Divers find marble treasure from Athens' Acropolis in Lord Elgin's shipwrecked brig at the bottom of the Aegean Sea

A scuba diver with a large flexible vacuum tube over their left shoulder digs into a soft tan sand .

A marble fragment from the Acropolis of Athens has been found in the remains of a ship that sank in 1802, according to Greece's Ministry of Culture.

The ship is the Mentor, a brig that went down southeast of the island of Kythira (also spelled Cythera and Kythera) in the Aegean Sea. The ship was used by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, to move sculptures from the ruins of the Acropolis to the United Kingdom, Greece's Ministry of Culture said in a translated statement.