Timewatch

Historian Bettany Hughes is amongst a growing number of leading experts who believe that Plato's story of Atlantis was inspired by a real historical event - the eruption in the Bronze Age of a massive volcano on the Aegean island of Thera, today better known as Santorini. Bettany presents evidence to support this theory, including the latest scientific findings, which show that the Thera eruption was much bigger than previously thought. And just like Atlantis, Thera was home to an amazing civilisation. Archaeologists have uncovered on the island a lost world - a Bronze Age city entombed by the eruption. This city belonged to the Minoan culture, Europe's first great civilisation preceding classical Greece by a thousand years.