Atlantis jh-1

by David Gibbins

  “I have a theory about that,” said Jack.

  A red warning light flashed on the instrument panel. He switched the controls to manual and engaged the two auxiliary fuel tanks, necessary for the long flight. After reverting to autopilot he pressed a CD-ROM into the console and folded down a miniature screen from the cockpit ceiling. It showed a gaudy procession of longboats leaving a town, the inhabitants peering out from elaborately tiered seaside dwellings.

  “The famous marine fresco, found in the 1960s in the Admiral’s House at Akrotiri on Thera. Usually interpreted as a ceremonial occasion, perhaps the consecration of a new high priest.”

  He tapped a key and the image changed to an aerial photograph showing layers of ruinous walls and balustrades protruding from a cliff face.

  “The earthquake that damaged the Parthenon last year also dislodged the cliff face on the shore of Paleo Kameni, ‘Old Burnt,’ the second biggest islet in the Thera group. It exposed the remains of what looks like a cliff-top monastery. Much of what we know about Minoan religion comes from so-called peak sanctuaries, sacred enclosures on the hilltops and mountains of Crete. We now believe the island of Thera was the greatest peak sanctuary of them all.”

  “The home of the gods, the entrance to the underworld,” Costas offered.

  “Something like that,” Jack replied. “The peak sanctuary itself was blown to smithereens when Thera erupted. But there was also a religious community, one buried under ash and pumice beyond the caldera.”

  “And your theory about the discs?” Costas prompted.

  “I’m coming to that,” said Jack. “First let’s consider our shipwreck. The best guess is it was caused before the eruption of Thera, sunk in a shockwave before the main blast.”

  The other two murmured in agreement.

  “I now believe she was more than just a wealthy merchantman. Think of the cargo. Gold chalices and necklaces. Gold and ivory statues, some almost life-sized. Libation altars carved out of rare Egyptian porphyry. The bull’s head rhyton. Vastly more wealth than would normally be entrusted to a single cargo.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Costas asked.

  “I think we’ve found the treasury of the high priests of Thera, the most sacred repository of Bronze Age civilization. I believe the discs were the most coveted possessions of the high priests. The gold disc was the oldest, brought out only for the most sacred ceremonies, and originally had no markings other than the central symbol. The ancient clay disc, the older of the two Phaistos discs, was a record tablet rather than a revered object. It contained a key to knowledge, but was written in ancient symbols only the priests could decipher. Following the warning earthquake, fearful of impending apocalypse, the high priest ordered these symbols to be stamped round the edge of the gold disc. They were a lexicon, a concordance of the ancient symbols on the clay disc with the prevailing Linear A and B scripts. Any literate Minoan would realize the syllabic groupings were an ancestral version of their own language.”

  “So it was an insurance policy,” Katya suggested. “A code book for reading the clay disc in case the priests should all perish.”

  “Yes.” Jack turned towards her. “Along with the magnificent bull’s head rhyton, the divers came up with a bundle of ebony and ivory rods exquisitely carved with images of the great mother goddess. We believe they were the sacred staffs of the Minoans, ritual accoutrements like the staffs of bishops and cardinals. I think they accompanied the high priest himself as he fled the island sanctuary.”

  “And the Phaistos discs?”

  “At the same time as having the symbols stamped on the gold disc, the high priest ordered a replica to be made of the ancient clay disc, one which appeared to contain a similar text but was in fact meaningless. As Professor Dillen said, the replica was a way of putting outsiders off seeking too much meaning in the symbols. Only the priests would know the significance of the text and have access to the concordance on the golden disc.”

  “How did they come to be at Phaistos?” Costas demanded.

  “I believe they were originally in the same repository as the golden disc, in the same temple storeroom on the island of Thera,” Jack said. “The high priest sent them in an earlier shipment which reached Crete safely. Phaistos would have seemed an obvious refuge, high above the sea and protected from the volcano by Mount Ida to the north.”

  “And a religious centre,” added Katya.

