Also, shipbuilding was pretty well advanced in the Eastern Mediterranean
by then, and (as far as I remember) there was active marine trade between
Crete and Egypt during the height of Minoan civilization.
It makes sense that Plato and Solon would have heard this story from the
Egyptians, too, and not from their own ancestors, since their own ancestors
were of the illiterates who finished off what was left of Minoan civilization
after Thera. As far as I'm concerned, civilization means a society that is
capable of producing and preserving literature, not just urban society.
That's why Sumer and Egypt are conventionally listed as the "first
civilizations", even though Neolithic urbanization in Palestine and
Anatolia precedes Sumerian and Egyptian urbanization. The Sumerians and
the Egyptians learned to write before the Anatolians and Palestinians
did.
(I'm using "literature" in the widest possible sense, a sense that would
include modern cinematic works and physics textbooks, for instance.)
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd