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.
The Land
The Minoan civilization began on the island of Crete, a large island located midway between Asia Minor and Greece. On the island, the climate is comfortable and the soil fertile; as an island, it was isolated from the mainland of Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Egypt (which isn't far away to the south). None of the earliest great cultures of the ancient world were seafaring cultures, so Crete was spared the great power struggles that shook small states like Judah and Israel. However, as an island, resources were limited. As the population began to thrive, it also began to increase, and it is evident that the resources of the island became increasingly insufficient to handle the increased population. So the Cretans improvised. Some migrated, populating other islands in the Aegean Sea, that island dotted expanse of water that separates Greece from Asia Minor. In doing so, they took their growing civilization with them and spread Minoan culture, religion, and government all over the Aegean Sea. For this reason, the Minoan culture is also called the "Aegean Palace civilization." But the Cretans who remained turned to other economic pursuits to support the growing population; in particular, they turned to trade. Crete became the central exporter of wine, oil, jewelry, and highly crafted works; in turn, they became importers of raw materials and food. In the process they built the first major navy in the world; its primary purpose, however, was mercantile.
One should always be reasonably suspicious of geographical explanations of culture or history, but the Minoans seem to have genuinely benefitted from their geographical uniqueness. Because Crete was relatively isolated, the palace civilizations that grew up there were spared the constant warfare that mainland cultures suffered. Also, the limited size of the island seems to have quashed any territorial greed that drove so many of their contemporaries. The expense of a standing army, the economic disaster of a foreign invasion, and the maintenance of a military bureaucracy all drained economic resources profoundly in all the cultures we've studied so far. The Minoans, however, seem to have been spared this economic onus, so economic growth really did translate into cultural and technological growth.
Minoan History & People
We know of the Minoans only through their ruins. Splendid as they are, with their remarkable architectural logic, their hypnotic art, and the richness of cultural artifacts, they spoke a language we don't understand and they wrote in a script which we can't read. So the voices of the Minoans, their stories, their history as they understood it, is lost to us. Even if we do by some miracle decipher their writing and penetrate the mists of their language, we may not end up with much of anything. For all of their writing seems to be one thing: accounts and records. The Minoans were, after all, a great mercantile people and they kept profoundly accurate records of their transactions.
So much of what we know of Minoan history is nothing more than a good guess, and good guesses are, I should warn, especially prone to being wrong. The archaeological evidence points to only a few reasonable certainties about Minoan history. Around 3000 BC, Crete was settled by a people who probably came from Asia Minor, who, by 2000 BC was already living in cities, trading with other nations in the Mediterranean, and employing a hieroglyphic system of writing, probably derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. This hieroglyphic writing would eventually evolve into a linear script. They built magnificent palace centers at Knossos, Phaistos, and Kato Zakros; these palaces seem to have dominated Cretan society. We have no idea what language they spoke, but they certainly spoke a non-Hellenic language (that is, a language not closely related to Greek) and probably spoke a non-Indo-European language. Homer, writing almost eight hundred years after the collapse of the Aegean palace civilizations, in Book Nine of The Odyssesy gives a list of people living on Crete; among that group he lists are the "Eteo-Cretans," who are probably the original Minoans. This group persists as an independent group until around 140 BC; their language, Eteo-Cretan, was probably a near relative of the language of the Minoans. The Greeks called non-Hellenic languages "barbaric," from the word "barbar," which means "speaking nonsense" ("bar bar bar bar"). They called people who spoke barbaric languages, "barbarians"; so the Greeks in many ways distinguished themselves from other people by the language they spoke. The Eteo-Cretans, then, originators of Greek civilization itself, had become the barbarians in the Greek world.
