Atlantis: The Evidence Timewatch

Athens, Greece.

It was here close on 2,500 years ago

that a tale was composed about an island civilisation

of unparalleled wealth and power

which was swallowed up by the sea.

The author was no less than Plato,

the father of Western philosophy.

And his story became the legend of Atlantis.

The idea of Atlantis has always fascinated me.

Now, you might think that, as a historian,

I'd pour scorn on the legend,

just condemn it as another fairy-tale.

Atlantis has generated feverish speculation as to whether this fabled island ever existed.

And it's spawned scores of crackpot theories about where it might be found.

But I'm certain that beneath the rubble of fantasy, are the foundations of a real story.

A thousand years before Plato lived,

a truly amazing civilisation thrived here

in the eastern Mediterranean.

But that civilisation suffered a terrible catastrophe.

Brand new scientific evidence shows us, that disaster

was at least twice as large as previously thought.

So could that tragedy be the basis for Plato's Atlantis myth?

When you say the name Atlantis, what often springs to mind

is a lost underwater city or a mythical utopia.

But actually Plato's Atlantis is neither of those things.

His was a maritime trading empire, a sort of super state that enjoyed huge success

but then became aggressive and overbearing,

and so was punished for its arrogance by the gods.

Now, because that idea is eternally fascinating to us, the notion that pride always comes before a fall,

from the moment that the Atlantis myth was set down here in Athens, it has never once left the human radar.

"Listen, then, to a tale which is though strange, but wholly true,

"for these histories tell of a mighty power.

"Atlantis.

"It had circular belts of sea and land enclosing one another alternately.

"In the sacred precincts of Poseidon, there were bulls roaming at large.

"The seaway and harbour were filled with ships and merchants coming from all quarters.

"They were of all men most renowned.

"And the wealth they possessed was so immense that the like had never been seen before.

"But at length they lost their comeliness.

"And there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them.

"And the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea, and vanished."

Atlantis is an allegory, a morality tale.

Plato wrote it as a warning to his fellow Athenians

that wealth and power lead to destruction if they are not grounded in virtue.

But Plato's description of Atlantis is so rich in specific detail that I think he picked up on stories

he'd heard, and transmitted a fantastical version of something that once existed.

But he is in the streets, he's chatting away, he's picking up ideas.

'Angie Hobbs is an expert on Plato.

'In return for a historical tour of his world,

'I want to find out what she thinks about the roots of the story.'

I've got a little treat for you.

-What are we about to see?

-We are about to see...

I've been given special access to these new city centre excavations, a time capsule from golden-age Athens.

We're walking where Plato, Aristotle, all my heroes would have walked and

chatted and argued and debated, and this is where it all began.

It's actually quite moving.

It is, it is. A bit of golden-age stone there.

I mean, that's what I love about Plato, the idea that he's out here, he's in the city,

he's using all the tricks he can, in a way, to try to encourage people to listen to his philosophy

and to be moved by it and to learn from it.

Yes, and, of course, we've got an age without media to promote your message for you.

You have to do everything yourself.

But he never loses sight of his Socratic inheritance of wanting to get out there

and really make individuals', people's lives better.

To save their lives, save their souls, as he puts it.

It could be, then, that this is just a moral fable,

that the Atlantis story is just one grand political allegory?

Well, it's a possibility. He's certainly got the vivid imagination to be able to have made it up.

He's not a historian, that's not his intention.

His intention is to use history, to use mythology

to make his own philosophical points.

How possible do you think it is that the Atlantis myth

has some kind of a root in the prehistoric past?

I think it's very likely that Plato has heard some stories of past civilisations

which have come crashing down, that he's got half-remembered bits of oral history which he weaves in.

He's concocting this fantastical brew here but he's using bits of

mythology, bits of history,

anything he wants, as part of the mix.

So I think there could be some factual historical basis for Plato's legend,

even though that's not what Plato himself is particularly interested in.

Whatever Plato's inspiration, Atlantis has captured our imagination ever since.

It's led to scores of expeditions and thousands of books.

More often than not, these quests tell us more about the power of human imagination

than about Atlantis itself.

Some of the most bizarre Atlantis theories are based on the idea

that human civilisation has extraterrestrial origins.

