What a coincidence that I visited the Akrotiri ruins only a few weeks ago. It was truly remarkable. Unlike Pompeii, the people of ancient Thera appear to have been familiar enough with volcanoes to know to evacuate well ahead of the eruption. No remains of valuables, pets, or humans have been discovered at the site. Still, much about the life and culture of these people is able to be learned from their architecture, visual culture, and more. The remains of Linear A tablets and frescos have strongly associated it with Minoan civilization (though the guide we had at the site was careful to not to simply call the people “Minoans”).
The museum of prehistoric Thera is also worth a visit if you make it there! It is fairly small but contains some incredibly well-preserved artifacts. The frescoes are stunning.
I found Fira (nearby "large" town on Santorini, very close to the sites) miserably crowded, but seeing Thera was very cool. This is all about 1500 years older than Pompeii, so a very different experience IMO.
> The weirdest thing about this island is that everything is built on a caldera rim, much higher than sea level. Extremely unusual for an island.
Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island. This was for defense reasons against pirates and other potential attackers.
The famous villages on the rim (like Oia) were the houses of Greek sea captains. The donkeys still there today would have been hired then to carry their wares and treasures up the staircases from the ports when they returned home from sea.
There is an older Chora with a street maze also, but more in the middle of the island, in a much more defensible position.
True, it's rare to have that little low-lying land even on Greek islands. But the seaside towns are regardless a modern addition to the other islands, barring the biggest fortified ones. Too vulnerable.
There is a truly unbelievable beauty and rich history hidden underneath the touristy views of Santorini cluttering your social media feeds every summer.
This is absolutely an amazing article. There was one thing in particular that stood out to me and was a bit shocking though. Look how much greener the island was in 2000 than it is today. Unreal and sad how much the changes caused by humans on the climate impact the health and vitality of our planet.
They had no defensive walls, at least not in the way we might expect, and no coinage. Still, they managed to maintain extensive trade networks, with connections reaching as far as Central Asia, and materials such as lapis lazuli ultimately originating in what is now Afghanistan.
The Aegean Sea around 1600 BC was probably far busier than we tend to imagine, with substantial maritime trade connecting islands, coastal settlements, and distant civilizations. Without compasses, sailors relied on landmarks, celestial navigation, experience, and routes that often took them from island to island. Minoan settlements across the Aegean may have helped secure maritime routes and provided a degree of protection to Crete itself. This could partly explain why major Minoan palaces lacked the defensive fortifications common elsewhere. There is also another issue, one that receives less attention in popular accounts, despite having affected several Eastern Mediterranean societies of the period.
The eruption of Thera was approaching, and there is archaeological evidence suggesting that at least some inhabitants had time to leave before the final catastrophic event. The absence of human remains in the excavated areas of Akrotiri is particularly striking, although it does not establish that the entire island was successfully evacuated. Some evidence also suggests limited human activity or resettlement in the broader area after the eruption.
The Minoans were not immediately destroyed by the eruption. Its impact on their fleets, ports, and trading networks remains debated, but the disruption may have weakened their maritime position. Over the following centuries, several major Minoan palaces were destroyed, in circumstances that likely involved a combination of natural disasters, conflict, and political change. Some destruction layers suggest deliberate burning, although the precise events and motivations remain uncertain. At one palace, evidence of exceptionally intense fire has prompted interpretations involving stored combustible materials and restricted ventilation, potentially producing furnace-like temperatures. The exact mechanism, however, is not firmly established.
The changing balance of power in the Aegean eventually favored the Mycenaeans, who came to dominate much of the region. Centuries later, the wider Eastern Mediterranean experienced another series of upheavals, conventionally associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse and the groups described in Egyptian records as the Sea Peoples. These events were separated by considerable time, and their causes were probably more complex than a single chain of disasters or conquests.
And that is perhaps the more important story of what was lost. Long-distance trade networks were disrupted or reorganized. In parts of the Aegean, palace administration disappeared, along with the use of Linear B writing. Monumental construction and certain specialized techniques declined or changed, although this did not mean that mathematical or architectural knowledge vanished everywhere. Earlier artifacts such as the Phaistos Disc, with its repeated stamped symbols, remind us that these societies had developed sophisticated techniques whose full significance we still do not understand.
Some regions also experienced declining use of wheeled transport, possibly reflecting changes in infrastructure, terrain, economics, and social organization rather than a literal forgetting of the wheel. Population losses, displacement, and settlement abandonment were substantial in some areas, but their scale varied across the Eastern Mediterranean.
By around the eighth century BC, alphabetic writing had become established in Greece, following centuries without the earlier palace-based writing system. Settlement patterns had changed, and some communities had moved to more defensible locations. Memories of earlier events may have survived through oral traditions and legends, although connecting individual myths to particular historical disasters is inherently speculative.
