Ships and boats: wood, sea and lake

Two hulls, two findspots

The Ma'agan Mikhael ship was found in August 1985 by a member of the kibbutz, about 70 m from the shore at about 2 m depth; according to the museum's page the keel, sternpost, planks, 14 ribs, the mast base and an intact anchor survived. Source 1. The boat from Ginosar was exposed in January 1986 on the bed of the Sea of Galilee after a drought, by two brothers of the kibbutz; it measures "some 8 meters in length", and its excavation was completed in ten days by archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority with many volunteers. Source 2. Open sea against a lake; two discovery stories the institutions tell themselves.

How a ship is dated

Both records give a date, but not in the same way. For Ma'agan Mikhael the museum writes that carbon-14 tests and the pottery dated the ship to the late 5th century BCE (about 400 BCE) - a method and a result. Source 1. For the boat from Ginosar the centre writes: "Scientists dated the boat to some 2,000 years ago" - a result without a range and without a method on the page. Source 2. The ship is therefore placed on this site in the Persian period on a cited editorial basis - the museum's date falls within that period - and the page says the placement is ours; the boat is not placed on the timeline and is shown with the centre's wording only. The guide "How are archaeological finds dated?" explains why the wording of a date matters as much as the number.

Water, wood and conservation

Wood that has been submerged for centuries disintegrates as it dries, so both hulls went through long conservation before they were displayed: PEG treatment over several years at Ma'agan Mikhael, fourteen years of conservation until 2000 at Ginosar. Sources 1, 2. What a visitor sees is the conserved hull, not the ship as it was at sea. The site adds no claims about construction, cargo or sailing route that the official pages do not state.

What a visit shows, and what it does not

The ship is displayed at the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, whose official page noted, on the day it was read, wings temporarily closed for renovation; the boat is displayed in the visitors' gallery of the Yigal Allon Centre at Ginosar. Visit details were checked on 22.10.2026 against the institutions' pages, and the visit trail "Ancient ships in the north" points to them; opening hours are not copied to this site. Both vessels are shown here in visitors' photographs under open licences from Wikimedia Commons - the ship in Oren Rozen's photograph at the Hecht Museum (CC BY-SA 3.0), the boat in a photograph released as public domain (CC0) - because the institutions publish no licence for their own pictures; the credit and licence appear under each photograph, and the photographs record the conserved hulls as displayed on the day they were taken.

Where to go next

The visit trail connects the two vessels and the Carmel coast in five reasoned steps. The place page "Newe Yam and the Carmel coast" puts Ma'agan Mikhael and Newe Yam on the map. The comparison page sets the two records against each other: wood against wood, carbon-14 and pottery against "some 2,000 years ago".