Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  I assumed Kühne’s questions were rhetorical, since we were not actually having a conversation. He was delivering a monologue that sounded like a very technical PowerPoint presentation without the diversion of the visual aids. He had been speaking nonstop for about forty-five minutes. His body language was pure FORTRAN.

  “The great plain that Plato described should be in Spain, between Cádiz and the border with Portugal, southwest of Seville. Plato also described the capital of Atlantis within the plain as fifty stades from the coast.” About nine kilometers, or six miles. “So you look nine kilometers from the southwest coast and you are directly in the marshes of the Doñana Park.”

  Kühne removed a map from one of his piles and unfolded it on the table. He began to describe in detail the various features of the landscape in Doñana—marshes, rivers, dunes. I thought to interject and mention that I’d seen all these things in person, but Kühne seemed to be building momentum toward something. I wasn’t sure if I could stop him anyway. Finally, pointing to a spot I recognized from Werner Wickboldt’s satellite photos, he said, “And this is what I thought was the Temple of Poseidon. This was my hypothesis ten years ago, yes. I’m not certain now if this idea was right.”

  The scientist whose article in Antiquity had launched two major projects in Doñana was having second thoughts about his theory! This detail had been left out of the Finding Atlantis documentary. Kühne’s thinking had evolved. He still thought Tartessos had been real. Atlantis was proving to be a little more complicated.

  “What changed your mind?” I asked.

  “Okay, first I say why I believe that Atlantis was not only fiction,” he said. Kühne explained that several of the details Plato gives about ancient Athens matched up with the Bronze Age city. For example, a long-lost spring that he locates on the Acropolis was rediscovered in the twentieth century. It had been smothered by an earthquake around 1200 BC. “Plato said that because of this earthquake, people who know the art of writing disappeared.” Scholars of ancient history agree that after an unexplained societal upheaval, Greece fell into a long period of illiteracy that also began around 1200 BC. Plato writes that before this cataclysm, the Acropolis had been many times its current size, stretching from the River Ilisos to its tributary the Eridanos, a distance of nearly a mile. “Of course, Plato cannot be entirely right because the Acropolis should be as large as Athens of his time. An impossibility, much too large. So Plato had a bit of fantasy. But it is clear he wrote about Athens and no city elsewhere.”

  As for the Atlanteans, Kühne said, the priests of Saïs in Egypt had told Solon the story of “the war against the Sea Peoples, also about 1200 BC. These descriptions exist today in Medinet Habu in a temple.” This temple is part of the vast Theban necropolis built along the Nile. Its hieroglyphs have been a primary source of Egyptian history since the decoding of the Rosetta stone in the nineteenth century. “The similarities are that both the Atlanteans and the Sea Peoples came from islands; that they ruled over Libya; that they had armies, a strong navy, and a large number of troops; that they fought against all eastern Mediterranean countries; that they finally lost the war; and after the war there occurred floods and earthquakes.” Or at least the hieroglyphs could be interpreted that way.

  “But it is not exactly the same because Plato wrote that the Atlanteans had triremes”—Greek warships with oars—“but the Sea Peoples had sailing boats. The Atlanteans had chariots that could not move without horses. The Sea Peoples had carts and no horses, but oxen. And of course the Sea Peoples were beaten by the Egyptians, but the Atlanteans were beaten by Athens. So I don’t think that Plato has written about historical truths but has either taken historical truth and heavily distorted it or he made a fiction out of it.”

  Kühne spoke excellent English—all Germans I met seemed to speak excellent English—but he pronounced the names of ancient peoples and places in his native accent. He rattled off long, comprehensive lists from memory. When he started rapidly naming the many tribes that had lived in the Middle East at the time of the Sea Peoples invasion, I couldn’t understand anything he said (not even weeks later when I repeatedly listened to a recording of it while simultaneously reviewing my interview notes and scanning websites about ancient history). It was a lot more detail than my tired brain could process. I thought about the three flights I had the next day, a twelve-hour journey to the Greek islands via Munich and Athens. I wondered if they served good coffee in Greece. It occurred to me that I needed to use the facilities.