All archaeological evidence suggests that the Cretan states of the first half of the second millenium BC were bureaucratic monarchies. While the government was dominated by priests and while the monarch seemed to have some religious functions, the principle role of the monarch seemed to be that of "chief entrepreneur," or better yet, CEO of the Cretan state. For the Cretans operated their state as a business, and entrepreneurship seemed to be the order of the day. While the bulk of the population enjoyed the wealth of international trading, the circumstances of that trade was tightly controlled from the palace. Beneath the king was a large administration of scribes and bureaucrats who carefully regulated production and distribution both within the state and without. This administration kept incredibly detailed records, which implies that they exercised a great deal of control over the economy.
In order to facilitate trade, the Cretans and their Aegean relatives developed the most advanced navy that had ever been seen. While scholars earlier believed that Crete must have been a "thalossocracy," that is, a "sea power," that view has been seriously challenged. The Cretans probably did not develop a military navy, as did the Egyptians, but concentrated solely on trade and mercantilism. They did build what looks like warships, but it seems that these warships were most likely mercantile ships with the capability of defense against pirates.
Their trade was extensive. The Egyptians were highly familiar with the Cretans, who even appear in Egyptian art. Cretan artifacts turn up all over Asia Minor, and they seem to have been involved in trade with the tribal clans living on the Greek mainland. All of this concentrated mercantile activity produced great wealth for the Cretans, which went into massive building projects, art, and technological development. The Cretans, for instance, seem to be the only people in the ancient world that would construct multi-room buiidings for a large part of society including even the poorest people. The common household in the ancient world, of course, was a single room (this would be the norm up until the 1600's in Europe. The Cretans were the first to build a plumbing system in their buildings (a technology that was forgotten when Cretan society collapsed). And Cretan society seems to be the first "leisure" society in existence, in which a large part of human activity focussed on leisure activities, such as sports. In fact, the Cretans seem to have been as sports addicted as modern Americans; the most popular sports were boxing and bull-jumping. Women actively participated in both of these sports. The immense concentration of wealth in such a small population led to an explosion of visual arts, as well. Unlike the bulk of the ancient world, the Minoans developed a visual culture that seems to have been solely oriented around visual pleasure, rather than visual utility, political, religious, or otherwise.
The concentration of wealth produced another singular phenomenon in the ancient world: social equality. In general, the move to urbanization is a traumatic move. Society ceases to be organized around kinship lines and begins to be organized around "class," that is, economic function. This always means social inequality, as the more "professional" classes (usually bureaucrats) enjoy more privileges and wealth. In Crete, however, the wealth seems to have been spread pretty liberally. In the excavated city of Gournia, we can discern easily the "poor" parts of town; even there, however, people are living in four, five, and six room houses-veritable mansions in the Middle East or Egypt! So life was pretty good for just about everyone. In addition, there seems to have been no inequality along gender lines, although we can't fully construct the gender relations in ancient Crete.
The architecture of the palaces and cities have one more singularity. Unlike any other major cities or palaces, the palaces and towns of the Cretans seem to have no defensive works whatsoever throughout much of their history. This understanding of Cretan society, however, is being seriously revised as city defensive works are being uncovered. These newly found defensive works, however, are not of the size and strength of other Asian and later Mycenean defensive works. The presence of only a small amount of defensive works in the archaeological record leads us to a tentative conclusion: the Minoans throughout much of their history were relatively secure from attack, though these attacks seem to have occured sporadically. This conclusion helps to explain every other aspect of Minoan history: their concentration of economic resources on mercantilism, their generous distribution of wealth among their people, and, unfortunately, their downfall.
