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

  “I don’t care what she said,” said Tony. “We’ve been over this. She’s wrong.”

  “If archaeologists are stating something that fits into the theory, why fight with the archaeologists?” Mifsud said.

  “How can water flow uphill?” Tony asked.

  “An uphill is also a downhill!”

  “Here’s a question for both of you,” I said. “Did the dates we got from Plato arrive to us uncorrupted, or did someone screw them up a little along the way?”

  “No, no, no,” said Mifsud. “I think Plato meant what he said about the nine thousand years, and this I say on the strength of a manuscript I found in the Vatican Secret Archives. I can’t talk about it but it was really trustworthy.” The Vatican Secret Archives, while not actually as secret as their cloak-and-dagger name implies (researchers can petition for access), are said to contain more than fifty miles of shelving containing items going back to the early Middle Ages.

  “You also have the fact that Plato mentions nine thousand or eight thousand years, two or three times,” Tony said. “So it would have had to be corrupted or interfered with on a number of occasions rather than just a slip of a pen.”

  “What if Solon or the priest at Saïs just got it wrong?” I asked. “Maybe one of them hadn’t slept well or had whatever awful food poisoning you could get in 600 BC. The ancient Egyptians drank beer, right? Maybe they were hungover.”

  “Basically, we have to work with what we’ve got: Plato’s writings,” Tony said. “You can speculate all you like and still it’s only speculation. Obviously some degree of reinterpretation is required, and that’s it. There’s nothing else you can do. Anton is bringing in corroboration from other sources that enhances his interpretation.”

  “There are people who say, ‘Plato didn’t mean this; he meant something else,’” Mifsud said. “And if we do that we can make a dog into a cat. So I wouldn’t want to tinker with anything that Plato said.”

  This wasn’t entirely accurate. As with his reinterpretations of Plato’s words Pillars of Heracles and their location, Mifsud was willing to correct information that he felt others had gotten wrong. His explanation for the nine thousand years was that Plato had actually used the Greek word for seasons.

  “Plato says Egyptian art started ten thousand years ago, but it didn’t. It started at the beginning of the dynasties, 2900 BC, yes?” The start of the Second Dynasty, which most people would recognize as “classical” Egypt, has been dated to approximately 2890 BC. (Mifsud had spent several weeks traveling in western Egypt and coauthored an engrossing book about a mysterious Egyptian statuette found in Malta in 1713. His output as a part-time writer was enviable, and I half hoped his productivity was pharmaceutically induced, and that he might have some extra samples of whatever he was taking.) Mifsud had also sponsored three carbon datings on Malta that showed some sort of cataclysm, possibly a tsunami, had hit the islands in 2200 BC.

  The year 2200 BC is another big question mark in ancient history. Around that time, for unknown reasons, societies collapsed more or less simultaneously in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, Palestine, the Indus Valley, and possibly China. A gap appears in Malta’s archaeological record as well. Mifsud used information from the writings of the second-century-BC Roman historian Aemilius Sura to date precisely the fall of Atlantis in Malta. “If you use his dates, you get 2198 BC. Yes! I’m proposing 2200 BC. Is that too good? Just two years!”

  Mifsud had recently returned from his trip to the Vatican archives, searching for definitive proof of the Eumalos manuscript.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked.

  “No. I did find other interesting things. Like the death of one of the popes. There was an autopsy and I found it.”

  “You found an autopsy?” Pope John Paul I’s sudden death in 1978 had inspired some Atlantis-quality speculation of its own at my Catholic school, largely based on the church’s insistence that Vatican protocol prohibited papal autopsies. Perhaps Mifsud had stumbled onto an older, equally juicy mystery. “Was there foul play?” I asked.

  “No. This pope, they found a perforated duodenal ulcer. Because he was a man who liked to eat and drink.” Mifsud held his hands out to indicate a full papal belly. “Hee hee! I asked for photocopies and they did it, two pages.”

  “Another conspiracy theory disproven,” Tony said.

  “Are there things about the original Atlantis story that ring true to you?” I asked. I was thinking of Juan Villarias-Robles’s notion of stripping away the contaminants to reach the original core of information. “To me, what sounds right are the mountains, the muddy shoals, the circular harbor, and the location outside the Pillars.”

  “Why do you say ‘mountains’?” Mifsud asked, sounding a little defensive. “Plato said montes, which can mean either a mountain or a hill. He said there were settlements on top of them—far more likely on a hill. You don’t need a mountain to shield a plain.” He looked at Tony, who was shaking his head dubiously. “He’s still not convinced.”

  I wasn’t convinced, either. Plato had obviously described a range of majestic peaks, and the highest mountain anywhere near Malta was Etna in Sicily, sixty miles away. When I asked about the concentric rings, Mifsud gave a somewhat evasive answer about how they had “fragmented.”

  But here we came to a point that is rarely raised among Atlantologists, even if the general public takes it as a given: Any remnants of Atlantis are likely to be found underwater. Malta had probably been connected to Sicily ten thousand years ago when the Ice Age ended. The relatively few miles of Mediterranean that now separate the islands are quite shallow. According to one recent geological survey, the site of Malta’s coastal capital, Valletta, had been six miles inland twenty thousand years ago. Mifsud argued that the muddy shoals of Atlantis that Plato described are the same as the Sands of Syrtis, the shallow seas near the coast of North Africa. If you look at a map of the Mediterranean, you can see it is essentially two seas, with the western half much farther north than the eastern. According to Greek mythology, the Pillars with which Heracles had marked the limit of the known world bore the words NEC PLUS ULTRA—nothing further beyond. Because Malta sits almost exactly at the midpoint, it’s possible that in 2200 BC it had marked a dangerous point past which little was known.

  I wanted to see Malta’s temples, and Mifsud, after a brief consultation of his calendar, agreed to schedule me into his Saturday afternoon, between individual visits to his four daughters, barring any pediatric emergencies. After dinner Tony and I stopped for a beer. Tony urged me to push Mifsud on the cart ruts. “Those ruts are his blind spot.”

  • • •

  Tony was heading back to Ireland, so after I spent a night on his couch he helped me move my things over to a bed-and-breakfast that he informed me, with some delight, was a former brothel. That afternoon I caught the bus to the capital city of Valletta, named after Jean Parisot de la Vallette, a grandmaster of the Knights of Saint John. He had planned the city’s construction in 1566, a year after the order had withstood the onslaught of the Great Siege of Malta. Not surprisingly, Valletta was laid out with defense in mind and still felt like a fortress. Its backstreets were narrow and shadowed, even at midday. As I walked toward the National Museum of Archaeology, housewives lowered baskets from their apartments down to produce sellers on the sidewalks below, as if too busy watching for marauders to leave their posts for the grocery store.

  A major reason why Malta is frequently floated as a site for Atlantis is that it is home to some of the oldest stone monuments in the Mediterranean region. Judging from the exhibits I saw at the archaeology museum, seemingly every time a new road was cut in Malta, an important prehistoric site was uncovered. Malta’s earliest settlements have been dated to 5200 BC and some of its more impressive stone temples predate the Great Pyramids of Egypt by a thousand years. The architectural style of these megaliths is unlike that seen anywhere else.
/>   I was primarily interested in the cart ruts. An entire room was devoted to them at the museum, including a life-size diorama of imitation grooves cut into fake stone, surely one of the world’s least interesting exhibits not sponsored by an agricultural council. A video playing on an endless loop showed the world’s preeminent cart rut expert, Dr. David Trump, standing at a spot known as Clapham Junction, ignoring (from my perspective, anyway) the controversy over whether they were the canals of Atlantis and asking instead whether they had been worn into the stone by wheels or by the runners of sledges. On the video Clapham Junction looked like a shopping mall parking lot after a heavy snowstorm, covered in deep intersecting tire tracks.

  On my way out of the exhibit I noticed a display named “The Significance of Cartruts in Ancient Landscapes.” One of its screens flashed a message that seemed to have been written by someone wearing a monocle and a too-tight ascot:

  The current intellectual debate over cart-ruts in the Maltese Islands is markedly divided between those who base their arguments on an academic/scientific basis and others who divert from the ethics of academia and delve into speculative tabloid sensationalism.

  I told Mifsud about this oblique challenge to his sleuthing the next day when he picked me up in front of my ex-brothel lodgings in his Opel Corsa. He wasn’t surprised. “People don’t like amateurs to meddle in archaeology. They think, why don’t you stick to your medicine?” He said he had archaeologist friends who admitted they agreed with some of his unorthodox ideas but couldn’t go on record publicly.

  The Mediterranean rainy season had just begun, and the sky darkened quickly as we drove. Mifsud fiddled with the radio looking for a weather report. Almost everyone in Malta spoke English, and most people spoke Italian, too, but the Maltese language sounded nothing like either language, or any other I’d ever heard. “Our language is basically Semitic,” Mifsud explained. “Originally it was Phoenician, and then we integrated with Muslims. There was no written form until about 1700.”

  We were heading toward the southwest coastline, where the most impressive megalithic temples are located. “Colin Renfrew, a professor of archaeology at Cambridge, established that the Maltese temples are the oldest in the world. He suggested that they are arranged in groups—one of them is aligned with the equinoxes,” Mifsud told me. I’d seen an interview with Renfrew in which he seemed sincerely baffled by the fact that Malta’s temples were virtually unknown despite the radiocarbon dating showing they were the oldest known free-standing structures in the world.

  Mifsud’s theory rested on the idea that thousands of years ago Malta had been much larger—large enough to hold a plain of Atlantean proportions. “Plato describes channels that are all over the plains, yes?” He pulled over—the Maltese drive on the left—and pointed to a rock bluff jutting out of the Mediterranean about two miles off the coast. “That island is called Filfla. The Turkish military used to use it for target practice. There are cart ruts that lead there from the main island. That shows that Filfla was occupied before the sea rose.”

  We pulled into the parking lot of the museum next to the Hagar Qim temple. “It looks like we’ll get some rain,” Mifsud said, opening the hatchback. “We’ll do the museum first. I’ll bring the umbrella.”

  Mifsud bounded up the steps to the museum and had already paid our admissions by the time I caught up to him. The first exhibit caught his attention. “There it is! The lizard!” He took a very expensive-looking camera out of his backpack and snapped a photo of a photo of a Podarcis filfolensis, a species of lizard found only on the Maltese islands and the nearby Pelagian islands. In his Atlantis book, Mifsud makes a convincing case that the lizard’s dispersal proved the islands had once been connected as one landmass. Even Tony agreed that this was solid evidence.

  We next stopped in front of some spirals carved into ancient stones. They looked a lot like the concentric circles on the Tartessian stele that Richard Freund had made so much of, but Mifsud paused only to point out, proudly, that while the legendary archaeologist Arthur Evans had said that Maltese spirals were imitations of those on Crete, the opposite now seems to be the case.

  The next room held a tabletop scale model of the megaliths. Mifsud noted various impressive features. “These are the temples of the gods. The two main ones represent the sun and the moon. Let’s go see them for real!” He placed a hand on my arm. “It’s about five hundred meters walking uphill. Is that okay for you? Are you fit?”

  We made the hike up to the temples, which were covered by what looked like a circus big top with open sides, there to protect the megaliths from the elements. The pockmarked limestone had been eroded by exposure to the salt air. “Since they were excavated the temples have been nearly eaten away,” Mifsud said. What remained was fascinating, though.

  The two temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra were each believed to have been constructed at least five thousand years ago. Their walls are rounded and the structures are subdivided into several rooms. Remnants of ancient animal sacrifices—like those the ten princes of Atlantis performed on their pillar of orichalcum—have been found near multiple altars. Some of these had been constructed with astronomical alignments. At sunrise on the summer solstice, Mifsud told me, a thin beam of light illuminates one of the temples at Mnajdra. Very Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  “The sun rises and it just shoots down here!” Mifsud said. “I’ve seen it; the sun shines right here onto the altar.”

  “Wow. So do you think this was Plato’s Temple of Poseidon?” These magnificent buildings were more ancient than Stonehenge, almost three thousand years old when Plato was in Syracuse, less than a hundred miles away on Sicily. Trade between the two islands had gone on since before recorded history, so ancient lore could easily have spread in either direction.

  “Was this the Temple of Poseidon? Mmm, no.” Mifsud believed that the megaliths remaining on Malta had been those Plato described in the Critias as the “many temples built and dedicated to many gods,” not the main buildings at the center of Atlantis. “The greater part of Plato’s island lies on the seafloor,” he told me.

  The sky was threatening and we had yet to make our most important stop, so we hurried back to the Corsa and sped off down the coastal highway. Gigantic raindrops started to fall, first steadily splashing the windshield like water balloons, and then in buckets. In two minutes the steeply inclined road became a river, and we were pushing against the current. Mifsud turned to me and said in what I imagined was his concerned clinician’s voice, “I think perhaps we shouldn’t go outside, with the lightning. Probably not a good idea to be driving, either.” We turned onto an unpaved private road and parked in the middle of a barren, rocky area. “I’m sorry but I don’t think we will be able to see the ruts up close,” he said. “Maybe you can get a look from here, yes?”

  The Corsa’s windows had steamed up completely; we might have been in a submarine. I rolled down my window halfway and my lap was immediately drenched. I thought that I could sort of see something off in the distance, maybe. Mifsud hummed as he flipped through a much-annotated book about the cart ruts. I asked a few questions about how Malta matched up, or didn’t, with Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis. Where the evidence was strong, as with the local preponderance of ancient bull cults that might relate to the sacrificial ceremony performed by the kings of Atlantis, he expounded. When the evidence was weak, as with the concentric circles, he downplayed. When he didn’t have an obscure ancient source to back up his theories, he had inventive solutions. I asked about the black, red, and white stone Plato had described in Atlantis.

  “My daughter the architect pointed out to me one day, ‘Daddy, that rock is red because it faces north and grows lichen. That rock is black because of fungus. And the new stone from the quarry is white!’” Not a bad explanation, except virtually all the building stone on Malta seemed to be the same color: yellow.

  “What about the elephants?” I asked.
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br />   “The elephants! Yes! But I can’t talk about that because it’s in my next book.” Mifsud had shown me the outline for the book on his iPad, a constellation of documents and photos and notes compressed onto one slim device. My own Atlantis library, like Tony O’Connell’s, now filled an entire office. I asked again about his 2200 BC date.

  “The Eumalos manuscript cites specifically the date 2200 BC, which was the reign of King Ninus of Babylon. That date was confirmed for me by carbon dating.”

  When Mifsud had mentioned 2200 BC at dinner with Tony, the date had sounded familiar. Doing a little web research on my lumpy bed at the ex-brothel, I remembered why. A group of scientists at Columbia University had demonstrated that the powerful Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia had collapsed due to sudden climate change. The resulting drought had lasted three hundred years and had been preserved in the epic poem “The Curse of Akkad,” which lamented,

  For the first time since cities were built and founded,

  The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,

  The inundated tracts produced no fish,

  The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,

  The gathered clouds did not rain.

  Like most such works, “The Curse of Akkad” had long been considered fiction, even though a similar poem had been written in Egypt around the same time. Mifsud believed that the unexplained societal collapses around the Mediterranean circa 2200 BC—including the one in Malta—were related to the fall of Atlantis.

  “Eumalos also gives the precise location of Atlantis, between Sicily and Libya,” Mifsud continued. “It would be right in the middle here.” Mifsud took my pen and notebook and scribbled a map of the western Mediterranean. I was amused to see that his physician’s handwriting was utterly illegible. He handed the notebook back to me. Malta/Atlantis was at the center, roughly equal in size to Italy and Africa, according to the sketch—the proper place and proportions from a Maltese point of view.