Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (24 page)

Within a few hours, a cloud of ash some eight kilometres high, containing billions of tons of volcanic material, had rolled 800 kilometres east. In three states – Washington, Idaho and Montana – the massive volcanic cloud covered the sky and day was turned to night. Throughout the whole area ash fell like rain, clogging motor engines, halting trains and blocking roads. Seven million hectares of lush farmland now looked like a grey desert, and millions of dollars'-worth of crops were flattened and destroyed. Hundreds of people, as far away as Billings in Montana (950 kilometres from the volcano), were taken to hospital with eye sores and skin rashes caused by exposure to the acidic fallout ash. For weeks afterwards, fishes in thousands of kilometres of rivers were found floating on the surface, killed by chemical pollutants in the water.

Mount St Helens was one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in recent years, yet compared with the explosion of
Thera it was tiny. When Ninkovich and Heezen published their findings regarding the Thera explosion, they used the Krakatau eruption of 1883 as a comparison. In August 1883, Krakatau, a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, exploded with a force twenty times that of Mount St Helens. The eruption was heard over 4,800 kilometres away in Australia, a volcanic cloud rose eighty kilometres into the air, fallout ash covered thousands of square kilometres, and the resultant tidal wave reached a height of thirty metres. Over 36,000 people perished!

The first signs of trouble began in May: firstly a series of earthquakes, followed by a succession of minor eruptions. On 26 August the volcano exploded. Forty kilometres away, at Katimbang on the Sumatran coast, 3,000 people who had been evacuated from Krakatau thought they were safe. Over a thousand of them died, and as many more were seriously injured, as suffocating ash and flaming cinders descended around them, setting fire to buildings and trees. People fled in all directions as thunder and lightning raged above, the result of the tremendous turbulence inside the deadly fallout cloud. A series of further explosions continued on Krakatau for two days, creating gigantic
tsunami
– tidal waves – over thirty metres high which swept away 165 villages on the Sumatran coast. The cloud of ash covered thousands of square kilometres, and over 3,000 kilometres away in the Indian Ocean ships' decks were covered with ash and pumice. Krakatau continued to belch forth ash for days and for almost a week there was no daylight up to 800 kilometres down wind.

It has been estimated by the size of the resultant crater that 19 cubic kilometres of volcanic material blasted skywards from Krakatau – yet Thera's crater is six times bigger. Accordingly, the explosion would have been heard halfway round the world,
volcanic debris would have been hurled over 100 kilometres high, and the ash fallout would have covered well over a million square kilometres. However, the most devastating phenomenon would have been massive tidal waves which thrashed the eastern Mediterranean.

The last nuclear weapon mankind used in warfare was the atom bomb that totally destroyed half the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945. It was a 20-kiloton explosion (the equivalent of 20,000 tons of conventional explosives). Mount St Helens exploded with a far greater force of 50,000 kilotons; Krakatau reached an incredible 1,000,000 kilotons; yet Thera dwarfs them all with a staggering 6,000,000 kilotons. 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. Much of the estimated 114 cubic kilometres of debris ejected skywards would have fallen to earth, although smaller particles would remain in the atmosphere for years. The green sunsets caused by Mount St Helens would be nothing compared to the bizarre observations made by the ancients for months, even years, after the Thera eruption. (A year after Krakatau, the sun was seen to be blue all day long in some parts of the world.) Is this what had prompted the strange behaviour of Amonhotep III, Akhenaten and the Egyptian people in the mid-fourteenth century
BC
?

Actually, the Thera eruption may have had a direct, and far more dramatic, affect on the ancient Egyptians. It was such a enormous eruption that it seems to have decimated an entire civilization: the Minoans. The first evidence of this came to light in 1901, when the Boston archaeologist Harriet Boyd excavated Minoan remains at Gournia on the island of Crete. Crete had been the centre of the Minoan seafaring empire, and Gournia had been a thriving community in the late Minoan era. Ms Boyd
was shocked by what she found: everywhere there was evidence that the last Minoans to have lived in the town had suddenly dropped everything and fled. Personal belongings and workmen's tools were found abandoned and cooking hearths still had their utensils in place as if in preparation for a meal. The cause of the panic was clear – a layer of charcoal revealed that the town had been razed by fire.

Gournia was not the only late Minoan community to suffer the same fate. In 1906, another American archaeologist, Richard Seager, excavated the Minoan port on the island of Mochlos, a couple of kilometres off the coast of Crete. He discovered that this community had also come to a sudden and violent end in the late Minoan period. As at Gournia, tools and other personal effects had been abandoned when fire swept the town. Here, however, the occupants seem to have been overwhelmed more quickly, as the charred remains of townsfolk had been found among the ruins.

Over the following decades many more Minoan sites discovered in eastern Crete revealed an almost identical picture of sudden catastrophe. For some time it was thought that the Minoan civilization had been overwhelmed by foreign invaders, who had sacked and plundered its cities: possibly the Greek Mycenaeans who had later established their own power base on Crete. However, in the 1920s, when the Greek archaeologist Stephanos Xanthoudidis uncovered the once magnificent villa of Nirou Khani, the invasion theory was discounted. Like the other sites, it had been destroyed by fire. However, at the time disaster struck it was crammed with valuable objects, such as jewellery and expensive ceramic ware, some of which had escaped the fire and lay exactly were they were left. Surely, if marauders had sacked the villa they would not have left such valuable items behind. Most indicative of all were the bronze battleaxes which had been left in the armoury, stacked neatly against the wall. The guards had clearly not attempted to repel a human foe.

