The museum of prehistoric Thera is also worth a visit if you make it there! It is fairly small but contains some incredibly well-preserved artifacts. The frescoes are stunning.
I found Fira (nearby "large" town on Santorini, very close to the sites) miserably crowded, but seeing Thera was very cool. This is all about 1500 years older than Pompeii, so a very different experience IMO.
> The weirdest thing about this island is that everything is built on a caldera rim, much higher than sea level. Extremely unusual for an island.
Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island. This was for defense reasons against pirates and other potential attackers.
True, it's rare to have that little low-lying land even on Greek islands. But the seaside towns are regardless a modern addition to the other islands, barring the biggest fortified ones. Too vulnerable.
There is a truly unbelievable beauty and rich history hidden underneath the touristy views of Santorini cluttering your social media feeds every summer.
From what I've understood [0], Atlantis was never meant to be a myth, it's only a fictional alternative version of Athen that Plato conjured up as a political allegory. It's like Batman's Gotham City, it only serves to evoke New York / Chicago.
Though to be fair the concept of a powerful city lost to time is something that resonates a lot, and there's multiple similar myth like the isle of Ys, the lost continent of Lemuria, or in the arabic folklore 'Iram of the pillar', often called 'Atlantis of the sand'.
What Plato describes perfectly fits a volcanic island, including the central pillar of rock that some volcanoes have as a volcanic plug, and the ring of water inside the caldera.
And the way Atlantis supposedly ended also fits what happens on volcanic islands.
Minoan fresco is so unique. They were truly a civilization unto themselves. I wonder how much they had in common with the rest of "Old Europe" (pre-Indo European farmers)
There are some claims of deciphering some parts of the Linear A Minoan documents, which are not corroborated yet by other researchers, but which are nonetheless more plausible than all the earlier claims of deciphering Linear A, which were definitely wrong.
If this partial decipherment were right, the language of Linear A would be Hurrian, i.e. the language of a state that was important around 4 thousand years ago and which was located in the territory of present Syria.
The Hurrians from Syria also used writing, but there they had adapted a variant of the cuneiform writing. Some Hurrian texts have also been found written with the Semitic alphabet used in Ugarit. There are some features of the Hittite variant of cuneiform writing that seem to have been taken from their Southern neighbors, the Hurrians, so it is possible that the Hittites have learned writing from the Hurrians, who had been using cuneiform writing for a few centuries before the Hittites, instead of taking writing directly from Assyria. This would be similar to how the Greek users of Linear B have taken writing from the Minoan users of Linear A.
It seems that the Hurrians had a rich mythology, which influenced many of their neighbors, and a few of their myths have been preserved, inclusively in the Hittite archives.
There exists no certain relationship between Hurrian and any language that survives today. In the antiquity there was a related language spoken in Urartu, on the territory of present Armenia. There are however a few similarities between Hurrian and some of the languages of the Caucasus area, but due to the difference in time of many thousands of years it cannot be known whether there is any genetic connection between them.
So if the claims about a decipherment of Linear A were true, that would imply that the Minoans have colonized Crete, and probably also Cyprus, by coming from the nearby territory where today is Syria. This sounds plausible, and that territory is one that had become "civilized" before the more Northern territories of Anatolia and Greece.
They are magnificent! I'd guess their civilization was influenced by the Ancient Near East as well as Old Europe. Hybrid creatures, women flanked by big cats, priestly figures holding serpents, all Minoan iconography with corrolaries in Egypy and the Levant. How I wish we had their myths, their histories.
The museum of prehistoric Thera is also worth a visit if you make it there! It is fairly small but contains some incredibly well-preserved artifacts. The frescoes are stunning.
I found Fira (nearby "large" town on Santorini, very close to the sites) miserably crowded, but seeing Thera was very cool. This is all about 1500 years older than Pompeii, so a very different experience IMO.
[dead]
In case you're thinking of going, note the excavated surface of Akrotiri is about 40 times smaller than what's visible at Pompeii.
