From the Vault: The Tempest Stele

and ultimately writing about. And it also gets to the sort of the heart of like what is what is a written um account of the past four what purpose does it serve to those who who are in charge of the inscriptions. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be talking about

an artifact. This is actually a topic that I was originally reading about thinking about doing one of our new short form episodes, the Artifact about but it kind of ballooned in my mind and kept picking up. Weird little tangents here and there, and I realized it was much too big of a subject just to be like a five to ten minute episode. So so now we're talking about this today, and the subject is an artifact from ancient Egypt known as the Almost Steela or the Tempest Steela.

And I already apologize because I know at some point in this episode, I'm going to forget to pronounce steel a with a long E and I'm gonna start saying stella. It's that word, you know, it's st e l A or st e l e, which I can never get the get the sounds right in my brain. Yeah, but we were rehearsing it before the episode. It's steel a as in steel uh, Steely Dan album from the records,

or uh, and there's some kind of uh. There's some kind of other word that's also steel or steely ste l e, which I can't figure out if it's totally interchangeable with Steela or just mostly interchangeable. Anyway, we're not gonna deal with that in this episode because we're only concerned with one primary Steela here, and it's this almost Steela or Tempest Steela. So this artifact is at its heart a big stone block. It is a slab. It is a big slab made of calcite that's currently in

multiple fragments. I think there are at least three major fragments um and they were recovered from the temple complex of Karnak, which is in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes near the modern Upper Egypt city of lux Or. And this artifact was recovered by archaeologists I think in the late nineteen forties or early nineteen fifties. Uh. Karnak,

of course, is this big, beautiful temple complex. You may have seen it represented digitally and like Transformers movies where they're big robots slugging around there, or as an actual shooting location in the Spy Who Loved Me? Did the

Transformers really battle here? I think they did at some point the transform It's part of the the raison dettor of of Transformers to eventually just slam through and demolish every work of human kind, like all artifacts and landscapes must be ground into sand by the Transformers until only Transformers remain. Right, just a barren, featureless earth that's completely smooth, but with Transformers with with mac trucks and jeeps, and stuff.

But anyway, what's the deal with this slab, the tempestila. It originally stood about one point eight meters talls about six ft tall, and it bears an inscription text that was copied on both sides and these horizontal lines. But it also has some imagery at the top. So two quote from one of the papers that we're going to

be referencing today. I think that this description comes from this first paper that was published by Karen poland your Foster, Robert K. Rittner, and Benjamin R. Foster in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in nineteen quote above. The horizontal body of each text is a lunette with two addorsed scenes and brief vertical labels. Unlike the parallel text, the two lunette labels display minor variation in wording. Both faces preserve dual scenes of the king followed by a female

deity of fecundity carrying offering trays. And these trays have like fruits and vegetables on them. So you've got this big old text that's on both sides and the image of a king and a lady who represents fertility, uh carrying up some nice food stuffs, fruits and vegetables, nice plant matter, and so here I think maybe we should actually just read the full text of the Tempest Steela because it's not all that long. Uh. And this is

something that I personally really love. Maybe maybe other people aren't as interested in it as I am, but it just reading the text of of texts that are this old, like these ancient Egyptian inscriptions, really does kind of put me in an altered state of consciousness. You know. It's like, uh, I feel like I'm inhabiting a mind that is so separated from me by time and culture that it's a little bit creepy. Yeah, I mean to to a certain extent.

That's that's exactly what's happening, right, the transfer of information across the ages. Yeah. And and there's this like weird tangling down at the bottom of my brain where I just feel like there's a lot that's really important that I'm not understanding, but I'm getting just the slightest hint of what it is coming through in the translation. Well, that's the tangler, you got that, that's the Offensive Price movie. Well, but I know what you're talking about with this, Okay.

This English translation is by the American egyptologist Robert K. Rittener, who is the one of the authors on a couple of studies that we're going to be mentioning today. Now again, the steel A text is damaged, so there are some gaps, and some of these have been filled in with what is very likely what their contents were. So there's just some texts that we don't have, but we feel very confident,

you know, this is what it would have been. And other parts are just left blank where there's less certainty. And I guess when we get to one of those blank spots will just sort of pause for a second in the reading. So here it goes. Long Live the Horace, great of manifestations, He of the two Ladies, pleasing of birth, the golden Horace who binds the two lands. King of the Upper and Lower Egypt, neb feti Ra, son of Raw, almost living forever now. Then his Majesty came Raw himself

had appointed him to be king of Upper Egypt. Then his Majesty dwelt at the town of said Yefa Tawi in the district just to the south of Dendera. While aman Ra, lord of the thrones of the two Lands, was in the It was his Majesty who sailed south to offer bread, beer, and everything good and pure. Now, after the offering, then attention was given in this district. Now, then the cold image of this God at his body

was installed in this temple while he was in joy. Now, then this great God desired his majesty, while the gods

declared their discontent. The gods caused the sky to come in a tempest of rain, with darkness in the western region, and the sky being unleashed without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses, more powerful than while the rain raged on the mountains, louder than the noise of the cataract, which is at Elephantine, every house, every quarter that they reached, floating on the water like skiffs of papyrus opposite the royal residence, for a period of days, while a torch

could not be lit in the two lands. Then his Majesty said, how much greater this is than the wrath of the Great God, than the plans of the gods. Then his Majesty descended to his boat, with his counsel following him. While the crowds on the east and west had hidden faces, having no clothing on them after the manifestation of the god's wrath. Then his Majesty reached the interior of thebes with gold confronting gold for this statue, so that he, meaning amun Rah, received that which he desired.

