Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City
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Kehoe suggests that the first sea crossings from the Old World to the New might have taken a longer route. “Mediterranean keel-bottomed boats were capable of crossing the ocean,” she said. “But if you really wanted to get across the ocean in 1000 BC, you should’ve gotten yourself a Chinese junk or a Polynesian double-hulled canoe.” The Polynesians, she pointed out, were able to voyage thousands of miles and locate the tiny speck of Easter Island centuries before Columbus sailed. It hardly seems possible that they never continued on to find the entire west coast of the Americas. Bones of Polynesian chickens have been excavated at a pre-Columbian site in Chile, and a sweet potato native to South America has been shown to have been introduced throughout Polynesia a thousand years ago. (In both places, Kehoe notes, the potato was called by the name kumara.) The geographer Carl Johannessen has tallied more than two hundred life forms that seem to predate Columbus’s crossing. Some cultures even share supernatural concepts. Kehoe told me that long before 1492 both Mesoamericans and the Chinese looked at the full moon and saw the same thing: a rabbit pounding some sort of beverage in a mortar and pestle.
Kehoe believes that her colleagues had constructed an imaginary “unsurmountable barrier” of water between the continents. “American archaeologists are incredibly land-bound,” Kehoe said. “They very rarely go out on the seas at all. People who go into archaeology do so because they’re not interested in political science, they’re not interested in mythology—they want to do science. They want to have quantifiable data. Some of us are also comfortable with history, but the majority are not. Like my husband. He didn’t really like to read. He went into archaeology because he liked to go outdoors and dig.”
Kehoe told me she considers the Atlantis story to be “a harmless parable for what Plato wanted to say about the fragility of civilization, that it can be totally overcome by natural forces.” She felt the cocaine mummies are important, that long ago coca leaves had traveled across the Pacific to Egypt, part of the search for elixirs of life that obsessed the early alchemists. Her response when I asked her opinion of the Lake Superior copper hypothesis was a long chuckle of recognition. “There’s so much copper in Eurasia,” she finally said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”11
• • •
I decided to give Papamarinopoulos an incomplete on the transatlantic crossings and turned to the cartographic evidence. Renaissance maps, of course, were popular with Atlantologists as evidence of distant voyages made by ancient sailors. Rand Flem-Ath based his theory largely on the evidence of the 1513 Piri Reis map. Papamarinopoulos cited several others, in particular the Orontius Finaeus (or Oronce Finé) map of 1531. The striking thing about these maps is that they appeared to show accurate depictions of Antarctica many centuries before its first recorded sighting in 1820. “One must conclude that the Antarctic continent was discovered not by whalers and sealers of the nineteenth century,” Papamarinopoulos wrote in an essay coauthored with the geologist John G. Weihaupt, “but by adventurers in or more likely before the sixteenth century.” Moreover, South America appears to be drawn with more precision before explorers began making ocean crossings in 1492 than it would be for the century that followed. The implication was that potential blockbuster evidence of Plato’s land across the panpelagos had been preserved in these ancient maps.
Gregory McIntosh, a historian who wrote the definitive history of the granddaddy of Atlantis-theory-inspiring maps, The Piri Reis Map of 1513, confirmed to me that the map is genuine and an extraordinarily important historical document. (The Oronce Finé map is also real.) On this side of the Aegean the Piri Reis may be best known as exhibit A in certain Atlantological arguments, but the document is so revered in Turkey that it appears on national currency. McIntosh’s expertise had made him a minor celebrity in Istanbul, and he’d just accepted a position teaching at the city’s Piri Reis University. I asked him about the map’s surprisingly accurate depiction of Antarctica.
“I’ve been looking at this map every single day for the last thirty years,” McIntosh said. He explained that any map that converts the Earth’s three-dimensional globe shape into a two-dimensional version is a projection, or an interpretation of how the world’s geographic features might relate to each other on a planar surface. “There are six aspects of the spherical Earth that can be distorted or preserved when made into a flat map: sizes, shapes, directions, bearings, distances, and ratios. The Piri Reis map, as with all flat maps, does not maintain accuracy in all these aspects. In fact, the Piri Reis map, as with most Renaissance maps, distorts all of these aspects.”
