Atlantis

by David Gibbins

  “That’s another story.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The discovery that underpins this story is fictional. However, the archaeological backdrop is as plausible as the story allows, taking account of the current state of knowledge and debate. The purpose of this note is to clarify the facts.

  The Black Sea Flood. The Messinian salinity crisis is an established event, a result of tectonic and glacio-eustatic processes which cut off the Mediterranean from the Atlantic; the crisis has been dated to 5.96 to 5.33 million years BP (Before Present), with inundation over the Gibraltar land bridge occurring rapidly at the end. The level of the Mediterranean rose about 130 metres further during the “great melt” at the end of the Ice Age some twelve to ten thousand years ago.

  Recently evidence has been marshalled to suggest that the Black Sea was cut off from the Mediterranean for several thousand years more, and did not rise to the same level until a natural dam across the Bosporus was overwhelmed in the sixth millennium BC. Core samples from below the floor of the Black Sea suggest a change from freshwater to seawater sediments about 7,500 years ago, a date pinpointed by radiocarbon analysis of mollusc shells from either side of the horizon. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have experienced a rapid retreat phase about this time, and it could be that such an event, combined with tectonic activity, pushed the sea over the Bosporus.

  In 1999 researchers using sonar and a dredge found a probable berm from an ancient shoreline 150 metres below sea level off northern Turkey near Sinope. Although there is much debate about the date, rapidity and volume of the Black Sea flood, its existence is widely accepted.

  The Neolithic Exodus. Many experts believe that Indo-European language originated in the Black Sea region sometime between the seventh and fifth millennia BC. Well before the Black Sea flood hypothesis, leading archaeologists argued that Indo-European language evolved among the first farmers of Anatolia about 7000 BC, that it reached Europe about 6000 BC and that its spread went hand in hand with the introduction of large-scale agriculture and animal husbandry. This model has provoked much controversy, not least over whether diffusion primarily involved the spread of people or ideas, but it remains central to any debate over the origins of civilization.

  Atlantis. The only source for the Atlantis story is the dialogues Timaeus and Critias written by the Greek philosopher Plato in the first half of the fourth century BC. The credibility of the story rests on two leaps of faith: first, that Plato was not simply making it up; second, that his avowed source, the Athenian scholar Solon several generations earlier, had not himself been spun a tale by the priests at Saïs in Egypt who were his supposed informants sometime in the early sixth century BC.

  It seems likely that Egyptian priests did indeed have records stretching back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus, who gathered reams of information from the priests when he visited in the mid-fifth century BC, much of it verifiable, was shown a papyrus with the succession list of “three hundred and thirty” Egyptian monarchs (Herodotus, Histories ii, 100). He sounds a note of caution: “Such as think the tales told by the Egyptians credible are free to accept them for history” (ii, 122).

  By the time of Solon, Mediterranean seafarers knew of distant shores beyond the Red Sea to the east and the Pillars of Hercules to the west. Yet there is no need to look so far afield for Atlantis. To the Egyptians in the sixth century BC, isolated for centuries following the collapse of the Bronze Age world, the island of Crete was a mysterious land beyond the horizon which had once housed a brilliant civilization. All contact had been lost following a cataclysm which they may have experienced in the pall of darkness and plague of locusts recorded in the Old Testament (Exodus, 10).

  Today, many who accept the veracity of Plato’s story see Atlantis in the civilization of Minoan Crete and its disappearance in the eruption of Thera in the middle of the second millennium BC.

  A Minoan shipwreck has yet to be excavated. However, several wrecks of later Bronze Age date have been found, including one in 1982 off south-west Turkey hailed as the greatest discovery in archaeology since the tomb of Tutankhamun. The finds include ten tonnes of oxhide-shaped copper and tin ingots; a cache of cobalt-blue glass ingots; logs of ebony, and ivory tusk; beautiful bronze swords; Near Eastern merchants’ seals; gold jewellery and a magnificent gold chalice; and an exquisite gold scarab of Nefertiti that pins the wreck to the late fourteenth century BC. The metal was enough to equip an entire army and may have been royal tribute. The finds even include items of religious significance interpreted as the accoutrements of priests. These treasures are now magnificently displayed in the Museum of Underwater Archaeology at Bodrum.

