Crete

         The sport of ritual bullfighting (where one unarmed man wrestled or jumped over a bull), attributed by Plato to Atlantis, was only present here. Although the Minoans were not present 9,000 years before Solon or 2,500 mi. (4,023 km.) away, they were present 900 years and 250 mi. (402 km.) away. A mistake could easily have been made in the nine centuries before Solon and the years between him and Plato. Cretan civilization was destroyed by an earthquake and flood, as well.
         In 1883, a volcano on the island of Krakatoa, between Java and Sumatra, erupted. A wave 40 y. (37 m.) high hit the neighboring islands, killing 36,000 people. Ash blackened the sky for three days. The sound of the explosion was heard 3,000 mi. (4,828 km.) away.
         The explosion on Thera in 1500 B. C., just 10 mi. (16 km.) north of Crete, was four times as big. The tsunami created by the explosion must have travelled 1/2 mi. (8/10 km.) inland. The great Minoan armadas were destroyed as if they were paper. The Minoan Empire was crushed and Crete never regained its importance.
         It is possible that the Minoan civilization would have survived, and even been restored to its full power, had it not been for the Mycenaeans. Their kings, long forced to bow to Crete, formed a council of war. They united and wiped out the Minoan civilization. Any remaining memory of the ruined civilization, the palaces of which were home to squatters, was wiped out in the return of the Heracleidae, the invasion of the Dorian Greeks that ended Mycenaean (also called Ionian) Greece in c.1200 B. C.
         The Greeks were plunged into a dark age and the only memories of the great civilization of the Minoans was a single king, their namesake, Minos.