The Lost Empire of Atlantis

by Gavin Menzies

  CHAPTER 31

  THE BRONZE BOY

  Now, I realised, the Minoans ran a vast Bronze Age ‘Common Market’, stretching from the Orkneys right through to India. They took English copper and tin all the way to ancient Egypt to make the Saqqara Pyramid’s bronze saws. However, as time went on, the copper and tin became scarce. But if the Minoans fuelled the entire global trade in the raw materials and finished products of the Bronze Age, then where else could it have been sourced? I already had an idea. But before we leave Britain’s shores to brave the Atlantic, there is one last thing I would like to do: like a million or more others, I am going to return to Stonehenge.

  Only last year, in 2010, came a rather stunning discovery. Scientists from the British Geological Survey had conducted tests on the body of a fifteen-year old boy – a body found in 2006 at Amesbury, quite near to the henge. The boy had been placed in a simple grave just a mile from the stone circle, an amber necklace of huge wealth – with ninety beads – by his side. The tests prove that he died of infection, rather than from any violence. More to the point, a broad range of scientific studies prove the teenager was from the Mediterranean.

  The discovery adds further meat to my overall thesis. The Mediterranean boy was buried here in around 1550 BC, a date that has significance. He could have been here as an apprentice, to pick up and capitalise on the Minoans’ lucrative system of established trade routes. Alternatively, he could have been a Minoan fleeing the Mycenaeans’ invading armies.

  I’m convinced that Stonehenge was a prehistoric international landmark. In the words of project archaeologist Andrew Fitzpatrick:

  We think that the wealthiest people may have made these long-distance journeys to source rare and exotic materials, like amber. By doing these journeys, they probably also acquired great kudos.12

  The most spectacular spiritual sanctuary in the world, Stonehenge would have been famous beyond measure, because reading the heavens and learning how to travel the world was tantamount to reading the will of the gods. It was a religious rite.

  Other people who had visited Stonehenge from afar include individuals found in a collective Bronze Age grave, the ‘Boscombe Bowmen’, who were almost certainly from Wales.

  Crowds came here initially for the religious ceremony and observation of the stars. But where better for the bringers of bronze to conduct trade than at a place where thousands gathered in prayer? Bronze Age wealth transformed the entire plain into a major centre of commerce and exchange.

  At that other mystical stone circle, Callanish, I had already made the connection between the Minoans and copper-prospecting in the Americas. Now here, at Stonehenge, I was beginning to think there could be much more evidence of transatlantic trade. This grave and the body of this teenager weren’t found until the 21st century: how much more, then, is left to find out?

  In May 2002, Wessex Archaeology was doing a routine excavation in an area that was due to become a housing scheme at Amesbury, a few miles from Stonehenge. It was simply standard procedure in an area like this to look, before the whole thing became covered in concrete. If they found anything at all, the Wessex team were expecting to come across Roman remains. But it wasn’t long before the archaeologists found something that turned their whole view of this place on its head. What they’d uncovered was a grave. No ordinary burial, this outwardly unassuming site was filled with pottery dating back at least 2,500 years before the Romans arrived in Britain.

  By mid-afternoon the team had literally struck gold: gold jewellery. A bank holiday was due that weekend and there was a danger that the grave would be robbed or disturbed if it was left unattended. The archaeologists knew they couldn’t leave this find, so the diggers worked on through the night, with just their car headlamps for lighting. By dawn they had unearthed the entire skeleton of a man. His was the richest Bronze Age grave ever found in Britain.

  The body of the man, also known as the ‘Amesbury Archer’, has since been dated to around 2300 BC, the early Bronze Age, almost a thousand years earlier than the burial of the Mediterranean ‘Boy with the Amber Necklace’. This was around the time that the first metals were brought into Britain. His mourners had laid the ‘Archer’ on his left-hand side, with his face to the north. Buried alongside him were the weapons of a hunter, including three copper daggers. Bound to his wrist was a slate guard, to protect him from the snap recoil of a bowstring.

  Clearly, this was a man of high status. Only the non-organic objects he was buried with survive, so we don’t know what he was wearing, but with him were two beautifully worked earrings in gold and two golden hair ornaments.

