When Energean, a London-listed natural gas company, sent a remote-operated robot to survey the deep Mediterranean seabed near Israel's proposed Katlan gas field, the last thing anyone expected was ancient history.

The Accidental Find

In 2023, the robot's sonar picked up something unusual on the ocean floor roughly 90 kilometres off Israel's northern coast - a dense cluster of pottery shapes. The team alerted the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which launched a follow-up mission. What they found was the oldest deep-sea shipwreck ever discovered: a Canaanite merchant vessel that had sat undisturbed on the seabed for approximately 3,300 years. The IAA announced the discovery publicly in June 2024.

What the Robot Saw

The wreck site spans roughly 14 metres by 6 metres, carpeted with hundreds of complete Canaanite storage jars called amphorae. Two were retrieved to the surface and dated to around 1300 BCE. The wooden hull is believed to lie beneath the jar layer, shielded by the cargo that settled over it. The depth - 1.8 kilometres below the surface - is the key to the extraordinary preservation: the water is near-freezing, almost entirely without oxygen, and too cold and dark for the wood-boring worms that destroy most ancient shipwrecks in shallower water.

The Part That Rewrote the Textbook

The wreck's location - 90 km from any coastline, far beyond the visible horizon - upended a longstanding assumption in archaeology. Scholars had believed Bronze Age Mediterranean sailors stayed within sight of land, using coastal landmarks to navigate. Jacob Sharvit, director of marine archaeology at the IAA, said sailors at that depth of sea could see only the horizon: "To navigate they probably used the celestial bodies, by taking sightings and angles of the sun and star positions." The find is the first physical proof that Canaanite merchants were crossing the open Mediterranean by the stars more than 3,000 years ago.

Left Where It Lay

The IAA recovered only two jars for study. The rest of the cargo - and the ship beneath it - remain on the seabed, undisturbed. Energean's vessel provided the support for the retrieval operation; the company had no commercial interest in the site. The wreck now sits at the bottom of the Mediterranean as it has since the Bronze Age, the oldest confirmed deep-water shipwreck in the world.

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