The picture was rapidly emerging of a number of Minoan towns having been razed, simultaneously, by some type of natural disaster, and in the 1930s the respected Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos found evidence for what that might have been. Excavating the site of Amnisos, once the harbour town for the capital at Knossos, he uncovered a villa whose walls had been bulged outward in a curious way. Large upright stones seemed to have been prised out of position as if by some huge external force, suggesting that they had been hit by the backwash of an enormous tidal wave. It seemed that the harbour town had been drowned by a towering wall of water, evidently the result of some tremendous seismic event.

In the 1960s another Greek archaeologist, Professor Nicholas Platon, discovered the remains of Crete's easternmost Minoan palace at Kato Zakro. Once more it had been destroyed by fire, and again precious objects had been left behind – elephant tusks, bronze ingots and exquisitely made vases, together with tools and cooking utensils – all hurriedly abandoned. Professor Platon noticed something else that was even stranger: 'Huge stones, some dressed, some not, had been hurled to a distance or had fallen and shattered, blocking passages and filling open spaces. Whole sections of the upper storey had been thrown down . . .'

Just like the evidence for a tidal wave at Amnisos, this was a clear indication of seismic upheaval. However, the disaster seemed to have been more than simply an earthquake. Professor Platon also noticed that many storage jars had been compressed and squeezed as if by the enormous pressure of an explosion, and the walls seemed to have fallen from their foundations in
one piece, as if toppled by some massive external force. Moreover, the ruins were full of volcanic pumice. There could be little doubt that Kato Zakro had suffered the effects of a volcanic eruption.

As Amnisos was on the north coast of Crete, then the tidal wave that pulverized the harbour must have come from the north of the island. As Thera lay only 112 kilometres north of Crete, Spyridon Marinatos was convinced that the Thera eruption had been responsible for the ancient devastation. He turned his attentions to the island of Thera, and in 1967 discovered there the remains of Akrotiri, a Minoan town that had been completely buried beneath molten lava in the same late period as the carnage on Crete. Marinatos excavated Akrotiri for seven years, until he was tragically killed by a falling wall while working on the site in 1974. He is actually buried were he fell, and his daughter Dr Nanno Marinatos continued his work.

Akrotiri must rank as one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. It had escaped total obliteration by the fact that it was shielded by the lower slopes of the surviving volcano. However, molten debris had smothered the town, burying it 36 metres below solid lava rock. It was only discovered because local quarrying uncovered some of its buildings. The archaeology was an enormous task; the pumice layer was ten times deeper than that which Vesuvius spewed over Roman Pompeii. As the pumice was removed slowly and laboriously, an entire Minoan town gradually came to light. It was if it had been frozen in time for three and a half thousand years. Three-storey buildings of sophisticated construction and beautifully paved streets reflected a people who were surprisingly affluent. Indeed, the distribution of wealth among the common people exceeded anything found in other contemporary civilizations, such as Egypt and Babylon. Each
house even had its own water closet, which a network of clay pipes connected to a communal sewage system. It would be many centuries before the ancient Greeks would match these achievements, and even then such amenities would only be available to the privileged elite. Fresco scenes actually showed daily life in Akrotiri: the mighty Minoan ships being steered into harbour, while women and children leant from balconies, happily welcoming their menfolk home.

At first, the findings at Akrotiri seemed to contradict Marinatos' theory that the Thera eruption had been responsible for the carnage on Crete. Pottery found at Akrotiri was of a slightly earlier period than that found at the other excavations. On Crete every one of the destroyed cities had pottery classified as Late Minoan 1B, which is uniquely decorated with marine life. At Akrotiri the latest pottery found was of the period immediately proceeding it – Late Minoan 1A. From examples found all around the Aegean, it is known that Late Minoan 1B designs had been fashionable for about thirty years before disaster struck the Minoan cities on Crete. Consequently, it appeared that the Thera eruption must have occurred at least this much earlier.

Ultimately, further excavations revealed that there had been a major earthquake, or series of earthquakes, on Thera which may have led to Akrotiri being abandoned some years before the actual eruption. Collapsed walls found without pumice beneath them showed that they must have fallen during violent earth tremors before the eruption occurred. As a layer of soil had had time to build up between the earthquake debris and the first layer of pumice, the city must have been empty for some years before it was smothered by the volcano.

There was additional evidence that Akrotiri had been abandoned well before the cataclysm. At Pompeii, hundreds of
people were overcome in the streets, most of them asphyxiated by searing hot ash. They still lay were they had dropped, the molten debris solidifying around them and encasing their bodies. At Akrotiri, however, no human victims of the eruption were found. Also, as the excavated houses lacked gold, silver, jewellery or anything of intrinsic value, it seems certain that the inhabitants had evacuated the city at some point between the earthquake and the eventual eruption. In 1972 Marinatos concluded that following a build-up of volcanic activity, and the resultant earthquakes, Akrotiri was abandoned. Then, some thirty years later, the massive eruption finally buried the city. Luckily for the inhabitants, it seems, by the time the volcano exploded they had long since taken to their ships and left the island.