Underworld

by Graham Hancock

  The upwarped shoulders of the Pantalleria Rift bear the Pelagian islands of Lampedusa and Lampione on the western shoulder and the Maltese islands on the eastern one. The still active shoulder up warping on both sides of the Pantalleria Rift causes the tilting. As the island of Lampedusa continues to tilt southerly, the Maltese islands tilt in a complementary manner towards the northeast …26

  This is the underlying geological process that created the sheer cliffs of southwest Malta, themselves forming the edge of an exposed fault-line at Maghlaq, near Mnajdra. And as Mifsud points out, the nature of the process makes it highly likely that Malta may once have extended much further to the south-west of Maghlaq than it does today (a continuation of the ‘thick end of the wedge’ on the up warping shoulder of the Rift). He proposes the cataclysmic collapse of this hypothetical south-western extension 4200 years ago as the explanation for the mystery of the sudden and apparently overnight extinction of Malta’s age-old temple-building culture at the same date:

  Tectonic movements in the Central Mediterranean are still responsible for the continuing separation of the two shoulders of the rift, respectively bearing the Maltese islands on the northeast and the Pelagian group on the southwest shoulder. It is far from inconceivable that [a] landmass joined to the southwest coast of Malta, at the Maghlaq site would have collapsed and submerged at a point in time when its underlying structures gave way to the rifting process. Such a collapse would have occasioned the displacement of massive volumes of seawater on the southwestern coastline, with a rapidly flowing torrential flooding event along a SW to NE direction.27

  It is this deluge that Mifsud proposes as the source of the grisly avalanche of jumbled and disarticulated skeletons washed out of Neolithic graveyards and into the Hypogeum 4200 years ago, and for the metre-thick deposit of silt that was dumped inside the Tarxien temples at the same time. And while I cannot agree with Anton that the same deluge and instantaneous loss of a large part of south-western Malta was also the source of the Atlantis myth, his notion of a cataclysmic fault collapse in this area is highly plausible and in full accord with the geological evidence. In addition, since Mifsud’s hypothetical south-western extension to Malta would have been created by tectonic motion along the Pantalleria Rift and destroyed by the same forces, it would have remained invisible to Glenn Milne’s inundation-mapping programme which, explicitly, does not account for tectonic motion.

  For the purposes of my own quest, the single most intriguing aspect of Mifsud’s hypothesis is that it permits Malta to have retained a large extension in the south-west down to 4200 years ago – i.e. more than 6000 years after the end of the post-glacial floods that had earlier been responsible for the inundation of huge areas to the north and east (see chapter 19). In the search for the experimental and ‘learning’ phases of Malta’s megalithic temples during the long gap between the end of the post-glacial floods 10,600 years ago and the ‘sudden’ appearance of the Gigantija phase 5600 years ago, I therefore suggest that we could hardly do better than begin to look here.

  Moreover, and again entirely beyond the data and resolution capabilities of Glenn Milne’s maps, there are the knock-on tectonic effects throughout Malta and Gozo that would have been caused by a massive collapse of up warped lands. Many adjustments of the coastline may have occurred that we will never have any knowledge of.

  What is certain, however – although the rates are unpredictable – is the continued stealthy emergence in the upwardly warping south-west and the continued stealthy submergence of the north-east Maltese coast. The particular implication of this process is that sites in the north-east shown on the inundation maps to have been submerged by 10,600 years ago may not in fact have been submerged until much later, when Malta’s tilt forced them under. It therefore follows that the inundated north-east, off-shore of Sliema, also remains a prime candidate for the missing archaeological remains of earlier phases of Malta’s temple-building culture.

  Broken images

  I have grossly oversimplified Anton Mifsud’s theory of a fault collapse along the Pantalleria Rift and left out much of the detailed empirical evidence that sustains the theory and dates the collapse to 2200 BC. Readers wishing to pursue the matter further are referred to his own book on this subject, Echoes of Plato’s Island, which presents the case more thoroughly than I am able to attempt here.28 I do, however, want to draw attention to one particular category of supporting evidence that Mifsud includes in Echoes. Unlike his geological and geophysical evidence this material is very hard to measure and assess and might be considered highly speculative. Nevertheless, I believe that it may prove to be of the greatest importance.

