They aimed a laser at a Bronze Age wall and found a fleet

Archaeology magazine and international news outlets highlighted the discovery of Bronze Age artwork that had gone unnoticed for generations at a temple complex in Cyprus.

University of Cincinnati Classics doctoral student Graham Braun and his research partners used a laser scanner to survey a stone wall at the ancient city of Kition, now called Larnaca. The scan revealed drawings of boats etched into the stone surface that because of weathering were no longer readily visible to the naked eye.

Braun and his research partners identified 23 ships, including merchantmen, galleys and sailing vessels associated with Levantine, Cypriot and Aegean shipbuilding.

Braun said some of the ship types they categorized were depicted in carved stone etchings found elsewhere in the temple complex at Kition that had been studied previously by researchers over the years.

“But it was the first time that all of the ships had been fully illustrated, measured, mapped and categorized,“ he said. “This showed that there are multiple ship-building traditions present in the corpus, mostly from Cyprus and the Levantine Coast, but also perhaps from the Aegean.“

Graham was joined in the project by research partners Caroline Barnes from the University of British Columbia and Tzveta Manolova from the Ludwig Maximilian University.

Braun said they found evidence that drawings were added to the stone at different times, perhaps spanning centuries.

“This required a reconsideration of the date of all the graffiti and forced us to seriously consider the possibility that they had been carved over a long period of time, not only in the Late Bronze Age, as previous scholars had suggested or assumed,“ he said.

If the stone carvings persisted past the late Bronze Age into the early Iron Age, it raises questions about the disappearance of civilizations throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, he said.

“We probably cannot treat this period as a total loss of civilization, but certainly it was a time of change when some human activities and practices ceased, new ones began and some persisted,“ he said.

Braun is now serving a 2026-27 Ione Mylonas Shear Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Featured image at top: UC Classics doctoral student Graham Braun and his research partners used laser scans to identify new stone carvings of Bronze Age ships in Cyprus. Graphic/Provided