This shipwreck was discovered near Marmaris, at Serce Limani,'Sparrow Harbour' a natural harbour on the Turkish southern coast in 1977. The ship was lying at 35 meters depth and archaeologist had to move 100 tons of sand to reach the remains of the ship. The result was astonishing. The ship contained more artifacts than any other shipwreck excavated up this time and yielded a collection of the most closely dated assemblage of Islamic ceramics, glass, and metal. It is well accepted that this was a Arabic ship of the 11th century with a glass cargo which consisted of finished product in addition to nearly 2 tons of raw glass culets (blocks) and nearly 1 ton of thousands of broken pieces. The ship, which started from the southern part of the Syrian coast, was probably carrying it's cargo to a glass factory for re-melting and remaking somewhere either in the Crimea or lower Danube region. The ship is 15m long with a flat bottom, ideal for river navigation.Although this was a Muslim ship, from the remains of pork bones, the archaeologists suggest that there were some Christian passenger on-board.This is further confirmed by the discovery of artifacts depicting figures of Peter,Paul,Mary and Christ. Other artifacts suggest people on the ship did some fishing. They also played chess when they had free time.The large number of swords, daggers and spears suggest that they were also well armed against attack by pirates. About 750,000 shards of glass were raised from the wreck.Many were cemented together in rock hard seabed concretion that required careful dissection with dental tools.After each shard was linked with a numbered code to preserve it's find spot on the wreck to within 50mm, all the glass was sorted by colour, thickness and decoration.This allowed conservators to find joining fragments.Over 200 different vessel shapes, some unique, had been identified by the time this exhibit opened in 1990. It is estimated that between 10 and 20,000 broken glass vessels are involved. Not all the fragments of a vessel are ever found, for they were not complete when placed on-board the ship.The cargo consists of used and broken glassware bought by door to door 'ragmen', along with rejects and waste from glass factories.As with recycled glass today, the glass was tamped down and broken into tiny pieces to take up less room.This makes the glass menders job much more difficult today.