Restored Roman barge now on display in the Museum of Ancient Arles in Arles, France

Restored Roman barge now on display in the Museum of Ancient Arles in Arles, France. 

Arles was once a major commercial hub of the Roman Empire, where ships that plied the waters of the Rhône and the Mediterranean Sea unloaded their wares at the city’s docks. Due to storms and floods, some of those goods found themselves at the bottom of the murky Rhône, presumably lost forever. But with dredging, some of these ancient wonders were rediscovered, buried among the rotting tires, broken tiles and other detritus from the last twenty centuries.  One such find was a more than 100-foot long Roman barge discovered in 2004. But raising the barge and restoring it was expensive.  Fortunately, the European Union came to the rescue in 2013 with a grant to restore the ship and build a new wing of the Arles museum to house it.  You can now walk around the barge and see where the cargo was held and where the crew  of 2000 years ago cooked and slept.

https://www.francetoday.com/culture/treasures-of-the-museum-of-ancient-arles/



Image: Two thousand year old Roman barge at the Museum of Ancient Arles in Arles, France.  Image courtesy of photographer Rémi Bénali.

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