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 – into the depths of the sea.
In Crete the human casualties, the destruction of houses and temples and, above all, the total annihilation of the shipping on which the island’s prosperity relied must have been crippling. After the volcano came days, possibly weeks of toxic gas and lethal ash falling thick upon the ground, suffocating people and plants and poisoning the water supplies. The catastrophe appeared to be coming from the very skies the Minoans had studied for so long. They must have thought the gods had abandoned them. There may still have been plenty of people left alive. But the towering wall of water – and the smothering ash – had destroyed everything of the Cretan harvest’s famous bounty.
Then came famine.
A telephone call. Would I be interviewed by Greek national TV about the new book I was thinking of doing? It was a great excuse to get away. Marcella and I decided, as we had done on a previous Christmas, to revive morale with a special trip.
We drove to Venice and from there we boarded a magnificent car ferry, which at noon sails splendidly past St Mark’s Square and into the Adriatic, en route to Greece. Forty-three years ago we sailed this same route, sleeping on the upper deck. Now, in old age, we can afford a cabin. As night falls we dine on rabbit cooked in white wine, gazing at the gathering darkness over a calm sea.
Six hundred years ago it was Venice that controlled the seaways of the Mediterranean. Her fleets were based at the (Croatian) island of Hvar in summer and further south at Corfu in winter. Pirates were ruthlessly crushed, free trade made safe. Three thousand years earlier, the Minoan fleets had performed the same role.
Marcella and I were sailing in the wake of history.
Once Minoan control of the seas collapsed, the pirates that King Minos had suppressed would have had free rein. The Adriatic is peppered with hundreds of small islands, perfect for camouflage and shelter. There are many more such in the Aegean.
The Minoans’ extraordinary trade network did not immediately waste into nothing. For two hundred years or so, from around 1400 to 1200 BC, it seems that Mycenae took over the controlling role of the seas. The great city-state also assumed power over Crete. We don’t know for certain whether this was the action of an ally helpfully stepping in to fill a power vacuum, or whether this was a hostile takeover by an aggressive force. When Mycenae’s influence eventually waned, the era of safe seas ended – and so did the glories of an age.
Quite suddenly, between 1225 and 1175 BC, the Bronze Age ended in the eastern Mediterranean. So did the voyages to northern Europe and the Americas. The Keweenaw and Isle Royale mines on and around Lake Superior stopped production at least as early as 1200 BC. English tin mining stopped at the same time, as did work at the Great Orme copper mine. Bronze Age settlements in La Mancha, southeast Spain, were all abandoned too.
Many reasons have been advanced for the sudden collapse of the Bronze Age – a crisis in civilisation that some have put down to comets, climate change, earthquakes, sunspots, or plagues. A great disaster had befallen the sophisticated world of the eastern Mediterranean. Some scholars call it simply ‘the Catastrophe’.
Most scholars now agree that the Catastrophe was caused by a mysterious new military force. They were a people who left few traces behind them, save fifty years’-worth of widespread destruction. Their ferocious armies fought with new-fangled weapons such as javelins and wore defensive armour such as greaves and corselets. Their small, round shields suggest that they may have evolved radical new battle techniques, using infantry soldiers to great effect. The Egyptians called them ‘the Sea Peoples’: to this day no one knows who they were, or where they came from.
Between 1225 and 1175 BC the raiders overran the great civil-isations of Crete, Mycenae, Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia. Many of the cities and fortified palaces along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, from proud Mycenae through Troy to the ancient Anatolian kingdoms of Kode and Hatti, were sacked. The Sea Peoples swept through the Amorite city-state of Emar and the city of Ugarit – both were in what is today known as Syria – and may even have reached as far inland as Hazor, north of the Sea of Galilee. As Robert Drews writes:
The catastrophe peaked in the 1180s BC and ended about 1179 BC, during the reign of Ramesses III in Egypt, virtually the last of the great Pharaohs. The regimes in the region had been stable, palace-centred, wealthy and relatively peaceful. What followed, at least in Greece, was a Dark Age.3
Two hundred and fifty years after the Minoan civilisation on Crete had collapsed, the Hittite and Mycenaean empires fell. All in all, forty-four cities were lost to the Sea Peoples – until finally Ramesses III managed to defeat the marauders. Lower Mesopotamia and Egypt escaped the wholesale destruction. Yet both were fatally weakened, and a two-decade famine in Egypt all but destroyed that remarkable empire.
