Gods of Atlantis

by David J. L. Gibbins

  ‘Wel , prepare to be amazed.’

  Costas tapped a key and the image transformed.

  The wide beds of lava constricted to narrow flows down the side of the volcano, like frozen rivers. In between Jack saw ghostly rectilinear outlines covering the slope. Costas pointed at the upper part of the screen. ‘You’re right, the lava would have destroyed al the mud-brick structures in their path.

  Where we dived this morning was through one of the solidified flows from five years ago, and the only structure that survived was that stone pil ar with the golden Atlantis symbol. But the lava flows are much narrower than we thought. When we were boring the tunnel yesterday, I used the submersible to take some core samples further down the slope, and I’ve just had a look at the results. Most of it is not lava but pyroclastic flow, solidified mud and ash. It looks as if the volcanic ash hardened with lime into a kind of hydraulic concrete, like the stuff we know the people of Atlantis used to make waterproof wal s. Where the flow was pyroclastic, it didn’t destroy Atlantis. It actual y preserved it.’

  He tapped again, and the image sharpened further.

  Jack let out a low whistle. ‘Wel I’l be damned,’ he said. It was as if the flow had been peeled away to reveal intact structures beneath, a vast complex of flat-roofed buildings that seemed to have been built organical y, reaching three or four storeys high and spreading up the slope of the volcano. Jack stared, shaking his head. ‘It’s fantastic. It’s like jumping back five years to when we first saw Atlantis from our Aquapods. I never thought I’d see that again.’

  ‘Wel , we won’t be excavating it in a hurry. Even if the volcano goes quiet and we can get down there again, it’d be like mining on the moon. Roman Herculaneum was covered by pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, and they’ve only excavated one fifth of the site in two hundred and fifty years. And Herculaneum’s not under a hundred metres of water poisoned by sulphur dioxide.’

  Jack was stil stunned by the image. ‘More so than anything we saw five years ago, this view is incredibly similar to Neolithic houses found elsewhere.’

  ‘That place on the Konya plain? Çatalhöyük?’

  Jack nodded. ‘About three hundred kilometres south-east of here.’ He reached over and tapped one of the thumbnails, revealing an artist’s impression of a town rising out of a plain, the structures built together like an Indian pueblo in the southern United States.

  ‘Do you remember I took a few days off from the excavation at Troy last month to go there? A friend of mine is leading an expedition into the Taurus mountains to the south, looking for caves that might contain paintings and other clues to their Stone Age ancestors. The excavations at Çatalhöyük in the 1960s gave the world an image of what the first Neolithic towns looked like.’

  ‘It dates to the same time period as Atlantis?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Early Neolithic, the first period of settled farming after the end of the Ice Age, beginning about eleven thousand years ago. Atlantis was inundated by the Black Sea in the late sixth millennium BC, but the radiocarbon dates we took from timbers in the buildings five years ago show that some of these structures date at least two mil ennia before that. Çatalhöyük flourished in the eighth millennium BC. But there were even earlier Neolithic sites.’ He touched another thumbnail and the scene transformed to an image of a Near Eastern tel , an ancient city mound cut through by old excavation trenches with ruined wal s protruding from the sections. ‘That’s Jericho, in the Jordan Val ey, just north of the Dead Sea,’ he said. ‘You know the Old Testament story of Joshua leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, and coming to Jericho?’

  Costas screwed up his eyes for a moment, then recited: ‘ So the people shouted when the priests blew with their trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat.’ He turned to Jack rueful y. ‘The benefits of a Greek Orthodox background, and then a boarding school in New York where we had to memorize passages from the Bible.’

  Jack grinned at him. ‘You never cease to amaze me. Is that how you got your interest in poetry?’

  ‘Nope. That was the Dead Poets Society, after school. We had to join something, and I hated sports.

  It meant I could hide in the back row and doodle submarine engine-room layouts.’

  ‘Some of the poetry must have washed off on you.’

  ‘That’s what Jeremy says. You know, he can declaim whole passages of Shakespeare. We do it when we’re alone in the engineering lab. That’s how I got that Othel o quote.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Wel , I just hope some of the poetry goes into the submersibles.’

