Atlantis

CHAPTER 32

After carefully examining the rest of the inner sanctum, they filed back into the main chamber. They assembled at the far end around the mysterious metallic orb. Dillen emerged last and picked up a chisel from the debris on the table.

“This is bronze,” he said. “An alloy of copper and tin, smelted sometime prior to the abandonment of this room in the middle of the sixth millennium BC. An extraordinary discovery. Before today, archaeologists would have said bronze was first made around 3500 BC, possibly in Anatolia, and only became widespread during the following millennium.”

Dillen replaced the chisel and put his hands on the table.

“The question is, why did it take so long for bronze to reappear after the Black Sea flood?”

“Presumably the civilization of Atlantis developed in isolation,” Costas said, “and much faster than anywhere else.”

Jack nodded, and started pacing up and down. “At the right time, in the right circumstances, progress can be phenomenal. When the Ice Age ended ten thousand years ago, the southern Black Sea region was already rich in flora and fauna. Because the Bosporus was blocked, the great melt had only a limited effect. The soil around the volcano was highly fertile, the sea teemed with fish and the land with aurochs, deer and boar. Add to this the other natural resources we know about: timber from the mountain forests; salt from the coastal evaporation pans; stone from the volcano; gold, copper and, perhaps most significant of all, tin. It was a cornucopia, a Garden of Eden, as if some power had concentrated all the ingredients for the good life in one place.”

Costas was staring pensively at the corpulent figure of the mother goddess. “So,” he said, “a particularly dynamic band of hunter-gatherers move into this area about forty thousand years ago. They discover the labyrinth inside the volcano. The animal paintings in the hall of the ancestors are theirs, and this chamber is their holy shrine. At the end of the Ice Age they invent agriculture.”

“Good so far,” Jack said. “Only agriculture probably emerged about the same time across the entire Near East, an idea that cropped up more or less simultaneously and spread rapidly. Sophisticated Neolithic settlements existed elsewhere as early as the tenth millennium BC, most famously at Jericho in Palestine and Çatal Hüyük in southern Anatolia, the two sites that most closely parallel our Neolithic village off Trabzon.”

“OK,” Costas went on. “Like the people at the Anatolian site, the Atlanteans hammer copper but they take a giant leap forward and learn how to smelt and alloy the metal. Like the people of Jericho they create monumental architecture, but instead of walls and towers they build arenas, processional ways and pyramids. From about 8000 BC something incredible happens. A farming and fishing community transforms into a metropolis of fifty, maybe one hundred thousand people. They have their own script, a religious headquarters the equal of any medieval monastery, public arenas that would have impressed the Romans, a complex water supply system — it’s unbelievable.”

“And none of this happened anywhere else,” Jack said. He stopped pacing. “Çatal Hüyük was abandoned at the end of the sixth millennium BC and never reoccupied, possibly a result of warfare. Jericho survived but the fabled walls of biblical times were a pale shadow of their Neolithic precursors. While the Atlanteans were building pyramids, most of the Near East was just beginning to grapple with pottery.”

“And bronze, above all, must have facilitated such a prodigious development.” Mustafa leaned forward over the table as he spoke, his bearded face caught in the torchlight. “Think of all the uses for hard, sharp-edged tools that could be made into virtually any shape and then recycled. Without adzes and chisels no ark would ever have made it off the drawing board. Bronze tools were crucial for quarrying and stone-working and agriculture. Ploughshares, picks and forks, hoes and shovels, sickles and scythes. Bronze truly spurred a second agricultural revolution.”

“In Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, it also spearheaded the world’s first arms race,” Hiebermeyer remarked, wiping his glasses as he spoke.

“An important point,” Dillen said. “Warfare was endemic in the early states of Mesopotamia and the Levant, often as a result of the avarice of the elite rather than any real competition for resources. It’s a dangerous modern fallacy that warfare accelerates technological progress. The benefits of advances in engineering and science are far outweighed by the exhaustion of human ingenuity in devising methods of destruction. Perhaps by exercising total control over the production and use of bronze, the priests of Atlantis could prevent it being used for weapons.”

