The real-life Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king of Uruk, living around 2700–2500 BC, who after a series of victories in war ruled the whole of southern Mesopotamia. The middle stories of the Gilgamesh epic warn about the perils of deforestation.4 Approximately 4,700 years ago in Uruk, a city-kingdom in southern Mesopotamia, the king and his companion set off to Lebanon to cut down her famous cedars. They incur the wrath of the forest god Humbaba, who in his turn punishes Gilgamesh. The story illustrates the fact that Mesopotamia did not have enough wood to support its flourishing Bronze Age civilisation. As Mesopotamia constructed thousands of roads, cities, canals and palaces using bronze, the forests were felled to fuel the furnaces. These new cities needed public buildings, palaces and cisterns in which to store water in the dry summer months. For these they also needed cement, plaster, brick and terracotta – all of which required fuel for their manufacture.
It’s intriguing that Plato also talks about an environmental crisis. In his dialogues he describes the consequences of deforestation on the Acropolis:
The land was the best in the world . . . in those days the country was fair as now, and yielded far more abundant produce . . . there remained only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, as in the case of the small islands. All the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left . . . there was [long ago] abundance of wood . . . the traces still remain.
The problem of deforestation became so serious that around 1750 BC King Hammurabi of Mesopotamia set up laws against unauthorised tree-felling.5 So I was beginning to suspect that war may not have been the only reason why tin mining did not start again in Göltepe after it had been sacked – perhaps it had used up its wood supply.
The difficulties involved in replacing and replanting timber are much more acute in dry Mediterranean countries than in wet northern Europe, where trees grow relatively quickly. In the Mediterranean, rain is restricted to winter and tends to be sudden and violent. The irony is that without trees to anchor it, the soil itself gets depleted – just, in fact, as Plato had described.
. . . winter rains on steep deforested slopes quickly degrade the soil by washing it downhill. Seedlings have difficulty in re-establishing the forest, especially after clean cutting, and the soil quickly degrades to the point that pine forest cannot recover . . . The tremendous tonnage of ancient copper slag on Cyprus suggests that the Cypriot copper industry collapsed around 300 AD, simply because the island ran out of cheap fuel. The slagheaps suggest a total production of perhaps 200,000 tonnes of copper – and that in turn suggests that fuel equivalent to 200 million pine trees were cut to supply the copper industry, forests 16 times the total area of the island.6
The problem would have been exacerbated by the conditions in the dry eastern Mediterranean, because the coastal cities and nearby Mesopotamia and the Levant were all developing rapidly and doing so in parallel with each other.
If Mari’s glorious 5-acre palace is anything to go by, then the Bronze Age was nothing if not architecturally ambitious. Meanwhile Egypt needed incalculable amounts of bronze to make the tools for its astonishing, relentless programme of pyramid and temple construction. Not that much later in time, the Mycenaeans would construct entire roads leading into magnificent edifices that blazed with gleaming copper and bronze.
Later on in history, the problem becomes still more acute. The Athenian fleet that defeated the Persians at Salamis was built from timber that came from the Balkans and southern Italy, rather than Greece, because Athens had so depleted her own forests. T.A Wertime estimates that the Laurion silver mines near Athens consumed an awe-inspiring 1 million tons of charcoal and 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of forest.7 The mines perhaps did not stop production because of a shortage of ore, but because imported fuel costs had risen so much that they were no longer economic.
Seen in that light, developing trade with the western Mediterranean and possibly even further – to the wet, Atlantic shores of Europe – made absolute sense. Not only were there abundant supplies of copper and tin in Iberia – but timber was plentiful. There was a lot of evidence on the museum shelves at Thera that suggested, at the least, mutually profitable trade. The Minoans would export their finished goods in return for the natural resources of wider Europe: much like Europe’s relationship with Africa today. Bronze pins, for example, of the same type are found across Iberia, France and Britain. I’d seen the exact same design in the museum at Akrotiri. Were they exported from Thera?
