The Minoan Eruption: Bronze Age Cataclysm

More than 3,500 years ago, a massive volcanic eruption devastated Thera - modern day Santorini - engulfing the Bronze Age world in ash and fire. Entire landscapes were buried, ash darkened the skies, and the shockwaves rippled across the eastern Mediterranean. In this episode of The Ancients, the first in our new special series on Great Disasters, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Steve Kershaw to uncover what really happened. Did this disaster spark the decline of the Minoans? Could it even lie behind Plato’s legend of Atlantis? Join us this month to step into the chaos and witness how catastrophe reshaped some of the most famous ancient civilisations. MORE Bronze Age Collapse: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4dEddIFS5yfamKqVZd6xAE?si=7f45c994dd5f4e82 Hephaestus: God of Fire: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2DLYVCLmrHxXZxQ7rMBREv?si=5b950d9c22ee4448 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:28Speaker 02

  A dozen different sources from the period say something very strange. They say basically that the sun disappeared.

• 1:35Tristan Hughes?

  Witness a world where nature reigns supreme and catastrophe rewrote the story of civilization.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Huge volcanic bombs are coming out of the sky, these great rocks, about three feet across, crashing through the material.

• 1:49Tristan Hughes?

  In the ancient world, disaster was always lurking. Earthquakes and volcanoes flattened and buried mighty cities in an instant. Drought and plague wiped out civilizations without mercy. So if you've got an empire, that too becomes immensely vulnerable and prone to collapse. Life in the ancient world often hung by a thread. Over the next four episodes, we'll discover that survival was never guaranteed.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  It's like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the six holes.

• 2:22Tristan Hughes?

  It's time to step into the chaos and witness the catastrophe to uncover how disaster reshaped civilizations and the world itself. This is Great Disasters. More than 3,500 years ago, at the height of the Bronze Age, a devastating volcanic eruption engulfed the island of Thera, present-day Santorini, in the Aegean. A great cloud of ash and rock rose more than 30 kilometres into the sky, blotting out the sun and covering the Mediterranean world in a veil of darkness.

• 3:04Tristan Hughes?

  Surging hot gases and volcanic rock then descended from the volcano, burying local Bronze Age settlements like Akrotiri for more than three millennia. But the consequences of this eruption spread far beyond Santorini and the central Mediterranean. Many Bronze Age civilizations were strongly affected by it, including the Minoans, this enigmatic and prosperous civilization centred on Crete but boasting connections that stretched to Egypt and far beyond. In this episode, we are going to explore what we know about this Minoan eruption and its consequences for this Bronze Age world. Did it cause the decline of the Minoans?

• 3:46Tristan Hughes?

  Could it have inspired Plato's famous story of Atlantis? This is the story of the Minoan eruption with our guest, Dr Stephen Kershaw. Steve, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  It's a great pleasure to be back. No, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to a nice chat about this extraordinary civilization and its trajectory from perhaps start to finish.

• 4:14Tristan Hughes?

  And an explosive topic as well, the Minoan eruption. First and foremost, can we say that this is one of the greatest natural disasters from ancient history?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  I think it probably is. There's a volcanic eruption that happens in the late Bronze Age that is possibly the biggest one that's, I don't, it's possibly there isn't a bigger one that's happened since. It's an absolutely extraordinary event with potentially enormous consequences, as you can imagine.

• 4:46Tristan Hughes?

  First of all, no such thing as a silly question. What was the Minoan eruption? Where are we talking about? And when?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  That's a great question to start with. The, this Minoan eruption happened on what is now the island of Santorini. And to be honest, the date of this is something that's hotly disputed amongst volcanologists and archaeologists, but the most likely, I think, is a date of somewhere in the region of 1625 BCE. So you're at the end of the 17th century BC, on the island of Santorini, where you have an absolutely humongous volcanic eruption that has defined what the island looks like today as this beautiful sort of tourist destination. It's been said that you kind of sit in the box seat of creation when you go there.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  So there was this mighty eruption in the Bronze Age that has cataclysmic consequences, potentially.

• 5:42Tristan Hughes?

  And what types of source material do we have to learn more about this eruption? You mentioned the disagreements around the date, but it still seems like quite a pinpoint date you can talk about with this story. What types of material is available for us?

• 5:55Speaker 03

  Lots of stuff. It's the, on the sort of volcanology side, you can go to the island and you can pretty much trace the course of the eruption throughout the volcanic material that's still there. The cliffs of the island almost contain a like a, it's like a cake with slices and and it's, it's almost gives you a sort of timeline of what was happening on the, on the, throughout the eruption period. So what it seems to have happened is that initially this, I mean, the area is very volcanic anyway, and there are earthquakes that happen. My Greek friends say that earthquakes in Greece are like rain in London. You know, it happens.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  And, and there's a particular archaeological site that we might want to talk about called Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, that shows evidence of earthquake damage. It was a huge earthquake that has, there's, there's great big staircases and it's like they snapped in two like a Kit Kat bar. So it was a big earthquake, but they're used to this and they were tidying up their city, sort of putting it back together when, and they didn't know there was a connection, but then the volcano started to, to blow. And what we see in the ash deposits is is sort of four very brief events that put down about maybe between them ten to fifteen centimetres of of different kinds of of volcanic ash.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  And it looks like the people on the island at that particular point have have said, well, it's time to go. You know, whether they were successful in that is is very hard to tell, but on the Akrotiri site, there is no evidence of human remains there, and everything that's precious and portable seems to have been taken away. What they haven't found is the harbour facilities there, and if they do find those, they might find a very different picture. But at the moment, the the the town that's been excavated has no people in it, which is interesting. So it there's possibly an exodus. But then the eruption column goes up, and the blast, the actual eruption column is