  “Rainer, may I use your bathroom?”

  “And now we see an interesting thing!” he said, taking out a new stack of photographs.

  Maybe I could wait. “What’s that?”

  “When you look here, the cities have no similarity to Atlantis. No large concentric circles. No harbor. No triremes. Chariots, yes, perhaps. But everything else is completely different. No large plain. No channels. So something must be wrong.”

  “So what you’re saying is it’s not really possible to search for Atlantis.”

  “It depends. Can you search for Gotham City in the Batman comic? Of course, if you have only the Batman comic, you will say no. But if you dig it out, you can find New York. So is it Gotham City or not? If you know nothing of Gotham City you say, New York found. If you know New York first, and not Gotham City, you would say this is New York but not Gotham City. It depends on your point of view. If you know about Atlantis but not the historical facts, some people would say it is Atlantis.”

  I wasn’t so sure about Kühne’s either/or distinction; he seemed to be saying the Atlantis tale had to be either completely true or false. At the very least the Sea Peoples deserved a closer look. Instead of expressing my concerns, I asked again if I could use the bathroom. Kühne ignored the question and removed a satellite photo of Doñana from his pile and started to point out microscopic things he saw in it.

  “Where did you find this picture?” I asked, crossing my legs.

  He raised his head, startled by the interruption. “It is from the Internet. I don’t know where. I lost it.” He returned to pointing out features on the satellite photo. I couldn’t sit through another laundry list.

  “How did you happen to publish that first article in Antiquity?”

  Kühne looked up and smiled. “It was luck! Hee hee! I tried to publish something in Antiquity when I was twenty-two years old. I had not much success. It was rejected. Then in 2003 I restarted it with the idea that Atlantis maybe was referred to as Tartessos. I was rather certain then that they were the same.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  “Now? Mmmm, maybe it really was only Tartessos.” He pulled a new satellite photo from his stack. “Where are the circular harbors, the inner rings?”

  “Hmm, good point. Rainer, I really need to use the bathroom.”

  “This is only a cross section . . .”

  “RAINER, I NEED TO USE THE BATHROOM,” I said, standing up.

  Kühne stood up, too. “The bathroom, yes, it is in the hallway.”

  As I was returning to my seat, I noticed that Kühne’s neatly made bed was covered with stuffed animals, lined up in a neat row. Kühne was still standing, like an android in sleep mode while awaiting my return.

  “Rainer, what do your friends and family think about your interest in Atlantis?” I asked, sitting down.

  “They don’t know much about it. My parents are not scholars and friends are few. Of course I had students when I was doing physics. But they were talking about physics and not about Atlantis. I’m also staying alone for twenty years. My personality is a loner. Other people cannot be alone but I can. I have a great theory about magnetic monopoles. This is a generalization of quantum electrodynamics and also of general relativity. My paper was published in a scientific journal, but the prestige is nearly zero. It does not help to find a job. But I have the physics theory and maybe in one hundred years someone will prov
e it. Why not! Ha ha!”

  “Maybe.”

  “Other people also publish their theories not in the best journals but they are confirmed now.” He mentioned Alfred Wegener and Gregor Mendel, respectively the discoverers of continental drift and genetics. If Galileo and Copernicus are the icons of heretical Renaissance thinking, then Wegener and Mendel, whose ideas were rejected as too radical by scientists with more prestigious credentials, are their modern heirs. They were the patron saints of all amateur researchers whose work isn’t taken seriously, which would include almost anyone interested in Atlantis. “So maybe not during my lifetime but maybe after I am gone.”

  “What about teaching physics?”

  “I have given up on finding work. Two years ago, I learned I have Asperger’s syndrome. It is a mild form of autism.”

  Ah, okay. That explained Kühne’s ability to examine near-identical satellite photos for hours on end and pick out tiny bits of data. The memorized lists of names. The missed social cues. I thought of my own autistic son and his habits that seemed odd to those who didn’t live with him. The last three hours were starting to make a lot more sense. The exasperation that had been building inside me gave way to embarrassment.

