Turkey says a 4,700-year-old wreck off Antalya is the world’s oldest known shipwreck

Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced in a post on X on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, that a wreck near Kekova Island in Antalya province is the world’s oldest shipwreck, dated to about 4,700 years ago in the Early Bronze Age. The wooden hull did not survive. What remains on the seabed is a cargo of ceramic storage jars, and the age rests on those jars rather than on any surviving timber. Hakan Oniz, an associate professor of archaeology at Akdeniz University, directed the excavation that recovered them.

Levantine jars on the seabed near Kekova

According to Al Jazeera’s report, Oniz told the BBC his team first found the site four years ago, when the jars looked to be only a century or two old. The team went back after recognizing the amphora forms in a publication on Egyptian archaeology. Oniz said the researchers became excited when they saw the same forms, and the excavation project that recovered the jars began earlier this year.

Clay analysis indicates the jars were made in workshops in the Jordan Valley, and similar styles have turned up in Egypt, Turkey and Greece. They are believed to have carried olive oil or wine. One vessel stands out for a design with nine markings and two holes in its body, which may have been used to churn butter or cheese, and Oniz said the jars resemble those found at the Giza pyramids in Egypt. Researchers believe the ship was sailing from the Levantine coast toward Hisarlik in Turkey or the Greek island of Crete when it capsized and sank, a route that would have carried the cargo across open water between the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean world.

Ersoy’s announcement and the earlier Kekova reporting

Ersoy said the find sheds light on “the deep-rooted history of maritime trade along the Anatolian coasts.” Al Jazeera presents the oldest-shipwreck label as his description, not as an independently verified finding, and the 4,700-year figure is the ministry’s claim. The site was not a secret in the days before the post. An Anadolu Agency feature carried by Daily Sabah on Oct. 6 described an Early Bronze Age wreck carrying Levantine-type amphorae near the Kekova islands as under investigation, and named Oniz as the underwater archaeologist leading research on the Antalya coast.

The same feature puts the scale of the field in context: more than 430 shipwrecks have been documented along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, among them Cape Gelidonya, excavated in 1960 and regarded as the first scientific excavation of an ancient shipwreck on the seabed, and Uluburun, found in 1982 and excavated over 11 years. If the dating holds, the Kekova wreck would predate Uluburun, which Divernet puts at about 3,400 years old.

The 2019 claim for another Antalya wreck

This is not the first time a wreck off Antalya has been called the oldest. In 2019, Divernet reported on the Western Antalya Shipwreck, which Oniz’s team at Akdeniz University’s Underwater Research Centre surveyed after finding it west of the city. Its cargo was about 1.4 tonnes of copper or tin ingots, with at least 77 pillow-type ingots counted, and it was dated to around 1600 B.C., roughly 3,600 years ago. Antalya Governor Munir Karaoglu called it an “archaeological breakthrough.” Divers made 10 dives to 55 meters on the first survey, and photo-mosaic recording and sonar scanning followed.

Oniz made the case himself in an article published in March 2019, describing that wreck as the earliest shipwreck of the world and dating it to the 16th and 15th centuries B.C. from the ingot types, which would make it older than Gelidonya and Uluburun.

Divernet’s account places the site about 40 to 45 meters down, spread over roughly 7 by 14 meters, and it cites the Uluburun excavators George Bass and Cemal Pulak on how ingot forms are dated. A separate report on The Cultural Experience in April 2019 repeated the line that it was the oldest wreck ever discovered. If the Kekova dating survives scrutiny, the new wreck would be roughly 1,100 years older than the 2019 one.

Depth, dating and an unpublished study

Several basics are missing from the coverage, and the gaps matter for a claim framed as a world record. Al Jazeera does not report the depth of the wreck, its dimensions, or any comparison with Uluburun or other known wrecks, and it cites no published study for the 4,700-year date. The evidence it describes is typological: amphora forms matched to Egyptian-era parallels and clay traced to the Jordan Valley. Ersoy’s post and Oniz’s account to the BBC are the only attributed voices in Al Jazeera’s piece, and no outside archaeologist is quoted weighing the dating. Whether independent dating or a peer-reviewed excavation report confirms the figure, and whether the oldest-shipwreck title holds against other claims, is still unsettled.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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