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

  “One piece of evidence, maybe not,” he said. “Two pieces, maybe not. But if all the evidence converges in Malta . . .”

  “Then Malta must be Atlantis,” I said.

  “Basically, I’d say that if there was an Atlantis, Malta has to be it.”

  This struck me as a very sensible perspective. Mifsud thumped a finger on a page in his cart-rut book. “Aha! See this?” He read aloud a passage stating that the ruts had been used for “transport of general agricultural and marine produce.”

  A red pickup truck pulled alongside us. Mifsud rolled down his window and shouted over the rain back and forth in Maltese with the driver, a teenage boy.

  “That’s the farmer’s son. He wants to lock the gate.” I hadn’t realized we were on a farm. “What do you think? Do we take the risk and have a look?” Mifsud already had one leg out the driver’s side door.

  We jogged out into the rain and onto a rocky moonscape pitted with divots. Clapham Junction, as it turned out. The ruts were indeed interesting, though a bit haphazard. They also seemed to have been carved exclusively in parallel pairs, probably by the constant friction of wheels or sled runners. They were a tiny fraction of the sizes Plato gave, perhaps large enough to float single-file armadas of bath toys.

  These were hardly the only problems with Mifsud’s theory. The cornerstone on which it was built, the manuscript written by Eumalos of Cyrene, had been linked by an eminent Maltese historian to a dubious “Atlantis stone” identified as a hoax in the 1830s. (A disagreement between Mifsud and a German researcher over this controversy later broke out on the Atlantipedia.) At the very least the manuscript written by Eumalos seemed suspiciously perfect.

  Mifsud’s hypothesis stood astride the line between crazy and just crazy enough to work. I probably should have pressed him on the Eumalos thing, and I definitely should have taken Tony’s advice and pushed him harder on the cart ruts.

  But in the moment, watching Mifsud standing there proudly smiling in the pouring rain, holding his hands up as if he’d just solved the mystery for me, I couldn’t help but think: If there was an Atlantis, why shouldn’t this be it?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Minoans Return

  Knossos, Crete (ca. 1900)

  Here was the problem: In terms of corroboration with Plato’s story, other rumored locations offered vastly more physical evidence than Malta. So much, in fact, that for a brief period a lot of reputable scientists believed that Atlantis had been found. Some still did.

  In 1883, as Ignatius Donnelly’s newly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World was establishing the mid-Atlantic as the likeliest location of Plato’s sunken island, a meeting took place in Athens that decades later would shift the focus of Atlantological studies back toward Greece.

  The host of this social engagement was Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of Troy and Mycenae, who welcomed into his custom-built neoclassical mansion Arthur Evans, a young English newspaper reporter recently chased out of the Balkans for stirring up opposition to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A year later Evans would be appointed keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, where he developed an interest in prealphabetic writing. This led him to the relic-rich island of Crete. An inheritance enabled Evans to acquire land and a permit to dig at a site near the city of Herakleion that had long intrigued scholars of ancient history. Schliemann had tried and failed to purchase it earlier. Considering Schliemann’s interest in myths, Crete would have been an obvious stop. According to legend, it was on Crete that King Minos had built an inescapable labyrinth beneath his palace at Knossos. Inside this maze lived the Minotaur, the half man, half beast who fed on the flesh of sacrificial Athenian youths and maidens.

  When the team Evans hired began excavating on March 23, 1900, he had a particular prize in mind. In his work at the Ashmolean, Evans had collected several ancient examples of what he believed was an unknown form of Cretan script, written in clay. On the eighth day of excavations, one of Evans’s laborers found an entire clay tablet inscribed with similar writing. By the end of that first season, more than a thousand complete and partial tablets had been discovered. Evans spent the next four decades trying, and failing, to decipher the mysterious script that he had named Linear B.

