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History's Hinge - 'Ain Jalut

[Bart]

Santorini eruption much larger than originally believed

Media Contact: Todd McLeish,

Santorini eruption much larger than originally believed; likely had significant impact on civilization

URI, Greek scientists find hydrothermal vent system nearby

KINGSTON, R.I. ? August 23, 2006 ? An international team of scientists has found that the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the massive Bronze Age eruption of Thera in Greece, was much larger and more widespread than previously believed.

During research expeditions in April and June, the scientists from the University of Rhode Island and the Hellenic Center for Marine Research found deposits of volcanic pumice and ash 10 to 80 meters thick extending out 20 to 30 kilometers in all directions from the Greek island of Santorini.

?These deposits have changed our thinking about the total volume of erupted material from the Minoan eruption,? said URI volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson.

In 1991 Sigurdsson and his URI colleague Steven Carey had estimated that 39 cubic kilometers of magma and rock had erupted from the volcano around 1600 B.C., based on fallout they observed on land. The new evidence of the marine deposits resulted in an upward adjustment in their estimate to about 60 cubic kilometers. (The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 is the largest known volcanic eruption, with approximately 100 cubic kilometers of material ejected.)

An eruption of this size likely had far-reaching impacts on the environment and civilizations in the region. The much-smaller Krakatau eruption of 1883 in Indonesia created a 100-foot-high tsunami that killed 36,000 people, as well as pyroclastic flows that traveled 40 kilometers across the surface of the seas killing 1,000 people on nearby islands. The Thera eruption would likely have generated an even larger tsunami and pyroclastic flows that traveled much farther over the surface of the sea.

?Given what we know about Krakatau, the effects of the Thera eruption would have been quite dramatic,? said Carey, a co-leader of this year?s expeditions. ?The area affected would have been very widespread, with much greater impacts on the people living there than we had considered before.?

Thera has erupted numerous times over the last 400,000 years, four of which were of such magnitude that the island collapsed and craters were formed. Some scientists believe the massive eruption 3,600 years ago was responsible for the disappearance of the Minoan culture on nearby Crete. Others link the eruption to the disappearance of the legendary island of Atlantis.

While investigating the seafloor around Santorini, the scientists explored the submarine crater of the Kolumbo volcano, just 5 kilometers from Thera and part of the same volcanic complex, and discovered an extensive field of previously unknown hydrothermal vents. Using remotely operated vehicles from the Institute for Exploration, the scientists recorded gases and fluids flowing from the vents at temperatures as high as 220 degrees Centigrade.

?Most of the known vents around the world have been found on the mid-ocean ridges in very deep water and in areas where there are geologic plate separations,? Sigurdsson explained. ?The Kolumbo and Santorini volcanoes are in shallow water at plate convergences, the only place besides Japan where high-temperature vents have been found in these conditions.?

?The high temperature of the vents tells us that the volcano is alive and healthy and there is magma near the surface,? added Carey.

The scientists said that, in addition to fluids and gases, the vents are emitting large quantities of metals, including silver, which precipitate out to form chimneys on the crater floor up to 10 feet tall and 2 to 4 feet wide. The floor of the crater is covered in a layer of red and orange mats of bacteria 2 to 3 inches thick that live on the nutrients in the vent fluids. Bacteria also cover the vent chimneys, and 4- to 5-inch long, hair-like bacterial filaments extend from the chimneys making them ?look like hairy beasts, like woolly mammoths,? according to Sigurdsson.

The expedition was part of a longer research cruise led by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard, a URI oceanography professor and president of the Institute for Exploration, which included a search for Bronze Age shipwrecks in the Black Sea and a survey of the seafloor in the Sea of Crete. Additional details can be found at www.uri.edu/endeavor/thera or www.oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/06blacksea/.

The research expeditions were funded in large part by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, the Rhode Island Endeavor Program, the Institute for Exploration, and the National Geographic Society. The April expedition was conducted aboard the Greek research vessel Aegaeo, while the June cruise was aboard the URI vessel Endeavor.

