The Lost Empire of Atlantis

by Gavin Menzies

  The ancient mounds and ruins lie at the crossing of the Tigris and the Khosr rivers, near the modern-day Iraqi town of Mosul. The ‘exceeding great city’, as it is called in the biblical Book of Jonah, lay on the eastern bank of the Tigris in what was ancient Assyria. It is now one immense area of mounds and broken walls, overlaid in parts by rackety modern suburbs.

  In its calm and quiet, Nineveh’s atmosphere must have once been like what we would today call a university town, like Oxford, Salamanca or Bologna. And yet here, in what’s now the Iraqi desert, all that remains are humps of rubble and mounds of bare earth. I was reminded of the biblical prophecy against ‘proud Nineveh’: ‘And He will stretch out His hand against the north and destroy Assyria, And He will make Nineveh a desolation, Parched like the wilderness.’23 That’s pretty much what seems to have happened.

  But it was here that the great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, or Aššurbanipal, had his palace and a library of world renown. Under his rule the Assyrian kingdom stretched as far as the Gaza Strip to the west, Armenia to the north (towards the Black Sea), east towards the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf to the south.

  Aššurbanipal reigned much later than the Minoans’ time, in the 7th century BC. Assyria’s genius had been built on the foundations of extreme military might, the imposition of ruthless discipline on its people and the exercise of extreme brutality over those it conquered. The Assyrians seized Babylon in the 8th century BC. Yet this contact at least seems to have been a civilising one, inspiring the Assyrians to educate themselves. Aššurbanipal was the ruler who finally managed the impossible: uniting the two traditions of Mesopotamia – war and words – within one culture. His significance for me was that, farsightedly, he had put together a collection of much older astronomical and scientific texts. This was sacred knowledge, all of which he had ordered to be collected together from all over Mesopotamia, not least from the already ancient cities of Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur. His collection began with the work of the Sumerians, to whom we owe so much of our own modern-day culture, including the division of time into twelve- and six-hour blocks. Aššurbanipal’s library was still in use when Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenid King Darius III and conquered Mesopotamia.

  When it was unearthed the library painted a vivid picture of a violent past; it also held a version of the biblical story of the great flood. Aššurbanipal’s collection also proves that as far back in history as you can look, humanity has been obsessed with the heavens. The seasons ruled people’s lives. Farmers calculated what work they had to do, and when, according to which constellations were rising and setting at dawn. At that time of mystery and wonder, celestial movements in the sky must have seemed like the jousting of the gods. The constellations were seen as miraculous things; they still inspire wonder today, thousands of years after Homer’s hero Odysseus made his slow way home by the stars:

  Sleep did not fall upon his eyelids

  as he watched the constellations – the Pleiades,

  the late-setting Boötes, and the Great Bear,

  which men call the Wain, always turning in one place,

  keeping watch over Orion – the only star

  that never takes a bath in Ocean. Calypso,

  the lovely goddess, had told him to keep this star

  on his left as he moved across the sea.24

  I was here because I had a problem. My theory that Minoan ships could cross the Atlantic depended on one thing: navigation.

  It is relatively easy to find latitude at sea. One way is to calculate the angle of the sun in relation to the horizon, at dead noon. It can be done using a very basic quadrant. With three pieces of wood and a little luck (no cloud or rain!) you can calculate your latitude to a fair degree of accuracy. You can also use the night sky and you can even use the simplest equipment of all, your own arms, to do it. In the northern hemisphere, all you need to do is point to the North Star, Polaris, and extend your other arm to the horizon. If the angle is 30 degrees, you are at 30 degrees north. At the equator – zero degrees latitude – Polaris appears to be on the horizon line.

  Longitude is a very different matter. It is much, much harder to calculate. It was the greatest problem for navigators in Europe up until the 18th century. Yet from my initial investigations into ancient records I had a strong feeling that the Babylonians had found a way of establishing longitude as far back as 1300 BC. And that their Minoan trading partners shared that knowledge.