  “Next to the palace is Hagia Triadha, a complex of ruins which has long perplexed archaeologists. It’s where both the discs were discovered a hundred years apart. We now think it was a kind of seminary, a training college for priests who would then be despatched to the peak sanctuaries.”

  “But Phaistos and Hagia Triadha were both destroyed at the time of the eruption,” Katya interjected. “Levelled by an earthquake and never reoccupied, the discs buried in the ruins only days after they arrived from Thera.”

  “I have one final question,” said Costas. “How did the high priest of the temple of Saïs in the Nile Delta come to know of Atlantis almost a thousand years after the eruption of Thera and the loss of these discs?”

  “I believe the Egyptians knew the story from the same source, far back in prehistory, that it survived separately in each civilization. It was sacred, passed down scrupulously without embellishment or emendation, as shown by the identical details of the Atlantis symbol on both the papyrus and the discs.”

  “We have Solon the Lawmaker to thank for the connection,” Katya said, “If he hadn’t fastidiously copied that symbol beside the Greek word Atlantis we might not be here.”

  “The Phaistos discs were worthless, made of pottery,” Costas mused, “of value only for the symbols. But the disc from the wreck is solid unalloyed gold, maybe the biggest ingot to survive from prehistory.” He turned in his seat and looked keenly at Jack. “My hunch is there’s more to this than meets the eye. I think our golden paperweight will somehow unlock an even greater mystery.”

  They had passed the Sea of Marmara and were flying over the Bosporus. The clear air of the Aegean had transformed into a haze of smog from the sprawl of Istanbul. They could just distinguish the Golden Horn, the inlet where Greek colonists founded Byzantium in the seventh century BC. Beside it a forest of minarets poked up out of the morning mist. On the promontory they could make out the palace of Topkapi, once the very symbol of oriental decadence but now one of the finest archaeological museums in the world. Near the seafront were the great walls of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which kept Rome alive in the east until the city fell to the Turks in 1453.

  “It’s one of my favourite cities,” Jack said. “Once you find your way around, it’s got the richest history you can imagine.”

  “When this is over I’d like you to take me there,” Katya said.

  Ahead lay the Black Sea, the broad sweep of coast on either side of the Bosporus seemingly extending to infinity. The GPS showed the final leg of their journey due east to a position some ten nautical miles north of the Turkish port of Trabzon. Jack opened the IMU channel on the VHF relayer and engaged the scrambler, punching in a routine position fix for the crew of Sea Venture.

  Moments later a blue light flashed on the lower right-hand corner of the screen above the central console.

  “Incoming email,” Costas said.

  Jack double-clicked the mouse and waited while the address appeared.

  “It’s from Professor Dillen. Let’s hope it’s his translation of the Phaistos disc.”

  Katya leaned forward from the back seat and they waited in hushed anticipation. Soon all the words were visible on the screen.

  My dear Jack,

  Since our teleconference last night I have worked flat out to complete the translation. Much has depended on the co-operation of colleagues around the world. The Linear A archive found at Knossos last year was parcelled out to many different scholars for study, and you know how protective academics can be of their unpublished data — remember the
trouble we had accessing the Dead Sea Scrolls when we began our search for Sodom and Gomorrah. Fortunately most scholars of Minoan epigraphy are former students of mine.

  Only the obverse of the second disc was meaningful. The attempt to conceal the true text was even more extensive than we thought.

  Our mysterious symbol occurs twice and I have simply translated it as Atlantis.

  Here it is:

  Beneath the sign of the bull lies the outstretched eagle god. (At) his tail (here is) golden-walled Atlantis, the great golden door of the (citadel?). (His) wingtips touch the rising and the setting of the sun. (At the) rising of the sun (here is) the mountain of fire and metal. (Here is) the hall of the high priests [Throne room? Audience chamber?]. Above (here is) Atlantis. (Here is) the mother goddess. (Here is) the place (of) the gods (and) the storeroom (of) knowledge.

  I do not yet know what to make of this. Is it a riddle? Maurice and I are eager to know what you think.

