Did anyone see the brilliant docu-drama with CGI about the demise of the Minoans (the exact title I forget), possibly giving birth to the legend of Atlantis via the writings of Strabo? I am presuming that this was a recently-made drama?

A colossal volcanic eruption, akin to Pompeii in 79ad and Krakatoa in 1883 was to blame - the disaster being three times the size of the latter- and tsunami which wiped out tens of thousands followed. Their surviving populus and ruined civilisation being thus consumed by the Mycenae.

The drama wasn't ruined by the use of 'Volcanic' computer graphics for me, but enhanced the sets and massive human tradegy unfolding beneath it.

If the disruption of the Minoan culture precipitated by the eruption of Thera was to lead to "Atlantis" type legends it would have been more likely to have happened in Egypt, a culture which had many dealings with them and whose traders would certainly have noticed their sudden absence. However there is no evidence that the Minoans "suddenly" disappeared. Instead they went into a two hundred year gradual decline in importance as they were eclipsed in the region by other nascent trading societies of the Bronze Age. The eruption most certainly didn't help matters and may even have been the catalyst for the decline, but while it makes great CGI images the actual demise of the Minoans as an increasingly stagnant and irrelevant society would make rather less graphic images for a TV programme so may not be advertised with the same relish through that medium, for all its being the actual truth.

Wunderlich proposed a better link between Minoan culture and the later Greek cultures with regard to legend formation. Much of the grave robbing conducted by Mycenaeans and later Greek visitors to the derelict sites of the Minoans (already ancient by their standards) could well have led to the frequent notion of brave ventures into underworlds which pop up in various formats in Greek mythology. Theseus and the Labyrinth is a glaring example but many others are there too, and all could have originated with Greek adventurers protecting the sources of their free booty with horror stories to discourage competition.

Atlantis as a legend is one that has caught the modern imagination much more than it apparently impinged on the ancient one. While admittedly ancient itself it fits rather better into the genre of other "lost civilisation" legends of which the two principal themes are sorrow for irretrievable grandeurs past and the dangers of haughtiness, pride and offending the gods. The route the legend allegedly took in its transmission to Greece via the Levant would give it in my view much more likelihood to have a Sumerian pedigree in origin, as so many of them apparently did around the area. Details differed depending on the audiences' own cultures but the basic thrust of the story was common to all.

Some more thoughts on this matter ...

A mythical Atlantis aside, the explosion of Thera/Santorini must have had serious repercussions for everyone who actually lived in the eastern Mediterranean and environs, not just the Minoans (we are not even sure that they weren't actually already in decline by the time of the event). What appears undeniable from the archaeological record is that in its aftermath there was definitely a surge in migrations, some of which contributed in no small way to the foundation of classical Greek demographics. In Egypt too there seems to have been a switch in foreign policy akin to Japan's and China's in more recent centuries which saw them shy away from extensive trade with neighbours and concentrate much more on defending their realm. This would suggest that it wasn't only the Minoans who were disappearing from their radar. The extent of the vacuum in demographic terms which these outsiders were apparently filling is itself suggestive of more than political chaos but in fact an ecological collapse. Egypt stopped trading because there was literally no one to trade with. Its survival switched to holding on to what it had against exterior threat - the "sea peoples" constituting one of them as perceived by the locals in Egypt.

There are intriguing clues - the deforestation of Crete and the Lebanon accelerates rapidly in these centuries. This has been attributed to human activity but also can be explained through climatic influence, probably better so. Recent Romanian archeological investigation of ancient pollens also confirms a rapid decline in agricultural activity in the whole region of the Caspian which fits the timeline, a phenomenon which matches almost perfectly the US mid-west during the dustbowl years of the Great Depression, only over a much longer period. Similar patterns have been detected as far north as Bavaria and as far east as Kazakhstan. For the first time humanity had reached the point of over-utilisation of agricultural resources and it would probably have taken less than a cataclysmic event to push the system over the edge of sustainability. Yet this is what apparently occurred.

