The Official newWitch Blog

According to legend, Aphrodite was born from the sea foam off the coast of Cyprus.   And if recent archaeological findings are to be believed, Cyprus also gave birth to the perfume industry.  At a sprawling archaeological site on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean at Pyrgos-Mavroraki, 55 miles south-west of Nicosia, archaelogists have unearthed 4,000 year old alabaster vials named after Greek goddesses and containing fragrances distilled from pine, coriander, cinnamon, parsley, bergamot, bitter almonds and laurel.

The perfumery formed part of a site dating from 2000BC which included a copper smelting works, a winery and an olive press that provided the base ingredient for the fragrances. Fragments of enormous storage jars capable of holding 500 litres of olive oi (the  base of these perfumes) were also discovered, suggesting the scope of this operation.  As Maria Rosa Belgiorno, lead archaeologist at the site said.

We were astonished at how big the place was … Perfumes must have been produced on an industrial scale. No wonder the island got its reputation for possessing the skills of Aphrodite.

For quite some time, archaeologists have speculated that the story of Atlantis was inspired by a massive volcanic eruption on Santorini, an island located approximately 125 miles (200km) from modern-day Greece.   New research suggests that blast was even bigger than previously supposed - and that its devastating effects were felt hundreds of miles away in Egypt.

Using techniques previously used by oil companies to locate petroleum deposits,  a team of Greek and American researchers found that the Santorini archipelago was ringed with volcanic deposits averaging 100 feet (30 meters) thick and extending about 19 miles (30 kilometers) in all directions.  This suggests that the Santorini eruption involved approximately 60 cubic kilometers of magma - or six times the amount released during the devastating Krakatoa eruption of 1883!

To give some idea of the sheer size of this event, Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed traces of solidified lava on the northern coast of Sinai that date to around 1500 B.C.  The archaeological team, led by Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, found houses, military structures, and tombs encased in ash, along with fragments of pumice, near the ancient Egyptian fortress of Tharo,  near where the Nile Delta meets the Sinai peninsula.

The Santorini eruption would have massive tsunamis: the much smaller Krakatoa eruption caused 100 ft. (30m) high waves.   These would have carried with them “overwater flows,” scalding debris composed of pumice, hot ash, and superheated gases.   The Minoans, a seafaring people living on nearby Crete, would have been caught unawares by the blast: famine and disease would soon claim many of those fortunate enough to survive the initial shockwave.   

According to Haraldur Sigurdsson, a volcanologist at the University of Rhode Island, this event inspired not only the legends of Atlantis but also a passage in Hesiod’s Theogony describing an epic battle between giants and Greek gods that took place out at sea.   Written some 800 years after the Santorini eruption, Sigurdsson believes Hesiod was inspired by folklore based on survivor accounts.

He uses all the terminology one would use in describing an eruption.  The people who lived close enough to see that it was a volcano were all killed. [The rest] could only describe it in supernatural terms.