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

  Papamarinopoulos is a professor of geophysics at the University of Patras, one of the best universities in Greece. “My job is to find ancient cities through geophysics, by means of software and computers,” he explained as we rode along the coast in the backseat of the taxi. His accomplishments were impressive. He had helped Dora Katsonopoulou find Helike using magnetometry to map beneath the site and conducted seismic surveys to prove that a fantastic-seeming story from Herodotus—that the Persian king Xerxes had ordered his men to dig a canal across the Mount Athos peninsula wide enough for two warships to pass each other—was true. He had once talked an Olympic Airways pilot into carrying two thousand pounds of geophysical equipment to Egypt when he supervised an unsuccessful search for the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria. “If it was there, we would have found it,” he said with a shrug.

  The taxi stopped in a commercial district of Patras. We rode a tiny elevator up to the suite of offices of Papamarinopoulos’s friend, an economist, who introduced himself as Yannis and then went off to buy coffees for everyone. Papamarinopoulos and I sat down on opposite sides of a conference table in the front room. It was a sunny Mediterranean day, and through the open windows we received the cicada buzz of motorbike traffic and a hint of a breeze from the Ionian Sea, a few blocks down the hill. Papamarinopoulos removed his sunglasses; he had a kind face and the sunken eyes of an exhausted man.

  Most Greeks I’d met looked worn-out by their recent economic troubles, and Papamarinopoulos certainly had his own: The government had been gradually cutting his salary since the economic crisis began. He had also spent decades suffering the insults—implied and direct—of his academic peers. Dora Katsonopoulou described her fellow archaeologists’ reactions to Papamarinopoulos’s Atlantis theory as “very hostile,” which was probably an understatement. A prominent French historian had once mocked him openly at an assembly in Athens. When Christos Doumas had condescendingly suggested to me that sandalmakers would be better off leaving archaeological questions to the professionals, he was referring to Papamarinopoulos.

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” Papamarinopoulos said, leaning forward across the table. “Who defined science?”

  “Plato did, in the Phaedrus,” I said. I didn’t mention that I’d learned this about two hours earlier while reading one of Papamarinopoulos’s essays on the bus from Athens, but I suspected that he knew. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates explain how a subject can be isolated, then divided into smaller chunks and analyzed until it becomes understandable.

  “Very good! Since you know that, you know at least part of the personality of Plato.” He pronounced the name Plah-toh, which seemed to give it even more gravitas than usual. “Plato also defined mythology. He differentiated between genuine and fabricated myths. It is advisable then to ask if Atlantis is a genuine or a fabricated myth.”

  The word myth is slippery because it has multiple meanings. The most common one, at least among nonspecialists, is something that is generally perceived to be true but is actually false. (Such as when Kermit explains in The Muppet Movie that contrary to popular belief, a person can’t get warts from touching a frog.) What Papamarinopoulos calls a fabricated myth is an invented story, the sort of tale that Plato in the Republic says is useful for instructing children. At the end of the Republic, Socrates tells the Myth of Er, in which a soldier returns from the land of the dead. The moral of this fabricated myth is that only the souls of those who live virtuous lives as outlined in the Republic will find eternal peace.

  The definition of myth that matters to folklorists (and Atlantologists like Papamarinopoulos) is this: a very old story, often containing supernatural elements, that explains an event or phenomenon from the distant past. These sorts of myths often include real historical truths, such as the Trojan War myth that led Heinrich Schliemann to Turkey. This is what Papamarinopoulos calls a genuine myth. Plato, in addition to stating several times in the Timaeus and Critias that the Atlantis story is true, also says that “the fact that it is no invented fable but genuine history is all important.”

  The respected classics scholar John V. Luce, a rare Atlantis possibilist in an otherwise suspicious field, noted that Plato always used the term logos when writing about Atlantis, rather than muthos (or mythos). A logos is an account of something that occurred, and its use typically refers to logical, fact-based thinking. A mythos is a traditional story that seeks to explain things that have no rational explanation—long-ago historical events for which there are no records. A myth might explain the existence of evil or the creation of the world. “Myth is about the unknown,” Karen Armstrong explains in A Short History of Myth. “It is about that for which initially we have no words.”

