The Tempest Stele

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 Steela 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 w. 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 record store. Uh. And there's some kind of uh, there's some kind of other word that's also steel or steely st e 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 archaeology, so I think in the late nineteen forties or early nineteen fifties. Uh. Karnac,

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 humankind, 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 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 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 adorsed scenes and brief vertical labels. Unlike the parallel text. The two Lunet labels display minor

variation in wording. Both faces preserved 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 this 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 temper Steel up 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 vinsive Price movie. Well, but I know what

you're talking about with this, Okay. This English translation is by the American egyptologist Robert K. Rittner, 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 text 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 welt at the town of said jeff A Tawi, in the district just to the south of Dendera, while aman Ra, lord of the thrones of the two Lands, was in Thebes. 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 could 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 am un Rah, received

that which he desired. Then his Majesty began to reestablish 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 fired. Then his Majesty made himself comfortable inside the palace life, prosperity, health.

Then his Majesty was informed that the mortuary concessions had been entered by water, with the tomb chambers collapsed, the funerary mansions 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. Ooh, so there are some parts of that that really give me chills. So the basic outline of it being that it introduces this great king, the great almost 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 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 out 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 Ra. 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 days. 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 b C. So probably sometime between sixteen hundred and fifteen hundred b C. E

the more conventional Egyptology chronology dates put put him in the middle somewhere in there, Yeah, like a fifteen you know, middle of the centuries, 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 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, we 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 Sos, they're they're very, very interesting, and people have have written and 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 them. 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 sue Tech, which was in turn equated with the Palestinian god ball Uh. The Hicksos called themselves theselves the Sons of Raw, but one of them actually bore the name of Ra's nemesis of Papus, the Great

Crocodile or snake of chaos, which is interesting. I didn't know that, yeah, um. And 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 heckal Kasuit rulers of foreign lands, and

Hicksos is derived from this via the Greek. Okay, right, so hisos 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 come in 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 chronology. 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 looked at history and look at things like the Hicks and try to draw a direct line, uh and say like these were uh the Jewish people, or say I've seen it before in in Bible notes, for instance, saying well, okay, the Hisos 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 past 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 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 fourteen 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. Yeah, 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 theme in 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 Thievens 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 steela 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 uh 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 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 thank 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. Now you may have seen that spelled t h E r A, and I have always said Terra when saying when saying that, but it's actually apparently Theora and theory or Santorini was the site of a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the ancient world that likely had a really powerful impact 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 a g See. So it's between Grease 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 mentioned 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

ancient 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 spy Rodin Mirinatos, who dug up parts of what would have been in a Minoan ports settlement on the southern part of Santorini that is now known as Akrotirie. This name is applied by modern scholars.

We don't know what the ancient 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 Create, 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 Crete, 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 culled lture 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 thea 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 and ground 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 art 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 uh 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 you should just get back to the eruption for now. Okay, now Oppenheimer and 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 appear 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 remain excavated 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 interesting 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 Joe 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 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. So 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 care touristics indicate formation by successive shattering blasts and associated with base surges similar to ground hugging currents apparent in photographs of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests that would have readily scaled the complex topography of the island um So so now Oppenheimer wrights 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, h 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 in Tefra goes far far away, like has 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 says 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 Sea is 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 your

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 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 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 d b C. 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 radio carb and 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 carbon 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 act 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 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 Nappenheimer goes into this bit. Many people have tried to link the Minoan eruption to the story of Atlantis told by Plato and the Timiest Dialogue. There are some obvious parallels.

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 sea 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 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, and he's right up there with the aliens, right 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 candidate. I just if you get more into that that sort of middle area of like, okay, a story, and even if 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 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 or 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 its eruption chronology you adhere to, the time of the eruption co sided 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 fift 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 stela erected by Amos 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 Stela was referring to the Man interruption, because first of all, it could have the Steeler 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 shrink back down. And this sort of um fluctuation is in a crucial part of of the the Egyptian worldview and the way that they saw the world and the way that they 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 Tempest steel a more plausible. And so this is a paper published by Robert K. Writtener and Nadine Muller Uh published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies INTEN called the

Almost Tempest steal Uh Theory and Comparative Chronology. Now, just to quickly refresh on the apocalyptic climatic lines from the

Steela inscription, at least the translation we read 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 uh, particularly bad monsoon season where 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 that 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 witten by Almos himself. Another thing is just some complicated interlocking date stuff like it looks like if you date the tempest Steela and the reign of almost something like thirty to fifty years earlier than the traditional uh pharoh 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 has different dates, But you remember the olive branch and the radiocarbon dating putting it closer to like the late sixteen hundreds BC. 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 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 the 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 of 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 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 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 interpret Titian 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 in the Storm Steela 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 is 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 Israel 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

jacobo Vici 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 Athens 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 u written Er and Moehler, but he

also talks about this jacobo Vici argument. Now. Jacopovici 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 Athis 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 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, i'm os described it as something greater than the work of a god, not the work of a god. Written Er and 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, Jakobovici 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 Hicksos ruled a portion of Egypt, which contrad the Exodus narrative and states the Israelites were slaves, not rulers. There are also chronological difficulties, including seeming clashes with the archaeological record of a settlement

into Canaan. And then, finally, Jacobovicci apparently plays fast and loose with the term proof According to athis 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 Is 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 you're 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 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 later tales and traditions. Uh, you know, of course, but that is a far cry

from a direct connection, you know. 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 of 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 there 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 curved 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 they began 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, and this is this could be that situation as well, Like they have this fluidity to their form, 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 to 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 Have 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 Steela and uh, and you know the the cataclusmic eruptions and UH and the stories of of of of legend and mythology. Uh. 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 top 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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