Dr Tsikritsis and I agreed that this complex and detailed subject was definitely meat and drink for another book. In the meantime, we all needed lunch. We’d walked through the village, reached the stone-built restaurant and ordered our food, but still we couldn’t stop swapping notes. There was so much to talk about.
‘What about the Phaestos Disc?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t translated it all,’ Dr Tsikritsis was keen to stress. ‘I think that at least one side is a . . .’ I must have looked blank. He turned to Chryssoula. They had a quick discussion about the translation.
‘A tragoudi,’ said Chryssoula, leaving me none the wiser.
‘. . . A sailor’s song,’ said Dimitris.
‘. . . A sea-shanty,’ I murmured.
I could scarcely believe it. Sitting in this warm and cloistered room, with the age-old aroma of slow-roasting lamb drifting into our nostrils, all of us seemed suddenly closer to the ancient world than to the modern one. I remembered the happy scenes of the frescoes, those sailors arriving back in Thera, the people thronging to the shore to greet them. The Phaestos Disc, a fire-hardened clay roundel found in the charred remains of a ruined palace, was what had started me out on my quest. Why had the mysterious object struck me quite so strongly? It seemed so appropriate, somehow. The disc that had fascinated me so much records a departing sailor’s sea-shanty.
CHAPTER 41
THE LEGACY OF HOPE
After this adventure Marcella and I returned to Athens with a lot more energy. Before meeting Dr Minas Tsikritsis, I had pretty much decided that most of the Minoans’ fantastic cultural legacy had been entirely lost. The idea had filled me with gloom. Now I could see that was simply not true. The Minoans may have suffered terribly, but their work, their invention and even their sense of fairness had lived on.
In the fading sun we wandered at the foot of the Acropolis, admiring the play of light and shade along the Parthenon’s soaring columns. The temple, designed to meet the ultimate standard of perfection, the Golden Section, points proudly towards the Bay of Salamis. Here Themistocles’ fleet destroyed the invading Persians’ mighty navy. The Parthenon is still to me the most beautiful building in the world: now I understand why.
In this island there existed a confederation of kings of great and marvellous power, who held sway over the island, and over many other islands also.4
Plato’s words echoed in my mind. The Minoans had achieved exactly this. Like ancient Crete with its mysterious Linear A, Plato’s Atlantis was a literate state; we know this because he describes the god Poseidon giving out rules, which the first prince ‘inscribed on a pillar of orichalcum’. What was ‘orichalcum’? It was a copper alloy. Plato describes such a substance lining the walls that entered the city of Atlantis, which gradually became more and more lavish as you approached the main temple.
. . . And they covered with brass, as though with a plaster, all the circumference of the wall which surrounded the outermost circle; and all that of the inner one they covered with tin; and that which encompassing the acropolis itself with orichalcum, which sparkled like fire . . .5
and a little later:
. . . All the exterior of the temple they covered with silver, save only the pinnacles and these they covered with gold. As to the exterior, they made the roof all of ivory, variegated with gold and silver and orichalcum.6
The Minoans were master smiths in metal and, of course, they were fabulously wealthy: it was certainly conceivable that they could line their city walls with decorative panels of bronze, copper, silver and gold. I realised now that everywhere that I had been, Plato’s majestic concept of Atlantis had dogged my every footstep.
As I’d realised in chapter 3, Plato’s text suggests that the ancient metropolis and the Royal City were separate entities. This bears a strong resemblance to the relationship between Crete and Thera. The main city, he said, lay on a circular island about 12 miles (19 kilometres) wide. The Royal City, meanwhile, lay on a rectangular-shaped island. So Plato’s Atlantis was certainly two islands and possibly more. There are plenty of islands to choose from within the Pax Minoica. Plato claimed that the kings of his fabled Atlantis had 1,200 ships; as I’ve explored in chapters 6 and 19, Crete had certainly had ships – in their many hundreds. Plato believed that Atlantis had suffered an environmental crisis and that the soil had become depleted. This is exactly what I’d found out had applied to the whole region of the eastern Mediterranean. Not only that, but he’d said that the people of Atlantis had been brave enough to breach the Pillars of Hercules. All of these things the Minoans had done, and more.