If this was an ecological disaster precipitated by the after effect of seismic activity of which Thera was the most dramatic instance then it is no wonder that the area proliferated with tales of what once had been.

Thera might represent the first great cultural shift in human development since cities had developed - when the millennia-old development of agriculture, which had led to social stability and the growth of the first great civilizations, was ruthlessly swept aside in one fell swoop and the remnants of civilisation forced to re-evaluate their prospects based on the new reality which pervailed. They were not to know that the situation was cyclical, or that the perceived threat to their own existence might not have been as great as the portents indicated. Yet it is easy to see why they would believe it and the middle Bronze Age is indeed a time of growing insularity and concentrations of resources with power being likewise concentrated in fewer and fewer hands - the model we still live by when you come to think of it.

In that sense, if Atlantis is a catch-all concept for those earlier stable days when peaceful co-existence amongst powerful but diffuse cultures could be perceived as an attainable goal, then Thera does indeed play a role in its consolidation as myth - at least to the Greeks.

I'm beginning to wonder if any of the commonly held views of the Minoans are actually true. Between Evans' imagination, the 'wiped out in their prime' adherents and the Cretan tourist board the utopian picture has been widely promulgated.

It is often believed that the their civilisation was a peaceful place where war and the warrior class did not have the prominence that can be discerned elsewhere however this recent paper has a very different view. http://phys.org/news/2013-01-war-central-europe-civilization-contrary.html

Next I expect we'll hear that their women were all ugly, badly dressed and viciously repressed. Or is that already out there?

Over the last 10 yrs or so archaeology has debunked many of the Minoan myths, but unfortunately the old ones still persist.

One such myth is that the Minoans lived only on Crete, when in fact, there were many Minoan settlements right across the Aegean. An excellent site here listing all archaeological Minoan sites and downloadable map http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Aegean_Minoan_Sites.php

On the left side of the page under Publications is also a list of links to further articles.

I was heartbroken on behalf of my friend in the early 1980s who had procured a summer job leading guided tours around Knossos. He was then a young archaeology student in Athens, born in Crete, whose interest in the subject had been largely fuelled by the Pendlebury debate which raged after the latter's death for several decades and which basically centred on the nature of "Minoan" (a completely artificial identity coined by Evans) culture in the broader context of Bronze Age developments, a field of knowledge which was being better informed at a fantastic rate thanks to archaeological research in the interim.

By the late 70s the debate had largely been concluded in favour of those who could by then demonstrate and not just assert that just about everything Evans assumed was wrong. However you would never believe the debate had even taken place at all if you were to listen to the drivel then being peddled to unsuspecting visitors to the Knossos site - where Princesses, baths and Venetian Palace terms still abounded in the "official" terminology.

Michael has gone on to be a well-respected historian, having (just about) survived the assault on his intelligence and sanity which was the then Greek Museum's standard issue bumph on one of their most important archaeological attractions. I am not sure what their present literature is like, but it is disheartening to see the number of publications in the intervening decades (mainly emanating from American publishers) which continue to adhere to this discredited, romantic and utterly obnoxious travesty of the data. It is obvious to this punter that many so-called "historians" have researched their subject primarily by taking a guided tour of the place and not even thinking to question the veracity of the bullshit often peddled there.

But then to see the "Minoans" as one evolutionary aspect to general Bronze Age cultural activity in the region and not as a "lost civilisation suddenly wiped from the planet" would be to put a huge hole in that other lucrative branch of pseudo-archaeology - "the Atlantis Industry". Hence, I imagine, the plethora of American authors who dare not stray from Evans' puerile assumptions.

Further to Ferval's article above

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2013/war-was-a-defining-characteristic-of-minoan-society

This programme was repeated last night;

It was a good programme as far as it went, but to me it smacks of making the story fit some known facts. The Atlantis story is one of a number which pop up all over the place and which are adopted by successive peoples. Noah's Flood is a fine example of the motif being reinvented by one particular faith group to suit the "divine punishment" angle that tends to accompany this particular story.

