- 5 weeks ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Three and a half thousand years ago, the first great European civilisation collapsed.
00:10Desperate and bewildered people resorted to sacrificing their own children.
00:18What was it that brought them to this terrible end?
00:30This is the story of a glorious civilisation and its total collapse.
00:47The Minoan Empire was so rich and so inventive, it passed into legend.
00:53At its heart, on the island of Crete, stood mighty palaces.
00:59The largest of them all was Knossos.
01:03But why, at its very peak, did the Minoan's world crumble?
01:08The Minoan Empire is a geologist determined to solve that mystery.
01:18The Minoan Empire is a geologist.
01:22The Minoan Empire is a geologist.
01:26Floyd McCoy is a geologist determined to solve that mystery.
01:33For decades, he's been captivated by the haunting ruins the Minoans left behind.
01:41Three and a half thousand years ago, Knossos stood invincible.
01:48Long before the ancient Greek Empire flourished, Knossos was the biggest building in Europe.
02:05Here, Minoans lived in luxury with Europe's first paved roads and running water.
02:17From Crete, the Minoans controlled a vast trading empire.
02:21So powerful were their navies, they lived centuries free from invasion.
02:28But when the Greeks from the mainland finally took over Crete, the Minoans' wealth and power had disappeared.
02:35Their towns and palaces went up in flames.
02:48The mystery here is what has happened.
02:50How and why has this been destroyed?
02:53What has caused this devastation here?
03:00Trying to answer that question will take Floyd on a remarkable journey.
03:05Gathering evidence from other scientists around the globe.
03:08But where better to start looking for clues than at Knossos itself?
03:12From an archaeologist who used to be a curator here.
03:22Colin MacDonald has evidence of something never before seen in Minoan culture.
03:27Sheer savagery.
03:29While digging near Knossos, archaeologists came across the skull of a small child.
03:39Nearby were the skeletons of four more children.
03:42When they studied these bones more closely, they came to a grim conclusion.
03:47The children had all been murdered.
03:49Those murders had taken place at just the time the Minoan Empire was collapsing.
03:54Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the bones which have been found here were the great knife marks, cut marks, slicing marks on the bones themselves.
04:16Which indicate that meat was actually sliced off these human bones.
04:23There was also found a large storage jar.
04:26And inside were bones with cut marks on them.
04:31And an edible snail called the Burburus snail.
04:35And it is highly possible that these were actually cooked together.
04:39And that we are talking about ritual cannibalism.
04:52What could make a civilised people literally devour its own children?
04:58Floyd believes he is searching for a culprit so powerful, it shattered the foundations of this society.
05:04A disaster caused by the one force the Minoans thought they understood, nature.
05:11Well it seems pretty clear that we are looking at a civilisation, a vast civilisation.
05:18Suddenly it is gone, it has been done in.
05:22Something quite that big really does point towards natural causes.
05:27This natural disaster has become almost a personal quest.
05:31It has become something to look for that is hard to stop looking for.
05:43Floyd is no stranger to natural disasters.
05:45He grew up on the islands of Hawaii, home to some of the most spectacular forces of nature, volcanoes.
05:52I was a child growing up in Hilo, Hawaii.
06:14I was surrounded by volcanoes.
06:16Then they were erupting every so often.
06:18In fact, very often.
06:20And they were wonderful to see.
06:22In high school we would go up and spend all night just staring at the volcano erupting.
06:26It was just part of my life.
06:28Part of my life.
06:42His experiences as a child inspired him to become a geologist.
06:46And learn about all the worlds volcanoes.
06:49But he became drawn to one in particular.
06:52An ancient and mighty explosion.
06:54That seemed on a scale like no other.
07:04That volcano lies 100 kilometres north of Crete.
07:08It's on a much smaller island, called Thera.
07:10Today, Santorini.
07:12Three and a half thousand years ago, when the Minoan civilisation was at its height, Thera erupted, blasting the island apart.
07:22Despite its distance from Crete, Floyd feels sure the eruption of Thera is the reason behind the end of the Minoans.
07:40He's come to Thera to see the evidence for himself.
07:44Something huge has happened here.
