Golden sunlight fell on the two amphorae, still caked in brown ooze, as they breached the Mediterranean's waves. Their ascent from the seafloor, more than a mile down and 60 miles from land, had taken three hours. It was the first daylight they had seen in at least 3,200 years, and they came from the only Bronze Age shipwreck discovered in deep waters.
Only a handful of other Late Bronze Age ships have been discovered-all of them in shallow coastal waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Sharvit helped spearhead a complex archaeological operation far offshore, along with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and offshore gas firm Energean to retrieve the jars from the seafloor.
In the Bronze Age people shipped these storage jars across the Levant starting around 2000 B.C.E., when maritime trade in the Mediterranean exploded. They're always either pointy or rounded at the bottom, so they rock with ship's motion but don't tip over and break, says Shelley Wachsmann, a nautical archaeology expert at Texas A&M University.
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