The downfall of the Cretans was a slow and painful process as near as we can tell. After five centuries of prosperity, the palace centers were destroyed by an earthquake in 1500 BC. The cataclysm may have been more serious. Around 1500 to 1450 BC, the island of Strongphyle, a volcano, erupted in an explosion four to five times greater than the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. This explosion fragmented the island into several small islands, and the caldera of the volcano is centered on the island of Thera; therefore, the event is called the Thera eruption. Based on the size of the caldera, the eruption was somewhere equivalent to 600 to 700 tons of TNT (that is, a 600 kiloton atomic bomb). Archaeological evidence suggests the explosion was not unexpected; on the island of Thera, the Cycladic city of Akrotiri was abandoned by its inhabitants shortly before the eruption. The earthquake activity preceding the explosion levelled several Minoan cities in the islands surrounding Strongphyle, and probably levelled Knossos as well. But the eruption itself would have produced tidal waves that would have destroyed all the palaces and cities on the northern coast of Crete, including Knossos. We aren't certain, however; it has been argued that the explosion of Thera occurred in 1200 BC, since there is little evidence that the palace cities were destroyed by anything other than an earthquake. Whatever happened, the Minoans, weakened by this catastrophe, seem to have been conquered by the Myceneans, who, influenced by the Aegean civilizations, had developed their own civilization on the Greek mainland. We know the Myceneans control the show after 1500 BC because a new style of writing dominates Cretan culture sometime between 1500 and 1400 BC. Called "Linear B" script, this writing is conclusively an early form of Greek, but it employs the earlier script (Linear A) of the Minoans. It seems the Myceneans employed Minoan bureaucrats and scribes to carry on business, but in a language they understood, that is, Greek. The Myceneans, however, seem to have adopted Minoan civilization comfortably rather than imposing their own more imposing culture. But in 1400, another wave of Myceneans put an end to the palace civilization on Crete for all time.
Minoan Religion
Since we have only ruins and remains from Minoan culture, we can only guess at their religious practices. We have no scriptures, no prayers, no books of ritual; all we have are objects and fragments all of which only hint at a rich and complex religious life and symbolic system behind their broken exteriors.
The most apparent characteristic of Minoan religion was that it was polytheistic and matriarchal, that is, a goddess religion; the gods were all female, not a single male god has been identified until later periods. Many religious and cultural scholars now believe that almost all religions began as matriarchal religions, even the Hebrew religion (where Yahweh is frequently referred to as physically female), but adopted patriarchal models in later incarnations. What precipitated the transition from goddess religions to god religions is still subject to much debate and controversy, but the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle because of agriculture may have fundamentally reoriented society towards patriarchal organization and the subsequent rethinking of goddess religions. It is certain, however, that urbanization dramatically precipitated gender inequality as human life suddenly assumed a double quality: public life and private life. The domination of public life, that is, administration, rule, and military organization, by men certainly produced a reorientation of religious beliefs. The Cretans, however, do not seem to have evolved either gender inequality nor adapted their religion to a male-centered universe. The legacy of the goddess religion seems to still be alive today. Both Greece and Crete are Greek Orthodox Christian. In Greece, however, only women regularly swear by the name of the Virgin Mary, while in Crete both men and women swear by her name, particularly the epithet, "Panagia," or "All-Holy."
The head of the Minoan pantheon seems to have been an all-powerful goddess which ruled everything in the universe. This deity was a mother deity, that is, her relationship to the world was as mother to offspring, which is a fundamentally different relation than the relationship of the father to his offspring. This is an impossibly difficult difference to really understand, but Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism hints at its fundamental aspect. The relationship between a mother and offspring is a real, biological relationship that can be concretely demonstrated (the child comes from the mother). The relationship to the father is also a biological relationship, but it can only be inferred (because the child doesn't come directly from the father's body). It is inferred symbolically, that is, the child looks like the father. One aspect of goddess religion, then, is a fundamentally closer relationship, kinship and otherwise, to the deity, wheras god religions tend to stress distance. These, however, are only guesses because so little comes down to us about goddess religions of antiquity.
