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

  Finally, Coleman addressed what he called Donnelly’s “black helicopters” opus, The Great Cryptogram, presumably the source of much guffawing and drink spilling at humanities department cocktail parties. This book, which followed The Antediluvian World by six years, marked Donnelly’s shift from revisionist historian to all-out conspiracy theorist. It was Donnelly’s attempt to decipher the code embedded in what he named “the so-called Shakespeare plays.” His theory posited that Sir Francis Bacon, the English statesman and philosopher whose prodigious career included serving as lord chancellor, helping develop the empirical method in science, and authoring dozens of influential essays and books—including the utopian classic The New Atlantis—had also managed to secretly write the collected works of Shakespeare. If composing the greatest dramas ever written in English weren’t enough to occupy a man’s time, Bacon also, according to Donnelly, embedded them with subtle clues about his true identity.

  When Coleman finished his talk, I walked up to the front of the room to take a look at Donnelly’s copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume lay open to a pair of annotated pages. Each had dozens of numbers scribbled on it, occult-looking calculations, underlined passages, and chaotic notations in the margin. For all I could tell, these pages demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was an inside job and that Paul McCartney’s secret twin brother really had written “Helter Skelter.”

  It was a reminder that if you bent the facts enough, you could convince yourself of anything.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Secrets of the Wine-Dark Sea

  On the Mediterranean

  In 1982, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Çakir surfaced from a plunge near a rocky promontory off Kas, on Turkey’s southern coast, with a confusing bit of information to report. About 150 feet down on the seafloor, he’d spotted a pile of unusual “metal biscuits with ears.” Çakir’s captain, who had recently attended a briefing about the emerging field of underwater archaeology, quickly understood what the objects were: oxhide ingots, slabs of copper cast in uniform shapes for easy sea transport. What Çakir had found was a Bronze Age shipwreck that dated to approximately 1300 BC. Scientific American later named the Uluburun wreck one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.

  What made the discovery so extraordinary was the cornucopia of goods the boat had been carrying when it presumably smashed against the rocks. Over the next decade, divers pulled seventeen tons of artifacts from the site. The cargo had originated in ports all around the eastern Mediterranean. The boat was Syro-Palestinian, built of Lebanese cedar and operated by the ancestors of the Phoenicians who lived along the Levant. Its ten tons of copper had been mined in Cyprus. One ton of tin, the other element essential in the manufacture of bronze, had likely originated in Afghanistan. Elephant ivory and ostrich eggs had journeyed from Africa. Mycenaean pottery had come from the Greek mainland. Gold and silver jewelry, including a gold scarab inscribed with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, dated to the reign of Tutankhamen. Here in one spot was ample evidence of a highly advanced ancient trading network that spread across three continents.

  For modern geographers, the Uluburun provided rare material evidence of where people were traveling, and why, in the time before Golden Age Greece. The Uluburun sank around 1300 BC, before the transition from oral transmission to written records took place. At that time the Mycenaeans ruled the Aegean Sea and traded widely in the area between Sardinia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Levant before their empire collapsed mysteriously during the late twelfth century BC. Exploration of the western Mediterranean beyond Sicily and Sardinia seems to have been spearheaded by Phoenician traders who passed through the Pillars of Heracles at Gibraltar sometime between 1100 BC (according to legend) and 800 BC (according to archaeological evidence). There they founded the trading colony of Gades mentioned by Plato in the Critias, which grew into the Spanish city of Cádiz. It’s probable that sailors from Iberia had met traders from the coast of Sardinia even earlier, exchanging information along with their goods.

  Little is known about early Greek attempts to explore the western Mediterranean. This gap is important to the search for Atlantis for two reasons. One, the likeliest spot for the Pillars of Heracles is the Strait of Gibraltar. If the story of Atlantis really was transmitted via Solon’s visit to Egypt, the information could have reached the priests of Saïs through the same trading network that assembled the Uluburun cargo. Two, it’s possible that Plato picked up stories from sailors in Syracuse, one of several distant lands he visited on a long journey after Socrates was sentenced to death in 399 BC for the crime of corrupting Athens’s youth. In the ancient Mediterranean, Syracuse was a key meeting point for East and West.

  As Duane Roller points out in his fascinating book Through the Pillars of Herakles, the Greeks had no word for exploration. Expeditions were launched to gather intelligence for military or trade purposes. Such valuable proprietary information was likely to be closely guarded; the Carthaginians are reported to have drowned anyone who attempted to locate the Pillars of Heracles. Any information travelers collected came from the residents of foreign lands, whose languages would have been difficult to translate and easy to misunderstand. Information passed along orally was transmitted in the form of stories. Thus accounts of fantastic voyages across the “wine-dark sea” to distant lands such as those in the Iliad and the Odyssey might combine essential geographic data with supernatural elements.

  In the Odyssey, Odysseus is trying to reach his home city of Ithaca (which, like many of the Greek places Homer names, actually existed) when he is blown for nine days to the land of the lotus-eaters. Here the inhabitants lived on the sweet fruits of a flowering plant “so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home.” Homer may have been describing the Tunisian island of Djerba, where date palms grew plentifully and still do.

  The pioneering Greek geographer Pytheas sailed shortly after Plato’s death on a journey that took him to the British Isles and beyond. He reported traveling so far north that the sun never set; claimed to have seen impassable frozen seas; and six days beyond Scotland discovered a mysterious distant island named Thule, which may have been Norway or Iceland. Christopher Columbus later claimed to have stopped in Thule on his way to encountering the New World.

  Pytheas was widely disbelieved when he returned home. Later historians cast doubt on his claims, those of Thule especially. The eminent Greek geographer and historian Strabo, who believed that Plato’s Atlantis was a true story, accused Pytheas of having lied outright about Thule’s existence. More than a century later, the respected historian Pausanias wrote credulously about the satyrs who lived in distant lands. “In modern times it is perhaps easier to be more dismissive of promiscuous red-haired men with tails than a frozen ocean,” Duane Roller notes, “yet in antiquity the former was believed rather than the latter.”

  We do have a few snippets of information that indicate some Greek exploration to the west was going on. Homer, who probably composed his works in the eighth century BC, describes Odysseus passing through Scylla and Charybdis—likely the Strait of Messina—sailing for the west until approaching the Oceanus, a deep-flowing river that encircled all the lands of the earth and marked the boundary of the world. Around 630 BC, a sailor named Kolaios from the island of Samos claimed to have been blown by a powerful easterly wind through the Pillars of Heracles and into the great sea beyond. According to Herodotus, Kolaios returned home with a vast fortune in silver from a land called Tartessos. Herodotus also related the story of the pharaoh Necho II (ruler of Egypt from 610 to 595 BC), who dispatched an expedition of Phoenician sailors to circumnavigate the African continent, departing southward through the Red Sea. During their third year at sea, Herodotus wrote, they “rounded the Pillars of Heracles” and sailed for home. “On their return home, they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing around Libya t
hey had the sun upon their right hand.” Herodotus couldn’t even imagine what had actually happened. They had passed through the unknown Southern Hemisphere and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope.

  Plato’s effort in the Timaeus to chart the earth’s location in the cosmos seems even bolder when one considers that attempts to map the known world were rudimentary. In the sixth century BC, the Greek philosopher Anaximander drew what may have been the first map of the known world. The Mediterranean was placed at the center of the world (hence its name in Latin, “middle land”) and was surrounded by the three continents, Europe, Libya, and Asia. The Nile flowed south into the southern part of the outer ocean. The western ocean was named the Atlantic and was linked to the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Heracles. Anaximander believed that the earth was a cylinder with a diameter three times its height, roughly the proportions of a can of tuna. More than a century later, Herodotus agreed that the world was flat. By that time, though, the geometry-mad philosopher Pythagoras had—according to much later histories—deduced that the earth was a sphere. Contrary to the legend of Christopher Columbus, many educated Greeks agreed that the earth was round. In the Timaeus Plato himself fixed the earth in the center of the universe and said that the creator had “made the world in the form of a globe . . . having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the center, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures.”

