Bettany Hughes is producing a program on Atlantis for the BBC.
Here's some of her claims. Is a volcanic explosion that destroyed Thera, the basis of Plato's story?
Around 1620BC the Greek island of Thera (now known as Santorini) blew sky high. Thera is in fact one giant volcano and its Bronze Age eruption was the greatest geophysical event in the human experience.
Forensic investigation of the seabed over the past five years tells us the eruption was 400 times the scale of the recent Icelandic explosion, detonating with a force 40,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The acidic ash cloud that followed restricted tree-growth as far afield as Ireland. Extruded volcanic material from the eruption – 150 billion tonnes of the stuff – is still turning up in archaeological digs from Eastern Turkey to Jordan. The explosion also set in train scores of tsunami waves, 27 feet high, travelling at 200 miles per hour, that pounded the Cyclades, Crete, the Levant and the European mainland. Over a period of between one to three days the entire population of Thera was wiped out, along with at least 75 per cent of the region’s coastal population.
And what a population. The inhabitants of Thera were, quite simply, awesome. We know this because the volcano preserved as it destroyed, with a fall of ash and pumice – in places it was 30 metres thick – smothering streets, houses, towns. The city of Akrotiri, first excavated in the 1960s and now yielding new treasures, is an unwitting time capsule that also reveals technological marvels including homes built using anti-earthquake engineering. Walls are whitewashed, and rooms decorated with paintings whose nonchalant naturalism is breathtaking. The Therans were not short of cash either – their women sport heavy, gold hoop earrings and necklaces made of cornelian, men are rowed in ships covered with gauzy sun-shades and garlanded with flowers.
The island had not much fertile land, not much water – but it was strategically situated between Asia, Africa and Europe, and the Therans made ''beyond the horizon’’ their business. One wall painting, the Marine Frieze, shows a newly invented kind of sailing ship breaking into uncharted waters. Around the edge are lions, date palms, and African antelope. This was a culture that interacted with the outside world. Thera would have been a legend in its own lifetime.
The apocalypse that destroyed it could not possibly have escaped the human radar. It would have become a story passed down the generations. I believe we find ghostly memories of it in one of the most famous myths of all, Plato’s account of the lost city of Atlantis; ''Listen to a tale which, though strange, is wholly true… these histories tell of a mighty power… that was swallowed up… in the span of one day and night… by the sea… and vanished.’’
The philosopher Plato was a mischievous genius who loved to stalk through Athens’s narrow streets and port district to pick up travellers’ tales and weave these into philosophical fictions. His story of Atlantis is a moral fable that warns of ambition and overweening pride, and he was, in fact, pointing up the failings of his own alma mater – the ''Golden Age’’ city of Athens that had raised both him and an empire.
The similarities between Plato’s account and the hard facts of the Theran eruption are too striking to be coincidental. Many of the specific details in the philosopher’s Atlantis story are the kind of vivid, episodic, visual memory passed down orally through the centuries. Plato describes the Atlantean buildings as being red, black and white – as indeed the masonry at Akrotiri strikingly was (and still is); and also talks about the city encircled by rings of land – the formation of the collapsed volcano.
One of his most intriguing lines is explained by geological fact. After the island’s destruction, Plato said: “That spot in the ocean has become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked by the shoal mud which the island created.’’ Volcanoes of Thera’s magnitude spew out rafts of floating pumice that can stretch for seventy or so miles and reach up to 10 feet deep, making the seas all around unnavigable.
reference: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10339254/Atlantis-secrets-of-the-real-lost-city.html