Bronze Age trade outpost uncovered.

Scientists have unearthed evidence suggesting that eastern Mediterranean mariners were trading with coastal Egyptians during the 14th century B.C. Over the summer, researchers from the United States and England conducted excavations on a tiny island in a saltwater lagoon about 300 kilometers west of the Nile Delta.

Artifacts discovered on the island, which borders the harbors of the modern city of Marsa Matruh, include pieces of several small buildings, pottery, lamps and metals tools. Many of the ancient remains were manufactured on Cyprus, Crete or other eastern mediterranean locations, according to expedition director Donald White of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The island settlement probably was a way station for Bronze age (3000 B.C. to 1000 B.C.) traders sailing from Crete toward the Nile Delta and the Syro-Palestinian coast, he explains.

In addition, says White, artifacts uncovered last summer indicate that Marsa Matruh was part of the overses trading empire of Iron Age Greece, nearly 300 years earlier than was previously suspected.

Further clues to trade networks among Mediterranean peoples around 1400 B.C. come from last year's discovery of a shipwreck off the southern coast of Turkey (SN: 12/8/84, p. 359). The origin of the trading vessel is unknown; it contained artifacts from Greek, cypriot and early Phoenician cultures. Expedition director George F. Bass of Texas A&M University in College Station suspects the ship was Greek.