07:56We're at the top of a volcano.
07:57Here's a huge hole in the ground.
07:59Excavated by a tremendous eruption.
08:01Now I'm from Hawaii where the volcanoes are perhaps just as big in height.
08:05But nothing like this.
08:07They're quiet, tranquil compared to what has happened here.
08:10This is something of epic proportions.
08:15This is the stuff of legends.
08:19The eruption ripped the heart out of Thera.
08:22And the centre of the island crashed into the sea.
08:25All that remains is a necklace of islands, surrounding a vast crater, called a caldera.
08:31Today the caldera is filled by a deep sea.
08:35The story of what happened that fateful summer is still written in the landscape.
08:50In this cliff face behind me is a wonderful depiction of what happened during this eruption.
08:57The sequence of events.
08:59Each layer tells us such a story about how the eruption proceeded.
09:04The dynamics of it.
09:05The explosivity.
09:06All this kind of thing.
09:07To start with.
09:09A lower layer.
09:10That textured layer right at the bottom.
09:12That's a layer of pumice.
09:14Pumice like this.
09:15This is pumice.
09:16Light stuff.
09:17Very frothy material.
09:19It flew up.
09:21And then plopped down.
09:23The pumice was blasted up into the sky in a plume 36 kilometers high.
09:30It plummeted back to earth.
09:32Blanketing the island in a layer up to 10 meters thick.
09:36Then the eruption dramatically changed character.
09:42What has happened is seawater has entered the vent over there.
09:48It has become ultra explosive.
09:51And out of the vent now comes horizontal sweeping avalanches of hot gas.
09:56That are pushing pumice and ash across the landscape at really just roaring speeds.
10:04Deadly torrents of searing hot ash swept across the landscape.
10:08Smothering the entire island.
10:10Now up there big rocks start to fly in.
10:18These are huge pieces of lava flows that are parts of the island that is now being blasted a bit.
10:24Then right up there another change.
10:50Now torrential rainstorms occur because there is lightning.
10:54Huge thunderstorms develop out of this eruption cloud.
10:57Torrential rains now rain down on the landscape.
11:02The whole slope just starts to move downhill.
11:05As it moves downhill it leaves larger rocks behind.
11:10And that's what that layer is right there.
11:12Then the eruption's over.
11:15How long did this take?
11:18From historic eruptions the best estimate is about four days.
11:23Give it a day for each one of those layers to happen.
11:26You get an idea of the intensity of what happened here.
11:31Floyd knows the eruption was big.
11:34What he doesn't know is how it could have devastated an entire civilization.
11:39This eruption happened about three and a half thousand years ago, 3600 years ago.
11:47This eruption blew.
11:49The timing of the eruption is almost precisely when the civilization, the Manoan civilization goes into a decline.
11:56There has to be a connection.
12:01What could that connection be?
12:03The clues are beginning to emerge from the ash.
12:05This is Akrotiri, a town on Fira where the eruption claimed its first victims.
12:22It was completely buried by the volcano, and the memory of it vanished.
12:31It was only in the 1960s that Greek archaeologists began to realize what wonders lay hidden.
12:39A layer of pumice 10 meters thick covered the town, creating a time capsule.
12:49Buildings up to three stories high were beautifully preserved.
12:53But what of the people who once lived in these buildings?
13:17Although it is risky to estimate with the extent of the excavation we have so far,
13:22I suspect the estimate of the population is about two and three thousand people.
13:34But there is a mystery about this bustling town.
13:37No bodies have ever been found.
13:41Christos Dumas believes the people were scared off by the first stirrings of the volcano.
13:52This is the thin layer of ash.
13:59And this is found all over the island, everywhere we have excavated.
14:05And after, probably this was the warning for people to leave.
14:11Panicked by this first dusting of ash, the people must have fled Akrotiri.
14:18But did they escape the island of Thira itself?
14:23They couldn't.
14:26To remove so many people you need a whole fleet.
14:30So where did they go?
14:32Christos Dumas thinks they fled to this barren patch of land,
14:37desperately hoping that enough boats would come and carry them to safety.
14:41This part is one of the harbours.
14:50It is the most obvious place.