  ‘Exactly what Jeremy said when we finished Little Joey.’ Costas sighed. ‘Little Joey, who has made the ultimate sacrifice.’

  Jack put a hand on Costas’ shoulder. ‘I real y am sorry.’ He turned back to the image on the screen.

  ‘The excavations at Jericho during the 1950s revealed a perimeter wal around the city almost four metres high, as wel as an eight-metre-high stone tower. The conventional Biblical chronology puts Joshua about the middle of the second mil ennium BC.

  But the wal s of Jericho didn’t date anywhere near that time. They dated a staggering six mil ennia earlier, to the eighth or even the ninth mil ennium BC. So the archaeology tel s a far more fantastic story than the Bible. The excavations at Jericho were the first to put the early Neolithic on the map, and showed that col ective endeavour to make large monuments like wal s and towers was possible right at the dawn of civilization, at a time when most humans stil lived as hunter-gatherers.’

  Costas whistled. ‘And wasn’t Jericho the site where the first of those plastered skul s was found?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Just like the ones in the inner sanctum we saw today. There was a connection between these early communities across this region, a connection in their religion, their belief system. But Jericho’s at the periphery of that early Neolithic world, at the south-west tip of the so-cal ed fertile crescent that extended up to Anatolia and down through Mesopotamia. I believe that the true heartland lay here, along the Black Sea coast before it flooded, and down into Anatolia further south. And I’m not just talking about Çatalhöyük. Two other sites have revolutionized our picture of early-Neolithic religion.’

  He touched another thumbnail, and Costas’ jaw dropped. ‘Holy cow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Those pil ars.

  They’re almost identical.’ It was as if the underwater sanctum from Atlantis had been lifted out of the cave and on to dry land, and sunk in a depression in the ground to make it semi-subterranean, like a crypt. The photograph showed a partial y excavated oval structure about ten metres across, with T-shaped pil ars placed at intervals around a coarsely built wal .

  On the nearest pil ars they could just make out low-relief carvings of animals and vultures, and what appeared to be a human arm.

  ‘That’s at Göbekli Tepe, about two hundred kilometres south of here on the Anatolian plateau,’

  Jack said. He touched another thumbnail, and a similar image appeared showing a group of pil ars arranged in rows within a chamber, sunk into the ground but rectilinear in shape. ‘And here’s Nevali Çori, the second site. There’s also another pil ar with an arm, and a sculpture in the round showing a human head with a vulture on it.’

  ‘So this is why you were so excited when you saw that chamber today.’

  ‘It fits into a pattern. These are among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries ever made.’

  ‘What’s the date?’ Costas asked.

  ‘That’s what makes these discoveries so earth-shattering. The Göbekli Tepe complex dates to at least 9000 BC. That’s eleven thousand years old.

  Before the first evidence for agriculture, before the first settled towns. Even before Jericho. This place was built by hunter-gatherers. They’re even cal ing this the world’s first temple, the Garden of Eden. But there’s something not right about that. Temples imply worship, and that’s
a modern concept. Look at the vultures, the skul s. I don’t think anything was worshipped here. I think this was a place for ceremony, for ritual, but more like an access point to the spirit world.’

  ‘Like the idea of an axis mundi, a portal between hel and heaven.’

  ‘Except that our idea of the underworld, of hel , may be an invention of the developing religions after this period, something to frighten people into compliance.

  It’s from then on that priest-kings began to shape religion to their own purposes, invoking human-like gods that melded in the eyes of the people with the priest-kings themselves and were worshipped as one.’

  Costas gestured at the pil ars. ‘How long did this place last?’

  ‘That’s what’s so fascinating. Göbekli Tepe wasn’t transformed into a later religious complex. Some time around

  8000 BC, it was deliberately buried.

  Thousands of years later, the same thing happens to henges and burial mounds in prehistoric Europe. In some places it may have to do with ancestor worship, with the idea that ancestors who were first venerated in these places had become too old and distant and needed to be parcel ed away, to be buried to make way for the new. But I don’t think that provides the ful explanation. I think we’re looking at the eclipsing of a whole belief system, one that was somehow stil threatening enough for the new priests to order the destruction of the ancient ritual places, for those sites never to be used again. I believe the turning point came with the development of the first towns and cities, with the rise of priest-kings. They came at a time of new gods, gods that were beginning to emerge in the final period at sites like Göbekli Tepe when those pil ars with the arms like humans were erected.’

