Jack looked into the sea. He could see far down, two hundred feet or more, and could just make out the top of the reef wall that rose up almost a mile from the abyss. He half expected to see some dark form beneath them, some lurking malevolence of the underworld come to punish them for discarding the palladion, but instead all he saw were thin trails of bubbles rising from far down in the abyss. He shifted slightly and saw his own reflection in the water, no details, just the silhouette of a man framed by the sun staring down. It seemed a timeless image. He remembered the voyage of Noah and Gilgamesh. For the first time it seemed real, not myth, like watching Second World War footage in colour. Noah had been here, in a boat not much larger than this one, smelling the sea breeze, trailing his fingers in the sea, looking down at the bubbles and the phosphorescence. Somewhere near here, Noah the shaman had gone on, and Gilgamesh the hero, the man who would be a god, had turned back.
Jack remembered the carnage and human sacrifice they had seen in the inner sanctum at Atlantis. That too had been real, as real as the horror of the Nazi bunker. He turned to Costas. ‘Do you remember, four years ago when we dived in the sacred cenotes of the Yucatan in Mexico, going to the site of Chichen Itza and seeing the appalling evidence of human sacrifice? You yourself said it was a society where something had gone terribly wrong, that had not developed normally, as if someone had come from over the sea and imposed a distorted memory of Egyptian and Near Eastern civilization. You said the Maya were like a cult brainwashed by a madman.’
‘You mean the madness of Noah-Uta-napishtim,’ Costas murmured.
‘Perhaps Noah was on his own voyage into insanity, pushed towards it by what he had seen and done in that chamber of horrors in Atlantis, then by the sun and starvation and exhaustion as he came to this place, and then by the desperation that drove him to leave and sail ever further west until he hit the mainland and met people who lived as he knew his ancestors had done, a way he admired. He taught them what he knew from Atlantis, how to build pyramids and how to sacrifice, something that came to an awful head thousands of years later in the orgy of bloodletting by the Maya and the Aztecs.’
‘Not a place we want to go,’ Rebecca said.
Jack shook his head. ‘I think we turn back, just as Gilgamesh did. We go back to the world where men became gods, and where it was a short step from those faceless pillars of the Neolithic temples to the tyrannical god-kings of the Middle East and the worst megalomaniacs of our time, to Hitler and Himmler and the other monsters of Nazism. But that’s our legacy, and we know from what has happened today that we can transcend it. If we carry on west and follow Noah-Uta-napishtim to his heart of darkness, I’m not sure if there is any happy ending. There’s nothing for us there, no treasure at the end of the trail, just a horrifying vision of what human beings are capable of inflicting on each other.’
‘We’ve seen enough of that in the past few days,’ Costas muttered.
‘So what’s next?’ Rebecca said.
Jack was dog-tired, but he felt that familiar adrenalin surging through him. ‘We were speaking of Maurice Hiebermeyer. I owe him.’
‘Egypt?’
Jack grinned. ‘He and I have been planning it for years. It’s so big, we’ve never quite wanted to go for it, both of us waiting until the time was right.’
‘That statue with the inscription Maurice found at Troy?’
‘That was the clue he needed. If I tell you this could be bigger than the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, far bigger, you’ll see where I’m coming from. It’s about Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father, the most mysterious and terrifying of the pharaohs, about where he came from and where he went. About what happened to his treasure. About finding his tomb.’
‘Any diving?’ Costas mumbled, now half asleep.
‘Like you wouldn’t believe. The most astonishing find has been made in the Red Sea.’
‘No more deadly toxins? Doomsday weapons?’
‘I swear.’
‘Erupting volcanoes?’
‘The dive site is beside a beach, one of those ones with parasols and reclining chairs and a little bar at the back serving cocktails.’
Costas tipped his hat up and squinted at Jack. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope.’
He leaned back again, sighing contentedly. ‘For the first time ever, you think of me.’
‘Only after you do your duty at Lanowski’s wedding.’
