Scientific studies increasingly offer an entirely new perspective: We should not be surprised to read about the capabilities of seafarers such as the Minoans, or comparatively recently, Admiral Zheng He’s voyage long before Columbus arrived in the New World. Genetic testing, particularly, shows that migrations within Europe also could be traced for thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands of years, and that these migrations would have depended on building boats and crossing the seas.
The trail starts with an international group of geneticists who discovered through DNA analysis that a section of Crete’s Neolithic population (that is, pre–Bronze Age) reached Crete from Anatolia—modern-day Turkey. Professor Konstantinos Triantafyllidis of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki has published the findings of this research group, which was led by geneticists from Greece, the United States, Canada, Russia, and Turkey. According to Triantafyllidis, the analysis indicates that the arrivals of these new peoples coincided with a social and cultural upsurge that led to the birth of the Minoan civilization around 7000 B.C. Specifically, the researchers connected the source population of ancient Crete to well-known Neolithic sites in Anatolia.
Triantafyllidis’s research deals with the debate about the origin of Neolithic farmers in Crete and the Greek mainland, which are the earliest such sites in Europe. One side in the debate claims that the population came from Anatolia. But there are also questions about the ability of such colonization to take place via ships on the Aegean Sea. He reports:
To address these issues, 171 samples were collected from near these known early Neolithic settlements areas in Greece together with 193 samples from Crete. An analysis of Y Chromosome hectographs determined that the samples from the Greek Neolithic sites showed strong affinity to Balkan data while Crete shows affinity with central/Mediterranean/Anatolia.
In addition, Triantafyllidis writes:
Haplogroup J2b-M12 was frequent in Thessaly and Greek Macedonia while haplogroup J2a-Ma10 was scarce. Alternatively, Crete, like Anatolia, showed a high frequency of J2a-M410 and a low frequency of J2b-M12. This dichotomy parallels archaebotanical evidence, specially that white bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is known from Anatolia, Crete and Southern Italy; [yet] it is absent from earliest Neolithic Greece.
Quite separately, a group of prestigious international researchers led by Thomas F. Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou had found that Neolithic man had settled in southern Crete at least 100,000 years ago.1 Crete has been an island for five million years so this finding by reputable, well-known scholars can only mean seafarers reached Crete by sea more than 100,000 years ago. The DNA research of Triantafyllidis and colleagues shows these early seafarers probably came from Anatolia (Asia Minor).
Was it really possible that the Cretans came from a seafaring Anatolian stock that had left Anatolia from Crete 100,000 years ago? I decided to do my best to find out if this was feasible.
First I collated evidence on the Neolithic Anatolian sites after reading a number of books on Anatolian history. Professor J. G. Macqueen, in The Hittites and Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor, has a very good summary of Neolithic and early Bronze Age sites in Anatolia.
There are thirty-four of these sites, from Troy in the northwest to Kultepe (Kanesh) in the east, from Bogazkoy (Hattusas) in the north to Mersin in the south.
The sites may be reached by road quite easily, although it would be a long road journey of around 2,400 miles. I calculated that if we drove for 250 miles each day and allowed six hours for each site visit we could view the majority of the sites in fourteen days. A group of friends agreed to join Marcella and I, which greatly reduced the costs.
After dealing with as much of the logistics as possible in advance, we left Istanbul on April 18, 2011, for Anatolia and followed the planned route, returning to Istanbul on April 30, traveling about 2,200 miles. We returned with a magnificent haul of books, maps, photos, videos, and other material from museums on the sites. There now follows a snapshot of our visit.
TROY AND THE DARDANELLES
The Greek poet Homer immortalized the Trojan War first in the Iliad, then in its aftermath, the Odyssey. Homer’s monumental works are recognized not only as epics but as the earliest surviving accounts of Western civilization. They rival the world’s great religious literature in their sweep and power. Homer’s theme is the epic struggle for Troy, where Paris has taken Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Troy is besieged and eventually sacked by the Spartans. Homer’s account is of a pointless war fought over Helen, an exceptionally beautiful but promiscuous woman.