Then his Majesty began to re establish the two lands to drain the flooded territories without his to provide them with silver, with gold, with copper, with oil, and cloth of every bolt that could be desired. Then his Majesty made himself comfortable inside the palace life, prosperity, health. Then his Majesty was informed that the mortuary concessions had been into by water, with the tomb chambers collapsed, the funerary mentions undermined, and the pyramids fallen, having been made into

that which was never made. Then his Majesty commanded to restore the temples which had fallen into ruin in this entire land, to refurbish the monuments of the gods, to erect their enclosure walls, to provide the sacred objects in the noble chamber, to mask the secret places, to introduce into their shrines the cult statues which were cast to the ground, to set up the braziers, to erect the offering tables, to establish their bread offerings, to double the

income of the personnel, to put the land into its former state. Then it was done in accordance with everything that His Majesty had commanded. Oh so there are some parts of that that really give me chills. The basic outline of it being that it introduces this great king, the Great Alma those who rises up and he answers this problem of there's some kind of calamity being described.

There are rains and a tempest coming out of the sky, with darkness in the western region, thundering in the sky, the sky being unleashed without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses. There's appear apparently some kind of flooding with bodies human bodies floating in the nile like skiffs of papyrus and uh, and a torch could not be

lit in the two lands. But then there is some kind of offering made to the gods to fix this problem, to make everything right, And it tells us basically that almost this guy did a really good job and he like got everything fixed and now it's under control. Yeah, so it's uh yeah, So it's so again, it's a story of a disaster occurring and then government responding to that disaster. But there's some We're not going to take

everything in that and explain it. I know there's some some names and some obvious gods and some kings, but just to run through a few things that I think are are are important or at least halfway important to understanding what's going on here. Um, I want to just call it a few things. So, first of all, Horace the Horace is the celestial falcon and the embodiment of kingship caught in an enduring conflict with Seth. Horace likely means the distant one, and there are two distinct versions.

There's Horace the Elder and Horace the Younger, not to be confused with Horace the child. Right, So an important god who's associated with the royal lineage of of Egypt

in this period. Right, and uh Now, one thing that this makes reference to that is geographically confusing to modern audiences is the concept of upper and lower Egypt, which are unless you're familiar with how ancient Egyptians talked about their geography, it's the opposite of what you would think, right, Yeah, it's always worth remembering that the ancient Egyptians saw their world uh, a little bit differently than we do today. Um. And not to say they saw the world upside down,

They just saw it from their point of view. Uh. So north and south are totally arbitrary, by the way, there's no such thing as objective north and south. Yeah. So with the way they saw it is with the Nile delta at the bottom of their kingdom. So Upper Egypt is actually somewhat lower on the modern state of Egypt that we memorize in school and look at on a map. Basically the in the area of Thebes, Lower

Egypt is the delta region that entails Memphis. So Lower Egypt is to the north and Upper Egypt is to the south. Right. Now, what about the sun god Raw? Right, there's reference to Raw yeah, Raw, the Sun god, source of all light and life. Um, you know. And there's a lot more to each of these gods, but this is just the short and simple. Now, there's some references in here to Amun Raw Yeah. And this, uh, if I'm correct on this, this is this is also known

as Almond. This is the mysterious Creator God and his name means the hidden one. Yeah. Now, the main character of the almost Stela or the tempest Stela here is almost himself, meaning almost the first who was a pharaoh, and he's the guy who who does all the fix in here. Yeah. He is the founder of the Eighteenth

dynasty who reigned well one of the day. The dates I was looking at, we're fifteen forty nine through fifteen twenty four b C. Right, So the dates of his reign are actually somewhat disputed, and that will come into that will be in some way the subject matter of what we're talking about today. Though it does appear he reigned sometime in the sixteenth century BC, so probably sometime

between sixteen hundred and fifteen hundred BC. The more conventional Egyptology chronology dates put put him in the middle somewhere in there, yeah, like a fifteen you know, the middle of the century to sometime in the late three quarters. Yeah. But either way, he seems to have been a very pivotal ruler at a very pivotal time. He was building on his father's military harry success and paved the road for the new Kingdom and the beginning of an age

of just Egyptian dominance. UM he reinvigorated and united Egypt. And this is key to he completed the expulsion of the Hicksos. So at this time Egypt, or part of Egypt anyway, were were ruled by these outsiders, these foreigners that invaded um perhaps you know, from Palestine or somewhere in that region. Uh. In anyway, basically, what Amos did

is he finished driving them out. He finished a rebellion against them that had begun by had been begun by his predecessors, and re exerted Egypt's rule over northern Nubia to the south. So it'll be important to think about all this as we discussed the details of his rule. But he was a pharaoh in an age of growth. He brought about a new kingdom, a conquest king. He was like, We're I'm going to conquer the areas to the north and the south and bring Egypt together again

under one rule. Yeah. Now, as for the Hicks, they're they're very, very interesting, and people have have written and researched regarding them and made various uh hypotheses and theories regarding their exact nature. There's a lot of very speculative Bible stuff about that. Yeah, yeah, you. You may have you're a Bible reader and a Bible student, you may have seen them pop up, I'm sure, and like just

even the notes in a standard Bible. They were the foreign Canaanite or Palestinian rulers of Egypt who took power during the seventeenth century b c. They ruled lower in Middle Egypt and established a capital at a Varis, which was associated with the Egyptian god Seth or set or su Tech, which was in turn equated with the Palestinian

god ball Uh. Hicksos called themselves theselves the sons of Raw, but one of them actually bore the name of Ra's nemesis, Apopus, the great crocodile or snake of Chaos, which is interesting. I didn't know that, yeah. Um. In Geraldine pinches the Egyptian mythology, she points out that the conflict of the time seems to have taken on mythological trappings as well as their stories related to a quarrel between the followers of Horace, the Thebans and the followers of Seth. The Hixos,

and the words seems to be related to just foreign rulers. Uh. I believe it's heckaal Kasuit rulers of foreign lands, and Hicksos is derived from this via the Greek. Okay, right, so hicksos would not have been what they called themselves but a sort of ex and m applied by the