Costas groaned and pulled his hat back over his face. Jack smiled at Rebecca, who raised her eyes and shook her head. He remembered the message he had written to her on the scrap of plastic when he thought he was going to die in the cavern below. He reached down to his buoyancy compensator pocket, felt for it, then discreetly took it out and dangled his hand over the pontoon, releasing the scrap into the sea and letting the waves wash through his fingers. The message would be there for her forever, in the sea, Jack’s spirit world, though the words would be erased by sun and water and would only ever be known to him. He felt a dawning happiness, as if that act had been the final release he had needed to throw off the burden that had weighed on him since Rebecca had been drawn into the nightmare of kidnapping and violence that had dogged their quest.
He lifted his hand from the water and shielded his eyes, looking up. The sound of the helicopter became louder, increasing to a roar as it took up position overhead. The downdraught kicked up a spray of water around the boat that sparkled as the sun shone through it, and for a moment it was as if they were in a vortex, one that would lift them to ever more fabulous places. Jack was suddenly coursing with excitement. He shaded his eyes and looked up, seeing Jeremy’s helmeted figure leaning out of the door. Costas reached up and caught the winch line, then looked at Jack and Rebecca, making a whirling motion with his free hand and pointing up. ‘Good to go?’ he yelled.
Rebecca draped her arm over Jack’s shoulders. Jack beamed at Costas, then tilted his head towards Rebecca, waiting. She turned and looked at him expectantly. Then she understood. She shook her head again, grinning, and they both shouted together.
‘Good to go.’
Background to the novel
When my first novel Atlantis was published in 2005, it was against a backdrop of extraordinary real-life discoveries that were transforming our view of the rise of civilization. A century ago, most scholars would have put that formative period at the beginning of the Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago; now we know that many of the key developments – the first towns, with walls, towers and even temples – had appeared more than five thousand years before that, soon after the end of the Ice Age. Cambridge University, where I completed my PhD in archaeology in 1991, had long been a centre of expertise in this era, and by the time I left my academic teaching career ten years later to write full-time, it was clear that the Neolithic period was where the most exciting breakthroughs were being made in understanding the past. Not only were amazing new sites being excavated – mainly in modern Turkey, on the Anatolian plateau – but archaeologists were thinking in daring new ways, using finds to question long-held assumptions about the transformation from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Most excitingly, they had begun to address the belief systems of our distant ancestors, to try to get inside their minds, something long thought beyond the scope of archaeology but where the new finds were shedding dazzling light. Was this a time of conflict, as the old beliefs of the hunter-gatherers were replaced by the new? Was it the birthplace of the gods? Much remains uncertain, but this sea change in archaeological thinking provides the backdrop to The Gods of Atlantis.
Atlantis revisited
My novel Atlantis was based on the premise that the sunken city, uniquely known from the fifth century BC Greek philosopher Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, was not Plato’s fictional creation but was truly derived – as he claims – from an account by the early sixth century BC Greek traveller Solon, who had heard it from an Egyptian priest in the temple at Sais in the Nile delta. The Egyptian priests
had an unbroken tradition of knowledge extending far back into prehistory, and my novel began with the fictional discovery of a papyrus containing Solon’s original account of his visit to the temple. However, instead of basing the story in the Bronze Age, on the second-millennium BC eruption of the Aegean volcano of Thera and its effect on Minoan civilization – as do many archaeologists who take Plato’s story at face value – my Atlantis dated thousands of years earlier, a distant memory of a devastating flood and a lost city at the dawn of civilization, not in the Aegean, but in the Black Sea to the north-east. This placed Atlantis in the Neolithic – the ‘New Stone Age’ – at the time when agriculture was first developed, a period dating from soon after the end of the Ice Age about twelve thousand years ago until the widespread adoption of copper technology from about the fifth millennium BC.