  The archaeologists’ dating places him here at the exact same time that the massive stones were being erected at Stonehenge. And as he was buried less than 3 miles (5 kilometres) away, there is speculation that this man of special status had had a hand in the planning of the monument.

  Later, another grave was found close by. Curled up in a foetal position and lying against the pockmarked chalk of his grave, this younger man was almost certainly related to the first. Both skeletons had the same highly unusual bone structure in their feet – the heel bone had a joint with one of the upper tarsal bones in the foot. It is possible that they were father and son.

  When he died the ‘King’ was thirty-five to forty-five years old. He was buried with objects useful to him in the next world, including arrowheads and copper knives. His cushion stone, for working metal, lay right next to him. He may have been one of the first people in Britain to have been able to work gold: hence the richness of his grave.

  His teeth were examined by oxygen isotope analysis, which can help identify where a person lived when he or she was young. Stronger than bone, tooth enamel is the hardest and the most mineralised substance in the human body – one of the reasons why human teeth can survive for centuries after a person has died. It envelops the teeth in a protective layer that shields the underlying dentin from decay. The enamel grows quickly until puberty and holds a chemical record of a child’s environment, even stretching to the climate and local geology.

  The enamel’s chemical components are mainly calcium, phosphorus and oxygen, with trace amounts of strontium and lead. Of these it is the isotopes of oxygen and strontium that are the strongest indications of the climate where a person grew up. The ratio of heavy to light oxygen isotopes depends on the water you drink when you are young. Drinking water in a warm climate results in more heavy isotopes, while cold water produces a lighter chemical signature.

  An analysis of the oxygen isotopes within the dental enamel of the two skeletons showed that the older man came from a colder climate than was then found in Britain. The wisdom teeth of the younger man, who was between twenty-five and thirty years old when he died, revealed that he spent his youth in southern England, but then moved to the Midlands or northeast Scotland in his late teens. Because the ‘King’ came from a colder climate, archaeologists think he may have come from the Alps, or possibly northern Germany. I would argue that he could just as well have come from Lake Superior. Assuming he was the ‘King’s’ son, the boy could have been left in England rather than brave the Atlantic as a child, but might have been taken to the Minoan trading posts in the Hebrides or the Orkneys as a teenager. DNA tests should determine more about the ancestry of the two men.

  A famous skeleton has been found on Lake Superior in the United States, which is approximately the same age (c.2300 BC) as the ‘King’ of Stonehenge. The ‘Rock Lake’ skeleton was buried with a copper axe similar to those found at Stonehenge. We are hoping to have his DNA compared with that of the ‘King of Stonehenge’, to see if both are those of Minoans with the rare haplogroup X2. A number of locally found skeletons – now in Milwaukee Public Museum – have peculiar bone deformities to their feet.

  There were other, independent reasons I thought I should look westwards to the Americas. I knew from enthusiastic letters and emails sent to my website that the Americas had significant amounts of copper ore. Bronze Age tools
found at the copper mines of Lake Superior are remarkably similar to contemporary artefacts discovered in Britain. What’s more, experts say that many of the copper artefacts found in ancient American mounds were actually produced by molten casting, a technique that was developed in the Mediterranean and was otherwise unknown in America at that time.

  Tests by both the US National Bureau of Standards and the New York Testing Laboratory confirm that many artefacts found in American mounds were made using Old World casting technology. Dr Gunnar Thompson is sure that this is clear evidence of overseas contact:

  Recent assays record that some of the copper artefacts found in North American burial mounds were made from zinc–copper alloys used in the Mediterranean. Ancient metal crafters added zinc to harden copper into a bronze alloy. The shapes of the copper tools found in American archaeological sites are identical to those of the ancient Mediterranean – including chisels, dagger blades, wedges, hoes, scythes, axes and spear points. These tools often have specific modifications including the use of rivets, spines and sockets. All of which were characteristic of Mediterranean tools. The fact that most of the tools were cast from molten metal implies that foreign craftsmen participated in their manufacture.13

  If it is true that indigenous American peoples did not cast copper or make bronze, then the masses of specialist mining tools found at Lake Superior must have been made by foreigners. The foreigners can only have come by sea. If these seagoing people who sailed to America were not the Minoans, then who were they?

