Did the Atlantic basin sink to its present shape and depth before human times? It is still not known when the last of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge sank; the date can still fluctuate as much as the age
of early man. But we at least know that there was some major geological catastrophe in the Atlantic in a period late enough to coincide with an identifiable stir among all known early civilizations. Its worst effects must have been on the founders of the island cul-tiures around Britain, as the disturbance formed a lasting spht in the Atlantic Ocean floor and right across the green countryside of Iceland, where a tree fell into the rift and was imbedded in the lava that emerged. It has been dated by radiocarbon analysis to approximately 3000 B.C.
Allowing for the usual radiocarbon margin of error, about a century plus or minus, this geological disturbance in the Atlantic of about 3000 B.C. coincides with the sudden blooming of civilization in the three aforesaid river vaUeys. But not only there. Archaeology has disclosed that around 3000 b.c. a new epoch started even on the island of Cyprus where the former occupation of neolithic sites came to an end, and it has been suspected that the cause may have been some unidentified natm-al disaster.^ Correspondingly, 3000 b.c. has also been cited by archaeologists as the date marking the end of the Neohthic phase and the beginning of a new cultural period on Malta.* Even on Crete archaeologists have found evidence of widespread dislocation and upheaval throughout the island about 3000 B.C., with people taking refuge in caves and subsequently setthng on high hills.°
Disastrous flood waves have struck civilized communities more than once, even in subsequent periods. Much attention has in recent years been paid to the violent waves that must have caused disaster on aU Mediterranean island and mainland shores about 2000-1400 B.C., when the volcano on Santorini exploded and buried the whole surface of the island with aU its people and buildings. The discovery of a truly lost island civilization beneath the volcanic ash on this island between Crete and Greece caused many serious scientists to revive the long-discredited story of Atlantis. One may wonder at this revival of a much disputed Greek account of an allegedly Egyptian tradition, the more so since the island of Santorini never sank, nor is it in the Atlantic, the two basic points of the Atlantis myth. The Atlantis myth has been revived and reinterpreted at intervals ever since it was written down by a noted Greek almost 2,400 years ago. It certainly reflects thoughts or notions concerning the **begin-nings," as put down in writing by men who cared about the past in that early period of documented history.
As for myself, I cracked many silly jokes about the possibility of rediscovering Atlantis when we strove to keep afloat on the papyrus ship Ra, built in Egypt, over the very locality where the Egyptians were said to believe their Atlantis had sunk. Hopefully, we said, we were to discover how far early Mediterranean civilization might have spread, not where the Egyptians said that the first civiU-zation had sunk.
As distinct from the Ra experiments, we had sailed in Tigris to trace the beginning of history according to Sumerian writings. This had brought us to Dilmun, where the Sumerians said their forefathers had settled after the world catastrophe when most of mankind drowned. When hstening to ancient man's opinion about our beginnings, we can nowhere get past the stories of a flood. Long before Christianity reached Hellas, the Greeks had three different versions of this disastrous flood: they had their own original deluge myth, in which it was their own supreme god Zeus who had punished mankind; then, already in pre-Christian times, they received a Hebrew variant from the Hellenistic Jews; and independent of both of these they had received the Egyptian version following their intimate contact with the Nile country. If we care for the opinion of the ancient people whose cultural origin we seek, we have to bear with their flood stories which obstruct everything beyond. The Egyptians are no exception, if we are to trust the authority of Plato.
About four centuries before Christ, the thinker Plato wrote his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which he has Critias tell Socrates about Solon's interview with the learned priests of Sais, an Egyptian city at the head of the Nile delta. We are told that the story is a strange one, "but Solon, the wisest of the seven wise men, once vouched its truth." Solon started by telling the Egyptians about the beginning of history according to Greek memories, about how Deucahon and Pyrrha survived the deluge, and he tried to enumerate their descendants in order to work out how long ago the flood had occurred. He was then interrupted by a very old Egyptian priest, who told him that the Greeks were hke children, with no ancient civilization and no memories before the last flood. More than one flood had struck the Mediterranean and destroyed all growing civihzations, sweeping all scribes and learned men into the sea from Greece and surrounding territories. The only survivors in those parts had been unlettered and uncultivated herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains. Thus "writings and other necessities of civi-
lization" had been destroyed, and the Greeks and their neighbors had to "begin again like children," in complete ignorance of their own past achievements. But these disastrous flood waves had not struck Egypt in the same way. According to the old priest, written records from the earliest times had consequently been preserved in their temples. The oldest writings were said by the priest to describe the important events which he dated to a period nine thousand years before Solon's visit to Egypt:
Our records teU how your city checked a great power which arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia. For in those days the Atlantic was navigable. There was an island opposite the strait which you call (so you say) the Pillars of Heracles, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite, continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For the sea within the strait we were talking about is hke a lake with a narrow entrance; the outer ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it is properly termed continent. On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings, who ruled the whole island, and many other islands as well and parts of the continent; in addition it controlled, within the strait, Libya up to the borders of Egypt and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.
