The troubled island. Minoan crete before and after the Santorini eruption / Неспокойный остров. Минойский Крит до и после извержения вулкана Санторини

Key moments in European history can be identified with relative ease, whereas periods of formation or disintegration require more lengthy analysis and argument to define their significance. In prehistory, on the other hand, rarely can significant moments be identified, although with the characterisation of broad periods, change, gradual or otherwise, can be described. The essential outlines of the periods discussed in this book are well known; they pivot around one clearly identifiable event, the cataclysmic eruption of the Santorini (Theran) volcano sometime in the late 17th or late 16th century B.C. The significance and effects of the event in terms of the history of the region have been much discussed, and there has been a tendency over the last twenty-five years to move from viewing the consequences as immediate and catastrophic to regarding the effects for Crete as minimal. There is no clear connection between the eruption and the fall of Minoan Crete a generation or more later, nor with the rise of the warrior kingdoms of the Mycenaean Mainland. These remain two of the more problematic phenomena in pre-history. For a period of several hundred years, during the “Old Palace” and “New Palace” periods, the island of Crete had flourished economically, artistically and technologically and was home to societies more “civilised” than the Aegean had hitherto seen. Organisation was centred in “Palaces” where religious control walked hand in hand with economic management. During Late Minoan I, contemporary with Late Cycladic I (cf. § 2), Minoan influence in many spheres stretched beyond Knossos, beyond Crete to islands of the Aegean which were perhaps used for trade and protection, the “Thalassocracy” of Thucydides. The most Minoanised of all Cycladic island settlements was at Akrotiri on Thera, but this was buried when the volcano exploded sending tonnes of ash to the winds which then bore it eastwards. It destroyed neither Crete nor its Palaces; indeed, traces of the eruption on the island are just that: traces. Sometime after this event, in what is called the Late Minoan IB period, most Minoan Palaces and settlements burned down to the ground, never to be rebuilt in the same manner, but preserving in the destruction layers the evidence crucial to the interpretation of the period. At the same time, a political, social and economic system, based on an elite culture all but disappeared. The destructions may have been the work of aggressors from the Mycenaean Mainland, from within Crete itself or a combination of both; natural disaster has also been suggested. Whatever the case, over a few generations, the Aegean changed. Minoan Crete began its swan song and Mycenaean centres emerged to take over the lead. <...>