Ancient ship Kybele reaches Italy one month after launch The Kybele, a boat built over a three-year period based on ancient ship designs, is continuing on its stormy 1,700 mile voyage, reaching Italy at the end of the first month of its voyage. The Kybele is accompanied by a smaller boat, the Harem.
A team of 20 rowers will next week aim to cross the Mediterranean Sea in a replica Phoenician-style "bireme" ship from Turkey to France. The Kybele boat -- named after an Anatolian goddess -- will leave the Turkish village of Foca near Izmir and travel 3,700 kilometres to the ancient port of Marseille in southern France.
The ancient Phoenicians may be largely forgotten, but they're not gone.
Rome destroyed the Phoenicians' greatest city - Carthage - centuries ago, but new genetic studies indicate that as many as one in 17 men living in communities around the Mediterranean may be descended from these ancient mariners.
Archaeologists in Sardinia have claimed to have found the port of the Phoenician city of Tharros, held by some to be the ancient peoples most important colony in the Mediterranean after Carthage. Researchers from the University of Cagliari and Sassari found the submerged port in the Mistras Lagoon, several kilometres from the city ruins.
On Arwad Island off the coast of Syria, a group of 20 sailors-to-be are preparing for a voyage their captain believes has not been undertaken for two and a half millennia. They plan to set off on Sunday on a journey that attempts to replicate what the Greek historian Herodotus mentions as the first circumnavigation of Africa in about 600BC.
More than 2,500 years after the first circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians, a brand new replica ship with 20 paying crew is preparing to follow in the footsteps of these ancient mariners.
British sailor Philip Beale aims to rewrite a bit of African history by sailing around the continent in a boat built with the same materials that he believes the Phoenicians used 2,500 years ago to make the same trip. Built of Aleppo pine, held together with wooden dowels and powered by wind and muscle, the 66-foot-long Phoenicia will set out down the Suez Canal on Aug. 6. Beale aims to complete the 15,000-mile clockwise journey 10 months later.
A Lebanese genetic scientist who has been following the genetic footprint of the ancient Phoenician civilisation across the Mediterranean for the last five years has found that close to one-third of modern-day Maltese share a genetic link with the ancient Phoenicians. Thirty per cent of DNA samples taken from Malta have been found to share a common and ancient genetic marker, known as the J2 haplogroup, with the Phoenician civilisation, which had colonised Malta for much of the first millennium BC.