• 8:05Speaker 03

  thirty to forty kilometres high. Wow. So, you know, when you fly into Santorini on a plane, you're at ten kilometres. This is thirty to forty. And stuff falls out of the sky, about six metres of volcanic material, which, on the island of Santorini, fills the sort of ground floor levels of the houses and preserves them because of this material in in in a in a way like happened at Pompeii, Perculaneum as well. So this stuff is falling out of the sky and is being blown in an arc largely to the east of the island, so towards what's now Turkey, slightly hitting the eastern end of Crete, and creating possibly climate change on a short term basis because the all of this

• 8:48Speaker 03

  stuff goes up into the atmosphere and the earth cools because the sun can't go through. But what goes up must come down. And the next phase is that you get the eruption column collapses and it sort of blasts out sideways, very high velocity, and it destroys everything that's sticking out of the ash to start with. So it's kind of scours the rest of it off. Huge volcanic bombs are coming out of the sky, these great rocks about three feet across, crashing through the material. And in the layers, you can see, there's a particular area on the island, a quarry, where the island has been sort of sliced down. Four more enormous explosions with these, what they call pyroclastic flows of hot gas and pumice and lithics that are dropping and blasting away.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  On top of all of that, they put down somewhere in the region of fifty-five metres of material. And then there's more, right? It kind of happens again, and the same again happens pretty much. So you're looking at kind of over a hundred metres of material pours down out of the sky. That's the scale of it. And underneath all of that, there's a beautiful town, other beautiful towns, and obviously impact throughout the the region. So that's what. And kind of, everybody pretty much agrees on that. The when is the one that is controversial. The Mycena civilization on Crete flourishes at its peak between about nineteen hundred and fourteen fifty B.C., thereabouts.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  So it's it's sometime in in that timeframe. And when they first made these excavations, the the thing that the archaeologists used was pottery. So you can you can use and trace the development of pottery styles, plug those into things that are exported to other cultures. So, you know, these people are in contact with Egypt and so on, and we could have pretty secure dates of things in Egypt. So if you find sort of Cretan or or Santorini, Atheran material in Egypt in dateable context, you can you can start to piece together the the dates.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  And originally, the the great archaeologist who explored Akrotiri and discovered it really was Spiridon Marinatos. And he thought initially that the, from his pottery finds, that the date was about fourteen fifty B.C. Which would coincide with what was felt to be the end of the Minoan civilization on Crete. So it was a good solution here to that. A bit later, he had to sort of revise his dates on the pottery, push them back about fifty years or so to about fifteen hundred. But at the end of the day, that was kind of cool for him as well, you know, cause in effect could still probably apply at that stage.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  If the sort of power of this eruption had been so disruptive that it could weaken a culture and a civilization. And that's pretty much what happened until the nineteen eighties. He was, he was working in the sixties and early seventies. In the nineteen eighties, though, carbon fourteen dating came on the scene. And at that point, the, the carbon fourteen dates came back with something in the sort of last quarter of the seventeenth century, so about sixteen twenty eight, twenty, something like that to sixteen oh six. So it, it then starts to become a little bit too far away from the, from the end of the Minoan civilization for many people's liking at this point.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Other things that went into the potential dating of this was, as I said, is that the, the eruption was so big that it, you know, blotted out the sun on a planetary scale. Wow. So you get what they call frost events in the earth's surface where, and, and that manifests itself primarily in the growth rings of trees. So the, the trees don't grow as much and, and trees have a kind of, their growth is like a barcode. And you can use it for dating, all sorts of different things, you can piece them all together. And that was coming back with, I mean, you can see the scale of this event. It was coming back with, there was sort of bristlecone pines in the United States and there were bog oaks in Ireland

• 13:09Speaker 03

  that weren't growing very much at that same particular point between sixteen twenty eight, sixteen twenty six or thereabouts. No evidence of frost damage of, you know, fourteen fifty, fifteen hundred, really. So, and that was interesting, I, I think. So they call that dendrochronology, the putting together of, of those dates.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  And also, also going into the mix is the stuff that comes out of the volcano is very rich in sulphur dioxide. And when it goes up into the atmosphere, it falls back in the form of acid rain. So, and you get a similar kind of barcode in the polar ice caps with each year, there's a new level of of ice. And what you see is acid spikes in the polar ice caps and in Greenland, taking place roughly that same time, you know, that last quarter of the 17th century. And then the final bit was that they also buried in the pumice in an upright position

• 14:14Speaker 03

  in the in the eruption material, they found an olive tree and were able to then do dating and analysis on that, coming back with very similar results about, so, you know, within that 25 year period of 1625 to the end of the thing, you know, but there's a lot of people will still argue the toss about this, but but it seems very likely, I think, that that is is the date of this event.

