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

  There was certainly a history of seismic activity in that area. The wave that barreled through Cádiz during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake has been estimated at more than sixty feet tall—comparable to the height of 2011’s devastating Fukushima tsunami. If Juan Villarias-Robles’s estimates about the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault are correct, the location Papamarinopoulos suggests would have gotten walloped.

  “In Greek there is a word cymatosyrmos. It is a better word than the Japanese tsunami,” he said. “Because tsunami means simply a wave in the coast. Cymatosyrmos is a train with wagons. Imagine a train with wagons, rushing with some hundreds of kilometers per hour of velocity, one after the other. Those are the extraordinary floods that followed the extraordinary earthquakes. So whatever was there in the coast was in a day and night destroyed. That is the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis.”

  Papamarinopoulos believed that Plato had given the name Atlantis to a place with three distinct elements: the giant nesos, the horseshoe-shaped plain that fit like a puzzle piece, and the concentric rings. He thought the rings had been located “in the southern part of the valley going out into the Atlantic Ocean”—before being buried by sediment.

  The creation of these rings, Papamarinopoulos told me, was likely the product not of superhuman labor but of an earlier natural disaster. “There are three ways of interpreting this system of concentric circles,” he said. “First, a concentric volcano, like Santorini or Kilimanjaro.” I had just seen Santorini’s bull’s-eye-shaped circularity. Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, is a dormant volcano with a three-ringed crater at its peak.

  Another prospect was an impact crater, a circular depression caused by a high-velocity object from space—like a meteorite—crashing into a planet’s surface. The moon’s face is pocked with round impact craters, some large enough to be seen on a clear night with the naked eye. There are plenty of craters on Earth, too. They’re just a lot harder to spot because of the effects of erosion and the Earth’s gradually shifting crust. Meteor Crater in Arizona, three-quarters of a mile across and 550 feet deep, is only fifty thousand years old, young enough to have survived the ravages of time.

  The third possibility was a geologic formation known as a mud volcano, caused by pressure from below the Earth’s surface. “Steam and methane escape sometimes and produce concentric circles,” Papamarinopoulos explained. Like most geologic concepts, this one is a little hard to convey with words, but I’d seen a photograph in one of the Atlantis essay collections of a possible mud volcano, the Richat Structure in Mauritania. For anyone interested in Atlantis, the image is jaw-dropping: a twenty-five-mile-wide set of naturally formed concentric rings that look like ripples from a stone tossed into God’s koi pond.

  Depending on the local geology, Papamarinopoulos said, the creation of all three types of crater can result in the formation of black, red, and white rock, as well as hot and cold springs, just as Plato said existed in Atlantis. Several craters, some of them circular, have been located underwater in the Bay of Cádiz near the spot where Tartessos is believed to have vanished. (One of these craters is quite close to shore but seems thus far to have attracted less interest from geologists than from people interested in crater-causing extraterrestrials.) Whatever the type of crater, Papamarinopoulos said, it was something that the Atlanteans “found in nature and they added on it. They did some engineering or built monuments or whatever. It doesn’t take supertechnology to do these things. If you know how the Egyptians built giant things, you can see how other people could do it. So the ancient Greek visitors in this area saw this thing and they interpret it as Poseidon’s work. Later writers presented it with different mythological variants.”

  Papamarinopoulos wasn’t especially concerned with the Saïs priest’s claim that “the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together.” The territory of Atlantis’s empire could have included most of the western Mediterranean. Or he could have meant that Egypt was describing the size of the threat they felt on their borders. The next part of Plato’s text, however, had always confused me. Atlantis, he wrote,

  was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbor, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

  “Plato did not use the word ocean; he called it a panpelagos, an infinite sea,” Papamarinopoulos said. “When he goes into the hypothetical crossing of the panpelagos, then you have a continent.” Contrary to popular belief, Plato never uses the word continent to describe the vanished Atlantis. But he uses for the first and only time three adverbs to describe the boundless continent across the panpelagos: totally, correctly, and truly. “If you go west of Atlantis,” Papamarinopoulos said, “you find—totally, correctly, and truly—a gigantic land. And it is your country.”

