An anchor cut from limestone and carved with a Cypro-Minoan sign—identified as “CM 102 Variant 7”—has been lifted from the floor of Tel Dor’s lagoon on Israel’s Carmel Coast. The object forms the centrepiece of a study published 26 May 2025 in the journal Antiquity by Prof. Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa and an international team, who describe it as the first in-situ cargo from an Iron Age port city in Israel.
The anchor lay inside a scatter of rare Iron I storage jars placed atop a ballast pile. Multispectral imaging shows red hieratic numerals painted on one jar and possible Cypro-Minoan characters on another, creating what the authors call “an unmistakable blend” of Cypriot and Egyptian markings in the same cargo. They argue that the mix points to a direct trade route linking Dor, Cyprus and Egypt as early as the eleventh century BCE, decades before biblical Israel controlled the harbour.
Dor’s role in that network was already famous to ancient scribes. The study notes that the Report of Wenamun, an Egyptian narrative dated to roughly the same century, records a voyage that moves from Egypt to Dor and on to Phoenicia and Cyprus—mirroring the anchor’s twin cultural signatures.
While the inscribed anchor is the most eye-catching artefact, the paper also documents two later wreck deposits. Cargo Dor L1, a scatter of Phoenician-style storage jars and well-worn galley bowls, dates to the late ninth–early eighth centuries BCE, when the city belonged to the Kingdom of Israel; its presence shows maritime traffic survived even as land excavations register economic decline. Dor L2, with basket-handle amphorae, iron blooms and a wood-and-lead anchor stock, belongs to the seventh–sixth centuries BCE, a period when Assyrian and then Babylonian policies revived long-distance trade through the harbour.
The authors conclude that the lagoon’s stratified cargoes “capture expansion and contraction in Dor’s seaborne economy over four centuries.” Future seasons will extend the trench westward, where ground-penetrating sonar has flagged timbers that could belong to the 11th-century hull itself—a discovery that would put flesh, or at least planks, on the anchor’s newly deciphered script.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.