Antiquities from the Sea: Amphorae, Wrecks and Divers off Cyprus

Most of what the sea round Cyprus has given up in modern times came up in the open: through the nets of fishermen and the hands of sponge divers who showed archaeologists where to look, and through surveys and excavations under permit, beginning with the Kyrenia ship in the 1960s. The law of the Republic treats the territorial sea as land for the purposes of the Antiquities Law, so an amphora on the seabed belongs to the Government exactly as a pot in a tomb does, and since 2014 the law has reached out to the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf. The documented cases of illicit removal from Cypriot waters are few and small, and the largest seizure on record, at Limassol in 2015, concerned a wreck in Lebanese waters. Sea-found antiquities still reach the market, mostly as transport amphorae with marine encrustation and a label saying "Cyprus", and on most of them nothing ties the jar to a Cypriot findspot. The photograph at the head of this page shows transport amphorae from the cargo of the Kyrenia ship, raised in 1968 and 1969 and kept in Kyrenia Castle, in the occupied north since the Turkish invasion of 1974.

What the Antiquities Law says about the sea

The Antiquities Law, Cap. 31, defines "land" to include "the territorial sea of the Republic" (s. 2) [1]. Because s. 3 makes every antiquity not yet discovered "in or on any land" the property of the Government, an antiquity lying on the seabed within the territorial sea is Government property, and the chance-find rule of s. 4 applies to it as it does on a field: the finder must give notice at once and, if the object is portable, deliver it to the village head, the nearest police station or the nearest archaeological museum, and show or describe the place [1]. The same definitions section brings the seabed into the rules on metal detectors, which are defined as instruments able to locate metal "in the ground, the subsoil, on the bed of the sea" or of rivers and lakes [1]. The law also defines "maritime zones" as the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf, and a "marine antiquity" (ενάλια αρχαιότητα) as one found, discovered or excavated within them [1].

Beyond the territorial sea, Part IIIA of the law (ss. 18A to 18D) governs antiquities "within the Exclusive Economic Zone and/or the Continental Shelf of the Republic" [1]. Giorgallis and Iasonos describe these sections as "adopted on the basis of the 1982 UNCLOS and amended in 2014" [2]. They provide that:

• every antiquity in the zone, discovered or not, "is the property of the Government" (s. 18A);
• anyone who discovers antiquities there without a permit must notify the Director of Antiquities at once, with the geographical coordinates of the find, and must not remove or otherwise interfere with them without the Director's permit; breach carries a fine of up to €100,000, up to three years in prison, or both (s. 18B);
• the Council of Ministers may declare protection zones for marine antiquities by decision published in the Official Gazette (s. 18C);
• no one may survey for antiquities or excavate in the zone without a written permit from the Director (s. 18D) [1].

Regulations made under the law in 2016, the Regulations for the Protection of Maritime Antiquities (No. 218/2016), came into force on 22 July 2016 [2]. The general penalties for illicit digging, possession and export, and the end of licensed trade in 1996, apply at sea as on land; they are set out on policing and monitoring and not repeated here.

Cyprus and the 2001 UNESCO Convention

UNESCO's Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage was adopted in Paris on 2 November 2001 and entered into force on 2 January 2009 [4]. Cyprus has not ratified it. The Cyprus National Commission for UNESCO states that "Cyprus has not yet ratified the Convention", though "it has been following some of the international meetings" and sends experts and students to seminars on underwater heritage [3]. Cyprus does not appear in UNESCO's list of States Parties [4], and Giorgallis and Iasonos note that of the states in the case they discuss "Only Lebanon is a party to the 2001 UNESCO Convention" [2].

Cyprus has nevertheless taken over the Convention's working rules. Giorgallis and Iasonos write that it "has incorporated the Annex to the Convention into its domestic legal framework" through the 2016 Regulations [2]. The Annex is the part of the Convention that sets out how underwater sites may be investigated: preservation in place as the first option, no commercial exploitation, and work only by qualified archaeologists under a project design. In practice, then, Cyprus applies the Convention's archaeological standards in its own waters without being bound by its inter-state machinery. Cyprus has been a party since 1979 to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on illicit transfer, which covers objects from the sea once they enter the trade (see policing and monitoring).

The documented cases of removal and seizure

The record of illicit removal of antiquities from Cypriot waters is thin. Three cases are on the published record.

• Salamis, about 1989 or 1990. Harpster reports, from a personal communication with an official of the Turkish Cypriot antiquities service in the occupied north, that a marble statue of Artemis was taken from Italian tourists "who had illegally removed it from the seabed in front of the ancient city of Salamis"; he records it on display in the museum of St Mamas at Morphou [5, p. 8]. The same paper describes the northern coast after 2003 as exposed by "a rapid rise in tourism and unchecked real estate development", with no inventory of underwater or coastal sites [5, p. 8].
• Limassol, December 2015. Police found 57 crates of antiquities on a vessel, the Odyssey Explorer, docked at Limassol since 17 December 2015 [6]. The police spokesman said the matter was "being carefully handled"; thirteen crew were questioned and no one was arrested [6]. The objects came from a seventeenth-century Ottoman wreck in deep water; the Department of Antiquities accepts that they were excavated in Lebanon's economic zone or contiguous zone, and accused the salvage company concerned of "violently extracting objects, causing destruction to their context" [7]. The company replied that its crew had not known that Cyprus required the finds to be declared as cargo [7]. On 4 March 2025 the District Court of Limassol held the customs seizure lawful, in Director of the Customs Department through the Attorney General v. Odyssey Retriever Inc. (Application No. 190/2019); an appeal is pending [2]. The court decided a customs question and did not examine the permit for the recovery [2].
• Neo Chorio, Paphos district, 26 February 2017. In a list of 67 antiquities complaints for 2012 to 2017, sent by the Minister of Transport to the House of Representatives in May 2018, the Department recorded the seizure of five objects "from illegal underwater activity" at Neo Chorio [8]. The list gives no description of the objects and no outcome.

One case from the south belongs here with a caution. In February 2014 police at Peyia, north of Paphos, found 58 amphorae in a house with gold objects, weapons, a metal detector and cash; the case and its source are on organised cases in the south. Amphorae in that number are more likely to have come from the sea than from tombs, but the published report does not say where they were found, and no outcome has been found.

No published case has been found of tourists stopped at the airports with jars from the sea, or of divers fined for lifting amphorae. In the published withdrawals and returns of 2024 to 2026, which are tabulated on policing and monitoring, no object is described as coming from the sea.

Amphorae on the market

The word "amphora" covers two different kinds of object in the Cypriot trade. The first is the painted tomb amphora: White Painted, Bichrome and Black-on-Red jars of the Iron Age, made in Cyprus, buried with the dead, and exported in large numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lawful channels set out on the legal export page. These come from land, and their market is the market for Cypriot pottery generally. The second is the transport amphora: the plain, heavy jar in which wine, oil and other goods were shipped. Cyprus made its own, from the horizontal-handled jars of the Archaic and Classical periods described in the article on Cypriot transport amphorae to the Late Roman 1 amphora, whose kilns have been excavated at Paphos and at Zygi-Petrini [13; 14]. Transport amphorae are the object most often raised from the sea.

A transport amphora sold as "from Cyprus" is usually a Roman or Late Roman jar with worm casts and shell on its surface. The encrustation shows that it lay in the sea. It does not show which sea. Jars of the same Roman types were made on many coasts and carried all over the Mediterranean, and Cypriot types travelled as far, so the type of a sea-found jar is not evidence that it was found off Cyprus. Of the four Kiti "sites" recorded in 1972, those round the reefs 500 m and 900 m offshore held Hellenistic and Roman amphorae of several origins [11, p. 57], and the 4th-century BC cargo at Mazotos was mostly of jars from Chios [10]. A Chian or Rhodian jar is not Cypriot, even when it lay off Cyprus.

For a buyer, the encrustation settles nothing about the history. A jar that came up by chance in a net may have been in a collection for decades, given or sold by a fisherman or a diver before the present law reached the waters it came from. A jar raised recently from a Cypriot wreck is the property of the Government of Cyprus. Without paper, the two look the same.

The evidence against this reading

The thinness of the record is partly a matter of where underwater sites lie. A tomb robbed in a field leaves a hole that a farmer sees; a wreck stripped at 40 metres leaves nothing that anyone on land will report, and the Department's list of 67 complaints for 2012 to 2017 contains a single underwater case [8]. The northern coast has had no inventory of underwater sites since 1974, and Harpster saw its heritage "facing a crisis" from tourism and development [5, p. 8]. A diver who worked at Mazotos told the Cyprus Mail in 2026 that he had "helped hide the ancient wreck from looters" [9]. The Limassol seizure shows that recovery of deep-water wrecks for sale is a real business in the eastern Mediterranean, carried on from Cypriot ports [6; 7].

