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

by Mark Adams

  Freund’s documentary built on Kühne’s thesis, compiling a number of other compelling similarities between Plato’s Atlantis and the Doñana Park site. Southwest Spain contains some of the world’s greatest copper deposits, which have been mined since Phoenician times. The narrator of Finding Atlantis points out that the ancient Greek word orichalcum, the mysterious metal that Plato wrote “flashed with . . . red light,” is often translated as “mountain copper.” The region’s geology shows evidence of having endured several of what scientists sometimes call “high-impact events.” The famously unstable Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault due west of the park could have caused tsunamis capable of laying waste to a coastal kingdom in a day and a night. A layer of methane found several meters below the ground at one spot in Doñana might be evidence that organic matter—flora, trash, or human remains—had decomposed after being smothered and trapped suddenly under debris carried by a tsunami. The existence of Kühne’s rings appeared to have been confirmed through electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), a geophysical method that uses electrical current to identify objects under the ground.

  Having assembled this impressive trove of evidence, near the end of Finding Atlantis Freund offered what he called his “smoking gun”: two small figurines, discovered while searching inside the circular area identified by Kühne. “People wait a whole career to find just one of these little figurines, and we found two!” Freund exults in the documentary. He identified them as possible images of the ancient goddess Astarte, who was worshipped in various forms for nearly four thousand years. Freund saw a possible connection to the Phoenicians. This race of seafarers, based in the area in and around modern Lebanon, built up a massive trading empire between the second millennium BC and their conquest by Persia in 539 BC, with colonies stretching the length of the Mediterranean. One such colony was Gades/Cádiz. The Phoenicians are credited with spreading the use of the alphabet, but since almost none of their writing has survived, their history is obscure. Based on the discovery of these figurines, Freund speculated that historians may have gotten the exploration of the Mediterranean backward—the Phoenicians might have actually originated in Spain and migrated east. A vanished Phoenician settlement on the southwest coast of Spain might have been the inspiration for Plato’s story. “That would make Atlantis the prototype for all other Phoenician outposts,” he writes in Digging Through History. Such an idea would rewrite the chronology of western civilization.

  If anything, the press response to Freund’s documentary exceeded the reaction to Kühne’s Antiquity article. The natural historian Simon Winchester, author of respected books on the Krakatoa cataclysm and the Atlantic Ocean, wrote in Newsweek of Freund’s claim to have found Atlantis: “Beguiling new research into one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries appears to have thrown up remarkably persuasive evidence that remains of the ancient city are to be found in the great Hinojos marsh on the southwestern coast of what is today’s Spain.” He invited readers to plug in a set of GPS coordinates and have a look at the site on Google Earth. “It is a remarkable site, and you will gasp.”

  I entered the coordinates. I squinted. I saw a brown smear. I did not gasp. Had Freund really solved the twenty-four-hundred-year-old mystery?

  • • •

  Freund’s offices were located in the basement of a building that looked like an Eisenhower-era recreation center. As I waited at his assistant’s desk—Freund is the director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies—I admired some photographs of artifacts he’d uncovered at digs in the Middle East. The subterranean air was swampy; a dehumidifier hummed in one corner. Eventually, I was waved in to an inner office. Freund sat behind a large, messy desk covered in papers and very-old-looking books in several languages. He was obviously relishing his sudden fame as the world’s most famous Atlantologist.

  “I’ve received about five thousand e-mails!” he told me, handing over a thick folder. “Here’s a selection of five hundred. From kids, from crazies. National Geographic was just overwhelmed.” He read aloud from a couple of letters and then handed these to me as well. “This might be something you and I could collaborate on—Letters to and from Atlantis. A whole book!” Freund wanted to make sure I knew I was missing out on a potentially hot property: A writer for The New Yorker had contacted him about doing a book together. “Anne Rice’s agent says she’s working on a nonfiction book about Atlantis!” The organizer of the triennial Atlantis conferences in Greece was all but begging him to attend, but Freund had prior plans to oversee the archaeological dig of an ancient city port in Israel.

