The Minoan Legacy

Often, I found myself giving a glimpse of thoughts of where I would move on this world in order to acquire at least a little bit better life compared to what we currently have. Or when. Has there ever been a time in history when there was a civilization with a more dignified style of living? With society built with a more honest foundation toward themselves and their neighbors. With equality among people, genders, colors, skin, and different cultures. With not at all or just a hint of superstition and religiosity. With no temples higher than schools and people's homes. With cities without strong police keeping order and without military of any kind. Was there a country without fortifications, both real and metaphorical? With no or just a bearable hostility toward others...

There is definitely no such idealistic settlement in this world. Not now. But there was one before. More than three thousand years ago on the island of Crete. The first civilization in Europe and perhaps the first and last one that fits this description. The place where I would time travel without hesitation if I could.

We know them in our history books as the Minoans, but that wasn't their real name. What they called themselves we don't know. We don't understand their letters and can't read their tablets. They built marvelous settlements with almost all the modern infrastructure we are familiar with today. Glorious city-palaces with paved roads between them. With main squares where they preferred practicing sports and arts instead of going into temples to pray. They were people who invented and lived one idealistic, peaceful life and based their wealth on trades among themselves and all the others across the sea.

Unfortunately, after several attempts throughout eons, human nature and natural catastrophes destroyed Minoan civilization, and these people at the end dispersed fully, and their way of life faded away for good. Among neighboring civilizations and their saved documents, as well as with the Bible, their names were probably either Keftiu, Kaptarians, Caphtor, or Kabturi. Or if you like, we can even call them Atlanteans if we connect Plato's story with the Minoan volcanic eruption that reshaped the island of Thera in the middle of the second millennium BC. Perhaps we should wait for their Linear A script to be revealed by maybe another Rosetta Stone, but until then, Sir Evan's label for Minoans based on the old Greek mythology is the best we've got. Nevertheless, this blog post is not really history research, and more stories about related old times I tried to list below in the references, but one thing is for sure. The end of Minoan culture, which started with earthquakes and at least one cataclysmic volcanic eruption, faded and dispersed during the final couple of centuries of the second millennium with hostile raids and occupations over time from both directions: mainland Greece in the face of old Mycenaeans and ancient invaders from the direction of the Middle East.

However, their life based solely on manufacturing goods and food, honest trade, sports, arts, and all the non-hostile human activities was once indeed possible and flourishing. Unfortunately, their legacy is, as it seems, lost for good, and after more than three and a half thousand years, we are living in a world filled with fear of self-destruction with little hope for humanity to survive the next three millennia. Anyhow, the road, or to better say, the airplane, took us this summer to the island of Crete, and we landed at the Chania airport, which is also the military base that hosts both air and nearby naval forces. The sight of supersonic fighters constantly flying above the beaches, heavy military aircraft parked next to the civilian runway, and large destroyer ships anchored in Souda Bay was definitely not something old Minoans would evolve into if history played the cards differently. After visiting the Knossos archeological site and the wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated to these ancient people, I am certain of it.

Caused by the city's amazing scope and Minoan fascination for bulls, centuries after the fall of civilization, Greek mythology created one of the most famous stories with characters as strong as Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Theseus, and, of course, the Minotaur captured in the center of the labyrinth. On the other side, the most plausible truth of why Knossos was built the way it was built is simply because Crete was positioned on top of the movement of the African tectonic plate under the Eurasian plate. This is causing lots of earthquakes, small and big, and results from the complex geological process; the entire eastern side of the island is sinking while the western part is rising. The ancient builders purposely made the palace in this way in order to sustain constant ground shake, with buildings and chambers literally supporting each other from all directions.

It probably goes without saying that I am fascinated with Greece and the Greeks. Their amazing history and all the contributions their ancestors gave to the rest of the world are enormous. With this summer trip, I rounded out walking the lands of all three main stages of ancient Greek times. Classical Greece that belongs to the mainland north of Sparta, the Mycenaean epoch that precedes them in the time of Agamemnon, and now the ancient civilization of Minoans that precedes them all. Surely, there are many more sites to see, but somehow I felt today that I fulfilled the genuine urge to visit all the main places and to walk the same paths where stories from history (and mythology) took place.