It's difficult to assess the nature of the mother-goddess of Crete. There are numerous representations of goddesses, which leads to the conclusion that the Cretans were polytheistic, while others argue that these represent manifestations of the one goddess. There are several goddesses we can distinguish, though. The first one we call "The Lady of the Beasts," or the "Huntress"; this goddess is represented as mastering or overcoming animals. In a later incarnation, she becomes "The Mountain Mother," who is standing on a mountain and apparently protects the animals and the natural world. The most popular goddess seems to be the "Snake Goddess," who has snakes entwined on her body or in her hands. Since the figurine is only found in houses and in small shrines in the palaces, we believe that she is some sort of domestic goddess or goddess of the house (a kind of guardian angel-in many regions of the world, including Greece, the household snake is worshipped and fed as a domestic guardian angel). But the household goddess also seems to have taken the form of a small bird, for numerous shrines are oriented around a dove-like figure. Most scholars believe that the principle female goddesses of Greek religions, such as Hera, Artemis, and so on, ultimately derive from the Minoan goddesses.
The world for the Minoans seems suffused with the divine; all objects in the world seem to have been charged with religious meaning. The Minoans particularly worshipped trees, pillars (sacred stones), and springs. The priesthood seems to have been almost entirely if not totally female, although there's evidence (precious little evidence) that the palace kings had some religious functions as well.
The Minoan religious world apparently had numerous demons as well, who are always pictured as performing some religious ritual or another, so their exact nature is difficult to assess. They are always depicted as human beings, with the hands and feet of a lion. While they are certainly monstrous, they may, in fact, be symbols of religious worship.
Woman in Minoan Culture
Urbanization dramatically changes social relations. In place of real, biological relationships based on kinship, urbanized cultures organize themselves around more abstract, less stable, and inherently unequal lines. In particular, urbanized society is organized around "class," that is, economic function, rather than kinship. Economic function produces a kind of social inequality, as administrators, kings, and priests, come to occupy economically more important roles (distribution and regulation) than others. While there is really no such thing as social mobility in the ancient world, class is inherently unstable as a way of organizing society. Urbanization also produces a split in human experience; life is divided into a public and a domestic sphere. In small tribal societies, this split is non-existent or barely evident, but urbanization produces a marked distinction between these two spheres. Almost universally, men dominate the newly formed public sphere: administration, regulation, and military organizations. Social inequality, then, gets established along sexual lines as well as economic function. This is a dramatic and traumatic change for any society to go through; literally, the entire world view has to adapt dramatically to account for this new inequality. For instance, most religions probably began as goddess religions; the new urbanized societies, however, develop god religions in their place.
Crete, so singular in everything else, seems to have avoided this. Not only does Crete seem to be a class-based society where there is little class inequality, archaeological evidence suggests that women never ceased playing an important role in the public life of the cities. They served as priestesses, as functionaries and administrators, and participated in all the sports that Cretan males participated in. These were not backyard sports, either, like croquet. The most popular sports in Crete were incredibly violent and dangerous: boxing and bull-jumping. In bull-jumping, as near as we can tell from the representations of it, a bull would charge headlong into a line of jumpers. Each jumper, when the bull was right on top of them, would grab the horns of the bull and vault over the bull in a somersault to land feet first behind the bull. This is not a sport for the squeamish. All the representations of this sport show young women participating as well as men.
Women also seem to have participated in every occupation and trade available to men. The rapid growth of industry on Crete included skilled craftswomen and entrepreneurs, and the large, top-heavy bureaucracy and priesthood seems to have been equally staffed with women. In fact, the priesthood was dominated by women. Although the palace kings were male, the society itself does not seem to have been patriarchal.
Evidence from Cretan-derived settlements on Asia Minor suggest that Cretan society was matrilineal, that is, kinship descent was reckoned through the mother. We live in a patrilineal society; we spell out our descent on our father's side-that's why we take our father's last name and not our mother's last name. While we can't be sure that Cretan society was matrilineal, it is a compelling conclusion since the religion was goddess-based.