In this scenario, Minoan shipbuilding expertise now becomes even more valuable. They did not have the metal ores on Crete. Paradoxically, this negative situation eventually turned out to be a strength for the Minoans; it meant that, latterly, large-scale smelting did not have to take place on Crete. If that had been the case they would still have had the wood to build their ships – and with that ability to travel came the opportunity to smelt plentiful ores in situ, where both the ore and the wood were readily available. They could have controlled the entire supply of bronze to the eastern Mediterranean. The Holy Grail was theirs.
At first, it seemed almost fanciful to think that the Minoans would roam that far across the globe. But bronze was the most powerful metal yet known to man. I knew there had been plentiful supplies of Cornish tin and Welsh copper in the British Isles. Now I discovered that experts believe that during the Bronze Age about half of the ‘wildwood’ or native forest disappeared from Britain: suggesting the possibility of smelting on an industrial scale.8
To achieve their goal the Minoans would have had to pass right through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the unknown. I thought of that eerie phrase, which ancient accounts say was once written in stone on the Pillars of Hercules:
Nec plus ultra (venture thus far, but no further).
Many hundreds of years later than the Minoans, the Greeks and the Romans were so scared of the Straits that there were dire admonitions not to go there. There were terrifying stories of petrifying monsters of the deep in the unknown ocean beyond. Perhaps the Minoans, whose rich and artistic culture was passed on to the Greeks, had also had their own fears?
Yet, drawing on my own knowledge of seafaring, I was beginning to piece together a picture of the ancient Minoan mariners as the greatest sailors the world has ever known. We tend to think of ‘progress’ as if humankind is in perpetual forward motion; as if knowledge, technology and culture always advance relentlessly, hand-in-hand.
Studying the Bronze Age gave the lie to that proposition: under the microscope of history I could see great civilisations rise and fall like waves breaking over a ship’s prow. I was learning that knowledge, even advanced knowledge, is as slippery as the deck of a clipper; and it can be lost a lot more easily than it can be gained.
The breezes in a Mediterranean summer often blow in the evening, because of the difference in temperature between the land and the sea. At dusk, the desert cools surprisingly quickly and the wind blows offshore to the warmer sea. Thus, I calculated, hugging the Mediterranean coast from Crete to the Straits of Gibraltar – setting sail after dusk and sailing for a few hours each night – should allow a galley with a decent sail to reach the Straits of Gibraltar in fits and starts even without the use of oars (see map showing Mediterranean winds).
Based on the three months that Severin’s Argo took to run the 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) from Spetses to Georgia, against wind and current, I thought the voyage from Thera to the Straits would perhaps have taken a third longer – four months.
There is solid evidence that the Minoans travelled westwards across the Mediterranean. A tale told by an intriguing name: a settlement called Minoa. According to Rodney Castleden:
There was a port called Minoa on the south-west coast of Sicily, which may have been a Crete-controlled trading station. Quite what the Minoans wanted from the West is unknown . . . the Minoans needed tin to make bronze, and the sources of their raw materials are unknown. The tin may have come from Etruria, Bohemia, Sp
ain, or even Britain . . . A gold-mounted disc of amber found at Knossos may have come from the Wessex culture of southern England.9
Over the half-century since Spyridon Marinatos’ astonishing discoveries on Thera, the documented evidence of Minoan settlements has grown and grown and the movement seems to have been westwards. Some of those settlements may have had the suffix ‘Minoa’ added to their names. Those client islands, or colonies as they may have been, are identifiable by features shared with Bronze Age Crete: such as an irregular street plan in the towns; the distinctive Minoan style of architecture; Minoan burial customs; and the introduction of Minoan pottery shapes and styles – including wares that were not imported from Crete, but show the local inhabitants adopting Minoan designs for themselves. Sometimes, there is also evidence of the introduction of Minoan religious rituals, such as ritual cups or figurines.10
There seems to have been a rapid growth in the Minoan trading empire between 1700 and 1500 BC. The settlement at Kastri on Kythera, which began in early Minoan times, is an early and small move westwards; by contrast, Minoa’s presence in Sicily shows the Minoans venturing far into the central Mediterranean, moving ever closer to the Balearic Islands and Spain.
