Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (25 page)

Support for Marinatos' theory had actually emerged back in the 1950s. At this time, the geologists Ninkovich and Heezen had already concluded that the Thera eruption was responsible for the carnage on Crete. From core samples taken from the seabed, it was discovered that the layer of volcanic sediment from the Thera eruption spread across the Aegean in a southeasterly direction, bisecting Crete at the eastern end of the island. This is precisely were the burned-out towns had been uncovered. A fiery ash cloud, similar to that which rained down on Sumatra after the Krakatau eruption, must have been responsible. The affected Sumatran coast had been forty kilometres from Krakatau, and the six-fold larger eruption of Thera may have created similar conditions up to 240 kilometres away. Crete is only 112 kilometres from Thera and so must have suffered far worse – just as the archaeological evidence revealed.

The fire storm may have ravaged part of Crete and a number of other Aegean islands, but the fallout was not the greatest danger. Based on the Krakatau event, it has been estimated that
a tidal wave a staggering 90 metres high would have thrashed the coast of Crete. (The
tsunami
in the immediate vicinity of the eruption would have been huge, but then it would have settled down to be only a couple of metres high, all its force deep under water. Then, when it approached shallow water, it would again have built into a mighty wave.) The towering wall of water would have lashed the densely populated north coast, sweeping through the great ports, pulverizing towns and villages – claiming countless lives.

The Minoan empire had spread throughout the Aegean islands. It had absolute supremacy over the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and as a result had grown remarkably rich. Dozens of Minoan ports must have been effected by the calamity, and hundreds of Minoan ships must have been sunk. For a civilization based on sea power, the consequences would have been disastrous. Although there is still debate as to how severely the Minoan empire was hit, there can be little doubt that the Thera cataclysm was a decisive element in the collapse of the civilization by the mid-fourteenth century
BC
, a time when the entire area was taken over by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece.

One of the most dramatic and emotive discoveries to portray the last moments before disaster overwhelmed Minoan Crete was uncovered in 1979 at excavations at a temple sanctuary on Mount Euptos. Here, a ritual had been taking place before a huge statue of the chief Minoan goddess when a massive quake had collapsed the building, burying the assembly for over three thousand years. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a young boy lying prostrate on the altar: his throat had been cut and a priest lay on the floor beside him, the offending knife still by his side. Not only does this show the ferocity of the shock waves that must have been produced by Thera – in addition to
the searing fire storm and deadly
tsunami
– but it reveals that when disaster struck, the Minoans may have been attempting to appease their goddess with a human sacrifice.

Minoan writing was far less sophisticated than Egyptian hieroglyphics, and what there is of it has never been translated. Whether or not the survivors of the cataclysm ever wrote of their terrible ordeal we may never know. However, it is believed by some scholars that the story was preserved in mythology. As the single most catastrophic natural disaster in the history of civilization, the Thera eruption may have been responsible for one of antiquity's most baffling mysteries: the legend of Atlantis.

Around 400
BC
, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote of Atlantis as a rich and powerful island empire. His
Dialogues
describe an ideal city state where the citizens lived in peace, obeyed their laws and prospered. As they grew richer, however, they also grew arrogant, angering their gods. In a single day and night earthquakes and tidal waves rocked the island, completely destroying the once mighty people. Could Plato's Atlantis have been more than an instructive fable? Until only a century ago, historians believed that the Greek poet Homer had invented Troy. Then, in 1870, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the city's remains at Hissarlik in Turkey. As Homer had not invented Troy, perhaps, some scholars began to speculate, Plato had not invented Atlantis?

On 19 February 1909 an article appeared in
The Times
which first suggested that there may be a connection between the Minoan civilization on Crete and the legend of Atlantis. The author, a young Belfast scholar named K.T. Frost, had based his idea on the degree of sophistication of the discoveries made by Arthur Evans at Knossos, and the apparent sudden destruction of the towns being excavated. Remarkably, this was thirty years before Marinatos' paper was published in the British archaeological
journal,
Antiquity,
which first outlined his tidal-wave theory. It was the Greek seismologist Professor Angelos Galanopoulos, however, in a series of short articles published in the 1960s, who first proposed the theory that Minoan Akrotiri and the island of Thera had been the city and island of Atlantis.

