The Cretan civilization ended within the first fifty years of this time period but the exact nature and cause of the destruction is not known. Syridon Marinatos, late Inspector General of Antiguities of Greece, believed that Crete was destroyed by a tremendous volcanic action in Thera, the island known anciently as Kalliste and later also as Sartorini. This last eruption of the Thera volcano was followed by massive tidal waves as the island center collapsed, and these waves surged outward perhaps 650 feet high at probably two hundred miles an hour, dealing the settlements of Crete a pulverizing blow. The ash was carried as far as 1600 miles, killing vegetation and choking harbors. The force of this volcanic explosion has been equated with that of 500 to 1,000 atomic bombs. The ash fallout plunged the Aegean Sea area into night for weeks. Total deposits of the ash on the remnant of Thera are still two hundred feet deep and the same ash has been found recently to be a layer seven feet thick some 9,850 feet deep on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, 87 miles from the volcano. Scandinavian scholars date this tremendous upheaval of the Mediterranean world as late as 1,200 B.C. and feel that the Sea People who roamed the Mediterranean, raiding the coasts of Asia Minor and Egypt were displaced peoples from island and other coastal civilizations destroyed in this great cataclysm. The period is likened by Heyerdahl (Ref. 95) to what he has described as a similar great unknown tumult of just before 3,000 B.C. There is no doubt but that the blast completely changed the Mediterranean, whether it completely destroyed Crete or weakened it for subsequent invasion by Mycenaeans, or whatnot. The Thera explosion was four times greater than the A.D.1,883 Java eruption that took 36,000 lives and spread a cloud of ash around the earth' (Ref. 129, 176, 109)

Arguments still go on about the actual dating of the great Thera incident, some recent revisions of radio-carbon datings indicating that it occurred about 1,600 B.C. and thus could not have had direct bearing on the Cretan demise. Regardless, there is no doubt that even before its final end, Crete had been subjected to devastating attacks in its island territories by the Phoenicians, new masters of the Mediterranean, and to attacks at home by the Mycenaean, "barbarian" Greeks. The latter, perhaps simply following their own warlike instincts for plunder, definitely came ashore on Crete, at least later, and left their marks, destroying whatever remained of all the palaces except Knossos, which they used for their own capital. The Mycenaean rulers wrote their language in Linear B which has now been at least partially deciphered and appears to be a form of ancient Greek. By 1,375 B.C. even Knossos was burned to the ground and whether this was done by rebelling, remnant Minoans or squabbling Mycenaeans chief s, no one knows. A disastrous expedition to Sicily had been undertaken at about that time, and its failure may have led to the fall of the Knossos lords. Still another view, however, is that Knossos remained functional until 1, 150 B.C. when it fell to invading Dorian Greeks. (Ref. 188) The last vestiges of the Cretan or Minoan civilization in their colonies along the coast of Asia Minor were also destroyed at a still later period by Ionian Greeks who then made their own settlements there. Remnants or refugees from the Cretan society are said to have fled to the Palestine coast, where they became known as Philistines1.

The Thera volcano was not the only cataclysmic occurrence of this period. There were earthquakes all over the Mediterranean and even northern Europe while volcanoes erupted in Italy and the Sinai and seismic tidal waves "caused the sea to recede from the land and even sucked out the rivers"2. After 1,100 B.C. the Dorian Greeks, who had charged down the Greek peninsula, crossed over to Crete to repopulate it and become the ancestors of its present population. (Ref. 127) Rhodes was also colonized by Dorians from Argos in the 11th century B.C. (Ref. 38)

Mycenaean power was dominant in the Mediterranean at least after 1,400 B.C.3 and their pottery was popular from Italy to the Turkish coast. They used many slaves, especially women who were used in the textile and bronze industries, as well as in private households. Some were captured in war, many were bought. Houses had flushing lavatories and bath rooms supplied with terra cotta pipes and sloping gutters. (Ref. 213) In the 14th century B.C. a giant mound covering a stone tomb was constructed at Mycenae which was 48 feet in diameter, 43 feet high to the tip of the dome and had a doorway topped with a lintel made of a 100 ton stone.