Our prime vacation time this summer was in Agia Marina, a cute little place several kilometers west of Chania, where we spent a wonderful ten days exploring local beaches and took an excursion to the old Venetian harbor in the old city and its nautical museum with an exact replica of the Bronze Age Minoan ship. The second trip to Heraklion and Knossos completed our travel through the history of the island, and the following day-by-day travel video clip Viktor and I made hopefully will show you more than still images could, especially if you have never visited Crete before.

Surely, summer vacations are never about visiting museums and the history of the area. It is also about the present, and in the most hedonistic fashion, we also visited the Balos Lagoon, one of the greatest beaches in Europe, and, most of all, tried to enjoy the time by meeting local people and visiting local sites and the neighborhood. It is hard to say what we liked the most, and I guess the best thing is to say that Crete is an exceptional place to visit. Something we will definitely try to do again. Many thanks to all the good people we met this July, especially to the crew of Fly Fly Travel and their great guides, Nebojša and Dobrivoje, for all their super-professional work and help.

Image and video refs:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tp8ugeNBg07zE9q52
https://www.greecehighdefinition.com/greece/

Refs:
http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/knossos/articleKnossos01.html
http://paleoglot.blogspot.rs/2010/01/minoan-name-for-minoa.html
http://www.minoanatlantis.com/Minoan_Science.php
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22527821
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knossos
https://www.timemaps.com/civilizations/minoan-civilization/
http://ancient-greece.org/history/minoan.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/.../HIST101-2.3.2-MinoanCrete-FINAL.pdf
http://www.ancient.eu/Minoan_Civilization/

Atlanteans

If I am going to give a thought or two about ancient Atlantis, its mysterious people, and all the conspiracy theories behind it, there is no doubt that I'll first think of the origin of the story. Classical Greece and Plato. One of the most famous scholars from BC. In his own time, Plato was definitely the top Greek philosopher from ancient Athens, who lived in the fourth century before Christ and dedicated his entire scholarly life to philosophical research and development of modern society and politics. The method he used in his publications was dialogues, a very popular way of expressing scientific thoughts at the time. Plato's dialogues, in which he never took the role as one of the participants, were often the front story accompanied with narration, but in some of them he even excluded the narrator and presented his work in pure novel style, with his characters carrying the story all the way.

In regard to today's title, two dialogues are especially interesting—Timaeus and Critias. Participants in the dialogues were Socrates, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and Critias, and Plato tried to describe the perfect society time-framed way back before the old Classical Greece. In short, these two dialogues describe a tale from a man called Solon, another Athenian, who, during his travels throughout ancient Egypt, learned about mysterious people who lived and perished many generations before. Twenty years or so before these dialogues, Plato had written his masterpiece "The Republic", in which he discussed what he thought of an ideal state with a 'just man' and the meaning of justice in general from the point of view of Greek cities from the classical time. His ideal state was named 'Ancient Athens', placed in existence 9000 years before Plato's time (or 900 if the suggested error in translation is true), and governed with a superior and almost utopian society. As it seems, Atlanteans are used in Plato's books just as an example of how even the enemy that was so powerful, beyond any current comprehension, is incapable of defeating a perfectly regulated society. After that the story went wild, and Atlanteans, who tried to enslave the entire Mediterranean, were easily defeated by 'utopian' and perfectly organized Athenians. In the aftermath, their superb armada retreated to their island, and the gods in their final rage destroyed the entire Atlantean civilization, which Plato described in his famous words, "There occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea." In the second dialogue, "Critias", Plato described in more detail the origin of the 'ancient' Atlanteans, with extensive use of old Greek mythology, as Poseidon's heaven, who created a perfect society that ultimately, over time, started to fade out as soon as they started losing their divine origin and got overwhelmed in corruption.

Today, we have great knowledge about ancient Greek times, and so far there are no scientific facts in favor of "ancient of the ancient" Greek society that is older than 3 millenniums BC, who fought mighty civilizations that came from the other side of the Pillars of Hercules and both vanished without a single trace. However, there is a faint clue and tons of theories of where Plato really found inspiration for this incredible tale.

