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

by Mark Adams

  “One day is not enough to talk about this, Mark. I have lived with this for forty years! Atlantis might look like a tale for a child, but it isn’t. Because it has layers with philosophical meanings, with mathematical meanings, musicology, even morality. But we take all that out and what we have left is the germ of the story.”

  Church bells rang six o’clock. We had been talking since noon. We stopped to get a beer at a noisy bar filled with college students celebrating their triumphant day on strike. I was jittery and mentally exhausted, and Papamarinopoulos looked wiped out, too. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes as we talked. I remembered the one question I’d forgotten to ask. Why are so many people interested in finding Atlantis?

  He opened his eyes and turned to me.

  “Because their minds are fired with a continuous fever,” he said. “They get possessed by this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Power of Myth

  New York, New York

  I suppose at this point it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when I telephoned one of the world’s leading experts on myth, hoping to get a little more clarity on Papamarinopoulos’s three-ring logos/paramyth/naughty-boy-secret-mathematical-code diagram, we wound up talking about vampires. This was actually a good thing. Elizabeth Wayland Barber is an emerita professor of linguistics and archaeology at Occidental College and author of several books, including When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, which she cowrote with her husband, Paul Barber. She was also a world-renowned expert on everything from prehistoric textiles to folk dancing and had once written a book with footnotes in twenty-six languages. After five minutes on the phone, I could tell she’d be delightful company on a long car trip. When I asked her if fellow archaeologists were a little reluctant to dip into mythology, she snorted and said, “A little bit? Uh, yeah.”

  It was Barber who had raised the subject of vampires, as a way to illustrate how myths are created. “The human brain demands explanations,” she told me. “For my husband’s first book he looked at all the original vampire descriptions from the archives of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” which existed from 1867 to 1918. “They would have an outbreak of vampires in some remote Transylvanian village. People don’t like their neighbors digging up their relatives’ corpses, so the central administration would send out a doctor to keep an eye on things and report back on what he saw.” The doctors looked at the recently deceased and saw bodies showing early signs of decomposition. The peasants looked at those same corpses and saw engorged bodies with blood dripping around the mouth. When stakes were driven through the hearts of some of these suspected vampires, they groaned and bled.

  “Bodies bloat” from gases that form during decomposition, Barber explained. “After rigor mortis, the blood liquefies again after some period of time and is forced out through any available cavities,” such as the mouth. A stake plunged into a bloated corpse’s chest can expel air past the voice box, causing the dead man to groan audibly. “So the peasants observed things quite accurately,” she said. “But their explanation of what happened was completely off the mark.” To get to the original kernel (or avocado pit) of truth, Barber subjects myths to something that she calls the Stripping Procedure: “In order to understand the true original events, we have to see clearly what the events are. In order to do that, we must strip the explanations from the story.” Good-bye, Poseidon.

  In the time before recorded history, Barber explains in When They Severed, the only way to transmit important information was through myth. Now that writing is the norm, “we have forgotten how nonliterate people stored and transmitted information and why it was done that way,” she writes. “We have lost track of how to decode the information often densely compressed into these stories, and they appear to us as mostly gibberish.” Humans are susceptible to what the Barbers call the Memory Crunch: Our brains have only so much storage capacity. “You’re working in a very constricted channel when you’re having to remember information,” she told me. “The great advantage of writing is you can put it down and have it later; you don’t have to remember it.”

  Yet the Barbers found multiple instances where information has been passed down orally and faithfully for up to thousands of years as long as three criteria are met. The information must be considered important enough to merit preservation, such as the massive volcanic explosion that formed Crater Lake in Oregon circa 5700 BC—a story that was still being passed down by the local Klamath Indians into the nineteenth century as the tale of an unpleasant visit from the Chief of the Below World. Second, the information must relate to something still visible to those who hear the myth (again, Crater Lake, which the Klamath had been taught to avoid so as not to incite the powerful subterranean deity). And third, the myth must be memorable; it has to be a good story. If the first two standards were uncertain in relation to Plato’s Atlantis tale—we don’t know if Plato was passing along ancient information—the third was an obvious match. The Atlantis story was certainly memorable.