The explosion on Thera was the first mortal wound to the Bronze Age cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Then the Sea Peoples came along and delivered the coup de grâce. The very thought depressed me. What would have happened to the world had its first great sea power, the ancient Mediterranean’s brightest jewel, not been destroyed?
CHAPTER 40
A RETURN TO CRETE
I had to keep my appointment with Greek national television. The interview itself passed off without incident. Following me in the studio discussion, although I didn’t know it, was a charming and unassuming man from Crete. I have relied on his inspired research more than once: his name cropped up when discussing Minoan mathematics (chapter 32). Dr Minas Tsikritsis was on the programme to talk about his ground-breaking research into Linear A, one of the world’s greatest linguistic conundrums.
The next day, Marcella checked our emails. ‘You’ve got a new message. From a Dr Minas Tsikritsis.’ Marcella and I were still treating our stay in Athens as a bit of a vacation, but holidays were soon to be off the agenda. I looked at the message, first curiously, then in shock.
Dr Tsikritsis had been studying my old friend, the Phaestos Disc. Not only that, but he felt that we would have a lot to talk about in terms of Minoan astronomy. Apologising for his use of English, the professor said he wanted to talk to me about his specially written computer programme. It had helped him to decipher some key aspects of Linear A – would I like to know more?
Dr Tsikritsis was excited. But not as excited as me. I read on. His new translation of Linear A, he said, allowed him to identify Minoan text and inscriptions wherever they could be found. He had identified inscriptions in Linear A written on ancient stone markers found by explorers in hundreds of different locations, which proved that the Minoans had visited India, the Baltic, northern Europe and Greenland.
Many of the ancient Minoan writings he’d decrypted tallied with the archaeologists’ current view, that the entire Aegean had been under Minoan sway. The empire was, in effect, a confederacy of twenty-two cities. But, he said, that was not all: the Linear A evidence had convinced him that the Minoans had founded further colonies, in (here I copy his email direct):
1. Sicily
2. Syria, Palestine
3. The Bosphorus
4. Bavaria and Baltic Sea. [They travel for obtaining amber.]
5. Greenland for obtaining pewter [tin and lead]
6. Nordisland
7. India (a colony called ‘Asteroysia’)
8. Arabian Gulf. [There are findings of writing in caves in a Minoan colony in Paghaia Island.]
‘I have evidence (photos, bibliographic references in Greek literature) for the above findings.’
His research matched my own findings – despite being arrived at through an entirely different process. Giddily, I did a quick calculation. With nine locations involved, the chance of this being a coincidence was factorial 9,360,000 to one.
Lovely though Athens was, this lead was more important. Marcella and I hurried to get back to Crete. This time, we were hea
ded for the very centre of the island, atop a precipitous hill at Skalani, outside the lovely restored village of Archanes.
Dr Tsikritsis, his wife Chryssoula and his son Dimitris greeted us with the kind, warm hospitality that Cretans are famed for. He is a thoughtful man with strong features and even stronger opinions.
The family took us into the garden and showed us their organic olive trees, their wood oven and the tomatoes growing underneath the vines; an organic way of keeping the pests away. Tsikritsis gave me a bottle of his lemon-infused home-pressed olive oil, made to a traditional recipe that his father, also an ancient history enthusiast, had rediscovered and handed down to him.
‘You are the only one to count the oars,’ he said to me, rather unexpectedly, referring to the Thera frescoes. ‘This is twenty-eight oars each side, a big, big ship . . .’.