“Imagine a society with no warfare yet abundant access to bronze so soon after the Ice Age,” Hiebermeyer said. “It would have accelerated the development of civilization like nothing else.”

“So if the Atlanteans were alone in discovering how to produce bronze, was the knowledge somehow lost when Atlantis flooded?” Costas asked.

“Not lost, but kept secret,” said Dillen. “We need to return to Amenhotep, the Egyptian high priest in the temple scriptorium at Saïs. I believe he was a caretaker of knowledge, one in an unbroken succession stretching back five thousand years to the time of Atlantis. The first priests of Saïs were the last priests of Atlantis, descendants of the women and men who fled this very chamber and embarked on a perilous journey west to the Bosporus. Their role was to regulate human behaviour according to their interpretation of divine will. This they achieved not only by enforcing a moral code but also as guardians of knowledge, including knowledge they knew could be destructive. After Atlantis disappeared, my guess is they kept the secret of bronze for generation after generation, master to novice, teacher to pupil.” Dillen gestured towards the shimmering plaques on the walls.

“Here we have the entire corpus of knowledge of the priesthood of Atlantis, codified as a sacred text. Some knowledge was open to all, like the rudiments of agriculture. Some was the preserve of the priests, perhaps including medicinal lore.” He swept his arm towards the untranslated plaques to his left. “The rest we can still only guess at. There may be ancient wisdom in these writings the high priests kept exclusively to themselves, to be revealed only at a time appointed by the gods.”

“But surely the rudiments of bronze technology would have been common knowledge, available to all,” Costas insisted.

“Not necessarily.” Jack was pacing behind the orb. “When I flew the ADSA over the eastern quarter of the city I noticed something strange. I saw woodworking areas, stonemasons’ yards, pottery manufactories, kilns for drying corn and baking bread. But no forges or metalsmiths’ workshops.” He looked questioningly at Mustafa, whose doctoral thesis on early metallurgy in Asia Minor was the benchmark for the subject.

“For a long time we thought the tin used in the Bronze Age all came from central Asia,” Mustafa said. “But trace-element analysis of tools has pointed to mines in south-eastern Anatolia as well. And now I believe we are looking at another source, one that could never have been guessed at before this discovery.”

Jack nodded enthusiastically while Mustafa continued.

“Smelting and forging are not household activities. Jack is right that a community of this size would have required a substantial metal-working facility well away from the residential districts. A place where intense heat could be harnessed, heat conceivably from a natural source.”

“Of course!” Costas cried. “The volcano! The minerals brought up in the eruption must have included cassiterite, tin ore. It was a mine, a honeycomb of galleries that followed veins of ore deep into the bowels of the mountain.”

“And since the mountain was already hallowed ground,” Dillen added, “the priests could control access not only to the means of producing bronze but to an essential ingredient of it as well. They could erect a further barrier, too, a wall of piety. A priesthood exists because it professes an understanding of truths beyond the grasp of lay people. By consecrating bronze they could elevate metallurgy to a rarefied art.”

Jack stared intently at the table in front of him. “We’re standing on a catacomb of ancient technology, a protean forge worthy of the fire god Hephaistos himself.”

“So what actually happened at the time of the Black Sea exodus?” Costas asked.

“Now we come to the nub of the matter,” Dillen answered. “When the Bosporus was breached and the floodwaters rose, the people must have assumed the worst, that the end was nigh. Even the priests could not have come up with a rational explanation for the relentless approach of the sea, a phenomenon as supernatural as the rumblings of the volcano itself.”

He began to pace, his gesticulations throwing strange shadows onto the walls.

“To appease the gods they fell back on propitiatory sacrifice. Perhaps they dragged a giant bull up the processional way and cut its throat on the altar. When that failed they may have turned in desperation to the ultimate offering, to human sacrifice. They slew their victims on the preparation slab in the mortuary chamber and flung their bodies from the funerary ledge into the heart of the volcano.”

He paused and looked up.

