Sunken Treasure Ships Diving Ceramics

 as an international trade center, inheriting the great tradition of the Srivijaya Empire.

- In the past centuries many ships anchored in Malacca to trade

spices such as pepper, mace, clover, and other items such as tin, ivory, turtle shell and silver with traders from China, India, Europe -mainly Dutch and Portuguese-, Middle East and other
countries. This was traded  with weapons, perfumes, woven cloth, silk, sugar, sulphur, sandal wood, ion, ore, ceramics, camphor etc..

For various reasons many of this ship traffic ended fatal for some in a storm or other, the ships sunk taken all the treasures with them, now treasure hunting is on with sophisticated high tech machinery.
 

- The presence of colonial western powers such as the Portuguese, Dutch  

and British in the 16 Century brought about western ceramics, modern armory and other decorative items. The Malay Peninsular then became actively producing raw material such as tin ore and rubber for export especially to Europe.


The maritime states along the shores of the straits of Melaka possessed a host of natural geographical and nautical advantage to facilitate the coming of traders from east and west to Malay Archipelago, this included:

- The position of the straits of Malacca as a water highway between east and west.

Its suitability as a place for collection, channeling and exchanging of goods by a entreport
system. There was the alternate system of monsoon winds which determined the course and direction of sailing ships which sometimes ended on the bottom of the sea and in the sunken ships we found a lot of treasures this days.
 

The facilities, environmental and man made, which were provided in this entrepot  ports by the traditional Malay kingdom of that area.

The emergence of Melaka as an emporium and a center of international trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the region must be seen in the context of the type of residents and from the perspective of commercial activity.

We are already aware that Melaka inherited the historical traditions and represented a continuity of the Sri Vijaya kingdom situated on the shores of the Straits of Melaka in the centuries preceding the year 1400. Therefore, the historical experience connected with maritime activities was nothing new to the indigenous population. A good information on all this is in Kuala Lumpur.

During the early part of the Yuan Dynasty (1280-1368) potters at Jingdezhen in China succeeded in decorating whitish local clay with blue cobalt oxide under a clear glaze,
overcoming technical difficulties related to the color and the glaze. The date of this major breakthrough in ceramic history could have been around A.D. 1300.

Production of the  blue and white porcelain developed rapidly

during the Ming Dynasty (1368-

1644), greatly influenced by the imperial court and its stringent requirements.Although “imperial” kilns in the Jingdezhen area also made trade ware, those at Swatow, Dehua and Fujian

A mysterious 500 years old ship sunken in a other part of our planet off the coast of Namibia a few hundred years ago will soon disappear again and forever in the Atlantic Ocean. A grid stricken government wont give enough time to rescue the archeological findings, they want to dig after diamonds. Archeologists in a race against time, after the 10 October the salvage of the Portuguese ship at the coast of Namibia has to end, according to government order. It is probably the greatest treasure ever found at the Coast of Africa. Approximately six months ago, Namibian miners of the Namdeb Diamond Society found the rotten wreck skeleton of a approximately 500 years old Portuguese ship. They drained the sea for diamond digging and one of the workers discovered wood and round stones, the stones were identified as old cannonballs. At this coast called the  Skeleton Coast hundreds of ships got lost in the ocean over the last few hundreds of years. This culturally priceless discovery was something special, the ship was the most interesting Portuguese vessel outside of Portugal ever found. Huge quantities of  gold coins make it probably the most valuable discovery ever in Africa, Egypt excluded. In this sunken ship 13 tons of copper ingots, more than 2,300 gold coins with a total weight of 21 kilogram and one kilogram of silver coins, the researchers were able to find until now. Six bronze cannons, eight tons of pewter and more than 50 ivory tusks, which together 600 kg.. At first the scientists thought, after more than 500 years the lost ship of the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz have been found. Diaz was the first European to circumvent the southern tip of Africa in 1488. Around  1500 Diaz disappeared including his ship and the entire crew. The sunken ship wreckage was never found. But some of the coins found now were from October 1525, 25 years after Diaz disappeared, means the origin of the wreck remains a mystery. "Approximately 70 percent of the coins came from Spain, the rest from Portugal," The copper ingots had triple notches, a mark of the  German merchant and banking family Fugger. The Sunken Treasure Ship Gold Coins Fugger family had at that time heavy trade with Portugal. Maybe someday at Oranje mouth a museum will be built to exhibit the treasure.   - Treasure hunters continuously search the sea for sunken ships maybe loaded with some treasure or for underwater archeological reason. Some estimation are as far that about three million sunken ship are still somewhere in the ocean depths. This is a good motivation for treasure divers who usually won’t find anything but sometimes luck strikes. Certain sunken ship diving sites such as the Thistlegorm Wreck in the red sea off Sharm el Sheikh became real tourist attractions since sunken ships open a limited view into the past

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