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Oldest Submerged City Visualized With CGI
Stirling Newberry writes "Nottingham University's Pavlopetri project spent months measuring a city that sank beneath the waves 3,000 years ago, perhaps in a tsunami. The result is a BBC documentary that features a detailed CGI reconstruction. 'The entire city – covering 20 acres – has been surveyed in ultra-high definition, with error margins of less than three centimeters. ... [T]he survey team has so far located scores of buildings, half a dozen major streets and even religious shrines and tombs.' eScience News chimes in about the oldest known submerged city, first inhabited 5,000 years ago and rediscovered in 1967. Of course, Slashdot readers will probably want to dig into the details of how stereo-vision mapping was used (PDF) to create the map in the first place."
I just want to see the pictures.
Maybe I'm wrong, but ISTM that a tsunami would only submerge a city temporarily. To stay under for 3000 years you need rising sea, sinking ground, or perhaps a sea breaking into a previously dry area below sea level.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Clearly submerged mortages sunk the housing market and all assets were lost when liquidity flooded the market.
Of *course* Atlantis existed. Atlanteans are the primary genetic source of the genes predisposing people to believe in conspiracy theories. All of the fine, upstanding men and women who believe in the Illuminati, UFOs, and Lizard Elvis owe their life obsessions to the brave few who escaped that grand City Upon the Sea.
Someone suggests its Atlantis. Atlantis never existed. It was a rhetorical device.
But it usually gets "discovered" every six months or so, and unless I haven't been following the news closely enough, we're overdue. So we may have to let this one in just to avoid a statistical fluke.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
People used to think the same thing about Troy. Then some German guy found it in the late 1800s.
Of course, the real Troy wasn't nearly as large as what Homer's story would have you believe, and there's no evidence of involvement by deities, but the city is real. Similarly, Atlantis, if it exists at all, probably doesn't have any advanced technology like flying machines and the like, but there could very well be a real city somewhere that used to be called Atlantis. After all, this currently unnamed city was once above sea level, and then some earthquakes happened causing the land to subside, and the city sunk; people back then probably assumed it was "the work of the gods".
It's not exactly far-fetched to say the story was based on an actual city that sank into the sea (*cough* Akrotiri *cough*). After all, modern story-tellers use historical events to make political points all the damn time.
"[...]a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. [...] there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. [...]Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent."
Someone is going to be VERY disappointed.
Tried to view the video on the BBC site. Says "not available in your area".
The irony is that I am in Greece...
Thanks BBC.
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Well we can see from Homer's telling of the Trojan War that we wasn't particularly accurate with details. In fact, I've been told that our modern obsession with realism and literal truth is actually a fairly recent development; back then, people didn't care for "true stories", they liked them embellished far beyond the limits of reality. Of course, while today we claim to like realism, looking at the way basic physics is handled in any Hollywood movie shows that we're all liars, unless you really believe that a gunshot will make a person fly backwards several yards.
And then that guy proceeded to utterly ruin the city, smashing through all the upper layers without even pretending to analyze or catalogue them in search of the gold or whatever he expected to find at the bottom.
I forget the exact details, but I know he trashed damn near 90% of the place; even by the looser standards of the 1800's he was a reckless, arrogant fuck. His own partner castigated him for his methods. It must have been inspirational for archeologists I suppose, to know that great things were still out there, but it quickly became one of the bigger archeological tragedies man has ever witnessed.
I just want to see the pictures.
I can do without their new fangled CGI, I just want to see a layout of the town. If it's been of known since 1967 surely there's a map, however crude, of it out there.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
You're trying to inject realism into a story where there was little, and exaggeration was normal. This isn't confined to the Greeks, just look at any Hollywood movie; there's no realism there. The "true stories" of Troy are probably rather dull: there was some stupid diplomatic gaffe (nothing as romantic as a stolen love), some sociopathic king got pissed and declared war, took a couple dozen ships and crossed the Aegean, and invaded some small town. The town's defenses helped for a short time, but were fairly quickly overcome with a battering ram or similar. King sacks city, survivors flee, end of story. Who wants to read a story about that, when they can read about a beautiful woman being taken by a foolish prince to his grandiose city, the other King angrily assembling a fleet of thousands of ships and traveling a great distance, then a great war being fought between tens of thousands of soldiers, and finally the King conquering the city through clever subterfuge, plus some stuff about various gods and super-warriors being thrown in for good measure?
