A 3,600-year-old bronze dagger with silver rivets, a product of the ancient Cretan-Minoan culture, has been found on what is reckoned to be the world’s oldest known shipwreck of a trading vessel.
The Mediterranean site lies off the coast of Kumluca in Antalya, and Türkiye’s culture & tourism minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy has hailed the find of the ancient weapon as one of the most important in the history of underwater archaeology.
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Ersoy, a scuba diver, recently visited the wreck-site to watch the archaeological team at work.
Excavations have been going on at the site since 2019 under the leadership of Dr Hakan Öniz, head of the Department of Conservation & Restoration of Cultural Heritage at Akdeniz University in Antalya.
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The 14m-long Middle Bronze Age shipwreck, thought to date to the 16th century BC, is thought to have sunk in a storm while on its way from Cyprus to Crete, according to the archaeologists.
The Kumluca Wreck lies on a steep rocky slope at depths between 37 and 52m, and many of the artefacts are heavily concreted, requiring painstaking work by the divers to extract them.
Findings at the site over the past five years have included lead balance weights and 1.5 tons of the large (25kg and 45cm long) copper ingots from Cypriot mines vital for the production of bronze, as well as fragments of ceramics and ballast pebbles.
The seafaring Cretan-Minoans are thought to have traded with Egypt, mainland Greece and Cyprus, what is now Türkiye, Syria, Lebanon and Israel and, for tin, ventured as far as Cornwall and Afghanistan.
They traded finished weapons and tools as well as raw metals, along with pottery, wine and olive oil, in return for luxury goods such as gold, gems and ivory.
“We are embarking on a comprehensive project to identify all archaeological dive-sites across Türkiye,” Ersoy said after his dives. “This is fundamentally a scientific endeavour, requiring formal validation.”
He said that the Ministry of Culture & Tourism would be funding the initiative, with the ultimate intention of setting up to more underwater archaeological museums and dive sites.
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