Fresh laser scans of the walls of an ancient temple on Cyprus have revealed 23 carvings of ships that had not been recorded before, adding to a body of evidence that suggests the sea was central to life in the community that built and used the site. The temple, known as Kition Kathari, overlooks a bay that was likely the location of an ancient harbor.
The scanning was led by Caroline Barnes of the University of British Columbia as part of a study of the temple's masonry. Earlier work, a survey published in 1982, had documented 19 ship images on the southern wall. The new scans bring the known total considerably higher and allow researchers to examine the carvings in far more detail than earlier methods permitted.
The vessels depicted are not all of one type. The carvings include Levantine merchant ships, Minoan sailing vessels, galleys of the kind associated with the Carmel Coast, and a local Cypriot boat. Because each style was tied to particular periods and seafaring traditions, researchers have used these differences to estimate when the images were made. Taken together, the carvings may span as long as 300 years.
The team also identified a repair block bearing a ship image that was added to the wall roughly 150 years after the original construction, which suggests the carvings were not a single event but part of a continuing tradition of marking the temple with images of ships. Graham Braun of the University of Cincinnati argues that the number and variety of the images point to seafaring being part of everyday community life, rather than a specialized activity limited to a few sailors.
The findings were published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
We rewrote this story on 4 November 2026 after an editorial review.
Credit. Based on reporting by Jessica Esther Saraceni for Archaeology Magazine. Is this your work? Write to us.
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