My inspiration derived from remarkable evidence published during the 1990s that the Black Sea may have been cut off during the last Ice Age from the Aegean by a land bridge across the Bosporus Strait, and that the Black Sea remained at its Ice Age level – a hundred metres or more below the present shoreline – until the global sea level rise caused the waters of the Aegean to breach the land bridge and flood the Black Sea basin. During the Ice Age, the glaciers themselves had not reached as far south as the Black Sea, but the great melt had a global effect on coastal settlement. The possibility that the Black Sea flood did not occur until the sixth millennium BC, more than three millennia after the beginning of the Neolithic, meant that the flood could have inundated early farming communities that may now lie underwater off the northern shore of Turkey. Evidence for the fecundity of this region suggests that it should be included within the ‘fertile crescent’ where agriculture first developed, stretching from present-day Israel up through Anatolian Turkey and down into the Zagros mountains of Iran.
The idea that there could have been a city with monumental structures was inspired by real-life evidence from the early Neolithic: Jericho, in present-day Palestine, had city walls and a tower as early as the ninth millennium BC, and at Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, the excavations in the 1960s revealed a substantial town of the eighth millennium BC. Catalhoyuk even produced a famous wall painting that may show a town on the slopes of a double-peaked volcano, an image that appears in The Gods of Atlantis. I was also inspired by a theory that associated the spread of farming with the spread of Indo-European language, which had been sourced by many scholars to the Black Sea region about the seventh millennium BC. I could therefore imagine groups of early farmers fleeing the flood, some going overland to Mesopotamia and the Levant and Egypt, others by boat into the Aegean and further west – taking their animals with them, as we know happened in the Neolithic and may be remembered in the Old Testament account of Noah – and spreading agriculture, a common language and new technology far across Asia and Europe, and perhaps beyond.
The Neolithic revolution
The phrase ‘Neolithic revolution’ was coined in the 1950s by the prehistorian Gordon Childe to describe the dramatic changes that took place in the Near East after the Ice Age. As recently as 1980, when I first studied archaeology as an undergraduate, the Neolithic was still being approached in his terms, as a time when the invention of agriculture led to the first towns. This approach – in which economic rationale was the driving force behind change – and the rapidity of the ‘revolution’ seemed to be borne out by the evidence of Jericho and Catalhoyuk, towns that dated very soon after the first evidence for agriculture. But this picture has been turned on its head by new discoveries in eastern Turkey. It is less clear now that hunter-gatherers would have seen the advantages of agriculture in a region where foraging may have provided an easier livelihood; other factors were at play. The most extraordinary new finds are religious sites – temples, for want of a better word – that may have preceded the first towns and agriculture, yet whose construction required a level of labour organization that would have made these other developments – the construction of towns and monuments – possible. New religious ideas may therefore have been a driving force behind the rise of civilization. This stunning idea makes this period one of the most exciting in current archaeology. What has emerged is not only a new kind of Neolithic revolution, but also a revolution in the way we approach the past.
The site above all that has led to this revolution in ideas is in southern Turkey, at Gobekli Tepe, where excavations began in the 1990s and are still ongoing. In my novel Atlantis, Jack sees a Stonehenge-like structure in Atlantis that hints at the religious ideas that fleeing priests may have taken with them far to the west. At Gobekli Tepe, the archaeological reality behind this image is spectacularly revealed in an oval structure containing a circle of monolithic stones, carved in a way that suggests they may have been anthropomorphic. Extraordinarily, this ‘temple’ may date to 9500 BC, older even than Jericho. Another site in Turkey containing monolithic pillars has been discovered at Nevali Cori, and a third temple is at Cayonu. The finds from these sites discussed in this novel are all actual discoveries. The Cayonu site is now submerged by the waters of the Ataturk dam, suggestive of sites similar to these that may have been submerged along the Black Sea coast by another flood more than seven thousand years ago.
