In Thirty Meters of Water, the World’s Oldest Shipwreck Waits

Beneath the warm waters off Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, where sunlight fades into a blue-green silence, a vessel has rested for nearly five millennia. Its wooden hull is gone, consumed by time and tide, but its cargo remains—a scattered hoard of ceramic jars and stone anchors that archaeologists now believe belonged to the oldest known shipwreck in the world.

The discovery was made near Kekova Island, off the coast of Antalya, during an underwater survey in 2024 . Excavations completed earlier this month recovered more than thirty storage jars, called amphorae, along with three stone anchors from a depth of about thirty meters . Based on the style and decoration of the pottery, researchers date the wreck to between 4,400 and 4,700 years ago—the Early Bronze Age, roughly contemporary with the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza .

“The shipwreck is a time capsule at the bottom of the sea,” said Professor Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University, who led the expedition . Without surviving timber, radiocarbon dating is impossible, so the dating relies on comparisons with pottery found at other archaeological sites . Clay analysis suggests the amphorae were produced in workshops in the Jordan Valley, pointing to trade networks that stretched across the eastern Mediterranean .

Similar vessels have been found near the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, Saqqara, and Abusir, as well as at Troy and on Crete . The ship, estimated at about ten meters in length, may have been sailing from a Levantine port toward Troy or Crete when it sank . One jar stands out: it bears nine different markings and two holes in its body, possibly used as a churn for making cheese or butter—a clue that sailors may have produced their own food during long voyages .

The previous oldest known shipwreck was the Dokos wreck, discovered near Greece in 1975 and dated to around 2200 BC . If the Kekova dating holds, it pushes the record back by centuries. Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, called the find “traces of the world’s oldest shipwreck” and said the artifacts would be displayed at a planned Mediterranean Underwater Archaeology Museum in Antalya .

The jars are undergoing conservation and further analysis. Some contain residues—glossy, viscous material that may be olive oil, wine, or tree resin . What the ship carried, and where it was bound, may yet be told by the chemistry of its cargo. For now, the vessel rests where it has always been, a quiet witness to a world that traded across seas long before history began to write it down.

The images accompanying this article are AI-generated and used for illustrative purposes only.

Sources: New Scientist, The National, Daily Mail, ORF, TVR Info