The wreck provided tangible evidence of an astonishing array of contacts and trade between the different cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East in the late Bronze Age. The Ulu Burun ship sailed at around the time that Tutankhamun ruled Egypt, and “it is far more important than Tutankhamun's tomb as a contribution to our understanding of the period”, according to Wachsmann. “This goes to the nitty gritty of the world. It's Wall Street in a ship.”
archeoblog comments:
I didn’t know that no Minoan ships had ever been discovered. Me, I’m still waiting for the rush of perfectly preserved Black Sea wrecks to come to light.
the destruction of the Minoan civilization is now thought to be due to the Santorini eruption, with the Mycenean Greeks invading and taking over. How this fits into the myth of Theusus and the Labyrinth is anyone's guess.
And another confused story is the relationship between the Minoans and the Phoenicians and the Hyksos...and some wonder if two centuries later the Trojan war caused the Bronze age collapse, with the Sea People migration and ultimately the resettlement of the Mycenean Greeks as the Philistines.
There are so many conspiracy theories about this that it may take another century or two to figure it out.
Dr. David Nieman's series on the Hyksos suggests that Minoans were part of the eastern Amorite empire. Part one of several short snips of his lecture on the Hyksos is here:
yes, it's Indiana Jones city of Tanis...
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