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The Fall of the Minoan Civilization

By Jessica Cecil

Last updated 2011-02-17

The burning light of a magnificent civilisation, which awed the ancient Greeks, dimmed and then suddenly disappeared. Discover Dr Floyd McCoy's theory of the Minoan collapse.

Volcanic explosion

Three and a half thousand years ago, the tiny Aegean island of Thera was devastated by one of the worst natural disasters since the Ice Age - a huge volcanic eruption.

This cataclysm happened 100km from the island of Crete, the home of the thriving Minoan civilisation. Fifty years after the eruption, that civilisation was in ruins. Did the volcano deliver a death blow to the Minoans? It's a whodunnit that has haunted historians and scientists for decades.

The lost world of the Minoans has intrigued people for thousands of years. Their palace at Knossos was vast and elaborate, with Europe's first paved roads and running water. The ancient Greeks wove its magnificence into their myths; it was the home of King Minos and his man-eating bull, the Minotaur, which roamed the palace labyrinth.

In the 1900s, British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans excavated and restored the ruins at Knossos. Beautiful and delicate frescoes of bulls and dolphins revealed a highly artistic civilisation and a people who apparently lived in harmony with nature.

Early 20th-century archaeologists knew of the devastating volcano and some concluded it must have snuffed out the Minoan civilisation almost instantly. But was it really as simple as that?

For a start, they discovered little ash had fallen on Crete - as luck would have it, the prevailing winds took the volcano's ash in the opposite direction. Then archaeologists found clay tablets that proved the Minoan civilisation survived for about 50 years after the eruption. So if the volcano killed the civilisation, what accounted for this long gap?

Vulcanologist Floyd McCoy, from the University of Hawaii, has been inspired by volcanoes since his childhood on the volcanic islands of Hawaii. His passion is the most romantic volcano of all time - Thera. He went on a journey of discovery, gathering evidence from other scientists around the globe, to try answer this question: was there a connection between the eruption of Thera and the end of the Minoans on Crete?

His journey started on the island of Thera. It was home to thousands and a flourishing trading post for the Minoans until disaster struck. So massive was the volcano it had an extraordinary effect, preserving forever the town of Akrotiri.

Mysteriously, no skeletons have ever been found on the island. Akrotiri's chief archaeologist, Christos Doumas, believes the people of Akrotiri didn't survive, and that the bodies are still to be uncovered, huddled at the harbour where they were trapped by the eruption as they waited to escape. He believes it's highly unlikely that scores of boats were waiting in the harbour to save them.

Tsunami destruction

Floyd McCoy was convinced that giant waves, or tsunamis, had been unleashed by the volcano. He believed these waves travelled across the open sea to batter the northern coast of Crete - but proof was hard to find.

In 1997 a young British geologist, Dr Dale Dominey-Howes of Kingston University, found what he believes is firm evidence of tsunamis on Crete. He drilled deep into the mud at an inland marsh near Malia in Crete, and took the mud core he found back to England for analysis.

The mud had been deposited, layer upon layer, over thousands of years. At one place, deep in the core, Dr Dominey-Howes found a type of tiny fossilised shell that only lives in very deep sea water. He felt sure the shells were brought into the marsh by an ancient tsunami. A Minoan palace near the marsh was buried at the same level as the shells, suggesting the tsunami could have hit soon after the palace was built.

If a tsunami had been unleashed by the eruption of Thera, Floyd McCoy wanted to know how big it might have been. He turned to Professor Costas Synolakis of the University of Southern California.

Professor Synolakis grew up on Crete, playing amongst the palace ruins as a child. He became one of the world's top predictors of tsunamis, travelling the world with his computer models to predict the waves of tomorrow.

Professor Synolakis can also use his technology to determine the size of a wave from the ancient past. He estimated that waves from Thera battering northern Crete could have been up to 12m high in places. Such waves would have destroyed boats and coastal villages, even travelling up rivers to flood farmland.

But however terrifying these waves, they can only have been part of the story. McCoy was convinced the volcano must have had wider effects.

A remarkable discovery by a British geologist gave rise to a new theory - that the volcano already classed as one of the most devastating of the last 10,000 years could have been even bigger than scientists had previously thought.

Professor Steve Sparks of Bristol University found clues in the smallest fragments of evidence. He was surprised to find clumps of fossilised algae high on the cliffs of the volcano. These algae only live in shallow waters, and their presence suggested there was once a shallow sea inside the crater of the volcano.

If there had been a shallow sea, Professor Sparks realised, the shape of the volcano could have been entirely different, and a differently shaped volcano could have produced far more ash. His hunch was that the volcano could have been twice as powerful as geologists had suspected.

Cycle of disaster

What might a volcano of this size have meant for the Minoans on Crete? Volcanoes throw up sulphur dioxide, and huge amounts of this gas can alter the climate. Climate modeller Mike Rampino at New York University calculated that the eruption on Thera could have lowered annual average temperatures by one to two degrees across Europe, Asia and North America. Rampino believes the summer temperatures would have dropped even more, suggesting years of cold, wet summers and ruined harvests.

Rampino's calculations were supported by the work of Professor Mike Baillie of the Queen's University, Belfast. Ancient logs preserved for millennia in Irish bogs contain a record of the weather - and especially the cold, wet periods that stunt trees' growth. Trees that were growing at the time of the eruption - 3,500 years ago - show signs that the climate was especially wet and cold then.

Floyd McCoy believes the volcano undermined the Minoans for years. First, it destroyed an entire island that had been crucial to their trade. Then, giant waves battered the Minoan coasts, destroying coastal villages and boats at harbour. Next, the Minoans faced summers of ruined harvests.

Knossos archaeologist Colin MacDonald thinks the effects of these disasters were compounded by something more - the Minoans began to see their world in a different way. MacDonald believes the Minoan people, stripped of their certainties, stopped obeying the priest kings in palaces like Knossos. This marked the start of a 50-year decline for the entire Minoan civilisation. They were in no position to fight back when Greeks from the mainland took control of the island.

For McCoy, this was the answer - an explanation of how one of the mightiest volcanoes ever witnessed could fell the great Minoan civilisation. The volcano struck the Minoans in ways only modern science could start to quantify. The effects were lethal.

Find out more

Books

The Troubled Island by Jan Driessen and Colin MacDonald (Aegaeum 17 Annales d'archéologie egéenne de l'Université de Liège et UT-PASP, 1997)

Volcanic Hazards and disasters in Human Antiquity by Floyd McCoy and Grant Heiken (special paper for The Geological Society of America, 2000)

Santorini Volcano (Geological Society Special Memoir) by TH Druitt et al, including an essay by Steve Sparks (Geological Society Publishing House, 1999)

Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth by J Alexander MacGillivray (Pimlico, 2001)

About the author

Jessica Cecil has worked in television for 15 years. She moved into science programming in 1998, as deputy editor of BBC ONE's 'Tomorrow's World', and was the series producer of 'Ancient Apocalypse'.

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