The birth of the gods
These ‘temple’ sites of the early Neolithic may represent a new form of religion, and the Neolithic revolution may above all have been a revolution in belief systems and the part they played in the rise of civilization. In order to understand what this new religion might have replaced, archaeologists have looked back to the rock paintings that first appear in caves in Europe about thirty-five thousand years ago. These caves, the basis for the fictional rock paintings in my novel, may have been portals into a spirit world, with spirit animals such as the bull – the aurochs – being used by shamans or seers as a way of transporting themselves into the supernatural, to a place where they could contact the dead. The famous female figurines of this period, with their exaggerated breasts and buttocks, may have been fertility symbols – good-luck charms – rather than ‘gods’; the much later mother goddesses of the Bronze Age may hark back to a clay figurine of this type found at Catalhoyuk, but if she was a ‘god’, it may have been as a transmogrification from the fertility symbol rather than evidence for a Palaeolithic – Old Stone Age – goddess cult. Good luck with fertility, good luck with the hunt – represented perhaps by the spirit animals of the caves – and a way of dealing with death may have been the building blocks of the first coherent belief system, one which did not involve gods or acts of worship as we would understand them today.
Some of the clearest evidence for this older belief system may be where it survived into the early Neolithic in private domestic contexts, visible for the first time in the earliest houses. Renewed excavations at Catalhoyuk since the 1980s have focused attention on the symbolism of art and artefacts within houses, including the bull’s-horn ‘bucrania’ that have become an iconic image of the site. Houses may have taken on some of the significance of caves in the Palaeolithic, with bulls ‘coming through’ the walls in the same way that animals appear in cave paintings, suggesting that man-made walls had taken over from rock as a portal into the spirit world.
The Neolithic evidence has drawn in archaeologists of earlier prehistory who have long pondered the significance of cave art, and have come to believe that Palaeolithic religion may have involved practices similar to those of the shaman or ‘seer’ in hunter-gatherer societies recorded by anthropologists. Using techniques such as repetitive chanting and sensory deprivation – as well as hallucinogenic drugs – shamans could achieve a trance-like state comparable to that of worshippers during intensive acts of devotion to a god. The similarity of these experiences has led scientists to suggest that they have a common neuropsychological basis, that they are ‘hard-wired’ into the brain as the sensations of altered consciousness. Common sensations include being in a vortex or a tunnel, floating in water, and visions of an upper and a lower world, the basis
for the tiered cosmology of heaven, earth and hell common to many religions. Just as devout believers can ‘see’ divinity all round them, so those who believe in a spirit realm can partly inhabit that world in their day-to-day lives; belief alone may be enough to propel them into a state of altered consciousness. This is what archaeologists mean when they talk of getting inside the prehistoric mind: trying to see the world in a way that is unfamiliar to many today who are not believers in the supernatural. In a prehistoric world where there may have been less fear of being ‘out of control’, the pleasure of surrendering to hallucinogenic experiences was also a factor. The strength of early religion – the draw to its participants – may have been these altered-consciousness experiences in which the voyage in the mind was more important than the destination, in a belief system that did not revolve around the worship of gods or reward for devotion with a favoured place in the afterlife.
How and why this type of belief system may have changed into the new religion seen at Gobekli Tepe, with its temple-like structures, is a matter for speculation. Earlier religious experience may have been inclusive, with access to the spirit world open to everyone, as reflected in its survival in the houses at Catalhoyuk; rather than being fixed to particular sites, religious practice may have been ‘portable’, involving sacred stones such as meteorites hinted at in the earliest foundation myths of the Bronze Age, noted below. The establishment of fixed sites for ritual may have come about during periods when the glaciers had receded and people were able to remain in one area for generations, particularly at the time of the first cave art in southern Europe and then after the end of the last Ice Age. That period, after about 10,000 BC, gave the ecological stability for long-term settlement that allowed the process to go further than it ever had before. Fixed places of ritual may have become increasingly exclusive, the preserve of shamans or priests empowered by their sway over increasingly large groups of hunter-gatherers who had begun to live in semi-permanent settlements. A new breed of priests may have been the first to exert authority over communities larger than kinship groups, and may have been behind the first communal endeavour in the building of ‘temples’ and then the organization of towns, agriculture and animal husbandry that were needed both to sustain the religious sites and to maintain and control population in one place.
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