  NOTES TO BOOK IV

  1. Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, Bloomsbury, 2010

  2. Complete Temples: Wilkins on RH, 2000

  3. BBC Timewatch, Professors Tim Darvill of the University of Bournemouth and Geoffrey Wainwright, President of the Society of Antiquaries

  4. Needham, S. L. et al. ‘Developments in the early Bronze Age Metallurgy of Southern Britain’, World Archaeology, vol. 20, no.23

  5. Thomas Goskar, British Archaeology 73

  6. R. J. C. Atkinson, Stonehenge, Pelican, 1960

  7. Herodotus 3, 115, trans. Basil Gildersleeve, in Syntax of Classical Greece

  8. The American Journal of Human Genetics (AM J Hum Genet) 2003, November, 73 (5) 1178–1190–X2 of Orkney inhabitants is 7.2 (research of Helgason et al. 2001) – the second highest after Druze

  9. Hedges, R. E. M., Housley, R. A., Law, I. A., Perry, C. and Gowlett, J. A. J., ‘Radiocarbon Dates from the Oxford AMS System: Archaeometry Datelist 6’, Archaeometry 29 (2), 1987, 289–306

  10. The Mummies of Cladh Hallan BBC, 18 March 2003

  11. T. G. Schurr, ‘Mitochondrial DNA and the Peopling of the New World’, American Scientist, 18 (2000)

  12. Andrew Fitzpatrick, National Geographic Magazine, 13 October 2010

  13. Dr Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery, Misty Isles Press, Seattle, 999

  BOOK V

  THE REACHES OF EMPIRE

  CHAPTER 32

  THE SEEKERS SET SAIL

  It may have taken thirty days or more to reach landfall. The passing days would have turned into weeks and the crew would be getting anxious. Just how anxious is illustrated by the first nail-biting voyage made across the Atlantic by the explorer Christopher Columbus. When he supposedly ‘discovered’ America in 1492, a continent which he thought was Asia, Columbus kept two logs. One showed the true distance the ship had sailed on a given day. The other one he faked, to make the distance they’d travelled look greater. As the days turned into weeks, the falsified log was the only one he dared show his increasingly terrified crew.

  Could Minoan ships have dealt with the rigours of an Atlantic crossing? Well, with very similar rigging the Vikings managed the same feat. Minoan sailing gear was planned for the best efficiency. Columbus’ ship, the Santa Maria – also known as the ‘Marigalante’, or ‘gallant Maria’ – was fitted out with two square sails on the foremast and mainmast. She had a single lateen (a triangular, Roman-style sail) at the stern. The log details that one of the smaller ships accompanying the Santa Maria, the Ninña, left Spain with lateen sails on all masts. By the time they got to the Canary Islands, Columbus had ordered her to be refitted with square sails, like the Santa Maria, to take advantage of the winds. The Thera frescoes show us quite clearly that the Minoans already sailed square-rigged, in the 2nd millennium before Christ’s birth.

  The central reaches of the Atlantic have always worried sailors, even in more modern times. Its sinister-looking masses of moving sargassum (floating seaweed); the fact that you can travel for weeks and still not reach land – all of this is deeply unsettling. In the days of sail, ships would also get hopelessly becalmed in the so-called ‘Horse Latitudes’, at which point the crew had to confront the very real risk of dying from thirst. You can imagine the sailors thinking: ‘Is this, in fact, the edge of the world? Is this where our ship is finally going to fall off?’ Truly, if ‘there be monsters’, they’d be here in the Sargasso Sea.

  Assuming they didn’t make the mistake of sailing into the Sargasso, helped by the current, the Minoans would loop up past the Antilles and on into the Gulf of Mexico. It is a monumental journey. As Columbus said of the currents of the Caribbean:

  When I left the Dragon’s Mouth, I found the sea ran so strangely to the westward that between the hour of Mass, when I weighed anchor, and the hour of Complines, I made sixty-five leagues.

