2,000-Year Old Greek Shipwreck Reveals Medical Secrets of the Ancient World

The Daily Galaxy, September 12, 2010

Twenty years ago, Archaeologists discovered a ship created In 130 BC from wood of walnut trees and bulging with a cargo hold of medicial pills and Syrian glassware, that sank off the coast of  Tuscany Italy. 

For the first time archaeobotanists have been able to examine and analyse the pills that were prepared by the physicians of ancient Greece. DNA analyses show that each millennia old tablet is a mixture of more than ten different plant extracts; from hibiscus to celery. Most of the medicines are still completely dry according to Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C.

“For the first time, we have physical evidence of what we have in writing from the ancient Greek physicians Dioscorides and Galen,” stated Alain Touwaide of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Fleischer analysed DNA fragments in two of the pills and compared the sequences to the GenBank genetic database maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He was able to identify: carrot, radish, celery, wild onion, oak, cabbage, alfalfa and yarrow. He also found hibiscus extract that was probably imported from east Asia or the lands of present day India or Ethiopia.

“Most of these plants are known to have been used by the ancients to treat sick people,” says Fleischer. Yarrow staunched the flow of blood from wounds, and Pedanius Dioscorides, a physician and pharmacologist in Rome in the first century AD, described the carrot as a panacea for a number of problems. “They say that reptiles do not harm people who have taken it in advance; it also aids conception,” he wrote around 60 AD.

The concoctions also provided the archaeobotanists a few surprises. Preliminary analyses suggest they contain sunflower, a plant that is not thought to have existed in the Old World before Europeans discovered the Americas in the 1400s. If the finding is confirmed, botanists may need to revise the traditional history of the plant and its diffusion, says Touwaide – but it’s impossible for now to be sure that the sunflower in the pills isn’t simply from recent contamination.

Drugs described by Dioscorides and another Greek physician known as Galen of Pergamon have often been dismissed as ineffectual quackery. “Scholars and scientists have often dismissed the literature on such medicines, and expressed doubt about their possible efficacy, which they attributed only to the presence of opium,” says Touwaide. He hopes to resolve this debate by exploring whether the plant extracts in the pills are now known to treat illnesses effectively.

He also hopes to discover therian, a medicine described by Galen in the second century AD that contains more than 80 different plant extracts and document the exact measurements ancient doctors used to manufacture the pills. “Who knows, these ancient medicines could open new paths for pharmacological research,” says Touwaide.

The team presented their findings at the Fourth International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Copenhagen, Denmark.