Akrotiri, Thera

A Bronze Age Pompeii

Around 1 627 BC, by the radiocarbon dates accepted by most archaeologists, the volcano on Thera — modern Santorini — erupted with a force estimated at seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Roughly four times larger than Krakatoa in 1883.

The eruption emptied the volcanic chamber so completely that the island collapsed inward into a six-kilometre-wide caldera. The surrounding Mediterranean briefly drained into the hole before rebounding as a tsunami that may have reached Crete a hundred kilometres south. Pumice from Thera has been found across the eastern Mediterranean and in ice cores in Greenland.

A town that emptied itself

No human skeletons have been found in buried Akrotiri. No jewellery. Almost no portable valuables.

The townspeople had read the warning signs of the earlier earthquakes and ash falls — and they had left. What they did leave behind has been preserved under five to twenty metres of pumice for more than 3 600 years.

Two- and three-storey houses with whitewashed plaster walls. Running water from clay pipes. Flush toilets that drained into a municipal sewer system. Furniture, beds, cookware, weaving looms. And walls painted with some of the most extraordinary frescoes of the ancient world: the Spring Fresco from the "House of the Ladies", swallows wheeling over fields of red lilies; the Saffron Gatherers, young women picking crocus stigmas to make the bright yellow-orange spice still cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean today.

The collapse, but later

For decades the Thera eruption was offered as the explanation for the collapse of the Minoan civilisation on Crete a hundred kilometres south.

Modern dating has complicated this. The eruption is now placed about 150 years before the Minoan palaces fell, which means it can't have caused the collapse directly — but it almost certainly damaged the Minoan economy. The tsunami would have destroyed the harbour fleets; the ash fall would have ruined one or two seasons of crops; and the trade networks the Minoans depended on may never have fully recovered.

By 1 450 BC, mainland Mycenaean Greeks were in control of Crete.

Atlantis, probably

Plato's account of Atlantis — a great maritime civilisation destroyed in a single day by earthquake and flood — was written about 360 BC, roughly 1 250 years after the Thera eruption.

The story passes through Egyptian priestly sources, and the Egyptian records of the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century BC describe a sudden loss of Aegean traders. The dates and the description are close enough that many classical scholars believe Akrotiri is the most likely real source of the Atlantis legend. Plato's island was large enough to threaten Athens; Thera before the eruption was twice its modern size.

The match isn't perfect. But no other ancient catastrophe fits the brief better.