  Barber believes that the Thera explosion, which volcanologists have estimated to have been more than double the size of the Crater Lake blast, was large enough to have inspired myths in several ancient Mediterranean cultures. The myth of the flood that Poseidon sends against Attica is one possible result of the blast. “Poseidon is really the god of the great unchained forces of nature, whereas Athena is the goddess of what human beings can do to combat that: with techne, know-how. When Athena wins the contest for ownership of Athens, Poseidon is a bad loser and he sends a tidal wave that comes up all the way to the foot of the Acropolis.” Once the supernatural battle-of-the-gods explanation is stripped away, what remains sounds like an account of an ancient tsunami. “There’s only one wave that could have been that big,” she said. Thera.

  “We know from the geologists that the wind was blowing southeast that day. That’s very nice for Western civilization, because had it been blowing to the northwest, it would have wiped out the Greeks. As it was, they had a ringside seat of watching Thera explode. Hesiod talks about how the sea was so hot it boiled and the sound was so loud it was as though the sky had fallen and was hitting upon earth.”

  In Hesiod’s Theogony (the name means “Birth of the Gods”), written about a hundred years before Solon, he tells the story of the epic battle between the gods and the giants. The Barbers cite fascinating research by the geology historian Mott Greene at the University of Puget Sound, who is a pioneer in the relatively new field of geomythology, which seeks out the geological phenomena, especially natural catastrophes, that have found their way into folklore. “Mott Greene was looking at Hesiod and the other Greek myths and saying, you know, each volcano erupts in its own way,” Barber told me. “It has its own signature type of eruption, as a result of the kind of magma and the temperatures underneath it. So Thera has its style, Etna has its style, Stromboli has its style, and so forth.” Greene noted a sequence of fifteen events in Hesiod that, based on a close examination of Thera’s geology, closely parallel the Thera eruption. The early trembling of Mount Olympus corresponds with powerful earthquakes at Thera. Missiles screeching through the air correspond to the discharge of “pyroclastic ejecta,” such as lava and volcanic rocks. Zeus’s arrival hurling thunderbolts that scorch the earth corresponds with Thera’s volcanic lightning.

  The Egyptians, being farther away from the blast than the mainland Greeks, would have had a different perspective. Like the Greek seismologist Galanopoulos, Barber believes that the stories from Exodus—whether they took place at the same time as the Thera blast or were combined with other stories from various centuries—match up with the volcanic explosion. Darkness falls over Egypt for three days (possibly the result of ash in the atmosphere obscuring the sun), and the Lord sends a pillar of cloud by day followed by a pillar of fire at night, which echoes the appearance of an eruption at different times of day. The Hittites in Asia Minor had a myth of a gi
ant who emerged from the sea to grow thousands of miles tall. He was vanquished only when scythed off at the base—a detail that mirrors the detachment of an ash pillar from its volcano once an eruption ceases.

  Barber believes that Solon was the first Greek to take written notes “to stockpile information regularly for his own use.” If he wrote down the story of an island that sank beneath the waves that had been told to him by an Egyptian priest, one of his descendants could very well have come across his musings decades later. After using her Stripping Procedure, we come away with an original source that is identical to Marinatos’s theory: The Egyptians witnessed the natural destruction of the Thera eruption, followed by a disruption in their trade with Crete. The story of a rich, vanished island kingdom is passed along to Solon by the priests at Saïs.

  I asked Barber, a student of ancient Greek, if she thought Plato had believed the story was true.

  “Plato really treats it as though he believed that he had read this in his family archives and that he believed that Solon had indeed written it down from the Egyptian. I think Plato had a lot of respect for the written word, and if he found this in the family archives, I can just imagine the look on his face the day he found the thing. Like, ‘Oh my God, look at this. This. Is. Amazing.’ And that there were probably some hiccups in it, but that basically it was telling him something about the early world that had happened.”

