Santorini and the collapse of the Bronze Age Civilisation
by
John Dayton
Institute of Archaeology, UCL, UK

It is generally agreed among archaeologists that the high civilisation of the Mycenean world, the Aegean, Anatolia, the Near East and Egypt, came to a sudden and dramatic end at about 1200 BC. Surprisingly, the farr off civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley also suffered a similar fate.

The c. 1200 BC date is roughly fixed by Egyptian records of invasions of 'Sea Peoples' during the reign of Ramses III put at between 1183 and 1152 BC (Ken Kitchen). The 'Sea Peoples' are depicted as coming by boat, but also by land with ox-carts with spare ploughing oxen, and also with women and children. They were not raiders of Viking kind but uprooted farmers. The Libyan king also brought his entire family, his treasure and all his animals in the earlier reign of Merneptah c. 1220 BC.

This writer has suggested (Dayton 2001) that this great extinction and migration of peoples was caused by a very large Plinian eruption of Santorini. This caused:

a) Enormous tsunamis that destroyed much of the Aegean shipping

b) Great earthquakes that destroyed buildings and harbours

c) An enormous volume of tephra over a large area of the Aegean which would have put the farmers' fields out of action for a period long enough to deprive their animals of grazing and the people out of grain. Egypt would have had food as the annual flood of the Nile would have dissipated any acid tephra in the Delta, and so there was 'corn in Egypt' to which they went.

Only in the last few years has two sources of accurate scientific evidence become available to date the eruption of Santorini.

1) The Ice-Core programme in Greenland and Antartica has shown only 3 layers of acid tephra from major volcanic events in the 2nd Millenium BC, at 2354, 1627 and 1159 BC.

2) Tree rings also show these events. 2354 BC has been attributed to Hekla in Iceland and fits the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The tephra of 1627 BC has been shown not to be from Santorini. The 1159 event shows up in the Irish oaks as an 18-year period of very low growth, and there is a 20-year period id a floating 806-year Juniper chronology from Gordion in Turkey dated to within 20 years of 1159 BC.

It has been shown that world climate is seriously affected by major volcanic eruptions. Tambora in 1815 caused the 'year without a summer' in 1816 when crops did not ripen. Laki in Iceland in 1783 caused the death of all the animals and 5% of the population on the island, and may have caused the crop failures in Europe that provoked the French Revolution. Dust clouds from volcanoes cause cold weather which shows up as frost damage in tree rings. More information from the ice cores covering the Holocene is desperately needed by archaeologists.

As Baillie says " It is clear that a strong archaeological lobby exists to play down the size and effects of Santorini". Their world of pottery chronology might be shattered.

Date received: August 19, 2002