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Greek underwater archaeologists investigating the wreck of the Mentor brig , which transported to England the marbles removed from the Acropolis of Athens by Lord Elgin, have discovered important objects ranging from Antiquity to the event.

As said on Wednesday the site manager, Dimitris Kurkumelis, "this wreck is related to one of the most dramatic events in our cultural history."

The brig sank after having hit rocks on the island of Kythira, south of Peloponnese, a few meters from the port of Avlemon in September 1802 .

The British ambassador of the Ottoman Empire Lord Elgin was able to recover from the shipwreck all the boxes containing the Parthenon metopes , impressive pieces that Greece still hopes to recover from England.

Elgin had obtained the pieces thanks to the permission of the Sultan, after which he ordered a large part of the inner frieze to be cut, to cut the metopes to separate them from the high relief - which caused the mutilation of many sculptures - and took possession of others, such as one of the Caryatids of the Erechtheion and various pieces of the Propylaea and the Temple of Athena Niké , all in the Acropolis.

In 1816 Elgin sold the pieces to his Government for 35,000 pounds in the middle of a great controversy, because he doubted that the imperial permit had given him free way to transfer such works.

The objects found by underwater archaeologists during the investigation provide information about Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages while they are from the end of the 18th century and are related to the logbook of the brig.

Among the findings of the investigation, which took place between August 27 and September 15, are the hilt of an ancient amphora manufactured on the island of Rhodes , two gold earrings, a gold ring also decorated with flowers, parts of a wooden compass, three chess pawns, a clay pot that was used for cooking and wooden pulleys with traces of ropes.

"The amphora dates from the second century BC, the ring is from the Byzantine period and the earrings must be from the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries," Kurkumelis explained.

The wreck investigation began in 2012 and so far has provided information on the construction of the brig.

"This brig was built in America and has differences with those built in Europe," Kurkumelis said.

According to the archaeologist, it has already been found and studied around a quarter of the ship's structure, which allows it to be compared with the brigs built in European shipyards.

The brig was a rowing sailboat that first appeared in the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century. From the sixteenth century, he stopped having oars and thus continued until the nineteenth century, being the most popular freighter, but also the ship preferred by pirates.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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