  “Maybe it’s a conflation of Thera and what Plato heard about Tartessos,” I said.

  “Or that the Egyptian priest had conflated. There are so many sources of possible hiccups in here. We just need to find a suitable inscription in Egypt, or a papyrus!”

  The idea that such things might one day be found was not impossible. While the great temples and statues that Herodotus described seeing in Saïs have long since disappeared—carted away by looters and builders—a British team has been excavating the old city with some success. An ancient garbage dump from the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus has yielded important papyrus fragments of Greek classics, such as the Republic, as well as previously unknown works.

  “There are a couple points where Critias says, ‘I know this is going to sound crazy, but this is what I heard . . . ,’” I said.

  “Right right right right! And so Plato was taking it with a little grain of salt but basically thought that he had a valuable document there which told him some real, true things about the early world, even if he couldn’t quite see all the details.”

  “So what would the purpose of Plato telling the story be? Assume it’s from Solon. Why, and telling it to whom?”

  “And he tells it at least twice. This presumably was something Plato was using to teach at the Academy. And calling on the things of greatest antiquity that he had within his grasp to make his point.” According to another of Barber’s key tenets, what she calls the Silence Principle, that audience would not have required an explanation of the sorts of details in the Atlantis story that befuddle us today. Such omissions lead to what she calls the Lethe Effect: “What is never said may eventually be forgotten entirely.”

  Did she have any recommendations on where I might go from here?

  “Follow the details!” she shouted. “The devil’s in the details!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Maps and Legends

  New York, New York

  Stavros Papamarinopoulos was hardly the first person to suggest that prehistoric sailors had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and returned with news of a distant land. Ancient writers prior to Plato described islands across the boundless sea. The conspiratorial theme “Who really discovered America?” had become a staple of pseudohistorical TV shows and controversial bestselling books. Even Spyridon Marinatos had once written coquettishly, “We are apt to underestimate the daring feats of ancient seafarers. Plato’s narrative could be considered as the first reference to the existence of America.”

  When I started to hunt through the modern scholarly research concerning what I assumed would be a hot topic, what I found was disciplines collectively holding their fingers in their ears and saying “La la la, can’t hear you.” Part of the resistance is logical—archaeologists and anthropologists depend on “material culture” like midden heaps, burial sites, and pottery sherds, and none exists that proves the occurrence of early transatlantic crossings. (Extraterrestrial landing strips don’t count.) As often as not, charges of hyperdiffusionism, the unforgivable sin committed by Ignatius Donnelly, would be hurled at anyone who tried to demonstrate that ancient seafarers had ever made round-trip visits.

  Reigning scientific paradigms do not shift easily. In 1960, the explorer Helge Ingstad began compiling proof that the Viking Leif Eriksson had not only sailed to Newfoundland around AD 1000 but also established a short-lived colony there. Historians, deeply invested in the romantic story of Christopher Columbus, loudly dismissed Ingstad’s idea until he eventually amassed an overwhelming amount of hard evidence. It didn’t help Ingstad’s case that his original hypothesis was based on interpretations of Norse sagas describing the settlement of Greenland and farther colonies in a place called Vinland.

  Should anyone ever compile a list of anthropologists’ least favorite twentieth-century Norwegian explorers, though, Ingstad is unlikely to place higher than second. The clear winner would be Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed west across the Pacific from Peru to French Polynesia in 1947 on the Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft he’d built. He believed the voyage demonstrated the likelihood that the South Seas had been settled by seafarers from the South American mainland. (This conclusion has not aged well; the overwhelming consensus is that migration occurred in the opposite direction.) In 1970, Heyerdahl crossed from Morocco to Barbados in the Ra II, a boat made of reeds. This time he demonstrated the possibility of Egyptian crossings during the Pharaonic period. The first voyage made Heyerdahl famous; his low standing among professional scholars was probably not enhanced by his directing an Oscar-winning documentary in which he also starred, his tanned and shirtless torso a silent rebuke to tenure-track bookworms. The Ra II expedition was, if anything, even less popular with mainstream academics, in part because any link between ancient Egypt and the New World—a clear echo of Ignatius Donnelly’s argument—boosted the possible case for hyperdiffusionism.