What really interests me is the burning desire we seem to have to find the "truth" behind such stories. Whether it is Atlantis, Robin Hood, King Arthur or whatever else, we rush to chuck away all the fun stuff as unimportant in the search for a holy grail/grain of historical truth. Which, of course, we invariably find just in the place we were looking for it.

For me, the real interest in these stories is the story itself. Robin Hood as a jolly outlaw thieving from corrupt abbots is not only a ripsnorting read but also tells us far more about medieval society than does hunting the Pipe Rolls to find some dreary fellow called Bobbin Hod who might have gone AWOL from Wakefield manorial court and might therefore have ended up in the Greenwood and might therefore be the "real" Robin. What on earth does that tell us other than that oulaws lived in the Greenwood? Didn't we sort of know that anyway?

Makes good telly I suppose - and we can't knock it for that. After all, these programmes tell us rather a lot about ourselves too (not least that we should focus on the CGI rather than on Bettany Hughes in her holiday rig).

Regards,

AR

Didn't Plato also embellish the Atlantis myth with some imaginative poetic licence?

Embellishing something conceived through poetic licence with further poetic licence is exactly what he did. But what a lot of the modern "commentators" on Atlantis fail to address is why he was mentioning the myth at all. The dialogues of Timaeus and Critias concern the nature of the physical world and the search for patterns within it, from the elemental level to the behavioural level, and from the basest of material up to the gods themselves. Mankind lies somewhere caught in the middle of this spectrum and its own behaviour therefore mirrors both extremes. Atlantis - a story attributed to Solon by Timaeus in Plato's work - serves as an illustration of collective hubris leading to annihilation or, as Critias chooses to interpret it in the same work, the inevitability of oblivion regardless of the illustriousness of that which humans have constructed en route.

The number of books which purport to analyse Atlantis as an historical possibility and which fail even to mention either of these hypothesised proponents through which Plato introduces the theme, is legion. Yet Timaeus and Critias are as essential an element in the narrative as the fictional city of which they speak.

But there's no bucks to be earned from introducing them into the modern sensationalist rendition of their own subject matter, so this omission is probably understandable on that basis alone. Yet it is also incontrovertible that their omission renders superfluous any subsequent "view" of their hypothesis, not least because the fact that they themselves are hypothesised by Plato has also been omitted. It is, in the main, a topic which in its modern treatment is typified mostly by the amazing ignorance brought to bear on it in the guise of informed opinion.

Plato's "poetic licence" was employed in the interest of intelligent philosphical debate. The modern equivalent has a much baser motive behind it, in my view.

Now you know you're all wrong.  I saw it on telly last Saturday so it must be true if I saw it on telly!! Jason goes to sea in a submarine seemingly in modern times, is wrecked on the shores of ancient Greece, finds some ancient Greek togs to change into on the beach - like you do - meets up with Pythagoras and Hercules - then Theseus (sorry Jason) goes to fight the Minotaur; wins of course. Incidentally en route Jason seems to have picked up by osmosis some acrobatic skills to equal anything exhibited by performers in Cirque du Soleil and I'm not writing with my tongue in my cheek (much) and the writers aren't writing this version of the tale in the hope of winning the Saturday night viewers ratings war.

On a slightly more serious note, could the legend of Atlantis have resulted from an actual flooding which took place and remained in "folk memory" but where the story rather grew with the telling?  Something like what happened way back in the shrouds of time when Britain ceased to be attached to mainland Europe and became an island?  Though of course we don't have an Atlantis legend in Blightey - though I have a vague childhood memory of a "city under the sea".  Slightly off-topic I remember that one of the "rotten boroughs" at the time of one of the (voting) Reform Acts was under the sea so whether that had anything to do with the "city under the sea" story ......