• 14:36Tristan Hughes?

  So, an amazingly rich record for us to delve into. Am I correct also, given that this is before the Bronze Age collapse, you've also got writing at this time, these thriving civilizations in the Near East, ancient Egypt and so on. Do we have some written texts surviving as well that document this this event?

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Very much, it's, this is a tricky one. It's unlikely, I think, if if we want this event to be 1625 ish, then there probably isn't. If you want it to be a bit later, there's there have been theories that things like the biblical plagues are something to do with this, or the parting of the Red Sea. But as far as dates wise, that's that's kind of not adding up for us. So there's nothing really in in the Egyptian records, say, or Babylonian or anything else.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  A slight problem here is that when the eruption happened, the the culture, the Minoan culture was, there's there's a number of things about it, it's an extraordinarily rich culture, fantastic art, wondrous pottery, great architecture, a very, you know, thriving and dynamic and wealthy culture.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  However, a number of things, we don't know what they called themselves, right? We call them Minoans. We have no idea what they called themselves. It may be that the Egyptians called them keftu. The Hebrews called them kaftor. The Babylonians in Akkadian called them kaptaru. So that that might be other people talking about them, but we don't know what they talk, what they talk about themselves as. Neither do we know what language they spoke. We have their own script, which is a script called Linear A, which is written in sort of syllables and and numbers that largely records lists of stuff.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  But it as yet hasn't been deciphered, so we don't know what that language is. Later on, we'll see another language coming into their world, which is Linear B, which we can decipher and we know is Greek. But before that, so what language these people were speaking when the eruption went off? We don't know, and there's, there's no specific, you know, records that they keep. Disappointing, really. You know, but that's the way it is.

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• 18:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Steve, you mentioned the Minoans there, this extraordinary Bronze Age civilisation. Of course, the civilisation based on Crete, but stretches far beyond that island that gives its name to this eruption. Can you give us a sense of just how, I guess, successful, prosperous this civilisation was before the eruption on Thera, on Santorini? And just how distinctive this Bronze Age culture was?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is a very distinctive culture. I think it's... There are those who like to see it as perhaps the first European civilisation, that's sometimes said, but it is thriving and dynamic and highly connected, I think, to the world around it as well. So, the culture is based on Crete, and there are a number of what are called palaces, whether they are palaces or not is another question, but the palaces, there's at Knossos and at Phaestos and elsewhere on the island, which are great sort of centres of administration and trade and exchange and religion and so on.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  And they're the focus of a very thriving society that produces art of the highest quality, wondrous ceramics that are beautifully decorated and exported widely, they're very desirable. We find them on Egyptian frescoes and so on, of people taking Minoan materials to Egypt and vice versa.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  There are ephrescos that show us little windows into the life of these people. Their, their, their dress, their activities, their, their artefacts, their ships, their religion, which is hard to interpret, but, but religious activity is taking place. And they, they have a mythical reputation as, as being powerful and successful. King Minos of Crete, who is a, doubtless a mythical character, but he was, is supposed to be the first person to have a seaborne empire in anywhere. That's the, that's what the myth tells about his. And he was, and he's focused on this myth of the Minotaur, so he was able to exact tribute from Athens.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  So he's powerful enough to, to interact with the Greek mainland, at least in myth. So these are, these are powerful, dynamic people, trading very widely across the region and prosperous as a result of it.

• 21:13Tristan Hughes?

  So can we imagine a place like Akkotiri, is it one of many Minoan, I mean, dare I say colonies or trade posts established across the Aegean that helps the Minoans kind of extend their trade routes to, you know, this thriving Bronze Age world?

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Very much so, I, I think, I mean, it seems that, that Akkotiri is, is like a trade hub, you know, it's so, and, and of the archaeological material that's been found there, about 15% of it is imported. So there's, you know, a lot of it is so there, and, and it's imported from north, south, east and west, from the Greek mainland, the islands, from Crete, from, from Cyprus, even as far away as Syria and Egypt. So, so they're, they're highly connected in a trade network that's, yeah, sort of region wide, if you like. So, so Akkotiri, whether it's a Minoan colony or an independent place on its own, hard to tell, but nevertheless, it's, it seems to be a very important, if you like, trading hub on routes that go right across the Aegean region.

• 22:17Tristan Hughes?

  And can we also imagine, I'm kind of drawing on having done a lot of work on Pompeii over the years and the eruption, given the similarities with this eruption that we're covering, the slopes of Pompeii, well, of Mount Vesuvius being very rich agricultural soil, can we also imagine that Aquitiri as well as being a place looking outwards into the Mediterranean world as a trading hub, also having a rich agricultural landscape too?

