All language subtitles for BBC.Ancient.Apocalypse.2of4.Mystery.of.the.Minoans.576p.PDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.en

3,500 years ago,

the first great
European civilisation collapsed.

Desperate and bewildered people

resorted to sacrificing
their own children.

What was it that brought them
to this terrible end?

This is the story of a glorious
civilisation and its total collapse.

The Minoan Empire was so rich and
so inventive, it passed into legend.

At its heart on the island
of Crete stood mighty palaces.

The largest of them all was Knossos.

But, why, at its very peak,
did the Minoans' world crumble?

Floyd McCoy is a geologist
determined to solve that mystery.

For decades, he's been captivated by the
haunting ruins the Minoans left behind.

3,500 years ago,
Knossos stood invincible.

Long before the Ancient Greek Empire flourished,
Knossos was the biggest building in Europe.

Here, Minoans lived in luxury with Europe's
first paved roads and running water.

From Crete, the Minoans controlled
a vast trading empire.

So powerful were their navies, they
lived centuries free from invasion.

But when mainland Greeks
finally took over Crete,

the Minoans wealth and power
had disappeared.

Their towns and palaces
went up in flames.

The mystery here is - how and why
has this been destroyed?

What has caused this devastation
here?

This investigation will take Floyd
on a remarkable journey

gathering evidence
from other scientists.

Where better to start looking
for clues than at Knossos itself

from an archaeologist
who used to be a curator here?

Colin McDonald has evidence of something never
seen before in Minoan culture - sheer savagery.

Whilst digging near Knossos, archaeologists
came across the skull of a small child.

Nearby, were the skeletons
of four more children.

When they studied these bones more
closely, they came to a grim conclusion.

The children had all been murdered.

Those murders took place at the time
when the Minoan Empire was collapsing.

A remarkable aspect of these bones
were the great knife marks -

cut marks, slicing marks -

on the bones themselves which indicate that
meat was actually sliced off these human bones.

There was also found
a large storage jar

and inside were bones
with cut marks on them

and an edible snail
called the buburas snail.

It's highly possible that these were actually cooked
together and that we are talking about ritual cannibalism.

What could make a civilised people
devour its own children?

Floyd believes he's searching for a culprit so
powerful it shattered the foundations of this society.

A disaster caused by a force the
Minoans thought they understood -

nature.

It seems pretty clear that we're
looking at a vast civilisation

and suddenly it's gone -
it's been done in.

Something that big
points towards natural causes.

This natural disaster
has become a quest -

it's become something to look for
that's hard to stop looking for.

Floyd is familiar
with natural disasters.

He grew up in Hawaii, home to some of
the most spectacular forces of nature -

volcanoes.

As a child growing up,
I was surrounded by volcanoes.

They were erupting every so often - in fact,
VERY often - and they were wonderful to see.

In high school, we would spend all night staring
at the volcano erupting. It was part of my life.

His experiences as a child inspired him to become a
geologist and learn about all the world's volcanoes.

He was drawn to one in particular -

an ancient, mighty explosion that
seemed on a scale like no other.

That volcano lies 100km
north of Crete.

It's on a much smaller island
called Thera - today, Santorini.

3,500 years ago, when the Minoan
civilisation was at its height,

Thera erupted,
blasting the island apart.

Despite its distance from Crete,

Floyd feels sure the eruption of Thera is
the reason behind the end of the Minoans.

He has come to Thera
to see the evidence for himself.

We're at the top of a volcano. Here's a huge hole
in the ground excavated by a tremendous eruption.

In Hawaii, the volcanoes are as big
in height but nothing like this.

They are tranquil
compared to what happened here.

This is something of epic
proportions - the stuff of legends.

The eruption ripped the heart out of Thera, and
the centre of the island crashed into the sea.

All that remains is a necklace of islands
surrounding a vast crater called a caldera.

Today,
the caldera is filled by a deep sea.

The story of what happened that fateful
summer is still written in the landscape.

In this cliff face is a depiction of what happened
during this eruption - the sequence of events.

