Timaios

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   Before Troy, the Aegean already had two thousand years of civilisation: the sculptors of the Cyclades, the palaces of Minoan Crete, and the town buried by the Thera eruption.

   Timaios · -360

   In an enclosed sea, the small islands are the nodes everything passes through.

   The Cyclades are the small islands between Athens and Crete: Naxos, Paros, Keros, Delos, Thera. Between 3200 and 2000 BC their people smelted bronze, sailed between islands and carved thin marble figurines with folded arms, which museums now call "Cycladic idols". On Keros, archaeologists found thousands of such figurines, deliberately broken and brought from all over the Aegean — a maritime sanctuary a thousand years before Homer's Troy. The islands were then drawn into the orbit of Minoan Crete, Europe's first palace civilisation, with writing, roads, a fleet and frescoes. On Thera (today's Santorini), the town of Akrotiri was buried by the ash of a huge eruption around 1600 BC and survived with two-storey houses, drains and wall paintings of ships. Plato's placing of Atlantis's disappearance "in a single day and night" has led many to see Thera as the distant echo of the myth; it is a hypothesis, not evidence. What matters for our thread is the chronology: the Achaean world that will besiege Troy grows on the ruins of this early Aegean and inherits its fleet, its writing and its taste for palaces. Today's parallel: small islands in an enclosed sea are still nodes — ports, undersea cables, bases — that matter more than their size. Whoever holds the Cyclades holds the routes.

   “But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.”

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