Excavations at Thera

The destruction of Pompeii by the volcano Vesuvius has become synonymous with the nature disaster of volcanic eruptions. The eruption of Vesuvius, among the deadliest in history, was the first natural disaster of its kind to have a first-handwritten account and this documented event has persisted in the public consciousness for nearly two millennia. Yet, despite being the one of the most famous and the deadliest, the eruption of Vesuvius is far from the most destructive. That honor might well go to the eruption of Thera in the 16th or 17th century BCE.

Excavations conducted on this Cycladic Island (among the Aegean Islands), such as the ones recorded in Excavations at Thera a seven-volume set of reports written by by the noted Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos and published by Archaiologikē Hetaireia en Athēnais between 1967-1971, showed that during the Minoan period (2000-1200 BCE) Thera once held an integral port city. Remains showed that though the city was flourishing, its inhabitants abandoned the island for reasons that would soon become apparent to the excavators. It didn’t take long for archaeologists to discover that Thera once held an oval shape, differing greatly to the crescent it is today. Further inspection revealed that several ancient structures were far underwater, pointing to the island collapsing in on itself after their construction. It wasn’t long before the pieces were put together, leading to the discovery that Thera once held an active volcano that erupted in the Minoan period, destroying the island in its entirety.

The collapse of the Minoan civilization has been a mystery that persists to this day, yet finding this once active volcano led many to draw lines of connection between the two events. The reports written by Professor Marinatos reference this theory as near fact when describing the history of the ancient civilization. Such a theory does make a good amount of sense as this eruption would have been much greater than that of Vesuvius with estimated effects reaching all the way to China with reports of a series of harsh winters. Yet as excavations on both the Cycladic Islands and Crete continued, the date for the eruption got pushed back as the fall of the Minoan civilization crept forward. Currently the most accurate date for the eruption of Thera is 1628 BCE with some room for error while the fall of the Minoans sits between 1200-1100 BCE.  

View more of my Classics posts.

– LauraJean, Special Collections Undergraduate Classics Intern

Carnelian stamp seal featuring a kitty, Minoan, 1900-1600 BC

from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Paleo art inspired by Minoan frescoes

✨ tag yourself ✨ but with Aegean Scripts! Mainly Bronze Age, with a sprinkle of Iron Age (Cypriot Syllabary).

Dolphins Fresco, Palace of Knossos (& detail)

c. 1700-1450 B.C.

Historical Mermay 2024: Minoan Mermaid!

This one was a little bit down to the wire. I did the sketching and inking 3 different times before I was happy enough with it. Even now I still have doubts. This illustration is based on at least two Minoan murals of women, but things like the hairstyle are wildly mermaid-exaggerated because I have a theme and that theme is princess hair. XD I also tried to work within some of the mural's color-palettes but I don't think I succeeded very well. Too many texture layers? I can't tell, I can't dwell on it any more.

Like last year this Mermay challenge prompt list comes from the amazing chloe.z.arts on IG. I'm going to do my best to keep up with the prompts, wish me luck!

I am the artist! Do not post without permission & credit! Thank you! Come visit me over on: instagram, tiktok or check out my coloring book available now \ („• ֊ •„) /

https://linktr.ee/ellen.artistic

Minoan Ladys

Back on my high effort joke bullshit

Bonding with the half-brother 🐮🧶✨

Or, Ariadne and Asterion (the Minotaur) spend some quality time together because f*ck Theseus 💅😌✨

I have the confidence of those men that think they could land an airplane but instead I just feel like I could be the first person to decode Linear-A if I really put my mind to it

Do the Greeks believe Santorini was Atlantis, or only the locals who want tourism?

Am I detecting some scepticism? 😂 Well, Atlantis is a fictional island first devised by Plato. What interests scholars is not whether Atlantis existed but what served as inspiration for it instead.

Plato says Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which nowadays is Gibraltar, but some believe it used to be a different place in Plato’s time, somewhere in the Mediterranean or even close or in Greek territory. In any case, scholars have suggested about two-three historical events potentially serving as inspiration for Atlantis and that of Santorini is the most popular one to date.

