Ancient Shipwreck Preserves a Deep Bronze Age Time Capsule

About a mile beneath the sea, the ship suggests that trade in the eastern Mediterranean Sea traveled much farther from the safety of land.

Remains of the oldest shipwreck ever discovered in deep water, and perhaps the oldest complete wreck in any water, have been located in the Mediterranean Sea about 56 miles off the coast of northern Israel.

The Israel Antiquities Authority, which announced the find on Thursday, said that preliminary examination of two clay jars known as Canaanite amphorae indicated that the merchant vessel, an estimated 39 to 46 feet long, sank sometime between 1400 B.C. and 1300 B.C., an epoch when the Egyptian empire stretched from what is now northern Syria to Sudan, and the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun briefly sat on the throne.

Whether the galley was the victim of a sudden storm, a wayward wind or attempted piracy is unclear. But judging from footage recorded by a remotely operated submersible robot, the craft settled to the bottom without capsizing, and the hundreds of storage jars in its hold survived pretty much intact.

Cemal Pulak, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the find, said, “I consider any Bronze Age shipwreck discovery to be a very important one as shipwrecks of this period are extremely rare.” They are so rare that only two other wrecks with cargo are known from the late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean — both found, unlike the current one, off the Turkish coast relatively close to the shore and accessible using standard diving gear. The more recent of those two discoveries occurred in 1982. No spectacular new finds have surfaced since then.

The new Bronze Age wonder was detected last summer at a depth of about a mile during a survey conducted by Energean, a London-based company seeking to develop natural gas fields. The patch of seafloor had been claimed by both Israel and Lebanon until a 2022 agreement brokered by the United States put it under Israeli control.