14:51And perhaps as an escape, what other place would be more convenient than the harbour?
14:58Where they could have found some means to escape.
15:01Then the pumice started to come pounding down.
15:08The avalanches of blistering ash that followed, erased everything from view.
15:14It was a desperate situation.
15:30Crowds of people could have been cornered, frantically scouring the horizon for boats.
15:35But the eruption was unstoppable.
15:38And on this very spot, Christos Dumas believes the people of Akrotiri
15:42was smothered by the ash, the first victims of the volcano.
15:51This is not the only time this kind of human tragedy has happened.
16:00These are the people of the Roman town of Herculaneum.
16:03They too were waiting for boats that never came.
16:07The avalanches of ash that killed them froze their bodies in time.
16:12The first the Minoans on Crete would have seen was a terrifying sight on the horizon.
16:29A plume of ash 36 kilometres high.
16:31Fortunately the winds blew the ash in the opposite direction.
16:35But the volcano had a lethal legacy they couldn't escape.
16:40Floyd has a theory that the blast was to hit the Minoans in three entirely different ways.
16:54He believes the first blow would have come within days.
16:58When Crete was hit by another terrifying force he knows all too well.
17:02In 1946 he looked on as giant waves battered the island of Hawaii, killing scores of people.
17:15As a young child I saw Hilo, my hometown destroyed by huge waves.
17:22Those waves were 54 feet high in front of our house.
17:26I was terrified later to walk through fields and find debris still left from that wave that might,
17:33underneath there might be a body or something.
17:48The explosive power of eruptions can bring volcanoes crashing into the sea.
17:52pushing water up into giant waves called tsunamis.
18:11The waves can travel thousands of kilometres across oceans.
18:15When they hit land, the results can be cataclysmic, as they were a century ago in Southeast Asia.
18:24Krakatau in Indonesia, 1883.
18:2736,000 people killed by an eruption that was far less in intensity,
18:32less than half the intensity of this eruption here.
18:36Those people were killed by tsunamis.
18:40This means then that we should perhaps be looking for tsunami deposits here,
18:45deposits left by these large waves.
18:50Evidence of those deposits has eluded archaeologists for decades.
18:54Now Floyd has heard of an intriguing find that just might be what he's looking for.
19:10In 1997, a team of geologists came to this saltwater marsh.
19:18They drilled deep down into the ground and removed a core of mud.
19:23Back at a laboratory in Britain, one of the team started sifting through the core.
19:29After months of patient work, Dale Dominey Howes found what he was looking for.
19:40Tiny fossilised shells called forams.
19:45The forams are actually very helpful to us because they live in a whole range of different environmental settings.
19:51Some like living in very shallow marine conditions like on marshes.
19:55Others prefer to live in estuaries and some in much deeper water.
20:00They're actually very useful because each individual species looks very different.
20:06Under the microscope, the difference between the shells becomes clear.
20:11The one on the right once lived in shallow water.
20:14The one on the left originally lived in very deep water.
20:18As Dale examined the mud core more closely, he found something very peculiar.
20:27As you go down through the core, you're going back in time.
20:31And all through the larger part of the core, we're finding absolutely no forams at all.
20:37When you get to this point, something very exciting happens.
20:40There's a very thin band or layer of sand.
20:43And this sand is absolutely stuffed with marine forams.
20:47This type of forams found in the layer are fully marine and come from much deeper water offshore.
20:56This means something very unusual happened here.
20:59A very unusual high energy event that's brought these deep water species from offshore into the marsh.
21:06So I suspect that this is actually the signature of a tsunami that's flooded into the marsh.
21:19Dale's evidence suggests the volcano on Thera produced waves that travelled 100 kilometres across the open sea.
21:27Their effect would have been felt right along the northern coast of Crete.
21:31But most of all at harbour towns like Palay Castro.
21:38Floyd has come to Palay Castro to meet one man who can tell him exactly how destructive those waves might have been.
21:49Costas Sinolakis chases tsunamis around the world.
21:53As they break, he rushes to the scene to map their destruction.
21:57In 1992, there was this big tsunami in Nicaragua.
22:02This time, Costas has come home.