  Could the Minoans truly have navigated well enough to be the world traders I thought they’d been? If so, how had they done it?

  In the West, we think it was Copernicus who first realised that the earth and the planets orbited around the sun. The truth, I’d discovered, could hardly be more different. It is clear that the Babylonians had realised this. How had they come upon such remarkable levels of knowledge?

  The answer lies in their extraordinary dedication to stargazing. To begin with, this was nothing to do with navigation. They believed that the gods had created the movements of the planets to help people on earth tell the future. The stars were used like a horoscope, to predict future happenings – and to try to avert catastrophes. One such prediction ran:

  When in the month of Ajaru, during the evening watch, the moon eclipses, the king will die. The sons of the king will vie for the throne of their father, but will not sit on it.25

  Apparently, just before a disaster like this was predicted to happen, the king would temporarily abdicate his throne. A substitute then took the crown. If the prediction was death, the unfortunate replacement would be killed. What’s known as a self-fulfilling prophecy . . . or having your cake and not eating it.

  So the Enuma Anu Enlil tablets, preserved for posterity by Aššurbanipal at Nineveh, are full of astronomical events that successions of Babylonian peoples and their kings had been charting, documenting and collecting for many generations. Astronomers worked for centuries, detailing exactly which stars rose on a particular day, the angle they rose at, at what time – and the distance between the stars. For instance, they knew that a different star rose on the eastern horizon each sunset over a time span of four years and they realised that after that the cycle repeated itself.

  Some of the tablets are missing and some are difficult to decipher. Yet many describe clearly the timings of moonrise and moonset, the rising and setting of the planets and the patterns of both solar and lunar eclipses. Tablets 1 to 22 ( dating from around 1646 BC) describe the moon’s movements; tablets 23–36 the sun’s eclipses, coronas and parhelia; tablets 50–70 the planetary positions; and tablet 63 shows the movement of Venus.

  By the time of the final, mathematical phase of Babylonian astronomy, so much data had been collected that scribes were able to calculate what was about to happen in both the day and the night sky simply by looking back in their records. Ephemeris tables (using both the sun and the stars) and sidereal tables (solely the stars) are essential to navigation. They show the day-by-day positions by sign and degree of the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Oxford English Dictionary defines them as ‘a table showing the predicted (or, rarely, the observed) positions of a heavenly body for every day during a given period’. In short, an almanac.

  Supposing the Minoans had relied on their trusted trading partners for reliable astronomical tables that would help them with their astronavigation, especially for determining latitude at sea with accuracy. Perhaps they’d taken that precious knowledge and worked out ways to produce their own star charts, for nearer home. I had to find out.

  I read and read: as a submarine navigator I’d spent many years of my life calculating both latitude and longitude, sometimes by using meridian passages of the moon. So I could anticipate some of the practical problems that the Bronze Age navigator must have faced. There are two essentials: having a fixed point, or observatory, as your reference point, and – and this is the killer – knowing the exact time of day.

  In navigation, time translates as distance. Most
sailors know the adage: ‘Longitude west, Greenwich time best. Longitude east, Greenwich time least.’ In other words, travel east and you are ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Go west, and you are behind it – or in other words, later than GMT. Thus, if you live near Greenwich, London, never ring a friend in Greenwich, New York State at nine in the morning. The chances are you’ll get someone with a bear for a head.

  Unfortunately, when navigating, you cannot get this wrong. While miscalculating a minute of latitude could put you out by a negligible 1.15 miles (2 kilometres), degrees of longitude vary in size, getting smaller towards the poles, where the meridians converge. If you guessed the time when trying to find your longitude at sea, you could easily be ‘out’ by 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) without knowing it.