Each layer tells us such a story
about how the eruption proceeded -

the dynamics of it,
the explositivity.

To start off, the lower layer, that
textured layer right at the bottom,

that's a layer of pumice.
This is pumice.

Light stuff. Frothy material.

It flew up...and then plopped down.

The pumice was blasted up
into the sky and it flew 36km high.

It plummeted back to Earth, blanketing the
island in a layer up to ten metres thick.

Then the eruption
dramatically changed character.

Sea water enters the vent there -
it becomes ultra-explosive.

Out of the vent comes horizontal-sweeping
avalanches of hot gas

that push pumice and ash across
the landscape at roaring speed.

Deadly torrents of searing hot ash swept across
the landscape, smothering the entire island.

Up there,
big rocks start to fly in.

These are pieces of lava flows that are parts of
the island that is now being blasted to bits.

Then, up there, another change.

Torrential rainstorms occur because there is lightning.
Thunderstorms develop out of this eruption cloud.

Torrential rain rains down on the landscape.
The slope starts moving downhill.

As it moves downhill,

it leaves the larger rocks behind and that's what
that layer is there. Then the eruption is over.

How long did this take? From historic
eruptions, the best estimate is four days.

Given a day for each layer to happen, you get
an idea of the intensity of what happened.

Floyd knows the eruption was big.

What he doesn't know is how it could
have devastated an entire civilisation.

This eruption happened about 3,500 years
ago. 3,600 years ago, this eruption blew.

The timing of the eruption

is almost precisely when the Minoan
civilisation goes into a decline.

There has to be a connection.

What could that connection be?

The clues are beginning to emerge
from the ash.

This is Akrotiri - a town in Thera where
the eruption claimed its first victims.

Completely buried by the volcano,
the memory of it vanished.

It was only in the 1960s
that Greek archaeologists

began to realise
what wonders lay hidden.

A layer of pumice ten metres thick covered
the town, creating a time capsule.

Buildings up to three storeys high
were beautifully preserved.

But what of the people
who once lived in these buildings?

Although it is risky to estimate, with the
extent of the excavation we have so far,

I suspect, er,

the estimate of the population
is about 2,000 and 3,000 people.

But there is a mystery
about this bustling town -

no bodies have ever been found.

Christos Doumas believes the people were scared
off by the first stirrings of the volcano.

This is the thin layer of ash,

and this is found all over the island
- everywhere we have excavated.

And after... Probably this was
the warning for people to leave.

Panicked by this first dusting of ash,
the people must have fled Akrotiri,

but did they escape
the island of Thera itself?

'They couldn't.

'To remove so many people,
you need a whole fleet.'

So where did they go?

Christos Doumas thinks they fled
to this barren patch of land,

desperately hoping enough boats
would come and carry them to safety.

This port is one of the harbours.
It is the most obvious place.

And, as an escape, what other place would
be more convenient than the harbour,

where they could have found
means to escape?

Then the pumice
started to come pounding down.

The avalanches of blistering ash that
followed erased everything from view.

It was a desperate situation.

Crowds of people could have been cornered,
frantically scouring the horizon for boats.

But the eruption was unstoppable,
and, on this very spot,

Christos believes the people of Akrotiri were smothered
by the ash - the first victims of the volcano.

This is not the only time this kind
of human tragedy has happened.

These are the people
of the town of Herculaneum.

They, too, were waiting for boats
that never came.

The avalanches of ash that killed
them froze their bodies in time.

The first the Minoans on Crete would have
seen was a terrifying sight on the horizon -

a plume of ash 36km high.

Fortunately, the winds blew the ash
in the opposite direction,

but the volcano had a lethal legacy
they couldn't escape.

Floyd believes that the blast hit
the Minoans in three different ways.

He believes the first blow
would have come within days

when Crete was hit by another
terrifying force he knows all too well.

In 19146, he watched as giant waves
battered the island of Hawaii,

killing scores of people.

As a child, I saw my home town
destroyed by huge waves.

