The Lost Atlantis

The hottest arguments and the highest enthusiasms in archaeology today swirl round the small Aegean island of Santorini. There Professor Spyridon don Marinatos, director of the Greek Department of Antiquities, is digging up evidence to explain the downfall of the great Minoan civilization in the middle of the second millennium B.C. Former TIME Art Editor Alexander Eliot, who has also written extensively on Greek history and mythology, recently visited Santorini to tour the excavations. His report:

Sailing into Santorini's embrace, a traveler senses that the majestic scenery was created by incomprehensible forces. The most prominent feature of Santorini, also called Thera, is a lagoon some 37 miles in circumference. At the lagoon's center are two low burnt black mounds of smoking lava, one named Nea Kameni, the other Palaia Kameni. To the east, the cliffs of the main crescent-shaped body of land stand sheer out of the water to a height of almost a thousand feet. The bottom of the lagoon is a full thousand feet below. In fact the ship is sailing across the bowl of a still smoldering volcano.

Four thousand years ago, Santorini was a single mountainous mass, almost completely round. At that time, archaeology has shown, the island was inhabited by an exceedingly sophisticated race of men. To make their buildings somewhat elastic and therefore earthquake resistant, they set wooden pins in the corner joints of the stones. They cultivated the olive. They produced pottery similar to the products found in Knossos, the Minoan city on Crete 75 miles to the south. But by far the most amazing creations of the ancient islanders were their frescoes.

Some of the frescoes recently unearthed on Santorini and put on public display at the Archaeological Museum at Athens are shown on the following color pages. Beyond any doubt, they surpass all others found so far in the Mediterranean region. The frescoes of Knossos, for example, are less delicate and free, less motionful and rhythmical than these. As for the celebrated splendors of a later age found at Pompeii, they would seem dry and artificial if set side by side with the Santorini frescoes. These new discoveries show Bronze Age civilization at its peak. The doomed people of Santorini were obviously capable of creating heavenly images upon the earth. They appear to have been as thoroughly attuned to art as Americans are to technology.

What doomed them was a catastrophe that rose from the bowels of the earth. Some time about the year 1500 B.C., Santorini exploded. The whole center of the island blew skyhigh. Not long afterward the sea rushed in to fill the red-hot wound of the crater. These two events produced what may well have been the most vast and terrible natural disaster ever to take place in the time that human beings have existed on the earth.

By way of comparison, consider the explosion of Krakatau in the East

Indies in August of 1883. The shock wave cracked walls 100 miles away and traveled three times round the world. Debris suspended in the air turned day into night over a radius of 130 miles. Floating pumice up to 13 feet blanketed the sea.

Santorini's caldera, or crater, is five times the size of Krakatau's. Quarry operations have disclosed that the ash blanket at Santorini reached a depth of 160 feet as against a few inches at Krakatau. For these reasons and others, geologists assume that the Santorini explosion must have had three or four times the force of Krakatau's. Within a very brief span of time, apparently, Santorini released energy estimated to be equivalent to the blast from a 400-megaton nuclear bomb.

The molten hail produced by Santorini's deafening eruption must have rendered all lands within a 100-mile radius (including central Crete) uninhabitable. Then came the incursion of the sea into the immense lava boil that had been Santorini--probably causing water to recede temporarily from shores around the Mediterranean. As the immense volume of water that had converged on Santorini rushed outward again in a giant wave, it smashed harbors and flooded large districts around the Mediterranean basin. The great sea empire of Minoan Crete simply vanished in the wake of Santorini's destruction.

