Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

by Patrick Hunt

  Naturally, as already mentioned, Christianity at the time hardly had anything canonically identified as scriptures anyway, and Paul’s epistles were clearly perceived as anti-Judaic and pro-Gentile in the minds of those who treasured their Judaic heritage. The third argument against all these rumors comes from the advantage of hindsight. Now that the majority of texts are published, translated and identified (less than 15 percent remaining unidentified), no revolutionary material has emerged supporting these rumors or conspiracy theories, and it is clear that these are primarily Jewish documents hidden from the conquering Romans.

  Conclusion

  The Dead Sea Scrolls have provided the oldest biblical documents known as well as a clearer picture of Judaism in the first century AD. They tell us much about the text parallels between biblical books of the Jewish scriptures before they were adopted by Christianity as the Old Testament and much about writing and scribal practices of the first century.

  In the aftermath of making the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to all in 1991, it is hard to understand why one small group was so obsessed with controlling the scrolls. Perhaps it was motivated only by academic exclusivity—the desire to control an intellectual fiefdom. Perhaps the rigid control and delays in publication were caused by sectarian pride, or dogma and fear wrangling over potential misinterpretations, apostasy or resurrected heresies. Yet neither Christianity nor Judaism has been destroyed as a result of publication.

  Nearly all the surviving Dead Sea Scrolls in public hands are now available to anyone on DVD or microfilm, and many are now online as well. While the controversies around the withholding of material will eventually subside, the arguable interpretations will continue to unfold over decades and even centuries to come. Whatever the outcome, the concept of a biblical treasure of such historic proportions would have been inconceivable to the two Bedouin boys of 1947, to whose curiosity we will be forever in debt.

  Chapter 8

  Thera

  The Key to the Aegean Bronze Age

  Aegean Sea, 1967

  The archaeologist shielded his weathered face against the afternoon sun reflecting off the Aegean. He wasn’t young anymore; in fact, he knew that now in his sixties he was old to be leading a rigorous new field project that would tire even much younger men. But he had been carefully assembling his data for decades on this little island of Thera. This dig was his final testing grounds for a theory many had scorned for years. After training in Minoan archaeology for long seasons, and leading projects on Crete, this patient archaeologist, Spyridon Marinatos, knew he needed to find something dramatic to vindicate his scholarship once and for all. Did he know this would be the day? Possibly. He had waited decades to find just the right spot, and this one already had some telltale signs—small broken potsherds emerging from just several feet below the surface on only the second day of digging. His local workers, from the nearby village of Akrotiri, were now trained to handle carefully anything that came up in their shovels and trowels in the soft, fine volcanic ash that powdered their clothes white and stuck to everything.

  It was the shout of excitement from the middle of the deepening trench that made his heart beat suddenly faster. He hurried over a few yards to examine what the worker was holding up gingerly in one hand while brushing it off with the other. Judging from its large silhouette, clearly this was not just another fragment. Dropping down on his knees, Marinatos’s experienced eyes gleamed as he quickly scanned and recognized the shape of a complete clay vessel. Thrilled, he saw the graceful ceramic vase was a beautifully intact, perfectly preserved Minoan stirrup vase, but then, blowing the dusty ash from the vase surface, his breath was taken away. The elegant vessel had a unique decoration of blue on white, a dolphin motif unlike any Minoan decoration he knew. Given the many sea miles of distance from Crete, this combination of known shape and unknown decoration was an extremely important hallmark. Eureka! He knew he had finally found the proof that he’d waited so long to uncover. . . . Even if this event is reconstructed from correspondence, conversations, and memories of witnesses, however trustworthy, its essence is still confirmed by Marinatos’s exciting discovery.

  Beyond the rewarding story of Marinatos’s dogged determination and instinct honed by years of preparation, the site of Akrotiri on Thera is very important for a number of reasons. Here Marinatos and his younger fellow archaeologist Christos Doumas soon uncovered a whole city buried by volcanic eruption, and the destruction of Thera now appears to help date the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. The eruption may have also destroyed a considerable part of the Minoan fleet on Crete, with a wide path of its ash spreading all the way to Palestine, and probably seriously affected Minoan civilization. Additionally, Thera’s rich trade with Egypt, including shipping olive oil from the Greek mainland, also centered on valuable local items like emery. In its multiple-storied buildings, many still standing, Akrotiri’s preserved wall frescoes show the high level of art and civilization on the island. Ultimately, Akrotiri may even prove Plato’s long-lost Atlantis is not just a myth. While Atlantis may never be understood, it is possible that Thera and the discovery of Akrotiri hold the key to understanding not only Atlantis but Aegean trade at a vital juncture of ancient history, possibly even ending one age and ushering in another, around 1620 BC.

