This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: About 40 years ago, researchers found ancient ship carvings on a temple wall in Cyprus, possibly all carved at once at the tail end of the Bronze Age, around the time of the infamous Bronze Age collapse. Then, decades later, a new study revealed they had missed nearly two dozen ancient carvings.
In 2024, a team of researchers pointed high-resolution laser scanners at the ancient temple walls in Kition Kathari. The scans revealed 23 potential ships, nearly invisible to the naked eye. They also weren't carved at the same time but spanned as many as 300 years, one generation of carvers after the next.
The real kicker: The team wasn't even looking for more ships. "When we noticed all the ships, I felt tremendously excited," said Caroline Barnes of the University of British Columbia. "We had not expected to find them—our intention going into the project was to laser scan the blocks in order to add to our larger study about ashlar masonry and Late Bronze Age masonry practices on the island." According to the study, published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, the ships had been carved onto the southern wall of Temple 1, which overlooked a sheltered bay that likely held the ancient harbor, though its exact location remains unknown.
Nineteen ships were recorded in 1982, and two more were found on an altar in Temple 4. By that point, they were already worn, but excavations had subjected them to another round of battering from the elements, causing many of the carvings and stone blocks to erode further. Hoping to gain a better understanding of the ancient masonry, Graham Braun of the University of Cincinnati and his team used high-resolution laser scanners to reconstruct the blocks in 3D.
One block after another, they stripped away years of damage, revealing something that had gone unnoticed for decades: nearly two dozen ancient ships, most of them consisting of little more than a few carved lines. One unexpected discovery came from a small repair block added to the temple about 150 years after the rest of the wall had been built—it had a ship, too. According to the study, this suggested the ships were not carved in a single event but may have been added over hundreds of years.
The researchers grouped the ships into six categories, hoping to match them against the wider corpus of eastern Mediterranean ship depictions. They found Levantine merchantmen, Minoan sailing ships, hybrid galleys possibly from the Carmel Coast and one distinctly Cypriot hybrid, all spanning different centuries, including before and after the Bronze Age collapse. "The term collapse often implies everything was erased and started anew much later," Braun and Barnes said.
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