  In their research, Mifsud and his co-authors came across recurrent references in traditions and classical geographies and maps to a formerly much larger Malta. For example: ‘Some medieval maps do not speak of Malta, but of a certain Gaulometin or Galonia leta, and combine Malta and Gozo into one big island.’29

  We know from Glenn Milne’s inundation data that Gozo and Malta were indeed one big island during the Ice Age, down to approximately 13,500 years ago, and that they did not take on their present form as an archipelago of three islands (with little Comino in between) until around 11,000 years ago. Accordingly, if the medieval tradition of Malta and Gozo as one big island is not a complete invention – and why should it be? – then, ‘fantastic’ though it may seem, it somehow preserves a memory of Malta as it appeared more than 11,000 years ago. It is well known that most medieval mapmakers were only copyists reproducing older maps and, for reasons that we will explore in Part 5, I believe we cannot exclude the possibility that the single large island called Gaulometin or Galonia leta that has somehow survived on certain medieval maps may indeed be a representation of Malta in a much earlier time.30

  A mental leap is required in order even to consider such a possibility. It is necessary to set aside all preconceptions about the past, and all unexamined notions of how societies evolve. Above all, we have to rid ourselves of the ingrained conviction that (despite some setbacks) the basic story of human civilization has been steadily and reassuringly onwards and upwards from the very beginning.

  It may not have been so. There may be tremendous gaps, of which we are blissfully unaware, in the evidence presently available to us concerning the origins and progress of civilization. In particular, there has been no sustained or serious search for very ancient underwater ruins along the millions of square kilometres of continental shelves flooded at the end of the Ice Age.

  So it is possible, and within the bounds of reason, that a civilization of some sort might have flourished during the closing millennia of the Ice Age and might not yet have been detected by archaeologists. A civilization not necessarily at all like our own but still advanced enough to have mastered complex skills such as seafaring and navigation (that do not call for a large material or industrial base) and to have left behind memories of the world as it looked before the flood and at various stages during the rising of the seas. The sort of civilization, perhaps, that would have built with megaliths and aligned them with navigational precision to the path of the sun. Maybe even a civilization that measured the earth, mapped it and netted it with a latitude and longitude grid.

  Until such a lost civilization has been entirely ruled out – and we are far from that – it is rational to keep our minds open to the possibility, however extraordinary it may seem, that certain ancient maps have indeed carried down to us broken images of the antediluvian world.

  Thus Mifsud is right to be intrigued that:

  A southern extension of the Maltese islands … is recorded in the annals of Claudius Ptolemy, the renowned ancient geographer, mathematician and astronomer … He had unlimited access to the ancient documents in the Alexandrine library, and his research included the Mediterranean and Maltese islands. Although his readings outside the Mediterranean were sometimes erroneous, his Mediterranean latitudes in particular were significantly accurate.31

  Ptolemy (C.AD 90�
�168) carried out his geographical research at the fabled library of Alexandria in Egypt, the most extensive archive of ancient texts then preserved anywhere in the world. Is it possible that he, too, was drawing on antediluvian sources with his uncharacteristically ‘inaccurate’ references to a formerly larger Malta?

  What is particularly noticeable about Ptolemy’s coordinates, Mifsud demonstrates, is that they extend Malta significantly into the sea to the south and west of the present coastline in the vicinity of Filfla – exactly where he believes that massive land-loss occurred through catastrophic faulting 4200 years ago.32

  The crucial point [is] that Ptolemy gave co-ordinates for Malta which extended over twenty minutes of latitude (between 34°45’ and 34°25’). He was therefore attributing a maximum latitude width for Malta alone of at least 30.82 kilometres. This measurement today is approximately 21.5 kilometres, so that it is evident that in the ancient sources researched by Ptolemy, the Maltese islands still extended southward significantly more than today.33

  Maps drawn in late medieval and early Renaissance times from Ptolemy’s original coordinates contain a variety of anomalies that may also reflect the same ancient sources. For example: ‘An early world map of Ptolemy [Ulm 1482] shows a large unidentified island in the central Mediterranean.’34 Although displaced too far to the east, this large unidentified island bears a strong resemblance to Malta as it would have looked 14,600 years ago, shortly after it first became isolated from Sicily. A similar island is clearly shown on the Ptolemaic world map in Ebner’s manuscript of 1460.