Live video of the June expedition was broadcast over the internet 24 hours a day by Immersion Presents, which also broadcast four, 30-minute live programs each day to museums, school districts, science centers and Boys and Girls Clubs featuring Sigurdsson, Carey and Ballard.

http://www.uri.edu/news/releases/?id=3654

[Solomon]

This is a useful addition, Bart, to our understanding of how one of the world's great civilisations ended.

Impact on Minoan civilization

Tsunamis from the pyroclastic flows and caldera collapse would have devastated the navy and ports of the Minoans on the north side of Crete. Being that the Minoans were a sea power and depended on their naval and merchant ships for their livelihood, the Thera eruption must have impacted the Minoans to some degree. Whether these effects were enough to trigger the downfall of the Minoans is under intense debate. Early conclusions concluded that the ash falling on the eastern half of Crete may have choked off plant life, causing starvation. It was alleged that 7-11 cm of ash fell on Kato Zakro, while 0.5cm fell on Knossos. However, when field examinations were carried out, this theory has lost some credibility, as no more than 5mm had fallen anywhere in Crete. (Callender, 1999) Earlier historians and archaeologists may have thought this because of the depth of pumice found on the sea floor. Recently, though, it has been established this came from a lateral crack in the volcano below sea level (Pichler & Friedrich, 1980) Also, Significant Minoan remains have been found above the LM I-era Thera ash layer, implying that the Thera eruption did not cause the immediate downfall of the Minoans. The Mycenaean conquest of the Minoans occurred in LM II not many years after the eruption, though; and many archaeologists speculate that the eruption induced a crisis in Minoan civilization, which allowed the Mycenaeans to conquer them.

This latest data will probably swing the argument in favour of the theory that the eruption brought about the end of Minoan civilisation.

Sol

[Sovereign]

One interesting possibility for the effects of Thera's eruption is the origin of the story of the ten plagues to which Egypt was subjected, as proposed by historian J.G. Bennett Jr. According to the Bible, Egypt was beset by such misfortunes as the transforming of their water supply to blood, the infestations of frogs, gnats, and flies, darkness, and violent hail. These effects are compatible with the catastrophic eruption of a volcano in different ways. While the "blood" may have been red tide which is poisonous to human beings, the frogs could have been displaced by the eruption, and their eventual death would have given rise to large numbers of scavenging insects. The darkness could have been the resulting volcanic winter, and the hail the large chunks of ejecta spewn from the volcano. The tsunami that resulted from the Thera eruption is also speculated to have caused the parting of the sea that allowed the Israelites, under Moses, safe passage of the Red Sea, possibly devastating the Egyptian army with the returning wave. This theory is obviously very speculative.

[Solomon]

Friday, 20 April 2007
By Harvey Lilley
BBC Timewatch
Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe's earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami.

Until about 3,500 years ago, a spectacular ancient civilisation was flourishing in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The ancient Minoans were building palaces, paved streets and sewers, while most Europeans were still living in primitive huts.

But around 1500BC the people who spawned the myths of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth abruptly disappeared. Now the mystery of their cataclysmic end may finally have been solved.

A group of scientists have uncovered new evidence that the island of Crete was hit by a massive tsunami at the same time that Minoan culture disappeared.

"The geo-archaeological deposits contain a number of distinct tsunami signatures," says Dutch-born geologist Professor Hendrik Bruins of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

"Minoan building material, pottery and cups along with food residue such as isolated animal bones were mixed up with rounded beach pebbles and sea shells and microscopic marine fauna.

"The latter can only have been scooped up from the sea-bed by one mechanism - a powerful tsunami, dumping all these materials together in a destructive swoop," says Professor Bruins.

The deposits are up to seven metres above sea level, well above the normal reach of storm waves.

"An event of ferocious force hit the coast of Crete and this wasn't just a Mediterranean storm," says Professor Bruins.

Big wave

The Minoans were sailors and traders. Most of their towns were along the coast, making them especially vulnerable to the effects of a tsunami.