“And then it happened. Perhaps a magma surge, maybe accompanied by a violent rainstorm, a combination that would have produced that remarkable vapour column and then a glorious rainbow. It was the long-awaited sign. A final mark was hastily scratched into the wall. Yahweh had not abandoned them after all. There was still hope. It convinced them to leave rather than await their doom.”

“And then they set off in their boats,” Costas said.

“Some took the shortest route to high land, east towards the Caucasus and south across the floodplain past Mount Ararat towards Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Others paddled west to the mouth of the Danube, some of their number eventually reaching the Atlantic coast. But I believe the largest group portaged round the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. They settled in Greece and Egypt and the Levant, some even as far west as Italy and Spain.”

“What did they take with them?” Efram asked.

“Think of Noah’s Ark,” Dillen responded. “Breeding pairs of domestic animals. Cattle, pigs, deer, sheep, goats. And bushels of seeds. Wheat, barley, beans, even olive trees and grape vines. But there was one item of immense significance they left behind.”

Costas looked at him. “Bronze?”

Dillen nodded gravely. “It’s the only possible explanation for the complete absence of bronze in the archaeological record for the next two thousand years. There would have been space in their boats to take their tools and implements but I believe the priests ordered them not to. Perhaps it was a final act of appeasement, an offering that would safeguard their passage into the unknown. They may even have thrown the tools into the sea itself, an offering to the force that had doomed their city.”

“But the priests took their knowledge of metallurgy,” Costas said.

“Indeed. I believe the high priests made a pact with their gods, a covenant if you like. After the omen gave them hope of escape they set to work with the greatest urgency copying out the words of their sacred text, transcribing the ten tablets onto sheets of beaten gold. We know their wisdom included the rudiments of agriculture and animal husbandry and stonemasonry, along with much else which will only be revealed when the translation is complete.” He glanced at Katya. “Each set of tablets was encased in a wooden coffer and entrusted to a high priest who accompanied each of the departing flotillas.”

“One group had an incomplete set,” Jack interjected. “The unfinished gold sheet in front of us, abandoned partway through copying the fourth tablet.”

Dillen nodded. “And I believe one group was larger than the others, including most of the high priests and their retinue. By despatching a copy of their sacred text with each group, the priests ensured their legacy would endure whatever befell the main flotilla. But their intention was to find a new holy mountain, a new Atlantis.”

“And you’re saying their descendants just sat on their knowledge for two thousand years,” Costas said incredulously.

“Think of the priests at Saïs,” Dillen replied. “For generation after generation they concealed the story of Atlantis, a civilization that perished eons before the first pharaohs came to power. As far as we know Solon was the first outsider made privy to their secrets.”

“And the priests had plenty to offer besides the mysteries of metallurgy,” Jack said. “They could still use their astronomical knowledge to forecast the seasons and prescribe the most propitious dates for sowing and harvesting. In Egypt they may have transposed their authority to the annual flooding of the Nile, a miracle that required divine intervention. The same was true in the other cradles of civilization where rivers inundated the land, the Tigris-Euphrates in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in Pakistan.”

“And we should not overlook what could well be a more direct legacy of bronze,” Mustafa added. “During the sixth and fifth millennia BC, workers in chipped flint and polished stone reached their pinnacle, producing exquisite knives and sickles. Some are so similar to metal forms they could have been made with the memory of bronze tools. At Varna on the coast of Bulgaria a cemetery has produced a dazzling array of ornaments in gold and copper. The site dates to before 4500 BC, so the first settlers could have been Atlanteans.”

“Nor should we forget language,” Katya said. “Their greatest gift may have been the Indo-European inscribed on those tablets. Theirs was the true mother tongue, the basis of the first written languages in the Old World. Greek. Latin. Slavonic. Iranian. Sanskrit. Germanic, with its descendant Old English. Their extensive vocabulary and advanced syntax boosted the spread of ideas, not only abstract notions of religion and astronomy but also more mundane matters. The clearest common denominator among Indo-European languages is vocabulary for working the land and animal husbandry.”