  In 2001 a hominid skull discovered at Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, was dated to an astonishing 1.8 million years BP, almost a million years before the earliest hominid fossils from Europe. A much later migration from Africa brought Homo sapiens sapiens, who began painting exquisitely lifelike animals on the walls of caves around 35,000 years ago.

  The “hall of the ancestors” is based not only on the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, dated respectively to 20,000 BP and 17,000 BP, but also on two more recent finds. In 1994 at Chauvet in south France cavers discovered a complex which had been blocked off by a rock fall in prehistory. The paintings have been dated to 35,000 BP, making them among the oldest ever found; they show that Stone Age artists reached the pinnacle of their skill only a few thousand years after anatomically modern humans arrived in the region. The depictions include giant woolly mammoths and other Ice Age megafauna. Another cave reported in 1991 near Marseilles contained more than 140 paintings and engravings, a particularly remarkable discovery because the entrance lies 37 metres below sea level. The Cosquer Cave shows that other treasures may remain undiscovered in caves submerged at the end of the Ice Age.

  It was to be many thousands of years before language was represented by a script, the earliest known being the cuneiform of Mesopotamia and the hieroglyphs of Egypt around 3200 BC. Yet finds from the Upper Palaeolithic (35,000–11,000 BP), contemporary with the cave art, include bones incised with lines and dots that may represent numerical sequences, possibly the passing of the days or the lunar calendar. The idea of writing may thus have been established well before the first need for extensive record-keeping in the early Bronze Age.

  The fictional priests of Atlantis are an amalgam of the shamans and medicine men of hunter-gatherer societies with the priest kings of the early city states. They are also distant precursors of the druids, the elusive priests known largely from Caesar’s Gallic Wars. The druids may have been powerful mediators who bound together the disparate tribes of Celtic Europe. Their forebears may have worn the conical golden “wizard’s caps,” intricately embellished with astrological symbols, which have recently been identified among Bronze Age finds; the symbols suggest an ability to chart and predict the movement of the heavens, including the lunar cycle, a knowledge also revealed in the megalithic observatories such as Stonehenge. The earliest cap dates from about 1200 BC and so far none have been reported outside western Europe.

  The first farmers on the Mediterranean islands had breeding pairs of domestic animals, including deer, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, that were not indigenous and must have been brought from the mainland in paddled longboats. Excavations on Cyprus suggest these migrations began as early as the ninth millennium BC, very soon after the inception of agriculture in the “Fertile Crescent” of Anatolia and the Near East.

  The earliest dated wooden boats are dugout fragments from Denmark of the fifth to fourth millennium BC. Whereas the first Egyptian and Near Eastern boats may have been bundles of reeds, recalled in the “papyri-form” shape of later funerary vessels, the abundance of timber along the southern Black Sea shore suggests that vessels built there may have been wooden even before metal tools became available.

  A model for Noah’s Ark is the “Dover Boat,” a remarkably well-preserved hull found in the English p
ort of that name in 1992. Though it dates from the Bronze Age, it is a generic shape that may have been typical of the earliest seagoing vessels. It was about fifteen metres long and constructed of planks sewn together with yew withies which could be disassembled for repair and overland transport. With eighteen or twenty paddlers it could have transported passengers, livestock and other cargo across the English Channel. A fleet of such vessels is more likely for a Neolithic exodus than a single vessel the size of the Old Testament ark, especially if metal carpentry tools were absent and effective sailing rigs had yet to be developed.

  The most important early Neolithic sites so far discovered are Jericho and Çatal Hüyük (also Çatalhöyük). Jericho, the biblical city identified as Tell es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley of Israel, was surrounded by a massive stone wall built about 8000 BC during the pre-pottery Neolithic. Elsewhere there is little direct evidence for warfare before the sixth millennium BC, in the form of fortifications, burned settlements or massacre sites and a recent reappraisal argues that the Jericho “defences” were in fact protection against floods.

