Russia’s Ghost Ships and the Evolution of a Grain Smuggling Operation - bellingcat

For example, decades earlier, during the mid-thirteenth century BC, a Hittite queen (referred to only as “Puduhepa”—which is literally the Hittite word for “queen” rather than her personal name) wrote to the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, stating, “I have no grain in my lands.” Soon thereafter, probably in a related move, the Hittites sent a trade emb

Already heavily populated with exiles, Yakutsk was seeing an almost daily influx of new arrivals. They came from all over the Russian Empire, from Moscow, from the Crimea, from Poland. Many of them were well educated, and most did not know what they had done to earn their term of banishment—which, often as not, was for life. Seldom had they even be

the wrecking business was lucrative, so much so that it was not unknown for a captain to arrange a convenient wreck in advance. Once the cargo had been claimed and sold, the proceeds would be divided between the captain and the wreckers, with the owners left to fight it out with insurers, if they had any.

And, in 2018, yet another Bronze Age shipwreck was discovered, in the same general vicinity as the Cape Gelidonya and Uluburun wrecks. It is known as the Kumluca shipwreck and seems to be several centuries earlier than the others we are discussing here. Preliminary reports, based on the shapes of the copper ingots that have been retrieved so far, i