  Yours ever,

  James Dillen

  They read the translation several times in silence. Costas was the first to speak, his mind as ever seeking practicality where others saw only mystery.

  “This is no riddle. It’s a treasure map.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Jack! Welcome aboard!”

  The voice was raised above the din of the Rolls-Royce Gem turboshafts as they powered down. Jack had just stepped out onto the inflatable skid landing gear, a modification of the usual fixed-wheel naval configuration that allowed the IMU helicopters to land on water. He hurried over to shake Malcolm Macleod’s outstretched hand, his tall frame stooped low as the rotor shuddered to a halt. Costas and Katya followed close behind. As they made their way below, several of the crew scurried round the Lynx, securing it to the deck, and began offloading gearbags from the cargo bay.

  Sea Venture differed from Seaquest only in the range of equipment suited to her role as IMU’s chief deep-sea research vessel. She had recently conducted the first manned submersible survey of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. Her present role in the Black Sea had begun as a routine sedimentological analysis but had now taken on a startling new dimension.

  “Follow me to the bridge console.”

  Malcolm Macleod led them below the same dome-shaped screen they had viewed on Seaquest. Macleod was Jack’s counterpart in the department of oceanography, a man whose expertise Jack had come greatly to respect through their many collaborative projects around the world.

  The burly, red-haired Scotsman sat down in the operator’s chair beside the console.

  “Welcome to Sea Venture. I trust your inspection can wait until I show you what we’ve found.”

  Jack nodded. “Go on.”

  “Do you know about the Messinian salinity crisis?”

  Jack and Costas nodded but Katya looked perplexed.

  “OK. For the benefit of our new colleague.” Macleod smiled at Katya. “Named after deposits found near the Strait of Messina in Sicily. In the early 1970s the deep-sea drilling ship Glomar Challenger took core samples across the Mediterranean. Beneath the sea floor they found a huge layer of compacted evaporates, in places three kilometres thick. It formed during the late Miocene, the most recent geological era before our own, around five and a half million years ago.”

  “Evaporates?” Katya asked.

  “Mainly halite, common rock salt, the stuff left when seawater evaporates. Above and below it are marls, normal marine sediments of clay and calcium carbonate. The salt layer formed at the same time across the Mediterranean.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “It means the Mediterranean evaporated.”

  Katya looked incredulous. “The Mediterranean evaporated? All of it?”

  Macleod nodded. “The trigger was a huge drop in atmospheric temperature, a far colder spell than our recent Ice Age. The polar ice trapped a vast amount of the world’s oceans, causing the sea level to fall as much as five hundred metres. The Mediterranean was sealed off and began to dry up, eventually leaving only brackish mire in the deepest basins.”

  “Like the Dead Sea,” Katya suggested.

  “Even more saline, in fact barely liquid at all. Too salty for most life, hence the paucity of fossils. Large areas became desert.”

  “When did it fill up again?”

  “About two hundred thousand years later. It would have been a dramatic process, a result of massive melt at the Poles. The first trickles from the Atlantic would have become a torrent, the biggest waterfall ever, a hundred times bigger than Niagara, carving the Strait of Gibraltar down to its present depth.”

  “How is this relevant to the Black Sea?” Katya asked.

  “The Messinian salinity crisis is an established scientific fact.” Macleod looked across keenly at Jack. “It will help you believe the unbelievable, which is what I’m going to tell you next.”

  They gathered behind Sea Venture’s remote operated vehicle station on the far side of the console. Macleod invited Katya to sit behind the screen and showed her how to use the joystick.

  “Think of it as a flight simulator. Use the joystick to fly it any way you want, up or down, sideways or backwards. Speed control is the dial on the left-hand side.”

  Macleod put his hand on Katya’s and executed a full clockwise circle, pulling it round at maximum depression. The wide-format video screen remained pitch-black but the direction indicator spun through 360 degrees. The depth gauge read 135 metres, and a set of GPS coordinates showed the ROV’s position with an accuracy deviation of less than half a metre.

