3,300-year-old shipwreck wows Israeli archaeologists

Israeli archaeologists say the world’s oldest known deep-sea shipwreck has been discovered about 55 miles off the coast of northern Israel, lying on the mile-deep bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

The 3,300-year-old cargo vessel was found during a routine survey conducted by Energean E&P, a natural gas company that operates several offshore drilling fields, the Israel Antiquities Authority said today. The shipwreck, which is about 42 feet long, contained hundreds of intact clay storage jars known as amphorae. Such jars were typically used for transporting oil, wine, fruit or other agricultural products.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority dated the jars to 1300 to 1400 B.C., during the Late Bronze Age — an era traditionally associated with the biblical tale of the Exodus. The jars are said to reflect the style of ancient Canaanite culture.

Jacob Sharvit, head of the authority’s marine unit, said the find is “a world-class, history-changing discovery.”

“This is both the first and the oldest ship found in the Eastern Mediterranean deep sea. … This find reveals to us as never before the ancient mariners’ navigational skills — capable of traversing the Mediterranean Sea without a line of sight to any coast.,” he said.

Sharvit said the navigators probably plotted their course by taking sightings and angles of the sun and star positions. He also said the ship’s final voyage apparently came to a sudden end, “either due to a storm or to an attempted piracy attack – a well-known occurrence in the Late Bronze Age.”

Karnit Bahartan, head of Energean’s environmental staff, said the wreck and its cargo were detected about a year ago during a natural-gas survey conducted using an advanced submersible robot. A special tool was built to extract artifacts from the mud of the Mediterranean seafloor while minimizing the risk of damage.

Archaeologists have identified only two other cargo-carrying shipwrecks from the Late Bronze Age — both of which were discovered off the Turkish coast, relatively close to shore.

“Based on these two finds, the academic assumption until now was that trade in that time was executed by safely flitting from port to port, hugging the coastline within eye contact,” Sharvit said. “The discovery of this boat now changes our entire understanding of ancient mariner abilities: It is the very first to be found at such a great distance with no line of sight to any landmass.”

Sharvit said there was “tremendous potential” for further research.

“The ship is preserved at such a great depth that time has frozen since the moment of disaster – its body and contexts have not been disturbed by human hand (divers, fishermen, etc.), nor affected by waves and currents which do impact shipwrecks in shallower waters,” he said in today’s news release.

Other news about long-ago times:

• Researchers say a newly deciphered inscription on a scrap of papyrus represents the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal tale of Jesus’ childhood. The papyrus was found in Egypt and locked away in a German library for decades. Now experts have dated the manuscript to the 4th or 5th century, and say it records several words from the previously known text in Greek. The passage — which is not part of the accepted biblical canon — recounts an episode known as the “vivification of sparrows,” in which the young Jesus molds 12 sparrows out of mud and brings the clay figures to life.
• An analysis of DNA from 64 young individuals whose remains were discovered at a ritual burial site at the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico found that all of the victims were boys, many of whom were closely related. That finding, published in Nature, runs counter to the popularly held view that the victims of sacrificial rites were typically girls.