The Fall of Crete

   From the 30th to the 16th century BC, a great civilization developed on the Aegean island of Crete. With centers of culture and power in such palatial cities as Knossos, Mallia, and Phaistos, the ancient race was one of skilled seafarers and artisans, an oceangoing people that dominated the Mediterranean for centuries. Then, inexplicably, all of Crete's towns and palaces were destroyed, and the society collapsed, abandoning its former influence and turning away from the sea. Because archaeologists have found echoes of Greek myth in the artifacts and ruins left from that vanished world, they have called it Minoan, after Minos, the legendary Cretan king— and mortal son of the god Zeus—whose palace held the labyrinth and the half bull, half man called the Minotaur. Historians speculate that the Minoans first arrived in Crete about 7000 BC, presumably from Asia Minor. By 1700 BC, the island's population was an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people, one of the largest in the world at that time. Expert sea­farers and boat builders, the Mi­noans built sturdy keeled craft that could travel several hundred miles in a few days—this at a time when the Egyptians were using rudimentary troughlike vessels for simple river navigation. Its maritime supremacy so eclipsed that of other cultures that Crete was virtually immune from invasion; the secure Minoans did not even bother to fortify their palaces.

   Still, their doom appears to have come from the sea. Around 1500 BC, all of Crete's towns and palaces were ravaged by fire; Minoan civilization was left in ruins. Some scholars originally believed that the great earthquakes of Crete caused the Minoan demise. Others placed the cause with civil unrest or invasion by the warlike Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland. Indeed, there is evidence that after 1500 BC, the Myce­naeans did occupy what was left of the city of Knossos.

   But another group of archaeologists holds that the Minean destruction came from a distance. About seventy miles north of Crete is a rugged crescent called Santorin, after Saint Irene. With four smaller isles, Santorin describes a shattered ring of rocky outcroppings rising from the sea. Four thousand years ago, these were part of the cone of a great volcano called Thera, with villages settled along its hard flanks until, near the year 1500 BC, Thera literally blew itself apart. Destructive waves called tsunamis struck Crete's coast within half an hour of the eruption; walls of water hundreds of feet high swept well inland, ripping away everything in their path. The fires that destroyed Cretan towns rained down from the sky, along with millions of tons of ash that blotted out the sun and suffocated farms and villages. Its store of lava temporarily exhausted, the volcano caved in upon itself, leaving no trace beyond the islands that still mark its broken rim.

Crete - Knossos