  To tease out the possible kernel of truth in Plato’s Atlantis tale, Papamarinopoulos approached the story from an unconventional direction. The most vivid and memorable elements of Plato’s Atlantis story are those that describe the rise and sudden fall of a mysterious lost civilization: the huge navy, the concentric rings, the magnificent temples, the catastrophic watery end. Papamarinopoulos instead began by taking a hard look at what Plato said about Athens. “In the Republic Plato presents an imaginary Athens,” he told me, referring to the ideal state ruled by a class of guardians. “But in the Critias, he presents a real Athens. One completely unknown to him.”

  This raised an obvious question: How could Plato write about an Athens that was completely unknown to him? Because, Papamarinopoulos said, the information had been passed down to him orally through many generations, via a chain that included Solon two hundred years earlier. “The Athens in the Atlantis tale is proved as a reality by geological and archaeological science,” he said.

  Prove is a pretty risky word to use in relation to Atlantis. It is interesting, though, how Plato piles up what seems at first to be a lot of irrelevant detail about Athens in the Atlantis story. He describes how the Acropolis had once been the site of a fortified Mycenaean castle, very different from the Golden Age collection of stone temples and buildings. In those ancient times, Critias explains, warriors spent winters living communally in simple structures located on the north side of the rock outcropping. These soldiers drew water from a single spring that “gave an abundant supply of water” but was choked off when a massive earthquake hit Athens. That quake was accompanied by torrential rains that swept most of Greece’s fertile soil into the sea, leaving behind “the mere skeleton of the land.” These natural disasters, the priest at Saïs told Solon, were so severe that only “a small seed or remnant” of the population survived. Written language died out, for as the priest at Saïs said, when “the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea.”

  Until fairly recently, the Athens half of Plato’s tale was largely ignored by Atlantologists. Ignatius Donnelly, who seems to have crammed every fact he could find about ancient history into The Antediluvian World, mentioned Athens just once in his four hundred–plus pages of argument, and the Acropolis not at all. In his groundbreaking 1913 article linking Atlantis with the Minoans, K. T. Frost wrote, “The whole description of the Athenian state in these dialogues seems much more fictitious than that of Atlantis itself.” John V. Luce’s scholarly book Lost Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend summarizes every single detail in the Timaeus and Critias related to Atlantis except for the parts about Athens, which the author dismisses with a note explaining that the “detailed account of Athens and Attica” has been “omitted as only marginally relevant to the identification of Atlantis.”

  Yet Plato’s precise descriptions of the ancient Mycenaean city—the evidence of which had been buried for several centuries at the time he wrote, and of which no written records remain—have been shown to be remarkably accurate. In the 1930s, the Swedish-American archaeologist Oscar Broneer was excavating at the Acropolis when he
located a subterranean spring that had evidently been smothered by the debris from an earthquake. Relics found in the bottom of the spring dated to around 1200 BC. “They found pottery in this well from the early twelfth century, the Mycenaean period,” Papamarinopoulos told me. “That defines the time framework.” Mycenaean-era housing similar to that used by Plato’s ancient warriors has also been uncovered on the northern slope of the rock, exactly where he placed it in the Critias. Even the story of the shrinking Acropolis might have had some truth to it. I later asked Michael Higgins, coauthor of the definitive Geological Companion to Greece and the Aegean if it were possible, as the priest told Solon, “that a single night of excessive rain washed away the earth and laid bare the rock.” Higgins replied that the meaning of acropolis (which means “high place”) might have changed over time. The rock outcropping on which the buildings sit actually juts out from the base of a much larger elevated area. As for storms, “You know the Greek climate. It is indeed possible that much soil and loose matériel could have been removed during a single storm.”

  The disappearance of written Greek, Papamarinopoulos believed, was another crucial historical event mentioned only by Plato, and only inadvertently. Historians generally agree that around 1200 BC Greece entered what is sometimes called its Dark Ages. Near that date, several Bronze Age civilizations around the Mediterranean, including that of the Mycenaeans, mysteriously collapsed. Use of the Linear B script that Arthur Evans had uncovered at Knossos, and which had also turned up at various sites throughout Greece, stopped abruptly around the same time.