  Çatal Hüyük in south-central Turkey flourished from the late seventh to the mid-sixth millennium BC, when it was abandoned. The image of its pueblo-like buildings, their cult rooms furnished with bull’s horn symbols and decorated with exuberant wall paintings, provides an authentic blueprint for structures imagined beneath the Black Sea. The finds include clay and stone figurines of a grotesquely corpulent mother goddess, reminiscent of a stylized female image in clay recently found on the Black Sea coast of Turkey at Ikiztepe.

  One of many extraordinary images from Çatal Hüyük is a fresco found in a cult room dated to about 6200 BC showing a volcano venting a great plume of ash. With its twin cones and intervening saddle the volcano looks remarkably like the bull’s horn images from the shrines. Beneath it lies a town, extending outwards as if along a seashore, the buildings reminiscent of Çatal Hüyük but separated into tightly packed rectilinear blocks. The volcano may represent a cinder cone in the Karapinar volcanic field, some fifty kilometres to the east, and the town may be Çatal Hüyük itself; or it may instead be a distant scene where a seaside town really did nestle beneath the twin peaks of a volcano. The painting is the oldest known image of an active volcano and of a planned town.

  Around the Black Sea the clearest evidence for precocious development comes from Varna in Bulgaria where a cemetery has produced an enormous cache of gold and copper artefacts alongside objects made from flint and bone. The finds reveal not only the extraordinary achievements of early metallurgists but also a society with stratification reflected in material wealth. The cemetery dates from the late Neolithic, a period also referred to as the “Chalcolithic” or Copper Age, and was in use by the middle of the fifth millennium BC.

  Eighty kilometres north of Crete lies the volcanic island of Thera. Only part of the prehistoric town of Akrotiri has been uncovered, but as it emerges from its tomb of ash and pumice it looks like a Bronze Age Pompeii. The inhabitants had some forewarning of the eruption, probably a series of violent earthquakes. As yet no “monastery” has been unearthed, but the splendid marine fresco from Akrotiri, showing a procession of ships and a palatial seaside structure, suggests that religious observance and ceremony played a major part in island life.

  Many archaeologists have placed the eruption around 1500 BC, based on evidence for the destruction of the palaces on Crete and the arrival of the Mycenaeans. However, scientists have recently suggested a “best fit” of 1628 BC in the acidity layers of Greenland ice, radiocarbon determinations and dendrochronological analysis of Irish oak and California bristlecone pine. Whatever the precise date, there can be no doubt of the colossal scale of the eruption that obliterated the settlement on Thera, smothered a huge swath of the east Mediterranean and caused tsunamis which pummelled the north coast of Crete and would have overwhelmed ships for miles around.

  Alexandria, the great port founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, is the setting for the conference early in this book. It takes place in the Qaitbay Fortress, the fifteenth-century AD castle built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. Many fragments of masonry and sculpture have been charted on the seabed where the lighthouse collapsed in the fourteenth century.

  More than two thousand kilometres to the west lies Carthage, location of the fictional Maritime Museum. Since 1972 the UNESCO “Save Carthage” programme has ensured that the city is among the most studied from antiquity, despite having been razed by the Romans in 146 BC and again by the Arabs almost nine hundred years later. Today an outstanding feature is the landlocked circular harbour where excavations have revealed slipways that once housed a fleet of war galleys.

  Solon is a genuine historical character who lived from about 640 to 560 BC. He was chief archon of Athens in 594 BC and famous as a statesman whose reforms paved the way towards the democratic city-state of the Golden Age. Afterwards he travelled extensively in Egypt and Asia Minor and was revered as one of the “seven wise men” of Greece. His only writings to survive are a few fragments of poetry, but there can be no doubt that like Herodotus a century later he would have taken extensive notes from the priests and other informants he met on his travels.