As Plato says, in those far-off days the ocean was navigable; since there was in front of the strait which I’ve heard you say your countrymen call ‘the pillars of Heracles’. This island was bigger than both Libya and Asia combined; and travellers in those days used it to cross to the other islands, from where they had access to the whole mainland on the other side which surrounds that genuine sea.7
The sea that we have here, lying within the mouth just mentioned, is evidently a basin with a narrow entrance; what lies beyond is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent.8
This, with thanks to a new translation by Rodney Castleden, can only be America, across the Atlantic. Plato writes about Poseidon:
Poseidon . . . named all his sons. To the eldest, the king, he gave the name from which the names of the whole island and of the ocean are derived – that is, the ocean was called the Atlantic, because the name of the first king was Atlas.9
Most crucially, Poseidon and Cleito were the parents of five sets of twin brothers and they divided the island equally between them. Those brothers and their descendants had founded not an island, but an entire empire. I could see it now. What I was confronting was not a ‘lost island’, but the Lost Empire of Atlantis.
Clearly the great classical tradition hadn’t all begun here, in ancient Athens. Iktinos and Kallikrates’ great temple was built on a great legacy. The golden era of classical Greece had evolved from a heroic tradition of enterprise and adventure. It was the fortunate heir to a much, much older civilisation. With new eyes I could now trace a clear evolution from the purity and grace I’d seen in Minoan architecture – a delicacy of form that came about due to the Minoans’ love of spiritual and mathematical perfection – to the eloquent classical ideal of the Golden Number. From there on, the genius of Greek architecture had flourished. It went on through revival after revival, affecting everything from Renaissance Rome to 18th-century Washington. The Minoans’ remarkable influence did not simply stop dead in its tracks.
There were also the ‘inventions’ that we have always attributed to the glory that was classical Greece: coinage; a system of standard weights; music, architecture and art; theatre; even the very idea of spectacle. As Arthur Evans had pointed out, the long-robed Cretan priests of Ayia Triadá were playing the seven-stringed lyre a full ten centuries before it was supposed to have been invented on the island of Lesbos.
Perhaps the greatest legacy is the idea of art for art’s sake – and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The Minoans gave the world exquisite painting, ceramics and jewellery and an appreciation of the finer things in life. Their building technology was superb, their ideals were glittering. They did have rulers, but they believed in share and share alike: out of this generous impulse, revolutionary ideals such as democracy would eventually take shape.
This legacy also applied to war. When the Greeks won the crucial battle of Salamis against the invading Persians they had behind them the inspiration given them by a long-standing tradition of shipbuilding technology: it was a baton that had been handed them by the Minoans.
ATHENIAN TRIREMES
The Athenian ships deployed at Salamis were called triremes. They were on average about 5.5 metres wide and 39.5 metres long (18 feet by 130 feet), approximately the same size as the Minoan ships before 1450 BC. Like the Minoan ships they wer
e dual-purpose vessels, with a large square sail on a horizontal yard when in trading configuration and with the mast stepped and powered by oars when in military mode.
The Athenians had modified the Minoan ships in such a way that two banks of oarsmen, one on top of the other, were used when fighting. These newer ships carried 150 men rather than the Minoan ships’ 120, so they could be rowed faster than the Minoan ships, to reach a speed of 10 knots. Their principal weapon was a ram in the bows, to pierce the enemy’s hull. However, they were inferior to the Minoan ships when they were underway, with a higher centre of gravity that made them much more likely to capsize in a gale in the open sea.
Just as the Athenian ships were developments of the Minoan ones, so was Athenian weaponry and armour. The Athenians’ helmets and shields were made of bronze, as was their body armour – one can see the similarities in the bronze Minoan armour that has been found in Crete itself and in Mycenaean graves.
At first sight the idea of militarism fits badly with the Minoans’ reputation as a carefree society which did not need the protection of soldiers and fleets – after all, Crete’s palaces were not guarded. Yet recent research by Stuart Manning has shown that although Crete itself was not protected from invasion, having no defensive walls to speak of, the wider empire was. The further away from Crete, the greater the level of protection. At the height of Minoan power and influence in the Aegean, there were no fortifications on the ‘Minoanised’ islands closest to Crete – that is Kythera, Thera and Rhodes. However the more distant sites, such as Ayia Irini on Keos and Kolonna on Aegina, were fortified. Mycenae’s great defensive walls are explained by the fact that it was on the mainland, and less easily defended.
The Minoan lead in art, science and astronomy was inherited by a Greek civilisation that went on to produce ageless works of art and literature; the Greeks invented theatre, devised calendars, became skilled engineers. Cherished ideals such as citizenship and democracy and disciplines such as philosophy and science followed.
Most astonishing of all is that the Minoans achieved all of this 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, 1,500 years before Buddha or Confucius and 2,500 years before Muhammad. Beauty had been this people’s watchword. They had shown the world that a peaceful existence was a profitable one. They had rid the oceans of pirates and then with luck, daring and great maritime skill they had voyaged on adventures beyond imagination. The Minoans hadn’t just been the bringers of bronze: they breathed the Bronze Age into life.
To me, the story of the Minoans – and as I now realised, that of the people of Atlantis – is truly one of wonder. But it is not one of fantasy. This was no underwater daydream. Yes, this was a society lost to history. But it was not a lost race of miraculous beings with fantastical powers. It was a real place of real achievement, where lived a people whose brilliance and resourcefulness resounds through the centuries. Atlantis was not one place, but an empire of many places – an empire that reached out across the world, bringing a magical new technology with it.
This is a tale that tells us one thing: that the history of this world is far more fascinating, complex and indeed more beautiful than we could ever imagine. Most important of all – what do you think?
Gavin Menzies
London
St Swithun’s Day 2010
NOTES TO BOOK VI
1. Science, 1998, vol. 280, p. 520
2. Pubmed Central Table 1, American Journal of Human Genetics, 2003; November 73(5) 1178–1190 as Table 1
3. Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age, Princeton University Press, 1995
4. Plato, Timaeus, 25a, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford World Classics, 2008
5. Plato, Critias, 116b, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford World Classics, 2008
6. Plato, Critias, 116d, op. cit.
7. Plato, Timaeus, 24e, op. cit.
8. Plato, Timaeaus, 25a, trans. Rodney Castleden in Atlantis Destroyed
9. Plato, Critias
TIMELINE
EPILOGUE
PLATO AND ATLANTIS, THE LOST PARADISE
Listen then, Socrates, to a tale which, though passing strange, is yet wholly true, as Solon . . . once upon a time declared.
This is Critias, a lone voice introducing a tale about a lost paradise, a magical Garden of Eden which was struck down by the awesome force of nature. This beautiful island was the cradle of civilisation, but was destroyed by the gods because of the arrogance, the hubris, of its people.
PLATO’S TALE OF ‘ATLANTIS’
Long ago there existed an island, populated by a noble and powerful race. This beautiful place was the domain of Poseidon, god of the sea, who had fallen in love with a mortal woman, Cleito. He created a magnificent palace for her in the centre of the island. The people of this land possessed great wealth thanks to the abundant natural resources of the island, which was also a centre for trade and commerce. The rulers held sway not just over their own people but over the Mediterranean, Europe and North Africa.
For generations the people of the island(s) led a noble and unselfish life. They prospered from their skill in using copper and precious metals. But slowly, corrupted by avarice and greed, they changed. They decided to use their powerful navy to invade Greece and Egypt. Zeus noticed their immorality. He sent a huge wave. This drowned Atlantis, which vanished forever in a sea of mud. Greece was saved.
