(News Nation) — Oldest deep sea shipwreck discovered It changed the way historians understand Bronze Age navigation.
The 3,300-year-old shipwreck was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea by a company searching for sites to extract natural gas, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement.
Relics of ancient history
Archaeologists The entire wreck could not be raised to the surface without causing damage, as it had been submerged on the ocean floor for thousands of years, but some of its cargo could be salvaged and brought to the surface.
The ship is believed to have sunk between 1400 and 1300 BC, a time when the Egyptian Empire stretched from present-day Sudan to Syria under the reign of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
The ship, estimated to be between 39 and 46 feet long, was loaded with Canaanite amphorae, containers for oil, honey, resin, and other materials. Archaeologists have pulled some of the amphorae to the surface in an attempt to determine what materials were in them.
It is not clear how the merchant ship sank or where it came from: it may have been sailing from Syria and Canaan to Greece, or it may have sailed to the region from an Aegean port and been carrying Canaanite goods for the return voyage.
New insights into the past
What’s unique about this wreck is its location: It was discovered in an area of the ocean where the people on board could not see land.
Evidence from older ships is rare, and most of what historians and archaeologists know about this period comes from two shipwrecks excavated in Turkey. Based on those finds, they believed trade routes were established by ships that stayed close to the shore as they traveled from port to port.
However, the ship does show that people at that time were able to navigate distances that would have required more advanced navigational skills: navigational aids such as the compass, astrolabe, and sextant had not yet been invented and were therefore unlikely to exist.
Archaeologist Proposed The wreck suggests that sailors of the time used celestial navigation to cross areas unmarked by land, which changes how they thought about trade at the time.
It also changes the trajectory of future discoveries: no one has searched the area for Bronze Age shipwrecks before because ships were thought to have sailed along the coast, but now the area may become a place to search for other wrecks that may hold clues to the past.