  Strangely enough, when it comes to navigation, we can take an initial steer from the ancient palaces of Crete. We know the Minoans could calculate bearings with accuracy, not least because the alignment of all of the Minoan palaces is the same, to within just a few degrees: NNE–SSW from a datum line, or 8 degrees east of north.

  The palace builders used a standard unit of measurement – the Minoan foot – as they did at their global observatory sites. J. Walter Graham, in a fascinating paper I’d searched out, studied in detail the Cretan palaces of Phaestos, Knossos and Malia and the small, Late Minoan palace of Gournia, and then put that measurement at between 203 and 204 millimetres (approx. 8 inches).1 This alone implies that using their common unit, the Minoans had a way of calculating complex numbers and therefore distance.

  I would venture further. The knowledge and sophistication of the Minoans was such that they were expert mathematicians. The late American professor and cryptologist Cyrus Gordon certainly believed this, often pointing out that in Linear A script, a small circle seemed to represent the number 100.2 Only very recently, the Oxford University archaeologist Anthony Johnson proposed that the builders of Stonehenge were actually using Pythagorean geo- metry. This was a good 2,000 years before Pythagoras.3

  Now we have certain proof. In 2010 Dr Minas Tsikritsis, a Greek mathematician, published a book about Minoan astronomy, in which he presented convincing new evidence that the Minoans had developed a solar calendar of 365.3 days. His certainty that they did so comes from his study of seal stones, rings and other ancient Minoan artefacts. Put together, the dating of those artefacts suggests that the Minoans had already developed their calendar by 2200 BC. This is around 1,700 years earlier than the Babylonian astronomer Nabu-rimanni is said to have invented the solar calendar. He did so at some point between the Persian (539 BC) and the Macedonian (331 BC) conquests of Babylon. If this is true, then it strongly indicates that the Minoans could calculate longitude – and they could do it independently of Babylon.

  Here is how the Minoans calculated numbers. They had two basic forms to construct their digits: symbols which to us look like a straight line and a circle. A vertical straight line signified the number one [|], while a horizontal straight line [–] was ten. A circle [O] denoted one hundred, while a circle with four equally spaced projections denoted a thousand. Ten thousand was represented by adding the symbol for ten to the unit for a thousand.

  So a large number such as 14,266 would have looked like this:

  Thanks to Dr Tsikritsis’ years of painstaking research we now know for certain that our ancient adventurers from Cret
e could count the number of units they reckoned they had travelled in a day – what we now call sea miles. They could record the number of days they had sailed by logging the number of sunsets since leaving Crete. So they could keep a log showing how far and in what direction they had travelled.

  Now to refine our ideas about Minoan ocean navigation. They started their voyages in spring, say a month after the spring equinox (which they calculated from their stone circles). This month is described in Linear B archives by the name ‘po-ro-wi-to’. The name meant ‘the month of voyages’.

  There are no signposts in the open ocean. The Minoan navigators, as we’ve already explored, must have used a virtual reference grid – their own equivalents of latitude and possibly even longitude lines – to work their way across the world. They noted the height of the pole star and hence the latitude of their home port in Crete or Thera. This is the latitude they must reach to return.

  We now know from the positioning of the stone circles at Stonehenge, Almendres and Callanish that the Minoans could determine latitude to within a mile – and they would have had to do so to avoid getting lost. Latitude is relatively easy to determine because there is a star at the extension of the North Pole billions of miles away in space. If you stood at the North Pole in 1450 BC and looked vertically above, at 90 degrees you would see the star Kochab. Because Kochab is so far away, at the equator it appears on the horizon at zero degrees; so by measuring the height of Kochab in the sky you could calculate your latitude.

  Assuming this is not their very first voyage to America, our explorers know that they have to sail due west for, say, twenty days to reach the African coast at Tunis. Then they hug that coast for another fifteen days to reach the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) whose latitude they know. They set off steering west by noting the position of sunrise and sunset, dividing this angle in half to find south, and checking that bearing at midday when the sun is at its highest – they then continue to steer west, at right angles to south.