  Even now Thera is perhaps the most beautiful island in the sparkling blue Aegean Sea. Thanks to years of study since Marinatos began digging at Akrotiri, we know it was even more so in antiquity. Visible for many miles away, its perfectly shaped cone mountain rose high above the shining water. Forests climbed its slopes, and its old legendary name brought awe to all who knew it or had traveled there in the eastern Mediterranean. Some knew this island as Kalliste, the “Fairest Isle,” and a growing number of archaeologists and ancient historians now believe it was the source of the myth of Atlantis. People today, sailing boats around its capes or peering down into the deep waters where the light reaches, call the island Thera or Santorini. It rests serenely alone in the Aegean Sea between mainland Greece and Crete almost away from sight of all the other islands. Today divers go deep into the clear water where sponges grow or where octopus colonies hide under the rocks. But the island we see now is very different from what it looked like before 1620 BC, when it was truly spectacular. Now it is only a shadow of its former beauty. This is because a world-changing volcanic eruption blew up most of the island around 3,400 years ago, leaving only a thin crescent of land and a deep caldera crater. Deep water now fills in what once was a round island. Was the island of Thera truly Atlantis?

  Spyridon Marinatos (1901-74) was one of the first modern historians to seriously consider the importance of ancient Thera. In 1939 he shook up the conservative academic community with a lecture and a paper published in the respected journal Antiquity that raised the possibility that the volcanic destruction of ancient Thera might have brought about the end of the Minoan civilization. Others have followed Marinatos by connecting Thera with the mythical Atlantis, both of them destroyed by nature in the forgotten past. At the time, much of the scholarly world laughed at Marinatos, and he had to wait almost forty years to truly test his hypothesis with an excavation on Thera. History and his successor, Christos Doumas, have proven that Spyridon Marinatos was absolutely right about a massive destruction that altered civilization in the Aegean. When he excavated on ancient Thera, he dramatically discovered the lost city of Akrotiri, a city buried in ash. As archaeologist Colin Renfrew said in 1983, “Thera . . . must rank as the most completely preserved prehistoric site in Europe, perhaps in the world.”

  Akrotiri may prove Plato’s long-lost Atlantis is not just a myth

  If the story of Atlantis is true—and Plato seemed to believe it—Atlantis was also very likely a great ancient civilization that ruled the seas before it was destroyed by a huge cataclysm. Linking Atlantis to Thera is still a very controversial idea, but here is the core of what Plato wrote sometime in the first half of the fourth century BC about Atlantis (Timaeus 25
a-d):Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia . . . But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

  If we examine Plato’s excerpted words on Atlantis, maybe through the eyes of Marinatos, several things immediately stand out. First, according to Plato, Atlantis was not just one island but an island empire, which required it to be a maritime power ruling the sea and the islands in it as well as much of the land around it. This would involve many ships and great navigational skills. What we now know is that long-distance oversea trade had been around for millennia in the Aegean, linking Europe to Egypt and the coast of Palestine by water over considerable distances of hundreds of miles.

  Evidence for this early maritime trade has been found through the work of archaeologists like Colin Renfrew, who helped prove decades ago that obsidian was traded across the Aegean from islands like Melos to the Greek mainland and even to Anatolia (Turkey) as far back as six thousand years ago. Other archaeologists, such as Peter Warren, have studied diorite stone vases from Egypt, carved long before that land was united, as far back as 3000 BC or earlier. These predynastic Egyptian vessels ended up on the island of Crete at some undetermined later date.

  Aegean and Mediterranean sea trade would require sailing out of sight of land, a frightening prospect for most of human history. Lionel Casson, the world’s foremost authority on ancient seafaring, suggests this Mediterranean scenario is not at all far-fetched. This is because navigators long relied on the positions of the sun, moon and stars for sighting and, after long observations, they were also able to predict the seasons of favorable winds. The ancient sailors depended on careful observations and generations of experience because the variable sea could never really be mastered. They knew that the wide sea could just as easily end their lives as bring them almost unimaginable wealth through trade. Yet many braved the sea by crossing again and again, considering the opportunities greater than the risks. If enough ships were built and sailed or rowed, filled with men to police the water traffic in the sea lanes or harbors, it is completely possible that one civilization could have controlled commerce and travel. So Plato is right in the sense that a culture or civilization could have ruled the seas, and many scholars do suggest that during 1800 to 1500 BC, the Minoans of Crete ruled the seafaring world in the eastern Mediterranean between Greece and Egypt.

  Another thing we can take from Plato’s words is that his account of the physical destruction of Atlantis is very close to what would have transpired in a volcanic eruption, often preceded and accompanied by earthquakes. The description could have been written from an observer’s view from very close to the eruption, wherein much would have been obscured by clouds of ash and steam generated by boiling seawater. Equally, an observer could have been viewing from miles away if the same phenomena spread out for miles around this Aegean area. These phenomena would likely have been attributed to the traumatic earthquakes often assigned to Poseidon, god of the sea. Plato’s story, differing slightly from a firsthand observation of a volcanic eruption but recorded just as seen or heard from a safer distance, could have been passed down orally through many generations until someone wrote it down. Furthermore, the island’s disappearance by subsidence, just as Plato noted, is quite in keeping with Thera having blown up, with the bulk of it, perhaps over 80 percent, disappearing as water rushed in to fill the deep caldera crater. The shoals Plato mentioned are absent today from Thera, but there are remnants of a circle of low island fragments around the caldera, and a new island, Nea Kameni, emerged near the center of the sea crater from modern volcanic activity between 1707 and 1950.

