Oldest shipwreck

The oldest shipwreck in the world can be found off the Greek island of Dokos in the Aegean. Peter Throckmorton of the Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology first discovered the wreck on 23 August 1975. It was identified by a large pile of pottery 20 metres (65 feet) below the sea, which was dated by archaeologist George Papathanasopoulos to 2200 BCE, making the Dokos shipwreck more than 4,200 years old.

The excavation of the wreck, which occurred between 1989 and 1992, was the first to apply up-to-date underwater archaeological techniques of the time to a wreck in Greece. The pots represent one of the largest assemblages of early Helladic pottery. They are believed to be cargo, transported from pottery workshops in the Argolida to smaller settlements around the Gulf of Argos. This makes the Dokos wreck among the earliest evidence for trade in the Aegean. Two stone anchors – boulders with holes drilled through the middle – were also found near the wreck site.

A Greek merchant ship dated to c. 400 BCE was discovered in the Black Sea, some 80 km (50 mi) off the coast of Bulgaria in summer 2017. Reports that emerged in Oct 2018 of the discovery described it as the "oldest intact/complete shipwreck", however given the subjectivity of assessing "intactness", this is not a category that Guinness World Records currently monitors.

The cargo of another merchant ship from the Bronze Age was found off the coast of the Kumluca District in Antalya, Türkiye, in 2018. Excavations in July/August 2019 from the site, ranging from 38 m to 52 m depth, uncovered copper ingots dating to the 16th–15th century BCE. The work was conducted by Akdeniz University and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, led by Dr Cemal Pulak. While a few items were salvaged for analysis, no remains of the body of the wreck have yet been found and it still is at least c. 600 years later than the Dokos wreck.