Gods of Atlantis

by David J. L. Gibbins

  ‘James Dil en said it was most important that I come to visit you now. I’m fascinated to hear what you have for us.’

  ‘You are, I know, very familiar with the Periplus Maris Erythraei.’

  Jack stared at him, then nodded. ‘The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, written in Greek in Egypt. One of the most extraordinary ancient texts on seafaring and maritime exploration to survive. Two years ago, we discovered a Roman shipwreck in the Red Sea with a huge trove of gold bul ion destined for India, the best corroboration yet of the ancient trade across the Indian Ocean described in the Periplus.’

  ‘I fol owed the excavation on your website. It was a marvel ous discovery. Then you know something of the Heidelberg Codex?’

  ‘ Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, containing the Periplus? A compilation of copied ancient texts on geography and exploration put together in about the tenth century, probably in a monastery in the Byzantine East. My col eagues Maria de Montijo and Jeremy Haverstock travel ed with me to Heidelberg University to examine it. They’ve done a complete palaeographic analysis of the text of the Periplus, and Dil en has been working on a new translation.’

  ‘Ah. He didn’t say. We’ve been out of touch since my retirement.’

  ‘I expect he wanted to tel you first about the new passages of Homer, The Fall of Troy. They came from the ancient library we discovered three years ago in Herculaneum. That’s been the huge excitement of the last year, in conjunction with the excavation at Troy, which has even produced a wal painting of a bard cal ed Homeros.’

  Schoenberg nodded, his eyes rapt. ‘A remarkable fi nd . Remarkable. Your work is so much what I envisaged al those years ago, when there were those of us in the Ahnenerbe, the genuine scholars, not the charlatans and the frauds, who saw our future had we won the war just as you must have first envisaged your own institute.’

  Costas narrowed his eyes, and Jack said nothing for a moment, watching Schoenberg, then took a sip of coffee. ‘Back to the Periplus. While Costas and I were excavating the shipwreck, Maurice Hiebermeyer and his team dug up a Roman merchant’s house at the Red Sea port site of Myos Hormos. They found fragments of inscribed potsherds that seemed to be a first draft of the Periplus, containing digressions that were excised from the final version, the one copied by the monk who compiled the Codex Palatinus Graecus. One of the digressions mentioned Roman legionaries who escaped from Parthian imprisonment and went east through the mountains of central Asia towards China. Fol owing that lead put us on the trail of a group of Romans who thought they’d found their own El Dorado, who had heard about the fabled riches of the First Emperor Shihuangdi’s tomb in China. They never made it that far, but settled on the distant reaches of the Silk Road, where their descendants stil live today.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Blond-haired, blue-eyed? We heard these rumours in the 1930s.

  Himmler wanted to find descendants of the Aryan master race who might stil exist in pockets of racial purity in isolated places around the world, as wel as in Germany.’

  ‘The trail got us in a little bit of trouble, as usual,’

  Costas grumbled. ‘Marxist guerril as in the Indian jungle, then the cross hairs of a sniper in Afghanistan.

  We came up against some pretty sinister modern-day opponents.’

  Jack glanced at Costas, then looked back at Schoenberg. ‘They were a Chinese secret society.

  For more than two thousand years they had been on the trail of a fabulous jewel they thought had been stolen by one of the custodians of the First Emperor’s tomb. The search for the jewel became enshrined in their mythology, the basis for a warrior cult. The society today is a ful y modern criminal cartel steeped in the drugs and arms trades, with its headquarters somewhere in the Taklamakan Desert. But finding the jewel remained their paramount obsession. They thought one of the Romans had taken it from the fleeing tomb custodian two thousand years ago, and that we knew where it was. They’re cal ed the Brotherhood of the Tiger, and the one who undertakes the quest to find the jewel is the Tiger Warrior. Have you heard of them?’

  Schoenberg looked taken aback, then pointedly shook his head. ‘I’m just a scholar.’ He smiled, then curled his lip. ‘But you have nothing to fear. When I was stil an undergraduate at Heidelberg in 1938, I was special y selected above dozens of others to join an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. We of course encountered many Mongoloids there, including agents of Chairman Mao sent to keep an eye on us.

