The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  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 well 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 tell 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 recall the excellent seminar you gave on it at Cambridge when we first met. The Periplus of Hanno really illustrates your point about transcription problems. It was originally inscribed on bronze tablets on a pillar 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 finally 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 still 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 dwell 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 vellum of the codex. It brought it all back to me. That’s when I called my old friend James Dillen. 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 pulled 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 vellum, yellowed 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.’

  ‘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 vellum. I could see a faint imprint in reverse of the main text on the following 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 following page, a mirror image, except in one place. Some time after the blank page had been inserted, one of the marginal notes on the following 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 Pillars 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 vellum vertically and shone the light through it. Jack gasped as saw the faint imprint of letters. Schoenberg moved the torch and shone it on one side at the bottom. Jack could clearly see letters in Greek, lower-case letters with the words separated, like modern cursive script. ‘I’ve transcribed it,’ Schoenberg murmured, ‘but you should he able to make out the original Greek. It’s quite clear.’

  Jack stared into the halo of light coming through the vellum, then reached out and held a corner to keep it still. He realized that he was looking at the obverse side, seeing the text the correct way round, rather than the mirror imprint on the reverse. He counted twenty-one words in the note, in three lines. Costas took out his notepad and pencil, and stared. ‘Holy cow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you see what I see?’

  Schoenberg peered at Costas. ‘Of course. Your name, Kazantzakis. You read Greek too.’

  Jack stared at the writing. That word. His heart was pounding, but he tried to stay focused. Costas wrote it down, keeping the lower-case script of the Greek minuscules: . He held the notepaper up so Jack could see it. Atlantis. Jack’s mind flashed back to five years before, to the fragment of papyrus that Maurice Hiebermeyer had found in the
mummy necropolis in Egypt, the words that had set in motion their quest for the lost city. That papyrus had been an original text of the early sixth century BC, written by the Greek traveller Solon after his visit to the high priest in the Egyptian temple at Saïs, the account that led Plato almost two centuries later to write about the legend of Atlantis in the book that became the basis for all modern speculation. Jack stared at the word, trying to remain analytical. This was a marginal note written by an unknown monk in the tenth century AD. Many monks in the Byzantine world would have known of Plato, and could have read the Atlantis story in his Critias and Timaeus. He thought of other ways the monk could have known that word. ‘The Greek word Atlantis, that exact spelling, first appears in the Histories of Herodotus in the fifth century BC. But for him it meant Atlas, and was his name for the Western Ocean, Atlantis Thalassa, the Sea of Atlas. That’s the first time in history that the ocean is called the Atlantic, and the monk could simply have been using the word Atlantis in that sense.’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first,’ Schoenberg said. ‘But despite its appearance so early in Herodotus, the more common Greek and Roman name for the Atlantic was simply Ocean. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History in the first century AD calls it that, Oceanus. The ancients of course knew about the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the Maris Erythraei of the other periplus, but to them there was only one Ocean, the huge expanse to the west beyond the Pillars of Hercules.’

  Costas had been peering closely at the vellum. Now he sat back up, clearing his throat. ‘What if all the scholars got it wrong? What if Herodotus too had heard the legend of Atlantis passed down from Solon, or at least part of it? What if Atlantis Thalassa really does mean the Sea of Atlantis, not the Sea of Atlas?’

  Jack stared at him. ‘Because we know Atlantis was in the Black Sea. We found it.’

  Costas shook his head. ‘No. I don’t mean the original Atlantis. I mean Atlantis refounded.’

  ‘The new Atlantis,’ Schoenberg said triumphantly. ‘My conclusion precisely. Now you see why I was so excited.’

  Jack leaned over and peered closely, letting his eyes adjust to the faint smudges left by the ink. He took the notepad from Costas and wrote down each letter of the Greek: . Then he sat up and read it aloud.

  Schoenberg looked at him intently. ‘As well as the word Atlantis, there are three proper names. The first two, Noé and Alkaios, are individuals. Alkaios was a common enough Greek name, the original name of Heracles before he became a demigod and took his mother Hera’s name. When I saw that, I wasn’t surprised, as the deeds of Heracles would have been in the mind of anyone thinking about those western extremities of the known world visited by Hanno. It was there that Heracles supposedly took the Golden Apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the “Ladies of the West”. But it was the first of those two names, Noé, that really intrigued me. The accent shows that it should be read with the last letter emphasized, as “ah”.’

  ‘Noah,’ Costas said.

  Jack looked at him, stunned. Noah. It was not possible.

  Schoenberg nodded. ‘Noah of course is a name familiar from the Hebrew Old Testament, though it probably has a much older Indo-European origin.’

  Costas turned to Jack. ‘Do you remember five years ago at Atlantis joking that we’d also found the basis for the story of Noah’s Ark? You speculated that an organized exodus from Atlantis as the flood waters rose would have included breeding pairs of livestock, even the giant aurochs that they bred for sacrifice.’

  Jack stared at the notebook. ‘I don’t think I was joking. This is extraordinary.’ He slowly translated the first sentence: ‘From here, Noah and Alkaios from Atlantis set sail to the west, to found a new city.’

  Schoenberg pointed at the vellum. ‘The word you’ve translated as “city”, polu, the Greek word polis, can mean “city-state” or “state”. The word apo, “from”, before the word Atlantis, is unambiguous, as is the word nea, “new”, before the word for city. They were going from Atlantis, to found a new city. When I saw that in 1942, I believed that the only rational explanation was that the Atlantis myth harked back to the fall of Minoan Crete in the Aegean Sea towards the end of the Bronze Age in the second millennium BC. Geographically this note seemed to make sense, that these two men, Noah and Alkaios, were refugees sailing west from the Aegean through the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic Ocean, to seek lands for a new city. In classical antiquity that would have been a familiar concept, with many Greek cities in the western Mediterranean being founded as colonies of their mother city. But now, with your discovery of a Neolithic Atlantis, I revise my theory. The direction of travel remains the same, from the Mediterranean to the west, but it is vastly older than I could have imagined then, as old as the sixth millennium BC.’

  ‘That is, if this comment isn’t just a bit of fantasy made up by a medieval monk,’ Costas said.

  ‘It’s unlikely that a monk would make up anything involving a Biblical name, as that might have been seen as heresy,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘And the next line in the note clinches it.’

  Jack took a deep breath, and read what he had written on the notepad: Alkaios returned, and set up an inscription in unknown writing on the pillar. Ex Pliny.

  ‘Your translation is most interesting,’ Schoenberg murmured. ‘I translated stulobate, stylobate, as “plaque” or “stela”, a stone panel. But pillar is possible, a stone pillar.’

  ‘I must have been thinking of the Pillars of Hercules, but actually it does make sense,’ Jack replied. ‘Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century placed stone pillars, padrões, where they made landfall, to stake claim to new land. We know that Hanno the Carthaginian left an account of his voyage on bronze plaques attached to a pillar in Carthage, and I’ve always imagined that one day someone will find a pillar marking his progress down the coast of west Africa.’

  ‘Remember what you saw three days ago at Atlantis, Jack?’ Costas said.

  ‘Three days ago?’ Schoenberg exclaimed. ‘You have been to Atlantis again? He leaned forward, peering at Jack eagerly.

  Jack nodded. ‘You’re giving us your treasure, so I’ll give you ours. Absolute secrecy, yes?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  ‘Costas and I were able to carry out a dive on the site under the guise of a geological assessment. The fault line’s active again and we ended up diving into a live volcano.’

  ‘A live volcano.’ Schoenberg leaned back, slapping his knee. ‘A live volcano. I never heard of such a thing. Marvellous. If only I could have told this to our divers in the Ahnenerbe. But they never had the equipment you have. I believe it was the oxygen rebreathers. They were always going too deep. We lost three of them on our expedition to Iceland. I was there, waiting for them, but they never came up.’

  Jack glanced at Costas, then back at Schoenberg. ‘We found an extraordinary temple with carved pillars. We’re sure it dates from the earliest Neolithic, eleven thousand years ago or more. My point is, these people were perfectly capable of erecting stone pillars, and indeed had a tradition of it.’

  ‘So if this note is based on fact, we’re looking for an inscribed stone,’ Costas said.

  ‘Somewhere on the coast of west Africa,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘That narrows it down.’

  Schoenberg took the sheet of vellum and held it up to the ceiling light, peering at it closely. ‘There’s more. Those final words, Ex Pliny, are a shorthand to show that the source of the story is Pliny’s Natural History. As you can imagine, I immediately found a copy of Pliny in the Heidelberg library and went to Book 5, Chapter 1, the text that deals with west Africa and the limit of Roman knowledge. There’s the usual Pliny ragbag of facts and myths, including an account of the Hercules myth and the expedition of Hanno. He mentions the Roman emperor Claudius, his war against a local ruler in Mauretania and his founding of Roman colonies at Lixus and Traducta Julia, both probably corresponding to the old Punic outposts in that list in the Periplus of Hanno. But there w
as absolutely nothing in the surviving edition of Pliny to corroborate this note. If the monk had seen a reference to Atlantis, it must have been in some lost text. It was a dead end for me, as without verification I could take it no further. I put it away for decades. Until three years ago.’

  Jack looked at Schoenberg shrewdly. ‘You hoped for a lost version of Pliny’s Natural History, containing its own marginalia.’

  Schoenberg gave a slight smile, and nodded. ‘One found three years ago by Jack Howard and his team in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy. As I said, I’ve been a keen follower of your discoveries.’

  ‘Good old Claudius,’ Costas said. ‘I knew you’d mentioned him for a reason.’

  ‘Claudius had a special interest in Mauretania,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘Poor lame Claudius was desperate for military glory, to shore up his claim to the empire. It was the main reason he invaded Britain in AD 43. In the secret retirement you discovered he had enjoyed in Herculaneum after faking his death, he probably dwelt greatly on his place in history. In his library you found that copy of Pliny’s Natural History with the marginal note about Claudius’ meeting as a young man with Jesus of Nazareth, added to the scroll by Pliny when he appears to have spent time with his friend Claudius in those fateful final days before Vesuvius erupted. If Pliny was adding material to his text like that – told to him by Claudius – then he might also have added what Claudius knew about west Africa. Claudius had probably amassed huge amounts of information in his years working as a historian before he was reluctantly made emperor. He would have had a special interest in west Africa through his own imperial involvement in Mauretania, and particularly as the author of a history of Carthage, which would have given him considerable knowledge of Phoenician exploration along that coast. He seems to have been a magpie, much like Pliny, interested in fascinating snippets of information that others had ignored.’