(3 of 4)
Into Surgery. "We approach these wonderful things scientifically," says Marinates. "If necessary, we can treat any new find like a casualty that is taken immediately to surgery." Where frescoes are found in a crumbled state, Marinates has them picked up piece by piece and reassembled on the spot by gentle-fingered experts in a workshed. The few visitors admitted to "surgery" find tables strewn with seeming jigsaw puzzles of painted plaster bits. One represents a blue monkey springing up through space with fingertip lightness (see second color page). The perfection of his leap sets this image among the greatest paintings of animals ever created.
There can be no controversy about the beauty of such fabulous finds, but arguments do rage over the question of whether or not they point to Plato's legendary Atlantis. Some scholars still insist that Plato was "resting his mind" and writing a moral fable when he described Atlantis and its fate in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. But Plato repeatedly stated that he was telling the truth, based on information handed down by Egyptian priests.
The philosopher may have been doing a bit of both. His story placed Atlantis out beyond the "pillars of Hercules" (the Strait of Gibraltar). The mighty island kingdom, he related, sank beneath the sea 9,000 years before his time. But the specific details and descriptions that Plato gives indicate events that modern science shows to have occurred in and around Santorini at the height of the Age of Bronze. They fit everything that is known concerning the final bloom and tragic end of what Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans arbitrarily labeled "Minoan" civilization. "Minoan" and "Atlantean" may well have been the same thing.
Among the many points cited in support of that contention are ones that Plato cannot have known, but that present-day archaeology confirms. For example, Plato puts sacred bulls at the center of the Atlantean religion; the so-called bull dances of the Minoans are familiar enough to all prehistory buffs. The golden "bull cups" of Minoan provenance at the Athens museum show bas-reliefs of young men capturing bulls with the help of only staves and nooses; Plato describes just such a ritual hunt as taking place on Atlantis. Again, he says that the Atlantean metropolis was built of red, black and white native stone in pleasing combinations; Santorini's cliffs, intriguingly enough, are striped with just those three colors of rock.
What about Plato's insistence that ancient Atlantis sank from sight "in a day and a night"? Minoan Crete did nothing of the kind, of course, but Santorini did sink. Moreover, its sudden destruction brought down Crete, and with Crete went the whole Minoan civilization.