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.
From every excavated site on Crete there can be no doubt that the Minoan civilization suffered from a major seismic event at the very end of its period of supremacy – when palaces, villas and entire settlements were abandoned permanently. From the geological findings of Ninkovich and Heezen, together with the archaeological discoveries of Spyridon Marinatos, we know that Thera was responsible. From the late Minoan style of pottery found at Akrotiri, we also know that Thera cannot have erupted before the fifteenth century BC. The ice core samples and the latest radiocarbon tests do not contradict any of this. However, archaeologists have tended to place the eruption of Thera no later than 1450 BC, whereas the ice core and latest radiocarbon dates all provide a central date well into the 1300s BC. Although this would not contradict the archaeological evidence, it would require a certain reinterpretation of the events at the end of the Minoan era.
From the historical perspective, Thera weakened Minoan power, resulting in the empire's gradual decline over a period of around a century before being overrun by the Mycenaeans. If Thera did not erupt until the first half of the fourteenth century BC, then its affects on the Minoan civilization would have been much greater than is generally thought, causing its empire to collapse within a few decades. This, however, would seem quite plausible. The tidal wave alone could have destroyed half of the Minoan fleet and devastated the empire's ports all over the Aegean. It had been a sea-based empire with little power on land. The Minoans were seemingly involved in a pact with Egypt against the Hittites in Turkey, who would no doubt have taken full advantage of the situation. Indeed, the Minoan decorations from Amonhotep III's Malkata palace appear to show that the Minoans were still well placed during the early fifteenth century BC (see Chapter Four). On the balance of evidence, therefore, Thera would seem to have erupted in the first half of the fourteenth century BC – circa 1400 to 1350 BC.
This would certainly sit within the reign of Amonhotep III. This can be dated from the Sothic Cycle discussed in Chapter Two. One particular calendar alignment occurred in the ninth year of the reign of the pharaoh Amonhotep I. It happened on the 309th day of the civil calendar, meaning that 1236 years had transpired since the beginning of the Sothic Cycle in 2781 BC, making the ninth year of Amonhotep I's reign 1545 BC. The first year of his reign was therefore 1554 BC. From various inscriptions from which the lengths of his and the subsequent eighteenth-dynasty kings' reigns can be determined, together with the calculated overlaps of co-regencies, Egyptologists generally estimate some 165 years separate the beginning of Amonhotep I's reign from the beginning of the reign of Amonhotep III. That means that Amonhotep III's reign began around 1389 BC. We know he lived for another thirty-seven years, which would place his death around 1352, the orthodox date Akhenaten came to the throne. However, as we have seen, there seems to have been an overlapping co-regency that has not been taken into consideration. If Cyril Aldred is right (see Chapter Six), Amonhotep died in Akhenaten's twelfth year, which would mean that Akhenaten came to the throne around 1364. Interestingly, this coincides almost exactly with the latest central radiocarbon dates for the Thera eruption.
The affects on Egypt of the Thera eruption would certainly account for Amonhotep's erection of the Sekhmet statues – the darkening of the skies, perhaps for days on end, and the shower of volcanic ash, would have terrified the Egyptians. They were not able to see the volcano erupting hundreds of miles away, al
though, if Krakatau is anything to go by, they would certainly have heard it. Witnessing something completely unprecedented, and totally outside the assumed order of things, the Egyptians would surely have thought that the world was coming to an end. In their mythology, this had almost happened once before, when Sekhmet had decided to annihilate the human race. She was the negative aspect of the sun's power, and it was the sun that was being obscured. She was also the goddess of devastation. Sekhmet would almost certainly have been considered responsible. Amonhotep may, therefore, have attempted to appease her by erecting the statues and making her supreme deity. However, the sun would continue to appear strange, its colour repeatedly turning sickly months, even years, after the ash cloud had dissipated. This may well have been taken as a sign that it could all happen again at any moment – and next time the world would end. Amonhotep and his policy of appeasing Sekhmet would accordingly be questioned – it clearly hadn't worked. Under such circumstances it is doubtful whether the frightened population would have opposed Akhenaten when he assumed control and installed an aspect of the god Re as chief deity.