That centuries-long disruption in technology, trade, and social organization may have had consequences extending far beyond its immediate aftermath. Technological progress is not necessarily linear, and the loss of complex networks can affect development for generations. The cumulative effect is difficult to measure, but potentially enormous.
To make a very broad and deliberately speculative analogy, perhaps AI could have been invented in 1400 AD under a radically different historical trajectory, and by now we might all be virtual.
On another note, all wtitten from memory, not an archeologist but I assisted the team that worked on the computational reconstruction of the Thera frescoes, which are now on display. The dedication of the Greek archaeological team was legendary in its own right.
From what I've understood [0], Atlantis was never meant to be a myth, it's only a fictional alternative version of Athen that Plato conjured up as a political allegory. It's like Batman's Gotham City, it only serves to evoke New York / Chicago.
Though to be fair the concept of a powerful city lost to time is something that resonates a lot, and there's multiple similar myth like the isle of Ys, the lost continent of Lemuria, or in the arabic folklore 'Iram of the pillar', often called 'Atlantis of the sand'.
What Plato describes perfectly fits a volcanic island, including the central pillar of rock that some volcanoes have as a volcanic plug, thermal springs and the ring of water inside the caldera.
And the way Atlantis supposedly ended also fits what happens on volcanic islands.
Nobody at the time could fabricate it out of his own imagination. The description is too accurate.
What Plato described was an invention he created for a philosophical parable, it wasn't intended as history and treating it as such would be akin treating Batman comics as history. The imagined and fictional island was also beyond the Pillars of Heracles which means it was in the Atlantic, not in the Mediterranean.
Indoor plumbing is very ancient. Many ancient civilizations had it, although generally only for the rich, temples, or government buildings. The Indus Valley and ancient Egypt developed it 4,500 years ago (2500 BCE). (Greek) Minoan Crete followed around 3,700 years ago (1700 BCE).
Minoan fresco is so unique. They were truly a civilization unto themselves. I wonder how much they had in common with the rest of "Old Europe" (pre-Indo European farmers)
There are some claims of deciphering some parts of the Linear A Minoan documents, which are not corroborated yet by other researchers, but which are nonetheless more plausible than all the earlier claims of deciphering Linear A, which were definitely wrong.
If this partial decipherment were right, the language of Linear A would be Hurrian, i.e. the language of a state that was important around 4 thousand years ago and which was located in the territory of present Syria.
The Hurrians from Syria also used writing, but there they had adapted a variant of the cuneiform writing. Some Hurrian texts have also been found written with the Semitic alphabet used in Ugarit. There are some features of the Hittite variant of cuneiform writing that seem to have been taken from their Southern neighbors, the Hurrians, so it is possible that the Hittites have learned writing from the Hurrians, who had been using cuneiform writing for a few centuries before the Hittites, instead of taking writing directly from Assyria. This would be similar to how the Greek users of Linear B have taken writing from the Minoan users of Linear A.
It seems that the Hurrians had a rich mythology, which influenced many of their neighbors, and a few of their myths have been preserved, inclusively in the Hittite archives.
There exists no certain relationship between Hurrian and any language that survives today. In the antiquity there was a related language spoken in Urartu, on the territory of present Armenia. There are however a few similarities between Hurrian and some of the languages of the Caucasus area, but due to the difference in time of many thousands of years it cannot be known whether there is any genetic connection between them.
So if the claims about a decipherment of Linear A were true, that would imply that the Minoans have colonized Crete, and probably also Cyprus, by coming from the nearby territory where today is Syria. This sounds plausible, and that territory is one that had become "civilized" before the more Northern territories of Anatolia and Greece.
They are magnificent! I'd guess their civilization was influenced by the Ancient Near East as well as Old Europe. Hybrid creatures, women flanked by big cats, priestly figures holding serpents, all Minoan iconography with corrolaries in Egypy and the Levant. How I wish we had their myths, their histories.
What a coincidence that I visited the Akrotiri ruins only a few weeks ago. It was truly remarkable. Unlike Pompeii, the people of ancient Thera appear to have been familiar enough with volcanoes to know to evacuate well ahead of the eruption. No remains of valuables, pets, or humans have been discovered at the site. Still, much about the life and culture of these people is able to be learned from their architecture, visual culture, and more. The remains of Linear A tablets and frescos have strongly associated it with Minoan civilization (though the guide we had at the site was careful to not to simply call the people “Minoans”).
The museum of prehistoric Thera is also worth a visit if you make it there! It is fairly small but contains some incredibly well-preserved artifacts. The frescoes are stunning.