Egyptians or even maybe later Greek speaking Egyptians. Right. And of course this is where it often gets interesting with with ancient history, when you're dealing with outsiders, right, because the outsiders are defined by those writing the history not only in terms of what happened and you know, what transpired, but but also like who they were, what were these people? Um? And so at times you've had people of historians, I mean, and and try and figure it out and and maybe

come in with a bit of an agenda. Uh. First century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus translated this at the time. Again this is first century Uh see um as as hicksos meaning king shepherds or captive shepherds. And this was an attempt to establish historical evidence for the Jewish people

in ancient Egypt. And this will come up again. Yeah, there there are a lot of um, I don't know, historical religious apologetics where people try to invoke the Hicksos as um somehow being descended from uh, say Joseph, like the story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis coming to Egypt and serving the pharaoh Um as someone who you know, listeners know that I'm a big fan of the Bible, especially at you know, I love the books

of the Torah and all that. So not to denigrate the story at all as a as a wonderful uh myth, but like, I don't think there's much historical evidence that these tales are like actual history that would be linked to Egyptian chronolog g. Yeah, I mean, very broadly speaking,

there seem to be like different levels of it. I mean they're there are are There are certainly people who look at history and look at things like the hicks Sos and try to draw a direct line, uh and say like these were the Jewish people, or say I've seen it before in Bible notes, for instance, saying well, okay, the Hicksos were foreign rulers in Egypt at the time, which would have made it possible for someone like Moses and outsider to rise up in the ranks enough to

have the role that he plays in the Exodus story. And then you have other people who are like that, that that that make kind of a middle ground argument saying, well, okay, the the the the Egyptian captivity is um is is a myth or or you know, it is a legend, but it is based in things that were passed down orally, and therefore there could be some connection between these two,

but the exact threads connecting them are uncertain. So, like I said, there a whole there's a whole lot of literature out there about, uh, this topic, and to what degree there are any connections here. I would just say that anything that tries to get too specific in tying these things to specific stories in the Bible is probably highly speculative. And we'll come back some of this later

on in the episode. Yeah, but what actually got me interested in talking about the Tempest Steela, apart from just being a very interesting text to read, is the question of is this referring to something that actually happened in Egyptian history? All this stuff about you know, the darkness and the sky and the and the flooding of the Nile and the bodies floating in the water and the water entering all these temple complexes, and uh, I'm being and the thundering and being unable to light a torch

in the two lands. What what is all this talking about? Um and so this actually ties into a study from fourteen actually a couple of studies, the most recent one I think was from in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies that I was reading about that that made an interesting connection between the events described in this text and

a possible actual geological cause. Or is this text, as it's been more traditionally interpreted, referring to either some kind of natural event that is more I don't know, a more regular and less extreme, or is it referring to something in a in a metaphorical sense, or telling a kind of fictional narrative to hype up this first ruler of the eighteenth dynasty Yea. Some have have have have made that argument that that it may be a metaphor the storm it felt, they may be a metaphor for

hickso suppression. Um Ian Shaw writes about this in the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, suggesting that it might have served as quote an official explanation for the impoverishment of the Theban region and more importantly, ah MOS's role in restoring the riches of the Karnak temple and it's God in other words, a story to explain why other temple riches were sold off to pay for to a certain extent, to pay for the Thevens rebellion of the seventeenth dynasty.

So not to say that there wasn't also a real storm of some sort, but that quote, these particular events might have been recounted on the Steeler simply in order to suit historical religious purposes. Yeah, and that's something that we see all throughout ancient history, I think is sort of creative re engineering of events and storytelling to make

certain leaders look good. Yeah. And I mean another thing is if this were just describing the flooding, Like the flooding is one of the major aspects of the calamity described in on this slab. You know, nile flooding is a regular occurrence that there's like there's like monsoonal seasonal flooding of the Nile that occurs every year to varying degrees, And so that that's something to keep in mind as

we go about this. Yeah, and I think I've mentioned before I'd love to come back and just do an episode on the Nile and it's flooding because it has such an such an intrinsic role in the world view of the ancient Egyptians and their entire cosmology. It's fascinating stuff. Thank you, thank you, Okay. But so to come into this possible or at least the hypothetical geological connection that we're exploring today, we need to travel north of Egypt.

We need to go up into the Mediterranean to a place that's now known as Santorini, but has also gone by the name of Theora. And now you may have seen that spelled th h e r A, and I have always said Terra when saying when saying that, but it's actually apparently Theora and Theora or Santorini was the site of a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the ancient world that likely had a really powerful impact act on Bronze Age history. Uh. This is also known as the Minoan

eruption or the eruption at Theora. Now, I actually found a really great source on the theory eruption, which was a chapter in a book by former show guest Clive Oppenheimer, who was on the show with us when we interviewed

him and Werner Herzog about their documentary Fireball. Clive Oppenheimer wrote a book that he published with Cambridge University Press in two thousand eleven called Eruptions That Shook the World that is about volcanic eruptions all throughout the past and how they've shaped the course of human events in human evolution, human history. So he's going to be one of my

main sources on on this eruption here. So uh Theora or today Santorini is an island, I guess, really a group of islands in the south of the Aegean c so it's between Greece and Turkey and north of Crete. It's one of the southern Nigian islands. And if you look at a picture of Santorini taken from above, you may immediately be able to guess something about its geological history.

