgery. Each button loads a unique 3D reconstruction, and dragging the 🧩 Unpack / Separate slider opens the raw-clay shipping casing around the 122-form dish stacks or separates the archaeological layers.

How could scientists read Roman wax tablets from Tongeren if the wax melted 1,800 years ago?

Roman wooden writing tablets (tabulae ceratae) had a shallow recessed wooden frame filled with dark beeswax. When a scribe pressed an iron or bone stylus through the wax, the sharp tip accidentally scratched microscopic grooves into the soft wood underneath. Even though the owners burned the tablets and threw them down a well in Tongeren to destroy the contracts and official records, multi-angle Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) allowed Prof. Markus Scholz and Prof. Jürgen Blänsdorf to separate the stylus scratches from the natural wood grain!

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