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Skara Brae
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 Skara Braeen.wikipedia.org From 3180 BCE to around 2500 BCE is roughly the same amount of time as passed since Europeans (not including the Norse) first colonized the Americas to now. We think about that, but it seems telescoped somehow into just a few events. Pilgrims, revolution, civil war, civil rights, lunar landing, and the second election of Donald ending American democracy, relative global peace and harmony. But these ten homes in Skara Brae, possibly a few more destroyed by gradual climate change, served the inhabitants of the little village for six hundred years. They had industry, farming, even flush toilets. Flush toilets five thousand years back. Otzi the ice man lived at that time, though probably never visited their little village. One wonders what technological marvels they chanced upon during those six hundred years, and the impact those developments had on their culture and society. What have we grown accustomed to? The Diner’s Club credit card was introduced in 1950, a full decade plus before my time. So before that we relied on the Phoenician system that replaced the barter exchange used at Skara Brae. Ne wonders how they treated travelers, what kind of exploring they did, if any challenged the channel waters (obviously some had), how inbreeding issues were resolved, and why they all departed. One hopes it wasn’t the result of some Jonestown style cult pulling a Masada. |
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www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk |
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Inbreeding? I don't think so. a) Note that the climate was slightly warmer during its time of settlement than later, so a wider range of crops could have been frown. Also, who knows what other settlements were also on the island, either still buried or now below the sea level. The 50 population has to be seen as a minimum. b) These people lived on an island small enough to walk from one end to the other in two days and ate seafood. They must have had serviceable boats. There were other islands, even the mainland of Scotland, within range of a routine boat journey. Plenty of scope for exogamy or even slave-getting. Why did they depart? Lots of possible reasons. Perhaps a series of very harsh winters as the climate cooled. Perhaps they were enslaved by raiders. Perhaps consolidation into a larger town for mutual protection or for specialisation of labour. There are lots of abandoned settlements all over the world and specially so in regions where population density is low. I'm hoping that someone will find the remains of a boat somewhere so we could reconstruct the quality of their sailing technology. |
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Invent Scenarios Possibly all the buildings were abandoned but miscreant teens carted off all the goods from the other buildings in ensuing centuries, before the sands of time obliterated the last memories of the place. Sixteen centuries after its last inhabitants a volcano in Italy erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Caesar’s uncle enjoyed a lovely villa in Herculaneum with a library rivaling mine. His was actually much larger, impressive as each manuscript was also far more valuable. These scrolls were all immolated in the heat of the volcanic gas and ash, but it turns out the texts are recoverable through computer tomography and AI. It is an expensive undertaking, but fortunately most scrolls were NOT destroyed in doomed efforts to unravel them. Many had been discarded as charcoal from firewood before their true nature was understood. I mourn as the poetry of Sappho may have been included, some of which we have found in garbage dumps discarded millennia ago. She was a most highly celebrated author, and like Colin a poet, though no doubt there is considerable difference in the style and subject of their poems. There are runes on Skara artifacts, none of which have yet been interpreted. It is sad they did not leave records of their exploits and history. And it is marvelous how much we have been able to learn. |
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I believe that these ancient sites are where we should be looking for corroboration of Plato's account of Atlantis. Although Plato put Atlantis at 9000 years before his own time, he ascribes 8000 of those to the span of historical Egypt. So there is a definite exaggeration going on there. We should be looking for traces of a culture which was active on the Atlantic coasts and in the Western Med, shortly before the rise of Egypt as a power. I submit that sites such as Skara Brae, Newgrange in Ireland, Carnac in France, and ancient temples on Malta, are actually a good fit to Plato's account once you get the timeline right. I think there are also sites I haven't seen on islands such as Sardinia. |
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Atlantis? But most of these rely on monumental buildings as evidence. I don't find this convincing; monumental buildings have been put up all over the world, including the Americas and as far back as Göbekli Tepe at 9,500 B.C. Size means plenty of manpower, but not high technology or social sophistication. The most convincing I've seen attributes the Atlantis legend to the Minoans, centred on Santorini, with fragments of other spectacular natural disasters woven into it (as happens with legends). It would be nice to have a time machine! |