For a modern-day parallel, watch any Hollywood movie that's "inspired by a true story", or heck, even those claiming to be "based on a true story".
People used to think the same thing about Troy.
I don't think that's actually true. We've always had lots of Roman references to the historical city of Ilium on the site (Roman version of Greek Ilion, source of the epic's title Iliad), with what was always thought to be Achilles' tomb nearby. We've always had references to the fact that Alexander visited the tomb during historical times and swapped his shield for the one on display there. And we have a Fifth Century CE (IIRC) travelogue where a guy reports visiting the site and being astonished to find that the Eternal Flame was still burning at the tomb - learning on investigation that it was maintained by the local Christian bishop.
Western Europe lost most of their contact with Greek and Roman literature for the better part of a millenium when germanic barbarians overran the western half of the empire, but the East Roman (Byzantine) empire wasn't squelched until 1453. And by then western Europe was starting to reacquaint itself with the literature.
Perhaps Schliemann faced skeptics, but we ought to make a distinction between a "lost" city and a city that was believed to have been mythical. We've found lots of cities in Western Asia that had been lost for several thousand years, but that doesn't mean nobody believed they existed. In fact, IIRC there are still a few that we know existed but haven't found yet.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In fact, I've been told that our modern obsession with realism and literal truth is actually a fairly recent development; back then, people didn't care for "true stories", they liked them embellished far beyond the limits of reality.
An important key to understanding Greek and Roman literature is that when an author reports a speech by a famous person, they aren't making the least effort to recount what was actually said; rather, they are constructing what they thought the person ought to have said on the occasion.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not exactly far-fetched to say the story was based on an actual city that sank into the sea (*cough* Akrotiri *cough*). After all, modern story-tellers use historical events to make political points all the damn time.
Perhaps it was, though if so it was more likely based on the famous circular harbor at Carthage than on Thera.
But Plato introduces it in a fictional account of a dinner party where one of the characters reports that a friend of a friend of ... (insert 7-8 removes) heard it from an Egyptian priest. We know that these stories of Plato, called Dramatic Dialogues, are just fictions to let him insert his opinions into the mouth of Socrates. So maybe he did drop in some common (or esoteric) knowledge about an ancient city - he does mention real cities - but there's absolutely no reason to suppose that he was doing so in the case of Atlantis. And there certainly weren't any Athenians around 7000 years earlier to fight these hypothetical Atlanteans.
Face it: he made up a story to make a point, and one facet of the story has caught the popular imagination. But almost no one who fancies that facet has the least idea where it came from, nor what else was in the story, nor why it was being told. Belief in Atlantis is the triumph of ignorance and wishful thinking over education, comprehension, and the expectation that claims should be supported by evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you think Schliemann was bad, you should check out what Evans did to Knossos. He didn't just dig right through all the previous layers with wild abandon, he plastered over and repainted what he found until it was a sort of Disney recreation.
Oh so about what you get from the news reporters of today.
A submerged city would have be covered with sediment, coral and fauna. A 1970's archeological survey map simplified for audiences would consist of some black squiggly lines superimposed over a blurry underwater photograph, providing conclusive proof that the structure was man-made.
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Have gnu, will travel.
What strikes me as odd is how much they look like average modern Mexican buildings. And many here in South Texas. wow 3000 years ago.
"Atlantis never existed."
Next you'll be saying that Discovery and Endeavour never existed, (or Challenger and Columbia)
Anyway one of the theories of the origin of the legend of Atlantis is that it recalls the Thera eruption which destroyed the Minoan civilistation around 1500 BC which was before 3000 years ago making that (the remnants of the Minoan city around Santorini) the oldest submerged city., or at least older than the one mentioned in the article. There are probably older sunken cities around, either that we haven't found yet or that have been found but we don't know how old.
I still reckon Atlantis was the best of the Stargate series, mainly because of Dr Rodney Mcay
Since nobody mentioned 'the king must die' as yet, I will.
Paai
So was Troy until it was excavated.
That would belong to this city http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm It was found in 2002
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
What about the submerged city in the Gulf of Cambay, India? This is reported as being up to 9000 years old (possibly) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm
Atlantis never existed. It was a rhetorical device.
So was Troy, until someone dug it out.
You can't take the sky from me...
Consider what the British did to Indus Valley civilization cities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization#Discovery_and_excavation