The end of Atlantis

In the first part of this article, published last Sunday, I described some of the main arguments for tentatively identifying the Atlantian civilisation with the Minoan, which flourished 15 centuries before Christ. The parallels are intriguing and the scholars' detective-like intuitions rather ingenious. But one huge problem remains: Atlantis sank into the sea and perished whereas Crete survived. Today we will travel 95 km north of Crete towards the most spectacular volcano in the Mediterranean, a dormant giant that one day, around 1450 BC, blew itself up out of the blue.

It is perhaps not uncoincidental to our theory that of all the ancient civilisations, the Minoan is the only one to have been completely destroyed by a natural disaster, the force and effect of which mankind has never experienced before or since. Minoan archaeologists in fact became immediately aware that around the turn of the 15th century before Christ, i.e. around 1490-1450 BC, their excavations showed an abrupt discontinuity, settlements presented signs of collapse and devastation by fire and earthquake activity whereas all over Crete and on some Cycladic islands, volcanic ash and pumice had fallen and buried the land like a blanket. These were undoubtedly the signs of a major tectonic event.

It was Professor Galanopoulos who first announced the discovery that the island of Santorini had suffered a gigantic eruption somewhere around 1490 BC. He immediately put forward the suggestion that the Santorini cataclysm was directly responsible for the catastrophic termination of Minoan civilisation and subsequent research into the material evidence of the eruption have substantially confirmed this view.

Santorini or, as the Greeks knew it once, Thera, is a tiny Cycladic island lying some 95 km north of Crete. It is actually the rim of a huge caldera of an underwater volcano that has been formed by the very tectonically active basin of the Aegean. Its inner cliffs rise majestically out of the deep blue waters that have invaded it since its centre fell back on itself in one mighty crash fifteen hundred years before Christ.

Geologists are of the opinion that at the time of the paroxysm, a vast magmatic chamber had formed under its very centre, bellowing with tension like a seething bull in agony, spewing blasts of hot gases and showering the island with pumice and ash. Then one day, after a flourish of violent activity, the chamber blew its inside out and the central portion collapsed headlong on its back. The shock must have sent earthquakes that brought every standing edifice as far away as Crete tumbling down.

Tidal waves must have gone crashing into the northern coast of Crete, smashing everything in their path. If the Cretan merchant fleet had been at shelter inside the northern ports, as we can justifiably assume during those troubled times, then it would have been obliterated. When Krakatoa exploded last century with only one-fourth the force of the Theran explosion it sent tidal waves as high as 36 metres crashing into the Javan coast 95 km away. We are left to wonder what the Theran giants would have looked like by comparison!

As we said already, the earthquakes and tsunamis were followed by a vast spreading blanket of ash that fell like soft snow over an area the extent of which has only recently been ascertained by geologists from Schripps boring for sediments over the Aegean seabed. Their findings show that most of Crete and the Cyclades, as far east as the coast of Asia minor, came under this fallout, which naturally killed whatever cultivation was under way and choked whatever human and animal activity still lingered on the already shaken islands.

But it is on Santorini itself that we can judge the magnitude of the eruption at its worst. I was there twice and the evidence, believe me, is impressive. Wherever I could discern some Minoan stratum, usually dark brown in colour, I was immediately struck by the enormity of the overlying strata, composed mainly of tephra and pumice. At places they reach the staggering depth of 60 metres! Ancient Thera was literally buried under a mountain of ash after its centre, presumably its richest and most densely populated area, had sunk with a mighty crash into the depths of the sea.

Galanopoulos thinks that Theran geomorphic characteristics might even be echoed in some peculiar details of the Atlantean myth. The Greek seismologist is of the opinion that Thera is most vividly reflected in the description of the Atlantean citadel whereas other aspects of Atlantean geography are best reflected by Cretan, as we saw last week.

James Mavor, who was the first to conduct a geological survey of the Theran caldera, corroborates Galanopoulos' first intuition because he says that the volcano exhibits recurrent behaviour, which means that we can deduce what it must have looked like in 1490 from the processes that we can still observe today. Let us see how.

The island as it is today consists of an outer rim, the remains of the 1490-1450 BC summit and three islets, which the still-active chamber has sprouted above water since the Middles Ages (see inset map). The way things stand there is the likelihood that these islets will grow by accumulation from below. As they fill the caldera, channels of water will be created going around the island in cicles, which may be complete or broken depending on the particular conditions of growth.

What transpires by this is that if, as Mavor says, such a future stage may well have been preceded by a similar one in 1490 BC, then it would fit perfectly with the Platonic description of the Atlantian citadel with its concentric rings of earth and water surrounding it in a circle. It is not difficult to imagine the ancient Therans taking advantage of this peculiar topography for security reasons. I would even speculate that the Minoan government on Knossos used Thera, with its magnificent and perfectly chiselled out harbours, as their main naval base, much like the British used Skapa Flow in the Orkneys during the First World War.

Conclusion

Summarising the main points we have surveyed in this two-part feature, we can say that the Minoan hypothesis rests squarely on one important fact: that in 1490-1450 BC, a volcanic island north of Crete exploded violently and suddenly as the Minoan Empire wallowed in its azure apogee under a brilliant Aegean sun. A large part of Thera disappeared under water and the remainder was literally buried under a mountain of ash and pumice, killing nearly everyone and everything.

Ninety-five kilometres to the south, huge tsunamis triggered by the shocks of the explosions, reared up to crash violently into the northern Minoan harbours carrying away whatever remained upright and floating after the flurry of earthquakes preceding the eruptions. Then an ash blanket fell inexorably and silently over the whole eastern Aegean, sealing over fields and choking everything that moved or breathed.

Over a large radius the sea was littered with floating pumice, which Solon had originally translated as "mud". To all intents, that corner of the world, which had until then dominated in a most brilliant and awe-inspiring manner, was suddenly no more.

News of the catastrophe seems to have filtered to the Myceneans who had lately settled on the southern shores of Greece. Their great saga of the Argonauts, which the Greeks inherited from them, relates that a band of voyagers, on crossing the Cretan sea, encountered a mighty giant who threw stones at them, thundering threats and spewing steam from his mouth in their direction. However, by the connivance of the gods, the giant was overwhelmed: molten ichor (lava) started to bleed from his ankle and he subsequently tottered and fell with a mighty crash into the sea.

It is a pity that the Hellenes coloured actual events with so much mythology and figurative language. But it seems that one or two survivors of the tragedy did manage to give a reasonable account, however garbled, to the temple priests of Sais, an account no doubt truthful but perhaps a little bit inflated by the tension and shock of those same survivors.

Keftiu, the island of the sacred pillars of heaven, had been destroyed. It had suffered the terrible ire of Zeus (born on Mount Ida, Crete, by the way) who in a frenzy of lightening and thunder, had sent their dear little island (Thera that is) plunging into the deep. The priests of Sais had no way of checking the exact facts and when Solon the lawgiver rummaged among their documents, 900 years later, (as far from his times as the Middle Ages from ours!), the story seemed so fantastic, so unreal that he thought it belonged outside historical time, even outside the then-known geography of the world. So was the myth of Atlantis born.