  The Linear B inscriptions were overshadowed by the discovery of an enormous palace, the hub of a sophisticated ancient culture. Its main building comprised hundreds of rooms built on several levels, a cabinet of archaeological wonders untouched for thirty-five hundred years: fragments of gorgeous wall paintings; large pithoi, or urns; a sophisticated plumbing system; more tablets inscribed with a second, previously unknown variety of indecipherable writing. A large chamber decorated with frescoes of griffins and anchored by a carved gypsum chair was dubbed the Throne Room. The entire structure had been severely damaged by some sort of natural disaster around 1450 BC. Taking inspiration from his hero Schliemann’s discovery at Troy, Evans declared that he had found Knossos, the palace of King Minos. Many centuries after their mysterious disappearance, Evans reintroduced to the world the people he called the Minoans.

  According to legend, Minos’s wife had been enchanted by Poseidon into mating with a bull and had given birth to the Minotaur. The bull theme seemed to be everywhere at Knossos, engraved into gemstones and gold signet rings, in ceremonial bull’s head–shaped vessels known as rhytons, and especially in the dramatic frescoes that covered the palace walls. One such painting, now among the most famous artworks from antiquity, is the Bull-Leaping Fresco, which depicts three young Minoans engaged in an activity that might make the steeliest matador wet his skintight pants. One girl stands in front of the bull, grabbing its horns, while another stands behind the animal, arms outstretched. The third youth, evidently a male acrobat, appears to be in the middle of executing a front flip over the beast.

  The bull theme at Knossos matched up with other Minoan finds. A pair of exquisite gold cups, known as the Vapheio Cups, had been discovered in a Bronze Age tomb just south of Sparta. One vessel was elaborately decorated with scenes similar to that in the Bull-Leaping Fresco. The other showed the netting of wild bulls. The second tableau echoed Plato’s description of the animals that ran free in the Temple of Poseidon in the center of Atlantis and the ten kings who “hunted the bulls, without weapons but with staves and nooses.”

  In February 1909, an article appeared in the London Times proposing that Evans’s finds might be connected to Atlantis. The anonymous writer argued that the Minoan empire had been “a vast and ancient power” so great that “it seemed to be a separate continent with a genius of its own.” Yet for unknown reasons the powerful maritime empire once centered at Knossos had collapsed during the Late Bronze Age. “It was as if the whole kingdom had sunk in the sea, as if the tale of Atlantis were true.”

  The author of the article later revealed himself to be K. T. Frost, a young professor at Queen’s University in Belfast. Frost’s initial reluctance to attach his name to his hypothesis may have been for professional reasons. The opinions of the late Benjamin Jowett, the Oxford tutor and classics scholar whose new translations of Plato’s dialogues sparked a sort of Platomania in Victorian Britain, were still hugely influential in all Platonic matters. Jowett had been one of the first academics who felt the need to tamp down the urge to take Atlantis seriously. In his introduction to a new translation of the Critias, he stated firmly that Plato had intended the Atlantis tale to be an allegory of the Persian Wars. “We may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato,” he wrote.

  Frost published a second essay four years later under his own byline. This time, he stressed the near certainty of a relationship between ancient Crete and Egypt. Minoan pottery had been found in Egypt, and representations of long-haired visitors wearing loincloths—typical signifiers of Cretans—appear in tomb paintings at the Theban Necropolis in Egypt. In one painting, the foreigners carry bull-themed gifts. To Frost, t
his was strong evidence that firsthand reports of the Minoan collapse had reached the Egyptians. “It is not impossible,” Frost wrote, “that Solon went to Egypt and learned what was in fact the Egyptian version of the overthrow of the Minoans, although he did not recognize it as such.” From this tale Solon might have composed notes for an epic poem, never completed, “the plot of which Plato knew and adapted to his own use.”

  Frost was less tentative in declaring that Plato had never intended the Atlantis story to be taken as historical fact. It was “geologically certain,” he wrote, that the most famous element of Plato’s story had to be fiction, since no vast island had been known to suddenly sink into the sea since the end of the last Ice Age.

  Frost died in World War I, and little was done to advance his theory until the 1930s, when the young Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos began working on the north coast of Crete. Marinatos noticed that some ancient structures seemed to have shifted when hit by a tremendous force. “What really piqued my interest,” he later wrote, “were the curious positions of several stone blocks that had been torn from their foundations and strewn toward the sea.” Even more intriguing was “a building near the shore with its basement full of pumice.”