Minoan Visual Culture
While very little Minoan culture remains for us-no writings, music, or religious texts-we do have Minoan art. For the Minoans seem to have been the first ancient culture to produce art for its beauty rather than its function. While much of Minoan art, like almost all the art produced in the Middle East and Egypt, had religious and political functions, the bulk of the art seems to be simply superfluous decoration. Art in Mesopotamia and Persia served political and religious purposes; while compelling and aesthetically very sophisticated, the art served a larger purpose. The Minoans, however, not only decorated their palaces, they decorated them with art; they used art for pleasure. To walk through a Minoan palace was to walk through room after room of splendid, wall-sized paintings. Minoan art frequently involves unimportant, trivial details of everyday life, such as a cat hunting a heathcock, or an octopus, or representations of sports events (rather than battles, or political events and leaders, and so on). This is simply design for design's sake and suggests a human imagination that is rapt by the details of life. Most depictions of human beings represent them in the less dramatic and meaningful events of life, such as bearing a vase or simply walking down the street.
This, perhaps, is the greatest Minoan legacy on the Greek world, for the great revolution in Greek art involves precisely this idea of producing art for pleasure only, that is, a purely aesthetic purpose for art: "art for art's sake." This is no trivial matter in the development of Western culture, for applied to other pursuits, such as philosophy and mathematics, this attitude towards art produces theoretical knowledge, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which doesn't exist until the Greeks invent it.
King Minos
Some ancient writers identified several kings by his name, especially Minos the Elder and his grandson Minos the Younger, but this distinction never appears in the accounts themselves.
Minos was the son of the princess Europa and Zeus, the father of the gods. From the city of Knossos he colonized many of the Cycladic Islands, and he was widely considered a just ruler. In the most famous story about Minos, he refused to sacrifice a certain bull. The god Poseidon punished him by making his wife Pasiphaë fall in love with the animal, and she subsequently gave birth to the Minotaur.
The Minotaur is half man half bull. The Minotaur was the love child of king Minos' wife and a bull she fell in love with. Of course King Minos would not want this child seeing as it wasn't his so he had Deadelus build the Labyrinth and locked the Minotaur up in it. The minotaur would devouer the 14 child tribute from athens every year until finally Theseus slayed the minotaur.
According to Attic legend, Minos was a tyrant who took harsh measures to avenge the death of his son Androgeous at the hands of the Athenians. At stated intervals he exacted a tribute from Athens of seven youths and seven maidens to be sacrificed to the Minotaur until Theseus led the expedition and with the aid of Ariadne daughter of Minos, killed Minotaur. Minos eventually met his death in Sicily, and he then became one of the judges of the dead in the underworld. The legends concerning Minos probably have a historical basis and reflect the age when Crete was supreme in the Aegean region and certain cities of Greece were subject to the kings of Knossos.
The Minoan Eruption (ca. 1645 B.C.?)
The Minoan eruption happened around 1645 BC in the Late Bronze Age. It was one of the largest plinian eruptions in younger time. It erupted ca. 30-40 km3 rhyodacitic magma and is ranked VEI=6. The eruption was followed by collapse of the magma chamber that enlarged an existing caldera. The height of the plinian eruption column is estimated 36-39 km (Pyle, 1990). It dispersed tephra throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and might have led to global climatic impacts. Its deposits on Santorini consist of up to 50 m thick layers of white pumice and ash.
The eruption destroyed an inhabited and culturally high-developed island which perhaps might be the origin of the Atlantis legend as many scientists believe. Since 1969 excavations near Akrotiri have brought to light an important marine Cycladic town famous for its well-preserved and magnificent wall-paintings.
Many believe that Santorini once was Atlantis. But why ?
Atlantis is one of the oldest legends of the western civilisation. It talks about a prosperous land (or even a continent), or an island, that sunk and disappeared into the sea. Atlantis has been assigned to almost every possible place on earth (even Antarctica...) and proofs that there are virtually no limits for the human fantasy. Everyone favours 'his' Atlantis. Very few people, however, seem to know the actual sources of the legend and discern physically and geologically possible facts from pure fiction. Obviously, fiction sometimes can be more stimulating and fascinating than perhaps reality. First of all, Atlantis seems to stand for one of mankind's oldest dreams and myths, the one of the lost Golden Age.
