Turkey's 4,500-year-old seabed jars may be world's oldest shipwreck

A cargo of clay jars resting on a seabed slope off Turkey may come from the world's oldest known shipwreck.

Archaeologists found about 30 storage jars near Kekova island, off Turkey's south-west coast. The vessel that carried them is believed to have sunk about 4,500 years ago, according to The Art Newspaper.

The jars lay scattered on a slope at depths of between 25 and 40 metres. Some still hold residue of whatever they once carried. That detail matters. It gives scientists something to test.

The excavation was led by Hakan Öniz, an archaeology professor at Akdeniz University in Antalya, working with the Mediterranean Archaeology Association. The team first spotted the site in 2022 during a survey of the Kekova area. Divers then returned to record and recover the finds.

The jars are amphorae, tall ceramic containers with pointed bases used to ship food and drink in the ancient Mediterranean. Their shape and clay match pottery made in the Jordan Valley during the Early Bronze Age, a period of early cities and long-distance trade. The wooden boat that carried them may have been only 10 metres long.

Karin Sowada, an Egyptologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, examined the finds. She confirmed their resemblance to imported Levantine amphorae, jars from the eastern Mediterranean coast found in Egypt. Preliminary results published in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology in July date the material to around 2700-2400 BCE.

That dating would push the wreck past the current holder of the title. That is a 4,200-year-old vessel found in 1975 off the Greek island of Dokos.

Turkey's culture minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the containers were believed to have carried olive oil or wine. Researchers are now testing that idea in the laboratory. They are using X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction, techniques that read the chemical makeup of clay and residues without destroying the object.

What makes this stand out is the distance involved. If the dating holds, a small boat was moving goods from the Levant to the Anatolian coast more than four millennia ago. The next step is the lab work, which should say more about what was inside the jars and where they were made.