Those waves were 54ft high
in front of our house.

I was terrified later to find
debris still left from that wave...

that underneath
there might be a body.

The explosive power of eruptions can
bring volcanoes crashing into the sea,

pushing water up into giant waves
called tsunamis.

The waves can travel thousands
of kilometres across oceans.

When they hit land, the results can be cataclysmic
as they were a century ago in South-East Asia.

Krakatau in Indonesia, 1883...

36,000 people killed by an eruption
that was far less in intensity -

less than half the intensity
of this eruption here.

Most people were killed
by...tsunamis.

This means then that we should perhaps be looking
for tsunami deposits left by these large waves.

Evidence of those deposits has
eluded archaeologists for decades.

Now Floyd has heard of an intriguing
find that may be what he's looking for.

In 1997, a team of geologists
came to this salt-water marsh.

They drilled deep down into the
ground and removed a core of mud.

At a laboratory in Britain, they
started sifting through the core.

After much work, Dale Dominey-Howes
found what he was looking for -

tiny fossilised shells
called for a ms.

The for a ms are actually very helpful
to us

as they live in a range of settings.
Some live in marshes,

others prefer estuaries
and some prefer deeper water.

They are actually very useful because each
individual species looks very different.

Under the microscope the difference
between the shells becomes clear.

The one on the right once lived in shallow
water. The one on the left lived in deep water.

As Dale examined the mud core
closely,

he found something peculiar.

As you go through the core,
you go back in time.

All through the larger part of the
core, we're finding no forams at all.

At this point,
something exciting happens.

There is a very thin band or layer of sand.
This sand is stuffed with marine forams.

These forams are fully marine
and come from deeper water offshore.

This means something very unusual
happened here.

A very unusual, high-energy event

that's brought these deep water
species from offshore into the marsh.

So I suspect that this shows that
a tsunami flooded into the marsh.

Dale's evidence suggests

the volcano on Thera produced waves that
travelled 100km across the open sea.

Their effect would have been felt
along the northern coast of Crete,

but most of all,
at harbour towns like Palaikastro.

Floyd has come to Palaikastro
to meet one man who can tell him

how destructive
those waves might have been.

Costas Synolakis
chases tsunamis around the world.

As they break, he rushes
to the scene to map the destruction.

In 1992,
there was a tsunami in Nicaragua...

This time, Costas has come home.

He was brought up on Crete.

With his expert knowledge,

he has built one of the world's most
sophisticated computer models of tsunamis.

Costas has spent weeks feeding data about
the Theran eruption into his computer.

Now he's ready
to show Floyd the results.

Can we see the wave in motion? Yes,
let's try to get to the animations...

This is the initial wave... There it is.
The eruption has taken place. Yes.

Oh, look at that!

Oh, that's really neat!

Costas's model shows the waves coming from
Thera and hitting the coast of Crete.

At Palaikastro, the bay is enclosed and the waves
would have become trapped - their effect magnified.

Look! The high water comes in,
inundates things and stays there.

Yes, it does. You have waves that
are getting trapped inside this bay.

Palaikastro is unique as you have the
effect of the first wave coming in,

but you have the effect
of the waves trapped inside the bay.

So if one building wasn't destroyed, it
will be destroyed. Unfortunately, yes.

The waves at Palaikastro would have formed a
towering wall of water three metres high.

What kind of damage would that do?

A three-metre wave
coming into a small harbour...

...would have been devastating.

All of the boats would have been
strewn out on the coast everywhere.

Here is a civilisation
that depended on boats.

One of the things that we find out in the field
when we go there a week after a tsunami hits

is we cannot find absolutely
any boats to use in our surveys.

Because all of the boats are gone...
They've been destroyed.

It wouldn't have been just the boats.

The wave would have travelled upstream and would
have flooded the area surrounding the river.

Salt would have destroyed the soil.

Yes. And there is the fact that

all of their warehouses, storage areas, food
supplies they were bringing in or exporting,

would all have been destroyed...
or wet.

All this by a three-metre wave? Yes.