It's got a kind of scary shape that immediately like if you, if you're volcano minded, can kind of make your gut sink because part of the island is this long C shaped land mass sea as in the letter C, like a capital c uh land mass that has steep cliffs on the inner wall of the curve of that sea. And then smoother tapering shores and slopes on the outside. And then opposite the inner curve of that letter C shape, there's another large land mass with similar characteristics facing inward.

Uh So, Oppenheimer mentions that if you look at the inward facing cliffs, you can see alternating colors of rock strata and yellow, white, and gray and red, and so it should be probably kind of obvious what this is. This island group is the partially submerged caldera of an a scient gigantic volcano that is now half swallowed by

the ocean. Now, this island, of course is famous to geologists and historians of the Bronze Age because this volcano was the source of the catastrophic Minoan eruption, which the again, the date of this eruption is going to be in dispute and part of what we're talking about today, but just to you know, be a very broad strokes, think roughly in the area of six b C. Now is in the twentieth century actually that archaeologists really came to

recognize the effects that this eruption had had on nearby human civilization. And one great example that Oppenheimer highlights is the work of an archaeologist named Spirodin Mirinatos who dug up parts of what would have been a Minoan ports settlement on the southern part of Santorini that is now known as Akrotirie. That this name is applied by modern scholars.

We don't know what the ancient and inhabitants of this town would have called it, but this would have been a relatively wealthy and well developed town until the volcano woke up. We talked actually some last October with Nicoletta Momiliano about the Minoan civilization and it's it's palace power centers on Crete. Now this this island again would have been north of Crete, so away from the real center

of political power of the Minoan empire. But still it was I think part of that civilization and shared in its wealth and its trade and its culture. Yeah. And in her book In Search of the Labyrinth, the Cultural Legacy of Minoan Creede, I mean she she does a reference volcanoes several times. Yeah, and Uh, I think volcanoes would have been highly relevant to the history of the Minoan culture. And eventually the Minoan culture uh declined and

was superseded and conquered by Mycenaean culture. But this kind of eruption would have been unprecedented in local human memory. The volcano had been calmed for approximately fifteen thousand years beforehand at least and UH, and so this late Bronze Age eruption was one of the largest European volcano eruptions of the past hundred thousand years. This was a huge,

highly energetic, highly destructive event. UM. And it's interesting actually looking at what's left behind in this particular settlement on Santorini, the place now known as Acritiri. And I was reading about it a bit in UH. This UH one of the first of two papers involving Robert K. Written Er that we're going to be looking at today. This was the one by Foster, written Er and Foster from nine in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies called Text Storms

and the Theory Eruption and UH. The authors here they talk about how archaeologists uncovered remnants of this ancient village on on the southern coast of the island group preserved under this thick bed of volcanic ash. And because it was an ancient settlement that was preserved under layers of tephra, it is similar in some ways to the ruins of places like Pompeii and Herculaneum up on the Italian Peninsula, which were themselves kind of frozen in time by the

eruption of Vesuvius in seventy nine. In a similar way, we see this settlement frozen in time. It was rapidly buried by volcanic ash, and there are lots of artifacts and features that were very well preserved, including some extremely beautiful original frescoes and paintings that I would really recommend looking up. Looking up the paintings from theory Um and

and the frescoes there. There are some that are these large sort of tableaus or landscape scenes that show like a port city with boats moving to and fro in the background of these colorful, colorful buildings and hills full of wild animals and plants. And there was even, for a brief tangent, there was even this really interesting mystery

about the are there that I came across. That was one painting at Acritiri showing monkeys, these blue monkeys that appear to be similar to a species that would not have been native to the Aegean, but would have been native either to h to Africa or to India, which is I think often taken as a sign of the kind of often surprising level of trade and interconnectedness in the ancient world. That either live specimens of these monkeys or artistic depictions of these monkeys were being taken back

and forth from far and wide around the world. That's impressive. I mean either way, once exposed to monkeys, one cannot help but create art about monkeys. Yes, maybe one day we should just come back and devote a whole thing to the blue monkeys. Controversy is that what kind of monkeys are these? Where did these images come from? And so forth. I I don't know. I found this very interesting, but maybe we should just get back to the eruption

for now. Okay. Now. Oppenheimer, in writing about the eruption of theory uh he he says that the eruption seems to have been preceded by an earthquake or maybe series of earthquakes, that the damage the local infrastructure. In fact, it looks from the remains of this settlement like the locals had not finished up cleaning the debris and the damage from the earthquake at the time. The town was buried under tephra from the eruption, so it seems very

likely that these things are related. Uh and Oppenheimer writes quote the townsfolk appeared to have suspected impending doom. At least no victims have been found, suggesting that Acritiris residents abandoned the town before it was buried by thick tephra fall and pyroclastic current deposits. On the other hand, so much tefra remained unexcavated that it's entirely possible that victims will be located eventually. Uh. Now, I guess this book

was written in two thousand eleven. I haven't read about any victims discovered since then, but that would be in or seemed to come back to anyway. Oppenheimer goes on to say the clearing away of debris and reconstruction were unfinished when the first hydro volcanic blasts excavated a new pathway for magma to reach the surface, probably through a vent on one of the islands and towards the eastern

wall of the present day caldera. Once the conduit was established, a sustained plenty and eruption ensued, gaining an intensity through time, evident from increasing size of pumice chunks upwards through the associated deposits, the eruption column reached an estimated maximum altitude of thirty six kilometers, from which it would have descended to its level of neutral buoyancy in the lower stratosphere.

