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To: gleeaikin
part of a much larger series of tectonic events aroung the Mediterranean and the Sinai
There were no active volcanoes in the Sinai. There's no extant evidence of tectonic activity during the Exodus, either, partly because there's been so much disagreement about the date.
I think the name was Valle del Bove (sp?). I really wonder why scientists have not paid more attention to this eruption, as the severe decline of the Minoans took place around this time.
At least the fictional 17th/16th/15th/14th c BC eruption of Thera has the virtue of being in the neighborhood. But regardless, there's no thick strata of ash on Crete, which was the Minoan homeland; there is no evidence of any destruction of Minoan sites apart from fire, showing that the agent of destruction was some sacker of cities; and there's no tsunami evidence, and destruction by earthquake is difficult to show (other than sites like Kourion on Cyprus where human remains are found buried under the toppled architecture).
Other research I have heard of indicated that Santorini had several earthquakes and was evacuated about 20 years before the big one.
The island was evacuated apparently due to an earthquake, and as noted above somewhere, someone stripped it pretty clean -- no valuables. Also, no human remains were found buried under toppled walls or whatnot.

The main arguments in favor of the earthquake are the lack of human traces and the lack of valuables, but both of those could have resulted from an invasion and sacking of the town. IOW, there's not even much evidence for the earthquake. It's just another idea which has been seized upon to support the idea of a later super fantastic volcanic eruption. :')

Sturt Manning's note (also above) that the pumice found in Egypt has actually been linked to the volcano on Kos -- which apparently saw its last eruption 161,000 years ago. The island of Kos itself is described as "dominantly non-volcanic" -- which means that it won't be long before someone dreams up a 17th century BC eruption by the Kos volcano, probably simultaneously with the supposed eruption of Thera.

Volcanic eruptions as the agent for the downfall of the Minoans started out an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and has grown into a delusional system.
51 posted on 08/24/2006 9:26:08 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (updated my FR profile on Thursday, August 10, 2006. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv

There were no active volcanoes in the Sinai.

What about the pillar of fire by night, the the pillar of smoke by day. Sounds pretty volcanic to me. The parting of the red (reed?) sea could have been caused by magma inflation of the earth and deflation.

While there may not be active volcanoes in the Sinai, there are on the West side of Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea. "The Encyclopedia of Volcanoes" (Sigurdsson, 2000), says regarding flood basalt fields, "They occur at hot spots where significant crustal spreading has occurred, for example...the fields in Arabia and Syria that parallel the Red Sea/Dead Sea rift systems. (pg. 287) On the next page, Figure 4 shows a "Sketch map of a moderate-sized flood basalt field: Harrat Rahat in Arabia....lavas under 0.6 Ma including those of historic eruptions in AD 641 and 1256"

The end plates of the Encyclopedia show 7 volcanoes along the northern half of Saudi Arabia's border on the Red Sea. I wish I knew more about those volcanoes, and when they might have been active.


52 posted on 08/25/2006 12:31:19 AM PDT by gleeaikin
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