According to Plato his account came from Solon, a famous Athenian statesman and philosopher of the sixth century
BC
. His notes had been handed down by the Critas family, relatives Plato shared with Solon. Solon, evidently, had in turn been told the Atlantis story by priests on a trip to Egypt, sometime around 565
BC
. As we have seen, the Egyptians certainly had close commercial ties with the Minoans during the time Thera seems to have erupted, and it is quite possible for the survivors of the disaster to have given a full account to the Egyptians. On the negative side, Thera does not fall outside the Pillars of Hercules – that is, in the Atlantic – where Plato tells us Atlantis was situated, and eruption had not happened 9,000 years earlier than Solon's time, the period that Atlantis was said to have been destroyed. However, as the only island city that is known to have perished in a manner anything like Plato describes, Akrotiri is so far the only truly historical contender for Atlantis.

We return now to the possibility that the Thera eruption may have had considerable effects in Egypt at the time of Amonhotep III and Akhenaten. Ninkovich and Heezen's survey of the Mediterranean seabed showed that sediment from the Thera eruption spread across the sea floor and bisected Crete at the eastern end of the island. This positively demonstrates that the prevailing wind was in the direction of Egypt. After blowing over Crete the fallout would have continued on its way to cross central and southern Egypt. On land, evidence of the ash fall would now be difficult to detect as it breaks down to produce a highly fertile soil. Apart from larger pieces of pumice, which are
unlikely to have made it as far as Egypt, there was no discernible layer of volcanic ash even on Crete. Moreover, erosion of the springtime
khamsin
winds (that create huge sandstorms) in Egypt, and the annual flooding of the Nile would long ago have obliterated all evidence.

Although the volcanic fallout must certainly have reached Egypt, how significant would have been its effects? The Egyptian coast is only about 800 kilometres from Thera. The much smaller Mount St Helens eruption resulted in thick falls of ash just as far away, and after Krakatau ash was falling on ships 2,000 miles from the volcano. Thera – six times bigger than Krakatau – would certainly have plunged much of Egypt into darkness, and covered the countryside with volcanic debris. It can be estimated that the effect on parts of Egypt would have been at least what it was on Washington State after Mount St Helens erupted. Few historians now doubt that something similar had occurred in Egypt. The question is: was this really during the reign of Amonhotep III?

The precise date of the Thera eruption has been difficult to determine by scientific techniques. It is a popular misconception that science can now fix the time of any historical event by radiocarbon dating. For a start, radiocarbon dating needs organic matter. Organic matter in whatever form, animal or vegetable, contains the radioactive isotope of carbon, Carbon 14, and once the living organism has died the Carbon 14 gradually decays until some 120,000 years later it disappears altogether. The amount of Carbon 14 in dead organic material can be measured by chemical analysis, thus enabling dating. Once thought to be the answer to archaeological dating, it has often proved more trouble than it's worth. Firstly, considerable quantities of organic material, such as wood or bone, are needed for the procedure – often more than is present among the
remains in question. Secondly, radiocarbon dating often has to allow for a considerable margin of error. Indeed the further back we go, the more inaccurate it becomes.

In the early 1990s a team of geologists from The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen attempted to date the Thera eruption by radiocarbon dating organic remains from within the ancient volcanic crater. Inside once-molten rock, they found charcoal deposits thought to be from trees that had perished in the eruption. Unfortunately, there was not enough for standard radiocarbon dating, so they tried a new approach using nuclear physics. The carbonated material was pressed into cartridges of an atomic accelerator and bombarded with electrically charged particles. On impact, the material was to shatter in such a way that a small amount of Carbon 14 could be dated. Using this procedure, the team arrived at a date two centuries earlier than anyone had previously considered Thera to have erupted – around 1650
BC
. If the Danish team was right, then the archaeologists had been completely wrong.