The plume was then carried towards the east and southeast by prevailing winds, so there would be this giant volcanic column, you know, visible from very far away, going up thirty six kilometers in the air, or at least up to thirty six kilometers in the air. And then he says the parts of the island were covered it in up

to six meters of white solicit pummice. And then the geological evidence indicates that sea water repeatedly sloshed into the volcanic vent, rapidly mixing together water and magma and uh and then through the surrounding sedimentary structures of the rock layers that we can see left there now, it looks like that there was this enhanced fragmentation of magma that you see when water and magma mixed together very quickly.

And Oppenheimer rights quote the resulting deposits which accumulated to a depth of twelve meters, are punctuated by desk sized lava bombs that must have traced ballistic trajectories from the vent to thwack into the soft and sticky pyroclastic beds.

These characteristics indicate formation by successive shattering blasts and associated with base surges similar to ground hugging currents apparent in photographs of atmosphere nuclear weapons tests that would have readily scaled the complex topography of the island um so So now, Oppenheimer rights that the event at this point in the eruption would have been filled with this sort of red hot salad of ash, water, steam and pummice, and you'd

get these repeated blasts that would have kept widening the vent as the energy released by the eruption just kept increasing, and eventually you would get this climactic phase of the eruption, you know, as it reaches it's it's pinnacle, uh and what he calls a soaring phoenix cloud and a new formation of a new caldera. So, in the end, this this gargantuan event had implications reaching far beyond just this

island here known as Santorini. There would have been weather and climate effects far and wide, quite possibly major damage from tsunami's Oppenheimer rights that quote. The total size of the eruption, which probably lasted no more than a few days, is difficult to estimate since so much of the material is beneath the waves, but it's thought to have been around a magnitude of seven point two or sixty cubic kilometers of dense magma. Uh So, do you know people

can't picture sixty cubic kilometers? What is that? Imagine a solid cube that is about three point nine kilometers or about two point four miles on each edge, and it's a cube that big. So we're talking about it. It's a real cataclysmic eruption here. This was this, this was, this was would have been horrifying to to witness from Afar. Yes, the local environment, the island itself would have been just

completely entombed, as the word Oppenheimer uses, just buried. And then my no, and Tefra goes far far away, like it's been found as far away as the Black Sea, indicating, um, you know, what Oppenheimer says is a fallout area bigger than two million square kilometers, which he's as is equivalent to about the size of Mexico, so gigantic radius of of effect if you're trying to picture on the map, it affecting areas beyond in the Black Sea, the Black

Seas on the other side of Turkey from the Aegean, so it is huge. But then, interestingly, Oppenheimer brings up one of the issues that is most debated with respect to the Minor interruption, which is what was its exact date? It seems like the kind of thing that you should be able to tell, right, You know, we know exactly what day this occurred, but it's harder than you might think. We know it was roughly thirty years ago, but what year exactly? Um, Now, I guess the question would be like,

why would this be tricky to date? You know, shouldn't shouldn't we have a record of it? Well, most of our chronology for the ancient Eastern Mediterranean is based on the historical timeline of Pharaonic dynasties in Egypt. You know that they kept pretty good records. They include the lengths of rains. But even with these, uh these pharaoh chronologies, there's still a lot of uncertainty in the dating of these Pharaohs. When you go farther back, especially to the

kind of period we're talking about. You know, if you get into like the period of the Roman Empire or something, Uh, then dates are really solid. We just know what year things happened. But if you go a thousand years fifteen hundred years back before that, throughout much of the Eastern Mediterranean, there's way more room for questioning and error because there are fewer written records. Those records are less correlated with objectively dated other things, so there's just there there are

a lot of question marks. Yeah, I like to drive on something we've We've mentioned in the past. We were in dealing with the with ancient Egypt. We're dealing with the ancient history of the Romans, like the Romans considered this ancient history. Yeah, what we're saying, so Julius Caesar, if he's thinking about the events concurrent with the eruption of theory, that would have been like something like fifteen

hundred years ago for him. So us thinking back to, you know, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then that's funny, that's just the new Kingdom of Egypt. Again, I've said this on the show before, but one of one of the most amazing things is to think about how far back ancient history goes. Just in the written part of history, where we have some records and there are recognizable civilizations. That's the New Kingdom to the ancient Romans. The old Kingdom of Egypt would have been more ancient

to them than the Romans were to us. Yeah, and that that's just always a nine boggling to think about it. I love that. Yeah. But anyway, so so we get to these dating issues. Um now, I'm gonna try to avoid getting too technical about the dating, because, like you know, are arguing about you know, how many decades in this direction or that direction, uh you date an event can get a little bit uh wearisome. I think if you if you don't have a lot of other history knowledge

to sort of orient around that. But to give you the short version, the standard view for some time, at least according to Oppenheimer, is that the Minor Interruption took place sometime around fifty f hundred BC. But there has recently been radiocarbon dating and other types of evidence that, if correct, would place the eruption like a hundred years earlier. So just one example is a study that I was reading about from two thousand six published in the journal

Science by Friedrich at All. That was radiocarbon dating of a branch from an olive tree that was buried alive in Tephra on Santorini. Uh. When so the branches would have been they were preserved in their life position. You know, this was not a dead tree. This was still living when it got put under the ash. And that evidence, the evidence from that radiocarbon dating would put the eruption in the late seventeenth century BC, so like sometime around

sixteen hundred to sixteen twenty seven or so. And of course the authors of this radio car urbon dating say, uh, whoops. The one problem here is this is not consistent with the eruption date as it uh, as it's assumed by many archaeologists, especially based on the chronology of pharaohs in the New Kingdom of Egypt. It doesn't really match up. So maybe there's something wrong with our date, or maybe there's something wrong with that chronology. Now, it certainly is

possible that the radio carbon dates could be wrong. Oppenheimer in his book points out that there are uncertainties with the level of atmospheric carbon fourteen right around this period, he says, between thirty five hundred and thirty seven hundred years ago, for various atmospheric chemical reasons um that make it a little bit harder than it might usually be to obtain accurate carbon dates for objects within this period.