Then we entered a light, airy drawing room, built on two levels. In one corner was Dr Tsikritsis’ study, a small, book-lined cubby hole with a telescope and a traditional Cretan wooden trestle stool. We hunkered down for a long talk.
As he began to explain his methods – with Chryssoula and Dimitris occasionally translating – it became clear to me that this was Dr Tsikritsis’ life’s work. He initially learned ancient Greek from his father, an expert in ancient scripts. Later, he developed his own specialist skills with degrees in mathematics and physics. He also has a master’s degree in the methodology of religion and a doctorate in content analysis from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Few linguistic experts have a similarly broad skill base. For twenty years Dr Tsikritsis had devoted every moment of his spare time to understanding Minoan culture and deciphering Linear A.
Tsikritsis explained that to help him break the hieroglyphic code behind Linear A, he’d used the technique of consonantal comparison. It was crucial that he was already familiar with ancient Greek, Cypro-Minoan and the Mycenaean script Linear B, as well as with Cretan hieroglyphs. However, it was his more modern skills – in computing and mathematics – that had made the crucial difference. The breakthroughs started to happen when he tried statistical cryptographic techniques. He used many different Minoan texts as the basis for the work. Unfortunately for scholars, to translate a language with absolute statistical certainty you need at least fifty-six symbols. The Phaestos Disc has only forty-eight. He has been busily finding other tablets and artefacts to help him go further with the translation and it’s this breadth of knowledge that seems to have been key. He told me what had inspired him.
‘I think my first inspiration was when looking at a spiral design on a ring. The Minoans used spiral designs all the time, just as on the Phaestos Disc. This ring, I suddenly realised, could be read backwards, as well as forwards.
‘. . . Another breakthrough was realising that there were fifteen symbols that were identical to Linear B.
‘. . . Then I realised that a symbol’s meaning could be changed by the word you put it next to.’
This was where the contextual analysis came in.
This is all complex stuff, but as Dr Tsikritsis showed me chart after chart of comparisons I saw it all unfold as a rational system: a beautiful, flowing language. It was simply astounding, the amount of evidence: again and again, on tablets and discs several millennia old, Dr Tsikritsis’ systematic solution to the ancient mystery of Linear A seemed rational, consistent and clear.
His translations, time and again, involve that most magical substance: bronze. The Minoans accorded the alloy a special significance; almost a reverence. The translations show the Minoan society’s huge prosperity and document the vast amounts of grain, pottery, olive oil and other goods that they shipped across the world. Dr Tsikritsis has even unearthed documents that show that this extraordinary society distributed food and goods to each according to their need. He also showed me the photographs of the ancient inscriptions he had mentioned in his email, which he would identify as being written in Minoan Linear A. They are found from Norway to the Arabian Gulf.
One of his most astounding discoveries is about the Minoans’ in-depth understanding of mathematics, which helped them develop their knowledge of the stars.
‘In mathematics it’s always thought that the Babylonians and the Egyptians were far more advanced than the Minoans,’ he said. ‘But in 1965, Mario Pope found something unique – a proper fraction. It was written on a wall in Hagia Triada.’
Hagia Triada, just 2.5 miles (4 kilometres) west of Phaestos, was a town with a royal villa at its centre. The inscription, which reads shows each number progressing by one and a half times the previous one. The calculation may have been drawn casually upon the wall for working out interest payments. What’s striking, said Dr Tsikritsis, is that we know that the Egyptians also studied mathematical progression. They, on the other hand, only used integers. This formula was mathematically far more sophisticated.
Once he first began to suspect that the Minoans’ grasp of mathematics was as inventive as that of the Babylonians, Dr Tsikritsis made it his business to discover other formulae that the Minoans had left behind. He discovered that they could count; in tens of thousands if they needed to. They could add, divide and subtract. What was interesting was their need for large numbers: the large amounts of goods and grain they were trading demanded that they developed this skill.
Showing me many diagrams, he convinced me that the Minoan use of geometry was unrivalled. For instance, to construct their signature spiral designs, they had to understand the use of tangents and cosines. It is Archimedes who is famed for defining the spiral in On Spirals; yet Archimedes’ account didn’t emerge until around 225 BC.
