The Lost Empire of Atlantis

by Gavin Menzies

  Along with naval architect Colin Mudie, Severin examined every aspect of ships built in the area more than 3,000 years ago and how to sail them – not least in relation to the crew. The physique of man in the Bronze Age was smaller than today. Cretans were also small – they were perhaps 165 centimetres (5 feet 5 inches) tall and about a stone lighter than today. The pair searched for a boatbuilder who specialised in building traditional Aegean sailing ships, one who would work in the same wood that was used thousands of years ago. Vasilis Delimitros was reputed to be the best shipwright on Spetses, which is now a picturesque, car-free island and a splendid holiday haven. In Jason’s time it would have been a Mycenaean stronghold. The galley was built using the same bronze adzes and saws which were in use in the Bronze Age. Delimitros followed Colin Mudie’s drawings closely, not least when constructing the hull, where the planks were joined edge to edge as in the Uluburun wreck. Grooves were chiselled out of the plank, a tongue of oak was inserted, a matching tongue was cut out of the plank to be joined, the two were hammered flush together, then a hole was drilled for a locking peg through the matching tongues. To Vasilis it was no problem. He built one complete side of the ship by eye, then the next. The planks were slotted together as quickly and smoothly as if he had been doing the job all his life.

  When the hull was ready they carved the mast from a tall, straight cypress tree, as well as two 3.5-metre (12-foot) high steering oars. The rigging was similar to ship 6 in the Thera fresco – hemp woven and stitched to make stays, sheets, and halyards. The pulleys were copied from the oldest-known shipwrecks, with wooden sheaves fixed around wooden pins. Finally the fierce and brave Argo was ready – and was even painted in the livery of red, white and blue found both in Mycenaean ships and on the Theran wall frescoes.

  What now follow are my own impressions. At times they may appear critical: that is not the intention. I have unqualified admiration for what Severin achieved with a largely amateur crew on a journey of 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) across open sea. The personal toll was extreme. For instance, Severin describes an occasion when a gnawing storm brewed up in the Black Sea, and the heavy downpour turned the hands of the rowers a horrible, pulpy white. As he describes it: ‘Their hard-won blisters looked like dead flesh.’

  The incident itself clearly shows the dangers that Bronze Age sailors would have had to face routinely. Severin was attempting to reach a calm cove, against the pressure of great round-shouldered waves, through a narrow cut in the cliffs:

  We were getting dangerously near the rocks, and the crew were falling quieter as the constant slog began to sap their energy . . . I turned Argo at right-angles to the entrance and drove her hard at the gap. She rose on the back of a wave, heaved forward, fell back and was picked up a second time. The crew rowed flat out to keep her moving through the water so that I had enough speed to steer her and to keep the boat from wavering off-course or broaching to the waves. In a spectacular roller-coaster ride the galley went tearing through the gap, her fierce eyes staring straight ahead, and we entered the haven.5

  There were plenty of disasters, but in the event many things went better than planned. Firstly, the bow ram proved a convenient place for the crew to sit to relieve themselves. A line of pegs doubled as a ladder to climb back on board. The sailors could wash themselves and their clothes when becalmed – as well as fish from the ram.

  Secondly, the twin steering oars (which were worked in opposite directions), turned the ship easily. Then in flat calm seas without wind, twelve oarsmen (out of the twenty) could push the ship along at 3 to 3.5 knots, even faster if the centre of gravity was adjusted by shifting the resting oarsmen and cargo aft. Severin writes:

  Argo spent all that day skimming over the waves in Jason’s wake like a ship out of a dream. Under full sail she behaved superbly. The hull cleaved through the blue sea and with the merest touch on the two steering oars, Argo responded like a well-schooled thor-oughbred. She turned as deftly as one could wish, and a second touch on the tillers to bring them level brought her back on course, running sweetly forward. One could feel the ship quiver as she sped downwind, her keel and planks thrumming as she rolled over to the following seas while her ram threw aside a cresting bow wave . . . For hour after hour Argo ploughed along at 5–6 knots leaving a clean wake behind her, while the crew relaxed on the benches . . .

