Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 25

Do Schliemann’s discoveries tell us every “lost” civilization was for real? No. I don’t think it means scientists or explorers will someday find the sunken nation of Atlantis. Oops. I shouldn’t have mentioned Atlantis. There isn’t room in this book to delve into even a small fraction of the theories and fantasies about where and what was Atlantis — if anything like it ever existed.

The story describes a land of peace and plenty, destroyed in an overnight cataclysm. It traces back to the writings of Greek philosopher Plato (about 428–347 BC), who used Atlantis to make a point about social order and good government. But Plato’s descriptions leave room for interpretation, and people have interpreted wildly for thousands of years.

Plato described Atlantis as in the Atlantic Ocean, just past Gibraltar on your way out of the Mediterranean Sea, but geology seems to dictate that it couldn’t have been there. Dueling historians, archaeologists, mystics, and self-appointed prophets have argued vociferously over an alternate site, putting the lost continent everywhere from Britain to Bermuda to Bolivia, from Colorado to the China Sea. One theory claims it was on another planet. Sci-fi movies, comics, and graphic novels depict Atlantis thriving in a giant plexiglass bubble on the ocean floor. Virtually every theory has to make allowances for Plato, who got the story of Atlantis indirectly from the Athenian statesman Solon, who supposedly got it from scholar–priests during a visit to Egypt in about 590 BC. Because Plato wrote his version almost two centuries later, in about 360 BC, details surely changed along the way.

One of the least outrageous theories is that the story of Atlantis is based on the volcanic disaster that destroyed Santorini, an island in the Mediterranean. Archaeologists and geologists have studied the way the Santorini cataclysm caused a monstrous tsunami, followed by sky-darkening ashfall.

Santorini (also known as Thera) lies about 45 miles north of the Greek island of Crete, which was the center of the Minoan culture. Minoan ruins are plentiful on what’s left of Santorini, but they’re only a small remnant of what was on the island until about 1600 BC, when the 5,000-foot volcano in its middle exploded and collapsed into the sea. Ever since, the island has been a crescent surrounding a volcanic-crater lagoon. The volcanic eruptions continued for 30 years, building up to a devastating climax: an enormous tidal wave that knocked down buildings on islands throughout the region.

The tsunami decimated the population, and the subsequent rain of volcanic ash probably finished off the Minoan civilization. Nobody knows for sure whether the sinking of Santorini had anything to do with launching a lasting legend of a capsized civilization, but news of such a catastrophic event surely spread around the Mediterranean and in time could have become legend.