Archaeologists from Turkey and Israel have identified the first victims of the greatest natural disaster of the Bronze Age, a series of tsunamis that swept across the eastern Mediterranean around 1600 BC The two bodies, a young man and a dog, were buried under from the stones of a building, partially torn down by the giant waves that reached the Turkish coast.
The tsunamis, in turn, are linked to colossal volcanic eruptions on the island of Santorini (or Tera, as the ancient Greeks called it), in the Aegean Sea. The three or four phases of the event are estimated to have thrown 100 cubic kilometers of volcanic material into the air, covering the island with a layer of fragments up to 60 meters thick and casting ash over much of the Mediterranean.
The process seems to have been so apocalyptic that some scholars even hypothesized that it would have inspired the myth of the submersion of Atlantis, recorded more than a millennium later by the Athenian philosopher Plato. However, finding the remains of those directly affected by the tragedy had been very difficult until now.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve fully resolved the missing victims issue, but our findings provide some insights into the events and people’s reactions in that very short window of time,” he told leaf geo-archaeologist Beverly Goodman-Tchernov, University of Haifa, Israel. Together with her Turkish colleague Vasif Sahoglu of the University of Ankara, she coordinated the study on the findings that has just come out in the scientific journal PNAS.
The pair and their colleagues studied the archaeological site of Cesme-Baglararasi, now on Turkey’s Asian coast. In the Bronze Age, the place was a busy trading post, with evidence of the arrival of goods from the so-called Minoan civilization, whose center was the island of Crete and which also encompassed Santorini and other insular territories in the Aegean. Today the site is about 200 m away from the sea, but there are indications that it was closer to the waves at the time of the disaster.
A series of archaeological “signatures” indicate the association between the human and canine skeletons and the Santorini catastrophe. The bodies were buried by stones that fell asymmetrically, leaving part of the building standing on the other side — consistent with the action of a tsunami, which hits only one side, rather than an ordinary earthquake, which shakes the buildings more “equally”.
The sediments from the destruction layers also contain the remains of marine micro-organisms and mollusc shells that are normally well attached to the sea floor—a sign that some violent process tore them away, hurling them ashore. Finally, there is the presence of volcanic ash whose composition and age match that of the Santorini eruption. The dates obtained by the researchers indicate that the event would have happened from the year 1612 BC — because of the difficulty of calibrating the raw data against our calendar, the exact date cannot yet be established.
According to Goodman-Tchernov, previous hypotheses trying to explain why it was difficult to find the victims’ bodies must be at least partially correct. Some places in the Aegean were probably evacuated when the first signs of the eruptions appeared. People who were caught by the disaster at sea were also at risk of being incinerated by the volcanic material blasts.
“A tsunami of this magnitude must have swept parts of many coastal settlements into the sea, as well as giving no chance of survival for those already at sea at that time,” she explains.
But another important clue to what may have happened to many of the bodies appeared at the Turkish archaeological site itself. On top of the layers of debris formed by the waves, the researchers found holes that appear to have been dug in an attempt to rescue buried people. The boy and the dog whose skeletons were found were apparently too deep to be found.
Another open question is the wider impact of the tragedy on the region’s civilizations. Some are betting that Minoan rule in Crete would have declined after the eruptions and tsunamis, making room for the Mycenaeans, a people who spoke a primitive form of the Greek language, to conquer the island. The point is that, depending on the chronology adopted, the catastrophe would have happened too soon to be one of the causes of the Mycenaean conquest. The archaeologist says that, at the very least, the natural disaster contributed to the process.
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