  Up until the 1950s, most classical scholars concurred that pre-Homeric Greeks were illiterate. Then in 1954 the London architect and former World War II cryptographer Michael Ventris stunned the world by demonstrating that one of the two mysterious scripts that Arthur Evans had found on the tablets at Knossos, Linear B, was in fact the earliest known written form of Greek. (One of the names Ventris deciphered was Poseidon.) The Linear B script, it emerged, had been brought to Crete by Mycenaean invaders. When literacy once again become widespread in Greece several hundred years later, the Greeks had adopted an entirely new alphabet containing vowels, derived from the Phoenician one, which had only consonants.

  “Plato said the Greeks were giving Greek names to their offspring,” Papamarinopoulos said. “Obviously they were speaking Greek, because if you speak Greek, you write it. But what sort of Greek? It was Linear B. He talks about the Linear B writing before the discovery of archaeologists in the modern period, before the decipherment of the Linear B!”

  For Papamarinopoulos, this meant one of two things. Plato either invented uncannily precise details about Mycenaean-era Athens, which was extremely unlikely, or he was passing along truthful information that had been passed down to him orally. “Therefore, 50 percent of Timaeus and Critias has proved data,” he said. “It has maybe some inaccuracies, some exaggerations, but the core of this information has been proved. To ignore this 50 percent is completely unscientific.” Any professor dismissing Plato’s story of Atlantis and Athens as fiction was guilty not only of poor scholarship, but also of academic malpractice, he said. “Science, as defined by Plato, has the conduct of honesty.”

  Papamarinopoulos argued that most Atlantis doubters, poisoned by their bias, have subsequently been led astray by laziness. Such people “take for granted Atlantis as a gigantic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, exasperated. This was a result of their perfunctory reading of Plato’s work in ancient Greek. Much as Dora Katsonopoulou revitalized the search for Helike with her reinterpretation of poros, Papamarinopoulos argued that the search for Atlantis hinges on Plato’s use of the ancient Greek word nesos, almost always translated as “island.”

  “I know ancient Greek,” he told me, leaning back in his chair. “I read and I write ancient Greek. In the sixth century, when Solon lived, nesos had five geographic meanings.” He began to count off on his fingers. “One, an island as we know it. Two, a promontory. Three, a peninsula. Four, a coast. Five, a land within a continent, surrounded by lakes, rivers, or springs.” By this definition, not only would Hawaii qualify as a nesos, but so would Utah, Florida, California, and Minnesota. For the 2008 Atlantis conference Papamarinopoulos had written a paper demonstrating that Pharos Island (aka Pharos Nesos), home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—Alexandria’s four-hundred-foot-high lighthouse—had actually been a peninsula. The land bridge I’d crossed on the bus from Athens that morning was an even clearer example. The name Peloponnesus, arguably Western history’s most famous peninsula, literally means “Island of Pelops.”

  “So if Atlantis wasn’t in the middle of the Atlantic, where was it?” I asked.

  Papamarinopoulos shook his head. “Before we go to that,” he said, rising from his chair, “I want to answer a question—is there anybody else who mentions Atlantis before Plato? It’s a classic question.” Christos Doumas, among others, had stressed the significance of there being no references to Atlantis in the voluminous Egyptian archives. “May I close the window? It’s noisy.”

  The room was suddenly as quiet as a library. Papamarinopoulos lowered his voice. “The experts and romantic archaeologists”—the Indiana Jones types who focus their efforts on finding precious artifacts and intact ancient structures—“are trapped by this question,” he said as he returned to his seat. “They try to find the word Atlantis in other cultures and they fail to find it. So what do they conclude? That there is no Atlantis, that it exists only in Plato’s mind. They don’t realize that Atlantis is a name invented by Plato.” Plato is pretty explicit on this point. In the Critias he explains that the priest at Saïs gave Solon names in Egyptian form. Solon then translated these names into Greek. Assuming that Plato really did receive the tale via Solon, he would have Hellenized the names.