  Reaction to Finding Atlantis may have been enthusiastic, but it had not been universally positive. In the documentary Freund appears to be the decisive leader of the expedition, shepherding a team of Spanish scholars through the dusty landscapes of Doñana in a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers. Long after watching it I learned that Freund’s role was the result of careful editing. The Spaniards worked for their country’s national research council and had invited Freund primarily because he had access to expensive equipment they needed. They’d been working in Doñana Park for years. Freund had been at the location for a week. The Emmy Award–winning producer of Finding Atlantis, Simcha Jacobovici, was famous for making the sorts of sensational documentaries that mainstream scholars despise, including one History Channel special purporting to have found the nails from Jesus’s cross. And as usual when the name Atlantis was raised, critics howled that Freund couldn’t have found it because Plato’s Atlantis was a fiction.

  Freund remained convinced that he’d located the true Atlantis. “This is like finding the Titanic or King Tut’s tomb,” he said, shaking his head. “There are too many things that are accurate to discount. He ticked off the evidence on his fingers: the Astarte figurines, the ERT readings (which he compared to “MRI readings for the ground”), the satellite photos. When I asked why no stones had been found during the team’s subterranean soundings, which would seem to contradict Plato’s description of a red, white, and black stone wall that surrounded the innermost circle of Atlantis, Freund explained that this absence was actually a good thing—evidence that a tremendous tsunami had obliterated the site and swept everything out to sea. A team of marine archaeologists had found the remains of enormous stone walls in the water off of the Bay of Cádiz, near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

  “There’s debris going all the way down the coast!” he told me excitedly. “Ancient walls and pillars deposited in front of the marsh—things that are nine, eleven, fifteen, eighteen meters down!”

  Carbon 14 dating of core samples taken from within Rainer Kühne’s innermost circle, where the figurines had been found, uncovered a sample of local oak—possibly remains of a ship—buried under forty feet of debris. To Freund, this indicated an ancient settlement suffocated by a sudden influx of sea matter. “Only in that one area of the marsh do the cores date back four thousand years,” he said. That could mean a disaster around 2000 BC.

  “So how do you explain the discrepancy with Plato’s figure of nine thousand years between the sinking and Solon’s trip to Saïs?” I asked.

  “The measurements were a mistake in translation from the Egyptian,” he said. “That’s a very common thing with ancient sources.” Freund notes in his book that for the ancient Greeks, 9 was a very powerful and mythical number. He compares it to the use of 40 in the Hebrew Bible: Noah’s ark sailed through forty days and nights of rain; Moses spent forty days atop Mount Sinai obtaining the Ten Commandments; the Israelites wandered forty years in the desert, and so on. Nine thousand years was simply Plato’s symbolic way of saying “once upon a time,” he said.

  Having already introduced the smoking gun of the Astarte statuettes, Freund had wrapped up Finding Atlantis with what he later called “the most compelling evidence for the existence of Atlantis.” He paid a visit to Cancho Roano, a ritual site 150 miles north of Doñana first excavated in 1978. Unlike the area within Doñana,
Cancho Roano is widely acknowledged as a Tartessian site, the finest ever uncovered. It seems to have been strictly ceremonial. The building has one entrance, is surrounded by a moat, and consists of a set of identically shaped rooms that radiate out from the center. To Freund, these echoed the single entrance canal, central island, and concentric rings that Plato had written about. When Freund visited a local archaeological museum and saw its collection of Bronze Age steles—slabs of stone decorated with carvings that serve as a marker or monument—he had what he called an aha moment. Several of the steles were inscribed with similar designs—that of a warrior standing next to an image of three concentric circles bisected by a single line leading from outside to the center. “I said to the archaeologist who brought me there, ‘Don’t you see? It’s a miniature version of Atlantis!’”

  Then Freund stood abruptly and said that he had to hurry off to set up for an Atlantis presentation at a local synagogue. We walked up the stairs and into the sunshine. I asked how his Spanish colleagues from the documentary had reacted to the finished product.

  “Well, the folks from Doñana weren’t very happy,” he said, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”

  We shook hands and I watched him drive off. Only then did something occur to me: If Freund had made the most important archaeological discovery in history, why wasn’t he going back to Spain anytime soon?