Paraphrased quote from a speech by Pat O'Connor - director of the Irish National Museum and good egg all round. He was talking about a claim that the Irish have "more folk memories" than most, but the principle is the same;

"When someone can show me how to differentiate between Folk Invention and Folk Memory then I will give the latter term more credit than I do now. For that matter if it is a mass hallucination that has been folk-memorised, then where does that leave invention? All in all it is better to take as a starting point that nothing is remembered with any useful degree of accuracy, if even at all, and then use the verifiable data to hand to prove yourself wrong. That way the study of history is littered with lovely surprises, not a lot of rather deflating disappointments."

Of course Atlantis could be said to be a "folk memory" of a flood, but until we know what flood and where (and why it was remembered so badly) then we might as well say that Atlantis is based on an Alexandrian's mushroom trip. It is as unverifiable, as possible, as good as anyone else's guess, and in certain respects probably more valid for all that.

Oh Nordmann, you've got me all disappointed now.  Next you'll be telling me that "The Historian who shall not be named" writes inaccurate fiction. I suppose I was thinking of stories growing in the telling.  That happens even now in a "Chinese Whispers" sort of way.  Somebody told me once that an acquaintance had recently become a grandfather to a little boy called "Perce" - the name was actually Pierce. I was taught that a possible reason for Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament being given such old ages was that their ages were artificially inflated in a society which revered great age (wish I lived in such a society now) and that Sarah was probably about 24 years of age when she was taken into Pharoah's harem.  One of my brother's childhood friends when on the "My Dad's bigger than your Dad" soap-box said "My Dad's sixty, my Dad's seventy,  my Dad's eighty, my Dad's so big he ought to be dead".

Chinese Whispers transmission of data I understand, after all that is really what the oral tradition is all about. But when you hear statements along the lines of "this is most likely a folk memory inherited from a race now extinct" you really have to stick your head in a bucket of cold water and check your sanity button. Especially when the whole "folk memory" was apparently related by one guy in Egypt to a passing Greek.

Arwe Rheged wrote:

What really interests me is the burning desire we seem to have to find the "truth" behind such stories.  Whether it is Atlantis, Robin Hood, King Arthur or whatever else, we rush to chuck away all the fun stuff as unimportant in the search for a holy grail/grain of historical truth.  Which, of course, we invariably find just in the place we were looking for it.

For me, the real interest in these stories is the story itself.  Robin Hood as a jolly outlaw thieving from corrupt abbots is not only a ripsnorting read but also  tells us far more about medieval society than does hunting the Pipe Rolls to find some dreary fellow called Bobbin Hod who might have gone AWOL from Wakefield manorial court and might therefore have ended up in the Greenwood and might therefore be the "real" Robin.  What on earth does that tell us other than that oulaws lived in the Greenwood?  Didn't we sort of know that anyway?

Yes - and with regard to the mythologizing and de-mythologizing of places there also seems to be circular, chicken-and-egg phenomenon in all this. The further science and academia get away from popular myths, the more they then later dig up and re-air these debunked myths in order to pique the interest of the public and potential funders etc. Thus, for example, the 2009 archaeological study of the coastal and marine environment of the Scilly Isles was dubbed The Lyonesse Project.

nordmann wrote:

Chinese Whispers transmission of data I understand, after all that is really what the oral tradition is all about. But when you hear statements along the lines of "this is most likely a folk memory inherited from a race now extinct" you really have to stick your head in a bucket of cold water and check your sanity button. Especially when the whole "folk memory" was apparently related by one guy in Egypt to a passing Greek.

  Some have tried to link Atlantis, as well as Noah's flood, to the Black Sea water level rise.

 I'm sure that some folk memories last a while, but 13,000 yrs seems unlikely.

Vizzer and brenogler I read again the whole thread and as we are up to the ten years of the BBC history message board, I was happely surprized with all the knowledge exposed on this small board and in this thread.

As the Thera eruption, that I on that BBC board in the time exposed as a possible explanation of the Biblical and for instance Gilgamesh flood and received nearly no attention overthere (Vizzer it was perhaps because of my wrong wording to seek for attention (as for funds of the general public as you mentioned).