Each of these points has an answer in the record. The wrecks that matter most were found by divers who reported them, and were excavated under permit: Kyrenia in the 1960s, Mazotos from 2007, Protaras in 2019. The Limassol case concerned a wreck in Lebanese waters and was caught by Cypriot customs, and the Department maintains that the recovery lacked "the necessary archaeological authorisations" [9]. Underwater objects are a small part of the Cypriot trade, and a sea-found transport amphora sells in the same cheap venues as ordinary pottery; in our own unpublished research on public auction results, the median sold Cypriot vessel made about $820 (2,168 sold lots), and the economics of looting shows why so little of it pays. None of this proves that any single sea-found jar left Cyprus lawfully. It shows that the documented losses are small beside the lawful record, and that the record has gaps where the sea is deep.

Meanwhile, lawfully: the Kyrenia ship and the work since

The Kyrenia ship came to archaeology through the lawful route. Andreas Cariolou, a "sponge diver living in Kyrenia", had found the wreck in 1965, and at the end of the Cyprus Underwater Archaeological Search of 1967 he brought Michael Katzev's team "to a small exposed mound of approximately 80 amphorae about a half a kilometre off the shore of Kyrenia" [5, p. 5]. Katzev's survey had spent a month going round the island in September 1967, finding possible wreck sites off the Akamas and Cape Andreas [5, p. 5]. The excavation of 1968 and 1969, directed by Michael Katzev for the University Museum of Pennsylvania and Oberlin College, raised the hull and its cargo, and both stayed in Cyprus, in Kyrenia Castle. What became of the castle galleries after the invasion is on museums and excavation stores in the north: the ship never left the castle. The finder, Andreas Cariolou, is remembered for reporting it.

The harbour of Nea Paphos was the first ancient Cypriot harbour surveyed by an archaeologist, by Wiktor Daszewski in 1965 [5, p. 5]. Elisha Linder and Avner Raban surveyed the harbours of Salamis, Kyrenia, Lapithos, Marion and Nea Paphos from 1971 [5, p. 6]. After 1974, work in the south resumed in 1980, when the Swedish team returned to Cape Kiti; John Leonard surveyed the coasts at Drousha-Kioni, Kourion and Nea Paphos from 1989, and Robert Hohlfelder mapped the submerged harbour of Nea Paphos in 1991 and 1992 (the Colorado survey) [5, p. 7]. Jean-Yves Empereur's French team worked on the harbour of Amathus in three seasons between 1984 and 1986 [5, p. 7].

Cape Kiti, at the southern end of Larnaca Bay, was surveyed in 1972 and 1973 with the Gothenburg team then excavating at Hala Sultan Tekke, again in 1977 and in 1980 [11, pp. 56–57]. The finds were mostly Late Bronze Age stone anchors and Roman pottery; they were first read as wrecks, and later, following Leonard, as the debris of an anchorage [11, p. 57]. The University of Cyprus ran field schools there in 2008 and 2009 [12].

The Mazotos wreck, found in 2006 [9], lies off the south coast 14 miles south-west of Larnaca. Since November 2007 it has been excavated by the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities [10]. In 2008 about 500 visible amphorae were counted in three or four layers, most from Chios and dated to the third quarter of the 4th century BC; six were lifted as a sample, and the finds went for conservation to the Larnaca District Museum [10]. The project was directed by Stella Demesticha [9], who as director of the University's maritime laboratory has said that "Collaboration with treasure hunters is out of the question" [9]. The same laboratory investigated the Roman wreck off Protaras found by volunteer divers in 2019, which the Department called the first undisturbed Roman shipwreck found in Cypriot waters (the Protaras project) [9].

The wider history of ships in Cypriot waters is on seafaring and ships.

What this means for a sea-found object on the market today

An amphora or other object from the sea offered today as Cypriot is in the same legal position as any Cypriot antiquity. If it was taken from the territorial sea, the economic zone or the continental shelf of the Republic since the law reached it, it is the property of the Government of Cyprus, and its removal without a permit was an offence [1]. If it left Cyprus in a collection, a dealer's stock or a licensed export before those dates, it may have a lawful history, and that history is proved in the same way as for a pot from a tomb: an export licence or lead seal, a dated receipt, an old collection label, a publication, a photograph. The article on export licences and labels shows how to read such papers, and provenance and provenience explains why a findspot and an ownership history are different questions.

A sea-found jar adds one question of its own: whether it came from Cypriot waters at all. Most Roman transport amphorae on the market have no recorded findspot, and the encrustation on them proves only a long stay in the sea. A label reading "Cyprus" on such a jar may record where it was bought, or where a previous owner thought it came from. Any amphora with a chain of ownership going back before 1974, or papers from the period of lawful export, is in a much stronger position than one without. An owner, heir or buyer with a sea-found piece, with or without papers, can send photographs through the identification page or contact us: the type, the encrustation and whatever paper survives usually say enough to tell what the object is and what can lawfully be done with it.