  I stopped scribbling in my notebook midsentence and looked up. “What? Plato was talking about America?”

  “Absolutely. Plato says also that Atlantis had relationships with other islands, which could be any of the five meanings of nesos. It is a very crude way of presenting the two Americas and Antarctica together. Plato is the very first person who mentions the existence of this land. Other historians, the real historians, say nothing about this land.”

  Had we shaken hands and said good-bye five minutes earlier, I’d have departed Patras convinced that I’d found the answer to the Atlantis mystery. We suddenly seemed to be veering into Ancient Aliens territory. “I suppose there are other sources besides Plato that talk about these crossings?”

  “Wait! Let me finish, Mark! In Paris, I met a woman, Michelle Lescot-Layer, a member of the Musée de l’Histoire, who in the early 1980s had found minute pieces of nicotine in the mummy of Ramses II. Her results produced a world sensation! She got many enemies.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Later, I communicated with Svetlana Balabanova in Munich, who analyzed ancient mummies and found 30 percent had nicotine and cotinine and cocaine.” Cotinine is a by-product of the body metabolizing nicotine. “Balabanova also produced a world sensation and many enemies.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I would accept that Nicotiana tabacum could be found as a wild species in South Africa. I find it rather unlikely that the Egyptians knew it, brought it to Egypt, cultivated it, and used it in ceremonies. But it is a possibility. But there is no possibility to find cocaine anywhere else but in South America.”

  It was true that Svetlana Balabanova had published such studies in the 1990s, but she had been pilloried by mainstream historians and archaeologists after doing so. Two decades later, attempts to repeat her experiment had been inconclusive. Balabanova stood behind her results and the argument had reached a stalemate. “Cocaine mummies” was a favorite topic of alternative history websites. Was it possible that the mummies had been contaminated? As for Lescot-Layer’s findings, skeptics had raised the possibility of nicotine-based insecticides having been used in museums. Judging from my personal experience with Egyptians, heavy smoking was also not exactly unknown in the greater Cairo area. I floated this possibility.

  “I cannot imagine they can do it deeply into the internal organs!” he said. “How much can you contaminate it?” Even if nicotine were ruled out, though, cocaine was still unexplained. Coca was definitely indigenous to South America. “This proves trade with America since at least the tenth century BC. Someone was going there in prehistoric times and knew where they were going. Repeatedly.”

  As further evidence of ancient sea crossings, Papamarinopoulos cites several sixteenth-century maps that seem to show accurate depictions of the South American and Antarctic continents. Strangely, even though the sixteenth century was the greatest in history for worldwide exploration, the depictions of these continents became less accurate as the century progressed. To Papamarinopo
ulos, the reason was clear—an earlier civilization had mastered longitude long before its official discovery in 1773. It was a paradox of progress. The further cartographers moved away from their ancient maps and the destruction of Atlantis, the less precise their work became.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “You Don’t Buy It”

  Patras, continued

  Papamarinopoulos seemed to sense that he was pushing the limits of my skepticism. He suggested a brief lunch recess. We took the mini elevator downstairs and walked a few blocks through the empty afternoon streets of downtown Patras. I asked if he had seen Richard Freund’s Finding Atlantis documentary, which leaned so heavily on Kühne’s original theory about Tartessos but didn’t mention any of Papamarinopoulos’s work. He hadn’t, though he had communicated with Freund during preproduction. “I sent him all the papers I did at the geological society. He told me, ‘It would take me two months to read all this.’”

  Once we’d ordered lunch, I asked if there were parts of the Atlantis story that he hadn’t been able to explain. He nodded yes.

  “Is it the elephants?” I asked.