From the archaeological perspective, the Minoan civilization was still going strong in the mid-fifteenth century
BC
: Egyptian records show that the great Minoan trading ships were being used regularly to carry timber from Lebanon to Egypt; distinctive Minoan pottery turns up all over the Eastern Mediterranean; and Minoan envoys are pictured in Egyptian art (see Chapter Four). It was not until the mid-fourteenth century that the Minoans would weaken sufficiently for the Mycenaeans to take over Crete.

To slot their findings into some kind of historical perspective, the Danish geological team postulated that the Thera eruption may not have been responsible for the end of Minoan civilization. In other words, they had survived the Thera eruption with little or no effect on their empire. To many
historians and archaeologists alike, this hardly seemed credible. The general consensus was that the new technique needed refinement. It was fairly clear from the late style of Minoan pottery found at Akrotiri that the city was not abandoned until at least the fifteenth century
BC
– 150 years after the new findings indicated.

In the summer of 1996 new arguments erupted over the date of Thera, with archaeologists, scientists and historians disagreeing with each other by as much as 300 years. After analysing the pattern of tree rings from ancient wood taken from Sarikaya Palace at Acemhoyuk in Turkey, Dr Stuart Manning of Reading University estimated a date of 1628
BC
for Thera. Trees have annual growth rings which are wider in warmer weather, due to more growth, and thinner when cooler, due to less growth. The Turkish samples showed that there had been a particularly dismal summer in 1628
BC
, which Dr Manning and his team attributed to fallout from Thera (dust in the stratosphere having reflected much of the sun's energy back into space). Professor Colin Renfrew of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, disagreed with this dendrochronology (tree ring dating). He was sceptical that the growth ring in question was due to the Thera eruption. He argued that another eruption may have been responsible. Hekla in Iceland, for instance, had erupted a few hundred years before Thera, and going by the size of its crater it was about twice the size of Thera. Dr Manning countered that a high latitude eruption was unlikely to have had an effect in mid-latitude Turkey. However, the year after the Krakatau eruption, which was more than 5 degrees south of the equator, the fallout caused it to snow in California, almost 40 degrees to the north. Iceland is only 25 degrees north of the site in Turkey. There were other objections besides: the whole question of whether or not the
eruption of Thera would have resulted in a colder Turkish summer depends on too many unknown variables and weather patterns. The year after Krakatau, for instance, Moscow was exceptionally hot.

A date somewhat later than had previously been considered appeared in an article in the journal
Nature
in July 1996. Two scientists – Hendrik J. Bruins of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and Johannes van der Plicht of the University of Groningen in Holland – had been dating ancient cereal grains from the site of Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) in Israel. They arrived at a date of 3,311 years (give or take 8 years) before the date of their writing for the destruction of Jericho. This made the central date 1315
BC
. They concluded from various observations that this may have been around forty-five years after the eruption of Thera. They based their conclusions on Carbon 14 tests that had been carried out on what were considered to have been sufficient samples of organic matter found at Akrotiri, measured separately at Oxford and Copenhagen. The first had provided a central date of 3,355 years before the time of writing, and the second a date of 3,356 years before. Respectively, these gave dates of 1359
BC
and 1360
BC
for the Thera eruption – with a margin of error of 32 years either side.

Even though this last example would fit with the reign of Amonhotep III, we have seen how caution is called for when it comes to radiocarbon dating. The ice core samples from Greenland would still seem to be the best indicator of the time Thera erupted. Whereas the tree rings only provide the date of a cool summer – which mayor may not have been the result of a volcanic eruption – the ice core samples clearly indicate a year of high volcanic acidity. The precise year the ice core readings obtained for a large-scale eruption was 1390
BC
, with a margin
of error of fifty years each way. This shows that a massive volcanic eruption had happened somewhere in the world either in the second half of the fifteenth century
BC
or the first half of the fourteenth century
BC
. As they show no eruptions anywhere near the known magnitude of Thera until two and a half centuries later (way into the Mycenaean period and so much too late), or for hundreds of years earlier, it was almost certainly the Thera eruption that was evidenced.