Reconstruction of a late Cycladic Ship (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

As for the faint clue, I would vote for the ancient Minoan civilization and their predecessors, who preceded the Greeks in the Aegean and suffered ultimate decimation from both natural disaster and human invaders. They lived on the island of Crete within the ancient settlements of Knossos and Gortyn and also on the northern Aegean island of Thera (Santorini) in the ancient site of Akrotiri, which, just like Roman Pompeii, is remarkably preserved after the tremendous volcanic eruption. Their civilization flourished in the late Bronze Age and, like in Plato's words, within a single day and night, around the year 1600 BC, disappeared into the sea in one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in the history of the entire world. What is today known as 'The Minoan eruption of Thera', seismologists tend to classify as four times more powerful than the well-known explosion of Krakatoa. If Minoans had more settlements in the neighborhood, which was likely, they were all destroyed and sunk during the natural reshaping of the archipelago. A massive eruption, no doubt, created a large tsunami wave that probably reached all the way to Crete and ultimately decimated the Minoan people in the northern part of the island. In the following years, pirates and thieves from the sea and land took the chance and made sure for Minoans to never recover to what they once were.

Well, in conclusion and after this small history glimpse, if you ask me, there is a fair chance that Plato's Atlanteans are truly based on ancient Minoans. After all, 2300+ years ago, in Plato's time, the world wasn't big, and the entire cradle of the civilization, as we popularly call Greek Classical times, was small and all about the Aegean Sea. Even the Mediterranean was too large for wooden galleys and far travels. Ancient Minoans came to the Aegean two millennia before Plato, and after their misfortune, I am sure the legends and myths about them grew slightly above the facts. Still, their language, clay tablets, art, pottery, architecture, and overall history prove they once were a very respectful and organized society.

There is no doubt that Atlanteans from Plato's 'Timaeus and Critias' served just a supporting role in this piece of philosophy, but still, ever since, the Atlantis story has had a large impact on literature, comic books, and movies. They are used in tons of novels and portrayed as an insanely advanced civilization with all the technological wonders, perfect cities, flying ships, state-of-the-art armory, etc. There is no bay or gulf in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Caribbean that some rich adventurer or scholar didn't try to find the Atlantean ruins or at least to post a new theory of the Atlantis site or a conspiracy theory of some sort. To be honest, I am really ok with that—if you look at it from the entertainment point of view, what you get is very much fun, and if you read it on the beach, it surely adds another level to your vacation time.

This is exactly what I did this summer, and during our ten days of R&R on Thassos Island of the northern Aegean, I loaded all three books of The Origin Mystery on my Kindle and swallowed them all in record time. Honestly, from this trilogy I expected a lot, and this is exactly what I got! You have to be brave to make yet another novel about Atlanteans, and A.G. Riddle wrapped it just right. He managed to connect several sci-fi genres into one successful story. For my taste all the sciences are there and connected perfectly. Biology, virology, genetic research including junk-DNA involvement, physics and space travel, quantum entanglement, Antarctica, known history, and the use of connection and conspiracy theories like the Nazi bell (Die Glocke) or the Roswell UFO sighting. Play with time dilation and hibernation. Space battles of enormous proportion. Explanation of gods and ancient astronauts. If you add the usual 'Indiana Jones' type of adventures and romance, there was no better choice for me this July. Perhaps, using so many connected sciences in the plot is too risky, as the author faces the challenge of choosing what is more important and deserves to be explained better at the expense of other technologies or speculations, but I don't mind. All in all, Riddle's Atlanteans are perhaps the best version I've read in a long while, and I warmly recommend it.

Reconstruction of the Akrotiri Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

As for the real Atlanteans, or in this case ancient Minoans, I hope some of next summer will lead us to the southern Aegean, and then this story will earn another post in the thread. No doubt with images from ancient Akrotiri. In the meantime, don't miss the below link with incredible scientific reconstructions from before the Minoan Eruption made by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archeology (LBI ArchPro).

Image credit:
* The Akrotiri Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)

Aegean Sea

Before I start writing about this amazing sea, first of all, I have to say that this story is equally about Greece, the oldest European country and the first known civilization in Europe. Surrounded by three seas, Greece is probably the most interesting place in the Mediterranean basin ever since it was formed and filled with water many millenniums ago. The Aegean Sea keeps the most important part in the history of mankind, being a natural barrier between civilizations independently developed over the west, east, and south. Once in those past times, today known as B.C., this was the center of the world. It was also the place where many amazing things were born that we know today as science, democracy, philosophy, mathematics, culture, and sport, along with all those "other inventions" like modern armies and wars, dictatorships, religion, divine beings...

