THE MINOAN-AMAZON-SCYTHIAN-PICTISH CONNECTION: Location, Location, Location...


Partial Panoramic View of the Santorini Caldera

In c. 1628 BC, a volcano at what is now Santorini erupted, spewing molten rock and ash into the air and ejecting an entire people from their homes on Thera, Crete, and the other Aegean islands and mainland.  True, the Minoan civilization did not vanish overnight, nor did they all leave at once, but this natural disaster is considered by scholars to be the catalyst for the decline of their civilization: the beginning of the end.
There is a theory that the Minoans left the Aegean and journeyed to the steppes of Scythia, where they became the people who are now known as the Amazons.  There has long been a theory that the Amazons either became or married into the Scythian tribes.  A third theory suggests that the Scythians – or some of them – later traveled to Scotland, where they became the people known as Picts.
As all of these theories, in particular the one concerning the Picts, have an enormous effect on my book, The Tyrant and the Twins, and its series, The Annals of Anavere, I have chosen to explore these theories and see if any correlation can be found between the cultures.  That exploration is the subject of this blog post and a number of posts that follow.
But first, for those of you to whom the names “Minoan”, “Amazon”, “Scythian”, and “Pict” sound remarkably similar to the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons – “Wah-wah, wah-wah, wah-wah!” – I have chosen to follow that most redundant of real-estate adages: “Location, location, location”!  The place from which a culture hails informs that culture’s identity.
Tomorrow: Location, Location…Minoan…

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