Geoscience Reference
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lived in close-packed mud huts with white plastered interiors
and rudimentary furniture, created a rural economy through
farming the surrounding Anatolian plain. While the wall paint-
ing may have been a direct reaction, however long delayed it
might have been, to the eruption, the fertility of the soil and
thus the people's living was the product of the eruptive local
volcano. This society had been settled long enough for it to
develop its own manufacturing infrastructure, from pottery to
plough-making, rising in sophistication to the programmatic cre-
ation of wall paintings and the making of blades from obsidian,
a volcanic product.²
If the residents of Çatal Hüyük had developed a narrative
tradition in which the volcano played a part, it has not come
down to us. It is not for another 4,000 years that myth begins
to shade into history when the volcano Santorini, now named
Thera, the island in the Aegean Sea more or less equidistant
between mainland Greece and Turkey, exploded around 1620
bc in what was the greatest event of natural destruction in
recorded human history. Nearby Akrotiri was buried under lava
and ash, while the tsunami that the eruption generated grew
into a ten-metre high wave. This, after an unbroken run to Crete,
cast itself on Knossos. The immediate destruction was one of
the factors that precipitated the downfall of the Minoan civili -
zation and, radiating in all directions, the tsunami brought havoc
to the Aegean and its littoral. The Santorini eruption is one of
the suggested causes of the disappearance of Atlantis - if,
indeed, Atlantis ever existed.
A group of volcanoes whose perturbations also left their
traces on classical myth are the Lipari islands, a volcanic chain
north of Sicily. The southernmost of these, Vulcano, which passed
through a long eruptive period around 400 bc, was explained in
Greek (and Roman) myth as the furnace and forge of Hephais-
tos, the god of fire, or his Roman equivalent, Vulcan. When the
mountain erupted, as it did regularly in classical times, it was
thought to signal that Hephaistos was at work. The Lipari islands
were both deadly and convenient, as Demeter (Roman: Ceres),
the goddess of the fertility of the earth, used them, and their near