  “That is why I can give a monologue on Atlantis for two hours but I can’t talk about the weather,” he continued. “I can’t make small talk. I can’t work with others in a group. When I was a boy I could focus on my exam for two hours like I was somewhere else. Then I would give it to my teacher and not remember what I had written.”

  Kühne didn’t seem sad when he told me these things; he was just sharing some interesting facts. I asked what his reaction had been to the Freund documentary.

  “The producer, Simcha Jacobovici, he is not a scientist. He does some speculations about a tomb of Jesus and so on.” That was another of Jacobovici’s documentaries, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, which sounded like the kind of film I would have loved in grade school. “First he asked Richard Freund, have you found Atlantis? And Freund said yes. ‘The circle here is Atlantis and this cross section here is the harbors,’ so he had the confirmation that this is Atlantis.

  “Then he asked me: ‘Is this Atlantis?’ And I said, well, no. Maybe it was Tartessos and Tartessos was a model of Atlantis. Then, Jacobovici asked Juan Villarias-Robles and Sebastián Celestino: ‘Have you found Atlantis?’ They said, ‘NO! We have found something of the Middle Ages. Of the Muslim period.’

  “Of course Jacobovici must have money to pay his film team. He cannot make a film about ‘We have found here some rectangles and a circle, maybe it is something of the Middle Ages.’ No one will see that film. So the film is made and they have to sell it somehow; they call it Finding Atlantis. Richard Freund says that it is Atlantis, so he is shown in front. I said Atlantis, no, but maybe Tartessos, so I am shown a bit smaller.”

  “I think you were on for three seconds,” I said. Kühne makes one brief appearance in the documentary, standing uncomfortably in the Andalusian sun wearing a dark baggy suit amid the empty dry-season marshes.

  “I counted it, fifteen seconds. Yes. You see me walking for twelve seconds and for three seconds I say the sentence ‘I am standing here in Doñana.’ It sounds like the first sentence I ever spoke, when I was two and a half years old: ‘Rainer has fallen out of the bed.’ That is what ‘I am standing here in Doñana’ sounds like. It is so stupid! I have a theory about Tartessos and instead I say ‘I am standing here in Doñana.’”

  Much of the appeal of Kühne’s original Antiquity article had been his demonstration that the shapes of Wickboldt’s satellite photos matched closely with Plato’s oddly specific measurements. It occurred to me that someone with Kühne’s brilliant mathematical mind and powers of concentration might have insight into Plato’s use of numbers. I asked what he saw in them.

  “See this large plain?” he asked, sketching a rectangle with the numbers 3,000 and 2,000 along the sides. He traced the perimeter with his finger. “Ten thousand stades. The Greek word for 10,000 is myriad, which also means ‘largest possible number.’”

  “And?” I leaned forward expectantly.

  “I think Plato maybe made a joke.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Fundamentalist

  Elsewhere in Braunschweig

  Shortly after Critias concludes the first part of the Atlantis tale in the Timaeus, Timaeus warns Socrates that he should not be surprised if certain topics—such as the gods or the creation of the universe—cannot be explained precisely. Humans are flawed. Unlike the tale of Atlantis, the account of the cosmos he’s about to give should be seen not as the truth but as “a likely story.” Only after my meeting with Kühne, as I rode a crosstown tram through central Braunschweig, did it occur to me that “a likely story” was the catchphrase of another famous cartoon waterfowl, Daffy Duck. The man I was meeting, Werner Wickboldt, had formulated a hypothesis that differed from Kühne’s in only one major respect—Wickboldt considered Tartessos-as-Atlantis to be an extremely likely story.

  As with Kühne, Wickboldt was not quite what I had expected. I knew him only as a semiretired teacher of dental technology who had initially been reluctant to speak with me and was prone to leaving crabby rebuttals to the comprehensive comments Kühne posted whenever his Antiquity article was cited on Atlantis-related web pages. “Kühne adopted my hypothesis and made it for his own” was the typical response to one encyclopedic Kühne post. “Inside his article he refers to me in an irritating manner.”