22:04He was brought up on Crete.
22:06With his expert knowledge, he's built one of the world's most sophisticated computer models of tsunamis.
22:16Costas has spent weeks feeding data about the Theran eruption into his computer.
22:21Now he's ready to show Floyd the results.
22:26Can we see the wave in motion?
22:27Yes.
22:28Let's try to get to the animations.
22:31You see, this is the initial wave, right?
22:33Oh, there it is.
22:34It has already been generated.
22:36The eruption has taken place.
22:41Oh, look at that.
22:44Oh, that's really neat.
22:45Costas' model shows the waves coming from Thera and hitting the coast of Crete.
22:55At Palay Castro, the bay is enclosed and the waves would have become trapped, their effect magnified.
23:04Look at that.
23:06So the high water comes in, inundates things and stays.
23:08Yes, it does, because you have waves that are getting trapped in there, inside this bay.
23:17This is why Palay Castro is such a unique location, because not only you have the effect of the first wave coming in,
23:23but you have the effect of the trapped waves that are trapped inside the bay.
23:27So if one building wasn't destroyed, it's going to be destroyed.
23:30Unfortunately, for the Minoans, yes.
23:32The waves at Palay Castro would have formed a towering wall of water three meters high.
23:47What kind of damage would that do?
23:49Well, you know, a three-meter wave coming in into a small harbor would have been devastating.
23:56All of the boats and ships would have been sort of thrown out on the coast everywhere.
24:04And here is a civilization that depended on boats and trade. It would have been devastating.
24:10Well, there would have been nothing left.
24:12One of the things that we find out in the field when we go there a week after a tsunami hits,
24:18is we cannot find absolutely any boats to use in our surveys.
24:22Why? Because all of the boats, they're gone.
24:24They've been destroyed.
24:25They've all been destroyed.
24:31And wouldn't have been just the boats.
24:34The wave would have traveled upstream on the river.
24:37And would have been flooded the area surrounding the river.
24:43So salt in the soils would have destroyed the soil.
24:47And one could couple that with the fact that all of their warehouses,
24:51storage areas, or their food supplies that they were bringing in or exporting,
24:56would all have been, you know, destroyed or wet.
24:59The waves would have been even more destructive on other parts of the north coast.
25:00In some places, they would have reached 12 meters high.
25:02The waves would have been even more destructive on other parts of the north coast.
25:04In some places, they would have reached 12 meters high.
25:05The waves would have been even more destructive on other parts of the north coast.
25:06In some places, they would have reached 12 meters high.
25:07The waves would have been even more destructive on other parts of the north coast.
25:08In some places, they would have reached 12 meters high.
25:12The waves would have been even more destructive on other parts of the north coast.
25:21In some places, they would have reached 12 meters high.
25:25Floyd is now sure tsunamis devastated the coast.
25:40But the huge waves weren't enough to wipe out an entire civilization.
25:45There must have been more.
26:00His hunt for the eruption's longer-lasting impact begins with a fresco.
26:06We're extraordinarily fortunate in that wonderful pieces of art were preserved in the ash
26:12that buried the ancient city of Akroteri.
26:15And among that art is an image of what the island looked like before the eruption.
26:21And in there is a very nice depiction of an island sitting inside another island with a ring of water around it.
26:32But most extraordinary, it shows a huge city sitting on that island.
26:38All of that may represent the pre-eruption landscape,
26:44and if so, then there was even a larger city sitting within that caldera,
26:49and all of that island city vaporized by the eruption.
26:55This evidence of another city on Thera is puzzling.
26:59How could an island this small support so many people in such luxury?
27:04Archaeologists are unearthing clues that show just how crucial Thera was as a source of the Minoans' legendary wealth.
27:21In this building alone, they discovered 400 pots.
27:29So many they must have been produced on an industrial scale.
27:34Then they found a vast number of lead discs, precisely cast to the Minoan standard for weights and measures.
27:51We have, so far, discovered here two-thirds of the total amount of lead weights found in the entire Aegean, including Crete.
28:04So, trade was the main activity which produced wealth.
28:10And, therefore, we could say that it is a kind of Hong Kong of the prehistoric Aegean.
