Real Tsunami May Have Inspired Legend of Atlantis

The volcanic explosion that obliterated much of the island that might have inspired the legend of Atlantis apparently triggered a tsunami that traveled hundreds of miles to reach as far as present-day Israel, scientists now suggest.

The new findings about this past tsunami could shed light on the destructive potential of future disasters, researchers added.

Speculation has abounded as to whether the Santorini eruption inspired the legend of Atlantis, which Plato said drowned in the ocean. Although the isle is often regarded as just an invention, the explosion might have given rise to the story of a lost empire by helping to wipe out the real-life Minoan civilization that once dominated the Mediterranean, from which the myth of the bull-headed 'minotaur' comes.

The primary means by which the eruption potentially wreaked havoc on the Minoan civilization is by the giant tsunami it would have triggered. However, the precise effects of this eruption and killer wave have been a mystery for decades.

Heh... those who have a big woody about pushing back the date of the supposed super-eruption have made the problem even worse; used to be the conventional date for the sudden fall of the palatial civ on Crete was 70 years or so after the supposed eruption — now as you said it’s nearly 200. That chunk of pumice found in Egypt that had been used as a serving tray or something had been saddled on as evidence of the super-eruption of Thera — until it was actually studied and found to have come from an eruption of Kos 100s of 1000s of years ago. At that point it was cast aside, and just as Zangger pointed out, the delusional system was further strengthened by abandonment of yet another key piece of evidence. :’D

The World Question Center 2004

Zangger's First Law

Most scientific breakthroughs are nothing else than the discovery of the obvious.

Zangger's Second Law

Truly great science is always ahead of its time.

Although there seems to be a slight contradiction in my laws, historical evidence proves them right:

The Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1847 reduced the death rate in his hospital from twelve to two percent, simply by washing hands between operations -- a concept that today would be advocated by a four year old child. When Semmelweiss urged his colleagues to introduce hygiene to the operating rooms, they had him committed to a mental hospital where he eventually died.
The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener discovered in 1913 what every ten year old looking at a globe will notice immediately: That the Atlantic coasts of the African and South American continents have matching contours and thus may have been locked together some time ago. The experts needed sixty more years to comprehend the concept.
When Louis Pasteur stated that bacteria could cause disease, colleagues treated the idea as "an absurd fantasy'!
The theories of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were called "a case for the police" during a neurologists' congress in Hamburg in 1910.
Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, only eight years before Orville and Wilbur Wright left the ground in an aeroplane, remarked: "Machines that are heavier than air will never be able to fly!"
German physicists Erwin Schrödinger's PhD thesis, in which he first introduced his famous equation, was initially rejected.
When the Spanish nobleman de Satuola discovered the Late Ice Age painted cave at Altamira, established scholars described him as a forger and a cheat.
The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean Francois Champollion in 1822 was still rejected by scholar twenty years after his death.
And when Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Duesseldorf in 1856, the president of the German Society of Anthropology considered it a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign by Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he died.
Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of Bronze Age Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece was considered by English archaeologists in The Times' as the remains of some obscure barbarian tribe' from the Byzantine period. In particular, the so-called prehistoric palace in Tiryns was labelled "the most remarkable hallucination of an unscientific enthusiast that has ever appeared in literature."

Scientific breakthroughs will always be held hostage to the lag needed to overcome existing beliefs. Lucius Annaeus Seneca realized this already two thousand years ago, when he said: "The time will come, when our successors will be surprised that we did not know such obvious things."

I read Graham Hancock’s book “Underworld” a couple of years ago...

I just posted a review of Hancock's "UNderworld" last week or so: UNDERWORLD - Graham Hancock The thesis of Hancock's is that during near the end of the Ice Age there arose an advanced stone age coastal civilization - not advanced like they had cars or lasers but advanced like the Egyptians and when the great melt happened this far flung coastal civilization/empire was drowned giving rise to the Atlantis myth and other flood myths with the survivors of the coastal flood moving inland to be among the less advanced humans of the inner continents who viewed the more advances coastal dwellers as gods or near gods. What survived are racial memories and some passed down knowledge turned to myth and legends and for the most part real evidence for this civilization is buried under the seas.

Looking at the premise of recognizing the obvious is an interesting observation.

A few years ago I was doing some in depth reading on Byzantium. One of the authors mentioned that one of the reasons that the loss of Crete impeded Byzantine naval power projection was because of the currents in Aegean Sea made it easier to sail from Cyprus to Crete to the home ports in Greece, Anatola and Byzantium. I filed that away Awhile later I was rereading Jason and the Argonauts I plotted the place names mentioned in the story to a current chart, and I was rather surprised that the Author was pretty much on target.

That's Zangger's take on the Atlantis legend. His book about it is way out of print, but he revisits it in The Future of the Past: Archaeology in the 21st Century. Here's a review of the German edition of the earlier book:

Ein neuer Kampf um Troia: Archäologie in der Krise
reviewed by Edmund F. Bloedow
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 95.02.18
Ein neuer Kampf um Troia: Archäologie in der Krise by Eberhard Zangger
In such a wide-ranging study, however, one can scarcely expect one individual to be able to assess all the primary evidence. Indeed, it soon becomes evident that Z.'s conclusions are based almost exclusively on secondary, and at times even tertiary, sources. And by casting his net very wide, he hauls in a multifarious medley, whose quality varies enormously. For instance, he brings to the debate for the first time, in particular, Plato's Timaeus and Critias, as well as Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, and other Mediaeval Homeric 'romances' (68-74). For Z., the accounts of the Sea Peoples, contemporary documents, the Homeric epics, ancient authors, legends, extra-Homeric literature, all compete essentially on a level playing field: broadly speaking, they can all be approached as "half true and half untrue" (74-75).

Atlantis is one of the more intriguing myths/legends. I actually have no problem believing that there was some such civilization at some far point in history, wiped out by some eruption or other cataclysm.

Where Plato is short on description that really helps nail down the location, the thing I find most interesting is how his narrative is somewhat cavalier about the basic fact of the existence and history of such a place. As if it was common enough knowledge at the time that it didn’t really need much in the way of explanation.

I have little doubt that there have been obscure city-states in the various parts of the world that rose and fell over hundreds or even thousands of years that we still have no idea were ever there.

If only the library at Alexandria had survived intact. How much more history would we have some idea about? There’s just no knowing.

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