  Alice Beck Kehoe, an emerita professor of anthropology at Marquette University, was one of the few experts I could find who had an open mind about ancient sea crossings. Kehoe was both an ardent critic of the sort of hyperdiffusionism that Donnelly had promoted (which, in her book Controversies in Archaeology, she calls a “grossly racist ideology”) and someone willing to write a textbook that asked the kinds of questions that might make bored undergraduates read ahead on the syllabus, such as this one: “Why did people in Afghanistan and Mexico and Utah make hundreds of little clay statuettes of naked women with fancy hairdos?”

  Kehoe had compiled dozens of modern examples of small craft making transoceanic crossings. The British explorer Tim Severin, seeking to prove that an account of the voyage of sixth-century Irish monk Saint Brendan across the Atlantic and back was true, successfully re-created the journey in 1976–77 aboard a thirty-six-foot craft built using only tools and materials available in Brendan’s day, including forty-nine greased oxhides. (Severin was particularly popular among Atlantologists, including Papamarinopoulos, because the only extant source for Brendan’s story is a legend written down centuries after the fact.) Within a few years, a voyage that a century earlier had been considered so dangerous as to be suicidal had entered the realm of stunts. Men and women have since crossed the oceans in both directions aboard craft such as rowboats, dinghies, and kayaks. Two Frenchmen windsurfed the Atlantic on an oversize surfboard.

  In some fields, such a preponderance of anecdotal evidence would open new areas of inquiry. It seemed to me that if a Japanese sailor could cross the eight thousand miles of the Pacific solo aboard a boat made from beer kegs, propelled by a sail made of rec
ycled plastic bottles, perhaps the notion of experienced Greek or Phoenician sailors bringing back stories from a trip across the Atlantic wasn’t so outlandish. I called Kehoe at her home in Milwaukee and asked if she ever tried to raise the subject of transatlantic crossings at professional conferences.

  “Oh, consistently,” she said. “It’s totally taboo. If you bring it up at archaeology meetings, people give you this kind of cold stare and start looking for somebody else to talk to.”

  Just because hyperdiffusionism as an explanation for all New World progress is a racist theory, Kehoe argues, doesn’t mean that pre-Viking contact never occurred. She sees in her colleagues’ resistance the lingering influence of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, which supported the conquest of the American frontier by labeling its native occupants “merciless Indian savages.” (The phrase is Thomas Jefferson’s, from the Declaration of Independence.) According to this line of thinking, even if someone had managed to reach the shore of North or South America, they’d have been massacred immediately by bloodthirsty primitives. Dead men don’t carry home tales of newly discovered continents.

  This convenient theoretical obliteration of possible contacts allows historians to discount or ignore intriguing references in ancient literature. Stavros Papamarinopoulos interprets passages from the first-century-AD historian Plutarch as describing the ancient Greeks possibly founding colonies in America. The fifth-century-AD Neoplatonist scholar Proclus quotes an earlier historian’s claim that “there were seven islands” in the Atlantic, as well as three larger ones. The last of these was inhabited by a people who, according to William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, had “preserved from their ancestors the memory of the exceedingly large island of Atlantis, which for many ages had ruled over all the islands of the Atlantic Sea, and which had been itself sacred to Poseidon.” By the sixth century BC, a century before Plato was born, the Greeks had heard reports of a discovery made by the Phoenicians, a large, fertile island with navigable rivers in the ocean outside the Pillars of Heracles. There are no islands between Spain and America with rivers of that size.