  Nowadays, it only takes a few seconds to download pre-calculated ephemeris tables on to your computer. However, the moon is nothing if not changeable. Calculating these lunar ephemerides is so complex that in the 18th century – all knowledge of Babylon’s tables having been wiped out by history – vast riches lay in the path of those who could find a new method of doing so. If my understanding of tables 20 and 21 of the Enuma Anu Enlil was correct, the extraordinary Babylonians were able to predict eclipses of the moon over its entire, 18.61-year cycle. Whether or not this enabled them to calculate longitude I was not sure. It is beyond strange to think that man already had this sacred knowledge 1,500 years before the ancient Greeks and more than three millennia before Copernicus or Galileo.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE KEY TO INDIA?

  Having arrived back in Beirut, I kept thinking back to Mari, on the middle Euphrates, to the northeast of Damascus. Diplomatic missions crossed frontiers and the Minoans traded here extensively. Intriguingly, by 2680 BC Indian glass beads in their thousands and cowries from the Maldives were used for currency.

  Where were the Minoans leading me now? So many of the items found at Mari and now housed in Aleppo’s museum seemed to have had their origins in India. How did all those cowries and beads I’d seen in the museums get to Mari – when the Maldives are deep in the Indian Ocean? From their base in Tell el Dab’a, could the Minoans have got to India? It took some stretch of the imagination to dare to think that. I had travelled all this way: it had taken me weeks and months of planning to do so. Imagine the challenges for a traveller during the Bronze Age.

  My mind turned back to the Indian elephant tusk I’d seen at Heraklion on Crete: excavators had found it in the ancient town of Zakros. There was also a similar one found packed into the hold in the Uluburun wreck. From the Yemen to India is some four weeks’ sailing on the southwest monsoon, which starts in June. Let us push on to India, in the wake of the ghosts of the Minoan fleet. Perhaps there is evidence that they did in fact reach the subcontinent somehow, travelling via the land mass of Egypt, just as the Egyptians had evidently reached the fabled Land of Punt?

  To my astonishment I discovered that a considerable number of hoards of bronze goods, deliberately hidden underground, have been found over much of northern India. There have been 129 of them to date, most frequently found near the Ganges – in the Jumna catchment area. Most of these sites have been discovered by local farmers ploughing their land rather than by controlled excavation, so it has not been easy to date them. However on a number of sites a distinctive ochre-coloured pottery has been found which has been much easier to date – to the 2nd millennium BC, once again, which according to all the evidence was the primary era of Cretan ascendancy and contemporaneous with the Minoan palace at Tell el Dab’a.

  Typically these Indian Bronze Age hoards consist of harpoons, swords, rings, chisels and axes, including double axes similar to those of Minoan Crete. The hoards have several noteworthy features. Firstly, they rarely include the implements and tools used by Indian village people – such as the knives, digging tools and arrowheads that you imagine would have been useful in the daily life of Indians as it was in the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC.

  Secondly the blades or cutting edges of the tools are seldom worn or chipped – they do not appear to have been actually used. They are more like samples, or stores, carried for sale.

  Who were these travelling salesmen of the Bronze Age? A possible answer is Minoan traders in fleets operating from their base in Egypt. It could, of course, be a series of coincidences that the Indian copper hoards are of the same era (the 2nd millennium BC). It could be another coincidence that they contain unused double-headed axes, of exactly the same design as the distinctive Minoan ones and that these implements were foreign to India (in the sense that they were not used by the local people as tools).

  The possibility of coincidence would be greatly reduced if there was evidence of trade between India, Egypt, and the Minoans in the 2nd millennium BC. I was going to have to go back to my research sources: there was a lot I had yet to understand. The bit was firmly between my teeth.

  THE SEARCH FOR THE RED SEA–NILE CANAL

  . . . And if they did reach India, then how? The key lies in that rich strategic relationship that Crete had with Egypt. Using Tell el Dab’a as a base meant the Minoans could load their ships with dates, fresh vegetables and salt fish ready for expeditions to India and the East. Queen Hatshepsut’s well-documented expedition to Punt in the summer of 1493 BC was prepared for in exactly this way. She had sent a fleet of five ships with thirty rowers each from Kosseir, on the Red Sea. Where would the Minoans go from Tell el Dab’a? The answer, I suspected, would be found near the Red Sea–Nile canal.