One of their largest settlements was at Palaikastro on the eastern edge of the island, one of the sites where Canadian archaeologist Sandy MacGillivray has been excavating for 25 years.

Here, he has found other tell-tale signs such as buildings where the walls facing the sea are missing but side walls which could have survived a giant wave are left intact.

"All of a sudden a lot of the deposits began making sense to us," says MacGillivary.

"Even though the town of Palaikastro is a port it stretched hundreds of metres into the hinterland and is, in places, at least 15 metres above sea level. This was a big wave."

But if this evidence is so clear why has it not been discovered before now?

Tsunami expert Costas Synolakis, from the University of Southern California, says that the study of ancient tsunamis is in its infancy and people have not, until now, really known what to look for.

Many scientists are still of the view that these waves only blasted material away and did not leave much behind in the way of deposits.

But observation of the Asian tsunami of 2004 changed all that.

"If you remember the video footage," says Costas, "some of it showed tonnes of debris being carried along by the wave and much of it was deposited inland."

Volcanic eruption

Costas Synolakis has come to the conclusion that the wave would have been as powerful as the one that devastated the coastlines of Thailand and Sri Lanka on Boxing day 2004 leading to the loss of over 250,000 lives.

After decades studying the Minoans, MacGillivray is struck by the scale of the destruction.

"The Minoans are so confident in their navy that they're living in unprotected cities all along the coastline. Now, you go to Bande Aceh [in Indonesia] and you find that the mortality rate is 80%. If we're looking at a similar mortality rate, that's the end of the Minoans."

But what caused the tsunami? The scientists have obtained radiocarbon dates for the deposits that show the tsunami could have hit the coast at exactly the same time as an eruption of the Santorini volcano, 70 km north of Crete, in the middle of the second millennium BC.

Recent scientific work has established that the Santorini eruption was up to 10 times more powerful than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. It caused massive climatic disruption and the blast was heard over 3000 miles away.

Costas Synolakis thinks that the collapse of Santorini's giant volcanic cone into the sea during the eruption was the mechanism that generated a wave large enough to destroy the Minoan coastal towns.

It is not clear if the tsunami could have reached inland to the Minoan capital at Knossos, but the fallout from the volcano would have carried other consequences - massive ash falls and crop failure. With their ports, trading fleet and navy destroyed, the Minoans would never have fully recovered.

The myth of Atlantis, the city state that was lost beneath the sea, was first mentioned by Plato over 2000 years ago.

It has had a hold on the popular imagination for centuries.

Perhaps we now have an explanation of its origin - a folk memory of a real ancient civilisation swallowed by the sea.

Preview 'The Wave That Destroyed Atlantis'

[Solomon]

The Palace Civilisations of the Aegean

   The story of European civilization really begins on the island of Crete with a civilization that probably thought of itself as Asian (in fact, Crete is closer to Asia than it is to Europe). Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. Mountains of records. For the Minoans produced a singular civilization in antiquity: one oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture, of course, lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece. These were a war-like people oriented around a war-chief; while they seemed to have borrowed elements of Minoan civilization, their's was a culture of battle and conquest. We call them the Myceneans after the best-preserved of their cities, and their greatest accomplishment, it would seem, was the destruction of a large commercial center across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor: Troy. Shortly after this defining event, their civilizations fell into a dark ages, in which Greeks stopped writing and, it seems, abandoned their cities. It was an inauspicious start for the Europeans: while the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had enjoyed almost two thousand years of continuous civilization, in Europe the experiement began with the brilliance of the Minoan commercial states translated into the brief, war-like city-states of the Myceneans, only to slip back into the tribal groups that had characterized European civilization for almost all of its history. In spite of this, the basic character of European civilization is laid down in this early experiment; even though they slip into obscurity, the Greeks will permanently remember the Myceneans as the defining moment in their history.