  Finally, Argo had very good sea-keeping qualities in a gale. Although she was wallowing and lurching, and was seemingly threatened by wave after wave, she did not take on much water. The crew – although they got seasick – just sat and waited for the gale to pass. Argo’s natural position was to lie broadside on to the waves, rising and falling to their advance and giving a lurching sideways heave as each crest passed under her keel.

  Now for the bad news. Rowing had been a nightmare. Continuously soaked, chafed and wet, the crew suffered multiple salt- water sores – their hands a mass of blisters. Even when they’d replaced mutton fat with olive oil as a lubricant, rowing was only practical in a flat calm. The slightest wind was a nightmare – ‘ . . . a scarcely perceptible breeze blowing against the prow of the boat cut down her speed alarmingly. It was not just like walking uphill, but like walking uphill through shifting sand’.

  In any sort of sea the oars got banged about and rowers were thumped in the back. The steering oars were not strong enough and broke frequently. Neither were the rowlocks, which snapped. The cotton sail became mildewed with damp (I think using a cotton sail was a mistake: Minoans used woven sheep’s wool impregnated with fat).

  After only five months’ sailing the hull of the ship was covered in barnacles, reducing speed by one knot (the Thera frescoes show that the Minoans sheathed the hull in canvas, which would have eliminated most barnacles). Despite all of this the Argo covered 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) in three months – against the wind and current – with a constantly changing, inexperienced crew. It was an astonishing achievement.

  Severin and his crew had shown that boats like the Argo could have successfully plied the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. By this evidence, they could even have got as far as the Baltic. Yet there were still major questions that needed answering, as far as I was concerned. I particularly wanted to discover whether it was specifically the Minoans who had developed the art of seafaring? Did they have a far-reaching tradition that made them better sailors than, say, the peoples from mainland Greece?

  In spring 2010, I once again picked up my Times newspaper, and found, by luck, another piece of the puzzle.

  Quartz tools at least 130,000 years old, such as hand axes, cleavers and scrapers, had just been found in an area of southwest Crete from Plakias to Ayios Pavlos, including the famous Preveli Gorge. They dated from the Lower Palaeolithic period. The fact that Crete has been isolated from the mainland by the Mediterranean Sea for five million years told the archaeological team that these early settlers must have arrived by boat. The team, headed by Dr Thomas Strasser of Providence College Rhode Island and Dr Eleni Panagopoulou of the Greek Ministry of Culture, had surveyed caves and rock shelters near the mouths of freshwater streams, the sorts of sites where Palaeolithic man is likely to have lived. Professor Curtis Runnels of the Plakias survey team told the newspaper: ‘[They] reached the island using craft capable of open-sea navigation and multiple journeys – a finding that pushes the history of seafaring in the Mediterranean back by more than 100,000 years.’

  All in all the team recovered more than 2,000 stone artefacts from 28 sites. The quartz rocks from which the tools were fashioned were sufficiently abundant for tools to be discarded when blunted. At five of the sites the geological context had helped the team arrive at an approximate age for the stone tools. Professor Runnels estimated that they were at least 130,000 years old and could be much older.

  In the report Dr Runnels suggested that they could be at least twice as old as the geologic layers (i.e. 260,000 years old). Dr Strasser went further – they could be at least 700,000 years old. Dr Strasser, who has condu
cted excavations in Crete for the past twenty years, bases his estimate on similar double-bladed hand axes fashioned in Africa 800,000 years ago. He believes that the large sets of hand axes found on the island suggest a substantial population, who must have made multiple sea crossings, all landing at the same place. In order to achieve that, Palaeolithic man must have had seaworthy vessels more than 100,000 years ago. He must also have had a system of navigation which allowed later arrivals to find Crete and the landing stages reached by earlier voyagers. The newer settlers must have heard about the previous voyages in detail – this at a time before the invention of writing as we know it.

  Before these extraordinary finds were made, it was thought seafarers had not reached Crete until around 6000 BC. But it is now generally accepted that by 4000 BC at the latest Cretan people had sufficient food, shelter and clothing to have surplus time on their hands – and at this point life ceased to be purely a battle for survival.

  The Plakias survey team believed that this was the earliest evidence of Lower Palaeolithic seafaring so far found in the Mediterranean. Crete’s very first inhabitants had arrived at the island by ship. Who knows what archaeologists will find next? We don’t know in what sort of craft, but it seems that people were navigating Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ tens of millennia earlier than anybody has ever dared to think.

  CHAPTER 10

  LIFE IN THE LIBRARY

  My task now, if I was going to get any further with my quest, was to find out more about the Minoans’ need to sail. What exactly were they trading and how far did they have to travel to get it? The Uluburun wreck had told a fascinating story and I needed to unravel it. Dauntingly, I had to bridge the more than 3,000-year gap between the wreck and our own age.

  Luckily it was not that difficult to stroll from my home in north London to the British Library. I spent three long weeks researching the Uluburun wreck and the objects found in its hold, going back and forth to the library’s enormous new red-brick building on the Euston Road, breathing in the calm and scholarly atmosphere with real enjoyment. It is somehow rather comforting to sit inside a building with so much knowledge propping it up from all sides. It feels like a cocoon against the world, a time shuttle carrying everything in its red-brick hold, from beautiful historic maps to rare manuscripts. I like to think of all those books and papers mouldering away in basements underneath but the reality, as a diligent and helpful librarian explained to me, is that they are kept in vast climatically controlled racks underground, often in off-site storage facilities as far away from London as Boston Spa.

  Now I was able to check up on the Uluburun’s cargo in detail. Only a few months ago, the ancient world had been simply darkness, as far as I was concerned. Gradually, flashes of bright colour were piercing through that shadow and murk. I was beginning to get a feel for the real lives of a fast-developing people who had been inhabiting an extraordinary, active, bustling world that a few months before I had scarcely known existed. I also wanted to discover more about the Egyptians’ political and strategic alliances. It seemed to me that the Minoans must have developed a longstanding relationship with Egypt, if they’d traded so many goods from Africa and the Middle East.

  Fairly quickly, I learned that Minoan Crete had been renowned for its sophisticated perfumes, which it exported across the Mediterranean. Terebinth, with its hyacinth-shaped candles of bright red flowers, still grows on Crete – and is often used to lace the local brandy. To people in ancient cultures scent was of great value. They burned many kinds of resins and woods in their religious rituals, as well as adorning themselves. I already knew from past travels to Egypt and the west bank of the Nile that Queen Hatshepsut had led whole expeditions in search of another intense scent, incense: the results were recorded on the walls of the mortuary temple created in her honour at Deir el-Bahri, near the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. In the Uluburun wreck’s hold the spirit of ‘waste not, want not’ was evident – the stalks and leaves of the terebinth bush itself had also been used on the ship as a springy packing material, protecting delicate items on the journey.

  One look at a botanical tome, and unwittingly the humble terebinth plant had helped me to find what I had not quite known I was looking for. The resin only comes after the early winter frosts. This small fact, along with the fact that the ship was also carrying ripe pomegranates in the hold, stopped me in my tracks. Surely, this meant that the ship was on a winter voyage? This would imply that by the time the Uluburun sank, and maybe long before that, voyages were no longer confined to high summer. Bronze Age sailors were sailing in all seasons, and into the wind.

  These early research successes aside, I soon realised that the task I had set myself was not as straightforward as it might have seemed. There was a geographical anomaly in the Uluburun’s hold, and it was staring me in the face.

  There was a rare ceremonial sceptre-mace on board. The expert analysis was that it came from either Bulgaria or Romania – from halfway up the Black Sea. Also in the hold was a large quantity of amber, the fossil produced by pine resin, which actually came from the Baltic. I thought at once of Severin’s voyage – the parallel with Jason’s voyage and the tale of the Golden Fleece – and then brushed it from my mind. This was real life we were talking about, not myth. Tim Severin had got as far as the Black Sea. The Baltic was an altogether more dangerous proposition. Had the Minoans truly obtained Baltic amber all the way from the north? Today polished amber is highly prized, treated like a jewel and bartered like one. But then?

  A quick look at the work of the great classicist Robert Graves6 and some science journals yielded a further series of supporting clues: apparently, wine is quite possibly a Cretan invention and not just in myth. The linguistic evidence comes with the fact that the very word is from Crete. The vines used to make it are thought to have first come from the area around the Black Sea, where they originated in the wild.

  My research also confirmed that amber had been both valued and used since the Stone Age. The Greek name for amber is electron; the origin of our own word electricity. Rub amber with a cloth and it will become electrified and even attract paper.7 It must have induced a real sense of mystery and wonder. It was certainly used in sympathetic magic. Worn as a charm, the belief was that amber protected against sore throats, toothache and stomach upsets. It was also seen as a remedy for snake bite and newborn babies were given amber necklaces to protect against infection. In much later times, even the prophet Muhammad valued it: he said that a true believer’s prayer beads should be made of amber.

  So amber was a true treasure; a great prize. To obtain it our ancient mariners would have needed to sail through the Kattegat and Skagerrack. Even those great sailors of latter times, the Vikings, had occasionally come to grief doing that.

  I cast my mind back to Jason and the Argonauts and thought how dangerous travel in rocky seas would have been. Yet the Baltic amber that had evidently been found in many ancient gravesites in mainland Greece, as well as on the Uluburun wreck, must have got there somehow. Neither did it feel like a coincidence that Crete had such a reputation for wine, if its sailors had been the first to discover vines, and grapes, because of their adventurous travels.

  I could see that to piece all of the strands of evidence together I needed to learn much, much more about the fascinating process of world trade from all that time ago. I decided to concentrate on four significant categories of the traded goods and see if I could discover more about the process. Taking a notebook, I began what for me was several days’ work, but it is summarised here as just five sections.

  AMBER

  Infrared spectroscopy proves that most of the amber found in ancient sites in the Mediterranean came from the Baltic, as did that in the Uluburun wreck. The earliest Baltic amber found in the Mediterranean was found at Mycenae (shaft grave O) and is dated to c.1725–1675 BC. A vast amount of the jewellery found at Mycenae was originally Minoan.

  A total of 1,560 pieces using amber were found at Mycenae, 1,290 fro
m shaft grave IV alone. It is intriguing that these earliest consignments show a remarkable similarity (in the design of their spacer plates) to amber necklaces of the same period found in Britain. Which also originated in the Baltic. So it appears possible that Crete’s expanding empire was already trading in amber by 1725 BC.

  I soon discovered that there are others apart from myself who believe that the Minoans were behind the ancient amber trade. In 1995 Hans Peter Duerr, who was then a director of the German scientific research organisation the Max Planck Institute, decided to take his family on holiday to the North Sea islands, near Hamburg. Duerr was interested in the lost city of Rungholt, which in the Middle Ages sank beneath the waves in a tempest.

  Medieval Rungholt, then a part of the nation of Nordfriesland, had a population of some 1,500 people and a reputation as an astoundingly wealthy port. It became victim to the first ‘Grote Mandraenke’, a Low Saxon term for ‘A Great Drowning of Men’ – a vicious North Sea storm tide that swept over England, Denmark, Saxony and the Netherlands in 1362, smashing island groups apart and killing an estimated 25,000 people.

  Duerr’s most exciting findings, he told the German magazine GEO, lay underneath the late medieval Rungholt – beneath, and therefore older than, a Bronze Age layer of peat dated to 1200 BC. They were just ordinary, everyday items; items that sailors, who were there for far more valuable goods, had left behind at a port.

  We came across remains of Levantine and especially Minoan ceramics, the daily kind used to transport goods. They were dated 13th and 14th century BC. Amongst these were shards of two tripod cooking pots from Crete. That’s why we believe ships were sailing in 1400 BC from Crete to the coast of Northern Frisia.8