  The “Atlantis Papyrus” is fictional, though the circumstances of its discovery are inspired by a remarkable series of finds in western Egypt. In 1996 at the oasis of Bahariya a donkey broke through the sand into a rock-cut necropolis that had lain undisturbed for fifteen centuries. Since then more than two hundred mummies have been uncovered, many gilded and painted with portrait faces and religious scenes. They are from the Graeco-Roman period, dating after Alexander’s conquest in 332 BC, but in 1999 archaeologists digging beneath the oasis town of El Bawiti discovered the tomb of a governor of Bahariya during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664–525 BC), the period of Solon’s travels.

  The ruins of Saïs lie under the modern village of Sa el-Hagar in the western Delta near the Rosetta branch of the Nile, less than thirty kilometres from the Mediterranean. Like Carthage and Alexandria, little remains of the riverside metropolis, its masonry plundered and its foundations lying beneath metres of silt. Nevertheless, Saïs was probably an important cult centre at the dawn of Egyptian history, even before the Early Dynastic Period (circa 3100 BC). By the time of Solon’s visit it was the Royal Capital of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, a place the Greeks would have known well from their nearby emporium of Naucratis.

  Pilgrims came from far and wide to pay their respects at the temple of the goddess Neith, a vast complex described by Herodotus when he visited the following century. He met with the “scribe,” his term for the high priest, who “kept the register of the sacred treasures of Athene (Neith) in the city of Saïs,” a man who regrettably “did not seem to me to be in earnest” (Histories ii, 28). The temple had towering obelisks, colossal statues and human-headed sphinxes (ii, 169–171, 175). Today it requires a leap of the imagination to envisage anything like this at the site, but a low limestone wall suggests a precinct as large as the famous complex at Karnak in Upper Egypt.

  The excavations which produced the early hieroglyphs and the priest list are fictional. However, by extraordinary chance the name of the man who may have been the very priest met by Solon is known: Amenhotep, whose impressive statue, in greywacke sandstone, probably from Saïs, probably dedicated in the temple and of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, is in the British Museum (no. EA41517). He holds a naos, a shrine containing a cult image of the goddess Neith.

  Bronze Age sailors intent on reaching the Nile from Crete may have departed from the recently excavated port of Kommos, on the south coast within sight of the palace of Phaistos. From its magnificent position the palace dominates the Mesara plain and abuts Mount Ida with its sacred caves and peak sanctuaries. Three kilometres away lies the complex known as Hagia Triadha, traditionally interpreted as a royal villa but perhaps some form of seminary for the Minoan priesthood. It was here in
1908 that the famous Phaistos disc was discovered. The 241 symbols and 61 “words” have so far defied translation but may relate to an early language spoken in western Anatolia, and thus to the Indo-European spoken in the early Neolithic. The shape of marking termed here the “Atlantis symbol” actually exists, uniquely on this disc: several of them from one die are clearly visible, one close to the centre on one side.

  No second disc has been discovered. However, visitors can ponder the existing disc close up in the Archaeological Museum at Heraklion, where it is displayed alongside other treasures of the Minoan world.

  Hagia Triadha in Crete also produced a painted sarcophagus depicting a bull trussed on an altar, its neck bleeding into a libation vessel. Some fifty kilometres north at Arkhanes archaeologists found evidence for a different kind of offering: a youth bound on a low platform inside a hilltop temple, his skeleton propping up a bronze knife incised with a mysterious boar-like beast. Moments after his death the temple collapsed in an earthquake and preserved the only evidence yet found for human sacrifice in the Bronze Age Aegean.

  Arkhanes lies under Mount Juktas, the sacred peak overlooking the valley leading to Knossos. Among the many extraordinary finds at Knossos were several thousand baked clay tablets, the majority impressed with symbols christened Linear B but several hundred with Linear A. Linear B was brilliantly deciphered as an early form of Greek, the language spoken by the Mycenaeans who arrived in Crete in the fifteenth century BC. They adopted the script but rejected the language; Linear A is similar, also being syllabic with a number of shared symbols, but dates from before the Mycenaean arrival and remains substantially untranslated.