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Hypothesis |
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Size So yes, current thinking is this is a portion of a much larger settlement, a good portion of which was lost to the sea. It makes sense to me. Were the inhabitants killed in a 2900 skirmish, or carted away as slaves, and did those who returned have any relationship to the ancestral population, or were they foreign interlopers, “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood” of the original population? Why did they leave for a hundred years? |
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Atlantis I think it’s just silly to suppose a fantastical society existed that simply sank beneath the waves. Though that DID happen to Mark Anthony’s bachelor pad off the coast of Alexandria (originally ON the coast). We are going to lose a lot of cities beneath the waves in coming decades. More than just Skara Brae. |
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Colin 15:38 en.wikipedia.org Almost immediately after this the Sea Peoples (Hyksos) conquered the Egyptian delta region and the Philistines took the coast of Palestine. Refugees/pirates from the Aegean? Meanwhile, Troy VI shows sublayers of destruction, which would be expected from a city which had probably gained a great deal of wealth from its control of the Dardanelles and the trade passing through it, but reduced now as trade collapsed. Was this legend of a combination of Santorini "at the outwash of a great sea" (i.e. the Aegean) and hints of Troy VI (at the outwash of the Black Sea) a fragment woven into the Atlantis myth? Remember that Egypt itself, the source of Plato's information, was itself thrown into turmoil by the Hyksos invasion that cut it off from the Mediterranean for a couple of centuries. The mention of 'the Pillars of Hercules' might be no more than a later interpretation that was absorbed into the legendary source description. There are no known references to any culture in the Eastern Mediterranean knowing about the Strait of Gibraltar before Phoenician traders around 1,000 B.C. The Phoenicians did NOT name them 'the Pillars of Heracles'. This term arose during the classical Greek era (around 450 B.C.), referring vaguely to some point in the far west. It doubtful that this was originally any more than a figure of speech, at best a vague awareness from Phoenician gossip, which was later applied to the Strait when it became better known. Plato's description of Atlantis is that it has concentric rings of waterways and islands. Was this an idealisation of the old Minoan city being built on a central island in the middle of a flooded caldera, further surrounded by the outer ring of the volcano just like modern Santorini? That's a summary of the case for Atlantis = Santorini. Not conclusive, but I find it more convincing than any other that I have read. |
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Thera |
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Shiva 19:45 The distantly-remembered myth, embellished over generations, adjusted to fit the geography of later generations. Not to be taken literally. |
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Apatzer 14:09 Were those actually beds, or did they serve some other purpose? In Russia the mother-in-law (grandmother) slept on the stove. When the Germans invaded they at first did not believe the peasant cottages were actual domiciles because there were just boards along the walls for everyone else to sleep on, except the father who always slumbered across the front doorway, on the floor. The Germans invaded the 1940s enjoyed all the creature comforts of home, while the Russians lived not a whole lot better than the Skara Brae villagers. Russians had an iron stove, chimney pipe, and a few additional metal implements. Probably better pottery. |
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Atlantis The story of Atlantis can be traced to the Greek philosopher Plato. He spoke of the fabled land back in 360 BC. In Plato’s telling, Atlantis was a land of rich and powerful people who were technologically advanced. It was not a complimentary tale though, and his stories about it were meant to illustrate that their knowledge and might had corrupted them as a people. For most of history these tales were regarded as allegorical, used by Plato to illustrate a point. There are no other writings of the time that ever mention anything like Atlantis, so it was generally considered just to be something he made up to be illustrative. Not everyone believes that was the case though. In more recent years, the belief that Atlantis may have been based on Minoan society has achieved some notoriety. The Minoan kingdom, ruled by King Minos, was said to be remarkably wealthy and advanced and had spread across much of Ancient Greece. Minoans had paved roads and were believed to have been the first Greek society to use a written language. And then one day they vanished. It’s believed that sometime around 1600 BC a massive earthquake set off the volcanoes on the Minoan island known as Thera, burying it and destroying the culture forever. www.toptenz.net |
