Atlantis

by David Gibbins

  “Then what happened?”

  “It recapitulates the Messinian salinity crisis. The glaciers melt, the Mediterranean rises, water cascades over the Bosporus. The immediate cause may have been a retreat phase some seven thousand years ago in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We believe it took only a year for the Black Sea to reach its present level. At full flow almost twenty cubic kilometres poured in daily, resulting in a rise of up to forty centimetres a day or two to three metres a week.”

  Jack pointed at the lower part of the map. “Could you give us a close-up of this?”

  “Certainly.” Macleod tapped a sequence and the screen zoomed in on the coast of northern Turkey. The isometric terrain mapper continued to depict the topography of the land before the inundation.

  Jack edged forward as he spoke. “We’re currently eleven nautical miles off the north coast of Turkey, say eighteen kilometres, and the depth of the sea below us is about one hundred and fifty metres. A constant gradient to the present seashore would mean a rise of about ten metres for every kilometre and a half inland, say a ratio of one to one hundred and fifty. That’s a pretty shallow slope, hardly noticeable. If the sea rose as quickly as you indicate, then we’re looking at three or four hundred metres being flooded inland every week, say fifty metres a day.”

  “Or even more,” Macleod said. “Before the inundation, much of what lies beneath us was only a few metres above sea level, with a sharper gradient close to the present shoreline as you begin to ascend the Anatolian Plateau. Within weeks huge areas would have been swamped.”

  Jack looked at the map in silence for a few moments. “We’re talking about the early Neolithic, the first period of farming,” he mused. “What would conditions have been like here?”

  Macleod beamed. “I’ve had our palaeoclimatologists working overtime on that one. They’ve run a series of simulations with all possible variables to reconstruct the environment between the end of the Pleistocene and the inundation.”

  “And?”

  “They believe this was the most fertile region in the entire Near East.”

  Katya let out a low whistle. “It could be an entirely new tapestry of human history. A strip of coast twenty kilometres wide, hundreds of kilometres long, in one of the key areas for the development of civilization. And never before explored by archaeologists.”

  Macleod was twitching with excitement. “And now the reason you’re here. It’s time to return to the ROV monitor.”

  The seabed was now more undulating, with occasional rocky outcrops and furrowed depressions where there had once been ravines and river valleys. The depth gauge showed the ROV was over the submerged land surface, some fifteen metres shallower and a kilometre inland from the ancient shoreline. The GPS co-ordinates were beginning to converge with the target figures programmed in by Macleod.

  “The Black Sea should be an archaeologists’ paradise,” Jack said. “The upper hundred metres are low in salt, a relic of the freshwater lake and a result of river inflow. Marine borers such as the shipworm Teredo navalis require a more saline environment, so ancient timbers can survive here in pristine condition. It’s always been a dream of mine to find a trireme, an ancient oared warship.”

  “But it’s a biologist’s nightmare,” Macleod countered. “Below a hundred metres it’s poisoned with hydrogen sulphide, a result of the chemical alteration of seawater as bacteria use it to digest the huge quantities of organic matter that come in with the rivers. And the abyssal depths are even worse. When the high-saline waters of the Mediterranean cascaded over the Bosporus they sank almost two thousand metres to the deepest part of the sea. It’s still there, a stagnant layer two hundred metres thick, unable to support any life. One of the world’s most noxious environments.”

  “At the Izmir NATO base I interrogated a submariner who had defected from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet,” Costas murmured. “An engineer who had worked on their top-secret deep-sea probes. He claimed to have seen shipwrecks standing proud of the seabed with their rigging intact. He showed me a picture where you could even make out human corpses, a jumble of spectral forms encased in brine. It’s one of the spookiest things I’ve ever seen.”

  “Almost as remarkable as this.”