Homer’s detailed descriptions appeared to place Troy near the entrance to the Dardanelles.
In the nineteenth century, Heinrich Schliemann, a brilliant German businessman with a fine sense of intuition, read Homer’s accounts and deduced the precise position of Troy. He started a dig in 1871 and scored a bull’s-eye. His first trench sliced through the middle of Troy. However, he had also cut through nine layers of previous Troys—Homer’s was in layer six. The previous layers were of pre-Hittite Troy, dating back to 3500 B.C., while Homer’s (Troy 6) existed c. 1740 to 1300 B.C., when Troy was known to the Hittites as Wilusa.
En route to Troy we had visited Gallipoli, a promontory that guards the entrance to the Dardanelles. Though a devastating earthquake left it destroyed and virtually abandoned in 1354, Gallipoli is more famous for the World War I invasion of the peninsula by Australian and New Zealand (Anzac) forces in 1914, an effort to open up the Dardanelles to military shipping with which to battle Germany and its allies. Eventually, the Anzacs were forced to retreat and the victorious Turks held the day, cementing the career of Turkish general Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the father of modern Turkey.
We arrived three days before Anzac Day, April 25, which memorializes the sacrifice of 250,000 men who gave their lives to capture this small promontory. Their gravestones are inscribed with heartfelt messages from their parents to their beloved children, buried at Gallipoli. I was overcome by the futile tragic deaths of so many young soldiers and wept. Gallipoli was, like the Trojan War, appallingly futile, a disgrace to European civilization.
The one redeeming feature was the message sent by the victorious Ataturk to the bereaved:
To those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives . . . you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us, where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. . . .
You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears: your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.2
We arrived at Troy in pouring rain, soaked and dispirited. After Gallipoli I had lost interest in Troy and wanted to return home. However, the site immediately captivated me—having been excavated and labeled under the direction of a series of extremely gifted archaeologists who followed Schliemann, it is a fascinating scene. Today one can stand on a tower at the apex of the site and view from above layer after layer of the nine cities, each built on top of its predecessor.
There are also well-documented exhibits describing Troy as a center of international trade that stretched from Sicily in the west to Egypt in the south. Clearly merchants must have plied the Mediterranean at the time of Homer’s Troy (1700 B.C.). Other maps show that the area of Troy’s ancient settlement is huge. As the late Manfred Korfmann wrote, in his wonderful book Troia,
Measurements taken in 2003 revealed that this [Troy] covered an area of 300,000m2; thus Troia reached dimensions more than fifteen times as great as had ever been suspected.
[S]uch evidence certainly seems to corroborate the existence of the large site recognized by the poet [Homer] in the extensive remains still visible at the end of the eighth century [B.C.] and celebrated in his epics.
After we left the site, the incessant rain of the previous three days suddenly stopped and the sun burs
t through to reveal the countryside around Troy in its full spring glory—carpets of flowers and trees in blossom in a kaleidoscope of soft colors. This part of northwest Anatolia has volcanic soil rich in minerals. The mountains bring rain, and for most of the year the sun is pleasantly warm. The climate and geography are ideal for agriculture and forestry. Trees and shrubs flourish—oleander, sandalwood, myrtle, carob, and pine, as well as chestnut, olive, fig, and almond trees. Today the main commercial crops are sunflowers, plums, and figs. Oak forests provide wood for shipbuilding.
Even today the area is famous for hunting—fallow deer, wolves, foxes, bears, wildcats, and leopards. Game birds abound—wild ducks, partridges, pigeons, woodcocks, and francolins. The sea is rich in bream, mackerel, gray mullet, gurnard, bonito, and sea bass, while rivers have perch, carp, eel, and trout. Troy was well supplied with water—an aqueduct had been cut through the rock to bring water into central Troy in the third millennium B.C. So Troy from 3500 B.C. was at the heart of a large metropolis, a center of seaborne international trade and near to the Dardanelles, a strait that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Trojans even had a system of writing from 1130 B.C.