The cities, temples and canals of Atlantis as described in this story can match the most impressive structures of the pharaohs and are full of Egyptian flavor, but the reference to the port is at least remarkable: ". . . the canal and large harbour were crowded with vast nimibers of merchant ships from aU quarters, from which rose a constant din of shouting and noise day and night."
It was the detailed description of this Atlantic island and the greatness of its culture and power that interested the Egyptian priesthood and the Greek narrator, whereas the dramatic details of its submergence are greatly underplayed: "At a later time there were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night aU your fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished; this is why the sea in that area is to this day impassable to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the simken island.**®
On the other side of the Atlantic, the priesthood of the Aztecs and Mayas also had their records written in hieroglyphics, most of which were burned by the Spaniards, who nevertheless recorded that these Mexican aborigines beheved in a great deluge and a land sunk in the Atlantic. The Aztecs took their own national name from that island, which they in their tongue referred to as Aztlan, saying that it had been their former fatherland. The whole foundation for their religious beliefs was the assertion that their own royal famihes descended from certain white and bearded men resembling the Spaniards who had come from that sunken land and instructed their savage ancestors in the rites of sun worship and aU the arts of civih-zation: writing, cotton cultivation, calendar system, and architecture, including the building of cities and pyramids. The amazingly accurate Maya calendar, more exact than ours today by half a day in every 5,000
years, began with a zero year of 4 Ahau 2 Cumhu, which converted into our calendar system becomes August 12, 3113 B.C. The Maya astronomical clock was more exact than our approximate radiocarbon dating. With a human background of two milhon years, we may again wonder at this close coincidence in time with the catastrophe that split Iceland, and the beginning of new cultural eras on Crete, Cyprus, Malta, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. No satisfactory explanation has ever been found as to why the Maya chose the date of August 12, 3113 b.c. for their beginning of time reckoning. All other calendar systems have chosen a zero year to coincide with some event in the life of the personage who founded their religion: those of the Buddhists, Hebrews, Christians and Moslems. Maya religion was founded by Kukulcan, the sacred priest-king who arrived from across the Atlantic, and claimed descent from the sun.'
Could it be, I thought, that aU these sun worshipers had been chased away in August 3113 B.C. from a former unidentified habitat by some natural catastrophe not yet known to us?
"Look at the moon!" It was Gherman who shouted in surprise from the steering bridge. I closed my books and put away my notes to crawl out and see what he found so strange. HP was there in a bound and grabbed Norman's astronomical almanac. The sky was clear but the moon was fading; it ceased to be a flat and shining disc and became globular and pale like a lost balloon. Then it began to disappear. It looked frightening. "March 24, 1978, total moon ecHpse over part of Asia and the Indian Ocean," HP reported. This
was the classical sight that would have been interpreted by prehistoric skywatchers as an ill omen. We were in no way superstitious, but we shared the somber feelings of earHer man that night, as we sailed along the coast of Punt at a good speed but with maximum caution so as not to stray within the war zone.
Three days later a beautiful bird, able to raise a majestic crest of feathers on its head, came from Africa and landed in the forestay. This was an upupa (called in Britain the hoopoe), known to the ancient Vikings as the "army bird" (hserfugl) and regarded by them as a sign of war. Carlo could confirm that the upupa in Italy was known as the "cock of Mars** (gaUo-di-Marte)y named after the Roman god of war. This would have been too many evil omens for ancient voyagers, and we could easily see how it would have impressed them if they next discovered what we aheady knew, that a war was really raging just beyond the horizon.
That same night Tom shouted from the bridge: "Did you hear that?" We did. Inside the cabin we too had heard the distant rumble of gunfire on the portside. And we heard it again.
Next day we even heard the growing drone of an airplane. "By gosh, he's coming straight for usi" Detlef shouted from the bridge. We all rushed out into the burning sun of the Gulf of Aden just as a twin-engined mihtary plane dived down over the oar in our mast-top, so low that the sails flapped back with the wind pressure. I was just in time to stop Detlef, who already had one leg over the bridge raihng ready to jump from the ship. We hoisted the United Nations flag. The plane turned and, very low, came straight back again. "Here they come againl" I yelled as I saw it turning. Eashad shouted that they were customs control men coming to bomb us, thinking we carried contraband. Asbjom suggested they had chosen us as a training target. "Hurrah, they are American marines 1" Norman cheered and danced and waved on the cabin roof as they again droned low overhead. Someone up there waved back from the cockpit. We were aU reUeved.
Norris had filmed and tape-recorded this episode, and as a moment later he replayed his tape on the cabin roof, everyone but me rushed out once more as they heard my voice shouting: "Here they come againl" followed by the recorded droning. We laughed, but not for long. Norris's tape had not ended when the droning came back louder than ever and of a different kind. We looked up, and there was a mihtary hehcopter coming straight for Tigris; Norman yelled that it was not Americanl
We were all ready to jump as the heavy war bird turned so close over the mast that we could see the uniformed men inside salute and point to their colors: they were French 1 No sooner had they disappeared into the blue before two other helicopters appeared, one on either horizon. They came toward us from different directions. This looked worse. They met above us and we were safe, for one was American and the other French. Friendly pilots photographed us from the air. Friendly to us but not to everybody in this surrounding area. We had reached the inner end of the gulf. On portside was the last of Somaha and a front line which was guarded on either side with the support of the conflicting great powers. On starboard was South Yemen, also with border feuds and with the old and famous port of Aden closed.