And there have been other attempts to date the eruption using In fact, he's got a long section in his chapter if you ever want to check out the book that's really interesting about using dendro chronology and the study of ancient trees in Turkey, UH to try I to understand what might have been happening with the theory eruption, Like there are these trees that show these sudden spurts of growth at a time that might be signaled by the eruption of the volcano. And it's like, why would

volcano erupting make trees grow more? But it has to do with the local climate in Turkey that actually having a cooler summer. If you're a tree in a hot arid climate, a cooler summer could actually help you grow more than you would normally. Oh. Fascinating, now to come back to something more parallel to what we were talking about with people trying to relate these events to the Bible. Uh. One thing that I think is funny is that a

n Oppenheimer goes into this bit. Many people have tried to link the Minoan eruption to the story of Atlantis told by Plato and the timmy Ist dialogue. There are some obvious parallels, Like it does tell of an island civilization that achieved great prosperity but then sank into the sea amid earthquakes and fire and left behind a shoal of mud that made the see in that region impassable.

So you know, you can see some similarities. But I think it's it's important to keep in mind that this is one of the places where it's really easy for the pattern seeking brain to get over excited, because the story of Atlantis was written more than a thousand years after the theory eruption, probably like the thirteen or fourteen hundred years later, might not even have been intended to be taken as anything more than like an allegorical story

to make a point. So I think any attempts to say Aha, Atlantis was Santorini that seems entirely speculative based on pretty weak inference. I don't think we can even be confident that that Atlantis was a place. Yes, but but Atlantis is one of those one of those things that people are always going to jump to conclusions with, and they're gonna they're gonna bend over backwards to try and fit Atlantis in with with some sort of existing evidence or tail. He's right up, there were the aliens,

it though, I admit. I guess like if you're gonna say the Atlanta story, if you knew somehow that it was based on a real event in Mediterranean history, I

guess maybe this wouldn't be a bad can todate? I just if you get more into that sort of middle area of like, okay, a story and may even it's just purely for allegorical purposes, based on a city vanishing into the sea and some sort of a cataclysm, it could have connections to this, you know, just to some uh you know, memories and accounts of this having happened before uh, you know, because that's just that's how humans work.

We we when we make things up, we tend to make them make that base them on things that came before us, either historical events or other myth cycles. Other stories, etcetera. Right, So, if we're trying to get come up with a good solid date for the theory eruption and and sort out all these discrepancies, one thing that would be really useful would be if there were a contemporary record that we could did you know that we could date definitively which

referred to the eruption. Unfortunately, we actually have shockingly few written records from this period in this region of any kind, and what we do have does not make explicit reference to the eruption, unless unless one of the papers we're looking at today is correct, and it does in an abstracted form. And this, of course is what brings us back to this hypothetical interpretation of the tempest Steela. Alright, Yes, the the intense rain, the darkening of the sky, the

flooding exactly so. So Oppenheimer actually makes reference in his chapter to this this possible connection. He says, quote in Egypt, depending on which it's eruption chronology you adhere to, the time of the eruption coincided with the end of the Second Intermediate Period and the rise of the brothers Commos

and Amos, who founded the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom. Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia, the Old Babylonian period was nearing its terminus with the hit Heights Sack of Babylon dated circa b C. Unfortunately, there are virtually no surviving historical texts from the period. And here's where we get to the really relevant part.

It has been suggested that hieroglyphs on a steela erected by almost in the Karnak Temple bear witness to the Manuan eruptions climatic consequences in the guise of a great storm accompanied by flooding and destruction. But it seems more likely the events recorded referred to severe monsoonal flooding in

the Nile, as still occurs from time to time. So at the time Oppenheimer published this in two thousand eleven, he thought it unlikely that the Tempest steela was referring to the Manoan eruption because, first of all, it could have the steela could have other plausible interpretations, like some of the interpretations we've talked about already. And also the dates, though close, don't exactly line up right. Yeah, and again, like you said, the Nile floods, it will it will

flood it will sink back down. And this sort of um fluctuation is in a crucial part of the Egyptian worldview and the way that they saw the world and the way that they formed their various interpretations of the gods. Right. But anyway, back to what originally got me interested in doing this episode was this paper that was published in that um certainly does not make a conclusive case, but maybe makes the mind no interruption interpretation of the Tempes

Stela more plausible. And so this is a paper published by Robert K. Rittner and Nadine muller Uh published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies called the Almost Tempest Stela Theory and Comparative Chronology. Now, just to quickly refresh on the apocalyptic climatic lines from the Steela inscription, at

least the translation we at earlier. It talks about quote the gods caused the sky to come in a tempest of rain, with darkness in the western region, and the sky being unleashed without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses, more powerful than something, while the rain raged on the mountains, louder than the noise of the cataract, which is at Elephantine, every house, every quarter that they reached floating on the water like skiffs of papyrus opposite

the royal residence for a period of days while a torch could not be lit in the two lands. Now, so so we've talked about the the sort of classic or regular interpretations of what's being described here. Maybe this is describing real weather like events that were and it maybe like a particularly bad monsoon season, you know, really intense nile flooding season one summer or maybe these this is a fictional account. Maybe it's somehow metaphorical as a

statement about military invasions or movements of people. Yeah, and and and it is also worth reminding ourselves that what we we see here, what has survived, Like, there's nothing in this account that couldn't have been said about just a really intense storm that was related to you know, to say, the monsoon, uh season or something you know, to that effect. You know that it's just it rained a whole lot. The sky was dark, the sky darkness

when there are heavy storms and uh, and then flooding occurred. Um, so you you don't need the volcano to explain what we're what we're reading here though if there were a volcanic eruption, it's very possible that it could It could create this kind of intense weather that is being described.