  The Greeks began to colonize the western Mediterranean starting around 600 BC, with the founding of Massalia, a trading outpost that has since grown into the French city of Marseilles. Herodotus credits seafaring Greeks who lived in Asia Minor with making the first trips deep into the western Mediterranean. “It was they who made Adria known, and Tyrrhenia, and Iberia and Tartessos,” he writes. Adria is the northeastern coast of Italy, which shares its name with the Adriatic Sea. Tyrrhenia was the land of the Etruscans on Italy’s west coast. Iberia was the Mediterranean shore of what is now the Spanish peninsula.

  The fourth place that Herodotus lists, Tartessos, is something of a mystery, even today. Kolaios the Greek was not the only sailor to report back on its mind-blowing riches. While Plato is the only writer known to have written about Atlantis, many ancients mentioned Tartessos by name. Yet it has never been found, either.

  The historian Rhys Carpenter explained how the first Greek sailors would likely have made their way west over time. Rowing their state-of-the-art penteconters, fifty-oared warships, they would have sailed from the Tyrrhenian coast to the isle of Elba and on to Corsica, from whence they would have sailed south to Sardinia. Here they would likely have encountered Iberian sailors who convinced them to sail across three hundred miles of empty sea to the Balearic Islands, from whence they could reach the Iberian Peninsula.

  We can only wonder what these Greeks thought as they journeyed south along the coast and passed beneath the fourteen-hundred-foot-high Rock of Gibraltar, the final checkpoint between the known world and the endless sea of the Atlantic. Here the vast water of the Mediterranean narrowed to seven miles across. Duane Roller notes that sailors who crossed through the strait noticed a sudden change in the tides and waves and “would find the water turning from blue to a less benign green.” The rock and its partner across the water must have become familiar sights, however, because to pass through the Pillars of Heracles was the only way to reach Tartessos—a land perched on the lip of the infinite sea, where fortunes in silver were to be found by those brave enough to risk the journey.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As Seen on TV

  Hartford, Connecticut

  Long before I ever took an interest in Atlantis, I traveled to Cusco, Peru, to interview a hard-core explorer with a reputation for finding lost cities. He’d recently returned from several months in the Amazon jungle and with his sunken cheeks and long beard looked as if he’d just stepped out of an El Greco painting. We talked a bit about ancient places that now existed only as mentions in old manuscripts, and I asked him which vanished site he’d most like to find. Without hesitation he said, “Tartessos.”

  A few years later, when I was hit with the sudden burst of news alerts about an Atlantis discovery, I began scrolling through them skeptically until a magic word caught my eye: Tartessos. The reports turned out to be linked to a National Geographic documentary called Finding Atlantis, which claimed that Plato’s lost city had been found right where he’d said it was, outside the Pillars of Heracles. The unlikely star of the show was a history professor from the University of Hartford, Richard Freund. With his round face, wire-rimmed spectacles, and neat mustache, Freund looked less like a swashbuckling international adventure hero than a middle-aged Connecticut rabbi, which was another of his identities. His lack of flash didn’t dim his confidence. At the documentary’s start, Freund made clear to his audience that the stakes of his quest were enormous. “This city of Atlantis is seen by many as the mother of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Israel and Europe and all the other civilizations that began in this area,” he explained, echoing Ignatius Donnelly’s diffusionism theory. “And if it began here, we may be looking at the single most important site for humanity.” He was standing in Doñana National Park, on the southwest coast of Spain.

  Freund’s argument was based on a radically simple solution to the question of Atlantis’s location: When writing of Atlantis, Plato related a tale that Solon had heard from the Egyptians, who had in turn learned it from earlier sources. Thus, when speaking of the kingdom he called Atlantis, Plato had really been describing a different lost city, Tartessos.

