Atlantis

CHAPTER 31

The group stood clustered round the portal and peered into the dark passage beyond. Again they felt the brush of ancient vapour, a musty waft that seemed to carry with it the distilled wisdom of the ages. Out of nowhere Jack conjured up an image of Solon the Lawmaker and the shadowy priest in the temple sanctuary at Saïs. In a moment the phantasm was gone, but he was left convinced they were about to delve the inner secrets of a people who had passed out of history thousands of years before.

After a few metres they reached the end of the passageway and Jack panned his light forward. Beside him Dillen blinked as his eyes adjusted to the unaccustomed brilliance of the scene ahead.

“What is it?” Hiebermeyer could not contain his excitement. “What can you see?”

“It’s a single chamber, approximately ten metres long by six metres wide,” Jack replied in the measured tones of a professional archaeologist. “There’s a rock table in the middle and a dividing screen towards the rear. Oh, and there’s gold. Thick gold panels on the walls.”

He and Dillen stooped through the entrance and the others followed cautiously behind. Once they were all inside, Jack and Costas adjusted their flashlights to wide beam and shone them down the length of the chamber.

Jack’s laconic description scarcely did it justice. On either side the walls were embellished with massive slabs of polished gold, each two metres high and a metre across. They shone with dazzling splendour, their surfaces pristine and mirror-like in the protective atmosphere. There were ten panels altogether, five on either side of the walls, evenly spaced with a gap of half a metre between each. They were covered with markings instantly recognizable as the Atlantis symbols.

“Take a look at her,” Costas whispered.

His beam had caught a gargantuan shape towards the rear of the chamber. It was barely recognizable as human, a grotesque parody of the female form with pendulous breasts, protuberant buttocks and a bloated belly that gave the torso a nearly spherical appearance. She was flanked by life-sized bulls that faced up towards her. The tableau was like a triptych or heraldic group that screened off the rear of the chamber.

Jack stared at the colossus and then glanced at Costas. “She’s what prehistorians flatteringly call a Venus figure,” he explained with a grin. “About eighty have been found in Europe and Russia, mostly small statuettes in ivory or stone. This one’s phenomenal, the only one I know of bigger than life-size.”

“She’s a little different from the comely maidens in the passageway,” Costas observed ruefully.

“She’s not meant to be a pin-up.” Katya’s tone was gently admonishing. “Look how they haven’t even bothered to finish the feet or the arms, and the head’s just a blank. Everything’s deliberately exaggerated to emphasize fecundity and good health. She may not conform to the modern western ideal of beauty, but for people living with the constant fear of starvation, an obese woman symbolized prosperity and survival.”

“Point taken.” Costas smiled. “How old is the lady?”

“Upper Palaeolithic,” Jack replied immediately. “All the Venus figurines fall between 40,000 and 10,000 BC, the same range as the paintings in the hall of the ancestors.”

“They used to be thought of as mother goddesses,” Hiebermeyer added pensively. “But there’s no certainty Stone Age European societies were matriarchal. They’re probably best seen as fertility idols, worshipped alongside male deities as well as animal spirits and inanimate forces.”

There was a brief silence, which Jack broke. “For hundreds of thousands of years hominids lived an unchanged existence during the Old Stone Age, right up to the Neolithic revolution. It’s no surprise the Atlanteans so soon after still revered the time-honoured gods of their ancestors, the hunter-gatherers who first painted wild beasts in the hall of the ancestors during the Ice Age.”

“The ancient Israelites of the Old Testament still worshipped a fertility god,” Efram Jacobovich interjected quietly. “Even the early Christians of the Mediterranean incorporated pagan fertility deities into their rituals, sometimes in the guise of saints or the Virgin Mary. The Venus of Atlantis might not be as far from our own beliefs as we might imagine.”

The stone table in front of the statue was massive. It extended almost to the entrance, terminating just in front of them in a raised ledge capped by an irregular globular shape about a metre across. In the light reflected off the gold it seemed preternaturally white, as if it had been burnished by the countless supplicants who had come to pray before the great goddess.

“It looks like a sacred stone,” Jack speculated. “What the ancient Greeks called a baetyl, a rock of meteoric origin, or an omphalos, a centre or navel. In Bronze Age Crete there were baetyls at the entrance to holy caves. In classical Greece the most famous omphalos was in front of the chasm where the oracle sat at Delphi.”

“Marking the threshold into the House of the Divine, like the bowl of holy water at the entrance to a Catholic church,” Efram suggested.

“Something like that,” Jack agreed.

“It’s definitely meteoric.” Costas was examining the bulbous form more closely. “But it’s curious, almost like a warped sheet of metal rather than a solid nodule.”

“The kind of thing Stone Age hunters might have picked up on the ice cap,” Jack mused. “Most fresh meteor fragments are found on ice because they’re easy to spot. This could be a sacred object passed down from their ancestors, another link to earliest prehistory.”

Aysha had edged her way along the far side of the table and stopped before reaching the goddess. “Come and look at this,” she exclaimed.

The two beams swept forward along the surface of the table. It was littered with slats of wood, some joined at right angles like the corners of boxes. They could make out a jumble of carpenter’s tools, familiar forms including chisels and files, awls and mallets. It looked like the paraphernalia of a cabinet-maker’s workshop, all hastily abandoned but immaculately preserved in the dust-free environment.

“This is more than it seems.” Dillen bent over beside Aysha and carefully swept the wood shavings from a raised surface facing him. It was a wooden frame like a portable lectern. As he straightened up they caught a glimpse of gold.

“It’s a copyist’s table,” he announced triumphantly. “And there’s a gold sheet on top.”

As they crowded round, they could see the upper third of the sheet was densely covered with Atlantean symbols, some aligned erratically as if done in a hurry but all separated into phrases like the Phaistos disc. From a small box at the side, Dillen held up three cigarsized stone punches, each terminating in an obverse instantly recognizable as the Mohican head, the sheaf of corn and the canoe paddle. Another one lying on the table terminated in the Atlantis symbol.

“It is identical to the inscription on the wall opposite,” Katya said. “The copyist was replicating the symbols on the second panel from the left.”

They looked where she indicated and could just make out the individual symbols, a sequence faithfully transcribed up to the twelfth line where it had been abruptly abandoned.

Efram Jacobovich remained at the head of the table. He was staring intensely at the clutter of wooden slats, clearly lost in thought. Without looking up he cleared his throat and began to recite.

He closed his eyes and continued.

There was a stunned silence. He looked up. “The Book of Exodus,” he explained. “Those of my faith believe God gave Moses the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, and inscribed them on tablets which were borne by the people of Israel in the Ark. Biblical references to the pharaohs put the event in the second half of the second millennium BC. But now I wonder whether the story contains the kernel of a much older account, of a people thousands of years earlier who were forced to flee their homeland, a people who took with them copies of their ten sacred texts from their holy sanctuary near the summit of a volcano.”

Jack looked up from where he had been examining a stack of blank gold sheets. “Of course,” he exclaimed. “Each of the migrating groups was to have a copy. Clay tablets would have been too fragile, stone inscriptions would have taken too long and copper would have corroded. Gold was in good supply from the Caucasus and was durable and soft enough for rapid inscription with punches. Each set of ten tablets was encased in a wooden crate just like the Ark of the Covenant. The priests worked right up to the last minute and abandoned the final copy only as the city was overwhelmed by the floodwaters.”

“These may be sacred texts but they are definitely not the Ten Commandments.” Katya had extracted her palm computer and was scrolling through the concordance of the Atlantis symbols with Minoan Linear A. “It’ll take time to translate them completely, but already I have a general sense of the meaning. The first tablet to the left refers to grains, legumes, even vines, and to seasons of the year. The second, the one our scribe was copying, refers to animal husbandry. The third is about copper and gold metallurgy and the fourth about architecture, the use of building stone.” She paused and looked up. “Unless I’m mistaken these tablets are a kind of encyclopedia, a blueprint for life in Neolithic Atlantis.”

Jack shook his head in wonder. “Aslan would have been disappointed. No royal cache, no fortune in works of art. Only the greatest treasure of them all, priceless beyond measure. The keys to civilization itself.”

While Katya and Dillen busied themselves translating in Jack’s torchlight, Costas made his way beyond Aysha to the goddess and the bulls. The gap between the front legs of the right-hand bull and the voluminous thigh of the goddess formed a low entryway worn smooth by generations of use. Costas crouched down and disappeared from sight, his presence only revealed by the beam of light that silhouetted the bulls where they reared up towards the head of the goddess.

“Follow me.” His voice was muffled but distinct. “There’s more.”

They all scrambled through and stood with their backs against the far side of the statues. They were inside a narrow annexe in front of an irregular rocky face.

“This must be the holy of holies.” Dillen’s eyes darted around as he spoke. “Like the cella in a Greek temple or the sanctuary in a Christian church. But it’s surprisingly bare.”

“Except for that.” Costas trained his beam on the rock face.

It was adorned with three painted figures, the central one almost as large as the mother goddess and the other two slightly smaller. They seemed to mimic the arrangement of the goddess and the bulls. They were dull red, identical to the pigment used in the hall of the ancestors, except here the colour had faded. Stylistically they were also reminiscent of Ice Age art, with broad, impressionistic strokes that gave a strong sense of animation yet were essentially outline representations. But in their form the figures were like nothing else they had seen in Atlantis.

Instead of powerful animals or statuesque priests they were scarcely recognizable as earthly beings, abstract renditions that barely captured the essence of the corporeal. Each had a bulbous, pear-shaped body with limbs jutting awkwardly sideways, the hands and feet terminating in ten or twelve digits that splayed out. The heads seemed grossly out of proportion to the bodies. The eyes were outsized lentoids edged in black, reminiscent of the kohl marks of ancient Egyptian portraits. They were like a child’s attempt at the human form, yet with something oddly deliberate about the shared characteristics of all three.

“These are old, very old,” Jack murmured. “Late Ice Age, maybe five thousand years before the flood. They’re executed on the living rock, just like the animals in the hall of the ancestors. There are plenty of minimalist depictions of the human form in rock art around the world, in the petroglyphs of Africa and Australia and the south-western United States. But I’ve never seen prehistoric figures like this.”

“These cannot be serious attempts at the human form.” Costas was shaking his head in disbelief. “There’s no way Ice Age art was this primitive. Those animals in the hall of the ancestors are amazingly naturalistic.”

“They’re probably humanoid rather than anthropomorphic,” Jack countered. “Remember, these are thousands of years older than the Atlanteans carved in the passageway, really more like shamans or spirits, or gods who had no defined physical form. In some societies the human form was sacrosanct and portraiture was never attempted. The Iron Age artists of Celtic Europe were wonderfully accomplished, but if you saw the representations of humans they began producing under the Romans you’d think they were primitive in the extreme.”

Jack’s beam rose to a small carved device atop the central figure. It was a single cartouche half a metre long and contained two of the Atlantean symbols, the perched eagle and the vertical paddle.

“That’s more recent than the paintings,” Jack commented. “The surface is cleaner and the carving would have required metal tools. Any idea of the translation?”

Katya knew most of the syllabary and did not bother to consult her computer. “It’s not in the concordance,” she asserted confidently. “It could be a verb or noun we haven’t encountered. But in the context I’d say it’s most likely a proper name.”

“How is it pronounced?” Efram spoke from the far corner of the room.

“Each of the Atlantean symbols represents a syllable, a consonant preceded or followed by a vowel,” Katya replied. “The perched eagle is always Y and the vertical paddle W. I’d suggest one word reading ye-we or ya-wa, the vowel sounds short rather than long.”

“The Tetragrammaton!” Efram sounded incredulous. “The name that shall not be spoken. The First Cause of all things, the Ruler of Heaven and Earth.” As if by instinct he shied away from the images on the wall, his eyes averted and his head bowed reverentially.

“Yahweh.” Dillen sounded scarcely less astonished. “The principle name of God in the Hebrew Old Testament, the divine name only to be uttered by the high priest in the Tabernacle, in the holy of holies, on the Day of Atonement. In Greek it was ‘The Four-Lettered Word,’ the Tetragrammaton. The early Christians translated it as Jehovah.”

“The God of Moses and Abraham.” Efram slowly recovered his composure as he spoke. “A tribal god of the Sinai at the time of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, but he may have revealed himself much earlier. Unlike the other gods who tempted the Israelites, he was highly interventionist, uniquely effective on behalf of his worshippers and able to alter current events in their favour. He led them in battle and exile and gave them the Ten Commandments.”

“And saved them from the flood.”

The words came from Costas, who unexpectedly began to recite from the Book of Genesis.

Jack was aware of his friend’s Greek Orthodox upbringing and nodded slowly, the gleam of revelation in his eyes as he spoke.

“Of course. The Jewish God caused the land to be inundated and then signalled his pact with the chosen by revealing the rainbow. It’s just as we thought. The building of the ark, the selection of breeding pairs of animals, the diaspora of Noah’s descendants around the world. The ancient flood myths not only tell us about river inundations and the great melt at the end of the Ice Age. They also tell of another cataclysm, of a flood in the sixth millennium BC that consumed the world’s first city, extinguishing a precocious civilization unequalled for thousands of years to come. Plato is not the only source of the Atlantis story after all. It’s been staring at us all along, encoded in the greatest work of literature ever written.”