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Second Opinion

  Madrid, Spain

  Several months later I was wandering the deserted halls of an enormous government building on the outskirts of Madrid, searching for Juan Villarias-Robles. Villarias is a historian and anthropologist who works at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, or CSIC, Spain’s multidisciplinary research council that is similar to the Smithsonian Institution. He had helped organize the research project in Doñana Park. His takeaway from the findings had been, to say the least, a little different from Freund’s.

  I rapped on the door matching the number I’d written down and was greeted by a man in his midfifties with eyeglasses and a neat mustache, wearing a necktie. Villarias had a tidy, spacious office, one wall of which was lined with books organized by subject. Large windows looked onto a hideous mirrored-glass building across the street. With a “please, sit down,” Villarias motioned to a pair of low-slung chairs facing each other, like those on a highbrow 1970s talk show. I felt like a patient who was about to receive bad news from his doctor.

  Almost no one who had appeared alongside Freund in the Finding Atlantis documentary was pleased with it. Part of the displeasure was the distinct impression left that Freund, with his one week of filming in Doñana, was a modern-day Schliemann who’d orchestrated a major archaeological discovery.6 Villarias and other members of the team had been working on what they called the Hinojos Project for six years. In the wake of the initial broadcast of Finding Atlantis, Villarias had posted a scathing fourteen-hundred-word rebuttal on the website of the Hartford Courant, in which he pointed out that Freund had piggybacked onto their research project and then had run off to tell the world he’d discovered Atlantis.

  “We were interested in Tartessos, not Atlantis,” Villarias explained. “When Freund came to us, he had no interest in Atlantis at all: His interest was King Solomon. When he learned about our project, he thought—with justification—that we could get data that would date to the tenth century BC. That would be a way of confirming that those expeditions in the Bible to the mysterious land of Tarshish corresponded to the land of Tartessos.”

  This made sense. After all, Freund was a historian who specialized in biblical history. I had expected Villarias to be what Spaniards call an aguafiestas, or a wet blanket, on the subject of Tartessos and Atlantis, and he certainly had the right to be cranky. Having made his point about Freund, though, Villarias was more interested in talking about the possibility of finding lost cities.

  “Tartessos was probably . . . I say ‘probably’”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“because we don’t know very much about it. It was probably a Bronze Age society, materially not as advanced as Greece and Rome. Probably the oldest organized society in the western Mediterranean, going back to about 1000 BC. There is some argument but I do believe that Tartessos and Tarshish are basically the same.”

  “How could you prove that?” I asked. “What sort of evidence would you need?”

  “Basically, goods—material remains from tenth-century Israel or Tyre. Pottery or other artifacts that date to the tenth century would be good evidence. Perhaps King Solomon would have said, ‘I’ll give you some nice clothes and crafts and you give me gold and silver from Tarshish.’” No evidence had yet surfaced that would prove the exchange of precious metals for luxury goods, but Villarias was optimistic that something might turn up in the future.

  Villarias’s Hinojos Project was a major undertaking, a team of nine Spanish specialists in fields ranging from geology to cartography to archaeology assembled to explore the Tartessos-Atlantis hypothesis put forth in Rainer Kühne’s Antiquity article and its accompanying satellite photos. A friend of Villarias had seen a Spanish news story about Kühne’s hypothesis and remembered that Villarias had written his BA thesis on Tartessos.

  “Actually, there were two German scholars,” Villarias clarified, raising two fingers. “Kühne, and also Werner Wickboldt, who originally identified the two rings and two rectangles.”

  Villarias recalled having been intrigued by 1990s satellite photos Wickboldt produced, but also confused. As far as he could recall, the area in the photos that contained the temples had been a lake in Roman times. Prior to that, it was a large estuary that formed where the Guadalquivir River met the Atlantic Ocean. One of Spain’s most celebrated geologists had established in the 1930s that the marsh had once extended all the way to the present city of Seville, which is sixty miles inland. It seemed unlikely that a majestic port city trading gold and monkeys would have been built in a gigantic swamp.