In mythology it had been Re's intervention that had previously saved the world from the fury of Sekhmet. The priests of Heliopolis would have been quick to draw attention to this fact. Re's assimilation with Amun, they would argue, had obviously displeased the god. If he was not reinstated, individually, as supreme deity, he would no longer restrain the wrath of his heavenly daughter. We know it was the cult of Heliopolis which had principally influenced Akhenaten. Indeed, to begin with, Akhenaten sees virtually no difference between Re and the Aten: many early references refer to him as 'only one of Re' (on the Boundary Stela at Amarna, for instance [see Chapter Three]). An early scene from the tomb of the vizier Ramose, at Thebes even describes Akhenaten as 'the image of Re who loves him more than any other king'.
As for the Amun priesthood: it is unlikely that they would have had much support if they tried to oppose the new religion Their cult revolved around the daily supplications to Amun, to keep the world in order and the forces of chaos at bay. Even from their own perspective, this had clearly failed. Akhenaten's logic would seem impeccable: Amun was no longer the chief god. Within a few years, once Akhenaten installed his new religion, the dust in the atmosphere would have subsided and the sun's appearance would have returned to normal. Surely, no one, no matter how much the new regime has altered his status, is going to risk the end of the world by opposing Akhenaten.
This scenario fits perfectly with everything we have so far examined – indeed, something along these lines is just about the only scenario that makes any sense of the Amarna era. It explains Amonhotep's Sekhmet statues, Akhenaten's new religion, the apparent wholesale acceptance of Atenism, even by the Amun priesthood, and it explains why the army went along with it all even when they had so much to lose. Does it, therefore, also explain the apparent Hebrew link with Akhenaten's religion?
Remarkably, the effects of the Thera eruption on Egypt bear a striking similarity to the plague of darkness and other ills which the Bible tells us God inflicted upon Egypt when the pharaoh refused to let the Israelites leave. Had Akhenaten come to believe that it was the God of the Hebrews who had been responsible for the terrifying phenomena, and ultimately incorporated their beliefs with his own?
SUMMARY
• It is not only Akhenaten's new religion which suggests that something very unusual had occurred just prior to his reign, but the behaviour of his father Amonhotep III. A year or two before Akhenaten comes to the throne, Amonhotep does something very strange for someone so completely devoted to the god Amun-Re: he erects literally hundreds of statues to another diety – the goddess Sekhmet. No other deity of ancient Egypt is represented by so many large-scale statues – and nearly all of them were erected by order of Amonhotep III. These statues of Sekhmet are a clear indication that, despite the apparent stability and wealth of the country, something was wrong, as Sekhmet was the goddess of devastation.
• There is compelling evidence that a gigantic volcanic eruption occurred in the eastern Mediterranean around the time of Amonhotep's reign. Every winter a fresh layer of ice forms on the Greenland ice cap, creating clearly defined strata, one for each year. Every layer contains trapped air, holding a sample of the earth's atmosphere as it was when the ice formed. In the 1970s Danish geophysicists began taking core samples many metres down into the ice, so as to recover a year-by-year record of the earth's atmospheric conditions going back some 100,000 years. The team soon observed that from years when there had been major volcanic eruptions the samples evidenced high levels of acidity. In November 1980 they eventually concluded that there had been a massive eruption somewhere in the world around 1390 BC, with a margin of error of some fifty years either way. This might indeed have coincided with the independent reign of Amonhotep III (circa 1389 to 1364 BC).
• The only eruption large enough to have resulted in the atmospheric conditions recorded by the Danes, and known by geologists to have occurred within 200 years either side of this date, was a gigantic eruption on the Aegean island of Thera. Although, at the time, this seemed to place the eruption around a hundred years after it was previously thought to have occurred, more recent radiocarbon tests from Thera have tended to support the findings, dating the eruption to around 1360 BC.
• In 1956 two geologists, Dragoslav Ninkovich and Bruce Heezen of Columbia University, conducted a survey of the seabed to try to determine precisely how large the eruption had been. It would take 6,000 of the most destructive modern nuclear warheads – each with the power to wipe out an entire city – to equal the explosive magnitude of Thera.
