Uluburun Diptych
I've been meaning to post about this find for quite some time, but other things keep getting in the way.
Between 1984 and 1994, underwater archaeologists working near Uluburun, Turkey, excavated a marvelously preserved shipwreck from the 14th century B.C. Among the amphorae and ingots of copper and tin, they found an object no one expected to find: a partially preserved wooden diptych.
This particular diptych, which would have been coated with wax, probably contained a ship's inventory, but it might also have contained a letter, perhaps between merchants, perhaps between local rulers. The existence of this object and the possibilities it offers suggested the plausibility of the correspondence between Hermione and Orestes in Helen's Daughter.