I tried to prove that this planet has been visited by beings from outer space several times in antiquity.

They made with our forefathers, a kind of artificial mutation.

And finally,

these wizards from outer space have gone into archaeological artefacts.

However incredible Erich Von Daniken's theory, he sold millions of books

and persuaded many that Atlantis was an extraterrestrial colony.

But Atlantis has also been used for more sinister purposes.

Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler was convinced that the so-called Aryan master race

was descended from the fabled Atlanteans,

and that the missing link could be found in one of the most unlikely places.

CYMBAL CRASHES, PIPES DRONE

Tibet.

During the Victorian age of exploration, the obsession with Atlantis even extended

to British prime ministers.

William Gladstone wrote a letter to an American congressman called Ignatius Donnelly,

who had written a book about the lost world, locating it somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

Gladstone proposed a government-sponsored expedition to search for it there.

But the Treasury rejected the proposal.

Atlantis hunting is a fraught exercise.

But precisely because it has generated so many wild theories,

there's even more reason to try to sift the fact from the fiction.

Fresh scientific evidence buttresses the idea that Plato's story was inspired by a real island

and a real ancient civilisation, which was destroyed by a real natural disaster.

The island I'm heading for is south-east of Athens.

It's called Santorini, or Thera,

as it was originally christened by the Greeks.

The first thing that strikes you about Thera is its really odd topography.

The land just juts straight out of the sea and then you get these small islands ringed by water,

which are then, in turn, cradled by that massive semi-circle of land up there.

Now just listen to what Plato has to say about his Atlantis.

"There were circular belts of sea and land enclosing one another, some greater, some smaller."

Now of course, that in itself doesn't prove anything.

I mean, there could be loads of locations all round the world that match this description.

But nonetheless, this account and that landscape are really remarkably similar.

This dramatic landscape draws thousands of tourists every year.

But not all of them realise that they are

actually sailing into the remnants of an enormous volcanic crater.

Everywhere you look on this island there is geological evidence of volcanic activity.

A thousand years before Plato was writing, in around about 1620 BC,

this island suffered the biggest volcanic eruption in the whole of the ancient world.

'One of the world's leading volcanologists, Haraldur Sigurdsson,

'recently led an expedition to the sea floor around Santorini.'

He found surprising evidence of the true scale of the Theran eruption.

We use two approaches.

So basically you're firing a gun that sends a sound wave into the sea floor

and you get data coming back

that tells you the thickness of the layers.

But then the other method we used was to send down a submersible,

which is like a small car, but you drive it from the ship.

It's got nine cameras on it all taking video,

and you get all sorts of information.

Haraldur's team scanned the sea floor, measuring underwater deposits produced by the volcano.

We know that the eruption produced mostly pyroclastic flows.

When an eruption of this type begins,

it immediately creates a plume of ash and pumice

that goes up into the atmosphere.

Then, after a few hours, you have a collapse of the eruption column cascading down like avalanches.

The pyroclastic flows begin.

Pyroclastic flows have a very distinctive rock type

composed of pumice and ash and big stones, all mixed together.

If the eruption really had had a big impact, we would expect to find pyroclastic flows on the sea floor.

What we found is that the deposit extends on the sea floor

30 kilometres in all directions from the Santorini volcano.

So it's very, very widespread.

These findings show that the eruption was one of the greatest ever in the human experience.

In the previous studies we had estimated

that there were about 30 cubic kilometres erupted from this event, which is a very large volume.

But with these new findings, we found that actually the deposit is about 60 cubic kilometres or maybe even more.

Let's compare it to some other eruptions and one convenient one is the very famous eruption of Vesuvius

in 79AD, in Italy, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.

We know that the Vesuvius eruption was about six kilometres, only,

compared to 60 here.

Another very famous eruption is the eruption of Mount St Helens

in the United States, in 1980.

It is like smoke coming out of a chimney.

But there was only half a cubic kilometre, compared to 60 here.

So this is a very, very special event.

Do you think there's a possibility that in Plato's Atlantis myth

what he's also remembering is this event here?

Personally I have no doubt that the Atlantis myth was triggered by the eruption of Santorini.