• 22:43Speaker 03

  I think that's likely. It's also mineral rich as well, so it has, certainly the soil is fertile, you can grow great things in it, they still do. Santorini wine is excellent, allow me to recommend, and I imagine it was in antiquity as well. But yeah, and also their, if you like, their mineral wealth is interesting, the volcanic material that's on the island is valuable in its own right. This has been analysed chemically and what have you, with the frescoes that they produce, so we know what pigments they're using here, so that, you know, that they can provide pigments for artists and what have you, and generally sort of sit at the, yeah, at the heart of

• 23:26Speaker 03

  a nice trading network themselves. And some of the frescoes from the island, from Santorini, do sort of present us with these scenes of prosperity, you know, you can look, there's little harbour towns with, full of ships toing and froing, and then there's hinterlands showing you, you know, scenes of pastoral peace really, sort of the guys herding their flocks, their goats, their cows, their sheep to fountains and what have you. So I guess as a place to live in the Bronze Age, Santorini's got to be a good one.

• 24:04Tristan Hughes?

  And you mentioned also earlier how there would have been earthquakes before this eruption, and seemed like greater in their scale as they got closer to the eruption. But do we think that the Minoans or the Aquitrians, whatever they called themselves, did they have any idea that they were living next to a volcano, or just that it was a special place maybe favoured by the gods or something like that?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I don't think they knew what was coming. I really don't think they knew what was coming. Again, there are all sorts of reconstruction about what shape the island had before it went off. Certainly that eruption removed most of it, but quite exactly what shape it was, we don't know, but it was, we don't really hear about it in sources pertinent to the Bronze Age, but we, we have a mythical account of the creation of the island, which is really rather wonderful. It's one of the Argonauts, as the Argonaut, Jason and the Argonauts are returning, the Argonaut Euphemus is given a sort of magic clod of earth that he throws into the sea and when he does, the island of Santorini appears. So it seems to be a

• 25:11Speaker 03

  sort of, it has a sort of blessed atmosphere to it in later times. But it seems, again, from these frescoes that are on the, were on the walls of this town, you're looking at this particular one that showed, they call it the flattilla fresco, which is full of ships playing their way between different harbors and ports and going to exotic locations and sort of seemingly returning home to a happy welcome. And it's really quite extraordinary. These, these people are thriving and dynamic and pretty prosperous, it seems.

• 25:43Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Steve, let's get to that art now. So kind of a recap, as you mentioned earlier. So the eruption happens and it sounds pretty similar to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in its, is it the Pliny eruption, that great kind of pine tree up into the atmosphere? Is it 30 or 40 kilometres, did you say?

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just extraordinary. So yeah, you've got to imagine, yes, like we'd call it a mushroom cloud, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, I beg your pardon, called it, it was like a pine tree, those umbrella pines that you see all over Italy. So, yeah. So it would have been like that. Yes, you'd have had this, this vast, yeah, sort of, I say Pliny eruption, this pine tree like eruption that was up in the sky, bursting its ash planet wide and then collapsing in on itself.

• 26:30Tristan Hughes?

  So that's the next big stage, is it? So you have all that pumice high into the air. It starts falling on places like Akrotiri, taken by the wind.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:37Tristan Hughes?

  And then the second stage is when that big cloud into the sky collapses on itself. And this is the next devastating part of the eruption.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  It is, absolutely. And that's the most devastating part of it. It's volcanic eruptions that that release lava and so on are by that standard relatively safe. You know, it's these pyroclastic flows that come when when an eruption column collapses on itself are. You you get these sort of avalanches of of gas and rock and ash that that travel at speeds of, you know, 70 miles an hour or so at temperatures of up to 400 degrees centigrade. That's, you know, it's, this is just utterly terrifyingly dangerous. So, you know, so that's what happened. This all sort of collapses back on itself with catastrophic effect.

• 27:26Tristan Hughes?

  And it covers Akrotiri. Also, a factoid there that you highlighted straight away, isn't it, Steve? No lava. Is this idea that we shouldn't be thinking of lava flows with this volcanic eruption?

• 27:36Speaker 03

  No, no, and neither neither at Pompeii either. This is, this is, this is ash and gas and pumice and and this is stuff essentially falling out of the sky. Obviously, there's lava underneath, if you like, and magma that that creates the eruption to start with. But yes, fundamentally, this is gas, rock, ash that comes down, superheated a lot of it.

• 27:58Tristan Hughes?

  Because Akrotiri is now names like the Pompeii of the Aegean because of the extraordinary preservation of this Bronze Age settlement, I feel like we should explore a few particular examples of art and archaeology from there. Steve, can you talk us through some examples that particularly fascinate you and really epitomise the amazing story of this site, the amazing preservation here that I think is fair to say many people might not have heard of as much as Pompeii today?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Quite. On the walls of the town were preserved a number of really extraordinary frescoes that are of the highest artistic quality, really. This, this full of energy, depth, imagination, movement, showing you much of what these people were doing on a daily basis. And a lot of it's a bit mysterious, you know, it's because there's no text to go with it. No one tells you what these people are doing. But you have scenes of perhaps initiation of, of young girls into womanhood, where there's different life stages are illustrated

• 29:03Speaker 03

  on these frescoes in rooms that appear to be dedicated to rituals and initiations. So, one of the, one of the things is you can distinguish people by their hairstyles. The younger people, prepubescent people, have their heads shaved. They kind of have like a, like a skinhead cut, but with sort of big snake-like locks at the front and the back. It's kind of cool, really. And then they, as they mature into sort of fully grown women, then they, they grow their hair longer. They have dazzling jewellery on these frescoes, beautifully produced clothing that's very distinctive, huge, great flouncy