  You were in no danger. They are an inherently weak race.’

  Jack sat back. ‘Al I know is that I personal y shot the latter-day Tiger Warrior in a remote val ey in Afghanistan. As far as I know his bones stil lie there along with the dream of the jewel. Our information led to the Brotherhood’s activities outside China being shut down, and al they are now is a gang of guns for hire. Their leader Shang Yong would like to see me dead, but any threat he poses wil evaporate in about a week’s time, when Chinese internal security final y takes out his headquarters in the Taklamakan. Any promise Shang Yong might make to his clients now is as hol ow as the place in his fantasy world for that jewel. One thing, though, that his men are very good at is assassination. Once he realizes he is under threat, I have no doubt he wil send out his remaining thugs to kil his clients to cover his tracks.’

  Schoenberg looked uncertain for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively as if ignoring what Jack had just said. ‘You two, James Dil en, your palaeographers, your divers. A team effort. That’s what I love about your projects. They remind me of the best of our research in the 1930s, bringing together the clues that led us on fabulous expeditions to Tibet, to the Andes, to Iceland. It was an exciting time.’

  ‘Al in the cause of Nazism,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘Searching for evidence of racial superiority.’

  Schoenberg gave him a cold look. ‘Not al of us were ardent Nazis. And we had no choice. Either we worked for the Ahnenerbe, or Himmler put us on the blacklist of dissidents who ended up in Dachau. I personal y found the anthropological research distasteful, but measuring skul s and photographing racial types seemed harmless. It was only later that we realized how much this was fortifying Himmler’s views. None of us had any idea then where it would lead. And for us as young men, searching for a lost Aryan civilization, for Atlantis, was a huge adventure.

  Surely we were not the only nation to use archaeology to search for our roots.’

  ‘You were the only one to use archaeology to help justify the extermination of an entire people.’

  Jack gave Costas a warning look, seeing Schoenberg watching him. ‘Atlantis. That’s what we’re here to talk about, isn’t it?’

  Schoenberg nodded, his lips pursed, then turned to Jack. ‘I am not an apologist for Nazi extremism, but I want to tel you how it was. We were not al madmen and psychopaths.’

  Jack looked at him impassively. ‘James Dil en holds your classical scholarship in high regard.’

  ‘I was a sane man trapped in a lunatic asylum.

  Wewelsburg Castle was the asylum, and I did al I could to avoid spending time there. The expeditions were my escape, and we always found new reasons to go, to justify ever more fantastic projects. The moment I stepped away from the castle, I could look forward to the fresh air of the mountains, the sea, the ice, the thril of new horizons to explore.’

  ‘Atlantis was one of those projects?’ Jack asked.

  Schoenberg paused. ‘There were many schemes.

  You have heard of “world ice theory”, Welteislehre, yes? We were supposed to believe that our Nordic ancestors grew strong in a world of ice and snow; ice is the cosmological heritage of Nordic man. For a time, I had to teach this nonsense at the SS ideology school at Wewelsburg.’

  Costas cleared his throat. ‘Did you teach them that world ice theory was promoted by the Nazis as the antithesis of the theory of relativity, which was seen as abhorrent because Einstein was Jewish?’

  Schoenb
erg waved his hand. ‘More nonsense.

  More fantasy.’

  ‘The type of fantasy that helped to tip Himmler towards the Final Solution.’

  Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas. ‘ Atlantis. Carry on, Professor.’

  Schoenberg paused. ‘Atlantis was another of the schemes. Himmler was under the spel of a man named Karl Maria Wiligut, who claimed to be the last in a line of ancient sages who told of lost cities and vanished civilizations.’

  Costas glanced at the notebook he had taken from his pocket. ‘ Wiligut. That rings a bel . Hard name to forget. Here we are. Karl Maria Wiligut also taught that the ancestral enemies of the German people were the Jews. Founder of an anti-Semitic league.