We're getting so much geological evidence that supports a major natural catastrophe in this area

that I think we have to look at it very carefully as the nucleus for this myth.

Plato's Atlantis was an island.

It was destroyed by a disaster

and it was home to an advanced civilisation.

Thera matches all three of these characteristics.

Firstly, its topography is remarkably similar to Plato's Atlantis.

Secondly, it was the scene of a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

And crucially, it was also home to an amazing civilisation.

The eruption rendered the island uninhabitable for centuries

but as the landscape came back to life, people returned.

Then in 1967, archaeologists made an incredible discovery.

Beneath more than 100 feet of metres of pumice and ash was a lost world,

entombed by the eruption.

It was heralded as the Pompeii of the Aegean.

But to my mind, even that phrase doesn't do this site justice.

So far archaeologists have excavated 10,000 square metres of the town.

But they actually estimate that it is 30 times bigger than that.

This is a buried city that is slowly being brought back to life.

In my opinion, Theran Bronze Age society is one of the most

beguiling of all civilisations that ever walked the earth.

And you've got to remember that we're talking about a people

who are living and working 3,500 years ago.

Kali me ra!

'The Greek authorities are reluctant to allow outsiders to film the ongoing restoration process.'

-Welcome.

-Thank you very much.

'But chief archaeologist Christos Doumas has granted us special permission to go behind the scenes.'

This treasure trove of artefacts provides a glimpse

of the sophisticated world that the Therans once inhabited.

We have the evidence that they were very sophisticated in inventing things...

Especially with pottery, they managed to solve a lot of very big problems.

They managed to produce very sophisticated

shapes and forms

and in very high quality.

These are very rare and unique.

The Akrotiri storage rooms also house a series of spectacular wall paintings.

As each one is painstakingly pieced together,

it becomes increasingly clear just how advanced this society was.

The wall paintings that are being discovered at Thera are in a league of their own.

They're very vivacious, they're very unsuppressed, they're very individualistic.

Compare that with the other art of the period,

the beautiful art of Egypt, for example,

and there you're looking at something

which is much more monumental,

much more formulaic, much more controlled.

Whereas the Theran wall paintings have their own life and their own story.

One of the things you notice immediately about the wall paintings

is that women are conspicuous not by their absence but by their presence.

In almost all of the figurative pictures you will find a woman there.

What is really interesting is they are clearly of high status.

Look at this beautiful girl.

She's got exquisite gold hoop earrings

and her bodice has clearly been coloured with that expensive saffron dye.

She's actually offering saffron to this kind of superwoman who I suspect is some kind of divinity

because she has got behind her a griffin, which was usually a sign of a goddess or a spirit.

The contrast between these women from the Bronze Age

and the women of Plato's day in 5th-century Athens

could not be starker.

In Athens, women were second-class citizens.

They were often not allowed out during daylight,

they only were given half rations and they were encouraged not to speak out in public.

Whereas these girls from 1,000 earlier in the Bronze Age, they have respect,

they have clout, and they clearly have standing in society.

So for me, Theran society is in more ways than one, a lost world.

The Therans were light years ahead of many other cultures of the time.

They used writing, they had a remarkably egalitarian society

and they had a well organised economy.

But there is one facet of this culture which ensured that Thera could never be forgotten

and which provides a direct parallel with Atlantis.

Thera was the central lynchpin in a trading network

that stretched between three continents...

Europe, Africa and Asia.

This is where you get really close to the secret behind Thera's success.

You cannot understand the Therans unless you understand their relationship to the sea.

Back in the Bronze Age, it was the oceans that were the highways of the known world.

And because Thera is so strategically placed,

the people who lived here became masters of those networks of trade and communication.

Plato describes Atlantis as a place where,

"The harbour was filled with ships and merchants coming from all quarters."

3,500 years ago, Thera would have mirrored that description.

It was an international trading hub with as many as a dozen languages

ranging from Minoan, and Hittite to Egyptian, and Canaanite

drifting out across the water between the boats.

A record of this cosmopolitan world was captured on the most spectacular

Theran wall painting of all, the fleet fresco.

It's thanks to this painting we have a lot of information

about sailing, shipping and trade.

