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.
Two other Bronze Age sites mentioned are Athens and Troy. On the Acropolis one of few survivals from prehistory is a rock-cut tunnel leading to a subterranean spring; it was this that inspired the idea that there may yet be hidden chambers from the classical period. At Troy, palaeogeographical research has pinpointed the line of the ancient beaches and may one day reveal evidence of a Bronze Age siege.
The Black Sea is indeed dead below about 200 metres, a result of huge accumulations of hydrogen sulphide caused by the biochemical process described in this book. In its deep recesses are deposits of brine which formed when the sea was cut off from the Mediterranean and began to evaporate, causing the salt to precipitate.
To the south the sea lies astride one of the world’s most active geological boundaries, one which came to world attention in 1999 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake devastated northwest Turkey. The North Anatolian Fault between the African and the Eurasian plates runs as far east as Mount Ararat, itself an extinct twin-peaked volcano, and could be associated with imaginary features in this book including the volcanic island, the tectonic rift and the hydrothermal vents.
Several wrecks of ancient merchantmen have been found in the coastal waters of the Black Sea, including one located by a submersible off Bulgaria in 2002. In 2000 the team that pinpointed the ancient shoreline near Sinope found a shipwreck from late antiquity in 320 metres of water, its wonderfully preserved hull an indication of the archaeological marvels that may lie elsewhere in the anoxic depths of the sea.
With the exception of the fictional EH-4, “magic sludge,” and some aspects of laser application, most of the technology presented in this book is grounded in current developments, including matters relating to diving and archaeology. Kazbek is a fictional variant of the Akula-1 class Soviet SSN attack submarine, and thus an imaginary addition to the six boats of this class known to have been commissioned between 1985 and 1990.
The quotes from Plato in Chapter 3 are from The Dialogues of Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett (1817–93). The Bible quotes in Chapter 3 are from Exodus 10:21 and in Chapter 31 from Exodus 20:16–18, Exodus 37:1–5 and Genesis 9:17–19, King James Version.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anative of Canada, at the age of fifteen David Gibbins dived on his first shipwreck in the Great Lakes. He has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University, he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada. This is his first novel.
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