Abu Mustafa has his own little museum in front of his fish shop in the small fishermen harbor of Tyre.

“Ten thousand dollars for all of it,” he says to the tourists who ask. “If you ask by piece, they’re five dollars, $10, $30. It depends on the piece,” he adds, pointing to an ancient amphora and to a Bacchus mask he says he recovered some time ago. 

Small-scale commerce in relics from ancient submerged Tyre is good business. Abu Mustafa sometimes recovers them while he’s fishing, and sometimes he dives especially for them. He has been doing it since he was 10 years old. Byzantine, Roman, Greek, Phoenician. They all pay. He explains he lives off of selling these artifacts to tourists, as many of the fishermen in Tyre do. 

“It must be Elissar, the queen of Tyre. She’s the one who built Carthage. We still pray to her and she helps us,” he says ceremoniously. 

Abu Mustafa is 50. In 40 years he learned everything about archeology. He can tell the difference between a Roman artifact covered in verdigris and a Phoenician or Greek one.  “The Roman objects have round features. Look at that Roman medical kit there. All utensils have round circles, see?” he says.

The Roman medical kit on sale at Abu Mustafa’s stand in the Tyre souq. (NOW Lebanon)

Antoine is 37 and he is a fisherman too, just like his father, his uncle and his grandfather before him. But he says he never dove to see the ancient submerged Tyre. He does know about the huge Phoenician and Roman columns, and the relics and houses buried in the sand on the bottom of the sea. His grandfather, father and uncle told him about the treasures down there. His 70-year-old uncle Razkallah might know more about it, he says and points to an old man who sits with some fishermen playing backgammon at one of the small cafes in the harbor.

“There is a whole city under the sea, with houses covered by sand. Anybody could see it if they removed the sand,” Razkallah says, pointing to the water. He says he can’t skin dive anymore, as he is too old. Now he just works on land as a fisherman. 

He says that fishermen skin dive with just a bottle of oxygen as equipment. “Anybody who knows how to dive does it. They bring up little souvenirs, little relics from the Roman or Phoenician times to sell them in the market.” 

Is it legal? The question makes him laugh, exposing his completely toothless gums. Then he comes closer, almost touches my face with his and whispers, looking around carefully. “They also bring the big statues, you know? The huge ones! They sell them on the black market for $5,000 each. But for them they have to dive 70 meters down with a compressor. They bring them out, they wrap them in blankets and they sell them to rich people.” 

Ali Baddawi, the archeologist in charge of the city of Tyre, knows it is happening. “They have been diving for relics since the 1920s or 1930s. It was very easy back then, and especially during the civil war, when there was no authority here,” he says. “But starting the 1990s, the army and the police started to patrol the two harbors of Tyre. Around a decade ago they actually caught a group of people with some statues wrapped in blankets. The statues are now exhibited in the History Museum in Beirut.”
 
He says the problem has been “minimized” now. He investigated the artifacts sold in the market, but he says the souk is also full of fake relics too. “Some of the sellers became really good at counterfeiting relics. They make them and then they throw them in the water for a few years and then they take them out and sell them to inexperienced tourists,” he laughs.

But the smuggling problem is still there, he says. “There are still people using the compressor diving method to reach the depth where the relics are. We can say that one out of 20 divers go out there for the antiquities. What they do is very harmful, because they use dynamite or other explosives. It is harmful for the environment too, not just for the relics,” Baddawi says.

He suggests that there should be a policeman in Tyre specialized in investigating the relic smuggling. The issue falls under the jurisdiction of the organized crime unit of the Internal Security Forces, the body that deals with drug and weapons trafficking. “Compared to this, relics being sold on the black market might not seem a priority. That’s why we need somebody specialized in this. Not a whole antiquities police unit as in Italy, but at least one policeman who could investigate this.”