In Plato’s work, Atlantis was a very advanced island civilisation which attacked Plato’s concept of an ideal Athens and was thus defeated. It fell greatly out of favour with the gods and the civilisation was utterly destroyed and the island submerged into the ocean.

Santorini, or Thera as is its official name, was home to a very advanced Minoan colony back in 3600 BC, remnants of which you can see today in the archaeological sites of the island. The place was prosperous and flourishing. In 1600 BC, the volcano of Thera erupted. This is confirmed to have been one of the most violent volcanic events in human history. All life on the island was exterminated. The eruption caused enormous tsunamis that hit the island of Crete, causing irreversible destruction to the Minoan civilisation there and gradually leading to its overall extinction. The tsunamis farther hit Egypt, causing so much trouble there that it is said the Biblical Ten Plagues of Egypt were about all the problems caused by the eruption of Thera. (I learned this on Tumblr myself! XD)

Most importantly, Thera itself, which used to be a round island called Strongíli (Στρογγύλη - round), exploded and half the island was submerged into the sea. This is why Santorini now has sort of a half-moon shape.

So, it comes down to whether Santorinians or Greeks in general think Atlantis is a real place. I don’t know about that. However, believing that Plato was inspired by Santorini’s story is not far off, neither is the theory that it is the real version of Atlantis, since historians entertained this possibility first. Santorinians weren’t fooling you, neither were they being weirdos, they just were asserting their wishful confidence that their island was indeed the inspiration for Atlantis. 

Santorini during and after the eruption. Graph by this article in ResearchGate.

Santorini from above. You can tell all the parts that blew up and took a dive. Fun fact: the central darker small land (Νέα Καμένη - Nea Kameni - New Burnt Land) was birthed by the still very much active volcano progressively since the 16th century and it is the youngest geological formation in the Mediterranean Sea. 

Knossian Board Game

This is modeled after an ancient bronze age artefact unearthed at Knossos, believed by archeologists to be an early board game.

The game is a chess clone and playing it will increase the logic skill.

Make sure when you are placing the object in build mode, you first attach chairs to the board game itself, and then place a table of your choosing underneath the game (using the commands testingcheats true and then bb.moveobjects on). If you do not follow these steps, the sims will not be able to sit and play!

BOARD GAME DOWNLOAD - Dropbox (no ads)

Ceramic octopus jug, Minoan, 1500-1450 BC

from The Heraklion Museum, Crete

Here are some of the pictures of the Minoan/Mycenaean look I did yesterday! Mind you, it's all very generalized since I haven't made any clothing studies from these time periods yet, so I had just grabbed random clothes and jewelry from my closet that I could at least pass off as the ~vibe~ . I went for a pretty simple interpretation of makeup back then and ended up not really putting a whole lot on my face before the decorative elements, just a very thin amount of white foundation, but even so I figured my skin is pretty pale as it is that if this were historical I probably would have just been fairly bare faced anyway in a similar fashion. I tried to stay pretty close to how makeup might be applied back then and not go too anachronistic, and if I did it was for photographic or artistic purposes (namely, light contouring on my nose not for any sort of like, modern feature minimization, but to make sure my own Greek ethnic features weren't flattened by lighting levels or camera perspective)

Overall this was a really fun exploration of historic culture! Seeing the finished makeup on myself kind of brought over this cultural euphoria for me, even though many things have changed since ancient Mediterranean civilizations, there's almost a feeling of sameness in exploring the history of your heritage and seeing someone who looks or feels like you in ancient art. (But also a brief little disclaimer: the Mediterranean has been an extremely diverse region for thousands of years! I'm just one way of looking and that absolutely isn't representative of all people of Greece, neither then nor now!) I want to explore more historical fashions within this realm, and next time try a more extreme version of the makeup, something that feels more on the ceremonial side than casual like this one.

oh hello! i made a little uquiz assigning you a historical period (and maybe i call you gay)

~ Necklace of assorted beads.

Culture: Early Aegean, Minoan

Period: Bronze Age, Middle Minoan Period

Date: 1800–1550 B.C.

Medium: Stone and gold