The world map most commonly used today is the Mercator projection of 1569, which captures geographic shapes accurately at the expense of size; those near the top and bottom appear far larger than they actually are. (Though the two landmasses appear similar in size on paper or Google Maps, Greenland is less than one-eighth the size of South America. In fact, it’s smaller than either Brazil or Argentina.) Prior to Mercator, there was a lot less standardization and a lot more guesswork. “Today we think of maps as highly scientific representations, but five hundred years ago world maps combined actual geography with theoretical geography,” McIntosh said. “Just because a Renaissance map shows a coastline doesn’t mean anybody saw and surveyed that coast. More often, distant lands on early maps included graphic descriptions and visualizations based on written descriptions, ideas, and beliefs.” In the case of Piri Reis, this would include the hypothetical Terra Australis Incognita, a giant southern landmass first hypothesized by Aristotle. A similar landmass, labeled “Terra Australis,” appears on the Oronce Finé map. “The Piri Reis map is not any more or less accurate than any other map made at the time,” McIntosh told me.
McIntosh got excited talking about the “fringe” that insisted these maps proved ancient knowledge. Many claimed that the Reis and Finé maps resembled Antarctica beneath the polar cap. And yet one can’t even be sure what an ice-free Antarctica would look like, because if what McIntosh called “a quintillion tons of ice” were to melt, the isotonic rebound effect of the weight loss would raise the continent’s elevation significantly, regardless of any resulting rise in sea levels. The process would completely change Antarctica’s size and the shape of its perimeter. In either case, McIntosh stressed each time I cited a supposed similarity between one of the maps and Antarctica, “They don’t look anything alike!”
“Not even a little?” I asked, rotating the copy I had on my desk to try to make a better match. Charles Hapgood had needed to do something similar in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings to accentuate the similarities. McIntosh was right, of course. On both old maps, the tip of South America bumps against Antarctica, obliterating the chilly six-hundred-mile sea gap of the Drake Passage and the nine-hundred-mile-long crooked finger of the Antarctic Peninsula, either of which would have been hard to miss. There was a small problem of scale, too. On the Finé map, McIntosh pointed out, Terra Australis is nine times the size of the real Antarctica.
“What the fringe means by accurate is ‘Gee, it looks the same to me,’” McIntosh told me.
Selective picking and choosing of evidence was, of course, a problem with every Atlantis location theory to some degree. Tony O’Connell had cautioned me about that from the get-go. I’d seen the sites in Spain, Malta, and Santorini, and while all seemed plausible candidates to one degree or another, the hypothesis behind each reflected the bias of its authors. I could empathize. My own journalistic objectivity about this project had long since evaporated. By this point I didn’t just want to figure out why people were searching for Atlantis. I wanted to find it, too.
Plato’s purpose in the Timaeus had been to impose mathematical logic on the cosmos, so it seemed appropriate to make my last stop in Morocco. There, I’d been promised, Atlantis had already been found strictly by the numbers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Statistically Speaking
Bonn, Germany; and Agadir, Morocco
Even the most math-obsessed Greeks before Plato’s time didn’t study probability. They were more interested in the power of gods like Poseidon to determine their fates. To learn what the residents of Olympus might be thinking, ancient Greeks consulted oracles, shrines where prophets could answer questions and prognosticate based on contact with the supernatural world. The most famous of these was the Oracle of Delphi, where a priestess passed along cryptic messages from Apollo that time and again redirected the course of ancient history. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the story of hearing that the Delphic oracle had declared no man was wiser than Socrates himself. He took this to mean that he was wisest because only he understood how limited his knowledge was.