The waves would have been even more
destructive in other parts.

In some places, they would have
reached 12 metres high.

Floyd is sure
tsunamis devastated the coast,

but the huge waves weren't enough
to wipe out an entire civilisation -

there must have been more.

His hunt for the eruption's
longer lasting impact

begins with a fresco.

We are extraordinarily fortunate

that wonderful pieces of art were preserved
in the ash that buried Akrotiri,

and among that art is an image of what the
island looked like before the eruption.

And, in there, is
a very nice depiction of an island

sitting inside another island
with a ring of water around it.

But most extraordinary - it shows
a huge city sitting on that island.

All of that may represent
the pre-eruption landscape.

If so, then there were even larger
cities sitting in that caldera,

and all of that island city
vaporised by the eruption.

This evidence of another city
on Thera is puzzling.

How could an island this small support
so many people in such luxury?

Archaeologists are unearthing clues
showing just how crucial Thera was

as a source of legendary wealth.

In this building alone,
they discovered 400 pots.

So many, they must have been
produced on an industrial scale.

Then they found a vast number
of lead discs

precisely cast to the Minoan
standard for weights and measures.

We have so far

discovered here two-thirds
of the total amount of lead weights

found in the entire Aegean.

So trade was the main activity
which produced wealth,

and therefore we could say that it is a kind
of Hong Kong of the prehistoric Aegean.

Archaeologists already knew that the Minoans'
trading empire spanned three continents.

Now they realised that Thera was one of the
most important marketplaces in the Aegean

where the Minoans
came to buy and sell goods.

When the eruption ripped the island
apart, that marketplace was wiped out.

The impact of this eruption
on the Minoans...

I mean, on Crete, suddenly their
trading hub here is gone...vaporised.

This core of their trade
has disappeared.

That had to have had a huge impact.

Floyd now believes the Minoans
suffered a series of blows.

The people of Thera
were engulfed by the ash.

Huge waves wrought havoc
on the coast of Crete.

The marketplace of
the Minoan empire was obliterated,

but he thinks even this wasn't enough
to destroy the Minoan civilisation.

He is sure the volcano had another
legacy - the most deadly yet.

This part of the story starts back on Thera
with a brainwave from one British geologist.

Steve Sparks has spent decades
studying the scale of the eruption,

but, over the years, one piece
of the puzzle refused to fit...

algae.

Fossilised algae lie high up on the slopes
of Thera, but that doesn't make sense.

This type of algae
doesn't live on hillsides.

Steve saw that the algae must have been blasted
up here by the force of the explosion,

but from where?

It could only have been from
a place where these algae Do live -

a shallow sea.

That means there must've once been
a shallow sea inside the crater.

A picture of the island
BEFORE the blast was emerging.

This is what the volcano

might have looked like from above
at that time.

You can see this large caldera
already exists.

You can also see a large volcanic
island which must have existed.

This island was blown up during the Minoan
eruption. There are bits of it in the deposit.

This new picture with a differently
shaped island and a shallow sea

had startling implications
for the scale of the eruption.

I was walking along the caldera rim a
few years ago, looking down into it,

when it struck me that the existence
of the shallow sea before the eruption

may mean that the eruption was
much larger than we had supposed.

Could it be that
all previous estimates were too low?

The size of this eruption was estimated from
the amount of ash that came pouring out.

Steve now suspected that tonnes
of ash may not have been counted

because the shallow sea would have trapped
that ash until it was filled to the brim.

If this hypothesis is right, an enormous amount of
volcanic ash was trapped within the caldera itself.

When the caldera collapsed, this
material would have been taken with it.

The force of the blast brought the volcano crashing
down and created the deep sea that exists today.

Steve is convinced that at the bottom of
that deep sea lies a thick layer of ash.

Add this hidden ash to previous estimates
and the real size of the eruption doubles.

This would make it perhaps the second largest
eruption on earth in the last 10,000 years.

Up to 70 cubic kilometres of ash
were blasted into the atmosphere,

and with that ash came something else
far more destructive - sulphurous gas.

