Sunken Ship -
Found Treasure
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Ancient treasure, Atocha treasure, boat sunken
buried treasure, famous sunken ship, gold treasure
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Trading Goods around the
Malay Peninsular.
Found treasure in sunken ships are a good
indicator to visualize the trade activities
over time in southeast
Asia and the Malay Peninsular.
This started during
pre-historic ages as early as the Neolithic
ages. Proven by objects such as cowries
found in the hinterland.
During the Metal Age, goods
for trading included metal axes, bells,
drums, bronze sockets and bowls, beads etc..
The emergence of several political powers
and small governments throughout the Malay
Peninsular increases the trade network.
Chronicles from
China, Arab Countries and
India together with other archeology
research show that other
famous goods for
trading includes ceramics, cloth products
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from the
forest, spices, weapons, items made from metal etc. Melaka then emerged as an international
trade center, inheriting the great tradition of the Srivijaya Empire.
In the past centuries many ships anchored in Malaka 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
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A mysterious 500 years old ship sunken 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.
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 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
Fugger family had
at that time heavy trade with Portugal.
Maybe someday at Oranje
mouth a museum will be built to exhibit the
treasure.
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Sunken Ship -
Found Treasure
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