A Fleet Hiding in Plain Sight: Laser Scans Find 23 New Ships on a Cypriot Temple Wall

Forty years ago, at the site of Kition Kathari in Larnaka Bay, Cyprus, researchers documented the remains of ship graffiti on a temple wall. Interpreted as a procession of ships, it was assumed they were all made in the Late Bronze Age before the societies around them all mysteriously collapsed. But what if that was wrong?

Decades later, researchers returned to the site to scan the building blocks, not expecting to uncover nearly two dozen additional ships, including some on a block installed 150 years after the original blocks were laid. The discovery suggests Cypriot Late Bronze Age people may have continued carving ships into the wall even after the famous Bronze Age collapse into the Early Iron Age, possibly indicating resilience and continuity for perhaps as long as 300 years.

So without further ado, let’s travel back in time.

A Fleet of Old

Kition Kathari began, as so many cities do, as a small smattering of buildings, before expanding dramatically around 1190 BCE into a complex of large structures including city walls, courtyards, and street systems that excavators labelled ‘sacred area’ using Greek terms like ‘temples’ to describe the buildings based on finds such as ‘horns of consecration’ and Mycenaean ritual vessels.

Today, scholars have revised these interpretations, suggesting that the buildings also served administrative and craft functions and were developed locally by Cypriots rather than through Mycenaean colonisation.

One of these temples, Temple 1, also sat near a copper-processing area, possibly reflecting a Cypriot link between the divine and metallurgy. Notably, even when the wider Mediterranean world seemingly plunged into chaos, crisis, and collapse in the 12th century BCE, Kition seems to have continued to thrive as a trade hub, characterised by impressive ashlar masonry (large limestone blocks hauled 20 km across Larnaka Bay).

In 1985, Lucien Basch and Michal Artzy published 19 carved ship images on the wall of Temple 1 and two more on an altar in Temple 4.

Ship graffiti seemed fitting considering Larnaka Bay was once an even more sheltered lagoon-like anchorage than it is today. The sea’s wider importance is further reflected at Kathari itself, where 134 unused stone anchors were built into temple walls, pillar bases and thresholds, possibly votive offerings.

The ship graffiti Basch and Artzy published were similarly interpreted as religious, perhaps a way of thanking the gods for a safe voyage or requesting safe passage in a journey to come.

They drew parallels with other ship graffiti known from medieval Cyprus and even the 3rd millennium BCE but could not say much more, as key details (prows, sails and so on) were too eroded. Centuries ago, wind and rain had beaten away at the carvings; when they were excavated and exposed to the elements again, the erosion only got worse.

Counting Ships

When Graham Braun and his colleagues revisited the site, equipped with high-resolution laser scanners, they weren’t initially looking for more ships. Their goal for that survey was simply to scan the blocks and gain a better understanding of the ashlar and later Bronze Age masonry.

Using the laser scanner and 3D surface analysis, the team stripped away centuries of weathering and damage, almost like offering a window into the past.

Sure, they had thought maybe they’d see some more details on the known ship graffiti, but then they started coming across more and more. One ship here, another there; on top of the 19, they ultimately counted 23 potential ships, so eroded and faded they were invisible to the naked eye.

They also reinterpreted two of Basch and Artzy’s tentative ships as probably mere stone damage. But the most striking discovery was one, possibly two, ship graffiti on Block T1.8.

What makes it so special? Simple: this yellow-sandstone repair block was added 150 years after the original blocks had been placed down, which suggests this wasn’t just one procession of ships carved all at once but dozens added one after the other over centuries.

Centuries of Ships

Carved graffiti can be difficult to analyse on its own; different ships were likely carved by different hands, the hard stone forces straight lines where curves should be, and years of weathering don’t help.

So the authors clustered the ships into six types, looking for repeated patterns in the hull shape, bow and stern, and what sits on the stem and stern tops, but filtered out secondary details like rigging and masts as those are artistic noise. Think of it like this: I know a child drew a male lion if it’s coloured yellow and has a long tail and a fluffy mane, but a long tail, orange colours, and stripes indicate a tiger. Whether that child drew the eyes blue, green or brown, the lion standing, sitting, or hunting doesn’t matter; that’s a secondary detail not counted for classification.