  ‘And at Atlantis maybe the same thing was happening,’ Costas suggested, tapping a thumbnail to recal the underwater image from that morning.

  ‘This sanctum was once open-air, on the flank of the volcano. It was once a cave with paintings, but it looks as if al that old stuff was being upgraded, with those pil ars and new carvings. At the end, there was only a smal entranceway through a masonry wal , and then that was blocked off. Someone was trying to obliterate it.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Jack enthused. ‘And al of this involves planning and manpower, whether you’re creating the site or destroying it. It doesn’t take a race of supermen to build a complex like this one, but it does take plenty of toil and organization. If this was the Garden of Eden, it wasn’t a place to lie around in and eat apples. There was a lot of quarrying involved to make those pil ars, using primitive stone and antler tools. They were free-standing monoliths: they’d been quarried and dragged into position. The biggest of them is thought to weigh at least twenty tons. Twenty tons. That was my point about the wal s of Jericho.

  Hundreds of people were brought together to work on these monuments, persuaded by some authority to carry out back-breaking and dangerous labour.’

  ‘So how does the date fit with Atlantis?’

  ‘I think what we found today is real y early, older than anything else. The cave paintings in that Atlantis sanctum are Palaeolithic, at least twelve thousand years old. And five years ago we found the other cave deep in the mountainside, the one we dubbed the Hal of the Ancestors, with organic paint pigments we radiocarbon-dated back at least thirty-five thousand years, as old as the earliest cave paintings anywhere in the world. This volcano was a site of religious significance way back into the Ice Age. Shamans must have come here from miles around to go deep inside the mountain and try to access the spirit world.’

  Costas nodded again at the image. ‘So at the beginning of the Neolithic, say eleven thousand years ago, you’ve got a new group arriving?’

  ‘I’d suggest new ideas from within, even from the shamans themselves, a new generation perhaps who could see how the world around them was changing and wanted to maintain control over it. They were people with a new religious power they could impose on the local population. People with the drive and vision of the original settlers at the site, who could translate that energy in a different way. A group whose influence soon spread far and wide over Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent, to places like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük and Jericho.’

  ‘You said they had power over the local population, Jack. Is that how they built this place? Did they enslave the population?’

  Jack pursed his lips. ‘It’s possible. Remember, the original people here were hunter-gatherers, the ones who found these caves and made the paintings. It’s even possible that organized agriculture was forced on them by the new priests as a way of having settled labour available to build religious monuments. That’s the kind of radical idea archaeologists started to play with when the temple at Göbekli Tepe was found, a temple older than the settlement around it, older even than the first evidence for agriculture. If we can pin that idea down, corroborate it, then Atlantis is an even bigger revelation than I could have imagined.’

  ‘So what’s going on at the time of the Black Sea flood?’

  Jack paused. ‘When I was researching our discovery of Atlantis, I looked at al the original flood myths: the Greek myth of Deucalion, the Old Testament

  account

  of

  Noah,

  the

  ancient

  Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. There was no doubt in my mind that they al originated from the same natural catastrophe, the sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age, and more specifical y the flooding of the Black Sea over the Bosporus in the sixth mil ennium BC. A date in the Neolithic is even hinted at in the stories. The account of Noah taking breeding pairs of animals matches what we know happened when early farmers spread from Anatolia to the islands of the Mediterranean such as Cyprus, where the excavations of Neolithic sites produce bones of animals that were not indigenous to the islands.’