The legend and the written sources
The antique sources from the ancient world, mostly Egypt and Crete, that are or at least seem to be connected to the legend and upon which a serious investigation should rely, are few and not always very clear. The most important texts where the Name Atlantis itself occurs first have come to us are by Plato (427-347 BC). He tells us in Kritias and Timaios in great detail the story of a highstanding, florishing zivisation with divine origins that lived on an island or small continent outside the columns of Hercules (mostly interpreted as the Street of Gibraltar). The race he describes had all the virtues and lived in peace as long the portion of their divine nature still was strong. When it faded and was more and more diluted, "when the human nature got the upper hand" (Plato, Critias 121b), they lost their paradise by becoming ambitious. Fighting war against the rest of the civilised world they couldn't be defeated but by the virtue and moral power of the Athenians. As having attracted the Gods' anger Atlantis was destroyed by earthquakes and sunk into the sea, leaving a mass of mud behind. Plato sustains to have in hand as his source an old Egyptian report that he obtained via his grandfather and a friend of this grandfather who got it from the Great Solon who lived around 640-560 BC. Solon in turn was told the story during one of his travels by Egyptian priests at Sais. He even brought with him an old Egyptian document and translated it.
To come back to the story, the most relevant passages are cited as follows:
Extracts from Plato's dialogues Kritias and Timaios:
(Plato: Kritias, 108e) "Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean."
(113e ff) "And Poseidon, receiving for his lot the island of Atlantis, begat children by a mortal woman, and settled them in a part of the island, which I will describe. Looking towards the sea, but in the centre of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the centre of the island at a distance of about fifty stadia, there was a mountain not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito. The maiden had already reached womanhood, when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in love with her and had intercourse with her, and breaking the ground, inclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe, each having its circumference equidistant every way from the centre, so that no man could get to the island, for ships and voyages were not as yet. He himself, being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm water and the other of cold, and making every variety of food to spring up abundantly from the soil. He also begat and brought up five pairs of twin male children; and dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he gave to the first-born of the eldest pair his mother's dwelling and the surrounding allotment, which was the largest and best, and made him king over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many men, and a large territory. And he named them all; the eldest, who was the first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean were called Atlantic."
(Plato: Timaios, 25a-d) "Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island."
The reception of Plato's Atlantis through history
Even though Plato himself sustains the thruth of his story, already short time after he had published it, Atlantis was interpreted by some as an educational legend invented by Solon and /or Plato in order to glorify the virtue of the Athenians and to illustrate their philosophical ideas. Aristotle (384-322 BC), as inferred from two passages in Strabo (Geographica II, 102 and XIII, 598) was among the first major critics. On the other hand, there were also sustainors of Platon's theory, as Plutarch (Solon 32.1-2), Proclus (410-485 AD, 76.1-10), Strabo (67 BC- 23 AD, Geographica II.3.6-7), Posidonius (135-51 BC), Ammianus Marcellinus (330-400 AD) who tell that the legend was regarded a historic fact in Alexandria (from Friedrich, 1994). One thing is very clear: invented or not, the major purpose of Platon's dialogues was not to tell a historic story or a fascinating science fiction, but to educate people and glorify Athens and its virtues. In this, the decadence of Atlantis from its divine origins and its prosperity to decadence and total destruction acts as both as a counterpoint to Athens and as a warning. It is also important to note, that the connection between gods, humans and nature is always present and naturally embedded in Plato's and the Ancient world. So to say, there are several levels within Plato's story: the Ancient world where gods and humans are connected and natural phenomena, especially if exceptionally powerful, are acts of gods, the educational and moral aspects of the tale, and finally, the story in terms of actual or fictional events. Today, we tend to see only this last aspect, but for Plato it was surely the least important one. This makes it even more difficult to judge whether Plato was telling pure fiction, pure reality or a mixture of both. Most likely, the latter is true. The story is rich in details, some of which seem invented and some appear surprisingly real. It is very improbable, in fact, that he based his story on nothing, and it is also unlikely, that he had such a detailed report (the translation of the old Egyptian report). Even if he had, it is natural to assume, that he modified it according to the purposes of his tale, which as has been said, certainly were not the telling of facts.