“Those abstract ideas included monotheism, the worship of one god.” Efram Jacobovich seemed in the throes of another revelation as he spoke, his voice tremulous with emotion. “In Jewish tradition we are taught that the Old Testament stories derive mainly from events of the late Bronze and early Iron Age, from the second and early first millennium BC. Now it seems they must incorporate a memory almost inconceivably older. The Black Sea flood and Noah. The golden tablets and the Ark of the Covenant. Even the evidence for sacrifice, possibly human sacrifice, as the ultimate test of fealty to God, evoking the story of Abraham and his son Isaac on Mount Moria. It’s all too much for coincidence.”

“Much that was once held true will need to be revised, much rewritten,” Dillen said solemnly. “A series of remarkable chances led to this discovery. The uncovering of the papyrus in the desert. The excavation of the Minoan shipwreck and the discovery of the golden disc, with its precious concordance of symbols. The translation of the clay disc from Phaistos.” He looked at Aysha and Hiebermeyer, Costas and Jack and Katya in turn, acknowledging the contribution of each. “A common thread runs through all of these finds, something which at first I dismissed as mere coincidence.”

“Minoan Crete,” Jack responded immediately.

Dillen nodded. “The garbled version of the Atlantis story from Plato seemed to refer to the Bronze Age Minoans, to their disappearance after the eruption of Thera. But by great good fortune the surviving fragment of papyrus showed Solon had recorded two separate accounts, one that did indeed refer to the cataclysm in the Aegean in the mid-second millennium BC but the other describing the disappearance of Atlantis in the Black Sea four thousand years earlier.”

“Events that were completely unconnected,” Costas interjected.

Dillen nodded. “I had assumed Amenhotep was giving Solon an anecdotal account of great natural catastrophes in the past, a list of civilizations lost to floods and earthquakes, something that pandered to the Greek taste for the dramatic. A century later the Egyptian priests fed Herodotus all manner of stories about bizarre goings-on in far-off places, some of them clearly spurious. But now I think differently. I have come to believe Amenhotep had a higher purpose.”

Costas looked perplexed. “I thought the only reason the priests were interested in Solon was his gold,” he said. “They would never have divulged their secrets otherwise, especially to a foreigner.”

“I now believe that was only part of the story. Amenhotep may have sensed the days of pharaonic Egypt were numbered, that the security which had allowed his forebears to carry their secrets for so many generations could no longer be counted on. Already the Greeks were establishing trading posts in the Delta, and only two centuries later Alexander the Great would storm through the land and sweep away the old order forever. Yet Amenhotep may also have looked hopefully at the Greeks. Theirs was a society on the cusp of democracy, one of enlightenment and curiosity, a place where the philosopher might truly be king. In the Greek world people might once again discover Utopia.”

“And the sight of the supplicant scholar may have rekindled memories of a fabled land over the northern horizon, an island civilization shrouded in legend that once held the greatest hope of resurrection for the priesthood.” Jack’s face lit up with excitement. “I too believe Amenhotep was a latter-day priest of Atlantis, a direct descendant of the holy men who guided a group of refugees five thousand years earlier to the shores of Egypt and shaped the destiny of that land. High priests, patriarchs, prophets, call them what you will. Other groups landed in the Levant, in western Italy where they were the forebears of the Etruscans and Romans, in southern Spain where the Tartessians were to flourish. But I believe the largest flotilla sailed no further than the Aegean.”

“The island of Thera,” Costas exclaimed.

“Before the eruption, Thera would have been the most imposing volcano in the Aegean, a vast cone dominating the archipelago,” Jack replied. “To the refugees the distant profile would have been startlingly reminiscent of their lost homeland. The latest reconstructions show the Thera volcano with twin peaks, remarkably similar to the view we first had of this island from Seaquest.”

“That monastery revealed in the cliffs of Thera after the earthquake last year,” Costas said. “Are you saying it was built by the Atlanteans?”

“Ever since the discovery of prehistoric Akrotiri in 1967 archaeologists have puzzled over why such a prosperous settlement had no palace,” Jack said. “Last year’s revelation proves what some of us thought all along, that the main focus on the island was a religious precinct that must have included a magnificent peak sanctuary. Our shipwreck clinches the matter. Its cargo of ceremonial accoutrements and sacred artefacts shows the priests possessed the wealth of kings.”

“But surely the wreck is Bronze Age, thousands of years later than the Black Sea exodus,” Costas protested.

“Yes, Akrotiri was a Bronze Age foundation, a trading emporium by the sea, but Neolithic pottery and stone tools have been found all over the island. The earliest settlement probably lay inland and upslope, a better location at a time when sea-raiding was rife.”

“What was the date of the monastery?” Costas asked.

“It’s astonishingly old, fifth to sixth millennium BC. You see how everything falls into place. As for the shipwreck, probably not just the gold disc but many other sacred artefacts on board will prove to have been much older, venerated heirlooms dating back thousands of years before the Bronze Age.”

“So how does Minoan Crete fit in?”

Jack gripped the edge of the table, his euphoria palpable.

“When people think of the ancient world before the Greeks and Romans, it tends to be the Egyptians, or the Assyrians and other Near Eastern peoples mentioned in the Bible. But in many ways the most extraordinary civilization was the one that developed on the island of Crete. They may not have built pyramids or ziggurats but everything points to a uniquely rich culture, wonderfully creative and perfectly attuned to the bounty of their land.” Jack could sense the mounting excitement in the others as they began to make sense of everything they had juggled in their minds since the conference in Alexandria.

“It’s difficult to visualize today, but from where we are now the Atlanteans controlled a vast plain that extended from the ancient shoreline to the foothills of Anatolia. The island of Thera is also highly fertile but too small to have sustained a population anything like this size. Instead the priests looked south, to the first landfall two days’ sail from Akrotiri, an immense stretch of mountain-backed coast that must have seemed like a new continent.”

“Crete was first occupied in the Neolithic,” Hiebermeyer commented. “As I recall, the oldest artefacts from under the palace at Knossos are dated by radiocarbon to the seventh millennium BC.”

“A thousand years before the end of Atlantis, part of the great wave of island settlement after the Ice Age,” Jack agreed. “But we already suspected another wave arrived in the sixth millennium BC, bringing pottery and new ideas about architecture and religion.”

He paused to marshal his thoughts.

“I now believe they were Atlanteans, colonists who paddled on from Thera. They terraced the valleys along the north coast of Crete, establishing vineyards and olive orchards and raising sheep and cattle from the stock they brought with them. They used obsidian which they found on the island of Melos and came to control as an export industry, just as the priests of Atlantis had controlled bronze. Obsidian came to be used in ceremonial gift exchanges that helped to establish peaceful relations all over the Aegean. For more than two thousand years the priests presided over the development of the island, exercising benign guidance from a network of peak sanctuaries as the population gradually coalesced into villages and towns and grew wealthy from agricultural surplus.”

“How do you explain the appearance of bronze more or less simultaneously across the entire Near East in the third millennium BC?” Costas asked.

Mustafa answered. “Tin was beginning to trickle into the Mediterranean from the east. It would have led to experimental alloying by coppersmiths all over the region.”

“And I believe the priests bowed to the inevitable and decided to reveal their greatest secret,” Jack added. “Like medieval monks or Celtic druids I think they were international arbiters of culture and justice, emissaries and intermediaries who linked together the developing nation states of the Bronze Age and maintained peace where they could. They saw to it that the legacy of Atlantis was a common currency in the culture of the region, with shared features as grandiose as the courtyard palaces of Crete and the Near East.”

“We know they were involved in trade from the shipwreck evidence,” Mustafa said.

“Before our wreck there had been three excavations of Bronze Age ships in the east Mediterranean, none Minoan and all of later date,” Jack went on. “The finds suggest it was the priests who controlled the lucrative metal trade, men and women who accompanied the cargoes on long-haul voyages to and from the Aegean. I believe that same priesthood first unveiled the wonders of bronze technology, a revelation orchestrated over the whole area but conducted in greatest earnest on the island of Crete, a place where careful nurture during the Neolithic had ensured conditions were right for a repetition of their grand experiment.”

“And then the multiplier effect.” Katya’s face seemed flushed in the torchlight as she spoke. “Bronze tools foster a second agricultural revolution. Villages become towns, towns beget palaces. The priests introduce Linear A writing to facilitate record-keeping and administration. Soon Minoan Crete is the greatest civilization the Mediterranean had ever seen, one whose power lay not in military might but in the success of its economy and the strength of its culture.” She looked across at Jack and nodded slowly. “You were right after all. Crete was Plato’s Atlantis. Only it was a new Atlantis, a utopia refounded, a second grand design that continued the age-old dream of paradise on earth.”

“By the middle of the second millennium BC, Minoan Crete was at its height,” Dillen said. “It was just as described in the first part of Solon’s papyrus, a land of magnificent palaces and exuberant culture, of bull-leaping and artistic splendour. The eruption of Thera shook that world to its foundations.”

“Bigger than Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens combined,” Costas said. “Forty cubic kilometres of fallout and a tidal wave high enough to sink Manhattan.”

“It was a cataclysm that reached far beyond the Minoans. With the priesthood all but extinguished, the entire edifice of the Bronze Age began to crumble. A world that had been prosperous and secure slid into anarchy and chaos, torn apart by internal conflict and unable to resist the invaders who swept down from the north.”

“But some of the priests escaped,” Costas interjected. “The passengers in our shipwreck perished but others made it, those who left earlier.”

“Indeed,” Dillen said. “Like the inhabitants of Akrotiri, the priests in the monastery took heed of some forewarning, probably violent tremors which seismologists think shook the island a few weeks before the cataclysm. I believe most of the priesthood perished in your ship. But others reached safe haven in their seminary at Phaistos on the south coast of Crete, and a few fled further to join their brethren in Egypt and the Levant.”

“Yet there was to be no new attempt to revive Atlantis, no further experiment with utopia,” Costas ventured.

“Already dark shadows were falling over the Bronze Age world,” Dillon said grimly. “To the north-east the Hittites were marshalling in their Anatolian stronghold of Boghazköy, a gathering storm that was to scythe its way to the very gates of Egypt. In Crete the surviving Minoans were powerless to resist the Mycenaean warriors who sallied forth from the Greek mainland, the forebears of Agamemnon and Menelaus whose titanic struggle with the east was to be immortalized by Homer in the siege of Troy.”

Dillen paused and eyed the group.

“The priests knew they no longer had the power to shape the destiny of their world. By their ambition they had rekindled the wrath of the gods, provoking once again the heavenly retribution that had obliterated their first homeland. The eruption of Thera must have seemed apocalyptic, a portent of Armageddon itself. From now on the priesthood would no longer take an active role in the affairs of men, but would closet itself in the inner recesses of sanctuary and shroud its lore in mystery. Soon Minoan Crete like Atlantis before it would be no more than a dimly remembered paradise, a morality tale of man’s hubris before the gods, a story that passed into the realm of myth and legend to be locked for ever in the mantras of the last remaining priests.”

“In the temple sanctum at Saïs,” Costas ventured.

Dillen nodded. “Egypt was the only civilization bordering the Mediterranean to weather the devastation at the end of the Bronze Age, the only place where the priesthood could claim unbroken continuity back thousands of years to Atlantis. I believe Amenhotep’s was the last surviving line, the only one still extant at the dawn of the classical era. And that too was doomed to extinction two centuries later with the arrival of Alexander the Great.”

“And yet the legacy endures,” Jack pointed out. “Amenhotep passed on the torch to Solon, a man whose culture held promise that the ideals of the founders could one day be resurrected.” He paused and then continued quietly, with barely suppressed emotion. “And now that sacred duty has fallen to us. For the first time since antiquity the legacy of Atlantis has been laid before mankind, not only what we have seen but untold wisdom not even Amenhotep could have divulged.”

They left the chamber and made their way slowly down the stairway towards the well of light at the bottom. On either side the carved figures of the priests and priestesses seemed to ascend past them, a solemn procession forever striving for the holy of holies.