Volcanic eruptions inject gases and ash particles way up into the atmosphere, which in some cases can cause extreme heavy rains, lightning, storms, and things like that in the area surrounding the eruption, And of course we know the on on an even broader scale. Big eruptions can have these huge climatic effects that can infect an entire hemisphere of the globe, like

they bring cool summers, bad harvests and famine, etcetera. But like we've said, you can have even earthquakes, you can have dark skies, thunderstorms and flooding in Egypt without it necessarily being the result of a volcano so wider. Writtener and Mueller further suggest the link in this paper. Just

to briefly mention a few points. One thing is that this paper offers a new revised translation of the Steela, which they argue, for one thing, makes it pretty clear that the events described are not supposed to be some kind of military or political metaphor. They really seem to be describing literal weather events, and these events are said

to have been personally witnessed by almost himself. Another thing is just some complicated interlocking date stuff like it looks like if you date the tempest Steela and the reign of something like fifty years earlier than the traditional uh Pharoah chronology, does that puts it closer to the date for the theory eruption, at least the date that would be implied by the more recent radiocarbon dating. And we've discussed already the reasons that the theory eruption as different dates.

But you remember the olive branch and the radiocarbon dating putting it closer to like the late sixteen hundreds b c uh. If you do that, allegedly, some other discrepancies and discontinuities about dates in ancient regional history would at least be partially resolved. Another interesting argument I came across was actually a point raised by a different professor, a University of Chicago archaeologist named David Schloan, which I saw

quoted in some news articles covering this paper. And this was that if this link is true, it would make almost as military victories over the hicks Os make even more sense. We know that the theory eruption caused catastrophic

tsunamis that affected places like the coast of Crete. If these tsunamis also struck the coast of Egypt along the Nile Delta, this potentially could have devastated Hickso supports and weakened the Hicksos greatly by crushing their coastal settlements and crushing their ships and their sea power, which in turn would have weakened them, making it easier for almost to

get victory in the conquest of Lower Egypt. So, yeah, what, While this is by no means conclusive, I think it seems plausible that the phenomena described in the Tempestila could be the theory eruption and or the weather effects that followed it, But of course it seems very hard to be certain about that. But in general, I do really enjoy things like this, finding new possible connections between natural events, geological and climate events, and artifacts from human history that

we didn't really know for sure how to interpret before. Yeah, and and one of those situations to where you you can't help but think, like, what is you know, what is the closest we could come to being sure about this, you know, um, and and there's you know, there may always be this gap it and then again who knows, who knows what else might be discovered in the future that uh, that could help line things up even better

than than now. I was poking around about this and I figured it might be worth addressing something that I think is um even with this the study we're talking about now, like we said, as far from conclusive, but

it's like it makes some interesting arguments. There's some stuff that I think is even more speculative and and goes in directions that might be unsurprising if you're familiar with you know, popular writing in this subject matter, UM, which is links to biblical interpretation, as some people who take the Biblical stories of like the Exodus and surrounding events as literal history have apparently tried to connect the events described the storm Steel as evidence that, for example, the

plague of darkness described in the Bible actually literally happened in Egypt. UM. And I would just say, from my point of view, this type of reading of religious texts seems kind of misguided in several ways, but I guess it is not surprising. Yeah, and again We touched on a little bit already about this about the Hebrew Hicksos correlation.

As I've seen it referred to. It's it's one of the usual suspects I've seen it referred to as in attempts to establish an historic record for the great antiquity of the Jewish people. And again, people have been writing about this possible connection for literally ages. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean as even before this new study. But for example, it is not surprising that people would like take one of these studies and run with it and say, like, hey,

proof of the Bible or something. I was just I didn't go deep on this, but for example, I found an article by it was like a blog post on the Times of is Real by this guy named Simcha jacobo Vici, uh, saying essentially that you know, this is somehow proof of the historicity of of the Exodus or the biblical plagues. I think it goes without saying that this is not what the authors of the study or alleging. Yeah,

this Jacobovici argument. Uh. This was referenced in a really interesting blog post that I read from George Athos, who teaches that More Theological College in Sydney, Australia, and an Athos points out that traditionally the the steela was interpreted as either the description of a localized natural disaster or is the metaphor for the oppression of the Egyptians at the hand of the hands of the the Hicksos rulers. And he discusses uh, written Er and Mohler, but he

also talks about this Jacobovici argument. Now, Jacobovici is an Israeli Canadian filmmaker who busts out a lot of work on archaeological evidence for biblical events. Uh, work that often clashes with accepted interpretations. So he's been all up on the History Channel for example. Of course, Uh, this is

what Athens says, writes quote. Jacobovici asserts that this new interpretation proves the Biblical Exodus because the natural disaster in the tempest Stela describes matches up with the plague of

darkness described in the Exodus narrative. Jacobovici claimed back in two thousand and six that this stela was a key piece of evidence for finding the Exodus in the archaeological records of Egypt, and now he says, here is the final proof now Athis goes on to say, no, in his opinion, there is no direct connection to be made here, no matter how much he himself would like to see such firm connection. He's very uh. You know, he mentions this several times, like he says, you know, I would