Aegean Sea

Today, after two millenniums, looking at this part of the world from my point of view and my own relations to the Aegean Sea, it is all about geography, really. I actually live in southern Serbia, where four different seas are more or less equally distant from my current location, and in the past four decades, in one way or another, I visited all of them. Before, with my parents, and now with my own family, every summer vacation is reserved for spending up to two weeks at the zero-level elevation of the nearby seaside. After I spent several vacations on the Black, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, I decided that those simply are not comparable to the Aegean. Don't get me wrong here, all those three seas have their good sides and charm, but the Aegean is something special for me. Who knows why? Maybe my inner being is somehow attuned to it, or I am simply connected with it on some lower level of understanding, but whatever it is, I calculated that when I sum up all the time I was there, I got about 400 days of vacation time spent in Greece. If I spent all those days in a row, you would probably read this post in Greek instead, but the truth is, due to my perforated time spent there, I only have a basic understanding of probably the most beautiful written language in all of Europe. I can't be sure, but I think my first vacation in Macedonian Greece was at about the age of 2, more than 40 years ago, and until today I have probably visited about the same amount of different towns, fishermen villages, and tourist settlements all around the northern Aegean. I literally watched Macedonian Greece grow from a modest, unexplored country to the prestige destination for anyone expecting a great time for a short vacation during summer break. I might have spent lots of days in Greece, but my son already reached one "Greek" record—his first encounter with Greece was a couple of miles under the Olympus mountain when he was only a couple of cells old, if you know what I mean. He was also learning to walk and swim there, and I am sure you would agree that those are pretty big milestones in anybody's life.

The history of Greece is one of the most colorful tales of them all. Not many nations in the world survived and built their history for that long period of time, starting millenniums before Christ. The ancient Greeks came to Europe almost three millenniums B.C., but maybe the common origin point when it all started is back in the 8th century B.C., when they started to build a civilization known today as a cradle of Western civilization or the world we live in today. This post is too small to carry all the history of the region, so I will let you browse them all in the below links, and instead I will focus on just one period of time known as Classical Greece that flourished for a couple of hundred years, starting somewhere in the 5th century B.C.

Alexander the Great

It was the time when artistic and scientific thought rapidly evolved and shaped humanity as we know it today. If you ask me, this was the period of time relatively free of violence and conservative influences like religion or politics. It started after the fall of the last Athenian tyrant, or, if you will, after a series of dictatorships ruled the ancient Greek cities back in the 6th and 7th centuries before Christ. Aristotle defined the tyrant as "one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others". Looks familiar? Hmm, it seems to me that ancient Greeks gave dictatorships in heritage as well. It also looks like Classical Greece is just a period of time where Greeks tried to recover from hundreds of wasted years, and it was the time that they really wanted to change their society for the better. In a way they did just that, and in a whole period of the next 200 years, they created a foundation of modern society and planted scientific thought deep into future generations. Sadly, this period ended with the rise of military societies shaped in the form of the Macedonian empire and Alexander the Great (and his father, Phillip II, before him), who suddenly decided that their land was too small in size and the best way to defend it was to conquer the neighbors, and by neighbors, sometimes this meant thousands of miles away from Greece, as far as India. Sounds familiar again? It definitely resembles some of today's governments that defend their countries far away from their borders. Military societies are a direct product of development in science and engineering, and it was not much of a surprise that the rise of the Macedonian and later Roman empires were byproducts of inventions of new state-of-the-art armory and transportation in both land and sea. The better an army is armored and organized, the more dangerous it becomes for the region. Same as today, only with different actors and more lethal weapons.

Carl Sagan, in his famous COSMOS series, in episode VII, "The Backbone of Night", described the birth of science in these Classical Greece times in the northern Aegean by telling a story of Democritus and his understanding of atoms and matter. Democritus posted his atomic theory somewhere in the 5th century B.C., and like many other famous scientists of the time, he is a direct descendant of the Ionian School founded by Thales, establishing critical thinking as a foundation in modern scientific thought.


History is always fun, and not because it teaches us about ourselves and how to fix errors from the past, but sadly, it also shows us the future. Nothing changes overnight, especially human behavior, and although we are living in a modern, technologically superior time, the inner core of our social being remains the same. We still have wars, dictatorships, bullies, cold wars, and borders of many kinds. Well, it is time to stop with all that, at least in this post, so let's continue the main story and see how the Aegean Sea survived the centuries.