• 29:42Speaker 03

  skirts and, and beautiful, very elaborately adorned bodices that they, they wear. Fabulous jewellery, elaborate hairstyles. And, and engaged very much in these what appear to be ritual activities. I mean, I know it's a cliche of archaeology that anything that an archaeologist, an archaeologist doesn't understand is a ritual activity. But, but I mean, they, they, these do seem to be ritual activities in ritual places. So, so we have insights into their religion, their life phases, both for males and females as well. There, there are, there are males there as well. We have wondrous frescoes of them

• 30:22Speaker 03

  at sea and the boats that they sail in, which are, again, gorgeous, elaborate, very elegant vessels with, with sails or road or both.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  With sort of cabins for the captain at the back and shelters for passengers. And making their voyages over dolphin-filled seas and and and so on. So these are seafaring people. And and these these frescoes are so accurately produced that they've been able to actually reproduce these vessels as well. There's there's a there's on on Crete, they've, you know, they've gone out and looked at the frescoes and built one and it works perfectly.

• 30:59Tristan Hughes?

  That's amazing.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  So, you know, these are great seafarers and in their in their houses, they've got, yeah, again, wondrous designs, sometimes with, yeah, with maritime scenes of of even parts of the ships. They have these lovely stern cabins. Those are beautiful in their own right. And there's there's frescoes with just paintings of those. And then there's kind of a sort of little, if you like, rogue frescoes as well, because in amongst all of that, we find quite a lot of monkeys.

• 31:27Tristan Hughes?

  Monkeys?

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, painted blue. These are not the species blue monkey. They are monkeys that have been painted blue. They're probably vervets or something like that. But this is fascinating because they're not native to the region. So these things have have either been, you know, imported to the island and and and reproduced artistically. Or someone from the island has has been to far-flung places and seen these and and and come back and produce these absolutely fantastically energetic illustrations of monkeys that are really authentic. You know, their behaviour on the frescoes is like their behaviour in real life. So so I think it just goes to show the the,

• 32:11Speaker 03

  yeah, if you like, the the diversity of connections that this island had to to various places. And these these monkeys also occur in what seems to be sacred scenes as well. So there's a, if you like, a sort of sacred element to the creatures as well. So it's, yeah, dynamic, thriving, artistically sensitive, well-connected, fabulous place.

• 32:31Tristan Hughes?

  And do we also get like, streets plans almost surviving with the remains of the buildings and the streets and maybe trying to pinpoint, oh, that was someone's house, that was a market building, a law court or I'm trying to think once again, like Pompeii is is almost the flip side of this terrible eruption, like this great disaster. The fact that it gives an invaluable insight into daily life, you know, for this Minoan society, how to survive on Minoan acriteri almost.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. The houses are there up to first, second story level sometimes. So these are actually multi-story houses. And I think the effect of walking through it would be like walking through any little Greek village on a Greek island today in that sense. So they have, you know, they, some of the houses have beautiful ashland masonry, you know, really nice cut blocks of stone. The streets are there. You can, you can walk the streets and the streets are paved. They have drainage underneath the streets. And in, in one of the finer houses, the guy even has a lavatory at first floor level. So, you know, you can, so all this waste is being flushed out of the town and down into the sea and the harbour.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  So really, really, really sophisticated. As I say, the houses are some, sometimes up to three stories high. Usually with kind of storage levels at the, on the ground floor for storage for, you know, all your essentials. Living quarters at, at first floor level. And, and you could just, yeah, you can walk the streets and there's little, little plazas. There's a particular one that I like that they call triangle square, which is a little square, but it's a triangle. That's surrounded by beautiful houses and, and so on. So you can very much get the flavour of, of, of what it was like to walk those streets.

• 34:22Tristan Hughes?

  Like a Beverly Hills equivalent or one of those squares in London, centre of London with all those remarkable houses surrounding it. I love that you also mentioned like the sewers there and the latrines, because that can tell you so much about people living there. The underground part of an ancient city. And also this idea you mentioned earlier, we've got this amazing archaeology and art surviving. Is it intriguing that we don't have the remains of people? I don't know if they're the remains of animals there, but this idea that you do have a lack of bones.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it is, it's quite striking in the, at least in the area that's been excavated thus far. It's, it's not an easy place to excavate because of this enormous amount of volcanic material that sits down on top of it. And the area really that perhaps would answer so many questions would be the harbour frontage area, which, I mean, in, in essence, you just have to follow the streets down until you hit the sea. But there's, there's such a mass of volcanic material that it's, it's really hard to get at. But what happened, for instance, at Herculaneum was that.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Initially, there were very few human remains found within the site itself, until they excavated at the harbour frontage, where they found hundreds of people sheltering in the, you know, under the arches of the harbour by the, by the waterside. So there, there might be, you know, macabre discoveries to come with, with the human remains if they weren't able to get away from the island and had, and had gone down to the harbour in order to try to, to, to sail away. So that's a bit of an unknown, but in the current excavations of what we have, there

• 36:07Speaker 03

  is nothing of the same ilk as those casts of the bodies at Pompeii that are so moving and what have you. And likewise, you know, small things, precious things, not so much of that, very, very, very little, really, you know, it looks like they've tried to gather up what's valuable and, and at least tried to get away, whether, I'd like to be optimistic about them, but I sometimes think I shouldn't be.