  ‘You’re talking about domestic animals?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Goats, sheep, cattle, tied down in longboats and rowed across from the mainland.’ He stared at the image of the carvings on the pil ars, showing leopards and bul s. ‘But for this very early period, when animals were just beginning to be domesticated, we have to keep an open mind about that. Our focus is too often on finding an economic rationale: you take domestic animals with you because they provide food and clothing. But look at these carvings. You see bul s, yes, but are they bul s for food or bul s for ceremonies, to help shamans enter a spirit world? Were wild bul s first corral ed and herded for that purpose? Did animal husbandry for food only arise later, after people had settled around these sacred sites and the corral ing and breeding of animals acquired a new purpose?’

  Costas leaned back, thinking. ‘I remember that the palaeoecological study done by IMU five years ago showed an abundance of wild animals in this area, plenty for hunter-gatherer groups just after the Ice Age. If you’ve got enough meat that way, why try to domesticate animals?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ Jack said. ‘And when there’s no economic rationale, you look to other explanations.

  That’s where religion comes in.’

  ‘So what about these pil ars?’ Costas asked.

  Jack paused. ‘The most intriguing group of texts I studied were the early Babylonian flood and creation myths, first written down on clay tablets in the third mil ennium BC in Mesopotamia. They name gods, like Enlil the al -powerful and Ishtar, goddess of love, and it’s just possible that those names originate in this period of the Neolithic. The flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh seems to derive from an earlier story, cal ed the Atrahasis, meaning “When the gods were men”. The Atrahasis and the other early creation myths contain a group of gods cal ed the Annunu, and sometimes another group, the Iggigi. Later they take on more character and become an established part of the Mesopotamian pantheon, but to begin with they’re nameless, faceless, like inchoate beings. They’re like these pil ars, which seem to have a human form within them, half in and half out of the spirit world.’

  Costas leaned forward, staring at the image. ‘The famous c
ave paintings at Lascaux and the other Palaeolithic sites sometimes show human hands, created in outline by the artist pressing his hand on the wal and flicking paint around it. Look at the hands on those pil ars. It’s as if the sculptors had rarely represented humans before, and these are like blanks for statues, roughly shaped, with just the hands appearing, the only part of the human form they were used to representing.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t that they’d never represented humans before,’ Jack said quietly. ‘Maybe they’d never represented gods before.’

  ‘But you talked of the bul s as sacred. Weren’t they gods?’

  ‘Not worshipped, but used as a conduit by the shaman to travel to the spirit world, real flesh-and-blood animals that could become spirit animals.’

  Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘So you’re suggesting that the concept of god was a Neolithic invention?’

  ‘It’s been nagging at me for five years. I knew the story here was more than just a fabulous archaeological discovery, a dazzling view of the foundation of civilization. There’s something here that should make us question ourselves, question the very basis of the belief systems that have kept people going for the last ten thousand years.’

  Costas let out a low whistle. ‘And this al begins here.’

  ‘The earliest Babylonian creation myths tel how agriculture and animal husbandry were brought from a sacred mountain, a place cal ed Dû-Re, the home of the Annunu.’

  ‘The sacred mountain of Dû-Re,’ Costas repeated slowly. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Atlantis?’

  Jack took a deep breath. ‘The Babylonian creation myths always seem to look north beyond the mountains towards the uplands of Anatolia, to the places where we know cereals were first cultivated and wild animals first tamed. It was in Mesopotamia that agriculture first took off in a big way, along the arid riverbanks of the desert where irrigation and cultivation real y were an economic rationale, crucial to the expansion of population where there were few wild resources. But I don’t believe those ideas just trickled down from the nearest early farming communities in Anatolia like Çatalhöyük. Big ideas don’t trickle, they move quickly. And I believe those ideas could have come with a wave of refugees from the flood on the Black Sea, with a priesthood who were on the verge of obliterating their Stone Age past, who brought with them their new gods and their new ability to control people. As for the Annunu of Babylonian myth, I think we may just be looking at them right now.’ He pointed to the pil ars on the screen, then tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘I want to find out where else they went. I want to find a place where we don’t have to look back at these people through their ancestors, through al the accreted layers of later civilization, in Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt, Mesopotamia. I want to find a place away from the cradle of civilization where some of the old priesthood may have gone, the shamans, where they may have tried to found a new Atlantis.’