28:17Archaeologists already knew that the Minoans' trading empire spanned three continents.
28:23Now they realized that Thera was one of the most important marketplaces in the Aegean,
28:28where the Minoan world came to buy and sell its goods.
28:32When the eruption ripped the island apart, that marketplace was wiped out.
28:38The impact of this eruption on the Minoans, I mean, on Crete.
28:45Suddenly, their trading hub here is gone, vaporized.
28:49This core of their trade routes has disappeared.
28:53That had to have had a huge impact.
28:59Floyd now believes the Minoans suffered a series of blows.
29:03The people of Thera were engulfed by the ash.
29:06Huge waves wrought havoc on the coast of Crete.
29:10The marketplace of the Minoan Empire was obliterated.
29:14But he thinks even this wasn't enough to destroy the Minoan civilization.
29:19He's sure the volcano had another legacy, the most deadly yet.
29:24This part of the story starts back on the island of Thera, with a brainwave from one British geologist.
29:42Steve Sparks has spent decades studying the scale of the eruption.
29:46But over the years, one piece of the puzzle simply refused to fit.
29:50Algae.
29:59Fossilized algae lie littered high up on the slopes of Thera.
30:02But that doesn't make sense.
30:04This type of algae doesn't live on hillsides.
30:08Steve saw that the algae must have been blasted up here, by the force of the explosion.
30:14But from where?
30:18It could only have been from a place where these algae do live.
30:25A shallow sea.
30:27That means there must have once been a shallow sea inside the crater.
30:35Now, a new picture of the island before the blast was beginning to emerge.
30:40This is what the volcano might have looked like if you'd looked at it from a satellite at that time.
30:46You can see here this large Cordera depression already existing.
30:50You can also see a large volcanic island, which must have existed,
30:54because there's very good evidence that this island was blown up during the Minoan eruption,
31:00and you find bits of it in the deposit.
31:04This new picture, with a differently shaped island and a shallow sea,
31:09had startling implications for the scale of the eruption.
31:13I was walking along the Caldera rim with a research student a few years ago,
31:17looking down into the great Caldera,
31:19and it suddenly struck me that the existence of the shallow sea,
31:23before the eruption,
31:24might mean that the eruption's actually very much larger than we'd previously supposed.
31:31Could it be that all previous estimates were too low?
31:34The size of this eruption had been estimated from the amount of ash
31:38that came pouring out.
31:40Steve now suspected that millions of tons of ash may not have been counted,
31:45because the shallow sea would have trapped that ash,
31:48until it was filled to the brim.
31:53If this hypothesis is right,
31:55then an enormous amount of volcanic ash was trapped within the Caldera itself,
31:59and when the Caldera collapsed and crashed down into the earth,
32:03this material would have been taken with it.
32:08The force of the blast brought the volcano crashing down,
32:12and it created the deep sea that exists today.
32:16Steve is convinced that at the bottom of that deep sea lies a thick layer of ash.
32:22Add this hidden ash to previous estimates,
32:25and the real size of the eruption doubles.
32:29This would make it perhaps the second largest eruption on earth in the last 10,000 years.
32:44Up to 70 cubic kilometers of ash were blasted into the atmosphere,
32:53and with that ash came something else far more destructive,
32:57sulfurous gas.
33:01If we were right about the scale of this eruption,
33:03then it could have been very bad news for the Minoans,
33:06because not only would there have been an enormous amount of volcanic ash in the atmosphere,
33:10but very large amounts of volcanic gas, in particular sulfur dioxide.
33:15This would have had implications for the Minoans,
33:18because large eruptions of this kind with huge amounts of sulfur dioxide can alter climate,
33:23and this may have had an effect, a big effect after the eruption.
33:28Steve's idea of doubling, nearly doubling the size of this eruption here on Serra,
33:32now brings it up to the same category as the eruption, for example, of Tambora, 1815 in Indonesia.
33:40That eruption was huge, the biggest in the last 10,000 years.
33:46It changed the global climate for years afterwards.
33:50In fact, the year directly after that eruption is known as the year without a summer.
33:55There was frost in New England, in England, in Germany.
