A 2,500-year-old graffiti featuring 21 ships, which was found in the basement of the civil basilica of the Agora of Smyrna, sheds light on the history of western Turkey’s Izmir.
Akın Ersoy, a faculty member of the Turkish and Islamic Archaeology department of Izmir Katip Çelebi University, stated that the graffiti is one of the most concrete documents of the historical port city of Izmir.
The excavations revealed the commercial and judicial structure of the agora, which is one of the largest ancient period agoras of the world.
Agoras were open spaces serving as meeting grounds for various activities in ancient Greek cities.
Highlighting that the graffiti depicts commercial ships rather than warships, “We assume that these ships were making commercial voyages in the Mediterranean in the second, third and fourth centuries B.C.
The materials were transported from Egypt and North Africa to the Aegean,” he added.