   Lost to human memory for over three and a half millenia, the Minoans stand at the very beginning of European civilization. While Europeans had known about the pre-Homeric world through the poems of Homer, only the Greeks and Romans seem to have taken these poems seriously as history. That pre-Homeric world, however, was lost in the haze of generations of oral story-telling before it finally got fixed in the poems of Homer. However, in 1870, an amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, determined to find the real Troy of the Trojan War, the war that is the center of the Homeric poems. After successfully locating and digging up Troy, he turned his sights to the Greek mainland and discovered two ancient cities, Myceanae and Tiryns, which together revealed a civilization that up until that point had only been known in the poems of Homer and Greek drama. His discoveries inspired a man named Arthur Evans to begin digging in Crete in order to discover what he thought would be an identical, Mycenean culture thriving on that island; instead, what he found was a people far more ancient than the Myceneans, and far more unique than any peoples in the ancient world: the Minoans.

   They were a people of magnificent social organization, culture, art, and commerce. There is no evidence that they were a military people; they thrived instead, it seems, on their remarkable mercantile abilities. This lack of a military culture, however, may have spelled their final downfall. For the Minoans also exported their culture as well as goods, and a derivative culture grew up on the mainland of Greece, the Myceneans, who were a war-like people. Strangely enough, the direct inheritors of their traditions may have been the agents of their destruction.

   But we know now that Greek civilization began at least a millenium before the Age of Athens and almost eight hundred years before Homer. It began off the mainland of Greece, in the Aegean Sea, in the palaces of the bureaucrat-kings of Minoa.

Richard Hooker

[Sovereign]

A fresco found at the Minoan site of Knossos, indicating a sport or ritual of "bull leaping", the dark skinned figure is a man and the two light skinned figures are women

The Palace at Knossos is the largest (it covers an area of 20,000 square metres) and most spectacular of all the Minoan palatial centres. It has all the typical features of the architectural type established in ca. 1700 B.C.E.: four wings arranged around a rectangular, central court, oriented N-S, which is actually the nucleus of the whole complex.

The east wing contains the residential quarters, the workshops and a shrine. The west wing is occupied by the storerooms with the large pithoi (storage jars), the shrines, the repositories, the throne room and, on the upper floors, the banquet halls.

The north wing contains the so-called "Customs House", a lustral basin and the stone-built theatral area.

The South Propylon is the most imposing building in the south wing. A second, paved courtyard to the west of the palace, equipped with the "processional ways" (narrow causeways), was probably used for religious ceremonies.

The palace had many storeys, it was built of ashlar blocks and its walls were decorated with splendid frescoes ( 1 , 2) , mostly representing religious ceremonies.

The old (first) palace was built in around 2000 B.C. but it was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1700 B.C. The new (second) palace, more complex in plan, strongly resembling a labyrinth, was constructed immediately afterwards. In the middle of the 15th century B.C. the Achaeans from the Greek Mainland conquered the island of Crete and settled at the palace of Knossos. They used the Greek language, as is indicated by the clay tablets they left, written in the Linear B script. The palace was again destroyed by fire in the mid-14th century B.C. (LM IIIA period) and ceased to function as a palatial centre.

The first excavations on the site of Knossos were conducted in 1878 by Minos Kalokairinos, a Cretan merchant and antiquarian, who brought to light part of the magazines in the west wing of the palace and a section of the west facade. After Kalokairinos, several people attempted to continue the excavations: W.J. Stillman, the American Consul in Greece, H. Schliemann, the excavator of Mycenae, together with his collaborator W. Doerpfeld, M. Joubin, a French archaeologist and Arthur Evans, director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. They all abandoned their efforts, not being able to purchase the land, due to the exaggerated demands of the owners.

In 1898, when Crete became an independent state with Prince George as the Governor General, a law was established according which all the antiquities of the island were the property of the state. Thus, in 1900, the systematic excavation of the palace began under the direction of A. Evans. Work was interrupted in 1912-1914 by the Balkan Wars but was resumed in 1922 and continued until 1931, when the investigation of the West Court and the Minoan town was completed.