It shows real ships and it is for the first time that we have depictions of ships of that period in that scale.

So does that mean that this is a new kind of ship that we're looking at here?

Yes, we have the earliest representations of sailing ships.

And presumably with this kind of inventiveness,

the Therans are really succeeding when they go onto the oceans.

They're actually managing to navigate routes that would have been impossible before.

Yes, exactly.

That's fascinating, isn't it? Because it could tell you either

that the Therans are managing to get to all these places,

or that you have traders coming into the Theran ports bringing their influences...

Yes. In many wall paintings we have themes from exotic lands...

antelopes, for example.

Because these are depicted in a very naturalistic way,

we believe that the artist had seen them real.

Like the Atlanteans, the Therans were masters of the sea.

And also like the Atlanteans, they harnessed the landscape

to create an architectural masterpiece in town planning.

Because Plato was writing about an extraordinary place,

you'd expect him to bang on about the glories of the architecture in his Atlantis,

make it a larger-than-life city...

And so it's always seemed pointless to match lock stock and barrel

all the details in here with one real location.

But coming here to Thera, two sentences have leapt out at me.

This is Plato talking about the masonry of the place,

"And of the buildings, some they framed in one simple colour,

"in others they wove a pattern of many colours by a blending the stones for the sake of the ornament.

"Some of it being white, some black and some red."

Now just look at the local stone that they still use here at the site of Akrotiri.

In Atlantis, red, black and white masonry was used to build the city.

Here in Akrotiri, we find exactly the same.

These buildings are so well preserved because they were buried under a deluge of volcanic ash

up to 60 feet thick.

Even so, it's been difficult to imagine what this place must have looked like in its former glory...

until now.

How many years have you been involved in Akrotiri?

Quite a few. 30 years at least.

Architect Clairy Palyvou has come up with a vision of Akrotiri in it's hey day, before the eruption,

when the buildings were intact.

Look at that!

The first impression is really strong one.

This is not any simple architecture

that one would have made the mistake of imagining for a prehistoric time.

It is a very sophisticated architecture,

not just about meeting everyday needs or physical requirements like shelter or protection.

It's much more.

So you are not just looking at them as great achievers in technology

but you're actually walking into their lives and how they ran their world?

Yes, precisely. There are so many things that one can stop and admire

and so many things that are there for the first time in the world.

These people are building two, three-storey buildings on an earthquake sensitive region.

They are also building in a style of architecture that involves a lot of openings.

We take windows as granted nowadays,

but back then that was something very innovative.

That's fascinating because it's a very modern concept.

When we employ architects now we always go on about the light, or give me a lot of light.

-You're saying this is what was happening in the Bronze Age.

-Yes.

This is the architecture of an affluent society.

This prosperity is shared by a large number of the members of the community.

That is what makes the difference.

It's not something that's kept only for the elite.

The Therans lived in a seismic landscape, there was salt water as far as the eye could see,

and yet they exploited the natural world around them

to pioneer a completely new kind of civilisation.

Just like the Atlanteans, the Therans were a technologically advanced people.

So accomplished, that throughout the Bronze Age world,

Theran wealth and sophistication would have been legendary.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYS

This is a feisty, advanced, strategically placed society.

And yet, even with its amazing trading connections,

you do ask yourself, how Thera could punch quite so far above its weight?

Well, the answer lies 70 miles to the south across the sea

in a place that was known in Plato's day as Megalo Nisi...

The Big Island.

Today we call it Crete but in the Bronze Age

this island was the political and religious centre

of Europe's first great civilisation.

Thera's wealth and sophistication were tied up with the fortunes of this potent, special place.

This was the beating heart of that culture, it's Knossos Palace.

In its heyday, this was a vast administrative complex.

It teemed with workshops, storage areas, and sumptuous wall paintings.

Just like Thera, it was littered with ancient artefacts and architecture.

These ruins had lain buried for centuries.

They were brought blinking back into the light in 1900

when they were excavated by British archaeologist, Arthur Evans.

All this reminded Evans of the Greek myth of King Minos.

Minos was the great ruler whose wife had spawned a monstrous creature,

a son who was half man, half bull.

So Evans matched the myth to the reality

and convinced himself that here he had uncovered the site of the legendary labyrinth.

Then he went a step further...

He actually gave a brand new name to the people who lived here 3,500 years ago.

He called them after King Minos, the Minoans.

CROWD CHEERS

This is the most ancient site in Crete...

'I want to get to the heart of why Thera had such a close relationship with Crete.'

So I've come here to meet archaeologist, Colin McDonald, a former curator of Knossos.

I know that you've dug up some Theran pottery here on Crete.

What do you think is going on here, why do these two islands have such a close relationship?

Well, first of all you're quite right to say

that it is a very close relationship.

But, Thera I see as being a kind of neutral trading point,

a sort of nodal point in the Aegean

which was used by Crete

so that many of the traded items in Thera would have found their way down to Crete.

You see Crete did not really produce many raw materials of its own, so it had to look elsewhere.

Perhaps this is another key to it making great strides.

It had nothing and therefore went in search of everything.

Crete and Thera each had their own distinct characteristics, but they shared the same dress code,

language, religious rituals and technological advances.

In a further link to Plato's Atlantis, they revered the same sacred animal...

..the bull.

This beautiful relief shows a bull in mid-charge.

What you've got to remember about the bulls of the Bronze Age

is that they were actually a species which is now extinct called aurochs.

Aurochs were HUGE creatures.

They stood two metres high at the shoulder with a horn span to match.

And all our evidence from Minoan culture suggests that they were brought right here

to the heart of Knossos Palace itself.

These bulls were most notably associated with the dangerous sport of bull leaping,

most likely an initiation rite undertaken by young men as they approached adulthood.

BULL SNORTS

Just imagine these creatures close on...

the hot smell of their breath, the flashing whites of their eyes

as they slowly lumbered up here ready to begin the ritual games,

up into the sacred central court.

And ranged all round here, in their fine jewellery and brightly-coloured clothes,

the cream of Minoan society.

CROWD CHEERS

All protected from the sun by billowing canopies, waiting for the spectacle to start.

Now just listen to what Plato has to say about the elite of his Atlantis society.

"In the sacred precincts of Poseidon there were bulls at large.

"And the princes, being alone after praying to the gods that they might capture a victim

"well pleasing unto him, hunted after the bulls with staves and with nooses,

"but with no weapon of iron."

Now this suggests to me that what Plato is writing about

is a kind of garbled memory of the real bull leaping

that happened here on Crete and back in Thera.

That is exactly what happens to memories down time.

A storyteller, in this case Plato, picks up on something he's heard maybe in the backstreets of Athens

or at the city's port,

amazing tales of a long lost civilisation

where men were equal to bulls,

where palaces glittered and were then destroyed.

And he uses those stories for his own purpose.

It's definitely not history, but it is a very informal way

of passing information down from one generation to another.

It's almost history by accident, if you like, and to be honest, it's all the more valuable for that.

But this beautiful, sophisticated society was sitting on a geological time bomb.

And around 1620 BC, that bomb was set to explode.

This is a good playground for a geologist.

It's a prime spot for every geologist.

Back on Thera, geologist Doctor Floyd McCoy

has helped unearth a series of scientific clues

which reveal what the Therans must have suffered

as their island was devastated by the greatest volcanic eruption of the ancient world.

This modern quarry is a cut through the island,

and the cut through the island goes right down here to the Minoan level.

Here it is, a cross section through not only a culture but an entire eruption.

So what I'm touching now, this is earth that they'd have been farming in the Minoan period?

This is the surface that man walked on here.

I mean, debris is everywhere. Right there...man walked on, built on and left his debris.

This is 3600 years ago and now look at it.

It's 30, 40 metres underground.

And realise this represents perhaps four days of accumulation.

So in four days the surface of the earth here went to that level.

So what are all these different parts? What do they tell us about how the eruption happened?

What it's telling us is there's a thin layer here

that comes up along here, and this is what we call the precursory eruption.

Preceding this probably were months of earthquakes,

lots of small earthquakes.

New gases coming out, like sulphur.

Springs would suddenly stop, reappear somewhere else.

Cracks in the ground.

They don't know why it was happening, but something dreadful was beginning.

I think the sense was pure fear.

