Ancient canal on Rome's trade route found
One of the biggest canals ever built by the Romans in an ancient port has been discovered
Rome: One of the biggest canals ever built by the Romans in an ancient port as important as Carthage or Alexandria has been discovered by archaeologists.
Scholars discovered the 100-yard-wide canal at Portus, the port through which goods from all over the empire were shipped to Rome for more than 400 years.
The archaeologists, from Cambridge and Southampton universities and the British School at Rome, believe the canal connected Portus, on the coast at the mouth of the Tiber, with the river port of Ostia, two miles away.
Cargo
It would have enabled cargo to be moved from big seagoing ships to smaller river vessels and taken up the Tiber to the docks and warehouses of the imperial capital.
Until now, it was thought that goods took a more circuitous overland route along a Roman road known as the Via Flavia.
The team, which includes Italian archaeologists, also unearthed a dozen human skeletons and a white marble head of a bearded man which they believe may represent Ulysses.
The three-year dig is the most comprehensive ever at the site 20 miles west of Rome. It has shown that trading links with North Africa were more extensive than previously thought.
