Jacob Sharvit, left, the director of maritime archaeology for the Israel Antiquities Authority, with two Bronze Age jugs moments after lifting them out of the Mediterranean Sea on the Energean Star on May 30.

The New York Times has a story about a very old shipwreck discovered off the coast of northern Israel.  The mile deep wreckage may be the oldest shipwreck ever found.  Two clay jars known as Canaanite amphorae indicate the merchant vessel dates to sometime between 1400 B.C. and 1300 B.C.  At that time, the the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun briefly sat on the throne of the Egyptian empire.  Egypt spanned the area from northern Syria to Sudan.

Whether the galley was the victim of a sudden storm, a wayward wind or attempted piracy is unclear. But judging from footage recorded by a remotely operated submersible robot, the craft settled to the bottom without capsizing, and the hundreds of storage jars in its hold survived pretty much intact.

Cemal Pulak, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the find, said, “I consider any Bronze Age shipwreck discovery to be a very important one as shipwrecks of this period are extremely rare.” They are so rare that only two other wrecks with cargo are known from the late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean — both found, unlike the current one, off the Turkish coast relatively close to the shore and accessible using standard diving gear. The more recent of those two discoveries occurred in 1982. No spectacular new finds have surfaced since then.

The new Bronze Age wonder was detected last summer at a depth of about a mile during a survey conducted by Energean, a London-based company seeking to develop natural gas fields. The patch of seafloor had been claimed by both Israel and Lebanon until a 2022 agreement brokered by the United States put it under Israeli control.