ANCIENT CITIES IN AEGEAN AND MEDITERRANEAN ANATOLIA
We had been traveling for five days and were on schedule, with no illness, fortunately. All the museums had been open and the hotels provided clean rooms and delicious Anatolian food. On this leg we were traveling beside the Aegean Sea—later it would be the Mediterranean. Our aim was to visit cities that flourished under Greeks and Romans to see whether they were—like Troy—built on layer upon layer of older cities, stretching back to the Bronze and Neolithic ages. To put it another way, were they in existence when Europeans from Anatolia were setting sail for Crete, thousands of years ago?
The plan was to visit Izmir, Ephesus, Bodrum, Antalya, Perge, Aspendos, and Side as major sites, as well as a number of smaller ones. It was a warm spring, with fourteen hours of daylight each day—ideal traveling conditions, yielding the full prospect that we would complete this leg of the program on schedule.
We started at the Anatolia Museum, one of the finest museums I have seen anywhere. The walls and floor are of white marble, the showcases of exhibits are brilliantly lit, and photography is permitted.
The museum provides an overview of 200,000 years of settlement, and it houses artifacts from the Karain Cave, which is located about twenty miles northwest of Anatolia and provides evidence of Neanderthal dwellers in the region. The first human-made stone tools found in Karain are 200,000 years old.
Examples of Paleolithic tools made of stone and fragments of bone are on display. Artifacts of the Early Bronze Age include daggers, spearheads, razors, ladles, bowls, pots, and animals, which are the same as their Minoan counterparts. The third millennium B.C. Bronze Age razor is identical to those I have seen in museums in Crete, Thera, the Orkneys in Scotland, and at Stonehenge.
By the time we had visited ten archaeological sites and museums along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Anatolia, we realized they had several common characteristics: exquisite classical Greek architecture, surrounded by fertile land, near the sea or a river, and each built on the site of a much older city. Perge is dated by a bronze plate found in Bogazkoy referring to “Parha” (Perge) artifacts from the Aksu River, on which Perge was based. Recent excavations have provided evidence for the establishment of the city in the “fourth–third millennium B.C.” Ephesus is of course mentioned by St. Paul. Even earlier, the artifacts exhibited in the Selçuk Ephesus Museum date as far back as the “7th millennium B.C. spanning the prehistoric, Mycenaean, Archaic, classical, Hellenistic, Roman . . . periods.” Ephesus Museum exhibits finds from the southeast part of the city that “date the environs of Ephesus back to 8200 B.C.” Bronze artifacts include a second millennium B.C. sword—identical to those found all over the Minoan trading empire, from the Great Lakes in the United States and Canada, all the way to Thera.
The museum at the ancient ruins of Aphrodisias, 130 miles from Izmir, adds additional information. Early Neolithic settlers came to the region around 6000 B.C. and settlements continued in the area through the Copper and Iron Ages.
As earlier described, Paleolithic man reached Crete more than 100,000 years ago but was present in south Anatolia 100,000 years before that. Furthermore, we have now learned that the inhabitants of Crete have the same DNA as those of Anatolia, as found by Triantafyllidis and his colleagues. So people must have traveled by sea from Anatolia to Crete—which has been an island for five million years. Even stranger, these seafarers must have had a system of navigation, since successive waves of human migrants to Crete in 100,000 B.C. pitched up in the same place—the Preveli Gorge in southern Crete.
How could they navigate accurately 100,000 years ago? A glance at a modern map provides the answer. The island of Rhodes, which lies between Anatolia and Crete, can be seen from the Aegean coast of Anatolia. The island of Karpathos, between Rhodes and Crete, is visible from Rhodes. Crete is visible from Karpathos. Seafarers from southwest Anatolia to Crete were thus in sight of land all the way. The sailors simply island-hopped—Anatolia, Rhodes, Karpathos, Crete.
Moreover, the prevailing wind in summer, known as the meltemi, is a strong, rotating monsoon wind that blows from northeast to northwest in the eastern Aegean. This wind would have carried them from Aegean Anatolia to Rhodes, from Rhodes to Karpathos, and from Karpathos to Crete—a relatively easy voyage. According to the historian Diodorus, Karpathos was a Minoan colony and remained part of Minoan civilization until the end of the Bronze Age. Rhodes has extensive evidence of Paleolithic man and also of Minoan civilization.