So, it is fair to assume, that there is a historic core of Plato's legend. Until this point, most people agree. But then...
The name
Most people think that the name 'Atlantis' is derived from the Atlantic Ocean (and therefore put it automatically somewhere into the Atlantic Ocean), but this reflects just our modern geographic view-point. Both the ocean's and the island's name are derived from the mythical giant Atlas, who held the sky upon his shoulders. Later, as Greek geographical knowledge grew, it gave also name to the high Moroccean mountain range. To locate Atlantis by using its name is not possible.
Could Santorini have been Atlantis?
Many serious investigators think that the source of the legend is actually the Minoan eruption of Santorini. Why? There are some fairly convincing arguments:
1. Plato tells about a circular island with concentric structures. Santorini today does have an impressive concentric geographic setting and had it also before the Minoan eruption. This has come out as a result of detailed geologic studies during the past 20 years, see the chapter of the reconstruction of the ring-shaped pre-Minoan island with a central shield. Furthermore Heiken and McCoy (1990) indicated that the famous picture in the West House from the Akrotiri excavations most likely represents a relatively naturalistic portrait of Thera. It shows an inhabited and flowering island landscape and the departing Therean fleet, and actually some concentric water-land ring structures are visible, too.
2. Plato writes that Atlantis was situated in the ocean, beyond the "Pillars of Hercules". The "Pillars of Hercules" were at Platon's time the Straigts of Gibraltar and this would put Atlantis into the Atlantic Ocean. Further, Plato tells that Atlantis was bigger than Libya and Asia together. If one believes Plato literally, Atlantis was then outside of the Mediterranean region. But it is also possible that Solon or Plato either were misinterpreting their old sources or that Plato put it willingly far beyond the Greek-influenced world.
3. Galanopoulos and Bacon (1969) argue that the date for the destruction of Atlantis Plato gives as 9000 years before his time should be read as 900 years and that there was an erroneous translation by Solon from the old Egyptian number system. Plato lived ca. 300 BC and Solon's journey to Egypt had taken place about 300 years earlier. Adding the figures, the Atlantis event should have taken place around 1500 BC, in good agreement to the recent datings of the Minoa eruption 1640BC. It is also imaginable, that 900 years looked not far enough in time for Platon (or Solon etc.). Putting it far into the past adds weight to the historic self-conception of the Athenians. Also, as far as Archeologists know (and they know a lot about the past of Athens...), there is no trace of a highly advanced Athenian culture at around 9000BC. From our knowledge's point of view, 9000 years must be wrong, or invented. Almost certainly.
4. The exiting archaeological findings on Thera (near Akrotiri) clearly demonstrate that before the Minoan eruption there was a developed, rich, and probably oligarchic marine community whose flourishing economy was provided by intensive trade, shipping, and probably vine, too, - like at present. We do not know what happened to these people. So far, no human body has been found killed by the eruption. It seems that they had been warned in time to evacuate the island. That means even if Platos completely invented the story, it is still true. Something like he describes has happened on Santorini 1640BC.
An event of that size must have had enormous impressions on the people living at that time. It is difficult to imagine that the eruption, which was much bigger than the 79 AD Vesuvius eruption, was completely forgotten in history. But strangely, no unambiguous sources seem to refer directly to the event. On the other hand, there are several ancient myths and hints that could allude to it including the plagues reported in the bible, but the most evident one, the one that fits best to the event is Plato's Atlantis legend.