  The elephants were tricky. Some Atlantologists claimed Plato was referring to mammoths or dwarf elephants, fossils of which have been found on the islands of Cyprus, Sicily, and Malta. Tony O’Connell had shown me a theory that explained the presence of elephants in Malta as a transcription error. Someone had mistakenly written elephas, Greek for “elephant,” rather than elaphos, Greek for “deer.” Except that Plato uses the elephants to illustrate the abundance of space in Atlantis, describing them as “the largest and most voracious of all” animals.

  Papamarinopoulos wasn’t worried about the elephants. “The elephants exist in the zone of influence of Atlantis,” he said with a shrug, meaning that they were just across the Strait of Gibraltar in North Africa.

  “No, I have two weak points,” he said. “The canals and the size of the valley. The size, maybe it’s a mistake with the numbers.” This referred to Plato’s incredible ten-thousand-stade perimeter. “The other thing which is a weak point for me—for the time being—is this.” He took my pen and drew a pattern of intersecting lines. “The checkerboard canals. We have not found this yet, but maybe in the future we can do it with satellite image processing. I can’t do everything. Now, I don’t want to make you crazy, but you can find this matrix in Guatemala and Bolivia.” He looked up and a half smile crept up the side of his mouth. “You don’t buy it.”

  Of course I didn’t buy it. Why would an enormous navy make its way from the altiplano of landlocked Bolivia, which, the last time I visited anyway, was two hundred miles from the nearest ocean and two miles above sea level, sail down and around the notoriously difficult-to-navigate Cape Horn, cross the Atlantic Ocean, navigate into the Mediterranean, and engage Athens in a war? How would you feed the gigantic navy you’d need? A high-altitude Atlantis also failed to explain an island sinking below the waves and leaving behind muddy shoals. I asked Papamarinopoulos his opinion of a similar theory, that some concentric circles found in northwest Louisiana indicated that the Atlanteans had traveled up the Mississippi River.

  “Do you know what the person who says this says the motivation was?” he asked.

  “Let me guess. Copper?” This was typically the second part of the Atlantis-meets-the-Mississippi theory; the supposed terminus of the journey was Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior, famous for its high-quality copper deposits. Millions of pounds of the metal seem to have been removed thousands of years ago, which no one has been able to account for. The natives of the Great Lakes region didn’t use copper. Where unexplained phenomena met the search for Atlantis, wild hypotheses were sure to follow. This one could be traced all the way back to Ignatius Donnelly.

  “Yes, copper!”

  “But isn’t the island of Cyprus basically one huge chunk of copper? Doesn’t the name Cyprus mean ‘copper’? Wasn’t Cyprus about ten thousand times easier to reach from the Mediterranean than Lake Superior would have been?”

  “Yes, but this is the purest deposit of copper in the world. And the Indians did not use it.” Another half smile. “You don’t buy it.”

  Nope. I still didn’t buy it. “Where does that leave the nine thousand years?”

  “Ah, now we come to the date! Serious experts”—he spat out the word—“take for granted the nine thousand years. They try to ridicule Plato, but they ridicule themselves! Solon talked only to the priests of Saïs. We know from the ancient Greek literature and from Egyptology that the priests used lunar calendars. So you take a solar year and divide it by 12.37, the number of full moons.” If one does so, as Werner Wickboldt had demonstrated in Braunschweig, the date of the Atlantis disaster catapults forward from 9600 BC to around 1200 BC.

  The revised date would not only yank Atlantis out of the murky, post–Ice Age era, but also conveniently place its end roughly alongside the destruction of Mycenaean Athens and the start of the Greek Dark Ages, as evidenced by the earthquake findings at the Acropolis: the time when cities and towns throughout Greece were abandoned and writing in Linear B ceased. In fact, Papamarinopoulos noted, “We have three collapses occurring—Atlantis, Athens, and Troy. Not in the same month, but in the same century.”

  The period around 1200 BC was one of sudden, and still unexplained, upheaval in the Mediterranean. The two great empires that had dominated the region, the Egyptians and the Hittites of Asia Minor, suffered vicious attacks. Egypt seems to have barely survived, while the Hittites vanished altogether. A letter survives from the king of Ugarit, an important port city in Syria, pleading with his trading partners in Cyprus to send aid to fight the mysterious sea raiders who have attacked his city. “The enemy ships are already here, they have set fire to my towns and have done great damage in the country,” he wrote. Ugarit, too, was burned to the ground.

  “Do you really think Solon got the story from the priest, undiluted?” I asked.

  “I like this question of yours, saying do you trust only one priest?” Papamarinopoulos said, tapping a finger on the table. He summoned the waiter and ordered coffees. By this point in my odyssey I was mixing caffeine and strange conversations with the regularity of a Stieg Larsson character. “No, I trust the priests because they were the antiquarians of Egypt. And I trust Plato, who possibly deduced something from stories he heard from the Greek mariners in Syracuse” during his visits with Dionysius I and II. In one of his papers, Papamarinopoulos cites a fragment from Hesiod, written before Solon’s time, that describes a sea route from Gadeira to Taras in southern Italy to Ionia in Asia Minor. Stories from beyond Gibraltar would surely have traveled east toward Greece. It’s possible that Plato or Solon or both would have been familiar with these tales. As for the incredible numbers in Plato’s story, Papamarinopoulos argued that they were the opposite of a mistake.

  “You’re dealing with a person who is a genius, Mark! A genius works in a way that we cannot understand. The large numbers of occupants in Atlantis, the large number of soldiers, the gigantic fleets, and all this. Plato, because he was a naughty boy, added mathematical exaggerations for his own purposes to this real story. Here, I will explain.” He motioned for my pen again and began drawing on a paper napkin. He handed the napkin back to me and said, “I want you to keep this as a memento.”

  The picture he had drawn (and signed, and dated) was of three concentric circles, but not those of Atlantis. It was a graph that looked like an avocado cut widthwise. The innermost circle (the avocado pit) was the nucleus of a historical event. This was the logos. “It is like a signal, but it has a cloud of noise around it,” he said. In order to get to the historic truth at the center of the story, one had to filter out the fantastic elements in the middle ring (the avocado’s flesh). Papamarinopoulos called these fabrications the paramyths. The outermost, third ring (the rind) was composed of mathematical and musicological information invented by Plato.

 
“Plato likes you to dig, to search to find the mathematical theory,” he said. He circled the outermost ring with the pen. “The thin black sector here is truth, but not historically, only mathematically. He tells you to try and play with the numbers. He invites you to decode it. And if you decode it, you will find something useless for historians and archaeologists but useful for mathematicians. He was obsessed with music. And with mathematics. Remember, the Greek language—the alphabetic Greek language—was used by an intelligent person three times. Written script, numbers, musical notes.”

  Incredibly, this seemed to be possible. A British philosophy professor had recently published a theory, quickly dubbed “The Plato Code” by the media, which claimed to have identified a twelve-note Pythagorean musical scale hidden in some of Plato’s most famous works. The discovery, he told The Guardian, “unlocks the gate to the labyrinth of symbolic messages in Plato.”

  “So if I want to communicate with you in music,” Papamarinopoulos said, “I would use the same symbols, and I will send you a poem with music. Or I will encrypt a mathematical formula through the same symbols. Or I will send a report from my work in Egypt as a script. So you have a language which could be used three ways.”

  The check arrived. I sat in stunned silence.

  “You have questions on this?” Papamarinopoulos asked.

  “I can’t say I understand it entirely,” I said. So he was saying not only were the enormous numbers exaggerations, but they also hinted at a secret code buried in the Atlantis story, which also happens to cryptically mention ancient sea crossings to America? Oh, and the Atlantis story was more or less true? One afternoon in Patras and I had enough material for my own BBC miniseries.