If we are right about the scale of the eruption, then
it could have been very bad news for the Minoans.

There would have been
much volcanic ash in the atmosphere

and large amounts of volcanic gas -
in particular, sulphur dioxide.

Large eruptions of this kind with huge amounts
of sulphur dioxide can alter climate,

and this may have had a big effect
after the eruption.

Steve's idea of doubling the size
of this eruption on Thera

now brings it up to the same category as the
eruption of, for example, Tambora, 1815, Indonesia.

That eruption was huge - the biggest
in the last 10,000 years.

It changed the global climate
for years afterwards.

The year after that eruption is
known as The Year Without A Summer.

There was frost. In New England, in England and Germany
crops would not grow and it led to mass starvation.

Might the Minoans on Crete have
faced a climate change as severe?

The answer may lie
with climate modeller Mike Rampino.

Large explosive volcanic eruptions put a lot
of dust and fine ash up into the atmosphere,

but they also put
sulphur dioxide gas.

This goes up into the atmosphere.

It's converted into droplets
of sulphuric acid.

These droplets cut out the sunlight that would
normally come in and warm the Earth's surface,

causing the Earth's surface to cool.

If Mike Rampino knows how much
sulphur is produced by an eruption,

his computer model can forecast
how much the climate will change.

We're using Steve Sparks' new
estimate of the size of the eruption.

He suggested the eruption
was twice as big as we had thought.

If we put that much volcanic aerosol into the atmosphere
in our computer model and spread it around the world,

we see a significant effect
on the Earth's climate.

We can see from the blue colours
here a climatic cooling,

especially concentrated in Europe, Asia and
North America, of one to two degrees celsius.

It doesn't sound much but that's
the average ANNUAL temperature drop.

The summer temperature - the most important for
crops - will drop even more than the average,

so the summer at these times
will be especially cool and wet,

and so the crops
will suffer accordingly.

Mike's model suggests years
of ruined harvests,

but without physical evidence, Floyd would
have no more than an enticing theory.

Proof has come
from an unlikely source far away.

The bogs of Ireland.

Slices of trees from these bogs contain a record
of climate stretching back over 7,000 years.

Each year,
the trees put on a ring of growth.

During the good years,
those growth rings are thick,

in bad years, so small,
they can be hard to measure.

When Mike measured the tree rings
in one particular sample,

something made him take notice.

This is a piece of Irish oak.

It grew for about 300 years, then was buried in a
peat bog and has survived to the present time.

It was growing about 3,500 years ago.
When you look at

the exactly dated rings
across this period,

you find that the tree has been growing quite
well up until 1628bc, which is this ring,

and in 1627, there is no summer growth, nor
in 1626, nor for about ten years thereafter.

These are the narrowest rings
in the life of this tree -

the worst growth conditions
of its lifetime.

The trees can't tell us
exactly what happened,

but the logic is
that they were probably responding

to increased coldness or
increased wetness or possibly both.

In a peat bog, if you raise
the amount of water in the peat,

you're likely to cover up the roots of
the trees and affect them that way.

So, I certainly became interested in whether this
environmental downturn, probably involving cold and wet,

was due to the eruption of Thera.

Proof that the Irish oak trees WERE
stunted by the eruption of Thera

has just been reported
from a desolate part of the world.

The ice sheets of Greenland have built up over
thousands of years from annual layers of snow.

As the snow falls, anything lingering in the
atmosphere is swept up and locked into the ice.

Sulphur from volcanic eruptions
is trapped as sulphuric acid.

The snow that fell 3,500 years ago
is now over 700 metres deep.

When Danish scientists tested the ice at that
level, they found a layer of sulphuric acid.

Embedded in that acid layer
were tiny shards of volcanic ash.

The shards have just been
chemically fingerprinted.

The unpublished results
have convinced the scientists

that the ash came from Thera.

It's fantastic news because it
gives us the final link in the chain.