  In all, Plato’s description of the destruction of Atlantis is uncannily close to what would have been observable from any ships fleeing Thera. Some survivors—later telling their frightening stories to their offspring—must have been lucky enough to escape just in time from ancient Thera’s buried harbor at Akrotiri or other harbors completely destroyed, along with most of the people who lived along them.

  The Greek seismologist Angelos Galanopoulos took Marinatos one step further in 1960 by theorizing that Thera’s destruction was directly associated with the myth of Atlantis and its demise. As time goes on, thanks to plausible collaborative reconstructions by volcanologists and archaeologists, some in the academic world no longer consider Atlantis just a myth repeated by Plato. Atlantis does not need to remain an elaborate tale relegated to speculation, but was possibly a real place whose rise and demise may be historically validated in Thera. On the other hand, Thera’s destruction is not necessarily connected to the end of Minoan culture but is nonetheless—even if only a local microcosm representing the mythic demise of Atlantis—vastly important in its own right as a major Cycladic island entrepôt.

  Marinatos and Doumas uncovered a whole city buried by the volcanic eruption

  The facts of the destruction of Thera can be reconstructed from what remains. Of the group of fragmentary islands surrounding the volcanic caldera, the primary remnant island, Thera, having partly survived the Bronze Age eruption around 1620 BC, now circles the deep water of the sunken crater like a crescent moon facing west. The secondary remnant island is Therasia, on the west side of the caldera mouth. Thera has the steep walls of a volcanic throat on the inner west side of the main island crescent that faces the caldera. This volcanic circle is a high cliff almost a thousand feet high in places. In contrast, the outer east side tapers off, usually leveling off gently to the water, although peaks like Profitis Ilias (Prophet Elijah) jut out from the flat landscape up to some 2,600 feet high. These surviving peaks are probably nowhere near the height of the original island volcanic cone. The older small island in the middle of the caldera, now called Palaia (Old) Kameni, was thought to have most likely erupted from the sea. This account can be found in the writing of the Greek geographer Strabo around AD 20, although written a few hundred years after the fact, since Old Kameni rose from the sea near Thera around 197 BC.

  The archaeological site of Akrotiri, the main Bronze Age site left on the island, lies on the south end of the crescent of land, close to the sea, sheltered from the north and northwest winds that blow almost all the time across the sea and over the island. This city once had a protected harbor where ships could berth from wind and storm. One can imagine even greater shelter from prevailing bad weather when the volcanic peak slightly to the north rose high above the town. This was before the eruption blew away three-quarters of the island mass and much of what was left collapsed into the deep caldera seen today. Only about twenty-eight square miles is left of over a likely one hundred or more square miles. A thick layer of ash covered the bulk of the island from the 1620 BC eruption, seen in some places as three separate strata from 60 to 150 feet or more thick, and it was at least 30 to 40 feet deep at Akrotiri itself.

  Although Marinatos had to wait over a quarter century—partly due to two intervening wars—for vindication of his ideas about the connection of Thera’s volcanic demise to the collapse of a civilization, in the interim he was carefully assembling clues about where to find the best location for evidence. He was helped in this by previous nineteenth-century research. First, between 1870 and 1874, the early French excavator H. Mamet had started an exploratory search at a ravine adjacent to Favatas near Akrotiri. Mamet had found white slip pottery from Cyprus, proving trade with other distant islands in the Minoan period. The German Archaeological Institute in Athens also provided Marinatos with records of its early exploration, among them the Ka
maras site along the Potamos valley. In addition, Baron Hiller von Gaertringen had also done work at a hillside site of classical Thera, itself 1,300 feet above sea level on the Mesa Vouno hill in 1890, and he had also overseen the various surveys of his assistant R. Zahn in different places across the island.

  Marinatos learned from the archaeological archives and from old farmers in that part of the island that his predecessors Mamet and Zahn had turned up a significant amount of broken “Minoan” pottery along the Potamos valley, especially near Favatas, opposite Akrotiri. Prehistoric giant stone mortars still being used by the townspeople of Favatas helped confirm its importance to Marinatos. He accurately reasoned these mill-stones were too large and heavy to move any great distance. The final clue came from farmers’ reports of collapsing earth in several places around this same area of the Potamos valley and its ravine. Marinatos suspected at once that this collapsing ground was proof of cavities under the surface, indicating collapsing roof structures under the surface ash layers. Adding up all the background data of ancient ceramic finds of a sufficiently high density in one spot—suggesting to an archaeologist some kind of long-term settlement—along with the pioneering reports of his predecessors, Marinatos was persuaded that he was looking in exactly the right place to find a lost city. Marinatos must have walked many times over the low plateau and coastal hills around the Potamos valley, seeing the fine volcanic dust covering the island’s surface being picked up by the sea breeze from the north and wondering what lay beneath.