  When Villarias collected a bunch of geological reports to review, though, he came across a reference to a fourth-century-AD poem by a Roman named Rufus Festus Avienus, titled “Ora Maritima” (“Sea Coasts”). The parallels between the transmission of the Atlantis story from Egypt to Plato and Avienus’s reliance on ancient sources are interesting.

  Avienus drew heavily on a document known as the Massaliote Periplus, a long-lost guide for merchant sailors, written around the sixth century BC. (The historian Rhys Carpenter defined a periplus as “a Greek literary tradition of versified marine handbooks for navigators, notably headlands, rivers, harbors, and towns along a given route.” Basically, a poetic set of point-to-point directions using landmarks.) The Massaliote Periplus, as transmitted through “Ora Maritima,” describes a sea voyage starting in Brittany near the English Channel, then tracing the perimeter of the Iberian Peninsula counterclockwise en route to Massalia, modern Marseille. Along the way, the poem provides a wealth of information about the location of the city of Tartessos.

  “It’s just a fragment of the poem, maybe twenty pages,” Villarias said. We stood up and walked over to a map of ancient Spain that he had tacked to his wall. “Adolf Schulten”—the German archaeologist who with George Bonsor excavated in Doñana Park in the 1920s, trying to find evidence of Tartessos and Atlantis—“made the argument that because Avienus mentions names, he is copying old texts. Some of them, such as Hecataeus of Miletus’s Journey Round the World, may have been written at the time Tartessos existed. Others, like Bakoris of Rhodes, we don’t even know who that guy is.”

  Historian Rhys Carpenter made a convincing argument that Avienus’s primary source, unmentioned in the poem, was the pioneering Greek geographer Pytheas, who had made the long sea voyage to the frozen north somewhere between the years 325 BC and 300 BC, a few decades after Plato wrote the Timaeus. Two short sections of “Ora Maritima” give the location of Tartessos and convey the fact that it had been destroyed sometime between
Hecataeus’s Journey, written in the fifth century BC and probably based on earlier information, and Pytheas’s eyewitness account of the late fourth century BC.

  . . . This is the Atlantic Gulf

  And here is Gadir, once Tartessos called,

  Here too the Pillars of persistent Heracles . . .

  Tartessos—prosperous and peopled state

  In ancient periods, but now forlorn,

  Tiny, deserted, heap of ruined mounds!

  Villarias traced his finger on the map, from Cádiz/Gades (a name derived from the Phoenician Gadir, meaning “walled city”) past the marshes of Doñana Park and through the Pillars of Heracles at Gibraltar. “Avienus must be interpreted, though,” he said. “Ora Maritima” can’t be read as a Rand McNally map any more than the Atlantis story can be read as pure history. Adolf Schulten’s interpretation of Avienus had led him to the Roman ruins at Cerro del Trigo, where the high water table had prevented him from searching for older ruins. No one followed up, and by the 1960s, Villarias explained, the use of ancient texts as archaeological sources had fallen out of fashion as scientific methods such as carbon dating, stratigraphy probes, and aerial photography took precedence. “Ora Maritima” was largely forgotten.

  In 2005, Villarias helped assemble a multidisciplinary team. The Hinojos Project had two simple objectives: to see if the shapes that the Germans Wickboldt and Kühne had seen in satellite photos were man-made (assuming they existed at all). Second, if these shapes were man-made, was it possible to determine how old they were? The team looked at detailed aerial photos taken in 1956, after dictator Francisco Franco agreed to allow the United States to build military bases in Spain. They gathered the oldest known maps, going back to Catalan and Italian sea charts of the fourteenth century, centuries before longitude had been discovered. They recruited a biologist to analyze prehistoric pollen samples. They arranged for a new set of aerial photographs. The initial results were intriguing. Where Wickboldt and Kühne had seen two rings and two rectangles hiding under the marshes, the Hinojos team found fifteen forms. “Because of their geometrical and well-proportioned outlines,” Villarias-Robles wrote in a follow-up report, ten of the shapes “look especially suggestive of man-made structures.” This wealth of promising evidence was enough to merit further investigation.