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• 37:32Tristan Hughes?

  So that's the story of Akrotiri and that immediate impact of the eruption on ancient Thera, on Monte Santorini. But Steve, what do we know about the impact of this eruption on the wider Minoan Mediterranean world? Because I've got in my notes earthquakes and tsunamis.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. The eruption has been, the events on Santorini have been linked to events on Crete and the potential demise of the Minoan civilisation on Crete. So yes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes is all part of the mix there. The idea is an old one, actually, is that very early in his excavations on Crete, Sir Arthur Evans, who was excavating at the beginning of the 19th century, there was a big earthquake on Crete and he and Marinatos, the excavator at Santorini, were together when it happened. And they wondered whether

• 38:33Speaker 03

  an earthquake had been the thing that, you know, would cause the demise of the Minoan civilisation. So they thought about that. And then Marinatos decided he'd rather have the volcano.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Nobody liked his idea very much, until in the 1960s, they discovered the site at Akrotiri. And then it kind of reemerged. And so whatever happened, it must have had, you know, a big effect on the, on the region, maybe changing trade patterns and things like that. The big question is, does the volcano cause the end of the civilisation of the Minoans on Crete?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  As I said before, I think there's possibly too much of a date gap between...

• 39:22Speaker 03

  The the one and the other. But certainly, what what we see here is that there is there is some ashfall on Crete, there is certainly the potential for tsunami damage on the coasts, and the Cretans are, you know, heavily dependent on their maritime trades and so on. So the destruction of harbors and and sort of things would be quite devastating, I think, potentially. Although not all the Cretan settlements are on the north side of the island facing Santorini, for instance. So but what you see on Crete, roughly fourteen fifty, fourteen twenty five, is is new things start to happen on the island. So these these are people whose language we don't

• 40:07Speaker 03

  know, writing their Linear A and and living their lovely Minoan lifestyle. All of a sudden, we start to see new burial practices coming in on the island, which are very different. They're more militaristic, if you like. You get boztesk helmets, you get bronze weaponry, that is very like that that you see on the Greek mainland in the the Mycenaean culture, which overlaps the Minoan. And you see new burial practices, you see sort of new kinds of settlement and and what have you. You also see a new language coming in. The language of the administration changes from Linear A to Linear B. And the Linear B tablets have been now been

• 40:51Speaker 03

  deciphered with great confidence, and they're they're great lists of stuff, but they are written in Greek. So it looks like we have potentially a new language, and certainly new cultural things are happening. The question is, I suppose, is this new people arriving on the island? Is this a takeover by people from the mainland of Greece, the Mycenians? Or is it, if you like, a cultural change? Is it the people on the island of Crete adopting a new?

• 41:21Speaker 03

  If you like, Mycenaeanizing culture that is perhaps associated with the elite on the island. A little bit hard to tell. It's from my own feeling on this is that these cultures are incredibly intertwined in in many ways. You know, we tend to want to look for clear dividing lines between, you know, Minoans and Mycenaeans and Egyptians and and so on. These people are intertwined in a in a in a very deep and and highly embedded way, I think. But but what you certainly see is new culture on the island of Crete, possibly brought by new people or possibly assimilated from from other people. So you do get big changes. The question is, is this a result of that eruption?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  If the dating of the eruption is right, it could be indirect, but it's taken quite a long time. And the eruption would also have had an effect on the people who would be the would be invaders, perhaps. So it's a tricky one. It's a, I suppose the other thing is a, you know, we all like this idea of one massive digitally created tsunami smashing into the coast of northern coast of of Crete and wiping out a civilization. It's quite an attractive idea. I I think perhaps the the the reality is is is more of a process than a than a than a point in time, I think. So, you know, certainly the the eruption would have had major effects on on the entire region in terms of its,

• 42:52Speaker 03

  you know, we we find we find pumice from the eruption in Egypt.

• 42:56Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  And that kind of thing. So it is going to affect, it might change trade patterns and and align things.

• 43:02Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that's what I was going to say. I mean, if not destroying the Minoan civilization, surely we can imagine this eruption weakening it in some way. You know, with the connections that it had with the traders. And also that other fact that you mentioned earlier, thanks to the science, this evidence that that's this great decrease in climate as well. So colder colder temperatures could lead to famine, could lead to movements of people. You know, all of a sudden, you've got almost this snowball effect.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is possible, but you certainly see that, sort of, if you like, post-eruption, the Minoans and Crete do quite well, nevertheless. I mean,

• 43:36Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  It sort of leads one to wonder, perhaps, whether, in a strange way, it was beneficial to them, if it made realignments of trade routes that they could then exploit and step into gaps that perhaps hadn't been there before. That, that we don't know. And this is, I guess, what we, we struggle with as ancient historians. In this particular area, there is no, there is no history. You know, there's no written history. We, we, we can go by the, the archaeological material we find, we can go by the climatic and, and, and geological material we find, but, but no one, at least no one that we've found as yet, you know,

• 44:18Speaker 03

  has, has had anything to say about this. And the, the, the Linear B script and tablets that we have, those, they're ceramic, they're, they're clay tablets, but they, they've been fired, but they're not fired on purpose. They were fired in, in destructions by fire. So they represent, if you like, the very last set of records that there are. Because they, because they're, because they're in clay, you can rewrite over them, and, and they did, you can reuse them. So we don't have anything, if you like, particularly earlier than the, the final, what they call the event horizon or destruction horizon of the, the places where they're found.

