Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read online

  The reason the Parian Chronicle was so interesting to Wickboldt was that its chronology seems to match several names and events that Plato mentions in the Timaeus and Critias. The priest at Saïs also names Cecrops as the oldest of Athenian kings and reports that Athens had been drowned three times since the sinking of Atlantis. The second of these floods was that of Deucalion, which the Parian Marble dates to 1478 BC. Even if the Parian dates aren’t precisely correct—as seems extremely likely—one of these deluges might be linked to the inundations of Athens and Atlantis. And if that were the case, other important details might be found outside of Plato’s work. But first one had to know where to look.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Pillars of Heracles

  Gibraltar

  If the concentric circles are Atlantis’s defining geological characteristic, then Plato’s careful placement of the lost kingdom opposite (or outside, or pro—Tony O’Connell had been correct when he warned me the translation of ancient Greek is not an exact science) the Pillars of Heracles is the number one geographic clue. Hard evidence of Atlantis was proving so difficult to come by—even evidence which, like the location of the Pillars, is debated by Atlantologists—that when I’d found myself with an extra day before departing Spain I couldn’t resist a sudden compulsion to see them.

  The trip south from Seville was strangely dreamlike, as long drives sometimes are when one travels alone. After an hour on a brand-new, empty toll road, I had passed fewer cars than I had gigantic windmills that looked like upturned boat propellers. I stopped for a coffee at a roadside cafe where at 9:00 A.M. a dozen men were drinking large brandies over ice and the proprietor’s wife was doing a brisk business selling bunches of fresh-picked asparagus as thick as my thigh.

  I followed the road signs toward Cádiz8 until the highway forked east, away from the Atlantic coast. Eventually, the hills of Andalusia flattened out into a road that wound through a series of southern Spanish towns: Los Barrios, San Roque, La Línea. And then suddenly, through the windshield, appeared one of the strangest sights on Earth: a fourteen-hundred-foot-high chunk of shale towering over the flat sea. I parallel-parked my car in Spain, dropped a few euros in the parking meter, and walked across the border into the United Kingdom.

  Gibraltar’s three square miles of overseas British territory are occupied primarily by the giant rock, with the remaining space essentially a 1950s London theme park. Double-decker buses carry British retirees around in circles, past red telephone booths and baton-twirling bobbies. Restaurants advertise fish and chips and full English breakfasts. On the day I arrived, banners everywhere saluted Queen Elizabeth II on her Diamond Jubilee. The British had been here for three hundred years; it was hard to imagine Gibraltar occupied by anyone else. But this coveted spot had been taken from the Spanish, who had in turn pushed out the Moors, the Islamic invaders who’d swept across the strait from Morocco and named the rock Jebel Tariq, or Mount of Tariq. Over time that name was corrupted into Gibraltar. The Vandals and Visigoths had taken the rock from the Romans, who’d taken it from the Carthaginians; Hannibal crossed his elephants near here on his way to attacking Rome.

  The first recorded occupiers of Gibraltar were the mysterious Phoenicians, who built nearby a temple to the legendary Melqart, a hero associated with voyages to distant lands. The Greeks adopted Melqart as the god they called Heracles for their own worship before passing him on to the Romans. To the Greeks, Heracles was not just a traveler but also a strong man, a son of Zeus who was required to fulfill twelve labors as penance for a horrible crime. Among these labors was one with possible links to Atlantis: a journey to an island in the far west called Erytheia—a land that several pre-Platonic writers had equated with Tartessos and the lands beyond the Pillars. Here Heracles defeated the three-bodied giant Geryon and stole his cattle. In one Greek version of the Geryon myth, the Pillars mark the farthest and westernmost point of all Heracles’s travels.

  In the spirit of Herculean tasks, I decided to walk up to the top of the Rock rather than take the cable car. Halfway up, I was greeted by a group of small Gibraltar apes, the only such primates on the European continent and, some have suggested, possible descendants of those that King Arganthonios once sent from Tartessos back to Hiram of Tyre. Seeing that I had no food to share, they turned heel and abandoned me for a minivan discharging a load of sunburned Brits. At the very top of the Rock I paid five euros to enter the special Pillars of Hercules viewing area, marked by the ugliest piece of public statuary I’d ever seen. It appeared to be a gigantic two-columned Soviet bowling trophy.

  The view across, however, was astounding. Through a light haze I could see Jebel Musa, the twin pillar of rock on the coast of Morocco. (Some believe that Gibraltar’s less famous African partner was Monte Hacho, a similar rock farther east.) It wasn’t hard to imagine that this spot would have marked the end of the known world, or that whoever held it would have possessed a huge strategic advantage at a time when most great Mediterranean powers were built on strong navies. Greek knowledge of what lay beyond the Straits was certainly limited in Plato’s time. Herodotus wrote, “I have never seen nor, despite my efforts, been able to learn from anyone whether there is an ocean beyond Europe.” This ignorance was due at least in part to the Carthaginians severely restricting their access to passage through the Pillars starting around 500 BC. It’s possible that Plato heard false information that the Carthaginians, who ruled the western Mediterranean during his lifetime, had spread about what lay in the unknown ocean. Plato could have heard these tales while visiting Syracuse, since Carthage also controlled half of Sicily.

  There was another possibility that I knew I had to face. Perhaps Plato was talking about another of the many sets of Pillars that Tony O’Connell had mentioned. If Plato had been referring to, say, the Bosphorus connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, or the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the toe of Italy’s boot (which Tony thought was likely), then Atlantis could have existed much farther east. If that were true, it would be hard to find a stronger candidate than one particular group of islands just south of Sicily, rich in myth and history, that had been well-known to the ancient Greeks centuries before Plato’s time.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Mysterious Island

  Malta

  A question occurred to me staring down at the blue Mediterranean from my window seat on Air Malta. Even if someone proved tomorrow that the Maltese archipelago had been Plato’s Atlantis, would that discovery squeeze onto a list of the top five strange-but-true facts about Malta? Perhaps not. The oldest known structures in Europe can be found on Malta’s two main islands, although geologically the islands are actually part of Africa (and sit farther south than Tunis). Malta’s thriving population vanished around 2500 BC for unexplained reasons. The apostle Saint Paul, who’d been blinded by a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, shipwrecked in Malta in AD 60, on his way to what would be his martyrdom in Rome. The Knights of Saint John, a still-extant religious order that dates back to the eleventh-century Crusades, were granted Malta as their private headquarters in 1530 by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, to whom they paid an annual tribute of one Maltese falcon. The knights’ presence did not dissuade Turkish invaders from attacking the Maltese island of Gozo in 1551 and dragging all five thousand of its residents off into slavery. Even today, Malta is home to unsolved mysteries. Judging from my nonscientific observations, it has the world’s highest per capita rates of fat men and beautiful women.

  I was welcomed to Malta by a familiar face. Since the mental image I’d kept of Tony O’Connell was of him bundled up in a sweater against the chilly Irish spring, it was a little hard to recognize the man who greeted me in the blinding sunshine outside the baggage terminal in sandals and shorts. He seemed to be in an excellent mood. “I don’t suppose you’ve found Atlantis already,” he said. “If you have, Anton certainly won’t be too pleased.”

  Anton was Dr. Anton M
ifsud, full-time pediatrician and part-time Atlantologist. Mifsud was the preeminent proponent of the theory that Malta was the original site of Atlantis and had published a well-argued book to support it. Tony kept a small apartment in the Saint Julian’s Bay neighborhood (Malta’s climate was beloved by northern Europeans) and had become friends with Mifsud through their shared interest. Tony had sent me a copy of Mifsud’s book, Malta: Echoes of Plato’s Island. He had arranged for the three of us to have dinner once Mifsud returned from his rounds.

  At Tony’s apartment he and I looked through photos of his and Paul’s civil partnership ceremony. Tony pointed out the new $100 suit he’d purchased for the occasion. “Ah, look at that old potato-head,” he said, pointing to himself. “We went out to the pub that night and everyone was lovely. Even the village homophobe wished us well.”

  Mifsud, I learned that evening, was the sort of pediatrician who got up each day at 4:00 A.M. to ride his bike for two hours (he was an exception to my fat Maltese men theory), then made house calls for twelve hours, driving all over the main island. He was in his early sixties, bald with a neatly trimmed goatee, and wore small rimless eyeglasses. Even after a full day of battling Malta’s awful traffic and inoculating screaming toddlers, he vibrated with the energy of a teenage boy. Mifsud cackled at his own jokes and had the infectious habit of affirming his own statements. A single “yes?” at the end of a sentence meant “Do you follow me?” The declarative “yes” served as an exclamation point. The double “Yes? Yes!” conveyed the feeling of “I know—I couldn’t believe it either!”

  The evening was warm. We sat at a table near an open window and ordered drinks. I asked Mifsud how a busy physician had become attracted to Atlantis.

  “There was a friend of mine; he told me he was investigating the angle that Malta was Atlantis. It had been ingrained in me the idea that Atlantis was a myth, yes? Of course I laughed in his face. I wasn’t expecting him to be such a nerd. He said, ‘I thought you were a scientist. Scientists are not biased.’ So I said, ‘In three weeks I will prove to you that Malta could never have been Atlantis.’ That was in 1999 and I have been investigating since!”

  In 2000, Mifsud published Echoes with the help of his son and two friends. Its preface offers a sort of manifesto for serious, but uncredentialed, Atlantologists. The best type of archaeologist to search for Atlantis, he explains, is neither the quack nor the professional but the amateur whose “principal motivation is to search for the truth” rather than perpetuating the “preconceived notions” of the Establishment.

  The truth as Mifsud had deduced it was this: Thousands of years ago, Malta had been a much larger landmass but had shrunk due to rising sea levels. Between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Mediterranean’s oldest known temple-building civilization lived in the Maltese archipelago. After this society’s sudden demise due to a probable natural disaster around 2200 BC according to Mifsud, the Egyptians recorded in their temples memories of the lost culture of Malta. These stories were then passed along to Solon as the accounts that became Plato’s Atlantis tale.

  Part of what made Mifsud’s theory intriguing was the extraordinary amount of original research he’d done. If he had a native Maltese’s tendency to root for the home team, he also had a philologist’s passion for finding the earliest possible sources. “No one ever looks at the original Greek,” Mifsud said. “Unfortunately, every time a manuscript is copied, the editor puts his own interpretation on it. Plato wrote in 360 BC. His manuscript probably ended up in the library at Alexandria. In 400 AD, it was transferred to Constantinople”—the new capital of Western thought after the fall of Rome and banning of pagan temples in Alexandria—“and stayed there until about 1450, when Constantinople was taken and the manuscripts returned to Europe. Most of them were taken by the Medicis and they commissioned this guy, Marsilio Ficino, to translate the Greek into Latin.” The Medicis had sponsored a school in Florence, based on Plato’s Academy, that was one of the primary catalysts of the Italian Renaissance. Its members, led by Ficino, produced new Latin translations of all Plato’s works. “And I have that one now, the earliest version. Yes? Yes! I saw it at an exhibition in Florence.”

  The most obvious problem with the Malta-as-Atlantis theory is the location of the Pillars of Heracles. Malta sits much closer to Athens than to the Strait of Gibraltar. Mifsud asked a classics professor at the University of Malta for his interpretation of Plato’s description and was very pleased with the result. “The words Plato uses are Steles of Hercules,” Mifsud told me. A stele is a stone slab, inscribed or decorated, like the warrior stele Richard Freund had gotten excited about in Spain. “The proper word for pillars is something else. So the Steles of Hercules are not the Pillars of Hercules. Even if they were the Pillars of Hercules, the Pillars are only recently situated at the Strait of Gibraltar.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you where I got it from—I went to Herculaneum!” Because even the most durable papyrus becomes brittle and disintegrates after a few centuries, the Herculaneum papyri are some of the few premedieval manuscripts that exist. Hundreds of blackened cylinders were found during the excavation of a wealthy Roman’s villa that was buried under a hundred feet of ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. (The same eruption smothered Pompeii.) These rolls turned out to be a vast library of Greek and Roman literature. Since the villa was excavated in the 1750s, hundreds of these delicate manuscripts have been deciphered. “Three of the papyri”—by authors other than Plato—“show that the Pillars of Hercules were situated in the central Mediterranean,” Mifsud said.

  Appetizers arrived. “Dig in, lads, and grab something,” Tony said, pushing the plate in our direction. “Whoever wants the prawn can have it.”

  Mifsud continued. “There is another manuscript that confirms Plato, yes? Yes! Eumalos of Cyrene.”

  “It’s true; he did,” Tony said, nodding in agreement. Eumalos of Cyrene was an obscure source who aside from a few brief mentions in nineteenth-century literature, only Mifsud, of all the Atlantologists, seemed to know about. (Mifsud had discovered him in an appendix to an 1830 guide to Malta, written in Italian.) Eumalos was a Greek copyist living in North Africa two or three generations after Plato’s lifetime. According to the 1830 appendix, Eumalos once transcribed a text stating that “the famous . . . Ogyge was the king of Atlantis, the island that once existed between Libia and Sicily and was submerged. This large island was known as Decapolis, Atlantika, by our forefathers of Cyrene as well as by the ancient Greeks.” Ogyge (usually called Ogyges) lent his name to Ogygia, the island where Odysseus is kept by the nymph Calypso in the Odyssey. Several ancient writers hypothesized that Ogygia was actually Malta, which the guidebook’s translation of Eumalos notes “is nothing more than the summit of the Mount of Atlantika.”

  If the translation of the Eumalos manuscript was real, it was an incredible piece of evidence—a contemporary of Plato sending a certified letter from twenty-four hundred years ago saying, essentially, “Atlantis was real, and it was Malta. Best regards, Eumalos of Cyrene.” Unfortunately, there was no way to confirm the credibility of Eumalos any more than one could confirm Solon’s notes from Saïs, regardless of how enthusiastic Mifsud was about him. The good doctor may have been a man of science, but he did gravitate toward interpretations that favored Malta. I later called a retired classics professor who’d written a book about the Pillars of Heracles. He’d never heard of Eumalos, he insisted stele and pillar meant the same thing for the purposes of Atlantis, and he saw only two logical reasons for Plato to refer to the Pillars of Heracles: Either he literally meant the Strait of Gibraltar or he metaphorically meant a spot beyond the edge of the known world.

  “Anyway, I know that Tony favors the Michael Hübner hypothesis,” Mifsud said, and winked at me. Hübner was the German Atlantologist who had used data analysis of Plato’s descriptions to narrow down the possible locations for Atlantis. I’d seen his presen
tation online, and it was impressive. Hübner believed Atlantis had existed along Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

  Tony sighed and tilted his head toward Mifsud. “What I said was that Hübner presented his case very well. There is one thing in there that really annoys me. Well, a number of things.”

  One of the things Hübner’s theory lacked—that virtually all Atlantis theories lacked—was a reasonable explanation for the checkerboard canals that Plato describes. For Mifsud, this was an ace to play. One of Malta’s chief mysteries is an enormous network of crisscrossing tracks, known as cart ruts, etched deep into its soft limestone. They are believed to be at least four thousand years old and are found all over the main island and its satellite, Gozo. Some cart ruts appear to run between temples; others disappear into the sea. They have defied explanation for centuries. (Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken suggested they are evidence of alien takeoffs and landings. Perhaps Malta was a hub for extraterrestrials making connecting flights to Mu.) Mifsud was convinced that these were the remnants of the incredible irrigation system that brought water from the mountains to Atlantis’s fertile plain, as Plato described it.

  “In Malta there are two archaeologists who give a function to the cart ruts,” Mifsud said. “One says they were used for the transport of agricultural produce. The other says they were also used for the transport of water, exactly as Plato said. Yes!”