Was Atlantis in the Aegean?

The island of Thera was at one time named Calliste, and its discovery attributed to Cadmus, who left a colony led by Membliarus. The name Thera was attributed to Theras, an immigrant from Sparta who arrived after Calliste had been inhabited for eight generations [ref]. Its modern name is Santorini. It is located in the Aegean Sea northwest of the island of Rhodes.

We see that Herodotus writes about the island with no mention of any eruption, and he lived no more than 1400 years later, probably no more than 450 years later (the possibility exists that he lived even a few centuries earlier). The actual date of the eruption may have been as early as 2000 BC, or as late as 199 BC, a date derived from Strabo [ref] for an eruption on Thera. The lack of any record in any other ancient writers suggests that the eruption occurred in late antiquity, or alternatively so long ago that any records had been lost by classic Greek times, along with any legends associated with the disaster.

The Atlantis story in Plato doesn't match any details of pre-eruption Thera (despite numerous claims to the contrary), and even among scholars disinterested in supposed connections with Atlantis, there's a consensus that the dating of the eruption doesn't coincide with the end of Minoan civilization.

The eruption of Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 AD. A written eyewitness account survives of this event. Some Roman noble families had second homes there and the eruption did not go without notice. Though largely forgotten after the empire fell, a faint memory of the city's location was preserved in a place name by survivors and their descendants. The scholarly world remained unaware of the site's significance until after the Renaissance when it was discovered by workers digging a well.

Many books have been written concerning the idea that the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Minoan city of Akrotiri was the event that Plato memorialized in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias. This idea has a history that seems to originate with the modern discovery of the site. To arrive at this conclusion is simple enough -- take the numbers Plato uses for the dimensions and antiquity of Atlantis, divide them by ten, then keep all the fabulous details about the architecture and pretend it applies to the structures and artifacts recovered by archaeology -- and then throw out all the details about its conquering armies, its location, and its complete disappearance.

No wonder there's such an exact match!

Reducing the age of the disaster from 9,000 to 900 before Plato's time is said to result in a correspondence between the legendary destruction of Atlantis and the volcanic eruption that destroyed the human presence on Thera. As Robert Schoch and probably others have pointed out, the ancient Greeks didn't use a base ten numbering system, and neither did the Egyptians -- the purported source for the tale.

Radiocarbon dating of Theran wood (without dendrochronological calibration) almost holds up the high chronology. After calibration the date must be revised drastically downward, and other samples show more recent dates for the eruption. The volcano itself provided Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 sufficient to make all samples test much older than they are. [ref] [ref]

Although there is a big rush to equate the Minoan civilization with Atlantis, and put Thera directly into the Minoan mainstream,

[r]elief frescoes are thus far unknown from Akrotiri, as are large scale grifÞn compositions and bull-jumping scenes, all of which are particularly characteristic of Knossian palatial murals. [ref]

Placing the blame for the decline or outright destruction of the Minoans on the Theran eruption is seen as an error. The real difÞculty seems to arise because there is no deÞnite date for the eruption on which everyone can agree.

In the case of Thera, a tidal wave would have been created by the collapse of the magma chamber within the volcano and the creation of a large, deep crater or caldera into which the sea would have rushed... Doumas in fact claimed that the collapse of the magma chamber and hence the appearance of the tidal wave was an event which postdated the volcanic eruption itself by a decade or more, thus explaining how events on Santorini directly caused the collapse of Minoan civilization even though Akrotiri was buried in late LM IA while... the end of the Neopalatial period cannot be dated earlier than LM IB. [ref]

The conventional belief among those who identified Thera with Atlantis is that a large eruption blew away the center of the island, buried its settlements, and created a tidal wave and rain of ash that destroyed most other Aegean cities and towns.

[m]ore recently, the vulcanologists have claimed that the Santorini caldera formed quite gradually and that a tidal wave, if indeed there was one at all, would not have been on anything like the scale envisaged by Marinatos and other proponents of the link between the Theran volcano and the sudden decline of Neopalatial Crete. [ref]

In other words, it didn't happen that way. The city may have been destroyed by an eruption or an earthquake, but the caldera itself seems to be prehistoric. The debris covering the city is not hundreds of feet thick, and in fact is in most places much less deep than that covering Pompeii.

The ruined town is dated by pottery evidence to Late Minoan I, corresponding to Egypt's 18th Dynasty. Using the revised chronology of Immanuel Velikovsky, the actual date for the presumed eruption would have to be no earlier than the late 11th century B.C. (1012-830 BC) [ref] Ironically, in 1950 Velikovsky himself suggested that Atlantis was Thera, destroyed 900 years before Plato, and he seems to have entertained the idea that the (at that time) undeciphered Cretan texts would hold some information about Atlantis. [ref]

In 1952 he mentions Atlantis again, in passing, speculating that the tale of Atlantis might someday be found in the texts of Cretan and Cypriot inscriptions. [ref] In 1955 he mentioned it once more, in quotation. [ref]

Velikovsky's interest in the Atlantis legend seems to have been rooted in his supposition that the catastrophic end of Thera became the story of Atlantis, therefore it was reasonable for him to predict that some written record of the event could exist in the inscriptions left by the Minoans and their contemporaries. No such account has been found, which doesn't refute the historicity of Plato's account or Velikovsky's reconstructed chronology, but it doesn't support the idea that the great eruption of Thera took place prior to the so-called Greek Dark Age.

Nevertheless, there is a belief that the purported 15th, 16th, or 17th century BC eruption led to the unravelling of Minoan society and the usual ancient litany of starvation, conquest, enslavement, and massacre, and thus no account for posterity. In a later essay, Velikovsky gave a different presumed location -- "[f]rom the Azores to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is the location of Atlantis." [ref]

Velikovsky's objection to the 9,000 year interval between the destruction of Atlantis and Plato's time was that the only known human cultures from that era did not build great cities or navigate the seas. Human navigation to cross miles of sea dates to at least 800,000 years ago, toolmaking is older than that, and structures were being constructed in Japan at least 500,000 years ago.

The Associated Press (May 1998) carried a story about an 11,500 year old skull found near Belo Horizonte in southeastern Brazil and dubbed Luzia (for "Lucy"), that seems to have South Pacific origins, rather than northeast Asian origins conventionally ascribed to all Precolumbian inhabitants of the Americas. If this age and origin is confirmed, presumably by a preponderance of subsequent finds, we'll no doubt be assured that the ancient South Pacific islanders walked over.

In Centuries of Darkness Peter James et al also proposed a series of date changes in the Egyptian chronology and by definition in the chronologies of the entire ancient Near East. Oddly enough, his placement of the 18th Dynasty, although not as radical (for want of a better word) as Velikovsky's, ignores the problem with the dating of the Thera eruption. He cites the increasing antiquity of Theran radiocarbon dates (150 years or so before the old conventional date of 1500 BC).

If the Theran destruction took place during the 18th Dynasty, in the CoD revised chronology the destruction must have taken place after 1300 BC, a downdating of at least three centuries. [ref] James has also mused that, "Tests done on Thera itself shows that the outgassing of old carbon from vents near the present inactive crater was making modern plants seem hundreds of years old." Radiocarbon dating appears to be a dead end at this site. Regarding the pottery evidence, he continues, "The relative dating of Middle Minoan and early Late Minoan styles viz a viz the Near East is a highly complex and confused matter."

The precise dating of the Theran and other Minoan pottery and worked stone by ESR or thermoluminescence could clarify it. Clarity at this site could help to build a coherent chronology for the ancient eastern Mediterranean. The reason for the complexity and confusion is that the artifacts are required to prop up an arbitrary chronology that was concocted during the 19th century (or in the case of Centuries of Darkness, concocted during the 20th century). The significance of a correct date lies in the nature of the disaster -- the life of the settlements was snuffed out and buried in a single moment, preserving most of the relationships between the artifacts, possibly from farflung cultures.

A geologist, while studying the Minoans, reached the controversial conclusion that the so called palaces on Crete, such as Knossos, were in fact mortuaries and tombs. He showed evidence for the ancient looting of the remains in the area near the ruins, a phenomenon that has gone on from ancient times to this day in the royal burials of Egypt. He goes on to point out the striking similarities between the Minoan burials and those of the Etruscans, writing "it is true that the Minoans and Etruscans were separated in time by a thousand years. But the coincidence is remarkable." [ref]

It is not surprising that Velikovsky concluded that there was no such separation, and in fact considered some of the same evidence. [ref]

Another similarity is that the surviving inscriptions left by each people seem mostly to be related to burial or sacred offerings. Sir Arthur Evans attempted to show a link between their languages before either was translated. [ref] Carian, the language from which we get place names like labyrinth, "place of the double axe", and which Velikovsky identified as Hurrian [ref], will turn out to have been related to Etruscan.

Epigrapher Barry Fell, who was totally unconnected with revised chronologies or catastrophism, found that "Etruscan is an Anatolian language, related therefore to Minoan". Despite the substantial similarities that he saw between Etruscan, Hittite, and Minoan, he points out that further similarities may not be forthcoming because of the presumed 750 year gulf between the Etruscans and the Hittites and Minoans in the conventional chronologies. [ref]

A number of languages were found expressed in cuneiform on tablets found in the supposed Hittite capital in Anatolia. The most commonly used language after Babylonian was labeled Hittite, but its name in the texts was Neshili. The next most common turned out to be called Khattili, the language of the Khatti. Velikovksy summed up the situation by writing, "removing the historical scene to where it belongs... we wonder which of these languages is Chaldean, which Phrygian, which Lydian, which Median, which perchance Etruscan... modern scholarship found that Lydian 'seems to be Hittite'." [ref]

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