They created extraordinary artifacts for hundreds of years, revealing an aesthetic sensibility that influences Western civilization to this day. Then they simply disappeared.
Scholars are seeking answers to one of the great mysteries of the ancient world: What happened to the Minoans of Crete, who controlled a thriving Mediterranean trade network from around 2,200-1,450 BC?
Now NOVA senior science editor Evan Hadingham reports on new evidence that a massive tsunami struck the Bronze Age society 3,500 years ago, destabilizing the culture to such a degree that social chaos brought about its ultimate destruction.
The Minoans
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The Minoans
Archaeologists look to the earth for Minoan fate
"It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
-George Steiner
-George Steiner
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Kind of a side bar, but I don't recall ever reading if there were Egyptian records of something like a tsunami or an volcanic eruption around that time. Egypt isn't that far away from Crete. 1450 BC was during the era of the New Kingdom in Egypt, and I know they had trouble a couple of hundred years later from what they called "Sea Peoples".
Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
Sam Rayburn