34:04Crops could not grow, and it led to mass starvation.
34:10Might the Minoans on Crete have faced a climate change just as severe?
34:17The answer may lie with climate modeler Mike Rampino.
34:20Large explosive volcanic eruptions put a lot of dust and fine ash up into the atmosphere,
34:32but they also put sulfur dioxide gas.
34:35This goes up about 20 miles up into the atmosphere.
34:39It's converted into little droplets of sulfuric acid,
34:43and these fine droplets act like a veil, cutting out the sunlight that would normally come in
34:47and warm the Earth's surface, causing the Earth's surface to get cooler.
34:53If Mike Rampino knows how much sulfur is produced by an eruption,
34:58his computer model can forecast how much the climate will change.
35:01We're using a new estimate of the size of the eruption supplied by Steve Sparks.
35:17And Steve suggests that the eruption was twice as big as we previously thought.
35:22When we put that much volcanic aerosols into the atmosphere in our computer model
35:26and spread it around the world, we see quite a significant effect on the Earth's climate.
35:35We can see from the blue colors here a climatic cooling, especially concentrated in Europe and Asia and North America,
35:44of one to two degrees Celsius.
35:46That doesn't sound like very much, but that's the average annual temperature drop.
35:50The summer temperatures, which are the most important for crops, would drop even more than the annual average.
35:57And so the summers at these times will be especially cool, especially wet,
36:02and the crop yields will suffer accordingly.
36:05Mike's model suggests years of ruined harvests,
36:10but without physical evidence, Floyd would have no more than an enticing theory.
36:14Proof has come from an unlikely source far away.
36:21The bogs of Ireland.
36:35Slices of trees from these bogs contain a record of climate stretching back over 7,000 years.
36:50Each year the trees put on a ring of growth.
36:58During the good years, those growth rings are thick.
37:00In bad years, so small they can be hard to measure.
37:06When Mike Bailey measured the tree rings in one particular sample,
37:10something made him sit up and take notice.
37:19This is a piece of Irish oak.
37:21It grew for about 300 years and then was buried in a peat bog
37:25and has survived to the present time.
37:26It was actually growing about 3,500 years ago.
37:30Now my interest in this is that when you look at the exactly dated rings across this period,
37:38we find that the tree has been growing quite well up until 1628 BC, which is this ring,
37:45and 1627 there's no summer growth, nor in 1626, nor for about 10 years thereafter.
37:51And these are the narrowest rings in the entire life of this tree,
37:55and clearly it's the worst growth conditions that this tree had seen in its lifetime.
38:00The trees can't tell us exactly what happened, but the logic is that they were probably responding to increased coldness, or increased wetness, or possibly both.
38:12The thing about wetness on a peat bog is that if you raise the amount of water in the peat, raise the water table,
38:23you're likely to cover up the roots of the trees and affect them in that way.
38:27So I certainly became interested in whether this environmental downturn, probably involving cold and wet, was due to the eruption of Thera.
38:38Absolute proof that the Irish oak trees were stunted by the eruption of Thera has just been reported from one of the most desolate parts of the world.
38:56The ice sheets of Greenland have built up over thousands of years from annual layers of snow.
39:17As the snow falls, anything lingering in the atmosphere is swept up and locked into the ice.
39:27Sulfur from volcanic eruptions is trapped as sulphuric acid.
39:32The snow that fell three and a half thousand years ago is now over 700 metres deep.
39:38When Danish scientists tested the ice at that level, they found a layer of sulphuric acid.
39:48Embedded in that acid layer were tiny shards of volcanic ash.
39:53The shards have just been chemically fingerprinted.
39:56The unpublished results have convinced the scientists that the ash came from Thera.
40:01I mean, it's fantastic news because what it gives us is the final link in the chain.
40:11What you've got is Thera linked to the acid in Greenland.
40:15The acid in Greenland is occurring at exactly the same time as this reduced growth in the Irish trees.
40:21So what you're seeing here are the direct environmental consequences of the eruption of Thera.
40:27That is fantastic.
40:31Floyd is now convinced that the volcano's aftermath so damaged the climate, harvests failed.