  A red light flashed in the lower right corner of the screen as the GPS fix converged. Almost simultaneously the seabed transformed into a scene so extraordinary it took their breath away. Directly in front of the ROV the floodlight reflected off a complex of low-set buildings, their flat roofs merging into each other like an Indian pueblo. Ladders connected lower and upper rooms. Everything was shrouded in a ghostly layer of silt like the ash from a volcanic eruption. It was a haunting and desolate image, yet one which made their hearts race with excitement.

  “Fantastic,” Jack exclaimed. “Can we take a closer look?”

  “I’ll put us where we were when I called you yesterday.”

  Macleod switched to manual and jetted the ROV towards an entrance in one of the rooftops. By gingerly feathering the joystick he moved inside, slowly panning the camera round the walls. They were decorated with moulded designs just visible in the gloom, long-necked ungulates, ibexes perhaps, as well as lions and tigers bounding along with outstretched limbs.

  “Hydraulic mortar,” Costas murmured.

  “What?” Jack asked distractedly.

  “It’s the only way those walls can have survived underwater. The mixture must include a hydraulic binding agent. They had access to volcanic dust.”

  At the far end of the submerged room was a form instantly recognizable to any student of prehistory. It was the U-shape of a bull’s horns, a larger than life carving embedded in a wide plinth like an altar.

  “It’s early Neolithic. No question about it.” Jack was ebullient, his attention completely focused on the extraordinary images in front of them. “This is a household shrine, exactly like one excavated more than thirty years ago at Çatal Hüyük.”

  “Where?” Costas enquired.

  “Central Turkey, on the Konya Plain about four hundred kilometres south of here. Possibly the earliest town in the world, a farming community established ten thousand years ago at the dawn of agriculture. A tightly packed conglomeration of mud-brick buildings with timber frames just like these.”

  “A unique site,” Katya said.

  “Until now. This changes everything.”

  “There’s more,” said Macleod. “Much more. The sonar shows anomalies like this along the ancient coast as far as we’ve surveyed, about thirty kilometres either way. They occur every couple of kilometres and each one is undoubtedly another village or homestead.”

  “Amazing.” Jack’s mind was racing. “This land must have been incredibly productive, supporting a population far larger than the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and the Levant.” He looked at Macleod, a wide grin on his face. “For an expert on deep-sea hydrothermal vents you’ve done a pretty good day’s work.”

  SEA VENTURE CUT A WHITE-FLECKED SWATH AS she made her way south from her position above the submerged ancient shoreline. The sky was clear but the sea was a dark and forbidding contrast to the deep blue of the Mediterranean. Ahead loomed the forested slopes of northern Turkey and the crest of the Anatolian Plateau, which marked the beginning of the uplands of Asia Minor.

  As soon as the ROV had been recovered, Sea Venture had made maximum headway for the IMU supply base at Trabzon, the Black Sea port whose whitewashed buildings nestled against the shoreline to the south. Katya was enjoying her first chance to relax since arriving in Alexandria three days previously, her long hair blowing in the breeze as she stripped down to a bathing costume that left little to the imagination. Beside her on deck Jack was finding it hard to concentrate as he talked to Costas and Macleod.

  Costas had been advising Macleod on the best way to map the sunken Neolithic village, drawing on their success with photogrammetry at the Minoan wreck. They had agreed that Seaquest would join Sea Venture in the Black Sea as soon as possible; her equipment and
expertise were essential for a full investigation. Another vessel had already been despatched from Carthage to assist at the wreck site and it would now take over from Seaquest.

  “If the sea was rising up to forty centimetres a day after the Bosporus was breached,” Costas said, his voice raised against the wind, “then it would have been pretty obvious to the coastal population. After a few days they’d have guessed the long-term prognosis was not good.”

  “Right,” Macleod agreed. “The Neolithic village is ten metres higher than the ancient shoreline. They would have had about a month to get out. That would explain the absence of artefacts in the rooms we saw.”

  “Could this be the biblical flood?” Costas ventured.

  “Virtually every civilization has a flood myth, but most can be related to river floods rather than some oceanic deluge,” Jack said. “Catastrophic river floods were more likely early on, before people learned to build embankments and channels to control the waters.”

