Just a quick post today, to share a piece of world-building I did a few years back. I was in the process of teaching myself map-making techniques in Photoshop and Inkscape, and dipped into my old notes on the Danassos setting to produce a map. Here’s a copy of the result:

That’s a pretty big file, so you may want to download it, or visit the pertinent page on DeviantArt.

(Yes, if you look closely at the map, you’ll see Atlantis. Thera, of course.)

The idea here is to trace the origins and eventual destiny of the so-called “Minoan” civilization, in the Danassos alternate history.

I’m assuming that the Minoans were originally Luwian people from southwestern Asia Minor, related to the Karian and Lykian peoples who lived there in historical times. About 3000 BCE some of them migrated into the Aegean and settled on Crete, forming the basis for Minoan culture. That would make the Minoan civilization an early outpost of the Indo-European language group, since the Luwian languages were part of the (very archaic) Anatolian branch of that family.

Centuries later, another branch of the Indo-European family made an appearance to the north, proto-Greeks migrating down into what we now think of as Thessaly. These people began as warlike nomads, using horses and primitive chariots to achieve military superiority over the pre-Greek peoples of the region. Eventually, they filtered further south, took over the small palace-states of the southern peninsula, and came into contact with the more sophisticated Minoans. The result was the Mycenaean culture, the first iteration of Greek civilization and the basis for all the later heroic myths.

All of that is entirely historical, of course. The first big divergence from our familiar history comes about 1450 BCE, when Mycenaean adventurers and warlords began to take over the Minoan palace-states on Crete. That sets up several decades of conflict, at the end of which the mainland Greeks invade and sack Crete, bringing Minoan culture to a bloody end. I’m assuming that the Minoans had long known about the existence of Italy and Sicily to the west; the major point of divergence is that some Minoan survivors escape the sack and set up the refugee colony in Sicily that later becomes the city of Danassos.

A note on dates: the calendar system I’m using is called Etos Kosmou or “era of the world.” (The Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church once used similar nomenclature for their calendars.) The epoch is the vernal equinox in the year 3058 BCE by our reckoning. Dates BCE can therefore be roughly determined by subtracting the EK date from 3058, and vice versa.

The idea here is that the ancient Minoans were aware of the procession of the equinoxes, and had the mathematical sophistication needed to estimate the position of the sun at the vernal equinox at various points in the past. This is all rampant speculation, of course – we have not a scrap of solid evidence for Minoan astronomy. However, it’s an interesting coincidence that right about the time the Minoan culture was established (circa 3000 BCE) the position of the equinox was in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull), not far from the bright star Aldebaran (the Bull’s “heart”).

We have evidence that the constellation of Taurus has been seen as a Bull since very ancient times. In fact, the Minoans were among the ancient cultures who maintained bull-cults and saw bulls as sacred creatures. I have to wonder if there wasn’t a certain amount of astronomical lore behind those cults. Maybe, maybe not – it’s not as if bulls aren’t impressive and dangerous creatures that any ancient culture might find worthy of worship.

Regardless, it struck me as a neat idea that the Minoans might have believed that at the moment of the world’s creation, the sun was at the vernal equinox and in the heart of the constellation of the Bull. I applied some astronomical software to estimate the point at which the sun would have been closest to Aldebaran at the vernal equinox, and that gave me an epoch of 3058 BCE. All of the notes I’ve gathered about the Danassos setting in the last few years, therefore, have used this version of the Etos Kosmou reckoning.