Of course it can't be the Zankian flood as memory of oral transmission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood

And perhaps for the Thera caldera explosion
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13332

But what for these floods? Not read it yet in depth...
https://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/ETUDESarchivees/BlackSeaInfill/BlackSeaLevel-Lericolais2007.pdf
What do you make of it nordmann? And was it that you were talking about brenogler?

Kind regards, Paul.

I think it was  a  similar paper which came to similarly indecisive conclusions.


 In the link you cite,I would disagree with the word 'cascading' as that suggests to me something rapid: the change may have been noticeable to the few hunter-gatherers around at that time but I would guess they only noticed that the beach was a bit closer when they returned to it each year after inland forays.


 I'm pretty sure it took a great deal more than 40 days and 40 nights and would not have been remembered for millennia as a cataclysm.  More likely they decided it was getting gradually less easy to live there and moved to somewhere more congenial.


l

brenogler wrote:

I think it was  a  similar paper which came to similarly indecisive conclusions.


 In the link you cite,I would disagree with the word 'cascading' as that suggests to me something rapid: the change may have been noticeable to the few hunter-gatherers around at that time but I would guess they only noticed that the beach was a bit closer when they returned to it each year after inland forays.


 I'm pretty sure it took a great deal more than 40 days and 40 nights and would not have been remembered for millennia as a cataclysm.  More likely they decided it was getting gradually less easy to live there and moved to somewhere more congenial.

 
brenogler, thanks for the immediate reply and for the remarks. If I have time I will read the whole article, especially in relation with your remarks.

But yesterday I did some research on the web about some "other floods" 
that I read about and studied in relation for instance with the cultivation of the Celtic? Belgica on the flat lands along the Flemish coastal plain. 
I see now that it is in English: "Plain of Flanders"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_of_Flanders
And in French: "Plaine maritime flamande".
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaine_maritime_flamande
and also in relation with the Romance-Germanic language border in that region...

But now back to the floods:
I read already about the Dunkirk transgressions, but learned yesterday more...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_transgression
The main parts of the Low Countries were lightly populated until about 200 BC, when the climate and environment became more amenable to human habitation.^[1][2] Conditions remained favourable until 250 AD, and the region became densely populated.^[3][4]
Fens below sea level were highly vulnerable to a tidal bulge until great dams and sea walls were built as shown in the North Sea flood of 1953. A series of marine transgressions followed (in specialist academic literature called Dunkirk 0 through to Dunkirk IIIb) characterised by a rising water table and floods that left layers of clay on the land. The heaviest blow came with the "Dunkirk II transgression" that began in the 3rd century and continually worsened, leaving such low land uninhabitable, c. 350–c. 700 CE. People were forced to abandon their homes and emigrate. Archaeologists find evidence for this across the Rhine/Meuse delta (Zeeland, Brabant, parts of South Holland and Limburg);^[5] Friesland;^[6][7] Groningen;^[8] Ostfriesland, German Friesland and the Weser/Jade estuary;^[5][8] and Dithmarschen, Eiderstedt and Nordfriesland.^[9][10]
And I learned now about a tidal bulge...and I think that floods could happen in one night due to these tidal bulges as in 1953.





As that island before the todays Belgian coast, which had to be abandoned on a relatively short time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testerep
"de streep"
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testerep





And yes that "strip" (streep) nearly the nowadays Westende-Middelkerke-Oostende (westend-middlechurch-eastend)
https://www.frankdeboosere.be/vragen/vraag146.php

And about the forming of the Romance-Germanic language border...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3716780-medieval-flanders
https://cutt.ly/nkkWv79

Kind regards, Paul.

Addendum to "floods" as that one of 1953 in the "Low Countries"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953

The 1953 North Sea flood was a major flood caused by a heavy storm at the end of Saturday, 31 January 1953 and morning of the next day. The storm surge struck the Netherlands, north-west Belgium, England and Scotland.
A combination of a high spring tide and a severe European windstorm over the North Sea caused a storm tide. The combination of wind, high tide, and low pressure caused the sea to flood land up to 5.6 metres (18.4 ft) above mean sea level. Most sea defences facing the surge were overwhelmed, causing extensive flooding."