40:47He's tantalizingly close to explaining how the Minoans were felled by the eruption.
40:53And yet there's one last problem that threatens to jeopardize his entire theory.
40:58Clay tablets.
41:02Many were written decades after the eruption.
41:06Covered with Minoan writing, they are proof that their culture survived well beyond the blast.
41:13It was fully 50 years after the eruption that a new script appeared.
41:18An ancient form of Greek, the language of the Minoans' conquerors.
41:22The problem we have is that the eruption itself cannot be said to have wiped out Minoan civilization.
41:38Minoan civilization continued, although it declined for at least a 50 year period after the eruption itself.
41:45The Minoans had survived each successive blow from the volcano, the eruption itself, the tsunamis and the failed harvests.
41:56But these blows had gone deep. How deep would only become clear with the final piece of the puzzle.
42:03It was found near the royal palace of Knossos, buried amongst the bones of the five murdered children.
42:26The children's bones were found in this very, very small area here, in a burnt destruction layer.
42:37And with these bones, which were in a state of disorder, were also found vases which we term ritual.
42:45The striking thing about these vases is the way they were decorated.
42:57They're covered with sea creatures. Some have starfish. Several are painted with octopus.
43:04The Minoans were painting the vases they used for religion with images from the deep.
43:10For Colin, the timing is crucial. He believes it's only after the eruption and the tsunamis that they started using this so-called marine style.
43:24This association of the marine style and ritual vases is very important because it indicates to us a totally new awareness of the power of the sea.
43:34And this was incorporated into their religion as a totally new aspect of their religion, probably to try and ward off future disasters which might have appeared to them to emanate from the sea, to come from the sea itself.
43:53The pottery suggests the damaging after effects of the volcano were as much psychological as physical.
44:01Colin believes the Minoans began to see their natural world in an entirely different way.
44:08Before the eruption, the Minoans observed rigid hierarchy. At the top stood the kings in palaces like Knossos, revered as priests as well as rulers.
44:23They controlled the shrines to the gods. They were even deemed capable of controlling the force of nature itself.
44:34But a stunning archaeological find has convinced Colin that after the eruption, all this changed.
44:45First, a glimmer of gold, then an ivory leg.
44:54Once they restored it, the archaeologists realized they'd found a religious statue.
45:07But what was so striking was where it was found, far from the palace where the priest kings presided, in a humble building in Palacastro, which lay beyond their control.
45:22Colin believes this shrine shows Minoan society had fallen apart from within.
45:34After the eruption, communities such as Palacastro no longer believed in the divine authority of the big palatial centres like Knossos.
45:43And this is all part of the fragmentation of society that we see in the 50 year period following the eruption itself.
45:51And this actually created a vacuum. And it was into this vacuum that mainland Greeks marched and ended Minoan culture and civilization as we knew it before.
46:05This is wonderful. This means that the eruption, the Thera eruption, had not so much an immediate effect, but a prolonged effect on the society.
46:13Floyd believes he's now pieced together what happened to the Minoans.
46:30Nature in the form of the volcano, the giant waves and the climate change had betrayed them.
46:37Desperate to repel these strange new terrors, the people turned away from their kings.
46:45They took their religion into their own hands. Order turned to chaos.
46:50And perhaps this is what explains the dreadful fate of the five children.
47:03In desperation, some Minoans were driven to extremes to win back their gods.
47:08They sacrificed their children. The greatest offering they had.
47:16For Floyd, the quest is over. In the end, it wasn't only the physical damage that brought the Minoans to their knees.
47:22He's convinced that Minoan society finally fell apart when the world they thought they knew turned against them.
47:40Did these people have a sense of conquering nature? Did they have a sense that they could occupy this landscape and control it? Quite likely.
47:56We have the same notion today, I think, in the thinking that we have conquered our environment and we've conquered nature.
48:05But you know, nature can strike back. The cataclysmic event is going to happen again.
48:12It's going to happen again.
48:42Transcription by CastingWords
49:00
|
Up next
44:11
58:41
58:42
52:51
Recommended
58:21
5:02
58:23
1:41:35
19:32
58:59
59:40
45:12
48:25