• 45:00Tristan Hughes?

  So did they continue to build palaces after this event?

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they did.

• 45:05Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  So, or not build, but to inhabit.

• 45:08Tristan Hughes?

  To inhabit.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  So Knossos seems to have done very well, at least for a while. So certainly after the eruption, the palaces are still functioning pretty normally. After the arrival of the new people or new culture, then there's, it's still, the culture still hangs on in a, in a kind of hybrid Minoan, Mycenaean culture that lasts for, yeah, another little while until that, again, in controversial circumstances, fizzles out and, and you enter what, what is sometimes conventionally called the, the Greek Dark Age, although don't ever. Call it a dark age to an archaeologist who operates in that region.

• 45:51Tristan Hughes?

  I certainly won't. Well, before we go on to mythology, and dare I say the word Atlantis as well. Going back to the actual eruption itself, do we have any idea for how long the the direct effects of the eruption were felt, the cooling of temperatures, the the blotting out of the sun? I mean, you mentioned earlier about the USA records and the Irish Boggs as well for that decrease in climate. Correct me if I'm wrong, if this is a mistake, but I've also got in front of me a record in the Chinese bamboo annals. That suggests that the collapse of the Shia dynasty and the rise of the Shang dynasty

• 46:28Tristan Hughes?

  was accompanied by yellow fog, a dim sun, then three suns, frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Fantastic. Yeah.

• 46:40Tristan Hughes?

  Can that also give us a sense that how long, like the dimming of the the sun?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it's again tough to say, but it's you're talking. I do. You're certainly talking years, perhaps not months. You know, so so enough to, you know, to have those kind of effects, you know, without without question. Absolutely.

• 47:01Tristan Hughes?

  But let's talk about mythology. So the Minoans, of course, with the Minotaur. There are lots of Greek myths that have become associated with this Bronze Age civilisation. Do they also potentially mythologise this seismic natural disaster that surely many of them would have remembered and told down through the generations? Do they mythologise it as well?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a it's a tricky question. The the answer to that is whether Plato's Atlantis tale can be plugged into this. Which again is is something that primarily spirit on Marinatos would have liked to have done or wanted to do. The Atlantis Tale is a new one by mythological standards. It only appears in the fourth century B.C. So it's not as old as Homer or anything like that. It only appears in two dialogues of Plato, which are the Timaeus and the Critias, where Socrates and his pals are talking about the ideal state. And Socrates says, I'd like to see the ideal state stress tested.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  And this reminds one of his mates about a story that he heard when he was 10 years old from his granddad, who heard it from his granddad, who heard it from a family friend, who heard it from an Athenian reformer called Solon, who lived about 600 B.C., of this massive event where Athens, who in this story is like an embodiment of the ideal state, is invaded by this huge power who live on an island out in the Atlantic Ocean that's bigger than Europe and Africa put together. And they come in and these ideal Athenians fight them and defeat them in battle. And then Zeus sinks the island in the Atlantic Ocean for their hubris.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  And this island is called Atlantis. So that's the basic story. And in Plato, you have these wondrous descriptions of the island. And it's, as I say, it's this massive island, but it has everything you could possibly want. It has wonderful, you know, vast plains with irrigation systems. It has the fabulous capital city that's built around a central island with concentric rings of water and land around it. And every facility you could possibly wish, canals linking it to the sea, and warships and riches beyond all imagination, and two harvests a year, and every beast you could want, and all the resources, everything.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  But for these people, far too much is never enough. And they kind of overreach themselves. And this is what leads them to invade the mainland of Europe and Africa and the Athenians to destroy them. So the question is, is that some kind of... And also, Solon, who gets the original story in Greeks, he says that he got it from some priests in Egypt. So the idea was that, is this something that...

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Could there be some sort of vestigial remembrance of some sort of wondrous civilization that actually wasn't in the Atlantic, but it was in the Mediterranean, that the Egyptians were in contact with and it was eradicated and then they had it in their records and they gave it to Solon and back it came to Plato? It's a bit of a tale of Chinese whispers, I think, on that, but fundamentally, there have been, yeah, many attempts, I think, to plug in the Santorini eruption to the Atlantis tale of Plato. Personally, I'm a little bit unsure about this.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  I think that the Atlantis tale that Plato tells is so seductive, so convincing, so wondrous, you know, he gives all the dimensions. You can draw perfect maps of Atlantisville, you know, the main capital city and what have you, and it sucks you into a wondrous tale, but it's entirely disconnected from the rest of Greek mythology. Greek mythology is really interconnected with everything else. This isn't. It stands alone. It's a standalone tale. And I think what is the purpose of telling the tale is, as I say, it's about the ideal