My parents called it a typical North-Western storm pushing the water into the  "Channel" between Britain and continental Europe.

I was there that night in Ostend. One death on the border between Ostend and Bredene. 
It happened on the "Eilandje" and most people had climbed to their roof of the one floor houses, but an elderly was trapped inside the house.
https://playandeat.be/locaties/t-eilandje/
My father has seen it. We, my sister and I had to stay at home...

Is there any point just listing "great floods I have known" in the context of this thread? After all, for the Atlantis legend to have any meaning in terms of a possible "folk memory" related to a particular flood then certain characteristics of that supposed flood have to be present. First of all the flood would have to have been sudden and unforeseen and, probably even more uniquely, unforeseen by a sophisticated and developed civilization. Moreover the loss of this civilization would have had to have been seen by near contemporaries as a huge retrograde step in the evolution of broader civilization itself. Without all these elements (which form the basis of the story) the alleged "folk memory", already a dubious concept itself anyway as a basis of legend at the best of times, becomes completely implausible.

There are practically no natural precedents for cataclysmic floods of that suddenness. In geological time we can point to many of course, but when we reduce our definition of suddenness to one that makes sense within human perception of the term then we are left with many incidents of failed engineering and practically no completely natural examples at all, especially ones in which the new aquatic environment is permanent and which also wipe out whole civilizations. And, even if we then are forced to presume that this is also what happened to Atlantis, we are left with a question regarding how a civilization so sophisticated as to hold an ocean at bay through engineering was somehow not sophisticated enough to anticipate the consequences of engineering failure and not sufficiently ahead of the game with regard to human social evolution as to reassert this intellectual dominance in some other form after the cataclysmic event anyway.

The analogy with Minoan culture on which the supposed use of Thera's explosion as an actual explanation of the legend's root is based fails even this basic attention to detail, and yet this is probably the nearest we can come to in terms of historical parallel. The "flooding" in this case applies to the tsunami effect of the explosion, which in terms of civilization hardly matters at all. We have seen even in our lifetimes many examples of such flooding and would find it hard to imagine how such an admittedly disruptive phenomenon could destroy an entire civilization. The dogged persistence of Holland, Japan and Indonesia to exist as civilized entities should at least point to how ridiculous this attribution of cause and effect is when viewed with any common sense. Either Atlantis is to be seen as a civilization or a small self-contained citadel. It cannot be both, and if it was just a citadel then there are huge questions regarding why the so-called "folk memory" has lent it the character of an entire civilization in the first place. Also, if indeed the Minoans lie anywhere near the root of the legend, we need to address why the "folk memory" somehow forgot to take into account the inconvenient fact that their civilization actually survived the Thera explosion and even reached at least one subsequent high point in terms of influence and visibility in the region (admittedly not as high as beforehand but visible and recorded nonetheless) before declining thereafter.

It is probably worth mentioning also that the oldest version of Atlantis on which all this useless conjecture is based does not even mention a "flood". Instead the language used to describe Atlantis's fate is maritime and related to sinking. Technically, I suppose, a sinking ship is "flooded", but we never use that terminology to describe the event, and nor did Plato. His words to describe the city's demise is that it "sank" just like one of their ships. And he even wonders in his story why they didn't use their considerable navy - they were after all allegedly the world's biggest naval power at the time -. to escape the cataclysm. The irony in his story is that the ships survived but the city sank, a warning as much to his contemporaries who exercised dominance in the region through naval might at the expense of diplomacy as to the hubris involved in basing one's own inflated sense of worth and power on just one aspect to one's character (the actual conversation with Solon as described by Plato anyway).

So, "folk memory" aside, there is even more over-attribution, confusion and ignorance involved in simply analysing the philological source of the legend itself than there is in pretending that it might have represented an actual historical occurrence. No matter how many floods you might remember.