Such is the scenario proposed by Professor Marinatos, the autocratic old genius of Greek archaeology, who has spent the past four summers excavating the rich Minoan town that he discovered on Santorini. The site of his dig is shrouded in rosy dust, shaded by tin-roof sheds, and shielded by high fences. Situated on the southern horn of the main island in a spot sheltered from the sometimes blistering north wind, the site straddles a deep, dry gully. Marinates began his dig by tunneling through the pumice from the gully bed. "We hit the bull's-eye right away," he boasts. "We struck at the heart of the most aristocratic quarter." Buildings standing two and three stories high, with 50-ft. street fronts, "French doors" and traces of balconies, were found still upright, protected by the dry volcanic ash that enveloped them before the final massive explosion. Upward of 3,500 ceramic pots and vases have been found, but no human or animal remains and no valuables. Marinates explains that the people of the town, warned of the impending disaster by earth tremors and ominous outpourings of ash and gases must have fled in time and taken their treasures with them. The greatest treasures of all, however, from the archaeological viewpoint--the frescoes --could not be taken away by the doomed race.

With his cloth cap jammed low on his white locks and his brown eyes squinting against the ever-present dust, Marinates scrambles down the gully to show interested visitors an example. He lowers himself into a masonry-lined oblong that was once a temple room. Triumphantly he points to the plaster of one wall. There is an image of a girl in a bell-shaped skirt, and she is dancing, dim in the sunlight. For 3,500 years, up until just a few weeks ago, that girl danced in the darkness of the earth.

Into Surgery. "We approach these wonderful things scientifically," says Marinates. "If necessary, we can treat any new find like a casualty that is taken immediately to surgery." Where frescoes are found in a crumbled state, Marinates has them picked up piece by piece and reassembled on the spot by gentle-fingered experts in a workshed. The few visitors admitted to "surgery" find tables strewn with seeming jigsaw puzzles of painted plaster bits. One represents a blue monkey springing up through space with fingertip lightness (see second color page). The perfection of his leap sets this image among the greatest paintings of animals ever created.

There can be no controversy about the beauty of such fabulous finds, but arguments do rage over the question of whether or not they point to Plato's legendary Atlantis. Some scholars still insist that Plato was "resting his mind" and writing a moral fable when he described Atlantis and its fate in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. But Plato repeatedly stated that he was telling the truth, based on information handed down by Egyptian priests.

The philosopher may have been doing a bit of both. His story placed Atlantis out beyond the "pillars of Hercules" (the Strait of Gibraltar). The mighty island kingdom, he related, sank beneath the sea 9,000 years before his time. But the specific details and descriptions that Plato gives indicate events that modern science shows to have occurred in and around Santorini at the height of the Age of Bronze. They fit everything that is known concerning the final bloom and tragic end of what Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans arbitrarily labeled "Minoan" civilization. "Minoan" and "Atlantean" may well have been the same thing.

Among the many points cited in support of that contention are ones that Plato cannot have known, but that present-day archaeology confirms. For example, Plato puts sacred bulls at the center of the Atlantean religion; the so-called bull dances of the Minoans are familiar enough to all prehistory buffs. The golden "bull cups" of Minoan provenance at the Athens museum show bas-reliefs of young men capturing bulls with the help of only staves and nooses; Plato describes just such a ritual hunt as taking place on Atlantis. Again, he says that the Atlantean metropolis was built of red, black and white native stone in pleasing combinations; Santorini's cliffs, intriguingly enough, are striped with just those three colors of rock.

What about Plato's insistence that ancient Atlantis sank from sight "in a day and a night"? Minoan Crete did nothing of the kind, of course, but Santorini did sink. Moreover, its sudden destruction brought down Crete, and with Crete went the whole Minoan civilization.

Plato capped his story of Atlantis with a stern moral. For generation after generation, he related, the people "easily bore the burden, as it were, of the vast volume of their gold and other goods; and thus their wealth did not make them drunk with pride so that they lost control of themselves." But in the end that was just what did happen. The Atlanteans "lost their comeliness, through being unable to bear the burden of their possessions, and became ugly to look upon, in the eyes of him [Zeus] who has the gift of sight . . . filled as they were with lawless ambition and power." Therefore Zeus destroyed them. As Professor Marinates continues to unearth evidence from his dig on Santorini, Plato's story of Atlantis begins to read more and more like actual history.

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