At about the 13th century B.C. at the height of their power and when the Mycenaeans controlled the Aegean world, they suddenly began to fortify all their cities and strengthen their defences, indicating a premonition of disaster. Other Greek speaking tribes had begun to drift down into the Greek peninsula by about 1,500 B.C. but it was not until about 1,300 that they were sufficiently strong to begin to usurp the Mycenaean power, so that by the end of that century the Mycenaean cities and fortresses were in ruins, the art degenerated and the written language (Linear B) had been forgotten. (Ref. 215, 176) 1,250 B.C. is usually given as the traditional date of the Trojan War, with complete collapse of Mycenaea by 1,200, but Cotterell (Ref. 41) gives the latter date as 1,150 B.C.

There were three main tribes of the new, invading Greeks, each with its own variation of the Greek language - lonic, Aeolic and Doric. The Dorians, descending from the upper Balkans about 1,200 B.C. are generally credited with the actual destruction of the Mycenaean Kingdom. They took the best lands with the less favored regions left to the other tribes. Attica became Ionian, along with a group of cities across the Aegean in the central section of the Asia Minor coast, and from these people came the master institution of Greek civilization, that is, the polis. Physically the polis consisted of a town or city with an area of farm and pasture land surrounding it. Politically it was a community governed by magistrates and laws. All of the invading warriors had ancestral ties with central Asia nomads and still lived a similar life, eating sheep, goat and wild hog. Still another tribe, the Thessalians, entered Greece in the province which now carries their name, sometime before 1,000 B.C. (Ref. 215, 136, 211)

Thrace, in the area of present Bulgaria and a corner of present Greece along with European Turkey, began a lively period with identifiable rulers and Indo-European gods, at about 1,500 B.C. This country had two coasts - one on the Aegean and the other on a corner of the Black Sea - and thus was at the cross-road of West and East. The Thracians were formidable horsemen with a taste for battle, banditry and elegant gold objects. Their goldsmiths were producing masterpieces in the 13th and 12th centuries B.C. One of the largest gold finds of Europe's Bronze Age comes from Vulchitrun, Bulgaria and dates to this period, with many resemblances to the art of Mycenaea. They did not have a written language and knowledge of them has come chiefly through their Greek neighbors and recent Bulgarian excavations. This was the homeland of the Phrygeans, who began at this time to spread to Asia Minor. (Ref. 171)

As noted in the last chapter, before 1,200 B.C. Italy was inhabited by a thinly scattered, backward population of dark whites of the Iberian or Mediterranean race. Then migrating Aryan Italics moved down, certainly by the end of this period, at 1,000 B.C., settled most of northern and eastern Italy, intermarried with the natives and established the Italian groups of Aryan languages. This included the Latin tribe south and east of the Tiber, and the Umbrians and the Sabines. These latter, living near Villanova, may have been the first Europeans to learn the use of iron. Extreme northern Italy, as well as the Mediterranean coasts of France and part of Spain, was originally peopled by a non-European speaking group called Ligurians. They were apparently pushed north by the Italics, where they came in contact with early Celts so that about 1,200 B.C. this Ligurian culture was absorbed into the Celto-ltalic (Apennine D) and the people gave up their own language to take on the Celtic-P tongue. Subsequently they were referred to by some European historians as Celto-Ligurians. They soon adopted the cremation rituals of the Urnfield Culture. The Italics at the toe of Italy pushed the Sicles toward Sicily, which was inhabited at the time by the Sican tribe, of unknown origin and language. In Etruria, of central Italy between the Tiber and the Arno, there was a Bronze Age Culture called Apennine and there was an abundance of copper and some tin for the making of bronze. Copper from the island of Elba was used throughout the 2nd millennium B.C. South Italy began to receive contacts from Mycenaean Greece as early as 1,300 B.C., particularly on the island of Pithecusae on the west, and Vivara and Lipara, and by the 13th century B.C. Mycenaean imports were already common. (Ref. 136, 75)

For hundreds of years the peaceful farmers of Corsica had buried their dead in great stone chambers with nearby single, standing menhirs which were roughly-shaped, unadorned, raised stones, and some seven feet high. After 1,500 B.C. there was a dramatic change and these menhirs became distinct sculptures with carved heads, tunics, daggers and swords. Whether they represented war trophies or memorials to a courageous enemy is still debatable. At about this same time, or at least between the 14th and the 12th centuries B.C., a tribe of the Sea People, the Shardana, came by way of Libya across the Mediterranean and overran the southern part of Corsica, pushing the remnants of the original Corsicans north, and by 1,000 B.C. the latter had disappeared. The conquering Shardana burned their dead and did not put up monuments. (Ref. 176)