Greece has its own Pompeii: Thera buried Akrotiri in ash 17th-16th century BCE
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
As Wikipedia says:
> Akrotiri (Greek: Ακρωτήρι, pronounced Greek: [akroˈtiri]) means "cape, promontory". As a result, many different seaside places bear this name.
I found Fira (nearby "large" town on Santorini, very close to the sites) miserably crowded, but seeing Thera was very cool. This is all about 1500 years older than Pompeii, so a very different experience IMO.
The real historic sites can be seen via
- taking a boat tour to the dead volcano "Caldera"
- visiting the Prehistoric ruins at Akrotiri (south side of the island)
Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island. This was for defense reasons against pirates and other potential attackers.
Well, others are mostly at sea level, with only some high points. Thira has very little land at sea level.
Though to be fair the concept of a powerful city lost to time is something that resonates a lot, and there's multiple similar myth like the isle of Ys, the lost continent of Lemuria, or in the arabic folklore 'Iram of the pillar', often called 'Atlantis of the sand'.
[0] There was an episode on it in the excellent podcast 'In Our Time' by the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c6t3)
And the way Atlantis supposedly ended also fits what happens on volcanic islands.
Nobody at the time could fabricate it out of his own imagination. The description is too accurate.
If this partial decipherment were right, the language of Linear A would be Hurrian, i.e. the language of a state that was important around 4 thousand years ago and which was located in the territory of present Syria.
The Hurrians from Syria also used writing, but there they had adapted a variant of the cuneiform writing. Some Hurrian texts have also been found written with the Semitic alphabet used in Ugarit. There are some features of the Hittite variant of cuneiform writing that seem to have been taken from their Southern neighbors, the Hurrians, so it is possible that the Hittites have learned writing from the Hurrians, who had been using cuneiform writing for a few centuries before the Hittites, instead of taking writing directly from Assyria. This would be similar to how the Greek users of Linear B have taken writing from the Minoan users of Linear A.
It seems that the Hurrians had a rich mythology, which influenced many of their neighbors, and a few of their myths have been preserved, inclusively in the Hittite archives.
There exists no certain relationship between Hurrian and any language that survives today. In the antiquity there was a related language spoken in Urartu, on the territory of present Armenia. There are however a few similarities between Hurrian and some of the languages of the Caucasus area, but due to the difference in time of many thousands of years it cannot be known whether there is any genetic connection between them.
So if the claims about a decipherment of Linear A were true, that would imply that the Minoans have colonized Crete, and probably also Cyprus, by coming from the nearby territory where today is Syria. This sounds plausible, and that territory is one that had become "civilized" before the more Northern territories of Anatolia and Greece.