  My fears of spending an afternoon with some crotchety Burgomeister evaporated when Wickboldt rode up, smiling, on his bike. He insisted on taking me for a tour of downtown Braunschweig before talking about Atlantis. The city had suffered a day and night of Atlantis-caliber destruction courtesy of the Royal Air Force late in World War II, after which its charming medieval center had burned for almost three days. One building, easily identifiable from a photo in which Hitler attends an early Nazi rally, was actually a perfect replica completed in 2004, with a shopping mall inside. (This seemed like a nice reminder of Plato’s concerns about confusing perception with reality.) The rest of the modern city center built in its place looked like a case study of the sort of urban planning cautionary tale that keeps Jane Jacobs books in print. “They say that this part of the city was destroyed after the war,” Wickboldt told me with a snort.

  As it turned out, the past decade’s Atlantology renaissance could be traced back to a single meeting—a play date held at Wickboldt’s home in 1988. “My son went to the same school as Kühne,” Wickboldt told me as we strolled past some buildings that someone, presumably under the influence of hallucinogens, had decided would look nice covered entirely with colorful pop art illustrations. “He visited my home once in the afternoon, and we began to talk about Atlantis. We talked from four to ten.” Wickboldt developed his ideas over the following years, and a local newspaper wrote about his theory in 2003. Kühne published his Antiquity article, based on very similar ideas, in 2004.

  Where the two men had once shared virtually identical hypotheses, they now differed on one key point. Wickboldt had not lost faith.

  “I believe in the original text, even the part that someone got it from the priest of Egypt,” Wickboldt told me when I asked which parts of the story he doubted. “I’m convinced that Plato reported true European history.” Wickboldt saw no reason to think Plato’s numbers shouldn’t be taken literally. The shapes he’d identified on the satellite photos were probably vanished temples, no matter what Juan Villarias-Robles and his team had found there.

  Wickboldt’s literal rendering of the Timaeus and Critias reminded me of strict constructionist judges who believe the US Constitution is a sacred document that should be interpreted only as its writers intended. This isn’t to say he, like certain Supreme Court justices, didn’t have his own esoteric explications of key passages. He believed that Plato used the word island to describe a river delta, such a
s the one at the mouth of the Guadalquivir where ancient sources had located Tartessos. When the standard Greek stade didn’t quite match up with the measurements of Doñana Park, he found an old Portuguese stade that did fit. One of the more interesting of Wickboldt’s adjustments was the idea that Plato’s nine thousand years was correct, but that “the Egyptians used a calendar of twelve thirty-day periods plus five separate days,” he explained to me in a loud second-story café. “Out of ancient texts referring to Manetho we learn that the Egyptians call thirty days a year.”

  Manetho was a great third-century-BC Egyptian historian. If one divides 9,000 by 12 and counts back from the date Solon probably visited Egypt, the result falls within the thirteenth century BC—roughly the same time period as the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the earthquake at the Acropolis. “It’s possible that this was the time of Atlantis’s collapse and that Tartessos was built on top of it,” Wickboldt said.

  Wickboldt invited me to his home for dinner, but I was fading fast after a long day. I still needed to find my way to Hanover for my morning flight. He listed a bunch of obscure German sources that I might want to investigate, then mentioned one that sounded familiar. “You should really take a look at the Parian Marble,” he said as I paid the check. Wickboldt was an enthusiastic talker, but he became even more excited by this new topic. “Part of it is at Oxford University, and the oldest part is now lost, but they have a drawing of it. There’s an English translation.”

  Tony O’Connell had told me about the Parian Marble, or Parian Chronicle, with much less skepticism than he had for most such evidence. The stele was a chronology of important events that had been carved on the Greek island of Paros, probably in the year 263 BC. (The two oldest chunks had been sold to a British earl in the early seventeenth century. The older of these was subsequently lost, a fact that never seemed to be raised by British politicians who insisted that the Elgin Marbles taken from the Parthenon in Athens couldn’t possibly be returned because the Greeks didn’t know how to properly care for them.) Its timeline goes all the way back to Cecrops, the mythical first king of Athens, dating his accession to approximately 1581 BC. Like most things regarding Cecrops, though, that date probably was not meant to be taken as truth. According to legend he had been born from the earth rather than human parents and had a tail like a snake.