Sylvia Horwitz,

The Find of a Lifetime (New York: Viking, 1981). A readable biography of Evans, with a balanced presentation of the controversies until its publication .

D. A. Hardy et al.,

Thera and the Aegean World III (London: Thera Foundation, 1990). These proceedings of a major international conference, held in Thera in 1989, include more than a hundred papers by archaeologists and other scientists. The clear consensus was that the Theran eruption was

not

responsible for the end of Minoan civilization .

J. Lesley Fitton,

The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, University Press, 1996). An authoritative account of the excavations at Troy, Mycenae, Knossos, Thera, and other Greek Bronze Age sites .

Rodney Castleden,

Atlantis Destroyed (New York: Routledge, 1998). Other Greek legends besides Theseus’s may be rooted in Minoan Crete. Of these, the best known is undoubtedly that of Atlantis, which Plato (writing in the fifth century B.C.) described as a great island civilization that, following earthquakes and floods, was swallowed up by the sea. Many writers have speculated that Crete was Atlantis, destroyed by the Thera volcano and accompanying earthquakes and floods. This is an argument that faces many obstacles, and not just those cited in this chapter. For example, Plato described Atlantis as having been in the Atlantic, though Crete is clearly in the Mediterranean. And Plato put the destruction nine thousand years before his time, while the actual span was closer to nine hundred years. Castleden is the latest to make the case for Crete as Atlantis, and he’s also one of the most reasonable, but it remains an unlikely scenario. Sometimes myths are just myths .

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