[Victoria]

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

. One thing that surprised me was that the book seemed to make much of the mystery concerning the destruction of Knossos. I thought it was reasonably accepted that the Minoan Civilisation was destroyed by the massive Santorini eruption.

https://www.sciencealert.com/tree-ri...eruption-thera

and

https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/san...tion/size.html

Thanks for the articles fantacyfan. In our connected world now, it’s exciting to see how one completely different branch of science helps elucidate questions in another.

Knossos was destroyed by the eruption. However the site was destroyed and rebuilt several times. I think the mystery the author was referring to, took place after after the eruption, called the late bronze age collapse.

I found the sequencing in the book a bit confusing but I understood that the Minoans built Knossos and had a flourishing society, with a written language. The Greek Mycenaeans invaded Crete and took over the Knossos site after the Minoans were destroyed. (I assume by the eruption, but I don’t remember her referencing this?) Not having their own writing, they used the Minoan’s system to compose the Linear B tablets that Evans found.

However, the Greek Mycenaeans were only at Knossos for a short time before they were toppled too. Apparently many civilizations across the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa mysteriously collapsed in the late bronze age. Scholars don’t have a lot of information, but some extant accounts referred to an invasion of an unidentified ‘sea peoples’.

I first read about it in “The Bible Unearthed”, which I picked up after seeing a PBS NOVA series by the same name. https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Unearth...al-text&sr=1-1

It seems that many advances made by those societies were completely lost, and people were plunged into a prolonged dark age.