Ancient city of Iasos rises out of the ashes

Archaeologists working on Iasos on Turkey’s Aegean coast have recently discovered that the ancient city was buried under a mountain of ash caused by the explosion of Mt. Thera on Santorini 3,600 years ago.

Excavation works have also revealed a sewage system that was in place in the 4,000-year-old city and tunnels to the city’s theater...

Spanu said columns that were found one meter underground provided vital information about the history of the city. “Following the explosion of the volcano Thera, which also caused the destruction of the Minoan civilization on the islands of Crete and Santorini, the ancient city was covered with ash and remained so for a while...

According to the Blue Guide: Turkey. The Aegean and Mediterranean Coasts (1989), Iasos has excellent harbors, rich fishing grounds, and marble quarries producing a fine red-tinted marble. They have found Minoan (2000-1550 B.C.) and Mycenaean pottery there. Supposedly it was colonized by Argos. The first Greek settlers are thought to have arrived in the 9th century. In the 5th century it was an Athenian ally.

Thucydides reports (8.28) its capture by Spartan and allied forces in 412 B.C.--they handed the city over to the Persian satrap Tissaphernes.

According to Diodorus Siculus, in 405 Lysander took Iasos by storm (it was again an Athenian ally), and killed all the adult males, 800 in all, then enslaved the women and children and leveled the city.

In the fourth century it was subject to Mausolus and later favored by Alexander the Great. It came under the control of Rhodes about 190 B.C. During Mithridates the Great's war against Rome, beginning in 88 B.C., Iasos sided with Mithridates. It prospered during the Roman imperial period.

There has been an Italian archaeological team working there since 1960. It is in SW Turkey, in what was ancient Caria, south of Miletus.

King Hammurabi is the best known of the early monarchs of ancient times... belonged to the First BabyIonian Dynasty which came to an end, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, some three or four generations after Hammurabi. For the next several centuries, the land was in the domain of a people known as the Kassites. They left few examples of art and hardly any literary works -- theirs was an age comparable to and contemporaneous with that of the Hyksos in Egypt, and various surmises were made as to the identity of the two peoples. A cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan was even found in Babylonia and another in Anatolia, a possible indication of the extent of the power and influence wielded by the Hyksos. Until a few decades ago, the reign of Hammurabi was dated to around the year 2100 before the present era... At Platanos on Crete, a seal of the Hammurabi type was discovered in a tomb together with Middle Minoan pottery of a kind associated at other sites with objects of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, more exactly, of its earlier part. This is regarded as proof that these two dynasties were contemporaneous... however... At Mari on the central Euphrates, among other rich material, a cuneiform tablet was found which established that Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria were contemporaries. An oath was sworn by the life of these two kings in the tenth year of Hammurabi, The finds at Mari "proved conclusively that Hammurabi came to the throne in Babylonia after the accession of Shamshi-Adad I in Assyria"... The Khorsabad list ends in the tenth year of Assur-Nerari V, which is computed to have been -745... the first year of Shamshi-Adad is calculated to have been -1726 and his last year -1694... it reduced the time of Hammurabi from the twenty-first century to the beginning of the seventeenth century... "a puzzling chronological discrepancy", which could only be resolved by making Hammurabi later than Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty... If Hammurabi reigned at the time allotted to him by the finds at Mari and Khorsabad -- but according to the finds at Platanos was a contemporary of the Egyptian kings of the early Twelfth Dynasty -- then that dynasty must have started at a time when, according to the accepted chronology, it had already come to its end. In conventionally-written history, by -1680 not only the Twelfth Dynasty, but also the Thirteenth, or the last of the Middle Kingdom, had expired.

[Immanuel Velikovsky, Hammurabi and the Revised Chronology]

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