This shipwreck might date from the Early Bronze Age

Hakan Oniz/Akdeniz University

An ancient shipwreck found off the southern coast of Turkey may be around 4500 years old. That makes it the oldest shipwreck ever found, says Hakan Öniz at Akdeniz University in Antalya, Turkey, who led the team that discovered it.

The archaeologists first saw the shipwreck near Kekova Island in 2024, during an underwater survey along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The wood of the wreck itself has long since decomposed, but in excavations completed earlier this month, they retrieved its cargo – around 30 storage jars called amphoras – from the seabed.

The amphoras from the Kekova shipwreck have a distinctive shape with side handles and flat bases, similar to other pottery from the Levant and Egypt that dates to the Early Bronze Age. This enabled the researchers to date them to between 2700 and 2400 BC. It’s an insight into the earliest period of Mediterranean maritime trade, says Öniz. As international trade became established, traders switched to jars with tapered, “carrot-shaped” bottoms, because they pack more efficiently onto ships.

Minor variations between the amphoras suggest that they came from “different workshops and probably different settlements”, says Öniz. He concludes from the cargo that the ship was about 10 metres long, and departed from a harbour along the eastern Mediterranean coast. The crew would then have sailed along the coast, picking up amphoras filled with olive oil or wine from different villages. They were probably taking them to the Minoan civilisation on Crete, or to the city of Troy, in north-western Turkey, when the ship sank.

As well as the amphoras, the archaeologists found several stone anchors. These were lying some distance from the wreck, suggesting they may have been thrown overboard when the ship got into difficulty during a storm. The wreck lies about 30 metres down, says Öniz, on a particularly treacherous stretch of coast that is plagued by strong currents and winds.

Hundreds of ancient shipwrecks have been found along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Most of them sank during the Roman and Byzantine periods, but a handful have been dated to the Bronze Age. The Uluburun wreck, for example, discovered in 1982 is from the Late Bronze Age. It sank around 1300 BC, carrying treasures including ebony, ivory, ostrich eggs and jewellery from cultures across the Mediterranean world. In recent surveys, Öniz has found another two Bronze Age wrecks, one dating from the Middle Bronze Age and one from the Early Bronze Age. But Kekova appears to be the oldest yet found.

It’s “a fascinating and potentially very important discovery”, says Jon Henderson at the University of Edinburgh, UK. But he cautions that he’d like to see published evidence before “crowning it the world’s oldest shipwreck”, noting that dating by pottery comparisons isn’t always very accurate, because similar forms and decorative features can occur over quite long periods. Radiocarbon data would help to pin down the date, but unfortunately no organic material survives at the site.

Until now, the world’s oldest known shipwreck was an Early Bronze Age wreck at Dokos in southern Greece, dated to 2700-2200 BC. Öniz argues that Kekova is older than Dokos, but the two wrecks could actually be contemporary, says Henderson.

“What really excites me isn’t whether this wreck is a century or two older than another one,” he adds. “It’s that we’re looking at a snapshot of Mediterranean maritime trade more than 4000 years ago.”

We know people were moving goods across the sea at this time, “but finding physical remains of this is extraordinarily rare”, says Henderson.