PEOPLE SCREAM

The many signs of an impending eruption culminated in one big earthquake

measuring around seven on the Richter scale.

It rendered the town uninhabitable.

After the earthquake

people started working in order to rescue things which were needed.

We have found quite a lot of pieces of bedsteads et cetera,

and these were trapped by the pumice.

So I suspect that people had moved out, living in a camp,

and they were working in the ruins

in order to rescue things which were essential

for their survival in the camp.

At Pompeii it happened quickly, in a few hours, I think,

whereas at Akrotiri they had time to prepare.

No victims, nothing has been found within the settlement.

So this was an organised departure.

There was one specific pot, which was no different than the others,

but the owner, for some reason, had wrapped it up with a piece of cloth which has survived.

And I had sort of the vision of the person who,

for some reason, was attached to this specific vessel

and had tried to protect it with the hope of the return.

Of course, they were familiar with earthquakes.

An earthquake was not the end of the world.

The end came after.

The troubling earthquake was just a prelude to the main event -

an eruption on a scale the ancient world had never experienced before.

Nothing would survive that, including the city of Akrotiri.

You would be buried beneath the pumice.

If that didn't happen, a pyroclastic flow would just grind you to tiny bits.

And if that didn't happen, then the fine ash would get into your lungs, block it up.

That same ash, mixing with the fluids in your body, would turn to cement.

There's no way you're going to survive this.

Since no bodies have ever been discovered, experts are now trying to establish whether

the islanders managed to escape or whether they're still buried beneath the ash and pumice.

I think it is stupid to say that they evacuated the island. When?

Since they were working until the moment of the eruption.

And were all the ships here?

And how many ships could accommodate thousands of people?

So I do not believe they evacuated.

God knows where the people have gone.

I believe that they were camping somewhere near in the vicinity

and they will be found there some day.

It's a tragedy that's beyond any imagination.

There is one thing I would love you to clear up for me, if you can.

There's one line at the very last paragraph here.

"The island vanished and the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable,

"being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down."

That seems unlikely, but could something like that have happened?

Absolutely. This is what the island created, this - pumice.

Pumice is the only rock that floats.

Vast amounts of this stuff... look at it here.

This same material was on the ocean.

It produced floating rafts, huge rafts.

Today we can see the same phenomenon in the Pacific, where pumice is ejected from underwater volcanoes.

On the surface of the sea, the pumice forms rafts, which sailors often find impossible to navigate.

The rafts from the Theran eruption would have been a full three feet thick.

That just makes such sense. So Plato's talking about mud,

but actually what it is, is huge levels of pumice on the ocean?

Absolutely. This is our account of antiquity of this eruption.

This was an eruption that shook much of the planet.

Ash was transported as far north as the Black Sea,

as far east as Central Turkey, and as far south as the Nile Delta.

Global temperatures dipped, stunting plant growth even in Ireland.

Closer to home, the eruption produced devastating shockwaves throughout the Aegean.

Pyroclastic flows sped across the sea on a bed of superheated steam.

There would have been a ring around Santorini

of pyroclastic flows all going over water, 10 kilometres or more away.

Then they would have started to go underwater and then, of course,

the sea would have been heated up by that.

But the most importantly,

a sea wave would be pushed up,

creating a tsunami.

If even a tenth of these pushed the ocean enough to make tsunami waves

then we had dozens and dozens and dozens of tsunamis sweeping across the ocean.

As the tsunamis gathered momentum, they pulsated away from Thera.

One of their destinations... Minoan Crete.

So what colour is it? What am I actually looking for here?

We're looking basically for water-worn volcanic ash.

'Archaeologist Sandy MacGillivray and tsunami expert Costas Synolakis

'are investigating the scale of the tsunamis by mapping Theran pumice on Crete's northern coastline.'

Here's some.

Here's a piece there.

So light, isn't it?

Isn't that a bit of...?

-That's a Minoan pot, isn't it?

-Sure.

-This is part of a late Bronze Age pithos, with this herring bone pattern on it.

-That's amazing.

But it must have floated here.

It's exactly what we like.

It floats and it gives us an idea of how high the wave reached.

This site has been undisturbed.

This is why it is so important to us from the point of view of modelling.