  The Ptolemaic map in Ebner’s manuscript of AD 1460 shows a large ghost island south-east of Sicily. Similar islands are also seen on the Klosterneuberg of AD 1450 (which appears to merge the Maltese islands into a single landmass) and the Ulm of AD 1482.

  Another map, reputedly copied ‘from ancient sources’ at Klosterneuberg, Austria, in AD 1450, shows a ‘significant landmass between Sicily and North Africa’.35 Again, the possibility that this is a reverberation of ancient information about Malta’s former extent, even if distorted through the passage of time, cannot in my view be ruled out.

  Malta in this respect is far from unique, but stands as the representative of a wider problem that we will return to in Part 5.

  Tantalus

  Balluta Bay, 25 June 2001

  On the very last evening of our June 2001 filming trip to Malta for Channel 4, Anton Mifsud arranged for us to meet Shaun Arrigo. We hadn’t seen him since our disastrous dives in November 1999 and I wanted to clear up the misunderstandings that had occurred between us then. Fortunately, this proved easy to do and, thanks to Anton, we passed the evening in the bar of the Lapsi Waterfront Hotel with a new mood of trust and cooperation in the air.

  As we talked it emerged that Shaun had been back to the Sliema ‘temple’ site several times. Working in a team with Anton Mifsud and other colleagues, he had also filmed a second submerged site in the same general vicinity (which the group had named Janet-Johann site after the discoverers). ‘Do you want to see it?’ he asked. ‘I’ve brought the tape along with me, if anyone’s got a player and a TV.’

  Our producer Stefan Wickham offered the facilities of his room and we all crowded upstairs to watch the video.

  It became obvious, within moments, that the Janet-Johann site was of great interest. At depths of between 10 and 15 metres off Sliema Arrigo’s footage showed a series of very large, almost ‘monumental’ canals and parallel ‘cart-ruts’ much wider and deeper than those we had seen at Marfa and Qawra. Some of the canals cut through the bedrock in perfectly straight horizontal lines for more than 100 metres without any break. Then, beyond them, the camera came suddenly into an area of huge scattered megaliths. All were fallen except one which stood partially upright leaning at a drunken angle.

  ‘I found a piece of pottery round there,’ Arrigo told us. ‘It was lodged in a fissure, and very worn and ancient. I retrieved it and took it to the National Museum, but they just weren’t interested – told me I could keep it.’

  ‘And did you tell them about this site as well?’ I asked, indicating the images on the TV screen.

  ‘Yes I did. I told them I thought it was a very suspicious, very man-made-looking place. I offered to lend them the tape or guide someone from the Museum there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Same story. They weren’t interested. In fact they seemed rather annoyed with me. They’ve been annoyed with me ever since the publicity in 1999 and I still don’t understand why.’

  There was no time on that trip for us to take a look at the new Sliema site with Arrigo – besides he himself was leaving for Italy the next morning. So we agreed that he would dive it again later in the summer on contract to us and shoot more detailed and more extensive tape of what he’d found there. Then we would decide what to do about it – although frankly, with a book to write, I did not see myself getting back to Malta to pursue the Sliema temple any time soon.

  I felt like Tantalus, the thirsty Greek king whose fate it was to stand for ever up to his neck in water that receded whenever he tried to drink it.

  PART FIVE

  Ancient Maps

  21 / Terra Incognita

  Marinus of Tyre seems to have been the most recent of our students of geographia and to have applied himself to the subject with the greatest enthusiasm … If we could see that his latest composition lacked nothing, we should even have been happy to complete our description of the known world from these notes of his alone, without researching any further. But as on certain points he himself seems to have composed without reliable comprehension, and as in embarking on his map he has in many places not devoted enough thought either to convenience or to symmetry, we were naturally induced to contribute to his work what seemed necessary to make it more logical and useful.

  Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 90–168)

  From the outset portolan charts appear to have been remarkably accurate with little evolutionary development from the earliest-known examples to the later charts made towards the end of the seventeenth century.

  John Goss

  Maps of the Mediterranean drawn in the fifteenth century AD, according to a table of coordinates devised by the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, show the Maltese archipelago as a single large island, much as it looked in the thirteenth millennium BC … Ptolemy, as we will see, based himself on an earlier geographer, Marinus of Tyre – a Phoenician – who in turn had drawn on even older maps and geographical knowledge.

  How far back in the human story does the quest for geographical knowledge go? And for how long – either in actual maps and charts, or in tables of coordinates, or in verbal accounts and ‘word-pictures’ of coastlines and journeys – has such knowledge been preserved and promulgated by navigators?

  There has been debate since the 1950s about the significance of certain maps from the late Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery that appear to show Ice Age topography and coastlines – rather than the world as it looked when the maps were drawn. Could these maps have been copied from older source maps that had emanated, ultimately, from a lost civilization of the Ice Age?

  I first touched on this mystery in Fingerprints of the Gods. But that was in the early 1990s, before I knew about the science of inundation mapping or had been able to explore the hidden world that it revealed. As the new information from Glenn Milne began to come in during the last quarter of 2000, therefore, I set my research assistant Sharif Sakr the task of reopening the investigation -with a brief to stay away from anomalies that I had already discussed in Fingerprints and to look only for good, new correlations between the ancient maps and the inundation data now at our disposal. We agreed that this would be a long-term project that should run continuously in the background while Sharif attended to many other day-to-day research matters for me. I warned him that I would sometimes have to take him off the maps for weeks at a time to work on more urgent and immediate issues.

  The Reinal map of 1510 />
  I was in India when Sharif e-mailed me in February 2001 with news of his first significant ‘hit’ – an early sixteenth-century Portuguese map of the Indian Ocean (the Reinal map of 1510), that appears to show the west coast of India as it looked more than 15,000 years ago. Sharif’s e-mail discussing the relationship of the Reinal map to other maps of the early sixteenth century, and setting out the initial details of the correlation, is reproduced in chapter 14.

  I didn’t hear from him again on the subject of Reinal for several months. Then in August 2001 he sent me an update:

  Sharif Sakr to Graham Hancock

  10 August 2001

  Large photos of the Reinal map of 1510 and Cantino map of 1502 have finally arrived from the Bodleian. Not only do they support the correlation I described in my e-mail of 23 Feb but they also suggest that the correlation is even more detailed than I thought -particularly with India at 11,500 BC (not at the LGM, as considered before).

  Before detailing the correlation, there are a couple of things I need to explain about the correlation I described on 23 Feb.

  Firstly, I suggested that Reinal’s map of India omits the Kathiawar peninsula and the Gulfs of Kutch and Cambay that flank this peninsula, such that it correlates with Milne‘s maps of India before sea-levels had risen to today’s levels. The omission of the peninsula is evidently true from the map itself, and I stand by it. But from looking at the maps of Reinal’s contemporaries (such as the Cantino 1502 and the Ribiero 1519), I suspect that if we could ask Reinal, Why haven’t you drawn this important peninsula?’ he would reply, ‘I have,’ and point to a specific peninsula on his map, far away from where the Kathiawar peninsula actually exists. Relative to the surrounding geography, this feature is much too far north and west to be the Kathiawar peninsula, and it’s on the wrong side of the Indus river. Nevertheless, this feature was erroneously associated with the Kathiawar peninsula on the Cantino and labelled ‘Camba’ – i.e. Cambay, which is the name given on modern maps to the long gulf on the south-east side of the Kathiawar peninsula. Reinal may well have made the same mistake. As to where this false ‘Camba’ peninsula comes from, the answer is quite clear: it comes from the older Ptolemaic model of India, which was highly inaccurate.