  In 1937, Marinatos traveled to the Netherlands as a visiting professor at Utrecht University. There he had access to the extensive Dutch colonial records regarding the explosion of Krakatoa in the Indonesian archipelago on August 27, 1883. Krakatoa’s eruption had been heard more than two thousand miles away in Australia and ejected enough pumice to blot out the sun for a hundred miles in all directions. The deadliest effects of the blast came from the waves that followed—hundred-foot-high walls of water moving at speeds greater than fifty miles an hour toward oblivious coastal towns on the islands of Java and Sumatra. “In places they raged inland for one thousand yards and were still thirty feet high,” Marinatos wrote. More than thirty-six thousand people died, most of them victims of the tsunami.

  In 1939, Marinatos published an article in the British archaeological journal Antiquity that suggested that parts of Crete had been similarly destroyed by aftereffects of the eruption of Thera (or Santorini), a volcanic island roughly midway between Knossos and Athens. This explosion, he wrote, had pulverized part of the island, burying much of the rest in ash one hundred feet deep, obliterating the culture of the Therans and unleashing tidal waves and ashfall that smothered Crete. The distance from Thera to Crete is only seventy miles. Thera’s eruption, Marinatos estimated, had been four times as powerful as Krakatoa’s. When the volcanic cone collapsed into the sea, it could have created massive waves moving at two hundred miles an hour. Marinatos dated the cataclysm to 1500 BC. His theory had raised a fascinating new possibility—that the “great and widespread catastrophe” caused by the eruption of Thera had suddenly ended the Minoan civilization that had built the extraordinary palace of Knossos.

  A great sea power disappears suddenly due to a natural disaster—Marinatos certainly saw the possible correlation with Plato. He titled a 1950 essay expanding on his Minoan hypothesis “On the Legend of Atlantis.” The word legend, Marinatos explained, “means something mixed of historic and imaginary elements and above all something which became a glorious but dubious tradition,” as opposed to a fable, which is fabricated. “Plato’s imagination could not possibly have conjured up an account so unique and unusual to classical literature,” he wrote, turning Benjamin Jowett’s earlier opinion on its head.

  Marinatos believed the likeliest “historical core of a legend” in the Atlantis tale was that “a piece of land becomes submerged.” The most obvious example of such a sunken land was Thera. Marinatos thought that the Egyptians, faced with the sudden unexplained absence of their Cretan trading partners, had merged that disappearance with reports they might have received of a sunken island. Plato’s placement of Atlantis in a spot beyond the Pillars of Heracles, he felt, was an embellishment inspired by the sixth-century Phoenician sailors who circumnavigated Africa and returned with details of its mysterious Atlantic Coast. Marinatos hypothesized that perhaps the mysterious Sea Peoples had first attacked Mycenaean Greece and were repulsed before regrouping to invade Egypt. This might have inspired an oral tradition of the Athenians defeating a vast sea power.

  Marinatos was uncommonly willing to view the Atlantis portions of the Timaeus and Critias as worthy of scholarly analysis. He wisely sidestepped any discussion of Plato’s enigmatic numbers, other than to venture that the 1500 BC explosion of Thera transpired about nine hundred years before Solon’s visit to Saïs, “which the Saite priest projected tenfold into the abyss of the past.” Because of his growing stature as one of the world’s leading archaeologists—he had also by this time identified the famous mountain pass at Thermopylae, where three hundred Spartans had held off thousands of Persian invaders—none of his peers protested when Marinatos concluded that while the Atlantis tale wasn’t strictly factual, it had likely sprouted from a kernel of real history. To use the Hollywood vernacular, Plato’s Atlantis had been based on a true story. Marinatos knew well the value of publicity, even if he had to drop the problematic name of Atlantis in order to catch the press’s interest. The brilliantly noncommittal title of a slim book he later published shortly before his death, Some Words About the Legend of Atlantis, may be an indication of his attempt to have his baklava and eat it, too.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Front-runner

