In 1932 the archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos excavated at the site of Amnisos, which had served as a port for the great palace of Knossos on Crete. Marinatos, while excavating the remains of a luxurious Minoan house baptized as “the Villa of the Lilies” for the splendid frescoes that decorated the interior walls, discovered something amazing. The village had been knocked off its foundations by some strange and powerful force . As Marinatos discovered more traces of the disaster elsewhere on the island, he became convinced that the Minoan civilization had been massacred by some natural force of incredible proportions.
In 1939 he published an article in Antiquity magazine titled The Volcanic Destruction of Minoan Chalk . Marinatos proposed that it was a volcano, more specifically the one on the nearby island of Santorini (known in ancient times as Tera), the cause of the destruction of the Minoan civilization. The eruption, followed by violent earthquakes that caused tremendous tidal waves, resulted in the destruction of the population’s settlements, while the ashes expelled by the volcano made the land uncultivable. In 1967 Marinatos discovered at the site of Akrotiri, in Santorini, a completely buried city, like Pompeii : for National Geographic magazine, Plato’s Atlantis had been unearthed.
The destruction of the Minoan civilization
It all happened around 1630 BC One day, a violent earthquake destroyed much of the city of Akrotiri. Its inhabitants were busy rebuilding their houses, ignoring what would happen later -although at first Marinatos proposed a practically continuous sequence of events between the earthquake and the volcanic eruption, subsequent research has extended the elapsed time-. About two weeks after the catastrophe, the Santorini volcano erupted : the huge cloud of ash, lava and stones reached a height of 30 km, the roof of the volcano collapsed and a caldera 400 meters deep was formed. Meanwhile, the usual north wind carried the ash and smaller stones towards the islands to the south and east, covering the fields of Crete , almost 100 kilometers away. Even the ashes reached the northern cities of Egypt, where their inhabitants did not see the light of the sun for days. The amount of volcanic ash deposited was such that it made agriculture impractical for years .
According to Marinatos, the mysterious disappearance of the Minoan civilization -the first Cretan civilization of the Copper and Bronze Ages- occurred due to the eruption of the Santorini volcano -the Greek archaeologist pointed to tsunamis that swept the nearby port cities-, but It has not yet been possible to directly correlate both facts . Other archaeologists point out that the Tera eruption and the natural catastrophes that accompanied it significantly weakened the Minoan empire, making it more vulnerable to later invasions, such as that of the Mycenaeans.
The discoverer of this catastrophe, Marinatos, died when he fell from a scaffolding while excavating at the Akrotiri site in 1974, but the suspicion remains that he was pushed by one of his own workers, excessively devoted people who saw the archaeologist’s investigations as a blasphemy.
The disappearance of the monoecious civilization is not the only mystery related to a geological phenomenon in the Mediterranean: just over a millennium later, in the second century BC, an Egyptian port city called Thonis (Heracleion for the Greeks) sank into the sea.
A city sunken in the sea
Heracleion was built on some islands in the Nile delta and, as in Venice, was crossed by different canals that had various anchorages. Its docks, temples and tower houses were connected by bridges and pontoons. The city was a commercial port; indeed in the Late Period of Ancient Egypt (beginning in the 7th century BC) it was the main port of entry for goods into the Nile country . It had a sister city, Naucratis, which was 72 km away and which, according to Herodotus, was the only authorized commercial port within the Nile delta: the goods were taken there or, failing that, to the nearby coastal city of Canopus. , for later distribution throughout the interior of Egypt. Both this and Heracleion would end up under the sea and their remains would not be discovered until later: those of Canopus, by a pilot of the English Air Force (RAF) in 1933, and Heracleion, in the year 2000 after two years of intense search, submerged in the bay of Abu Quir . The first traces were located more than six kilometers from the current coastline.
Both Heracleion and Canopus disappeared swallowed by the Mediterranean towards the end of the 2nd century BC without the causes of the disaster being known for sure. Archaeologists suspect that its buildings were weakened by a combination of earthquakes, tsunamis and rising sea levels. At the end of the second century a. C., and probably after a strong flood, the ground on which they were built gave way: the hardened clay turned to liquid and the buildings collapsed. An ending that makes us think of the mythical Atlantis…
