On the southern wall of the temple in ancient Kition, beneath modern Larnaca, laser scanners have discovered 23 previously unnoticed images of ships. What forty years ago was considered a complete gallery of nineteen drawings turned out to be only part of a far longer maritime chronicle.
In the 1980s, archaeologists Lucien Basch and Michal Artzy documented these graffiti on the facade of Temple 1 at Kition-Kathari. They were thought to have all been carved at the end of the Bronze Age, shortly before the collapse of the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. A new study published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology shows otherwise.
A team led by Graham Brown of the University of Cincinnati used terrestrial laser scanning and photogrammetry. The technology made it possible to distinguish shallow human cuts from cracks, weathering, and accidental damage. As a result, on the blocks of Temple 1 they identified 23 additional possible images of ships: nine with a high degree of confidence, six with medium, and eight with low.
Particularly important is that two ships were found on block T1.8 of yellow sandstone — a material that appeared in Kition only after the end of the Late Bronze Age. This block is part of a repair of the southern facade carried out roughly a century and a half later. This means that people continued to carve images of ships over the course of several centuries — from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, possibly as late as the time of Homer.
Now the total number of known graffiti at the site reaches 43: 41 on Temple 1 and two on the altar of Temple 4. The drawings reflect different shipbuilding traditions — Cypriot, Levantine, and Aegean. They link Kition to a broad network of sea routes and testify to a collective memory that was preserved by the walls of the sanctuary.
Modern technologies do not merely add new facts. They show that even after the large-scale upheavals of the Bronze Age, maritime life and the memory of it did not disappear but continued. People returned to the same wall and left new marks on it — as if confirming that the sea remained part of their world.
Careful digital documentation makes it possible to preserve these fragile traces for future research and offers a chance to see how ancient craftsmen passed down knowledge of ships through generations.