love to see this proven true. I would love to find this connection, you know, but this is not it. We can't jump to conclusions and and you know announced that it is that is done, you know. And he presents several reasons why. First of all, uh, he said this connection was not made by written Er and Moehler in their work. Also the Tempest, Steeler makes no mention of slaves, he Brews, or anything else that matches up

with Exodus. Also, Amos described it as something greater than the work of a god, not the work of a god. Written or in Moelar stress that the emphasis is not the darkness, but rather the abnormally harsh rain storm. Darkness is secondary to the rain. Uh. You know, think back to what we read earlier, or even go back and listen to it where they're like, it rained crazy and

it was dark. It wasn't like and then there was darkness and also it was raining and then he writes, jacobo Vici makes a direct link between the Hicks sos and the Israelite slaves of the Exodus narrative. He is not the first to make this link, but it creates a series of other problems. For example, the Hicks has ruled a portion of Egypt which contradicts the Exodus narrative

and states the Israelites were slaves, not rulers. They are also chronological difficulties, including seeming clashes with the archaeological record of a settlement into came In. And then finally, Jacobovicci apparently plays fast and loose with the term proof. According to Avis, yeah, and that seems like one of the biggest things obviously. I mean, as soon as you're saying like proof, you're you're really setting a bar for yourself

that you're almost never going to clear. Yeah. So, so ath this finishes up by saying, quote, I'll be glad of the day when we do find evidence for the Exodus outside the Bible, but today is not that day. So I thought that that was a rather interesting take on it, you know, um uh, you know, again, somebody coming from the point of view where they're not just saying like, I'm here to to disprove all um, you know, bits of legend and mythology. I'm here to disprove the Bible.

And he's saying, you know, I would I would love for this to be proven true. And he really seems to write from a standpoint where it sounds like he his faith is in that, that in the reality of it. But he was saying, you know, this is not the proof you're looking for. This is not you know, we cannot say that the job is done and that we can you know that that it has been proven to have existed via archaeological evidence. Yeah, don't, don't get sucked

in by the checkmate mentality. Yeah, now, of course, you know, could the Steeler refer to a cataclysm that remembered by various people ends up influencing lighter tales and traditions, Uh, you know, of course, But that is a far cry from a direct connection, you know. Right. Yeah, I'm finally scrolling down and getting to see the blue monkeys. I think maybe sometimes we should just come back and and

look more at the paintings of a criteria. They are weird and beautiful, like there are I don't know, I love the artistic style of them that give living beings these strange curves, like they are these very elongated s shaped gazelles that look almost like something out of a I don't know, abstract or uh, I don't know what the term would be. I'm not good at my art history,

the impressionist or something like. They're clearly representative, they are gazelles, but they have these ridiculously elongated, sort of tubular curve irved bodies and also like humans, Like there's an image of these these two guys that look like they're boxing each other but with these sort of curved s shaped torsos. Yeah, yeah, it's um, it's fascinating to look at some of these images.

I'm looking at the blue monkeys right now that you referenced earlier, and um, I mean, aside from looking very much like monkeys, there's a fluidity to the way that their their bodies are illustrated here. You know that that certainly matches up with the actual movements the actual bodies of these So you know, this isn't one of those cases as fascinating as I find second and third hand

reproductions of animals in art. You know where somebody's clearly painting something based on a description, uh, second or third hand description rather than than direct evidence like these these seem to capture the essence of these animals as they are alive, perhaps even in the wild. Yeah, yeah, though exactly.

One of the questions that comes up as I was reading this weird back and forth in the journal Primates, or at least the again in the Journal Primates by people arguing about what species the monkeys depicted in this painting are supposed to be. And so there was a paper and I think twenty nineteen saying, uh, they're actually these monkeys from India, and then there was a reply saying, no, there are these monkeys from Africa, and then there was

another reply. But basically it came down to the question of were the people painting these monkeys painting a monkey that they had seen alive or were they painting a monkey as it had been portrayed in other art that they had seen. Oh that's true too, this is this could be yeah, that situation as well. Like, you know, they have this fluidity to their formed and they've caught in several poses that feel very appropriate and realistic for monkeys.

But they could have been basing this on another work that that someone else had done for sure. Yeah. Interesting, we'll have to come back to that. It is a whole mess of monkeys, though they look like they're up to no good there, there is also a sense of barrel of monkeys too it, you know, like I don't want to to to reduce them to that, but there is kind of like a bunch of blue monkeys spilled

on some tiles, you know. Um, because the barrel of monkeys are good representations of the fluidity of the monkey's form and movement as well, I think maybe we need to call it all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and uh and and finish this uh steva right now and go ahead and uh and and and and put it into the archives. But we'd love for anybody out

there to uh touch base with us on this. Have you have you seen any of the places that we have, if you visited any of the places that we discussed here, do you have any thoughts on you know, the connections possible connections between the tempest Stela and uh and you know the the catacausmic eruptions and uh and and stories of of of of legend and mythology. Let us know

we'd love to hear from you. There are all kinds of other interesting effects of the minor interruption that people have done studies on all over the place about how they affected, how it affected civilizations, and and marks it left on the planet. So yeah, if you've got anything interesting along those lines to share with us, please do all right. In the meantime, if you want more stuff to blow your mind, you know where to find it.

The Stuff to Blow your Mind feed We have normal, regular core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursday's Little Listener Mail on Monday's Wednesday is the short form artifact episode that we mentioned earlier, you know, a little little uh you know, specific things, specific, specific moments in time, uh, specific ideas, that sort of thing.

And then on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema, which is uh our less science e installment, our chance to just focus on a particular weird film and chat about it. Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

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