  In 1998 a group of stone megaliths was found at the coastal plain of Tihamah, Yemen (see map). The site was investigated by the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada and the Yemen Government. Beneath the standing stones they found a hoard of copper and bronze artefacts and tools, dated between 2400 BC and 1800 BC. As Edward Keall of the Royal Ontario Museum said at the time:

  We didn’t know what was keeping people in this terribly marginal desert area . . . Was it a natural resource or a strategic position that prompted these people to invest such effort in creating these remarkable monuments? (www.archaeology.org)

  Why else, I thought to myself, than because of the Red Sea–Nile canal? ‘King Scorpion’ is said to have been the very first Egyptian canal builder. His superb macehead is now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, like many fascinating artefacts from the Bronze Age, including the controversial fresco fragments from Alalakh. After an extraordinary refit the museum has emerged, blinking, as it were, into the new light. It was once something of a labyrinth of its own, where it was hard to find all but its most famous curiosities, such as Lawrence of Arabia’s cloak. The Minoan collections are fascinating: they include a six-tentacled octopus storage jar of around 1400 BC, a large decorated pithos from the storerooms of Knossos and weapons from the so-called ‘warrior graves’.

  Once I discovered that Arthur Evans had worked there, I soon began to explore the museum for inspiration as well as information. In Evans’ archive is a photograph of a pillar being excavated in the east pillar crypt at Knossos. The symbol of the labrys – the double axe – is marked on every surface.

  Meanwhile ‘King Scorpion’s’ huge pear-shaped macehead shows a threatening scorpion hovering in the air. Wearing the tall white crown of Upper Egypt, the king stands on the bank of the Red Sea– Nile canal, with a digging implement in his hands. Down below, the king’s workmen are seen putting the final touches to the canal banks. The limestone mace dates from the 4th millennium BC.

  We know little about this pharaoh save that he conquered part of the Delta. The first king after ‘Scorpion’ whom we can date with reasonable accuracy is King Menes, who lived around 3000 BC in his palace at Memphis. According to Herodotus he dammed the Nile some 12 miles (19 kilometres) south of Memphis and directed the waters to form a new lake linked to the Nile by a canal. In the 6th Dynasty (c.2300–2180 BC) Pepi I planned a canal through the first cataract – to tame it. The canal was cut by Uni, the governor of Upper Egypt. Sometime during the Middle Kingdom (2040–1640) a can
al was dug between the Red Sea and the eastern branch of the Nile at the Delta.26 Using captured enemies as slave labour, Egypt set off on an orgy of water-channel-making, so much so that the face of the nation was completely changed.

  . . . All Egypt is level; yet from this time onwards it has been unfit for horse or wheeled traffic because of the innumerable canals running in all directions, cutting the country into small segments. It was the King’s desire to supply waters to the towns which lay inland at some distance from the River, for previously when the level of the Nile fell, the people went short and drank brackish water from the wells. It was this King also who divided the land into lots and gave everyone a square piece of equal size and from the produce extracted an annual tax . . . Perhaps this was the way in which geometry was invented . . .27

  Herodotus says Egyptian priests informed him that at one time the Red Sea and the Mediterranean were connected. Thousands of years later, Napoleon carried out a cadastral (land boundaries) survey after his conquest of Egypt in 1798. His maps of the Delta and the Red Sea–Nile canal may be viewed in the Louvre. The Red Sea– Nile canal is also shown on a British cadastral survey of 1882. By comparing this 1882 map with Napoleon’s maps and Google Earth, even today one can see the route of the ancient waterway. After heavy rain in particular, you can trace its course on satellite photos as it passes under Ramses II Street, emerges in northeast Cairo and then heads toward Zagazig, in the eastern part of the Nile Delta. You can follow its faint outline all the way to the Red Sea.