While oracles may have been handy, there’s little doubt that Plato would have preferred statistics, with its magical-seeming formulas and bell curves that tease out the unseen patterns underlying the world. But it was Aristotle, the great taxonomist, who first classified events into three types: certain, probable, and unpredictable. As I packed my bags in Athens to fly to Morocco, I knew what Plato must’ve felt like to be stuck between Socrates and Aristotle. I knew what I didn’t know about Atlantis, and I knew that there were some things I couldn’t know. I also thought I might be zeroing in on some probable answers. First I needed to meet the one Atlantologist who had used statistical modeling to search for Plato’s lost civilization, and got surprisingly definite results.
• • •
Back in Malta, Tony O’Connell had spoken so highly of Michael Hübner’s work on Atlantis that I’d sensed Anton Mifsud was a little jealous. Hübner’s theory was far and away the most objective I’d seen—he had located Atlantis strictly by analyzing the data he could glean from Plato’s accounts. After watching Hübner’s half-hour online video presentation, I understood why Tony had written in the Atlantipedia that “although there are still some outstanding questions in my mind, I consider Hübner’s hypothesis one of the more convincing on offer to date.” Hübner had pinpointed the Atlantic coast of Morocco.
I had first met Hübner in Bonn on my way to visit Kühne and Wickboldt. Hübner lived a few blocks from Beethoven’s old house, on a pretty tree-lined street that in midautumn looked like a movie set for a European romantic comedy. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and bearish, with a long ponytail and a four-day growth of beard. He invited me into his one-bedroom apartment and immediately handed me a piece of tangible Atlantis evidence he’d brought back from Morocco: a chunk of rock that had red, white, and black striations like a slice of Poseidon’s marble cheesecake.
Hübner brewed me an enormous cup of tea and offered me a selection of pastries on a platter before sitting down at his desk. The surface was crowded with two open laptop computers and a large microscope. Since science and philosophy have been moving in opposite directions almost since the Timaeus, I told Hübner I thought it was odd that an information technology specialist had taken an interest in Plato.
“One day I was carrying a washing machine and my back cracked,” he explained in a voice that was surprisingly soft for a man built like a nightclub bouncer. “I was in bed for two weeks—even going to the toilet was . . . ach. I used the time in bed to read Plato.” Like so many others before him, he was struck by the level of detail in the Atlantis story. Rather than just ponder the lost city as a Gedankenexperiment, he said, “I made an Excel file and put the entire text of Plato into it.”
Because he was mathematically inclined, Hübner decided to locate the most probable site for Atlantis through a search procedure known as hierarchical constraint satisfaction. It was a statistical method of plugging variables—in this instance, data from the Timaeus and Critias—into a map overlaid with a grid. The more variables that matched a set of geographic coordinates, the higher the probability that particular square had once contained Plato’s lost island. The overall effect was like a game of Battleship, with the location of Atlantis as the prize.
Hübner started with the assumption that Atlantis must be “within a reasonable distance” of Athens, which he set at five thousand kilometers, or about thirty-one hundred miles. (His point of reference was the forty-seven hundred kilometers that Alexander the Great reached in his farthest military campaigns.) Such an area encompasses virtually all of Europe, Africa north of the equator, and the Middle East. Hübner then mapped this zone onto a twenty-by-twenty grid, creating four hundred possible subareas in which Atlantis might have been located. From there, he worked his way through seven geographical clues that Plato gave. Each subarea was awarded points for being on a coast; for being situated on a large body of water that was connected to the Mediterranean; for sitting west of Egypt and Tyrrhenia (modern Tuscany); for having tall mountains to its north (Hübner found nine such locations in his master zone); for sitting outside the Strait of Gibraltar (he didn’t consider any other candidates for the Pillars of Heracles); for containing elephants (not, as some Atlantologists have posited, mammoths, because the flora and fauna Plato describes indicate a tropical or subtropical climate); and—because Atlantis was planning to attack Europe and Asia, two of the ancient Greek world’s three primary land masses—for sitting within Libya, or what we now call North Africa. (I thought this was the shakiest of his assumptions. Would the Maltese islands, which lay farther south than Carthage, have been considered part of Europe? Couldn’t a distant land such as Tartessos be a possibility?) When Hübner tallied up his scores, one of the four hundred squares clearly stood out—a chunk of modern-day coastal Morocco, just south of the Atlas Mountains, known as the Souss-Massa region.