One of Dr Tsikritsis’ more electrifying ideas could be really highly controversial. He is convinced that almost every single Minoan ceremonial object or building conforms to the ‘golden mean’ of [H9272], or ‘Phi’. One of the most talked about, disputed and revered aspects of practical mathematics used in the arts and architecture, Phi is also known as ‘The Golden Section,’ or ‘The Golden Ratio’.
This is a most significant claim. You can express Phi, the golden ratio of divine proportion, through this equation:
Dr Tsikritsis has found this specific proportion of 1.61 in literally hundreds of Minoan objects and buildings he has measured and he does not think this can possibly be a coincidence. Today the Greeks usually attribute the discovery of Phi to Pythagoras, who lived c. 570–495 BC.
One ancient Minoan object in particular illustrates his point about Phi and the art of proportion, on two levels. It is an exquisite stone vase, found at the lesser-known palace of Zakros, that has what appear to be mysterious fire scorch marks on it. The Heraklion Museum dates it to 1500–1450 BC, although Professor Tsikritsis believes it may be older.
It is a libation vase, also known as a rhyton, which was used for ceremonial drinking. On it, you can see a design – a shrine or a temple, shown in a mountain landscape. Now brown with age and smoke, this precious thing was originally much prized. It is decorated with gold leaf. Both the proportions of the vase itself and the design inscribed on it conform to ‘the golden ratio’. Draw a rectangle over the vase as a whole or the image of the shrine and then measure it: you will find that the proportions conform to Phi, says Dr Tsikritsis. In other words, both the form of the vase itself and the imagery upon it are composed using a mathematical ratio that we have always attributed to the ancient Greeks – and not to the Minoans. These are the very proportions that Iktinos and Kallikrates later used to build that greatest of world temples, the Parthenon, creating an unrivalled sense of harmony and serenity. ‘This,’ Dr Tsikritsis said, warming to his theme, ‘is all about beauty.’
All of his studies show that the Minoans believed that Phi’s beauty and harmony was sanctified. A vase constructed according to the Golden Mean would, they believed, be holy. Its very perfection would purify the water: a bit like the idea of Feng Shui today.
But it was when it came to describing the Minoans’ love of the stars that these new revelati
ons really came alive for me. Here I felt I knew these fascinating people. Dr Tsikritsis’ theory is that for the Minoans the constellations were not merely stars. They felt they were gods, who lived and moved in the sky. Not only that, but, much like the Chinese believed until very recently, the ancient Minoans were convinced that their ancestors had joined those gods in the skies. They had become celestial bodies.
One of the absolute masterpieces of Minoan gold work, the Isopata ring, illustrates Dr Tsikritsis’ ideas perfectly. The entire ring is only 2 centimetres (three-quarters of an inch) across and the skill it must have taken to cut it is extraordinary. It was found in a tomb at Isopata, near Knossos. (See second colour plate section.)
Four women seem to be enjoying an ecstatic ritual dance; their heads, though, are not human. They have the nodding heads of wheat or corn. In the background you can see the symbols of an eye and a snake. A smaller figure drifts downwards into the picture, as if she is from far away: she may be a goddess descending from the heavens. Dr Tsikritsis’ theory is that the snake, which pops up time and again from object to object, is a Minoan symbol for the constellation of the Corona Borealis. In English, we call it the Blaze Star, but it is also known as the ‘Northern Crown’. The crown, he believes, was given to King Minos’ daughter Ariadne at her wedding . . . the Corona is Ariadne, forever guiding her people out of the maze.
This ring, Dr Tsikritsis believes, is a type of sacred calendar. It shows a way of counting down towards the rainy season, using the position of the stars . . . and the symbolic know-how of Ariadne. The stars didn’t just guide the Minoans and inform them about the changing seasons – the Minoans thought that their ancestors were now their guiding stars: celestial bodies.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 30
