The remains of a ship more than 3,000 years old were accidentally discovered off the coast of Israel with a load of hundreds of amphorae, reports Israel Today.
The sunken ship was discovered during exploratory work by geologists of the Energean company, which extracts natural gas in the Mediterranean Sea. The sunken ship is located at a depth of 1.8 kilometers, 90 kilometers from the northern coast of Israel. Experts call the find revolutionary, as these shipwrecks are the oldest ever discovered on the seabed.
A survey of the seabed with a special robot showed that the ship was between 12 and 14 meters long. Hundreds of intact amphorae lie near the remains. According to the researchers, such ships 3,000 years ago were “the most efficient means of transport for transporting relatively cheap products such as oil, wine and other agricultural goods”.
Archaeologists have determined that this was once a Bronze Age Canaanite cargo ship. According to the head of the maritime department of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Yaakov Sharvit, the ship may have been wrecked due to a storm or an attack by pirates. “This is both the first and the oldest ship found in deep waters in the Eastern Mediterranean, 90 kilometers from the nearest shore. This is a world-class find that changes the way we look at history: it reveals the skill level of ancient seafarers who were able to cross the Mediterranean Sea without seeing the shore. They probably used celestial bodies for navigation, measuring the angles of the sun and stars,” said Sharvit.
„This is a truly sensational find,”, Sharvit emphasized, explaining that so far only two sunken ships with preserved cargo from the Bronze Age have been found. Both were found off the coast of Turkey at a shallow depth. Based on these two findings, scientists believed that maritime trade in ancient times took place in short, safe passages from one port to another, with sailors moving along the coast without venturing out into the open sea. The found ship refutes these hypotheses.