When Hübner added his regional and local constraints, the evidence was even more compelling. Perhaps the most appealing part of his hypothesis was his comparisons with Plato’s strangely precise descriptions and measurements for the capital of Atlantis. Hübner had found a circular hill surrounded by three concentric wadis, or dry riverbeds. The measurements for the diameter of his outermost ring and the distance of his capital from the Atlantic Ocean varied by only about 10 percent from Plato’s numbers. On paper, at least, he made a compelling case.
“You know perhaps Six Sigma?” Hübner asked, referring to the quality-control term in which 99.999 percent of a company’s products are manufactured defect-free. Particle physicists must reach a Five Sigma level of certainty before they are credited with making a scientific discovery. He pointed to the map on his computer screen. “Well, if Plato’s criteria are real, this is better than Seven Sigma.”
If the numbers were on Hübner’s side, time was not. When Hübner started visiting the area several years earlier following his lower-lumbar epiphany, it had been covered in ancient ruins built from colored stone, but these were rapidly being dug up and pulverized to make pigment for paint. The only archaeological expert on the area that Hübner was able to locate was a professor at the University of Agadir, who showed little interest in the Neolithic ruins. European scholars had even less interest in a Moroccan site.
“I tried to get some German experts involved, but in my experience it’s very hard to get scientists to look at this place,” he told me.
“Why?”
“I think I made a mistake by mentioning Atlantis. They are afraid of getting contaminated.”
Hübner had arranged for me to stay overnight at his father’s house in a nearby suburb of Bonn, so we climbed into his red Volkswagen, which seemed a couple of sizes too small for him. On the way out of town we talked about his use of sources other than Plato. Hübner was an admirer of the works of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek born in Sicily in the first century BC. Diodorus was the author of the Bibliotheca Historica, a forty-volume universal history of the world from mythological times to his present. One of the fifteen volumes that remain deals with the history of North Africa. Diodorus wrote of a land bordered by the Atlas Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, ruled by a king named Atlas. The land, which occupied the same space Hübner’s calculations had zeroed in on, was called Atlantis.
“The names Diodorus used were a little different, too,” Hübner said, shifting gears. “He called the people the Atalantoi. Scheisse!” Hübner had been so involved in reciting his evidence that we had taken the wrong exit and were crossing a bridge over the Rhine. In Diodorus’s telling, a tribe of women warriors called the Amazons lived in Atalantoi territory on an island within a large freshwater North African lake. The island was eventually destroyed by earthquakes, which caused most of the water to drain into the sea, leaving behind only a marsh.
Another ancient source that Hübner used, the second-century-AD writer Maximus of Tyre, also describes an area in West Africa that sounds a lot like the spot that Hübner had focused on. In this place, Maximus wrote, ocean waves had been known to rise “like a wall” and flood the coastal plain. The Souss-Massa was certainly susceptible to seismic disasters. A 1960 earthquake had leveled the regional capital of Agadir and killed fifteen thousand people.
When I’d first contacted Hübner, he’d briefly tried to explain where all his most important sites were located via GPS coordinates but soon sensed (correctly) that I would probably take a wrong turn at Marrakesh and vanish forever into the Sahara. He had agreed to meet me in Morocco to show me his evidence personally. To celebrate our forthcoming trip, his stepmother had prepared a traditional Moroccan tagine for dinner, and the smell of lamb and couscous followed us out onto the balcony, where we watched barges traveling up and down the Rhine. Hübner’s father, a stern-looking older man with thick white hair and a bushy mustache, joined us. He told me that he had been a little boy at the end of World War II. “The American GIs I met after the war were very kind,” he said. “They gave me a piece of chewing tobacco and I swallowed it.”