You've got Thera
linked to the acid in Greenland,

this acid occurs at the same time as
the reduced growth in the Irish trees,

so you're seeing direct environmental
consequences of the eruption of Thera,

and that is fantastic.

Floyd is now convinced that the volcano's aftermath
so damaged the climate, harvests failed.

He's close to explaining how the
Minoans were felled by the eruption.

Yet there is one last problem that threatens
to jeopardise his entire theory...

...clay tablets.

Many were written
decades after the eruption.

Covered with Minoan writing, they are proof that
their culture survived well beyond the blast.

It was 50 years after the eruption
that a new script appeared -

an ancient form of Greek - the
language of the Minoans' conquerors.

The problem we have is that the eruption itself can't
be said to have wiped out Minoan civilisation.

The civilisation continued, although
it declined, for at least 50 years

after the eruption itself.

The Minoans had survived each
successive blow from the volcano -

the eruption itself, the tsunamis
and the failed harvests.

But these blows had gone deep.

How deep would only become clear
with the final piece of the puzzle.

It was found
near the royal palace of Knossos,

buried amongst the bones
of the five murdered children.

The children's bones were found in this very, very
small area here in a burnt destruction layer,

and with these bones,
which were in a state of disorder,

were also found vases
which we term "ritual".

The striking thing about the vases
is the way they were decorated.

They are covered with sea creatures.

Some have starfish,
several are painted with octopus.

The Minoans were painting the vases they
used for religion with images from the deep.

For Colin, the timing is crucial.

He believes it's only after
the eruption and the tsunamis

that they started using
this so-called Marine Style.

This association of the Marine Style
and ritual vases is very important,

because it indicates to us a totally
new awareness of the power of the sea.

This was incorporated into their religion
as a totally new aspect of their religion,

probably to try and ward off
future disasters

which might have appeared to them
to emanate from the sea itself.

The pottery suggests the damaging aftereffects of
the volcano were as much psychological as physical.

Colin believes the Minoans
began to see their natural world

in an entirely different way.

Before the eruption, the Minoans
observed rigid hierarchy.

At the top stood the kings in palaces like
Knossos, revered as priests as well as rulers.

They controlled
the shrines to the gods.

They were even deemed capable
of controlling the force of nature.

But a stunning archaeological find
has convinced Colin

that, after the eruption,
all this changed.

First, a glimmer of gold.

Then, an ivory leg.

Once they restored it,

the archaeologists realised
they'd found a religious statue.

But what was so striking
was WHERE it was found -

far from the palace where the priest-kings
presided, in a humble building in Palaikastro

which lay beyond their control.

Colin believes that this shrine shows Minoan
society had fallen apart from within.

After the eruption,
communities such as Palaikastro

no longer believed in the divine authority
of the big, palatial centres like Knossos,

and it is part of the fragmentation of society, seen
in the 50-year period following the eruption itself.

And this actually created a vacuum,

and it was into this vacuum
that mainland Greeks marched

and ended Minoan culture and
civilisation as we knew it before.

Wonderful. This means the eruption
had not an immediate effect

but a prolonged effect on society.

Floyd believes he's now worked out
what happened to the Minoans.

Nature in the form of the volcano, the
giant waves and the climate change

had betrayed them.

Desperate to end these new terrors, the
people turned away from their kings.

They took their religion into their
own hands - order turned to chaos.

Perhaps this is what explains the
dreadful fate of the five children.

In desperation, some Minoans were driven
to extremes to win back their gods.

They sacrificed their children -

the greatest offering they had.

For Floyd, the quest is over.

In the end, it wasn't only the physical damage
that brought the Minoans to their knees.

He is convinced that
Minoan society finally fell apart

when the world they thought
they knew turned against them.

Did these people
have a sense of conquering nature?

Did they have a sense that they could occupy
this landscape and control it? ..Quite likely.

We have the same notion today,
I think.

We think that we have conquered our
environment and conquered nature.

But nature can strike back.

The cataclysmic event
IS going to happen again.

Subtitles by Caroline Tosh
BBC Scotland - 2001

E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk