Bronze Age Facts

A natural gas company's robot found hundreds of ancient jars on the Mediterranean floor: a 3,300-year-old Canaanite cargo ship, the oldest ever found in deep water. At 1.8 km depth, cold oxygen-free water kept it perfectly intact. Bronze Age sailors were crossing the open sea by the stars, not hugging the coast.

Mehmed Çakir spotted odd metal shapes on the seabed off Turkey in 1982. The sponge diver called them metal biscuits with ears. They turned out to be 3,300-year-old copper ingots from one of the richest Bronze Age shipwrecks ever found. Its cargo came from at least seven ancient civilizations, including Egyptian ivory and Baltic amber. There was enough copper and tin aboard to arm 5,000 soldiers with bronze swords.