Gottfried (ship)

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The Gottfried was under Danish propelled Flag schooner that on the night of March 12, 1822 between Cuxhaven , Eider estuary west of the island and a point Trischen ran into heavy seas aground and then sank. With the ship precious antique went Egyptian finds that for the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. were destined to be lost.

ship

The Gottfried was a cargo sailing ship built in Greifswald in 1815 from oak with two masts of the Huker -Galeasse type . The length of the ship was 20 m, the draft with the maximum cargo of 157 t was less than 3 m. She sailed under the Danish flag and under the command of Greifswald captain Heinrich Jacob Riesbeck, who had taken it over in 1818. The home port was Copenhagen . Riesbeck went down with the ship.

Average

At the beginning of 1822 the Gottfried was on her way from Trieste to Hamburg . She cast off in Trieste on December 10, 1821, but made unplanned stops, for example in Livorno , which increased the duration of the crossing. On board the ship had ancient Egyptian finds, some of which the Prussian nobleman Baron Menu von Minutoli had dug up himself in 1820/1821 and some of which had bought in Luxor . Some of them came from Saqqara . Only the heaviest valuables from Egypt were stowed in 97 freight boxes on the Gottfried in Trieste . The rest of the valuable antiquities were transported overland from Venice to Berlin.

On the night of March 11th to 12th, 1822, the Gottfried sank during a severe hurricane in the mouth of the Elbe near Cuxhaven , whose sandbanks are also known as Nordergrund. The ship is believed to be south of the Gelbersand sandbank near the Klotzenloches. The 5 days raging hurricane in the North Sea prevented the rescue of the team. Almost all crew members and one passenger were killed. Eight people drowned, only one sailor survived. Contemporaries described the hurricane as the strongest in living memory - it even pushed the water out of the Thames , so that various finds in the empty river bed could be made with dry feet.

The Gottfried accident would have plunged Minutoli, who found out about it in Venice at the time, into financial ruin and into a personal crisis if he had not insured the cargo with 27,000 Marks Banco . He had originally planned to use the finds in Berlin as the basis of a planned Egyptian museum.

search

In 2003 there was a hot lead in the search for the wreck . During a photo preservation, the Egyptologist Renate Germer in the Egyptian department of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) accidentally discovered a lock of hair from a mummy that came from the ship and which she became aware of when it was mentioned in a historical letter. Mummy curls were popular gifts back then. She then made contact with her colleague Joachim Karig from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin , for whom the cargo was intended at the time. Karig and Leive investigated in 1992 on the ship Altair with sediment - Echo counts after the wreck and released in 1993 on the then state of the search. Until his retirement, Karig was deputy director and chief curator at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin .

After the accident, parts of the cargo were washed up on the left bank of the Elbe between Cuxhaven, Otterndorf and Balje (including seven of eight mummies and an Arab tent that Minutoli had received from the then ruler of Egypt, Mehemed Ali ). The location of the wreck was known to the Cuxhaven pilot commander Christopher Jansen. The later search could be built from his correspondence. The found objects were auctioned off on September 4, 1822 by broker Johannes Noodt at an auction in Hamburg on behalf of Messrs. Assecuradeure. During a search in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in July 1991, Leive and the museum management of the MKG found a male mummy skull with a gold coating, which can be assumed to be the gilded mummy skull, the minutoli of the step pyramid from Saqqara with two gilded soles and the head of a little vulture. These pieces were demonstrably part of the cargo. Apart from the discovery of Renate Germer and the discovery of Leive, nothing is known about the whereabouts of the auctioned pieces, apart from the fact that on February 1, 1823 , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe received a braided curl from the then Göttingen anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Head hair of a female Egyptian mummy received. Blumenbach himself kept another one for his skull collection. According to the state of research, these curls and the curls from the MKG come from the mummy of the Senchonsis (also called Saupaulis), who was born on May 12, 101 AD as the daughter of Piket and on March 11, 145 AD . died. Together with twelve other mummies, Senchonsis was taken from the family grave of the Theban archon Soter by Antonio Lebolo .

The museum in Berlin owns some of Minutoli's collector's items, which at the time were not taken by sea in 20 boxes, but were transported overland. After long research in cooperation with the history and coastal researcher Rainer Leive, both Karig and Leive believe that they have found the site in the middle of the wide estuary of the Elbe near the "Nordergrund". The find area is close to the busy shipping channel, is feared because of its shallows and is subject to constant changes. There are also numerous other wrecks there. Since the Elbe is to be deepened and expanded in the coming years, time was of the essence. In the summer of 2010, underwater archaeologists led by Martin Segschneider from the Schleswig-Holstein State Archaeological Office searched a place delimited by side-viewing sonar , which was suspicious by several larger objects that were scattered like a shipwreck. In 2011, Segschneider and employees explored the places accessible when the water is low. However, the wreckage or objects from the cargo were not found. It should be emphasized at this point that the search was not for the wreck of the Gottfried , but for lost cargo.

The cargo - the cargo list has been preserved - included a heavy sarcophagus made of red granite , the top of a pyramid made of syenite , a door frame, animal mummies, minerals, steles made of various materials and vases made of clay and alabaster . The sarcophagus was decorated with images and hieroglyphics inside and out . Minutoli had employed 200 workers for three months to recover it from a 90-foot-deep shaft. This unusually large amount of work alone indicates that this can hardly be a normal-sized stone sarcophagus.

Others

In 1992 a film was made in the ZDF series C14 Advancing into the Past by Gisela Graichen and Hans Hellmut Hillrichs (director: Rita Knobel-Ulrich) about the case. A film about the search for the wreck and the Gottfried was broadcast in October 2012 by ZDF in the Terra X series. In 2011 there were exhibitions in Greifswald and in the Natureum Niederelbe .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New exhibition in the Rathausgalerie: Sunk in the Elbe Estuary - The Minutoli Collection and the sinking of the Greifswald Hukergaleasse "Gottfried" 1822 , University and Hanseatic City of Greifswald, August 20, 2011. Accessed October 25, 2012.
  2. ^ ZDF media library TERRA-X. Broadcast creation October 28, 2012
  3. ↑ Gisela Graichen : The secret of the mummies from the Elbe . In: Hamburger Abendblatt . December 6, 2003
  4. ^ The exhibition in Greifswald