So this left me with a question. Could the Minoans have set up further foreign bases, just as they had done at Avaris (Tell el Dab’a) in ancient Egypt? If I was correct, and copper of the purity found on the Uluburun wreck could only have come from America, ships setting out across the Atlantic would need a base for repairs, provision and preparation for the serious journey ahead. They would need storage facilities and possibly labour. Could there have been permanent forward bases established in southwest Spain or Portugal?
If the Minoans had got as far as the Straits, I reasoned, it would have been logical for them to explore the lands they had discovered there. I’d read various books that hinted at Minoan interest in Britain. Logically, they would have traded with Spain well before they even got to the British Isles. By chance, I also happened to know something about the wealth of minerals in what was once known as Iberia. Later in history, the Romans had been eager to conquer the peninsula for that very reason. Today’s Spanish term for a stream, ‘arroyo’, comes from the Latin ‘arrugius’ – meaning a gold mine. Both Spain and its neighbour Portugal would have held great riches for eager traders in search of bronze. Could I too strike gold? I decided that Spain would have to be my next stop in the journey.
CHAPTER 20
A FOLK MEMORY OF HOME?
Once the Minoans had succeeded in sailing the Mediterranean, it was surely only a matter of time before they discovered Iberia, one of the most heavily mineralised places on earth. Beyond the Straits are two majestic rivers, both of which would have led the Minoans straight to all of the glittering prizes of this land – not only copper, but gold and silver.
I will never forget entering the Guadalquivir in HMS Diamond, when I was officer of the watch. The Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal are always memorable to seafarers; not least because of the smell of hay as you pass Cape St Vincent en route to the magic East; on the way home, turning north on passing Sagres, you savour the scent of pines.
It was 1958. Like the Rio Tinto, the Guadalquivir debouches into the Atlantic Ocean at the very southern tip of Spain and would have been readily visible to Minoan mariners had they dared to broach the Straits. The river is one of the longest in Spain. It flows west for 408 miles (657 kilometres), emptying into the Atlantic at Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the Gulf of Cádiz. We had been ordered to pay a goodwill visit to Seville, some 70 miles (112 kilometres) upriver. The Guadalquivir is so shallow that a ship of the Diamond ’s size could only pass over the bar at Sanlúcar de Barrameda at high spring tide. Which happened to be exactly the same time that every year a sheer wall of water, a ‘bore’, surges up the river. We had to time our entrance to the minute.
There was a huge judder underneath us. Then good old HMS Diamond had to mount the bore and travel on its crest which, since it races along at more than 20 knots, is a hair-raising experience. It was like skiing on stilts. What’s more, a big ship travelling at this kind of speed causes a vast wave of its own. In vain we flashed our lights and blasted our fog horn to warn the farmers who were pootling their way to market along the riverbanks. Time after time the wave caught them – fortunately with no casualties, bar the odd half-drowned, furiously braying donkey.
So I had a special fondness for the Guadalquivir and paid attention when I noticed magazine reports which said that a Bronze Age settlement had recently been discovered on its estuary. In the process of creating a beautiful national park, the Donñana, the excavators had uncovered an ancient human settlement. They had also found the wrecked timber carcasses of what could well be Bronze Age ships, in the swamps the Spanish know as ‘Las Marismas’. It would be a long time before all of the archaeologists’ detailed studies were complete, but initial carbon dating estimates from the French excavating team suggested that the remains dated from 2000 BC.
I also knew the large modern port of Huelva, about 50 miles (80 kilometres) north, which is fed by the Rio Tinto. I’d visited it in the 1950s, but now I saw a completely different side to what I’d always thought of as just a 17th-century port town. The town’s origins were definitely ancient and there were still a number of Roman remains, I read. Yet what was most intriguing here was that a specialist in human prehistory, Martín Almagro Basch, had investigated a hoard of bronze artefacts found hidden in the area. Other archaeologically significant hoards had also been found in the region, notably the Leiro hoard, which was discovered by a fisherman in 1976 in the estuary waters of the Ulla River, near Leiro in Galicia.