So the tsunami would have carried this up here?

At least to this point. It could have carried it further up

and then have washed down with the rain,

but this helps us bracket the size of the wave right offshore.

It's been estimated that the Theran tsunami rose at least

65 feet above sea level in places

and travelled up to five miles inland.

With Sandy's advice, Costas has developed a computer simulation

of how the tsunamis would have travelled as they pulsated away from Thera.

This is the initial wave.

We follow it all the way to Crete.

The first wave causes the shoreline to retreat, to move offshore.

We're less than an hour from the eruption and already the south side

of Crete and the eastern Peloponnese are experiencing

-the big wave.

-It's so fast!

It's like a steam train, isn't it?

And so what we're seeing here, the green is the wave as we think of it, so the tall crest of the wave,

and all this purple and blue, right on the edge of Asia Minor,

-that's the kind of drawback that you were describing earlier.

-Yes.

Costas, I know that you've gone all round the world looking at tsunamis and their effects.

How far can you draw on that data and make a comparison with what's

happening here on Crete and the Theran eruption?

From recent tsunamis we have a certain feeling

of what the inundation, the debris line looks like.

This is a picture from Sri Lanka.

You see where the debris line is.

We would be measuring the difference between this debris and the shoreline.

Then we will say, well, this is how high the wave penetrated on this occasion.

In our view, the impact of the Minoan tsunami in Crete

was very similar to the impact of the Boxing Day tsunami,

the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka.

We think that the size of the wave of Amnisos

was very similar to the size of the wave of Sri Lanka.

So this is a very good sort of analogy for me

to try to visualise what it must have looked like for the Minoans, the wave coming in.

They're such terrible images, aren't they?

30,000 people died in Sri Lanka within a few minutes.

So, if you've got 70% of the population dying,

what do you think, Sandy, that says about what happened to Crete?

Because most people live along the coast, don't they?

I think so. There's the city of Knossos, which is inland,

but otherwise it's very much open coastline, unprotected harbours.

The death toll would have been staggering, phenomenal.

The impact of the Theran eruption extended beyond the death toll.

Minoan society was shaken to its core.

Every year there's a new excavating season here.

Huge amounts of new Bronze Age material is found.

It's almost as if Minoan Crete is a giant jigsaw puzzle that is slowly being pieced back together again.

From some of these fragments we can get clues as to how the Minoans

reacted to the Theran eruption and the tsunami.

What starts to happen is that the pottery is decorated

in this really weird way.

It's called marine style, and basically the surfaces of

the pots are suddenly painted with slithering creatures from the deep.

You can see here, you've got an octopus' tentacle above a rock with seaweed.

There's a starfish.

That's a conch shell,

and this is a kind of a giant shellfish.

It's almost as if the Minoans are trying to placate

or even kind of face down the sea demons

that have suddenly arrived on their island.

With most of the ancient cultures, the sea is where we come from.

We rise out of the sea. So the idea that this place comes back and devastates us

is a very powerful message.

So the first thing they do after the tsunamis, they rebuild the temples.

In recent tsunamis, in 1998 there's a tsunami in Papua New Guinea.

What's the first thing...?

It's a devastating tsunami. What's the first thing that they do afterwards?

Rebuild the churches. Why? There are missionaries there.

The locals felt that it was a punishment from God for their impiety.

In the 1970s, archaeologists made a grim discovery at this Bronze Age shrine in Crete.

It showed how the Minoans would also have responded in the face of a cataclysmic natural disaster.

In this room there was the body of a young man aged about 17 or 18.

He'd been trussed up and he was laid out on this altar.

Next to his head there was a bronze dagger.

We can tell from the bone evidence that one of his arteries

had been cut and his body had been bled completely dry.

Experts believe that this young man was being sacrificed

to try to stop one of the many earthquakes that shook this region before the Theran eruption.

A few paces out here there was another body.

This was a man lying face down and he had been carrying a vessel full of some kind of liquid.

Presumably it was human blood from the sacrifice, a desperate attempt,

a gift to try to appease the gods.

It's believed the priest performing this ritual died as the building collapsed during the earthquake.

This shows that in the face of a natural disaster like the Theran eruption

the Minoans might have gone as far as sacrificing one of their fellow human beings.