  Santorini, Greece, 1967

  In the early 1960s, the respected Greek seismologist Angelos Galanopoulos began tweaking Marinatos’s theory and refining it into what has become known in Atlantology as the Minoan Hypothesis. Minoan pottery had been found beneath the ash of Santorini, demonstrating a relationship with Crete. Galanopoulos proposed that the two had once comprised the single political entity that Plato describes as Atlantis. Plato’s capital city, with its concentric rings, matches Santorini’s distinctive bull’s-eye shape. One ancient name for Thera, Galanopoulos noted in his book Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend, was Strongyle, which means “round.” Galanopoulos argued that the rings Poseidon carved around Atlantis had actually been, prior to Thera’s eruption, “natural channels surrounding the central cone.” Nea Kameni, the relatively new and still-growing volcanic island at the center of Santorini’s donut-shaped caldera, had replaced an identical island that once held the temple of Poseidon. The shipping lane that bisected Plato’s circles (“from the sea they bored a canal . . . fifty stades in length,” Critias tells his friends) Galanopoulos believed was largely man-made and could still be seen in a sharply defined gap between modern Santorini’s two main islands. Santorini was filled with red, white, and black stone, just as Plato’s Atlantis had been. “The coincidences,” Galanopoulos wrote, “are too many and too strong to be accepted as accidental.”

  Perhaps the most clever element of Galanopoulos’s hypothesis was his explanation for Plato’s fantastic-seeming numbers. In translating the story for Solon, he wrote, the hieroglyphic symbol for 100 was mistakenly replaced with the sign for 1,000. With his simple mathematical trick, Galanopoulos eliminated the biggest anachronisms in Plato’s tale. Not coincidentally, his elegant solution also placed the disappearance of Atlantis at about 1500 BC—or almost exactly the time Marinatos pegged for the Thera explosion. By those same calculations, the fertile Atlantean plain shrank from two hundred miles long by three hundred miles wide down to twenty by thirty, which fit neatly into central Crete. (Plato’s thousand-mile-long canal enwreathing the plain was thus shrunk to a more manageable hundred miles long.) As for the matter of Santorini’s location far from the Atlantic Ocean, Galanopoulos argued that Plato’s words had been misinterpreted. “The identification of the Pillars of Hercules with the Straits of Gibraltar need not be taken too literally,” he explained, while shifting them to a convenient spot on the jagged southern edge of the Peloponnesus.

  To me, this multiple-of-ten business seemed too much like a magic bullet. A very skepti
cal Tony O’Connell had shown me a page from a history of numbers that pretty clearly demonstrated the hieroglyphic symbols for 100 and 1,000 looked nothing alike. Still, I figured I should double-check with an authority and so e-mailed Janet Johnson, a University of Chicago professor of Egyptology, who is arguably America’s leading expert on the ancient Egyptian language. She explained that a priest would likely have been writing in the hieratic or demotic script, which was more cursive than the hieroglyphs used in monuments—and illustrated in Tony’s book. “In both of those writing systems,” Johnson wrote me, “the 9 of 900 or 9,000 would look much the same; the difference would be in the ‘tail’ marking the hundreds or thousands. A practiced scribe would not likely make a mistake, but a Greek reading over his shoulder might, I suppose.”

  I checked Johnson’s Chicago Demotic Dictionary, and it was true. To my unpracticed eye the symbols for hundreds and thousands were virtually indistinguishable. When I showed Tony, even he agreed that a nonnative scribe taking down the words of the priest at Saïs or reading Solon’s notes might have mixed up the two.

  The folkloric evidence for a catastrophic event in the eastern Mediterranean around the year 1500 BC is surprisingly strong. As Werner Wickboldt had pointed out to me in Braunschweig, the Parian Marble dates Deucalion’s flood to 1528–27 BC. The fourth-century Christian scholar Saint Jerome dated the flood to 1460 BC. In The City of God, St. Augustine placed Deucalion’s flood during the lifetime of Moses, very loosely dated to the span between 1557 BC and 1437 BC. Galanopoulos believed that the Thera cataclysm not only had inspired the myths of Deucalion and Atlantis but also was the source material for the story of God parting the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape from Egypt, found in the book of Exodus.