  Head of the Department for Pre- and Early History within the Race and Settlement Office. Funny name for a scholarly institution, don’t you think?’

  Schoenberg opened his arms and sat back. ‘Is this to be an interrogation?’ he said, looking at Jack.

  Costas stared at him, then closed his notebook and put it in his pocket. ‘Do carry on, please.’

  Schoenberg paused, then leaned forward again. ‘In the mind of Himmler, Atlantis was the ancient foundation civilization, the original Aryan homeland. It existed in the Age of Ice, and evidence for it was to be found in Iceland, in Greenland, under Antarctica, high in the glaciers of the Alps and the Andes and the Himalayas, where people might live who were genetical y untainted descendants of the original Atlanteans. But those of us who were genuine scholars knew better. When your IMU team discovered the Neolithic citadel in the Black Sea, I felt an extraordinary vindication. If Plato’s Atlantis was based on reality, we knew it could not have been in some remote location but must have been a vanished civilization of the Old World, right in the heartland of the first civilizations. The revelations of the Bronze Age, of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, of Troy, showed how much had been lost to history, and we assumed that Atlantis would be another civilization like that, waiting to be rediscovered by some latter-day Schliemann. But I also believed that a precocious early civilization would have spread its wings. My private quest was not to find Atlantis, but to find Atlantis reborn. We guessed that the most famous Bronze Age civilizations, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Minoans, might owe their extraordinary achievements to some precursor civilization, to refugees from Atlantis. But where else might the Atlanteans have gone?’

  Jack leaned forward. ‘Did you find clues in the Heidelberg Codex?’ Schoenberg’s eyes lit up with fervour. ‘When the order came from Himmler to scour the ancient sources in the search for Atlantis, Heidelberg was the first place I went. I’d been just about to start research for my doctorate at the university when I was fingered for the Ahnenerbe. My subject had been another periplus, the ancient Periplus of Hanno, one of the other texts bound up in Codex Palatinus Graecus 398 with the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.’

  Costas looked at Jack ‘Were these original texts?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Tenth-century AD copies.

  Until Hiebermeyer’s discovery of those pottery fragments with the Erythraean Sea text, the Heidelberg Codex represented the earliest surviving versions of the geographical works it contains. The monk who transcribed them may wel have copied from exemplars dating from antiquity, though probably even those were not the originals.’

  ‘That’s the key to what I’m about to tel you,’

  Schoenberg said. ‘Even the most careful monks could lose concentration and introduce errors, and of course they copied any existing errors in the versions they were transcribing. Sometimes if they recognized errors they tried to rectify them, yet they often failed to grasp the original meaning and in so doing made it worse. The biggest problems are with texts that have also gone through translations. With those, the more knowledgeable monks sometimes added their own comments in the margins, where they felt they might fix a questionable translation or clarify a passage.

  Where they include reference to other ancient sources to make their point, this can reveal the existence of other works now lost.’

  ‘So what’s your point?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Do you remember which text comes next in the Heidelberg

  Codex

  after

  the Periplus

  Maris

  Erythraei?’

  Jack cast his mind back to the day he had spent with Maria and Jeremy at Heidelberg. ‘It’s your speciality, the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian, the extraordinary account of Hanno’s voyage in the sixth century BC down the west coast of Africa. Folio pages 55v to 58v, if I remember correctly. I can vividly recal the excel ent seminar you gave on it at Cambridge when we first met. The Periplus of Hanno real y il ustrates your point about transcription problems. It was original y inscribed on bronze tablets on a pil ar in Carthage, and then was translated into Greek. We glanced at it when we were examining the codex but didn’t have time to study it in detail.’

  ‘Nor did I, to begin with,’ Schoenberg said, beaming. ‘My study of the codex for my doctoral research was interrupted when I was recruited into the Ahnenerbe. It was only when they sent me back to the library to look for clues to Atlantis that I had the chance. And even if you had read it, you wouldn’t have seen what I saw.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said.

  Schoenberg picked up the leather document case in front of him and opened it, taking out a brown envelope. He held it for a moment, then looked at Jack. ‘You must understand me. I’ve kept the contents of this envelope secret since the war. In April 1945, when the Russians were closing in, I was forced into the Volkssturm militia for the defence of Berlin. My unit defended the western part of the Tiergarten below the Zoo flak tower. I was one of the lucky few who were captured. I say lucky now, but we didn’t think so at the time. We were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. Most of my comrades who weren’t summarily executed or worked to death died of disease or starvation. When I was final y released in 1954, I went to Germany to retrieve this case from where I had hidden it and then took advantage of the lifting of immigration restrictions on former Nazis by the Canadian government to emigrate. They needed manual labour, and for several years I worked as a lumberjack. Then I was able to resume my studies, to complete my doctorate and embark on an academic career. I married, had children and now have great-grandchildren. The past was behind me. I had no wish to reveal anything while my children were stil growing up that might expose what I had been and what I had done.’

  ‘Why now?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Because I am old, and sitting here looking over the ocean, imagining ancient explorers and seafarers, I dwel often in the past in Heidelberg, when I was so excited to be in that library. I took out this document a few days ago and smelt the old vel um of the codex. It brought it al back to me. That’s when I cal ed my old friend James Dil en. I could not die without revealing this to someone. And there is a specific reason why I wanted it to be you.’

  ‘Let’s see it,’ Costas said, leaning forward on his elbows. Schoenberg took a deep breath, then reached in and pul ed out two sheets from the envelope, placing them on top of the table. The upper sheet was an A4-sized black-and-white photograph of an old manuscript. ‘This is an image of folio 23v of Codex Palatinus Graecus 398,’ he said. ‘You can see that the monk wrote the main text in minuscules –

  that is, lower-case letters – but put marginal headings in uncials, upper-case letters. That’s how we can date it: Byzantine scribes only started writing Greek in minuscules around the ninth century AD, and this codex is one of the earliest examples. I’m showing you this page as an example because you can see where he has put comments and corrections in the left-hand column. Now look at this.’ He lifted the photograph, revealing an old sheet of vel um, yel owed around the edges and crinkled at the bottom. ‘This is an actual page from the codex, an insert before the first page containing the text of the Periplus of Hanno. The earlier translators of the codex in the nineteenth century failed to mention it. It’s pretty obvious why.’

&n
bsp; ‘Because it’s blank,’ Costas said.

  ‘So it seems. It was inserted as a blotter, to prevent poorer-quality ink from spreading on the back of the preceding sheet. When I first saw this in 1942, I remembered similar blank pages inserted for that purpose in other codices. On a whim I raised the page and shone a torch through the vel um. I could see a faint imprint in reverse of the main text on the fol owing page, and a clearer imprint from the monk’s marginal notes where that part of the page had been compressed close to the binding when the book was closed. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but with the light you can make out most of the text. It matched exactly the text on the fol owing page, a mirror image, except in one place. Some time after the blank page had been inserted, one of the marginal notes on the fol owing page had been erased: scraped away or painted over with a solution that dissolved the ink. The note only survived in ghostly reverse on the back of the blank sheet.’

  ‘What was the subject of the text of the Periplus of Hanno beside the note?’ Jack asked.

  ‘It was the first sentences of the Periplus, where the text describes Hanno sailing past the Pil ars of Hercules with fifty large ships and thirty thousand settlers. The erased note is opposite the line where Hanno talks about cities of the “Libyo-Phoenicians”.

  He lists city names that occur nowhere else and can’t be precisely identified, though several of them probably correspond to the known Phoenician outposts of Lixus and Mogador on the Moroccan coast facing the Atlantic. There’s a clue in that note to which one of those cities he’s referring to.’

  ‘I’ve

  been

  there,’

  Jack

  murmured.

  ‘My

  undergraduate study tour, examining evidence for Phoenician exploration along the coast of west Africa.

  The archaeology of the very early period is pretty elusive, difficult to pin down. Go on.’

  Schoenberg picked up a Mini Maglite, held the vel um vertical y and shone the light through it. Jack gasped as saw the faint imprint of letters.