The River, or Rio, Tinto is named ‘the red’ for a good reason: as it trickles past the ancient fortified walls of Spanish medieval towns it runs a symbolic blood-red. Copper. Copper ore everywhere. The sheer wealth of the minerals in this landscape of other-worldly greens, yellows and reds gave the area a fabled status in times of yore: these were, according to legend, King Solomon’s mines.
I began to research, again using the British Library – and this time, the Web.
If the Minoans did come here, then initially at least they could have simply sifted the incredibly rich alluvial sediments for metallic ore. Was there any evidence that they had done so? Much later than the Minoans, ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Strabo (63 BC–AD 23) wrote that northwest Iberia was by then well known as a rich source of tin, as did Ptolemy.
Starting a survey of Spain from the north, I looked for as much evidence as I could. Professor Beatriz Comendador Rey of the University of Vigo believes that northwest Iberia could also have a rich archaeological heritage of metallic finds, but that the wet climate of this part of Spain makes dating and scientific evaluation problematic. I was interested in this area, as I had already come across a lot of evidence to suggest that the Minoans had reached the Baltic. If they had, they would have had to follow the coastline, and from here at the chilly tip of Vigo move north through the markedly colder English Channel.
Professor Comendador Rey links similar finds by Almeida with Bronze Age awls found on the nearby islet of Guidor Aredso. She also refers to the artefacts recovered from the River Ulla, mostly swords and spearheads dating from the Middle/Late Bronze Age. Taking all of these finds together, it seems beyond argument that they came from shipwrecks of the Middle/Late Bronze Age.
Moving south, the vast Rio Tinto copper, silver and gold mines were first worked during the third millennium BC.11 Mark A. Hunt Ortiz dates the mines’ initial period of use to around 2900 BC.12
It is worth pausing at this point: continuing up the Guadiana River (see map) would bring us to Évora. Ten miles (16 kilometres) west of Évora is the Bronze Age stone circle of Almendres Cromlech. I looked at some pictures I found of the circle on a website. ‘How strange,’ I thought. ‘That picture shows a carving on one of the menhirs.’ An enthusiastic amateur photographer had somehow got a shot that was at exactly the right angle to
show something carved into the rock. To my eye, it looked like an axe. Thinking back to the newly discovered stone circle by the Red Sea and also to the ‘woodhenge’ of Kerala, I made a mental note to return to Évora, both in body and in thought.
Sailing northwestwards along the coast for another 30 miles (48 kilometres), from the Rio Tinto estuary, would have brought the Minoans to the Rio Guadiana, and what we would now call Portugal. Its waters were most likely just as red as the Rio Tinto, for just 40 miles (65 kilometres) upstream are the copper mines of Saño Domingos (see map). To this day the water is still contaminated by copper, a threat to the health of both people and wildlife in the region. Archaeological digs at the mine have found prehistoric tools, showing that the ores here were exploited more than 4,000 years ago.
The Rio Guadiana is navigable upriver for over 100 miles (160 kilometres) into the interior after Évora: the river continues past Badajoz to Cuidad Real and the romantic, gaunt and beautiful land of La Mancha.
During the past thirty-five years, the work of Spanish archaeologists in La Mancha has revealed what is probably the highest density of Bronze Age settlements in Europe. There are many massive stone complexes of large, permanent, fortified Bronze Age settlements. Their extent only became apparent after excavations had been carried out by the University of Granada in 1973. Survey work in Albacete has documented no fewer than 43 Bronze Age settlements and another 300 Bronze Age occupation sites. According to Dr Concepcion Martin:
The concentration of surviving early 2nd millennium Bronze Age settlements in La Mancha has few parallels elsewhere in western Europe.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 18
