Atlantis Read online

  “You may think Atlantis was a global legend, some distant episode in history half remembered by many different cultures, preserved in myth and legend around the world.”

  “Like the stories of the Great Flood,” Jack interjected.

  “Exactly.” She fixed his eyes with wry amusement. “But you would be wrong. There is one source only.” She picked up the two books as she spoke. “The ancient Greek philosopher Plato.”

  The others settled back to listen.

  “Plato lived in Athens from 427 to 347 BC, a generation after Herodotus,” she said. “As a young man Plato would have known of the orator Pericles, would have attended the plays of Euripides and Aeschylus and Aristophanes, would have seen the great temples being erected on the Acropolis. These were the glory days of classical Greece, the greatest period of civilization ever known.”

  Katya put down the books and pressed them open. “These two books are known as the Timaeus and the Critias. They are imaginary dialogues between men of those names and Socrates, Plato’s mentor whose wisdom survives only through the writings of his pupil.

  “Here, in a fictional conversation, Critias tells Socrates about a mighty civilization, one which came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean nine thousand years before. The Atlanteans were descendants of Poseidon, god of the sea. Critias is lecturing Socrates.

  “There was an island situated in front of the Straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together. In this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjugated the parts of Libya within the Columns of Hercules as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the Straits.”

  Katya took the second volume, looking up briefly. “Libya was the ancient name for Africa, Tyrrhenia was central Italy and the Pillars of Hercules the Strait of Gibraltar. But Plato was neither geographer nor historian. His theme was a monumental war between the Athenians and the Atlanteans, one which the Athenians naturally won but only after enduring the most extreme danger.”

  She looked again at the text.

  “And now the climax, the nub of the legend. These final few sentences have tantalized scholars for more than two thousand years, and have led to more dead ends than I can count.

  “But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.”

  Katya closed the book and gazed quizzically at Jack. “What would you expect to find in Atlantis?”

  Jack hesitated uncharacteristically, aware that she would be judging his scholarship for the first time. “Atlantis has always meant much more than simply a lost civilization,” he replied. “To the ancients it was a fascination with the fallen, with greatness doomed by arrogance and hubris. Every age has had its Atlantis fantasy, always harking back to a world of unimagined splendour overshadowing all history. To the Nazis it was the birthplace of Überman, the original Aryan homeland, spurring a demented search around the world for racially pure descendants. To others it was the Garden of Eden, a Paradise Lost.”

  Katya nodded and spoke quietly. “If there is any truth to this story, if the papyrus gives us any more clues, then we may be able to solve one of the greatest mysteries of ancient history.”

  There was a pause as the assembled gathering looked from one to the other, anticipation and barely repressed eagerness on their faces.

  “Thank you, Katya.” Dillen stood up, obviously more comfortable speaking on his feet. He was an accomplished lecturer, used to commanding the full attention of his audience.

  “I suggest the Atlantis story is not history but allegory. Plato’s intention was to draw out a series of moral lessons. In the Timaeus, order triumphs over chaos in the formation of the Cosmos. In the Critias, men of self-discipline, moderation and respect for the law triumph over men of pride and presumption. The conflict with Atlantis was contrived to show that Athenians had always been people of resolve who would ultimately be victorious in any war. Even Plato’s pupil Aristotle thought Atlantis never existed.” Dillen put his hands on the table and leaned forward.

  “I suggest Atlantis is a political fable. Plato’s account of how he came by the story is a whimsical fiction like Swift’s introduction to Gulliver’s Travels, where he gives a source which is plausible but could never be verified.”

  Dillen was playing devil’s advocate, Jack knew. He always relished his old professor’s rhetorical skills, a reflection of years spent in the world’s great universities.

  “It would be useful if you could run over Plato’s source,” Hiebermeyer said.

  “Certainly.” Dillen looked at his notes. “Critias was Plato’s great-grandfather. Critias claims that his own great-grandfather heard the Atlantis story from Solon, the famed Athenian lawmaker. Solon in turn heard it from an aged Egyptian priest at Saïs in the Nile Delta.”

  Jack did a quick mental calculation. “Solon lived from about 640 to 560 BC. He would only have been admitted to the temple as a venerated scholar. If we therefore assume he visited Egypt as an older man, but not too old to travel, that would place the encounter some time in the early sixth century BC, say 590 or 580 BC.”

  “If, that is, we are dealing with fact and not fiction. I would like to pose a question. How is it that such a remarkable story was not known more widely? Herodotus visited Egypt in the middle of the fifth century BC, about half a century before Plato’s time. He was an indefatigable researcher, a magpie who scooped up every bit of trivia, and his work survives in its entirety. Yet there is no mention of Atlantis. Why?”

  Dillen’s gaze ranged around the room taking in each of them in turn. He sat down. After a pause Hiebermeyer stood up and paced behind his chair.

  “I think I might be able to answer your question.” He paused briefly. “In our world we tend to think of historical knowledge as universal property. There are exceptions of course, and we all know history can be manipulated, but in general little of significance can be kept hidden for long. Well, ancient Egypt was not like that.”

  The others listened attentively.

  “Unlike Greece and the Near East, whose cultures had been swept away by invasions, Egypt had an unbroken tradition stretching back to the early Bronze Age, to the early dynastic period around 3100 BC. Some believe it stretched back even as far as the arrival of the first agriculturalists almost four thousand years earlier.”

  There was a murmur of interest from the others.

  “Yet by the time of Solon this ancient knowledge had become increasingly hard to access. It was as if it had been divided into interlocking fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle, then packaged up and parcelled away.” He paused, pleased with the metaphor. “It came to reside in many different temples, dedicated to many different gods. The priests came to guard their own parcel of knowledge covetously, as their own treasure. It could only be revealed to outsiders through divine intervention, through some sign from the gods. Oddly,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, “these signs came most often when the applicant offered a benefaction, usually gold.”

  “So you could buy knowledge?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, but only when the circumstances were right, on the right day of the month, outside the many religious festivals, according to a host of other signs and auguries. Unless everything was right, an applicant would be turned away, even if he arrived with a shipload of gold.”

  “So the Atlantis story could have been known in only one temple, and told to only one Greek.”

  “Precisely.” Hiebermeyer nodded solemnly at Jack. “Only a handful of Greeks ever made it into the temple scriptoria. The priests were suspicious of men like Herodotus who were too inqu
isitive and indiscriminate, travelling from temple to temple. Herodotus was sometimes fed misinformation, stories that were exaggerated and falsified. He was, as you English say, led up the garden path.

  “The most precious knowledge was too sacred to be committed to paper. It was passed down by word of mouth, from high priest to high priest. Most of it died with the last priests when the Greeks shut down the temples. What little made it to paper was lost under the Romans, when the Royal Library of Alexandria was burnt during the civil war in 48 BC and the Daughter Library went the same way when the emperor Theodosius ordered the destruction of all remaining pagan temples in AD 391. We already know some of what was lost from references in surviving ancient texts. The Geography of Pytheas the Navigator. The History of the World by the emperor Claudius. The missing volumes of Galen and Celsus. Great works of history and science, compendia of pharmaceutical knowledge that would have advanced medicine immeasurably. We can barely begin to imagine the secret knowledge of the Egyptians that went the same way.”

  Hiebermeyer sat down and Katya spoke again.

  “I’d like to propose an alternative hypothesis. I suggest Plato was telling the truth about his source. Yet for some reason Solon did not write down an account of his visit. Was he forbidden from doing so by the priests?”

  She picked up the books and continued. “I believe Plato took the bare facts he knew and embellished them to suit his purposes. Here I agree in part with Professor Dillen. Plato exaggerated to make Atlantis a more remote and awesome place, fitting for a distant age. So he put the story far back in the past, made Atlantis equal to the largest landmass he could envisage, and placed it in the western ocean beyond the boundaries of the ancient world.” She looked at Jack. “There is a theory about Atlantis, one widely held by archaeologists. We are fortunate in having one of its leading proponents among us today. Dr. Howard?”

  Jack was already flicking the remote control to a map of the Aegean with the island of Crete prominently in the centre.

  “It only becomes plausible if we scale it down,” he said. “If we set it nine hundred rather than nine thousand years before Solon we arrive at about 1600 BC. That was the period of the great Bronze Age civilizations, the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Canaanites of Syro-Palestine, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Mycenaeans of Greece, the Minoans of Crete. This is the only possible context for the Atlantis story.”

  He aimed a pencil-sized light pointer at the map. “And I believe the only possible location is Crete.” He looked at Hiebermeyer. “For most Egyptians at the time of the Pharaohs, Crete was the northerly limit of their experience. From the south it’s an imposing land, a long shoreline backed by mountains, yet the Egyptians would have known it was an island from the expeditions they undertook to the palace of Knossos on the north coast.”

  “What about the Atlantic Ocean?” Hiebermeyer asked.

  “You can forget that,” Jack said. “In Plato’s day the sea to the west of Gibraltar was unknown, a vast ocean leading to the fiery edge of the world. So that was where Plato relocated Atlantis. His readers would hardly have been awestruck by an island in the Mediterranean.”

  “And the word Atlantis?”

  “The sea god Poseidon had a son Atlas, the muscle-bound colossus who carried the sky on his shoulders. The Atlantic Ocean was the Ocean of Atlas, not of Atlantis. The term Atlantic first appears in Herodotus, so it was probably in widespread currency by the time Plato was writing.” Jack paused and looked at the others.

  “Before seeing the papyrus I would have argued that Plato made up the word Atlantis, a plausible name for a lost continent in the Ocean of Atlas. We know from inscriptions that the Egyptians referred to the Minoans and Mycenaeans as the people of Keftiu, people from the north who came in ships bearing tribute. I would have suggested that Keftiu, not Atlantis, was the name for the lost continent in the original account. Now I’m not so sure. If this papyrus really does date from before Plato’s time, then clearly he didn’t invent the word.”

  Katya swept her long hair back and gazed at Jack. “Was the war between the Athenians and the Atlanteans in reality a war between the Mycenaeans and the Minoans?”

  “I believe so,” Jack looked keenly back at her as he replied. “The Athenian Acropolis may have been the most impressive of all the Mycenaean strongholds before it was demolished to make way for the buildings of the classical period. Soon after 1500 BC Mycenaean warriors took over Knossos on Crete, ruling it until the palace was destroyed by fire and rampage a hundred years later. The conventional view is that the Mycenaeans were warlike, the Minoans peaceable. The takeover occurred after the Minoans had been devastated by a natural catastrophe.”

  “There may be a hint of this in the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur,” Katya said. “Theseus the Athenian prince wooed Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Knossos, but before taking her hand he had to confront the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. The Minotaur was half bull, half man, surely a representation of Minoan strength in arms.”

  Hiebermeyer joined in. “The Greek Bronze Age was rediscovered by men who believed the legends contained a kernel of truth. Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, Heinrich Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae. Both believed the Trojan wars of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, written down in the eighth century BC, preserved a memory of the tumultuous events which led to the collapse of Bronze Age civilization.”

  “That brings me to my final point,” Jack said. “Plato would have known nothing of Bronze Age Crete, which had been forgotten in the Dark Age that preceded the classical period. Yet there is much in the story reminiscent of the Minoans, details Plato could never have known. Katya, may I?” Jack reached across and took the two books she pushed forward, catching her eye as he did so. He flicked through one and laid it open towards the end.

  “Here. Atlantis was the way to other islands, and from those you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent. That’s exactly how Crete looks from Egypt, the other islands being the Dodecanese and Cycladic archipelagos in the Aegean and the continent Greece and Asia Minor. And there’s more.” He opened the other book and read out another passage.

  “Atlantis was very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, and encompassed a large mountain-girt plain.” Jack strode over to the screen which now displayed a large-scale map of Crete. “That’s exactly the appearance of the southern coast of Crete and the great plain of the Mesara.”

  He moved back to where he had left the books on the table.

  “And finally the Atlanteans themselves. They were divided into ten relatively independent administrative districts under the primacy of the royal metropolis.” He swivelled round and pointed at the map. “Archaeologists believe Minoan Crete was divided into a dozen or so semi-autonomous palace fiefdoms, with Knossos the most important.”

  He flicked the remote control to reveal a spectacular image of the excavated palace at Knossos with its restored throne room. “This surely is the splendid capital city halfway along the coast.” He advanced the slides to a close-up of the drainage system in the palace. “And just as the Minoans were excellent hydraulic engineers, so the Atlanteans made cisterns, some open to the heavens, others roofed over, to use in winters as warm baths; there were the baths for the kings and for private persons and for horses and cattle. And then the bull.” Jack pressed the selector and another view of Knossos appeared, this time showing a magnificent bull’s horn sculpture beside the courtyard. He read again. “There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon, and the kings, being left alone in the temple, after they had offered prayers to the god that they might capture the victim which was acceptable to him, hunted the bulls, without weapons but with staves and nooses.”

  Jack turned towards the screen and flicked through the remaining images. “A wall painting from Knossos of a bull with a leaping acrobat. A stone libation vase in the shape of a bull’s head. A golden cup impressed with a bull-hunting scene. An excavated pit containing hundreds of bulls’ horns, recently discovered below th
e main courtyard of the palace.” Jack sat down and looked at the others. “And there is one final ingredient in this story.”

  The image transformed to an aerial shot of the island of Thera, one Jack had taken from Seaquest’s helicopter only a few days before. The jagged outline of the caldera could clearly be seen, its vast basin surrounded by spectacular cliffs surmounted by the whitewashed houses of the modern villages.

  “The only active volcano in the Aegean and one of the biggest in the world. Some time in the middle of the second millennium BC that thing blew its top. Eighteen cubic kilometres of rock and ash were thrown eighty kilometres high and hundreds of kilometres south over Crete and the east Mediterranean, darkening the sky for days. The concussion shook buildings in Egypt.”

  Hiebermeyer recited from memory from the Old Testament: “ ‘And the Lord said unto Moses, stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt. And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days.’ ”

  “The ash would have carpeted Crete and wiped out agriculture for a generation,” Jack continued. “Vast tidal waves, tsunamis, battered the northern shore, devastating the palaces. There were massive earthquakes. The remaining population was no match for the Mycenaeans when they arrived seeking rich pickings.”

  Katya raised her hands to her chin and spoke.

  “So. The Egyptians hear a huge noise. The sky darkens. A few survivors make it to Egypt with terrifying stories of a deluge. The men of Keftiu no longer arrive with their tribute. Atlantis doesn’t exactly sink beneath the waves, but it does disappear forever from the Egyptian world.” She raised her head and looked at Jack, who smiled at her.

  “I rest my case,” he said.

  Throughout this discussion Dillen had sat silently. He knew the others were acutely aware of his presence, conscious that the translation of the papyrus fragment may have unlocked secrets that would overturn everything they believed. They looked at him expectantly as Jack reset the digital projector to the first image. The screen was again filled with the close-set script of ancient Greek.