I found Fira (nearby "large" town on Santorini, very close to the sites) miserably crowded, but seeing Thera was very cool. This is all about 1500 years older than Pompeii, so a very different experience IMO.
Everyone goes for the blue domes.
The real historic sites can be seen via
The weirdest thing about this island is that everything is built on a caldera rim, much higher than sea level. Extremely unusual for an island.https://ashishb.net/travel/greece/santorini/
> The weirdest thing about this island is that everything is built on a caldera rim, much higher than sea level. Extremely unusual for an island.
Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island. This was for defense reasons against pirates and other potential attackers.
The famous villages on the rim (like Oia) were the houses of Greek sea captains. The donkeys still there today would have been hired then to carry their wares and treasures up the staircases from the ports when they returned home from sea.
There is an older Chora with a street maze also, but more in the middle of the island, in a much more defensible position.
> Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island.
Well, others are mostly at sea level, with only some high points. Thira has very little land at sea level.
True, it's rare to have that little low-lying land even on Greek islands. But the seaside towns are regardless a modern addition to the other islands, barring the biggest fortified ones. Too vulnerable.
In case you're thinking of going, note the excavated surface of Akrotiri is about 40 times smaller than what's visible at Pompeii.
No relation of the British territory on the south of the island of Cyprus, for anyone else who wondered.
As Wikipedia says:
> Akrotiri (Greek: Ακρωτήρι, pronounced Greek: [akroˈtiri]) means "cape, promontory". As a result, many different seaside places bear this name.
It's a little sad and funny to think that if the people of Akrotiri hadn't escaped with their possessions then we'd know a lot more about them.
There is a truly unbelievable beauty and rich history hidden underneath the touristy views of Santorini cluttering your social media feeds every summer.
This is absolutely an amazing article. There was one thing in particular that stood out to me and was a bit shocking though. Look how much greener the island was in 2000 than it is today. Unreal and sad how much the changes caused by humans on the climate impact the health and vitality of our planet.
They had no defensive walls, at least not in the way we might expect, and no coinage. Still, they managed to maintain extensive trade networks, with connections reaching as far as Central Asia, and materials such as lapis lazuli ultimately originating in what is now Afghanistan.
The Aegean Sea around 1600 BC was probably far busier than we tend to imagine, with substantial maritime trade connecting islands, coastal settlements, and distant civilizations. Without compasses, sailors relied on landmarks, celestial navigation, experience, and routes that often took them from island to island. Minoan settlements across the Aegean may have helped secure maritime routes and provided a degree of protection to Crete itself. This could partly explain why major Minoan palaces lacked the defensive fortifications common elsewhere. There is also another issue, one that receives less attention in popular accounts, despite having affected several Eastern Mediterranean societies of the period.
The eruption of Thera was approaching, and there is archaeological evidence suggesting that at least some inhabitants had time to leave before the final catastrophic event. The absence of human remains in the excavated areas of Akrotiri is particularly striking, although it does not establish that the entire island was successfully evacuated. Some evidence also suggests limited human activity or resettlement in the broader area after the eruption.
The Minoans were not immediately destroyed by the eruption. Its impact on their fleets, ports, and trading networks remains debated, but the disruption may have weakened their maritime position. Over the following centuries, several major Minoan palaces were destroyed, in circumstances that likely involved a combination of natural disasters, conflict, and political change. Some destruction layers suggest deliberate burning, although the precise events and motivations remain uncertain. At one palace, evidence of exceptionally intense fire has prompted interpretations involving stored combustible materials and restricted ventilation, potentially producing furnace-like temperatures. The exact mechanism, however, is not firmly established.
The changing balance of power in the Aegean eventually favored the Mycenaeans, who came to dominate much of the region. Centuries later, the wider Eastern Mediterranean experienced another series of upheavals, conventionally associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse and the groups described in Egyptian records as the Sea Peoples. These events were separated by considerable time, and their causes were probably more complex than a single chain of disasters or conquests.
And that is perhaps the more important story of what was lost. Long-distance trade networks were disrupted or reorganized. In parts of the Aegean, palace administration disappeared, along with the use of Linear B writing. Monumental construction and certain specialized techniques declined or changed, although this did not mean that mathematical or architectural knowledge vanished everywhere. Earlier artifacts such as the Phaistos Disc, with its repeated stamped symbols, remind us that these societies had developed sophisticated techniques whose full significance we still do not understand.
Some regions also experienced declining use of wheeled transport, possibly reflecting changes in infrastructure, terrain, economics, and social organization rather than a literal forgetting of the wheel. Population losses, displacement, and settlement abandonment were substantial in some areas, but their scale varied across the Eastern Mediterranean.