• Ninkovich and Heezen's survey of the Mediterranean seabed showed that sediment from the Thera eruption spread across the sea floor and bisected the eastern end of the island of Crete. This positively demonstrated that the prevailing wind was in the direction of Egypt. The Egyptian coast is only . about 800 kilometres from Thera. The much smaller Mount St Helens eruption in the USA in 1980 resulted in thick falls of ash just as far away, and after the eruption of the Krakatau volcano near Sumatra in 1886 ash was falling on ships over 3,000 kilometres away. Thera – six times bigger than Krakatau – would certainly have plunged much of Egypt into darkness and covered the countryside with volcanic debris.
• The effects in Egypt caused by the Thera eruption would certainly account for Amonhotep's erection of the Sekhmet statues – the darkening of the skies, perhaps for days on end, and the shower of volcanic ash would have terrified the Egyptians. Witnessing something completely unprecedented, and totally outside the assumed order of things, the Egyptians would surely have thought that the world was coming to an end. In their mythology, this had almost happened once before, when Sekhmet had decided to annihilate the human race. Sekhmet would almost certainly have been considered responsible. Akhenaten, however, may have considered it to have been the work of his new god, the Aten, punishing Egypt for worshipping other gods. Under such circumstances it is doubtful whether the frightened population would have opposed Akhenaten when he installed the Aten as chief deity.
CHAPTER TEN
Exodus
According to the Exodus account, the pharaoh, concerned about the growing number of Israelites, orders that all their newborn sons should be killed. Although many are murdered, the baby Moses is saved when his mother places him in a basket made from bulrushes and hides him below the river bank. The daughter of the pharaoh then discovers the child and decides to raise him as her own son. Years later, although he has been brought up as an Egyptian prince, Moses still has compassion for his countrymen, and when he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite slave he kills the man. When the deed is discovered, the pharaoh orders Moses to be executed. However, he manages to escape and settles in the land of Midian, east of the Gulf of Aqaba. After many years, God appears to Moses and charges him to return horne and confront the new pharaoh of Egypt. Moses does as God asks and, accompanied by his brother Aaron, appears before the pharaoh
with God's command: he must free the Israelites and let them return to Canaan. When the king refuses, and actually makes life harder for the Hebrews, God punishes the Egyptians by a series of plagues: bloodied water, frogs, lice, flies, cattle deaths, boils, hailstorms, locusts and darkness.
In 1985, British author Ian Wilson, in his book The Exodus Enigma, drew scholarly attention to the astonishing similarities between these biblical plagues and the likely effects on Egypt from the Thera eruption. At the time the eruption was thought to have occurred around the mid 1450s BC, and accordingly Wilson placed the event around the reign of Tuthmosis III. However, as we have seen, it now seems more likely that the volcano really erupted over half a century later, during the reign of Amonhotep III. Unfortunately, neither reign – nor any other from ancient Egypt – has records making direct allusions to the Thera eruption. If any records were made during Amonhotep's reign or during the time of Akhenaten, the former would probably have been destroyed during the anti-Amun desecrations of the late Amarna period, and the latter would have been destroyed during the anti-Atenist backlash during the period of Horemheb. Although we cannot make direct comparisons between biblical plagues and Egyptian reports of the Thera eruption, we can compare the Exodus account with modern reports of Thera-like eruptions. When we do, we find them to be almost identical.
When Krakatau erupted, the explosion was so loud that in the Northern Territory of Australia – 4,800 kilometres away – people were woken from their sleep by what they thought were inconsiderate quarry workers blasting rocks nearby. The Egyptian coast is only 800 kilometres from Thera and so its explosion, six times bigger, would have sounded like thunder throughout the country. In fact, its shock waves would have rattled the windows of modern Cairo. They would certainly have been felt by the ancient Egyptians. Within a day of the eruption, the fallout cloud would have drifted high over Egypt and the skies would have darkened. After Mount St Helens, the sun was obscured for hours 500 kilometres from the volcano, and after Krakatau the skies were darkened to a much greater distance – it was actually as dark as night for days on end up to 800 kilometres away. Because of the greater magnitude of the Thera eruption, we can assume that the same must have been true for much of Egypt.
Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings Page 21