Glass technology was first introduced into the

island of Crete by migrant craftsmen from the

ancient Near East. While the Mycenaean

Greeks certainly manufactured small glass

objects, the limited range of colors – or rather

the almost exclusive use of bright, translucent

blue – suggests that the raw material was

imported. This suggestion is reinforced by the

approximately 170 mostly fragmentary ingots

of blue colored glass discovered as cargo in the

shipwreck of late Bronze Age date discovered at

Ulu Burun (Kaš, in Turkey, not far from the

Greek island of Rhodes) in 1984. Towards the

end of the thirteenth century BCE, this first

flowering of the glass industry came to an end.