Everyone goes for the blue domes.
The real historic sites can be seen via
The weirdest thing about this island is that everything is built on a caldera rim, much higher than sea level. Extremely unusual for an island.https://ashishb.net/travel/greece/santorini/
> The weirdest thing about this island is that everything is built on a caldera rim, much higher than sea level. Extremely unusual for an island.
Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island. This was for defense reasons against pirates and other potential attackers.
> Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island.
Well, others are mostly at sea level, with only some high points. Thira has very little land at sea level.
True, it's rare to have that little low-lying land even on Greek islands. But the seaside towns are regardless a modern addition to the other islands, barring the biggest fortified ones. Too vulnerable.
There is a truly unbelievable beauty and rich history hidden underneath the touristy views of Santorini cluttering your social media feeds every summer.
This is likely the inspiration for the myth of Atlantis.
From what I've understood [0], Atlantis was never meant to be a myth, it's only a fictional alternative version of Athen that Plato conjured up as a political allegory. It's like Batman's Gotham City, it only serves to evoke New York / Chicago.
Though to be fair the concept of a powerful city lost to time is something that resonates a lot, and there's multiple similar myth like the isle of Ys, the lost continent of Lemuria, or in the arabic folklore 'Iram of the pillar', often called 'Atlantis of the sand'.
[0] There was an episode on it in the excellent podcast 'In Our Time' by the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c6t3)
What Plato describes perfectly fits a volcanic island, including the central pillar of rock that some volcanoes have as a volcanic plug, and the ring of water inside the caldera.
And the way Atlantis supposedly ended also fits what happens on volcanic islands.
As well as the mighty, powerful, technologically advanced empire run by.. Santorini?
A bunch more photos if you click the wikimedia link in the article: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Xeste_3_of_archa...
Minoan fresco is so unique. They were truly a civilization unto themselves. I wonder how much they had in common with the rest of "Old Europe" (pre-Indo European farmers)
There are some claims of deciphering some parts of the Linear A Minoan documents, which are not corroborated yet by other researchers, but which are nonetheless more plausible than all the earlier claims of deciphering Linear A, which were definitely wrong.
If this partial decipherment were right, the language of Linear A would be Hurrian, i.e. the language of a state that was important around 4 thousand years ago and which was located in the territory of present Syria.
The Hurrians from Syria also used writing, but there they had adapted a variant of the cuneiform writing. Some Hurrian texts have also been found written with the Semitic alphabet used in Ugarit. There are some features of the Hittite variant of cuneiform writing that seem to have been taken from their Southern neighbors, the Hurrians, so it is possible that the Hittites have learned writing from the Hurrians, who had been using cuneiform writing for a few centuries before the Hittites, instead of taking writing directly from Assyria. This would be similar to how the Greek users of Linear B have taken writing from the Minoan users of Linear A.
It seems that the Hurrians had a rich mythology, which influenced many of their neighbors, and a few of their myths have been preserved, inclusively in the Hittite archives.
There exists no certain relationship between Hurrian and any language that survives today. In the antiquity there was a related language spoken in Urartu, on the territory of present Armenia. There are however a few similarities between Hurrian and some of the languages of the Caucasus area, but due to the difference in time of many thousands of years it cannot be known whether there is any genetic connection between them.
So if the claims about a decipherment of Linear A were true, that would imply that the Minoans have colonized Crete, and probably also Cyprus, by coming from the nearby territory where today is Syria. This sounds plausible, and that territory is one that had become "civilized" before the more Northern territories of Anatolia and Greece.
They are magnificent! I'd guess their civilization was influenced by the Ancient Near East as well as Old Europe. Hybrid creatures, women flanked by big cats, priestly figures holding serpents, all Minoan iconography with corrolaries in Egypy and the Levant. How I wish we had their myths, their histories.
There was definitely trade & cultural exchange between the Minoans and Egypt. How much there was is not clear, but there definitely was some.
[flagged]
[dead]