Man finds 3,400-year-old Egyptian anchor during his morning swim

An Israeli man Rafi Bahalul went for a dip off the shores of Atlit, when he noticed hieroglyphs on the seabed.

"I saw it, kept on swimming for a few meters, then realised what I had seen and dived down to touch it," Bahalul told Haaretz.

"It was like entering an Egyptian temple at the bottom of the Mediterranean."

Shirly Ben Dor Evian, curator of Emoglyphs, said the stone would have at one time been part of a larger, ornate wall relief.

"The stone was discovered by chance -- spotted on the seabed by a swimmer," Ben Dor Evian said.

"The Egyptian relief was reused as a stone anchor on a ship sailing the Mediterranean coast," she added.

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