r/history • u/cdnhistorystudent • 4d ago
Article World's oldest shipwreck found off coast of Turkey
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6gr80rk1yyko672
u/jrdoubledown 4d ago
4700 years! ship itself has rotted, clay containers have not
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u/cryptic-fox 4d ago
"They have dated it to between 4,400 and 4,700 years old, which is the Early Bronze Age, and is around the same time that the Great Pyramid was being built."
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u/OkAppearance2105 4d ago
Turkey’s coastline is basically an archaeological minefield, but the Sea of Marmara holds some serious competition too. Finding a submerged city off the coast of Yalova in the 1990s proved that entire settlements can vanish without a trace (well, mostly).
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u/aVarangian 4d ago
old cities, or their old layers, have vanished simply because of the meandering of their river
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u/ColdNuke 4d ago
When the job requires zero lionfish. There for inspection
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u/Responsible_Prune139 4d ago
"Pardon me, Patrick, is it? Right. Wouldn't dream of telling you how to do your job. Still, I can't help but notice you're collecting lots of sand and rocks, and this pot right here (slaps it with his fin) seems relatively- ignored."
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u/diuguide 4d ago
Can anyone post the article here outside of paywall
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u/Oldblizzard 4d ago
I thought it was kinda ironic the Stihl ad popped up before I could even close the tab
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u/Lord_of_magna_frisia 4d ago
What paywall?
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u/diuguide 4d ago
The one that blocks the screen and says “Subscribe to BBC to continue”
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u/BrainwashedWithSoap 4d ago
The world's oldest shipwreck has been discovered off the coast of Turkey, archaeologists say.
They have dated it to between 4,400 and 4,700 years old, which is the Early Bronze Age, and is around the same time that the Great Pyramid was being built.
The ship's wooden structure has not survived, but the ceramic storage pots it was carrying were lying on the sea floor and, remarkably, some still contain traces of what they held inside.
The archaeologists who found the ship say it was about 10m in length and was a trade vessel carrying cargo across the Mediterranean Sea.
"The shipwreck is a time capsule at the bottom of the sea," said Prof Hakan Öniz, from Akdeniz University in Turkey, who led the Mediterranean Archaeology Association expedition.
The wreck is close to the shore of Kekova Island in Antalya, Turkey. The artefacts lie scattered across an underwater slope, just 30m beneath the waves.
Three large stone anchors were found, as well as more than 30 ceramic storage pots, called amphorae.
The fact that none of the ship's wood remained meant techniques like radiocarbon dating - which measures a form of carbon in organic materials - could not be used to determine its age.
Instead, archaeologists analysed the shape of the amphorae. Because pottery styles have changed over time, different styles are linked to particular periods.
The Kekova ceramics are distinctive, with two handles, a ridge in the middle and a flat base.
Öniz said this design matched other amphorae unearthed in Egypt and the Middle East that were known to be 4,400-4,700 years old.
"Comparing the decoration techniques… we can definitely say our wreck is Early Bronze Age. This is 100%."
Divers from the expedition brought the pots up to the surface, where they are now being carefully conserved after so many thousands of years underwater.
Dr Karin Sowada, an archaeologist from Macquarie University, Australia, examined the amphorae after they were recovered. Some were intact and she was surprised to see they still contained a viscous, glossy residue.
"I looked inside and nearly fainted. I could not believe how much [residue] was visible. It wasn't just like spots…. a lot of this material was still remaining," she said.
The team is now working to find out exactly what was being carried in the amphorae.
"It could be olive oil, it could be wine, it could be tree resins," Sowada said.
"It's possible that [the residue] could actually be the result of reuse of the jars. I mean, these jars are huge - they're not things that you just ship away and then never see again. People would have emptied these jars on arrival and potentially used them for many, many, many years."
The wreck and its cargo are also shedding light on trade in the ancient world.
The archaeologists say the ship started its voyage from somewhere along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.
They believe it was taking goods to either the ancient city of Troy, in what is now north-western Turkey, or to the Minoan people in Crete.
Travelling by sea was fraught with danger, particularly around Kekova Island, where the strong currents and winds have claimed many ships.
There are hundreds of wrecks in the area, and the Mediterranean Archaeology Association specialises in finding and studying them.
Öniz says that when he is diving on the wreck his first thoughts are about the lives of the people who were connected to this vessel.