Children boxing in a fresco on the island of Santorini

Knossos

Knossos ( 35?18′N, 25?10′E; alternative spellings Knossus, Cnossus, Gnossus, Greek Κνωσός pronounced [kno̞sˈo̞s]; see also List of traditional Greek place names), is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete, probably the ceremonial and political center of the Minoan civilization and culture. It is a popular tourist destination today, as it is near the main city of Heraklion and has been substantially if imaginatively "rebuilt", making the site accessible to the casual visitor in a way that a field of unmarked ruins is not.

The palace is about 130 meters on a side and since the Roman period has been suggested as the source of the myth of the Labyrinth, an elaborate mazelike structure constructed for King Minos of Crete and designed by the legendary artificer Daedalus to hold the Minotaur, a creature that was half man and half bull and was eventually killed by the Athenian hero Theseus.

Labyrinth comes from the word labrys, referring to a double, or two-bladed, axe. Its representation had a religious and probably magical significance. It was used throughout the Mycenaean world as an apotropaic symbol; that is, the presence of the symbol on an object would prevent it from being "killed." Axe motifs were scratched on many of the stones of the palace. It appears in pottery decoration and is a theme of the Shrine of the Double Axes at the palace, as well as of many shrines throughout Crete and the Aegean. The etymology of the name is not known; it is probably not Greek. The form labyr-inthos uses a suffix generally considered to be pre-Greek.

The location of the labyrinth of legend has long been a question for Minoan studies. It might have been the name of the palace or of some portion of the palace. Throughout most of the 20th century the intimations of human sacrifice in the myth puzzled Bronze Age scholarship, because evidence for human sacrifice on Crete had never been discovered and so it was vigorously denied. The practice was finally verified archaeologically (see under Minoan civilization). It is possible that the palace was a great sacrificial center and could have been named the Labyrinth. Its layout certainly is labyrinthine, in the sense of intricate and confusing.

Many other possibilities have been suggested. The modern meaning of labyrinth as a twisting maze is based on the myth.


Throne from which the Throne Room was named

Throne Room
Throne from which the Throne Room was named.The centerpiece of the "Mycenaean" palace was the so-called Throne Room or Little Throne Room[2], dated to LM II. This chamber has an alabaster seat identified by Evans as a "throne" built into the north wall. On three sides of the room are gypsum benches. A sort of tub area is opposite the throne, behind the benches, termed a lustral basin, meaning that Evans and his team saw it as a place for ceremonial purification.

The room was accessed from an anteroom through two double doors. The anteroom in turn connected to the central court, which was four broad steps up through four doors. The anteroom had gypsum benches also, with carbonized remains between two of them thought to be a possible wooden throne. Both rooms are located in the ceremonial complex on the west of the central court

The throne is flanked by the Griffin Fresco, with two griffins couchant (lying down) facing the throne, one on either side. Griffins were important mythological creatures, also appearing on seal rings, which were used to stamp the identity of the bearer into pliable material, such as clay or wax.

The actual use of the room and the throne is unclear. The two main theories are:

The seat of a priest-king or his consort, the queen. This is the older theory, originating with Evans. In that regard Matz speaks of the "heraldic arrangement" of the griffins, meaning that they are more formal and monumental than previous Minoan decorative styles. In this theory, the Mycenaean Greeks would have held court in this room, as they came to power in Knossos at about 1450. The "lustral basin" and the location of the room in a sanctuary complex cannot be ignored; hence, "priest-king."
A room reserved for the epiphany of a goddess[3], who would have sat in the throne, either in effigy, or in the person of a priestess, or in imagination only. In that case the griffins would have been purely a symbol of divinity rather than a heraldic motif.
The lustral basin was originally thought to have had a ritual washing use, but the lack of drainage has more recently brought some scholars to doubt this theory.

[Solomon]

A reconstruction of Knossos

<a href="http://www.ancient-greece.org/images/maps/plans/knossos-plan.swf" target="_blank">http://www.ancient-greece.org/images/maps/plans/knossos-plan.swf</a>