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Unearthing Atlantis
Looking for the lost city of Atlantis amid the rubble on the island of Santorini
There has been much written about the lost world of Atlantis, a mythical city said to have been populated by an advanced race of people. It had the great misfortune of being swallowed up by an ocean. All of this was chronicled in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias. Over time the word Atlantis has become associated with writers of the occult.
However, while writers of the occult speculated about a lost city somewhere in the Atlantic, archeologists were looking elsewhere in the Aegean. The search began in earnest in the first decade of the 1900s. "Between 1902 and 1909, the discovery of four cities and what had once been splendid palaces, with Greek ruins buried in the soil above them, revealed that a glorious and hitherto unsuspected civilization had existed before the age of Greek ‘Enlightenment.’"
So begins Charles Pellegrino’s wonderful adventure on the Aegean Island of Thera, today known as Santorini. Circa 1600 BC, the island, an active volcano, exploded with the force of 150 hydrogen bombs. It destroyed cities on the island of Crete, about 70 miles south of the island. The resulting tidal wave destroyed coastal towns on the southwestern shore of Turkey and wrought havoc throughout the Biblical Middle East and beyond. Its dust cloud enveloped the globe as witness in ash deposits in ice in the Antarctic and in tree rings in trees several thousand years old in California.
In chronicling the lost Minoan civilization, Pellegrino details the geological forces that eventually led to the catastrophic destruction of the island. Taking the view of a geologist he details the plate tectonics that reshaped the earth’s landmass and created the conditions enabling volcanoes to thrive.
Pellegrino’s book explains the current knowledge of volcano behavior. A great deal of this new information was gained from the explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. He also describes other great volcanic eruptions, Mount Pelee in Martinique in the West Indies in 1902 and Mount Vesuvius in Italy in 79 AD. Finally, using this information, Pellegrino examines the gargantuan explosion of Thera in 1610 BC and the destruction of what has become known as the Minoan Civilization.
Describing Thera, Pellegrino writes, "I know a city…nearly four thousand years old and buried, in places, under more than two hundred feet of ash. Its storefronts and apartments are perfectly preserved, and they would not look out of place on a present-day street. The homes had running water and bathtubs and flush toilets; and it seems possible that bedrooms were heated in wintertime by steam piped in from volcanic vents, as it traveled up to rooftop cisterns, where it was condensed for bathwater."
In reciting the disaster befalling the Minoan Civilization, Pellegrino draws from a wide range of sources, Bible references, the writing of Plato, Egyptian writing detailing the cataclysm, and the geological records. Like a modern day forensic scientist, Pellegrino looks at the event using the enormous amount of trace evidence it has left behind intact and interprets this evidence in the context of a larger geological picture.
The great disappointment is the lack of a clear picture of the Minoans themselves. What little we know of them come from pottery and some magnificent frescos decorating the homes found buried at Thera. What the Frescos suggest is a civilization that the reader wants to know much more of.
"The Minoans evidently placed great importance on idyllic scenes of people at leisure, or carrying fish to the market, or engaged in boxing, bull fighting and other sports. Almost half of the rooms are decorated with scenes of flowers and wildlife."
Sadly, the story of Thera is also the chronicle of a great civilization destroyed by an act of nature. In the aftermath of the Theran eruption, the complete power structure in the Mediterranean changed completely. And once powerful people become refugees scattered throughout the Middle East, many migrating to Canaan, there to be called the Philistines of the Old Testament.
Unearthing Atlantis is a wonderful read especially if you, like me, have a hunger to understand the great civilizations that predate our current historical record.
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