5. Probably, there were no close eyewitnesses of the eruption that could survive and give a direct report. What the ancient people experienced, must have been terrifying. If one compares the Minoan with the much smaller 79AD Vesuvius and the 1883 Krakatau eruptions one gets an idea of the circumstances of the eruption. The 30-40 km high eruption cloud was seen from hundreds of km and the thundering noise from the explosions must have been heard in almost the whole known world. Ash and pumice was falling throughout the Easter Mediterranean and lasted for several days or weeks. East of Santorini, the sky could have been completely dark for hours or days. Probably, tsunamis were generated (like in the Krakatau eruption) and likely devastated the coasts of Crete and other surrounding islands. On a global scale, even the climate might have changed for some years, causing colder weather and failed crops.
It is a matter of speculation how long it took until the first curious visitors arrived again by ship and visited Thera. Considering the possible destructive effects of the eruption and the fact that the sea due to rafting pumice must have been innavigatable for months (as was the case for the much smaller historic 726AD eruption of Palea Kameni), at least some time (years, decades ?) could have passed before a human being first saw the changed island. Was among these people somebody who knew the island before the eruption? Would he or she have recognised it? Probably not. When Vesuvius erupted in 1631, some villages were completely buried beneath ash, and people could not find their houses and fields any more. Santorini erupted 3000 years earlier and 100 times stronger.
Thera itself would have presented to these people a picture of complete destruction and profound change and there would have been visible no trace at all of what existed before, everything being covered with white and unstable masses of ash subject to frequent landslides and other forms of erosion. Furthermore, the shape of the island was largely changed. Some steep slopes had been smoothed and new coastal plains created by the ash flows, the isolated rock of Monolithos, previously a small island, had been integrated. Most striking of all, parts of the former ring-shaped island had subsided and disappeared during caldera collapse. Probably it was not a very pleasant and inviting sight. That explains that no traces of resettlement occur on the island for many hundreds years after the eruption.
Probably the first people who repopulated the island centuries later were the Phoenicians. A new part of history began then; antique legends refer to Thera, then also called 'Callisti' (gr. = the most beautiful one) as a present by the God Triton to the the Argonauts, as for example reported by Pindar (4th Pyth. Ode, Verse 10).
6. Some details of Platon's story are clearly describing volcanic phenomena. Such are the colours Platos describes of being typical of the rocks of Atlantis: black (lava), white (pumice and ash) and red (lava). These are the colours of Santorini. The warm and cold springs are typical of volcanic places and still found on Santorini today. Most obvious, the way the gods, i.e. nature for us, destroyed Atlantis: by earthquake, fire and lightning. Lightning is always accomanying huge eruption columns and probably the most impressive sign of a terrible event if observed from far. From close rage, nobody could have survived. Another hint is the mentioned mud that remained at the site of Atlantis. It is enough to translate mud with the enormous masses of pumice and ash from the eruption that floated on the sea.
Conclusion:
Is Atlantis identical with Santorini? Maybe that is the wrong question. Probably at no time there was a place whose name was written ''Atlantis'' on some map... But the theory that the volcanic disaster of Santorini is the source behind Plato's story of Atlantis is quite supported, in my opinion more than any other theory. Details will remain unclear. For example, some people associate Crete with Atlantis rather than Santorini. This is not opposite to the Santorini theory. Santorini and Crete shared a culture, that dissappeared on Crete about 100 years later than the eruption. Likely, the impacts of the eruption were enormous for the whole region and might have weakened the power of the Minoans on Crete, so that they could not survive for more than 100 years longer. Also, Crete would fit better to some aspects of Atlantis as described by Plato. Actually it is not very clear from Plato's writings, whether the descibed Metropolis and the larger mainland of Atlantis are the same geographic place. So, maybe, the mainland was Crete and the Metropolis with its concentric structure of land and sea could have been Santorini. But going further with this point, we are stepping into fiction ourselves.