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The Ruins of Akrotiri on Thera
Devastation of Crete
"In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Diodorus sailed east to the Turkish island of Samos, where he reported that the inhabitants followed an ancient tradition of offering animal sacrifices on altars that had been planted high above the beaches, to make the flood line of a terrible inundation from the sea. According to legend, there had been a fire in the sky, and thunder and darkness, and Poseidon was said to have turned against his own children, who inhabited an island far away in the west; and on that island he covered up a city, 'shutting it in with a mountain."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 89
"The absence of any bodies and the dearth of metal artifacts or other portable objects of obvious material value in the ruins of Akrotiri [on Santorini] clearly indicate that the inhabitants had ample warning of the imminence of the volcanic eruption which buried the island so deeply in ash and other volcanic debris that it became uninhabitable for as much as a century or two. At Akrotiri, the lowest stratum of this volcanic debris consists of a thin layer of pellety pumice some 3 cms. thick, the top of which was crusted as though water had fallen on it after its deposition. Slight oxidation of this layer suggests that it was exposed to the atmosphere for anywhere between two and twenty-four months before itself being sealed by a subsequent pumice fall. The first layer of pumice, preserved as a significantly deeper stratum in locations on Thera closer to the volcano than Akrotiri and less exposed to erosion, may in fact have been the warning which induced the Therans to flee, since it probably lacked the volume to have caused extensive damage or loss of life. A second stratum of rather larger pumice varying between 0.50 and 1.00 m. thick at Akrotiri but again deeper elsewhere on the island then fell."
- "Akrotiri and the Santorini Volcano"
"No bodies have been found in the ash like those at Vesuvius. Archeologists also reported that movable objects had been taken from the city."
- "Santorini, Greece"
"The final deposition of tephra (volcanic ash) attributable to this eruptional sequence is over five meters thick at Akrotiri but up to fifty meters thick elsewhere on Thera and includes large boulders of basalt in addition to the lighter and smaller bits of pumice which themselves now measure as much as fifteen centimeters across."
- "Akrotiri and the Santorini Volcano"
(2) Archaeological Dating
"Oceanographic core drillings have revealed ash deposits two feet deep on the sea floor near the Turkish and Cypriot coasts. It is anyone's guess what the ashfall did to tuna populations, the main source of protein in the eastern Mediterranean."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 77
"Cores taken from the sea-bed round Crete in 1964 had been found to contain considerable quantities of ash from the eruption, and it was known from Iceland and Indonesia that such ash fall-out could seriously disrupt agricultural production."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
"The [Thera] blast - twice that of Krakatau and 40 times that of Mount St. Helens-destroyed the island's civilization, and through tidal waves, destroyed Minoan cities on surrounding shores, especially on Crete. Beneath five distinct layers of pumice and ash lies evidence of this cultural and spiritual center of Minoan culture: pastures then cultivated with crops and orchards, each field divided by rock walls and shelters; uncultivated uplands with wild animals; gentle streams and valleys incised into soft volcanic rock; multistoried buildings with internal plumbing; and country villas scattered across the landscape."
- Dr. Floyd McCoy, in Ground Truth, Earthwatch Research Report
"At the time of the first Thera Conference [Athens 1971] excavation had clearly documented a widespread 'destruction horizon' on Cretan sites datable to about the middle of the 15th century B.C. The date was deduced from the pottery found in the burned and flattened buildings, pottery which includes fine specimens of the style known as Late Minoan IB. Prosperous towns like Mochlos, Pseira, and Gournia were wrecked and abandoned. The palaces at Mallia, Phaestos, and Kato Zakro fell, and were never rebuilt. The era of the 'villas' - opulent mansions serving as district administrative centres - came to an abrupt end. The great palace at Knossos survived the disaster, but suffered damage, and was rebuilt and redecorated in a rather different style. When it too perished by fire, perhaps c. 1375 B.C., though this is disputed, it contained records written in Greek (the Linear B tablets), indicating a take-over by Mycenaean power in its final phase."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
Golden earrings found in a grave shaft and the depiction of a Mycenaean ship commander and Mycenaean weapons and boars tusk helmets in small paintings on the West House at Akrotiri are amongst the evidence that "the presence...of Mycenaean elements in Akrotirian art cannot be disputed. This strongly suggests that Thera had close connections with mainland Greece even at the height of her liaison with Crete. Crete either acquiesced or was too weak a power by this time to raise any objections. The presence of Mycenaean elements at Phylakopi in Melos too suggest that the Minoan policy in the rest of the Cyclades was the same."
- Christos G. Doumas Thera - Pompeii of the Ancient Aegean, p. 132
"...The destructions at the end of L.M. IB could, it seemed, have been caused by Theran vulcanism. But if one turned to the Akrotiri site on Thera, one found that the pottery in its abandoned houses seemed to be at least a generation earlier in date, being painted in the Late Minoan IA style. "
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
"The Cretan pottery style known as Late Minoan 1A, characterized by geometric shapes girdling a pot or vase, was found everywhere on Thera and Crete, and inside Egyptian tombs contemporary with the pharaohs Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III."
"The later LM1B pottery style was distinct from LM1A and apparently became very popular on Crete around the time Thera exploded [approximately fifty years later]. Spirals, circles and other geometric shapes had been replaced by paintings of leaping dolphins, writhing octopuses, flying fish, swallows and lilies."
"...It seems reasonable that [LM1B pottery's] emergence on Crete could have been brought about by evacuees from Thera. A swallow decorating a Cretan pot looks as if it were painted by the same hand that rendered the birds in Delta House's Room of the Lilies [in Akrotiri]...Dolphins on a Cretan vase [resemble those found] on the tripod table and a wall from West House."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 223, 228
"...At the second Thera Conference [Athens 1978], the German geologist Dr Keller created a major sensation by announcing his find of layers of ash, still visible to the naked eye, near the town of Cos. These layers were not in an archaeological context, but Professor Doumas, assisted by Professor Renfrew and the writer, was soon to find similar layers at the Minoan site of Trianda on Rhodes. These deposits of Theran ash, some up to a metre thick, lie over 200 km. from the volcano - impressive testimony to the force of the eruption. Very recently similar deposits have been discovered in lake-bed sediment near Sardis in western Turkey, 320 km. from source.
".Naturally enough, excavators on Minoan sites are now very alive to the possibility of discovering Theran ash in well stratified contexts, and this has been achieved in the reexamination of the island sites of Pseira and Mochlos just off the north coast of Crete. Here there can be no doubt that the
ash has turned up in sealed floor deposits that are to be dated to L.M. IA rather than L.M. IB [c. 1500 rather than c. 1450]."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
(3) The Final Fall
A two century gap in time?
Tree ring and radiocarbon dating place the Thera eruption at 1628/7 B.C.E.
"Despite numerous and varied arguments by a host of reputable scholars [e.g. Marinatos (1939), Page (1970), Doumas (1974), Luce (1976)] that one or more of the events associated with the period of extreme activity of the Santorini volcano surveyed above [i.e. earthquake(s), ash fall(s), tidal wave(s)] had a direct and disastrous effect on Neopalatial Minoan civilization, the simple facts are that the great earthquake which badly damaged Akrotiri is to be dated quite early in LM IA (either ca. 1650 or ca. 1560 B.C.?), that the entire town was buried in meters of volcanic ash still within the LM IA period (ca. 1625 or ca. 1550/1540 B.C.?), and that the wave of destructions (most of them including fires) which defines the end of the Neopalatial period on Crete and to which the palaces at Mallia, Phaistos, and Zakro all fell victim cannot be dated earlier than LM IB (ca. 1480/1470 B.C.?). Hood [TAW I (1978) 681-690] claims that clear evidence of the earthquake which so severely damaged Akrotiri before the town was buried is to be found at several sites on Crete where it is clearly dated to LM IA. More importantly, tephra from the later eruption of the Theran volcano has been found within the past decade in LM IA contexts on Rhodes (at Trianda) and Melos (at Phylakopi) as well as on Crete itself, ample confirmation that the eruption preceded the LM IB destruction horizon on Crete by a significant amount of time. Thus no direct correlation can be established between the Santorini volcano and the collapse of Neopalatial Minoan civilization."
- Author Unknown
A fifty year decline in power?
"One can no longer suppose that the paroxysmal eruption was the direct cause of the destruction and abandonment of so many sites in East Crete c. 1450 B.C. But any attempt to play down the destructive force of the eruption has been more than counteracted by the new evidence on the extent of the ash fall-out. I still believe that the eruption, which I would date closer to 1470 than 1500, was a severe body blow to Minoan power and prosperity, and that it greatly undermined their morale. The sudden extinction of their naval base on Thera, and devastation extending past their shores to Rhodes and Cos, would indicate that they had lost the favour of the great Mother Goddess of earth and mountain."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
"...The Mount Pelée death cloud, small although it was, killed vegetation on the island even where it fell cold enough not to be lethal, even where it covered leaves only a sixteenth of an inch deep. Crops all over the island blighted and yellowed, causing famine and economic collapse.
"In 1815, when Tambora let loose with a Thera-magnitude explosion, a one-9nch fall of cools ash, 250 miles away in Makassar, blotted out the sun for two days, choked all the birds to death, blighted crops and killed most of the fish in the lakes. A week later, rats, which must have become desperately hungry, were seen hunting animals larger than themselves. On western Sumbawa, 125 miles from Tambora, the ash accumulated more than a foot deep. During the weeks that followed, thirty-eight thousand survivors died from starvation and disease."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 74-75
By 1450, virtually every building was leveled and all palaces except Knossos were in ruin. Approximately 75 years later it too was destroyed by earthquake and the Myceneans from the Greek mainland took Crete as an easy conquest.
"Sir Arthur Evans believed that the destruction horizon of 1450 B.C. was caused by that perennial scourge of Crete, a tectonic earthquake. That still seems to me the best explanation for such a simultaneous and pervasive disaster. The former reaction of the Minoans to earthquakes had been to rebuild on a more ample scale, but now the old resilience had been totally sapped. The survivors moved to the west of the island, or were dispersed overseas, and the power centre at Knossos fell an easy prey to a Mycenaean dynastic take-over. As I wrote in 1969, 'Minoan Crete was battered to her knees by the brute forces of nature and never rose again'. And I still think that a dim memory of these extraordinary happenings was preserved in Egypt, and that Plato picked it up there in a garbled form and worked it into the texture of his Atlantis legend."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
"Nobody ever talked of the civilization of Crete having been wiped out. But it seems more that probable that the results of the eruptions created enough damage to bring about a hiatus, which [in turn] brought about a weakening of the Cretan economy and a political crisis."
- Professor Spyros Iakovidis quoted in Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 279
A long period of quiescence?
"The city beneath Akrotiri was abandoned and covered with pumice and ash; then the volcano went into a phase of quiescence before exploding some fifty years later, choking, burning and drowning portions of Crete.
"The second possibility was more in agreement with...the Atlantis legend."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 224
Mount St. Helens buried a forest under pumice and ash in the nineteenth century, then became quiescent before exploding in 1980. The possibility of a prolonged period of quiescent on Thera is disputed by vulcanologists, however.
"There is no archaeological evidence for how long the full series of eruptions [on Thera] lasted, but vulcanologists have reached a consensus that the process was a fairly rapid, hence short-lived one. The absence of any clear signs of erosion at the preserved tops of the ruins of Akrotiri supports the notion that complete burial of these ruins followed close upon the heels of the events which produced the ruins in the first place, that is, the initial stages of the eruption."
- "Akrotiri and the Santorini Volcano"
"From the archaeological evidence it is clear that...minor tremors presages a major earthquake which was then followed by a period of calm-perhaps of several month's duration - during which the townsfolk came back. The evidence of their return is quite convincing, for some of the buildings were repaired in a makeshift fashion and reinhabited. The evidence was originally interpreted by Marinatos to mean that squatters, in search of loot from the houses of the wealthy, had taken over the abandoned city. However, as the excavation has progressed, it has become clear that the renovations were substantial enough for a major reoccupation of the city by its original inhabitants to have taken place."
- Christos G. Doumas Thera - Pompeii of the Ancient Aegean, p. 134
A contracted sequence of events?
Archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos has identified the following sequence of events on Thera:
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According to this timeline "that a minimum of five years had passed between the abandonment of Thera and the explosion."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 225
In the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, "the first phase was very mild and of short duration, commenced on 28 May and can be compared with that phase of the Thera eruption which warned the inhabitants of Akrotiri to leave their homes and which ended with the ejection and fall of pallety pumice over the whole island. The second phase of the Krakatoa eruption, much more intense, lasted seventy-one days, from 19 June to 29 August, and coincides with the phase on Thera when enormous quantities of pumice and ash were ejected, covering the entire island with a voluminous mantle. Within this phase, in both instances, is included the final explosion which produced fine dust and terminated in the total collapse of the volcano."
- Christos G. Doumas Thera - Pompeii of the Ancient Aegean, p. 141
"The gap between LM1A and LM1B was small, perhaps no more than five or ten year, and quite possibly less, and the volcano did indeed bury abandoned Thera at the LM1A phase, then exploded a short time later, catching Crete at LM1B."
"So why should an earthquake have frightened the Therans off - especially if one of the few places to go from Thera was to earthquake-prone Crete?"
"My guess is that the first major earthquake was accompanied by St. Pierre-type ground surges, fiery black snakes that descended from the mountain and turned men into pillars of charcoal before they could scream or run."
"The most likely reason no one returned for the [valuable gold-inlaid] dagger beneath Akrotiri is that no one who knew where it was survived the initial quake and surge. The fact that gold was also left behind on the north shore, and that at least one body was left unburied (suggesting that other charred skeletons await discovery) hints that friends and relatives of the deceased had perished with them."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) pp. 225-226, 281
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