This is a brief summary of the tale related by Plato around 360 BC, in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias . These two accounts are the only known descriptions of Atlantis and have promoted controversy and debate for over 2,000 years. Many believe the stories are morality tales and fables, works of Plato’s wonderful imagination. Others think that Plato may have been describing a lost civilisation, one that really existed, that he called ‘Atlantis’.
FINDING THE TRUTH
It is extraordinary to think it, but the story of the Minoans is so incredibly ancient that even the ancient Greeks had forgotten it. History got lost in the mists of time. The tale was finally retold by Plato, but it is only because of this one sole author, and two texts, one of which is unfinished, that we know anything about ancient ‘Atlantis’ at all. So why, then, would we think it could possibly be true?
Here I have to acknowledge my debt to A.G. Galanopoulos, whose book Atlantis: the Truth Behind the Legend , was written with Edward Bacon in 1969. Together they mounted the first serious challenge to the orthodox academic view of the time – that Atlantis was total invention. It was Galanopoulos who first told the world the truth about the sheer scale of the ‘Theran event’, as the vast volcanic eruption is known. He was also the first to speculate that the tsunami that then hit Crete would have been of huge, destructive force.
It was also Galanopoulos who pointed out, quite rightly, the sheer number of times that Plato insisted that, although he was no historian, his account was based on truth. In Plato’s two dialogues it is not just Critias who insists that the story is true: Socrates ends Critias’ tale by saying:
And the fact that it is not invented fable but a genuine history is all-important.
Plato makes the point that this is not ‘a story’, but historical fact not once, but four times. As Galanopoulos points out, Plato isn’t creating a fictional world, the details of which were in his control. He actually seems worried about the inconsistencies in his account. For instance, he questions whether or not a trench as deep as he states it is could even be built. If this was indeed fiction, then why would he worry?
It seems fitting that these major breakthroughs should have been made by the top seismologist of his day. The climax of the story of Atlantis is also the story of one of the biggest geophysical events the world has ever seen. And with irreproachable scientific logic, Galanopoulos also worked out the solution to another of the great mysteries behind the Atlantis ‘myth’.
Plato’s account throws a few rotten eggs our way. He says that the date Atlantis was eaten up and buried under the sea was 9,000 years before the information was passed on by an Eg
yptian priest. Plato also greatly exaggerated the size of Crete, doubling its actual size. He gives the dimensions of the plain of the Royal City as 3,000 by 2,000 stades. Both figures have confused the picture. Scholars have triumphantly held them up to demolish the arguments in favour of Minoan Crete being Atlantis. It was Galanopoulos who pointed out the obvious.
‘The solution of this riddle,’ he said, ‘is as simple as the mistake which created it.’
It was simply an error in the maths. Plato’s Atlantis (Crete) is given as 3,000 stades, twice the length of Crete. Either Plato, or more likely the Egyptian priests who passed this information on, simply mis-translated the numbers.
As Bacon and Professor Galanopoulos pointed out, the parallels between Crete, Santorini/Thera and Atlantis are unavoidable. Minoan Crete was densely populated, as was Plato’s Atlantis. Atlantis was divided into settlements each with a separate leader, but all subject to the Royal City. On Minoan Crete the king appears to have been the overall leader, with (let’s call them) nobles governing other centres across the island in the king’s name. The bull is crucial to Minoan life and art; in the Critias (119c-120d) we find that this is the case in Atlantis, too:
In the sacred precincts of Poseidon there were bulls at large; and the ten princes being alone by themselves, after praying to the God that they might capture a victim well-pleasing unto him, hunted after the bulls with staves and nooses, but no weapons of iron.
Plato is known to have visited Crete in person. What is not certain is whether he himself made the connection between ‘Atlantis’ and Crete. Here I have put together a commentary on some of the things Plato says, and how it is possible to interpret them, once you know something of Crete, Santorini, and their eventful pasts.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 31