  The historical record for Tartessos is certainly much deeper than that for Atlantis. The early Greek geographer Hecataeus is quoted in a fragment of a lost work as referring to a “Tartessian polis,” or city-state. Herodotus, writing in the century before Plato, placed Tartessos “beyond the Pillars of Heracles” and wrote that the kingdom was ruled by a wealthy monarch named Arganthonios, a name that means “Silver-Locks.” (This may refer either to the area’s mineral riches or to the king’s advanced age. Herodotus claimed that Arganthonios reigned for eighty years and died at the age of 120.) Aristotle wrote that Tartessos was the name of a river that flowed from the Pyrenees Mountains between Iberia and Gaul to a spot outside the Pillars. Roman sources referred to a River Tartessos, now the Guadalquivir River, near the city of Cádiz, which sits, still, about sixty miles northwest of the Strait of Gibraltar. Where this river met the sea, it was split into two mouths by a large island. On that island, the second-century-AD geographer Pausanias wrote in his Description of Greece, was built a city, also called Tartessos. To recap: a wealthy island city, opposite the Pillars of Heracles, in the very land, Gades/Cádiz, that Plato had mentioned in the Critias.

  Richard Freund believed that Tartessos, in addition to being Plato’s source for Atlantis, was another name for the land of Tarshish, mentioned several times in the Old Testament, perhaps most famously as the distant place Jonah sails for prior to his miraculous encounter with a whale. In the tenth century BC, King Solomon of Israel (he of the famed let’s-cut-this-baby-in-half wisdom), in partnership with the Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre, owned a fleet of ships that sailed for Tarshish every three years. These returned “bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes and monkeys.” One group of Phoenician traders, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote, having carried olive oil and other wares to exchange in Tarshish, received so much silver in return that they cast new silver anchors to replace their lead ones—“and there still was a great quantity of the metal left over.” Freund notes in his book Digging Through History that the book of Isaiah, from the eighth century BC, contains this passage: “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for your strength is laid waste.” Might a maritime disaster that struck Tarshish be related to the one that demolished Atlantis?

  Freund wasn’t the first scholar to make a connection between Tartessos and Atlantis, nor to go hunting for Plato’s lost city along the coast of southwest Spain. The German archaeologist Adolf Sc
hulten published a theory in 1922 that proposed Tartessos and Atlantis were one and the same. Working with the Anglo-French archaeologist George Bonsor, Schulten conducted excavations for several seasons in an area that is now part of the Doñana National Park, the marshland where Freund’s documentary was filmed. In 1923, the pair excavated at a site called Cerro del Trigo (“Wheat Hill”). They found old stone blocks that indicated the site had once been a Roman colony. Because the team saw no other stones nearby, Bonsor proposed that the Romans must have used stones from an older settlement as their building materials. Further excavations to find what lay beneath the Roman ruins were impossible due to the Doñana’s high water table. Any hole they dug more than a few feet deep was quickly flooded. Whatever archaeological secrets lay buried at the site would likely remain out of reach forever.

  After Schulten’s inconclusive digs, the Tartessos-as-Atlantis hypothesis largely lay dormant for several decades, overshadowed by the lingering influence of Ignatius Donnelly’s mid-Atlantic location theory. Then in 2004, the prestigious British scholarly journal Antiquity published a brief article titled “A Location for ‘Atlantis’?” The author, Dr. Rainer Kühne, a physicist at Dortmund University in Germany, noted that on satellite photos of the Doñana region one could see the outlines of two large rectangular structures—possibly remnants of the spectacular temples of Poseidon and Cleito that Plato had described—on what appeared to be a chunk of land roughly five stades (or three thousand feet) in diameter, the same size he had cited for the central island of Atlantis.5

  As usually happens when someone floats a new Atlantis hypothesis, especially one with the implicit support of an eminent publication, the media went crazy. In an interview with the BBC, Kühne gave additional detail, pointing out how the faint outline of circles could be seen surrounding the rectangular shapes. “We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described,” Kühne told a reporter. Amazingly, both the rings and one of the rectangles also more or less matched the precise dimensions that Plato had given in the Critias.