Norman was strongly in favor of taking advantage of our present favorable position to head straight through the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and continue up the Red Sea. But since neither of the two nations flanking the Red Sea inside the strait had responded to our request for landing permits, we unanimously agreed on altering course for Djibouti, the tiny nation that had welcomed us to land on the African side of the strait.
On March 28 we saw the blue mountains of Africa, and that night we steered by the lights from the shore. Long before daybreak we passed the lighthouses outside Djibouti harbor, and dropped anchor. As day broke we found ourselves riding with a huge battleship of some sort as our nearest neighbor. The sun rose and a small yacht came out of port and guided us in, under full sail, past the flagship and other units of the French Indian Ocean fleet. The ancient harbor seemed packed with warships that were there to protect neutral Djibouti from intrusion by belligerent nations fighting each other all around. This minirepublic had just been granted its independence from France. OflBcers and men on all the naval vessels were lined up to welcome peaceful Tigris as I shouted "sails down" and turned the tiller for anchoring. Norman climbed the mast and made a masterly performance of riding the yardarm down to deck all alone, as the rest of us worked at rudder oars, punt poles and anchors.
To receive us in Djibouti and collect our films were Bruce Norman and Roy Davies from the BBC. They brought with them from London the news that under no circumstances could we land in Ethiopia on the African side inside the Red Sea. Massawa, where I
had loaded the papyrus from Lake Tana for Ra I and Ra II, and where for this reason I had hoped to end the Tigris voyage after an estimated five more days of sailing, was in a state of siege. The city and the port were in the hands of the Ethiopians, supported by Russians, but the entrance and the surrounding coasts were held by Eritrean Hberation forces, and any trespassers would be shot. But Roy triumphantly handed me two letters from the North Yemen authorities. One was from Mohamed Abdulla Al-Eryani, ambassador of the Yemen Arab RepubHc in London. The other was from the Minister Plenipotentiary, Mohamed Al-Makhadhi. The first confirmed North Yemen's interest in our expedition, expressed the warmest wishes for its success, and referred to the minister. The minister wrote: "I can assure you of our fullest cooperation at all times since Dr. T. Heyerdahl's expedition is a very remarkable and praiseworthy one. Yours sincerely . . ."
There was every reason to celebrate. We could now rest a few days and then continue through the strait to land in North Yemen. It was on the opposite side from Massawa, but that meant nothing.
We jumped ashore among friendly, black Africans, and checked in at Siesta Hotel. I shall never forget the big juicy pepper steak that was put in front of my nose just as the telephone rang. Counterorders from Londonl North Yemen had withdrawn permission for us to sail into their national waters "for security reasons." Since we did not have as much as a pistol on board, nobody could be afraid of us. The very friendly previous messages indicated that the concern was perhaps for our security, not their own. With the UN flag astern and men from east and west on board, a slow-moving Sumerian ma-gur would be a tempting prey for modem hijackers. This was a hot comer of our twentieth-century planet. Nobody knew it then, but possibly fear was in the air: for in the following year the presidents of both North and South Yemen were assassinated on two successive days.
There was suddenly nowhere to sail in any direction. Scientifi
cally it did not matter a bit that we were not allowed to add another five days to an experiment that had gone on for five months. But what hurt all of us was that we had come back to our own world, our own contemporaries, and met again the results of twenty centuries of progress since the time of Christ, the peace-loving moralist whose birth marks our own zero year. And here, around us on all sides, wonderful people were taught to kill each other by our
own experts, and were helped to do so by the most advanced methods man had invented at the end of five millennia of known history.
I did not tell my celebrating companions the bad news. I sneaked away from the party and spent all night on my back on board Tigris, gazing into the cane roof of the cozy cabin and wondering what we could do. We had to abandon ship and end the expedition here, that was certain. So far we had never given a thought to what to do with Tigris; in fact we had boldly promised to stay on board as long as it would float. It so happened that it still floated high; the distance from deck to water was as on Ra / and Ra II when we started. The outer mats had begun to tear and were marked by pollution, but the forty-four inner bundles made by the Marsh Arabs were as good as ever, and so was the palm-stem repair of the bow. Both Kon-Tiki and Ra II were taken to Oslo after their expeditions, and were on exhibition, with sails up, in the Kon-Tiki Museum. But with the new hall for Ra II there was no possible room for further extension. If we left Tigris in the polluted harbor of Djibouti, the ropes would quickly rot and the beautiful reed ship would fall apart and disintegrate in a few months. Business people in different parts were ready to buy Tigris, the last offer being from the man who towed us out from Karachi. But I hated the thought of our proud vessel traveling about stage-managed by some speculator. In addition, I was upset by the unbeHevable nightmare of modem war and the suffering of the refugees around us. I was sure the rest of the world was as ignorant as we had been of what was going on; to them, as to us, war in some distant part, away from our own doorsteps, was unreal, merely part of the daily news.
The Tigris Expedition Page 41