  Macleod pulled the stick back to its default alignment.

  “A freefall spin followed by a perfect recovery.” He grinned at Jack, who well remembered their ROV dogfights when they had trained together at the IMU deep-sea equipment facility off Bermuda.

  “ROVs have been used extensively by scientific teams for a couple of decades now,” Macleod explained. “But over the last few years the technology has become increasingly refined. For exploratory survey we use AUVs, autonomous operated vehicles, which have multitask sensor packages including video and side-scan sonar. Once a target is identified we deploy direct-control ROVs. The IMU Mark 7 we’re operating here is not much larger than a briefcase, small enough to penetrate a sub-sea vent.”

  “You can turn one of these babies on a dime,” Costas added. “And the Doppler radio-pulse control means it can go fifteen nautical miles horizontally or straight down to the deepest abyss.”

  “Nearly there,” Macleod interrupted. “Activating floodlights.”

  He depressed the joystick, flipping several switches on the console panel as he did so. Suddenly the screen came to life, the inky blackness replaced by a brilliant shimmer of speckles.

  “Silt,” Macleod explained. “Our lights reflecting off particles disturbed in the water.”

  They began to make out something more substantial, a shadowy background which gradually came into clearer view. It was the sea floor, a bleak, featureless expanse of grey. Macleod switched on the ROV’s terrain-contour radar which showed the seabed sloping down on a 30-degree gradient from the south.

  “Depth 148 metres.”

  A strange tower-like structure suddenly hove into view and Macleod halted the ROV a few metres away.

  “Another of Costas’ ingenious contraptions. A remote-operated excavator, capable of drilling cores a hundred metres below the seabed or airlifting huge volumes of sediment.” With his free hand Macleod reached into a box beside his seat. “And this is what we found just below the sea floor.”

  He passed Katya a shiny black object the size of his fist. She weighed it in her hand and cast a quizzical look.

  “A beach pebble?”

  “Worn smooth on the seashore. All along this gradient we’ve found evidence of an ancient coastline, one hundred and fifty metres deep and ten nautical miles from shore. Even more astonishing is its date. It’s one of the most remarkable discoveries we’ve ever made.”

  Macleod punched in
a set of GPS co-ordinates and the image on the screen began to move, the floodlit sea floor showing little change as the ROV kept to the same depth contour.

  “I’ve put it on autopilot. Fifteen minutes to target.”

  Katya handed back the blackened beach pebble. “Could this be associated with the Messinian salinity crisis?”

  “We certainly would have put it before the arrival of humans — or rather, hominids — in this region two million years ago.”

  “But?”

  “But we would have been wrong. Wildly wrong. Submerged shorelines are hardly unusual in our line of work but this one’s big news. Follow me and I’ll show you.”

  Macleod downloaded a computer-generated isometric map of the Black Sea and the Bosporus.

  “The relationship between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea is a kind of microcosm of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,” he explained. “The Bosporus is only about one hundred metres deep. Any lowering of the Mediterranean below that depth and it becomes a land bridge, cutting off the Black Sea. These were the conditions that allowed the first hominids in Europe to cross over from Asia.” He moved the cursor to highlight three river systems leading into the sea.

  “When the Bosporus was a land bridge, evaporation caused the Black Sea to lower, just like the Mediterranean in the salinity crisis. But the Black Sea was replenished by river inflow, from the Danube, the Dnieper and the Don. A median was reached where the rate of evaporation equalled the rate of inflow, and from then on the change was in salinity, with the Black Sea eventually becoming a vast freshwater lake.”

  He punched a key and the computer began to simulate the events he had been describing, showing the Bosporus becoming dry and the Black Sea lowering to a point about 150 metres below present sea level and 50 metres below the floor of the Bosporus, where its level was maintained by inflow from the rivers.

  He swivelled round and looked at the others.

  “Now for the surprise. This is not an image from the early Pleistocene, from the depths of the Ice Age. What you’re looking at is the Black Sea less than ten thousand years ago.”