Forty years ago Lucien Basch and Michal Artzy published nineteen ships scratched into the south wall of Temple 1 at Kition Kathari, on the edge of modern Larnaca. They became a standard reference for Late Bronze Age maritime imagery. Nobody went looking for more.
The altar of Temple 4 at Kition and its two ship graffiti, traced in black on a photogrammetric model. Credit: Model and drawing by T. V. Manolova, from Braun et al., International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2026. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
In 2024 Graham Braun of the University of Cincinnati and Caroline Barnes of the University of British Columbia pointed a terrestrial laser scanner at the same wall. They were recording ashlar masonry, the dressed stone blocks, for a wider study of Late Bronze Age building on Cyprus. The ships came out of the data unannounced.
Barnes says they had not expected to find them at all. The study, written with Tzveta Manolova, who had been recording the site’s graffiti separately by photogrammetry, is published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
