The World's Oldest Shipwreck Is 4,400 Years Old — Found Off Turkey's Coast

Divers first spotted it in 2022 and thought the pottery looked only a century or two old. They were wrong by roughly 4,500 years. This week, archaeologists announced that a cluster of amphorae and stone anchors off Kekova Island in Turkey belongs to the world's oldest known shipwreck — a Bronze Age cargo vessel that sank around the time the Great Pyramid of Giza was rising.

What they found

The wreck lies on a submerged slope about 30 meters beneath the waves near Kekova Island, off Turkey's Antalya coast. The ship's wooden hull has completely vanished over the millennia, but more than 30 ceramic storage pots — amphorae — and three large stone anchors remain scattered across the seabed. From the size of the cargo, researchers estimate the vessel was about 10 meters long: a modest trading ship making its way across the eastern Mediterranean, bound for Troy or Crete.

How do you date a ship with no wood?

Radiocarbon dating was impossible — there was no surviving timber. Instead, the team led by Prof. Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University dated the wreck through the amphorae themselves. Their distinctive shape — twin handles, a central ridge, a flat base — matched pottery from Egypt and the Middle East securely dated to the Early Bronze Age. The breakthrough came when Öniz saw the same amphora forms in a publication on Egyptian archaeology, identical to vessels found at Giza. The team now dates the wreck to between 4,400 and 4,700 years ago — older than the previous record holder, the Dokos wreck in the Aegean Sea, which dates to around 2200 BC.

The mystery cargo

Here is the part that made the researchers gasp: several intact amphorae still contain glossy, viscous residues after nearly five millennia underwater. Dr. Karin Sowada of Macquarie University, who examined the cargo, says the jars may have held olive oil, wine or tree resins — chemical analysis is underway. One amphora's markings and two holes suggest it may even have been used to make cheese or butter. Clay analysis indicates the pots were likely produced in workshops in the Jordan Valley, adding a new data point to the map of Bronze Age trade routes.

The artifacts are now in conservation and will become centerpieces of a planned Mediterranean Underwater Archaeology Museum in Antalya. A 10-meter merchant ship from the age of the pyramids — carrying goods between civilizations that were inventing writing, mathematics and empire — is a time capsule in the truest sense. For another deep-time discovery, read our piece on Megacauda, the Jurassic swimmer.

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