The Minoans were very, very close to nature

and so when something like this happens you really become very circumspect. How did this happen?

Why did this happen? How can we appease these natural forces so that perhaps it won't happen again?

For a people who were saturated with a superstitious piety,

a dreadful natural disaster like this

could be nothing other than a punishment from the gods.

So what happened here wasn't just a physical but a psychological apocalypse.

This is a really significant symbol.

Actually, you can only see it at this time of day when the sunlight starts to get low.

What you've got here is the traditional mason's mark of Knossos.

It's a double axe head.

But just look what's been rammed into it.

These are the prongs of a trident.

Now of course, the trident is the weapon of the almighty god of the sea,

the deity that we now call Poseidon,

the god that brought so much trouble to this island.

Poseidon was fearsomely powerful in Minoan society.

Both the sea god and the earth shaker,

he could inflict devastating punishments at will.

This is yet another strong link to the Atlantis legend.

According to Plato, Poseidon was the master of Atlantis

and when its people fell foul of him

their island was swallowed by the sea.

150 years after the Theran eruption the Minoan civilisation had all but disappeared.

We don't know why exactly, but I think it's true to say that the eruption

marked the beginning of the end for Europe's first great culture.

When you think back to the terrible destruction that ranged right across this island and beyond,

to Egypt and to Asia Minor and even to the outposts of western Europe,

then you realise that this was devastation quite simply could not ever have been forgotten.

Almost immediately this must have become a horror story

passed down from father to son and mother to daughter.

Of course, that's what logic tells us must have happened.

But the historian in me needs to see the evidence in black and white.

How can we try to prove that the catastrophe that happened here

was still remembered 1,000 years later in Plato's day?

We have an increasing body of evidence that the memory of prehistoric events

can be preserved through tales and legends.

It's a kind of oral history that is surprisingly resilient.

Irving Finkel is one of the world's leading experts in deciphering ancient languages.

He believes he can trace how the memory of real events and real people can survive

through oral history for hundreds of years

before they enter the written record.

One prime example is one of the oldest stories in the world, the epic of Gilgamesh.

If you want to see this you have to turn on this light.

You can see the writing, it's pressed into the clay in rows,

and in fact the name of Gilgamesh even occurs up here.

The epic of Gilgamesh is a story about a king who is part man, part god.

Irving Finkel believes it is based on a real king

who lived in ancient Iraq at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC,

1,000 years before the story was ever written down,

proving that oral memory can be exceptionally tenacious.

The chain of all the information that we have,

which is archaeological, plus writing, plus common sense,

those three components, when you put them together, to me it is a certainty that Gilgamesh

was a really unusual and heroic person

who lived at a very remote time,

and that there's a continuous oral stream of tradition from the death of Gilgamesh

until this was written for the King of Assyria.

So you don't always have to have all the links in the chain for the chain to be there.

In the particular case of Atlantis, I think that there are elements in here

which directly relate to events of the Bronze Age.

Am I a mad Atlantis hunter, or would you support my thesis?

I would support your thesis and I support it out of a long held conviction,

which is that when you have such a big thing as this cataclysm,

which is used by Plato as a kind of intellectual jumping off board for other material,

to me it seems axiomatic that, just as he argues that this happens once, so it in fact did,

that it's a real thing that somehow survived, just like with this mad stuff on bits of clay.

-Plato's remembering something that is too important to forget?

-Yeah.

Plato's Atlantis myth sets down that all too familiar story

of the rise and then the fall of mankind.

He immortalised a great story and a great idea, one that still captures our imagination today.

His account was first and foremost a moral fable.

But there are numerous clues that Plato based Atlantis

on an oral memory of Bronze Age Thera.

The hard evidence shows us that here there was here a sophisticated trading civilisation that flourished

and was then swallowed by the sea,

ravaged by a disaster of legendary proportions.

Surely this is the root of Plato's Atlantis legend.

Legions of treasure hunters and pseudo scientists

have projected their dreams and desires onto the myth.

But however beguiling the Atlantis of the imagination,

it will never be as intriguing as the real place, the real event,

and the real people of the Bronze Age

that inspired Plato's magnificent tale.

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