Word: santorini
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Dates: during 1972-1972
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Such is the scenario proposed by Professor Marinatos, the autocratic old genius of Greek archaeology, who has spent the past four summers excavating the rich Minoan town that he discovered on Santorini. The site of his dig is shrouded in rosy dust, shaded by tin-roof sheds, and shielded by high fences. Situated on the southern horn of the main island in a spot sheltered from the sometimes blistering north wind, the site straddles a deep, dry gully. Marinates began his dig by tunneling through the pumice from the gully bed. "We hit the bull's-eye right away...
...placed Atlantis out beyond the "pillars of Hercules" (the Strait of Gibraltar). The mighty island kingdom, he related, sank beneath the sea 9,000 years before his time. But the specific details and descriptions that Plato gives indicate events that modern science shows to have occurred in and around Santorini at the height of the Age of Bronze. They fit everything that is known concerning the final bloom and tragic end of what Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans arbitrarily labeled "Minoan" civilization. "Minoan" and "Atlantean" may well have been the same thing...
...Athens museum show bas-reliefs of young men capturing bulls with the help of only staves and nooses; Plato describes just such a ritual hunt as taking place on Atlantis. Again, he says that the Atlantean metropolis was built of red, black and white native stone in pleasing combinations; Santorini's cliffs, intriguingly enough, are striped with just those three colors of rock...
What about Plato's insistence that ancient Atlantis sank from sight "in a day and a night"? Minoan Crete did nothing of the kind, of course, but Santorini did sink. Moreover, its sudden destruction brought down Crete, and with Crete went the whole Minoan civilization...
...bear the burden of their possessions, and became ugly to look upon, in the eyes of him [Zeus] who has the gift of sight . . . filled as they were with lawless ambition and power." Therefore Zeus destroyed them. As Professor Marinates continues to unearth evidence from his dig on Santorini, Plato's story of Atlantis begins to read more and more like actual history...