Cool Finds

This Diver Stumbled Upon a Centuries-Old Sword Beneath the Mediterranean Sea. Years Later, He Found Another One Nearby

Shlomi Katzin, who unearthed a 900-year-old sword in 2021, recently discovered a similar artifact jutting out of the seabed off the coast of Israel

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

March 19, 2026

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In 2021, a man diving off the coast of Israel discovered a 900-year-old sword resting on the seafloor. The four-foot-long iron weapon was encrusted in marine organisms, but it appeared to be in good condition otherwise. It was a lucky find for the diver, Shlomi Katzin, who turned the sword over to officials.

Now, Katzin’s luck has returned. He recently discovered another sword jutting out of the seabed, not far from where he found the first one. It’s slightly smaller, measuring just three feet long, but it appears to be roughly the same age.

Katzin, who is an underwater archaeologist at the University of Haifa, was swimming off Dor Beach on Israel’s Mediterranean coast when he spotted a group of divers with metal detectors, according to a university statement announcing the find. He was concerned that the divers were antiquities thieves, so he chased them out of the area. Then, he noticed the sword protruding from the sand beneath the waves.

Katzin reached out to Deborah Cvikel, also an underwater archaeologist at the university, who contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority. The agency gave the researchers permission to study the sword in the university’s conservation laboratory.

Researchers think the sword dates to the 12th century C.E., the same period as the sword Katzin discovered in 2021. Since it’s covered in marine sediment and shells, the weapon is difficult to study directly. But the researchers came up with a clever workaround: They ran it through a CT scanner at a nearby hospital. This noninvasive imaging technique allowed them to peer behind the barnacles for a closer look at the artifact’s internal structure.

“This discovery greatly contributes to our understanding of the use of maritime anchorages and the lives of warriors during this era,” Cvikel says in a statement, per a translation by the Times of Israel’s Rossella Tercatin.

Their investigation revealed a small fracture in the blade. Additionally, very little of the original iron appears to have survived. The sword, which was likely designed to be held in one hand, doesn’t appear to have been made in Israel. Instead, the team suspects it came from Europe.

The researchers think both of Katzin’s swords may have been wielded by European knights during the Crusades. “It could have been from a knight who fell in the sea or lost it in a fight at sea,” Jonathan Phillips, a historian of the Crusades at Royal Holloway, University of London, told the New York Times’ Eduardo Medina in 2021.

However, the swords’ connection to the Crusades isn’t straightforward.

“Not every person in the Middle Ages who traversed the seas off the coast of what’s now Israel was a Christian, and not every person who was a Christian at that time was a ‘Crusader,’” historians David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2021. “The Crusades weren’t the only events happening during these two centuries in either the Middle East or Europe … and not everything that fell into the eastern Mediterranean Sea during this period was a Crusader artifact.”

Broadly speaking, the term “Crusades” is used to describe a series of religious wars fought by Muslim and Christian armies between 1095 and 1291. The period began with a fiery speech by Pope Urban II, which sparked a series of military campaigns to reclaim the Holy Land. 

In the years that followed, however, the term “crusading” was applied to “whoever the pope decided might be an enemy of the faith,” including “polytheists and Orthodox Christians in the north, Muslims in Iberia, heretics or rival European Christian powers in France and Italy,” wrote Perry and Gabriele.

Instead of labeling everything from this period as a “Crusader” object, historians should develop and use more accurate terminology, they argued.

“We’ll likely never really know who specifically owned the newly discovered sword,” they wrote. “Objects have lives of their own, and the weapon’s journey from ship to ocean floor may not have been its first voyage. But attaching the ‘Crusader’ adjective … reveals our own modern assumptions about the object, the region’s past and the people who lived there.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.