• 51:25Speaker 03

  state and it's to show fundamentally how the Atlanteans seem like a paradise island. They've got, as I say, they've got everything they could possibly want, but they still want more. Once you kind of get beneath the surface, it's not. It's a nasty dystopian imperialist nightmare. And I think the context in which Plato wrote it, when Athens itself was moving back into imperialist ventures, was perhaps something that he's telling this as a, kind of like as a warning to his own people of saying, look, stop it. These Atlanteans, they come from the West, they're like, just like the Persians who came

• 52:08Speaker 03

  in back in our history and got defeated by the Athenians, that it's just like, you Athenians, when you attacked Sicily in the Sicilian Exhibition and got catastrophically hammered, this is what happens when you overreach yourself and do this, you know, so don't be like, you know, the Atlanteans, don't be like your stupid forefathers, don't be like the Persians, stop it. You know, it's a moral tale. And I think I sort of imagine Plato being a bit disappointed if we if we all go out and start looking for the island rather than taking the the moral message that he's trying to to to give us.

• 52:46Tristan Hughes?

  I think you're right, especially when you know the context. As you say, the story of Atlantis is created, you know, is the villain of his story, the message that he's getting across of the ideal city-state in Athens. I think where I'm coming from with that is just it's this idea that when he's creating this story, like, could there have been this memory, you know, on Thera, on Santorini, that there once was this massive explosion, well, this eruption, which resulted in this island sinking into the sea. So maybe that part of the story where Atlantis sinks into the sea. I guess my question is, could there potentially have been inspiration for Plato to create that part of the story for maybe a lasting memory through the centuries that actually Thera wants that very different?

• 53:29Speaker 03

  It's attractive to do that. I think the the challenge is making it stick.

• 53:33Tristan Hughes?

  Hmm.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  So we have mythical tales, as I say, of the creation of the island, which is fascinating, but there's no mythical tale of its destruction unless you want to make Atlantis the one. There's a lot of potential, I think, for ancient historians to talk about it, but there is no paper trail, if you if you like. You know, when the Eusidides starts his history, he talks about the ancient history of Greece. There's nothing about it there. When Diodorus of Sicily starts his, I mean, he's not the greatest historian in the world, but when he starts his history, he goes back into mythical times. Nothing about it there. So trying to trying to find those those traces.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  I mean, it's kind of odd that there isn't really anything of that nature that's been openly transmitted, but it's simply, I think it's just hard to find. I think that's the that's the bottom line.

• 54:27Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough. And Steve, given how important you have not you have not disappointed. I was expecting it with that answer. But also, given how important Diodorus of Sicily is for the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death, I will not hear too many bad words said against him, but I'll I'll understand why you why you say in in this case. My last question in regards to this is also once again bringing back on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius Pompeii and what happened afterwards, which is the aftermath. We know that some Romans did return to Pompeii and dug through the pumice layers to see what they could get from like the Forum and so on. Have we got any idea whether some Minoans did return to Accretiri, to ancient Thera, to try and find their belongings or try and

• 55:12Tristan Hughes?

  find this lost settlement?

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Good question. I think, I think unlikely in this case. Pompeii, it was in a sense doable. And as you say, people were going back to Pompeii almost immediately to tunnel through and to go and get their stuff or loot other people's stuff. The Accretiri site is buried under so much material that it would be simply impossible. Fundamentally, it's just eradicated from the, from the world until remarkably, the reason it was found was because it's sort of in a ravine. And, and whenever the, whenever there was sort of torrential floods that went down that ravine to the, to the sea, people started

• 55:54Speaker 03

  to see bits of walls and pottery and, and, and things like that. And they made some finds in the 19th century where they were using, they were mining pumice to build the Suez Canal. They were using pumice in the Suez Canal and mining it from there. And they were finding bits of archaeological stuff, but no one followed it through. So it, so it was like another hundred years before, again, our friend Marinatos was, was told by people on the island that every time it flooded, there were, you know, there were bits of pottery and things. So he went out and hired a load of pumice miners and started putting trenches into where he hoped he might find it and found the town, you know,

• 56:39Speaker 03

  almost instantly. But there's no, when you go there, it's under so much material, there is absolutely no way you would ever think there was a settlement down there. And it's beneath metres and metres of volcanic material.

• 56:52Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that's also a very cool fact to end on, that pumice from the Minoan eruption was used in the building of the Suez Canal. There you go. The legacy of this eruption lives on. Steve, this has been absolutely fantastic. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  An absolute pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me.

• 57:15Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Stephen Kershaw talking through the story of the Minoan eruption. Stephen, he is such a wonderful, passionate speaker, full of joy, full of happiness. It was wonderful to have him back on the show. You can also listen to him talk through the story of Hephaestus, god of the forge, god of blacksmiths, that we recorded with him a couple of years back too. So, thank you Stephen for being a wonderful guest of this new Great Disasters series on The Ancients this September. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't

• 57:58Tristan Hughes?

  forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me. The next episode in this Great Disasters series is just around the corner and I'll see you there.