Posted on 07/18/2004 1:17:56 PM PDT by blam
50 ancient tombs uncovered
From correspondents in Athens
July 18, 2004
ARCHEOLOGISTS have discovered 50 tombs dating back to the late Minoan period, around 1400 BC, and containing a number of artifacts on the Greek island of Crete, ANA news agency reported today.
The tombs were part of the once powerful ancient city of Kydonia, which was destroyed at the time but later rebuilt.
The oldest among them contained bronze weapons, jewellery and vases and are similar to the tombs of fallen soldiers of the Mycenaean type from mainland Greece, said the head of the excavations, Maria Vlazaki.
The more recent family tombs are of a more traditional Kydonia type.
Earlier excavations in the area in northwest Crete near the town of Chania had already yielded some 100 burial sites
GGG Ping.
Each filled with registered democrats and Kerry 2004 bumper stickers.
ping
"Each filled with registered democrats and Kerry 2004 bumper stickers."
ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!
Don't laugh. I'll lay you 10-to-1 that a bunch of these corpses vote in the 2004 election.
Good, maybe one of them will have a Minoan-Mycenaean dictionary in it. Or Minoan-Anything, I'm not picky.
I've read before that the Red Sea crossing was connected with the eruption of Thera. Things that make you go hmmmmm...
Most date the Exodus to about 1450BC. I date it to the time of the Thera eruption which was in 1628BC +-.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list -- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Still,this discovery should provide some interesting new info.
I've read that after Thera blew in 1628BC and sent tsunamis over Crete destroying the Minoan civilizations.The idea of the tsunami was dreamed up decades ago. The 1628 BC date for the eruption was seized on due to some chronology problems in the Near East (ahem) and derived from proxy data from Greenland. The actual experts refuted that date by noting that the chemical signatures not only don't match Thera's. Others noted that there are a variety of other traces of eruptions much later than 1628 BC.
And, Professor Mike Baillie, in his excellent book Exodus To Arthur using tree-rings, makes a compelling case for a 1628BC date for the Thera explosion. On page 58 of that book he says:"In 1987, data regarding a new acid layer at 1645+/-20 BC, in the important Dye 3 ice core from Greenland, was published. Claus Hammer and his co-workers suggested that this new date might be Santorini..."
Also, I think the ancient Egyptian dates are highly suspect.
I definately do not believe Thera/Santorini was the location of Atlantis. I'm presently looking towards SE Asia for Atlantis, 8-9,000 years ago.
Such a mysterious island and with such interesting people. I always wondered if it was the true cradle of civiliazation instead of Iraq.
Neither. Look east during the Ice Age.
That is what I call civilized.
Crete just had a 5 or 6 in the past week. Just a matter of time, it's going to go again.
Interestingly enough, Manning cites Lesson 17: Akrotiri on Thera which, while it toes the line regarding the current dating fictions, also notes that:Debate erupts anew:In 1939, Spyridon Marinatos, a Greek archaeologist, proposed that the eruption wrecked Minoan culture on Thera and Crete. He envisioned the damage as done by associated earthquakes and tsunamis. While geologists found tsunamis credible, they doubted the destructive power of Thera's earthquakes, saying volcanic ones tend to be relatively mild... Despite the power of Thera, the Danish scientists' evidence raised doubts about its links to the Minoan decline. Their date for Thera's explosion, 1645 B.C., based on frozen ash in Greenland, is some 150 years earlier than the usual date. Given that the Minoan fall was usually dated to 1450 B.C., the gap between cause and effect seemed too large. Another blow landed in 1989 when scholars on Crete found, above a Thera ash layer, a house that had been substantially rebuilt in the Minoan style. It suggested at least partial cultural survival. By 1996, experts like Jeremy Rutter, head of classics at Dartmouth, judged the chronological gap too extreme for any linkage. "No direct correlation can be established" between the volcano and the Minoan decline, he concluded.
Did Thera's explosion
doom Minoan Crete?
William J. Broad NYT
Thursday, October 23, 2003Re: When did Thera Erupt?The truth of the matter is quite simple. There was once only one sulphur spike great enough to match Thera because budgetary restraints on the ice core work meant that such peaks had not been systematically looked for. Second millennium ice cores have now been searched more thoroughly, and there are peaks of sulphuric acid easily enough to match Thera (which vulcanologists say was not the kind of eruption to shoot out that much sulphur anyway), at NUMEROUS dates within the 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th, 14th centuries BC (see Zielinski et al in Science 264, 1994, pp. 948-952). The REAL FACTS show not only how pathetic is the case for the 17th-century proxy dating.
by Peter JamesGeoarchaeology:p 158-159 -- "Artifacts from Akrotiri, linked to the Egyptian calendar [sic] put the Thera eruption at more than a hundred years later [than 1644 +/- 20 BC]. While the controversy remains open, it is our view that the volcanic activity recorded in the Greenland ice core more likely came from nearby Iceland than from the eastern Mediterranean (this may be testable by any chemical signature).
The Earth-Science Approach to Archaeological Interpretation
by George (Rip) Rapp, Jr. and Christopher L. Hill
p 166 -- "Living samples from a freshwater lake on limestone terrain have been known to give a radiocarbon date of up to 1600 BP."Bronze Age Myths?A first rule of statistics is that the existence of a correlation does not itself prove a causal connection... This paper examines some of the available evidence for these two Bronze Age 'catastrophes', the one real and in need of a calendar date, the other hypothesized on archaeological grounds and dated by a tenuous link through tree rings to an Icelandic volcano... Despite several cautionary comments from both archaeologists (Manning 1988; Warren 1988) and geologists (Pyle 1989; 1990), the 1628 BC date, or one close to it, continues to be accepted (e.g. Michael and Betancourt 1988), without questioning why the effects of the Santorini eruption should be especially recognizable in the ice-core and tree-ring sequences. Large-scale explosive volcanic activity is common on a global scale (Zielinski et al. 1996), and so before accepting the possibility that the Santorini eruption can be recognized by unusual perturbations in the regional records of ice-cores or tree-rings, the case for its distinctive character must be proved.
Volcanic Activity and Human Response in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic Region
Paul C. Buckland
Andrew J. Dugmore
Kevin J. Edwards
Antiquity Vol. 71 (1997), pp. 581-593.The Thera (Santorini) Volcanic Eruption and...It is argued that the key Late Minoan IA period, the high point of the Minoan civilisation, was not, as conventionally held, contemporary (even in part) with the New Kingdom (18th Dynasty) of Egypt, nor the Late Bronze 1 phase of the Levant. Instead, the Late Minoan IA period in the Aegean is linked with the late Middle Bronze Age of Syria-Palestine, the Second Intermediate (Hyksos) Period of Egypt, and the Late Cypriot IA period of Cyprus. This is an important realignment of cultural synchronisations. The high point of Crete should be considered in terms of the dominant Canaanite trading system of the late Middle Bronze Age, and not New Kingdom Egypt...
the Absolute Chronology of the Aegean Bronze Age
by Sturt W. Manning
Appendix 2: Why the standard chronologies are approximately correct, and why radical re-datings are therefore incorrect.
"More recently, the vulcanologists have claimed that the Santorini caldera formed quite gradually and that a tidal wave, if indeed there was one at all, would not have been on anything like the scale envisaged by Marinatos and other proponents of the link between the Theran volcano and the sudden decline of Neopalatial Crete."
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