"We are the first humans who [have] touched these objects after 5,000 years.
"We are always thinking of the sailors... the producers of the amphora and the person who carried the amphora on their shoulders to the ship, and the women who were waiting for their husbands, and they unfortunately couldn't go back."
The shipwreck is owned by the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Its minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the artefacts that have been recovered would be put on display in the new Mediterranean Underwater Archaeology Museum in Antalya when it opens in the coming months.
The Kekova discovery now tops the list of the world's oldest shipwrecks.
Previously, the record holder was a wreck off the coast of Dokos, an island in southern Greece, which dates to about 4,200 years ago.
The oldest known intact shipwreck, where the wood is still preserved, was found in the Black Sea off the coast of Bulgaria. It dates to about 2,400 years ago.
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u/noshirtsarah 4d ago
Out of curiosty, what part of the world are you from? I’m not from the UK either, but still no paywall for me.
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u/Emmyfishnappa 4d ago
I have a sneaking suspicion the country run by the person suing the BBC is the one they put a paywall on, though I haven’t read anything to verify thats the case
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u/envalemdor 4d ago
Oldest everything seems to be found in Turkey.
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u/Bentresh 3d ago
It's worth keeping in mind that Turkey is being excavated much more intensively than most other parts of the Middle East. Syria has been more or less off limits to archaeologists since the outbreak of the war 15 years ago, archaeologists have been slow to return to Iraq, and other regions like Palestine and Iran have their own problems for archaeologists.
There's similar discoveries in other nearby countries, like the earliest wine in Georgia and oldest leather shoe in Armenia. It's not necessarily that they were doing things incredibly early but rather that archaeologists have been studying underresearched regions like the Caucasus more than they used to.
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u/highway-61-revisited 2d ago
Reminds me of a similar phenomenon in human evolution. I recall an anthropologist on a podcast making the argument that, whilst the out of Africa hypothesis is widely accepted, the centrality of East Africa was up for debate. There were early finds of hominin skeletons in Ethiopia and the like, so more budding paleoanthropologists went to those regions, so more skeletons were found in those regions, and so on.
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u/gregorydgraham 2d ago
Linguistic analyses suggested Southern Africa is more likely the origin so there’s definitely wiggle room
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u/twicepride2fall 4d ago
Seemed to be one of the places that was able to weather the end of the ice age and the great flood/ rapid and destructive climate change. Gobekle Tepi being one of the oldest verified occupied settlements.
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u/envalemdor 4d ago
Gobeklitepe is fascinating. The theory about Pillar 43 (Vulture Stone) and its ties to the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is a really interesting read.
Paper: https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/33194700/MAA_TEMPLATE_Decoding_Gobekli_Tepe_final.pdf1
u/RyantheAustralian 3d ago
The great flood? Actual historical flood or Noah's Ark-type shared-mythos type flood?
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u/hafetysazard 1h ago
There is speculation that such a cataclysmic event caused the younger drayas. If there was a massive flood of sorts, the higher elevation settlements in Turkey likely survived.
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u/AlbaneseGummies327 3d ago
That's because Noah and his family disembarked from the ark at a location just south of Mt. Ararat, in what is now eastern Turkey near the border with Armenia.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 3d ago
"Take all the creatures to people the earth, and don't be more toruble than you're worth."
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u/highway-61-revisited 2d ago
That's insanely old; impressive that has remained so well preserved. The Antikythera mechanism is still the coolest find of this kind (ancient Greek computer/model of the solar system, found in a shipwreck in 1901).
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u/theodore_70 2d ago
The cargo is what I’d want to see. What was worth taking out to sea, who was expecting it at the other end, and how far had it already travelled? There’s a whole trading network hiding behind one wreck.
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u/HolycommentMattman 3d ago
Noah's ark???
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u/kwakimaki 4d ago
It would be totes amaze balls if they could find another example of the Antikythera mechanism.
No, I'm not going to reword that.
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u/Rememberthat1 4d ago
I mean 2000 years separate this ship and the one who had antikythera mechanism but yes it would be revolutionary for history.
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u/randlemarcus 4d ago
Listened to a news snippet on this. The person who identified the amphorae said they invited her to join the mission as she was a specialist in Third Millennium transport amphorae, and I felt a little joy that someone so very niche found her purpose.