  “That’s always seemed the most likely basis for the epic of Gilgamesh,” Katya said. “A flood story written on twelve clay tablets about 2000 BC, discovered in the ruins of Nineveh in Iraq. Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king of Uruk on the Euphrates, a place first settled in the late sixth millennium BC.”

  “The biblical flood may have had a different origin,” Macleod added. “IMU has surveyed the Mediterranean coast of Israel and found evidence for human activity dating back to the end of the Ice Age, to the time of the great melt twelve thousand years ago. Five kilometres offshore we found stone tools and shell middens where Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers ranged before it was submerged.”

  “You’re suggesting the Israelites of the Old Testament retained some memory of these events?” Costas asked.

  “Oral tradition can survive thousands of years, especially in a tightly knit society. But some of our displaced farmers from the Black Sea could also have settled in Israel.”

  “Remember Noah’s Ark,” Jack said. “A huge ship built after warnings of a flood. Breeding pairs of every animal. Think of our Black Sea farmers. The sea would have been their main escape route and they would have taken as many of their animals as possible, in breeding pairs to start up new populations.”

  “I thought they didn’t have big boats that early on,” Costas said.

  “Neolithic shipwrights could build longboats able to carry several tons of cargo. The first farmers on Cyprus had giant aurochs, the ancestor of today’s cattle, as well as pigs and deer. None of these species were indigenous and they can only have been brought by boat. That was around 9000 BC. The same thing probably happened on Crete a thousand years later.”

  Costas scratched his chin thoughtfully. “So the story of Noah might contain a kernel of truth, not one huge vessel but many smaller vessels carrying farmers and livestock from the Black Sea.”

  Jack nodded. “It’s a very compelling idea.”

  Sea Venture’s engines powered down as she made for the harbour entrance at Trabzon. Beside the eastern quay they could see the grey silhouettes of two Dogan-class FPB-57 fast attack craft, part of the Turkish Navy’s response to the increasing scourge of smuggling on the Black Sea. The Turks had taken an uncompromising view, striking hard and fast and shooting to kill. Jack felt reassured by the sight, knowing his contacts in the Turkish Navy would ensure a swift response should they encounter any trouble in territorial waters.

  They were standing by the railing on the upper deck as Sea Venture edged towards the western quay. Costas peered up at the densely wooded slopes above the town.

  “Where did they go after the flood? They wouldn’t have been able to farm up there.”

  “They would have needed to go a long way inland,” Jack agreed. “And this was a large population, tens of thousands at least, to judge by the number of settlements we saw on the sonar read-out.”

  “So they split up.”

  “It may have been an organized exodus, orchestrated by a central authority to ensure the greatest chance of finding suitable new lands for the entire population. Some went south over that ridge, some east, some west. Malcolm mentioned Israel. There are other obvious destinations.”

  Costas spoke excitedly. “The early civilizations. Egypt. Mesopotamia. The Indus Valley. Crete.”

  “It is not so far-fetched.” The words came from Katya, who had sat up and was now fully absorbed in the discussion. “One of the most striking features about the history of language is that much of it stems from a common root. Across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, most of the languages spoken today have one origin.”

  “Indo-European,” Costas offered.

  “An ancient mother tongue which many linguists already thought came from the Black Sea region. We can reconstruct its vocabulary from words held in common by later languages, such as Sanscrit pitar, Latin pater and German vater, the origin of English father.”

  “What about words for agriculture?” Costas asked.

  “The vocabulary shows they ploughed the land, wore woollen clothing and worked leather. They had domesticated animals including oxen, pigs and sheep. They had complex social structures and wealth differentiation. They worshipped a great mother goddess.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Many of us already believe Indo-European expansion went hand in hand with the spread of agriculture, a gradual process over many years. I now suggest it was the result of one migration. Our Black Sea farmers were the original Indo-Europeans.”