After Aphrodisias, we were on schedule and halfway through our journey. I was anxious to find out what aspects of Anatolian civilization the first Europeans had taken with them to Crete, not least the technology of copper and bronze (we know Minoans had been smelting copper from 4500 B.C.). The next leg of our journey was thus northward into central and northern Anatolia. In planning this I relied extensively on J. G. Macqueen’s book The Hittites and Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor. Macqueen has pointed out that the countryside was even more lush and fertile five thousand years ago than it is today. Huge quantities of trees were felled to smelt copper and tin to make bronze—a subject covered in more detail in my book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis. This denuded the forests. Macqueen has summarized the evolution of Anatolian civilization:
In recent years it has become clear that Anatolia was an area of vital importance in human development in the Neolithic period, even before the development of metalworking. The discovery that animals and crops could be domesticated, which was first made in the Middle East between 9000 and 7000 B.C., has been described as a “Neolithic Revolution,” but its importance lies not so much in its immediate effect (the establishment of settled agricultural villages) as in its enormous potential as a basis for further advance, given the right stimulus and the right conditions. An agricultural village does not grow automatically into a town, but one result of its formation is an increased demand for materials such as flint and obsidian, which are necessary to make cultivating tools and other equipment . . . in this way trade becomes increasingly important and those communities which happen to have vital materials on their doorsteps are in a position which they can exploit to the full. . . .
Macqueen described such a settlement as archaeologists have found on the Konya Plain in central Turkey. A thirty-two-acre settlement known as Catal Huyuk flourished with an industry of copper smelting, lead, and bronze production about 6500 B.C. It is considered by some scientists to be the first example of urban dwelling in world history3 and the largest of its kind ever found. Writes Macqueen: “A community of this type has been partially excavated in the Konya Plain . . . covers an area of 32 acres and is by far the largest site of its age so far found. It was occupied from before 7000 B.C. . . . [T]hough then prosperity was based on obsidian, the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk were
also acquainted with the use of other local materials which were to be of infinitely greater value in the later history of Anatolia.”
Anatolia, Macqueen tells us, had become in the latter part of the third millennium B.C. “a land of small city states, their rulers living in castles, their economies based primarily on agriculture, but their real wealth and importance residing in their metals and metal products.”
ANATOLIAN METALS
The Minoans’ ancestors were the first Hittites, whose capital, Kanesh, was at Kultepe, about twelve miles northeast of Kayseri. Kayseri’s archaeological museum exhibits finds from the Kultepe archaeological dig, including cuneiform tablets that tell us much about the Hittites. These describe that copper extracted from the Kultepe mine or found lying on the ground was sold in the metal bazaar at nearby Kanesh. Assyrian metal traders had their own quarter at Kanesh, under license from the Hittite overlords. There were additional copper mines at Derekutugun, some two hundred miles north of the Kultepe mines and near the Hittite religious capital Hattusa (Bogazkoy).
While Bronze Age Anatolia was rich in copper, Mesopotamians had neither copper nor tin in commercial quantities. Hence the development of Assyrian merchant colonies set up to purchase Anatolian copper to take back to Mesopotamia. These were called “Karum.” Each had its own organization and administrator, and lived in accordance with its own laws and regulations.
THE MINOANS’ INHERITANCE
By the time later Minoan voyages sailed to Crete from Anatolia around 5000 B.C., they had a rich legacy to take with them. By that date copper was being smelted at Kultepe. As we have discovered, Anatolia had many harbors in its Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, with a long maritime tradition.
Anatolia had developed cities such as Catal Huyuk, incorporating rudimentary town planning. They were technologically advanced cities where smiths were making the most of their local resources and were already turning out copper jewelry. Hittites by then had a cuneiform method of recording their history. In short, Minoans came from what was at the time probably the world’s most advanced civilization, the world leader in metallurgy. With these advantages it should come as no great surprise that they were smelting copper in Crete by 4500 B.C.
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