Geographically and also touristically speaking, the northern and southern parts of the sea look very different, and it is caused by one large cataclysmic event. It was the late Bronze Age, a couple of millennia before Christ, when one of the most powerful volcanoes literally exploded under the island of Thera, nowadays Santorini, in the middle of the Aegean. It is now well known as a Minoan eruption, and by recent study, seismologists tend to classify this explosion as four times more powerful than the well-known explosion of Krakatoa Island. This eruption probably caused the volcanic winter in the 17th century B.C. recorded in China by the "Bamboo Chronicles" with "yellow fog, a dim sun, then three suns, frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals". It also caused the devastation of Minoan civilization, the complete reshaping of Aegean geography, and the birth of many myths, including the one of sinking the entire island of Atlantis "in a single day and night of misfortune", recorded by Plato.

Reconstruction of the Santorini Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

Whatever happened, the Aegean is filled with many islands south of Athens compared to its northern counterpart. Our vacations are always targeting the northern part simply because it is located less than 1000 km from southern Serbia, and it is cheaper and easier to get there by car in less than 10 hours of driving. If it is a family vacation, this is also the best route. However, spending vacation on some Greek island is a completely different experience. There are only two major (in size) islands on the north, Thassos and Corcyra. I visited both of them several times, and their crystal-clear beaches, small fisherman villages, and unique people are simply totally different from the coastline where the tourism over the years almost destroyed small towns and turned them into hotels, clubs, discos, and loud streets. Don't get me wrong here, they also have their unique charm, but the vacation for me is more book-reading silence, wave sounds, and seagulls and less loud music and football match atmosphere. However, there are lots of islands in the southern Aegean left for me to explore. Plenty of time. I also need one thing to confirm there: once we indeed visited the southern Aegean, but from the eastern, Turkish side of the sea, and we felt a couple of small tremors that originated from the middle of the sea, according to our Turkish guide. I am wondering if this is really the truth, and if it is, how bothersome this is on the Greek islands lying exactly there in the "Santorini" area. After all, there are no dead volcanoes, just dormant ones, and we are still living on a very live planet, especially here where African and Eurasian tectonic plates are kissing each other at regular intervals.

Today, Greece is facing a big economic crisis, affecting millions of people, especially in large cities. Greece is probably on top of several European countries affected by the world's recession(s) initiated after the 9/11 event a decade ago. Greek misfortune mainly happened because of the organization of the Olympic Games back in 2004. The extremely large cost of this giant event forced Greece to take many credits and loans in order to fix infrastructure and build new arenas. The Olympics went well, but now, almost a decade after, Greece is facing bankruptcy and an empty state treasury. To be completely honest, I am not very good when it comes to understanding world economics. I am also not good at reading between the lines, so I am not sure what really is at stake here, but speculatively speaking, the major loans happened after the world's recession could be easily predicted, and I can only state a big amount of skepticism that bankers and international fund keepers who actually financed Greece at the time couldn't predict the world economy in the next decade. I mean, if there was even a shadow of doubt that something would happen, why provide credits in the first place? I am really not one of those who believe in conspiracy theories, but something is not really right here. Whether or not the world crisis is manufactured or this is just one natural financial wave of recessions, I am sure Greece will survive, just like in the previous three or so millenniums. Elegant bankers who loaned the money in the first place will survive too, and I am sure there will be no need to exclude caviar and champagne from their menus. After all, this is just another man-made crisis, not a natural disaster. It will pass.

Aegean Sea - Marble beach, Thassos

You know what else will survive? Aegean Sea. It doesn't care for all human stupidities. It ironically smiled two and a change millenniums ago when Alexander the Great fought Persians in wooden galleys, and I am sure it is smiling today when EU officials debate on excluding Greece from the monetary eurozone.

It will stay crystal clear, perfectly reflecting the mother star from sunrise till sunset.

Image ref:
* https://www.7reasons.net/?dt_portfolio=der-supervulkan-von-akrotiri&lang=en

Refs:
http://www.egeonet.gr/index_en.html
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/greekorg/greekorg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Greece
http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/democritus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Annals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/santorini/eruption.html
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/118706-Ye-gods-Ancient
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alexander_the_great.shtml