By around the eighth century BC, alphabetic writing had become established in Greece, following centuries without the earlier palace-based writing system. Settlement patterns had changed, and some communities had moved to more defensible locations. Memories of earlier events may have survived through oral traditions and legends, although connecting individual myths to particular historical disasters is inherently speculative.
That centuries-long disruption in technology, trade, and social organization may have had consequences extending far beyond its immediate aftermath. Technological progress is not necessarily linear, and the loss of complex networks can affect development for generations. The cumulative effect is difficult to measure, but potentially enormous.
To make a very broad and deliberately speculative analogy, perhaps AI could have been invented in 1400 AD under a radically different historical trajectory, and by now we might all be virtual.
On another note, all wtitten from memory, not an archeologist but I assisted the team that worked on the computational reconstruction of the Thera frescoes, which are now on display. The dedication of the Greek archaeological team was legendary in its own right.
This is likely the inspiration for the myth of Atlantis.
From what I've understood [0], Atlantis was never meant to be a myth, it's only a fictional alternative version of Athen that Plato conjured up as a political allegory. It's like Batman's Gotham City, it only serves to evoke New York / Chicago.
Though to be fair the concept of a powerful city lost to time is something that resonates a lot, and there's multiple similar myth like the isle of Ys, the lost continent of Lemuria, or in the arabic folklore 'Iram of the pillar', often called 'Atlantis of the sand'.
[0] There was an episode on it in the excellent podcast 'In Our Time' by the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c6t3)
What Plato describes perfectly fits a volcanic island, including the central pillar of rock that some volcanoes have as a volcanic plug, thermal springs and the ring of water inside the caldera.
And the way Atlantis supposedly ended also fits what happens on volcanic islands.
Nobody at the time could fabricate it out of his own imagination. The description is too accurate.
What Plato described was an invention he created for a philosophical parable, it wasn't intended as history and treating it as such would be akin treating Batman comics as history. The imagined and fictional island was also beyond the Pillars of Heracles which means it was in the Atlantic, not in the Mediterranean.
As well as the mighty, powerful, technologically advanced empire run by.. Santorini?
They had indoor plumbing!
Indoor plumbing is very ancient. Many ancient civilizations had it, although generally only for the rich, temples, or government buildings. The Indus Valley and ancient Egypt developed it 4,500 years ago (2500 BCE). (Greek) Minoan Crete followed around 3,700 years ago (1700 BCE).
A bunch more photos if you click the wikimedia link in the article: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Xeste_3_of_archa...
Minoan fresco is so unique. They were truly a civilization unto themselves. I wonder how much they had in common with the rest of "Old Europe" (pre-Indo European farmers)
There are some claims of deciphering some parts of the Linear A Minoan documents, which are not corroborated yet by other researchers, but which are nonetheless more plausible than all the earlier claims of deciphering Linear A, which were definitely wrong.
If this partial decipherment were right, the language of Linear A would be Hurrian, i.e. the language of a state that was important around 4 thousand years ago and which was located in the territory of present Syria.
The Hurrians from Syria also used writing, but there they had adapted a variant of the cuneiform writing. Some Hurrian texts have also been found written with the Semitic alphabet used in Ugarit. There are some features of the Hittite variant of cuneiform writing that seem to have been taken from their Southern neighbors, the Hurrians, so it is possible that the Hittites have learned writing from the Hurrians, who had been using cuneiform writing for a few centuries before the Hittites, instead of taking writing directly from Assyria. This would be similar to how the Greek users of Linear B have taken writing from the Minoan users of Linear A.
It seems that the Hurrians had a rich mythology, which influenced many of their neighbors, and a few of their myths have been preserved, inclusively in the Hittite archives.
There exists no certain relationship between Hurrian and any language that survives today. In the antiquity there was a related language spoken in Urartu, on the territory of present Armenia. There are however a few similarities between Hurrian and some of the languages of the Caucasus area, but due to the difference in time of many thousands of years it cannot be known whether there is any genetic connection between them.
So if the claims about a decipherment of Linear A were true, that would imply that the Minoans have colonized Crete, and probably also Cyprus, by coming from the nearby territory where today is Syria. This sounds plausible, and that territory is one that had become "civilized" before the more Northern territories of Anatolia and Greece.
They are magnificent! I'd guess their civilization was influenced by the Ancient Near East as well as Old Europe. Hybrid creatures, women flanked by big cats, priestly figures holding serpents, all Minoan iconography with corrolaries in Egypy and the Levant. How I wish we had their myths, their histories.
There was definitely trade & cultural exchange between the Minoans and Egypt. How much there was is not clear, but there definitely was some.