Then, it had been part of what Plato8 and later legend called the lost continent of Atlantis, which with Crete made up the Minoan empire. The major part of it and perhaps parts of Crete as well were suddenly 1ooo feet underwater. Most of the remaining land of Thera was covered with a 150-foot-deep crust of volcanic ash and pumice.
Geologists have hypothesized that the black cloud caused by the eruption darkened the sky for days and affected the atmo-sphere for years. The air shock waves have been estimated at 350 times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb. Thick poisonous vapors puffed out over the blue sea for miles. A tsunami or huge tidal wave followed. Towering 700 feet high and traveling at 350
miles per hour, it smashed into the fragile coasts of the bicameral kingdoms along the Aegean mainland and its islands. Everything for two miles inland was destroyed. A civilization and its gods had ended.
Just when it happened, whether it was a series of eruptions or a two-stage affair with a year between the eruption and the collapse, will require better scientific methods of dating volcanic 7 See Jerome J. Pollit, "Atlantis and Minoan Civilization: An archeological nexus"; and Robert S. Brumbaugh, "Plato's Atlantis,'' both in the Yale Alumni Magazine, 1970, 33, 20-29.
8 See particularly Critias, 1o8e-119e, passim.
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ash and pumice. Some believe it to have occurred in 1470 B.C.9
Others have dated the collapse of Thera between 1180 and 1170
B.C. when the whole of the Mediterranean, including Cyprus, the Nile delta, and the coast of Israel, suffered universal calamity of a magnitude that dwarfed the 1470 B.C. destruction.10
Whenever it was, whether it was one or a series of eruptions, it set off a huge procession of mass migrations and invasions which wrecked the Hittite and Mycenaean empires, threw the world into a dark ages within which came the dawn of consciousness. Only Egypt seems to have retained the elaboration of its civilized life, although the exodus of the Israelites about the time of the Trojan War, perhaps 1230 B.C., is close enough to be considered a part of this great world event. The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.
The result is that, in the space of a single day, whole populations or what survive of them are suddenly refugees. Like files of dominoes, anarchy and chaos ripple and lurch across the frightened land as neighbor invades neighbor. And what can the gods say in these ruins? What can the gods say, with hunger and death more strict than they, with strange people staring at strange people, and strange language bellowed at uncomprehend-ing ears? The bicameral man was ruled in the trivial circumstance of everyday life by unconscious habit, and in his encounters with anything new or out of the ordinary in his own behavior or others' by his voice-visions. Ripped out of context in the larger hierarchical group, where neither habit nor bicameral voice could assist and direct him, he must have been a pitiable creature indeed. How could the storings up and distillings of admonitory experience gained in the peaceful authoritarian ordering of a bicameral nation say anything that would work now?
Huge migrations begin moving into Ionia and then south. The 9 S. Marinatos, Crete and Mycaenae (New York: Abrams, 1960).
10 New York Times, Sept. 28, 1966, p. 34.
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coastal lands of the Levant are invaded by land and sea by peoples from eastern Europe, of whom the Philistines of the Old Testament were a part. The pressure of the refugees is so great in Anatolia that in 1200 B.C. the puissant Hittite empire collapses, driving the Hittites down into Syria where other refugees are seeking new lands. Assyria was inland and protected. And the chaos resulting from these invasions allowed the cruel Assyrian armies to push all the way into Phrygia, Syria, Phoenicia, and even to the subjugation of the mountain peoples of Armenia in the north and those of the Zagros Mountains to the east. Could Assyria do this on a strictly bicameral basis?
The most powerful king of this middle Assyria was Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 B.C.). Note how he no longer joins the name of his god to his name. His exploits are well known from a large clay prism of monstrous boasts. His laws have come down to us in a collection of cruel tablets. Scholars have called his policy "a policy of frightfulness."11 And so it was. The Assyrians fell like butchers upon harmless villagers, enslaved what refugees they could, and slaughtered others in thousands. Bas-reliefs show what appear to be whole cities whose populace have been stuck alive on stakes running up through the groin and out the shoulders. His laws meted out the bloodiest penalties yet known in world history for even minor misdemeanors. They make a dramatic contrast to the juster admonishments that the god of Babylon dictated to bicameral Hammurabi six centuries earlier.
W h y this harshness? And for the first time in the history of civilization? Unless the previous method of social control had absolutely broken down. And that form of social control was the bicameral mind. The very practice of cruelty as an attempt to rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink of subjective consciousness.
The chaos is widespread and continuing. In Greece it is darkly known as the Dorian invasions. The Acropolis is in flames by the 11 H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), p. 101.
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end of the thirteenth century B.C. Mycenae no longer exists by the end of the twelfth century B.C. It has been ground out into legend and wonder. And we can imagine the first aoidos, still bicameral, wandering entranced from ruined camp to camp of refugees, singing the bright goddess through his white lips of the wrath of Achilles in a golden age that was and is no more.
Even from somewhere around the Black Sea, hordes that some called the Mushku, known in the Old Testament as Meshech, thrust down into the ruined Hittite kingdom. Then twenty thousand of them drifted further south invading the Assyrian province of Kummuh. Hordes of Aramaeans continuously pressed in on the Assyrian from the western deserts and continued to do so up into the first millennium B.C.
In the south, more of these refugees, called in hieroglyphics the “People from the Sea,” attempt to invade Egypt by the Nile delta at the beginning of the eleventh century B.C. Their defeat by Rameses III can still be seen on the north wall of his funerary temple at Medinet Habu in western Thebes.12 The invaders in ships, chariots, and on foot, with families and oxcarts of possessions, stream through these murals in refugee fashion. Had the invasion been successful, it is possible that Egypt might have done for the intellect what Greece was to do in the next millennium. And so the People from the Sea are pressed back east-ward into the clutch of Assyrian militarism.
And finally all these pressures become too great for even Assyrian cruelty. In the tenth century B.C., Assyria itself cannot control the situation and shrivels back into poverty behind the Tigris. But only to breathe. For in the very next century, the Assyrians begin their reconquest of the world with unprecedented sadistic ferocity, butchering and terroring their way back to their former empire and then beyond and all the way to Egypt and up the fertile Nile to the holy sun-god himself, even as Pizarro was 12 For illustrations of these see William Stevenson Smith, Interconnections in the Ancient Near East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 220-221.
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to take the divine Inca captive two and a half millennia later on the opposite side of the earth. And by this time, the great transilience in mentality had occurred. Man had become conscious of himself and his world.