Once they had the types, they could compare them against the known ships of the Mediterranean, turning the wall into something you can tentatively date and locate.

Groups 1 and 2 were rather simplistic, with too little detail to definitively link them to any known ship corpus. Group 3, however, was properly identifiable as depictions of ships. They are the most decorated of the carvings, with masts, a yard, and a crow’s nest; based on their size and shape, they may be Levantine cargo ships that sailed across the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries.

Group 4 appears to show Minoan sailing ships that vanished from the record during the Bronze Age collapse. And before this study and recent finds near Paphos, no one had ever seen this type of ship recorded in Cyprus at all.

Group 5 consisted of hybrids, something between a lean warship and a fat merchantman, with similarities to carvings seen in Akko and the Carmel Coast in modern Israel.

The final group (Group 6) was made up of galleys; among the older Bronze Age galleys are those with a vertical stem and a modest projection at the waterline. One such galley may have been later reworked, adding a projection that flows smoothly into the stem, similar to the way artists drew proper rams in the Iron Age. Their distinctive curling ‘horn’ figurehead, long thought to be Aegean in origin, is depicted here far earlier than any Aegean parallels, possibly suggesting a Cypro-Levantine origin.

Taken together, the ships may offer a snapshot into an entire ancient maritime world passing through the harbours of Kition. Group 4’s crescent-shaped hulls point to Crete, Group 5’s hybrid hulls point to the Carmel coast and Group 6’s galleys point to a shared Cypro-Levantine tradition.

Cyprus was seemingly not just absorbing ship traffic passively; it was incorporating it and creating its own. That may not sound too impressive, but ships don’t really survive well in the archaeological record, and all we can sometimes go on are depictions; they tell us where these ships went, who built them, when they sailed the seas and when they vanished.

The Bronze Age collapse is often thought of as just that: a collapse; cities were abandoned, records dried up, and everything just stopped. But Kition’s temple wall, which people seem to have kept adding to for centuries from roughly 1200 BCE to at least the mid-11th century BCE, challenges that; it suggests that, at least in Cyprus, generation after generation, throughout the collapse and beyond, people were still trading and keeping track of the ships that arrived at their harbour. The graffiti may not have been ‘graffiti’ per se, not in the modern sense, but rather a sanctioned and perhaps ritualised practice specifically for this monument.

There may also be a tentative suggestion as to the purpose of the many dots that often run just below the ships’ hulls. The authors suggest they may be waves, or ripples similar to a Bronze Age fresco from Ayia Irini where painters dabbed white impasto dots to capture “the reflected light that sparkles on the foamy bubbles of the sea”.

The ship graffiti on Temple 1, carved at eye level, look similar to the silhouettes of vessels seen moored nearby, while the graffiti low on the Temple 4 altar, just above the floor, may have been seen flickering in the glow of the altar’s fire, ‘sailing on a flickering light’.

With time and continued exposure, these ships will continue to fade, and it is quite likely that many were already too eroded for even the high-resolution laser to pick them up. People often imagine the devastating collapse of the Bronze Age, but here in Cyprus, at least, 300 years of continued carving may suggest unbroken continuity and resilience in the face of change. A reminder that even when the world seemingly falls apart, people don’t just vanish; they endure.

I wonder what that wall looked like in antiquity; was it only carved or could it also have been painted? Did one person begin the trend and then someone else added to his small cluster of carving, or was it planned from the beginning of the wall’s construction?

If you ever go to Cyprus, perhaps by then the team’s virtual reality reconstruction of the wall will be done, a little piece of the past brought back to life.

Why did Cyprus endure when so many other places collapsed, and do you think these were opportunistic doodles or sanctioned carvings?

Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can chip in once, monthly, or yearly. Only if you'd like to.

Reference

Braun, G. C., Barnes, C., & Manolova, T. V. (2026). The Ship Graffiti from Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age Kition, Cyprus: New Additions and Reconsiderations 40 Years Later. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572414.2026.2702905