  Jack balanced a sketchpad and pencil on the railing and quickly drew an outline map of the ancient world.

  “Here’s a hypothesis,” he said. “Our Indo-Europeans leave their homeland on the Black Sea coast.” He drew a sweeping arrow east from their present position. “One group goes towards the Caucasus, modern Georgia. Some of them travel overland to the Zagros Mountains, eventually reaching the Indus Valley in Pakistan.”

  “They would have seen Mount Ararat soon after striking inland,” Macleod asserted. “It would have been an awesome sight, much loftier than any of the mountains they knew. It may have become fixed in folklore as the place where they finally realized they had escaped the flood.”

  Jack marked another arrow on the map. “A second group heads south over the Anatolian Plateau to Mesopotamia, settling on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

  “And another north-west to the Danube,” Costas suggested.

  Jack slashed a third arrow across the map. “Some settle there, others use the river system to reach the heartland of Europe.”

  Macleod spoke excitedly. “Britain became an island at the end of the Ice Age, when the North Sea flooded. But these people had the technology to get across. Were they the first farmers in Britain, the ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge?”

  “The Celtic language of Britain was Indo-European,” Katya added.

  Jack drew an arrow west which branched in different directions like an overhanging tree. “And the final group, perhaps the most significant, paddle west and portage past the Bosporus, then re-embark and set off across the Aegean. Some settle in Greece and Crete, some in Israel and Egypt, some as far away as Italy and Spain.”

  “The Bosporus would have been an awesome sight,” Costas mused. “Something that remained in the collective memory like Mount Ararat for the eastern group, hence the cataract of Bos mentioned on the disc.”

  Katya stared intently at Jack. “It fits beautifully with the linguistic evidence,” she said. “There are more than forty ancient languages with Indo-European roots.”

  Jack nodded and looked down at his map. “Professor Dillen tells me the Minoan language of Linear A and the Phaistos symbols is the closest we have to the Indo-European mother tongue. Crete may have seen the greatest survival of Indo-European culture.”

  Sea Venture was now drawing alongside the quay at Trabzon. Several crew had jumped the narrowing gap and were busy laying hawser lines to secure the vessel. A small group were gathered on the dockside, Turkish
officials and staff from IMU’s supply depot who were keen to hear about the latest discoveries. Among them was the handsome figure of Mustafa Alközen, a former Turkish naval officer who was IMU’s chief representative in the country. Jack and Costas waved across at their old friend, happy to renew a partnership which had begun when they were stationed together at the Izmir base and he had joined them to excavate the galleys of the Trojan War.

  Costas turned back and looked at Macleod. “I have one final question.”

  “Fire away.”

  “The date.”

  Macleod grinned broadly and tapped a map case he was holding. “I was wondering when you’d ask that.”

  He took out three large photographs and passed them over. They were stills from the ROV camera, the depth and co-ordinates imprinted in the lower right-hand corner. They showed a large wooden frame with stacks of logs alongside.

  “It looks like a building site,” said Costas.

  “We came across it yesterday beside the house with the shrine. New rooms were being added at the time the village was abandoned.” Macleod pointed to one stack of wood on the sea floor. “We used the ROV’s water jet to clear away the silt. They’re recently felled trunks, the bark still firmly in place and sap on the surface.”

  He opened his case and took out a clear plastic tube about half a metre long. It contained a thin wooden rod.

  “The ROV has a hollow drill which can extract samples up to two metres long from timber and other compacted materials.”

  The honey-coloured grain was remarkably well preserved, as if it had just come from a living tree. Macleod passed it to Costas, who saw at once what he was driving at.

  “Dendrochronology.”

  “You got it. There’s a continuous tree-ring sequence for Asia Minor from 8500 BC to the present day. We bored into the heart of the log and found fifty-four rings, enough for dating.”

  “And?”

  “In Sea Venture’s lab we have a scanner which matches the baseline sequences in a matter of seconds.”