  “So who were the Atlanteans? Plato gave one name to a coalition of different nations that came and invaded the eastern Mediterranean. Twice. With a difference of thirty years. Plato doesn’t say two invasions; he talks about one. We don’t know which one. But we have the names of these people written in hieroglyphics in Medinet Habu, in a victorious granite stele.” Rainer Kühne had mentioned Medinet Habu. It’s one of the archaeological treasures of Egypt. It was built as the mortuary temple of the great pharaoh Ramses III, who reigned from roughly 1186 BC to 1155 BC. Its walls contain some of the most spectacular hieroglyphics in existence.

  “So who were they?” I asked.

  “It’s interesting. All these countries were traditionally enemies for centuries, before the two invasions. The Libyans. The ancestors of some of the Italians. Others from the Middle East. But also others with peculiar boats. How do you call these in English?” He made a rowing motion.

  “Oars?”

  “Oars. They did not have oars. These people also had, in the front and the back of their boats, a bird, like a duck. And if you don’t have oars in the Nile and the wind is not favorable to you, your boat with a duck becomes a sitting duck! The Egyptians got them as prisoners and divided them into two categories. The punishment was unbelievable!” He brought his palm to his brow and laughed. “One group lost their hands. The other lost their penis!”

  Shelley Wachsmann, a professor of biblical archaeology at Texas A & M University, had identified these boats as coming from central Europe. “So this coalition of Sea Peoples may also have had central Europeans and perhaps western Europeans,” Papamarinopoulos said. “And we have paintings of the warriors that connect them with certain northwestern European cultures.” Long pause. “Of which Spain is perhaps a part.”

  Papamarinopoulos believed that the nesos Plato wrote of was not an island, but a giant peninsula, encompassing all of mainland Europe west of Italy. I may have let out a small groan.

  “If you follow Plato, you go exactly to the Iberian Peninsula because this is where the text leads you. Literally! He describes a valley that is flat and elongated, surrounded b
y mountains. These mountains are the Sierra Nevada and Sierra Morena. The valley has the same position and orientation. It fits exactly with Plato’s description. Like a puzzle piece.”

  So we were back to Spain. Hoping to convey skepticism through body language, I took a huge, slow swig of my tepid coffee, realizing too late it had been made Greek-style, with an inch of grounds at the bottom of the cup. “So the Pillars of Heracles really were at Gibraltar,” I finally said, dislodging bits of coffee from my teeth with my tongue. “Did you consider other possible locations?”

  “Of course! There are eight others. None of them has a Gadeiriki peninsula.” This was a new twist on the Gades/Cádiz clue from the Critias. Gadeiriki is a diminutive variant of Gadeira, the ancient Greek name for Gades/Cádiz; the suffix denotes a small peninsula. Gadir is the old Phoenician name meaning “walled city,” such as the one situated on a tiny spit of land northwest of the Rock of Gibraltar. Plato wrote that Gadeirus, one of the ten twin sons of Poseidon, “obtained as his lot the extremity of the island toward the Pillars of Heracles, facing the country which is now called the region of Gadeira in that part of the world.”

  Atlantis doubters have seized on the tortured geography in this sentence as evidence that Plato must have invented such a place. There are no islands west of modern Cádiz, so it would be impossible to stand on one while looking back toward Cádiz and the Pillars. Such a location would need to be in the Atlantic Ocean.

  But if the entire Iberian peninsula is counted as a nesos, then just up the coast from Cádiz is another lost city that could have been the original Atlantis. Tartessos.

  Plato evidently had no firsthand knowledge of Tartessos. Other ancient Greek writers mention it by name and—possibly—by description. It took me several weeks after returning home to untangle all the threads of Papamarinopoulos’s explanation of pre-Platonic evidence, so here’s a watered-down version. Several Greeks who lived in the centuries before Plato and were familiar with details of the western Mediterranean, including Homer and Hesiod, described an obscure circular shape that was believed to be the work of Poseidon. This “circularity,” as Papamarinopoulos called it, was once located on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia.