The Lost Empire of Atlantis

by Gavin Menzies

  There is a possibility that these pots could have been antiquities which were being carried much later by a more modern ship. Duerr doesn’t believe that, because the items themselves were so ordinary. The cooking vessels were scarcely ‘antiques’.

  The pots we found were not trade goods being carried by merchants. The ceramics were of practical daily use – belonging, with great certainty, to equipment on a ship.

  The finds did include lance tips and incense, but mainly what they found were containers for drinking and eating. Most crucially, Duerr discovered a seal that he claims had a Linear A inscription on it.

  What could have tempted the Minoans from Crete to the North Sea in the 14th century BC?

  Their interest was first prompted, Duerr believes, by: ‘Tin from Cornwall. The finds point to a shipwreck.’ He went on:

  I can now add it was not far from Britain to Frisia, where amber came from, beloved by the people of Mycenae. It was possible for the Minoans to navigate the North Sea 3,300 years ago . . . . Tin from Cornwall: navigation of the highly dangerous North Sea . . . For now, I was going to put those astonishing assertions aside and continue investigating the Uluburun’s hold.

  ELEPHANT TUSKS

  A length of elephant tusk, cleanly sawn at both ends. Heavily stained by the copper ingots in the wreck, it was found at the stern of the ship. Ivories were regularly traded as luxury goods. I vividly remembered seeing the charred ends of an elephant tusk in Hera-klion’s museum; it had been found in a 15th-century BC tomb at Zakros in Crete. Elephants are, of course, found in both Africa and India, but the tusks discovered in the Uluburun wreck have not yet been classified. However, we know Indian elephant tusks did reach the wider Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Five tusks from Indian elephants have been found in the ruins of a Middle Bronze Age palace at Alalakh in southern Turkey and more at Megiddo, in northern Israel’s Jezreel valley.

  HIPPO TEETH

  I have a soft spot for the hippopotamus and its teeth. In 1959 I had the misfortune to be serving on HMS Newfoundland, a cruiser returning from Singapore to the UK to decommission. Newfoundland was an old Second World War ship, useless in the age of strike aircraft and nuclear submarines. She had a complement of fifty-eight officers, when eight would have been enough. For most of the time we had nothing to do, so we drank heavily to pass the time.

  We berthed at Lourenço Marques in southern Mozambique and spent the first night at a seedy Portuguese night club. One of my favourite singers, Maria de Lourdes Machado, was singing fados, the sad Portuguese songs of lost love and betrayal. I think we must have all over-indulged . . . It was a beautiful dawn and we decided to go on a hippopotamus shoot in the delta of the Limpopo River, to the north. We took one of the ship’s motor boats, a crate of rum and some limes and set off.

  We found plenty of hippos snorting in the shallows and we started shooting at their flat backs. The hippos didn’t like this at all. In fact, they rammed the boat. I remember seeing the boat in the air, cartwheeling upside down, with the propellers still turning. An angry hippo with red, bloodshot eyes and huge teeth was staring at me from a few feet away, eyeing me up for breakfast. Too drunk to care, I vomited green bile, which spread in an oily slick across the muddy Limpopo water towards him. In disgust, he dived under me and disappeared.

  So I had had a good enough close-up of hippopotamus teeth. More to the point, their teeth have been worked into ivory jewellery for a very long time. A fragment of a hippopotamus lower canine was found at Knossos in the ruin of an early Minoan (3rd millennium BC) palace. So there was trade between Africa and Crete long ago.

  SHELLS

  It’s extraordinary to think that objects as delicate as ostrich eggs managed to survive the wreck of the Uluburun, but some of them did. At least five tortoise carapaces were also on the ship; the bowl-like shells were used for making lyres.

  But I was interested in two types of shell in particular. The first sort came in their thousands: those of murex opercula sea snails. Crete was the world centre of the trade in the prized purple dye that was extracted from these incredibly smelly molluscs. It took thousands of murex to make enough dye for the hem of a cloak and the Minoans had farmed them in great numbers for this lucrative trade. The presence of so many of them on the wreck supports the idea that the ship was Minoan.

  I was also intrigued by twenty-eight rings from an unidentified, large shell. The rings were found cut into shape and ground down. Their size implies that they were not from the Mediterranean, but from the Indo-Pacific region. They had already attracted the attention of experts:

  . . . The Uluburun rings provide evidence for trade between the Persian Gulf and the Levantine coast during the 14th century BC. Shells were either imported into Mesopotamia as finished rings, as may have been the case at Usiyeh, or made into rings there and probably also embellished with inlays affixed with Mesopotamian bitumen, before being exported to the Levant.9

  So here we have a hint of the trade between the Minoans in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

  THE COPPER INGOTS

  When he discovered the Uluburun wreck Mehmet Cakir was looking for sponges. What he found, instead, he said, were biscuits – ‘biscuits with ears’. What looked to him like biscuits turned out to be copper and tin ingots, lying near the keel. Many of the tin ingots had corroded into sludge, but the copper ones remain in remarkable condition even after their 3,500 long years under water.

  The total weight of the ingots was some 11 tons – 10 of copper and one of tin. There were 354 copper ingots in the shape of an oxhide, 121 smaller bun-shaped copper ingots and fragments forming another nine. No moulds have been found to show how the molten metal was formed into these shapes, but it seems that there were two pours of molten metal into one mould, in rapid succession – evidenced by cracking during cooling as the metal contracted. Most of the ingots were incised with marks when cold – probably at the trading place where they were collected and sold.

  The origins of this copper are heatedly debated: this is also true of the tin. If we knew its sources, it could explain how the Mediterranean exploited such enormous quantities of bronze, when there appeared to be insufficient numbers of mines to satisfy the demand.

  A thorough analysis of the copper ingots has been carried out by Professors Andreas Hauptmann, Robert Maddin and Michael Prange. It is described in their paper ‘On the structure and composition of copper and tin ingots excavated from the shipwreck of Uluburun’.10 They write:

  The ship carried ten tons of copper and one ton of tin. The cargo thus represented the ‘world market’ bulk metal in the Mediterranean . . . Cores drilled from a number of ingots show an extraordinarily high porosity of the copper. Inclusions of slag, cuprite and copper sulphides suggest the ingots were produced from raw copper smelted in a furnace and in a second step re-melted in a crucible. Internal cooling rims point to a multiple pouring. We doubt that the entity of an ingot was made of one batch of metal tapped from a late Bronze Age smelting furnace. The quality of the copper is poor [viz. the smelting process] and needed further purification before casting, even if the chemical composition [i.e. the raw copper] shows that it is rather pure. The copper was not refined. The tin ingots in most case are heavily corroded. The metal is low in trace elements, except for lead.

  The authors were studying the smelting process. Yet in examining that procedure, they also had to analyse the raw material. And the results intrigued me. They continued:

  From the chemical point of view, the purity of this copper is extraordinary in comparison with other sorts of copper distributed in the late Bronze Age Old World. For instance copper from the Wadi Arabah is much higher in lead (up to several per cent) . . . copper from the Caucasus area is extraordinarily high in arsenic (up to several per cent) . . . copper from Oman usually contains arsenic and nickel in the percentage area.

  The authors don’t believe that this extraordinary purity could have been the result of smelting

  . . . the concentratio
ns, for instance, of lead, arsenic, antimony, nickel or silver do not change very much during smelting . . . We therefore conclude that the ingots reflect the composition of ‘pure’ copper ores that were smelted to produce the metal.

  Detailed results, including a table for the composition of each ingot, showing the staggering purity of the copper, are contained on our website.

  I was more than surprised. There is only one type of copper with that level of purity, the copper that comes from Lake Superior on the Canadian–American border. I only knew about it because many North American readers of my earlier books about Chinese discovery, 1421 and 1434, had written to me on the subject. The Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan still boasts some of the purest copper ever found: a metal so pure you scarcely had to refine it to make your burnished copper cooking pots. Millions of pounds of copper from North America – mined in the 2nd millennium BC – appeared to have been exported somewhere, no one knew where. Readers had been wondering if it had been taken back home to China, in Chinese ships.

  How could ten of the bun-shaped copper ingots found in the Uluburun wreck be made up of Lake Superior copper? But then, how could a tiny American tobacco beetle have turned up in a ruined merchant’s house on Thera, in the middle of the Mediterranean?

  In an Annex on our website there is, firstly, Professor Hauptmann and colleagues’ report on the chemical analysis of the Uluburun wreck copper ingots. Secondly, there are extracts of thirteen reports on Lake Superior copper. As may be seen, all thirteen copper samples from Lake Superior and ten ingots from the wreck have purity of at least 99 per cent – purity unique to both Uluburun ingots and Lake Superior copper.

  That evening, unable to put the subject or myself to bed, I read up on the investigating chief archaeologist’s account of the find. Dr Cemal Pulak is director of research at, and vice-president of, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Turkey.

  Because of the enormous value of the goods in the Uluburun’s hold, Dr Pulak believes that when it came to grief the wreck had been carrying a royal or élite shipment. Even some of the ‘everyday’ objects on board bear this theory out. For instance, both the Minoans and their successors the Mycenaeans preferred to be clean-shaven. Dr Pulak believes that at least two Mycenaeans were aboard, escorting the goods. His theory was partly based on the evidence of five typically Mycenaean bronze razors found on board.

  Dr Pulak’s thesis is that the ship’s home port may have been in Canaan, in what’s now the north Carmel Coast of Israel, mainly because of the characteristic Canaanite design of twenty-four stone anchors found with the wreck. However the typically Minoan construction of the ship leads me to think that its origin was on either Thera or Crete, during the Mycenaean era.

  The ship’s carrying capacity was at least 20 tons, the archaeological team calculated, a figure they had worked out by tallying the recovered objects, including the 10 tons of copper and tin. I had estimated the admiral’s larger vessel’s carrying capacity at 50 metric tons.

  It was from Dr Pulak’s work that I learned, with great curiosity, of the existence of the so-called ‘Amarna Letters’. The name Amarna had cropped up before, when we were on Crete. I now knew it as the alternative capital city founded by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten of the late 18th Dynasty – husband to Nefertiti – and that the new capital had been abandoned shortly afterwards. The letters prove that during Akhenaten’s reign there was a sophisticated and developed system of trade going on between Egypt and a number of nations. They also show just how crucial it was to Egypt’s power base to keep up a continuous supply of bronze.

  Akhenaten (c.1353–1336 BC) is now remembered mostly as father to Tutankhamun, the famous boy king. Statues show Akhenaten to have been fleshily handsome: his long face bears large, well-defined features and has a high forehead. In fact, you might even say he looks headstrong. Akhenaten was a radical, so much so that he broke with the worship of traditional Egyptian gods. He built his new capital Amarna in an extraordinary new style. Thousands of years later, in 1887, a Bedouin woman was working in what appeared to be just a field when she discovered a cache of cuneiform (the ancient Mesopotamian lettering system) stone tablets.

  Dating of the 382 tablets is difficult, except to say that most of them would have been written well before Amarna was abandoned, shortly after Akhenaten’s reign.

  As the translator and Assyriologist William Moran confirms: ‘The chronology of the Amarna letters, both relative and absolute, presents many problems, some of bewildering complexity, that still elude definitive solution.’11

  What these tablets and fragments do tell us is about the established and elaborate trading etiquette that existed between kings. For example, the king of Alashiya wrote that he was late on delivery because much of his workforce had been ‘slain’ by the god of pestilence:

  As to the fact that I am sending you only 500 [shekels of] copper, I send it as a greeting gift to my brother. My brother, do not be concerned that the amount is so small. In my country all the men have been slain by the hand of Nergal, and there is nobody left to produce copper . . . send me silver in quantity, and I will send you whatever you request . . .12

  Experts think this was a negotiating tactic: if the king can send copper later, then it’s unlikely that the men he would have relied on to produce it had genuinely died. In effect what the king is doing is buying time and testing out his potential client: he is sending a sample and asking Akhenaten for silver in return.

  This world was beginning to form more and more complex dimensions; a multi-faceted but elusive jewel, the colours drifting slowly into place. To me, it looked increasingly as if the Minoans had sailed to all parts of the compass. It also looked like I was going to have to follow them.

  CHAPTER 11

  A PLACE OF MANY NAMES

  AND MANY NATIONS

  Today’s destination: Tell el Dab’a, a Middle Kingdom palace on a hill in the Nile Delta. Our goal is an ancient port beside the modern city, a place that was named Avaris during the Egyptian 13th Dynasty, when it was a crucial trading port dominated by the commercial traders known as the Hyksos.

  A group of friends had agreed to get involved with the first stage of my quest: an expedition to Tell el Dab’a and then on to the Nile Delta, following the old Red Sea–Nile canal north of Cairo to Zagazig, to test what I thought must have been Minoan trade routes. En route we visited Bubastis, the old capital city of the ‘Cat Pharaoh’, Bastet, simply for fun, but my true aim was to track Minoan influence and involvement though ancient Egypt.

  I’d decided that I would have to explore the routes the Minoans had taken, using the sources of the Uluburun wreck’s treasures as my guide. Doing so would be a £100,000 gamble of a trip starting in Beirut, then on via Damascus and Aleppo to Babylon, the beating heart of the Bronze Age world. All were important trade hubs during the Bronze Age. But first, I was going to take my time travelling through one of my first loves, the sacred land of Egypt, hunting down the truth behind this statement, written by Bernard Knapp:

  . . . Egyptian Keftiu documents clearly indicate the leadership of Crete . . . The recently uncovered ‘Minoan style’ frescos at the site of Tell el-Dab’a in Egypt’s eastern Delta and the Minoan style painted plaster floors at Tel Kabri in Israel open up the likelihood of diverse social or political contacts.13

  It can be much harder to locate and investigate the remains of Bronze Age Egypt here in the fertile flat lands of the Delta north of Cairo than it would be in the dry south of the Nile valley. For millennia the Delta has bestowed plenty upon Egypt. These are some of the richest agricultural lands in the world: Egyptian farmers simply plant their crops and wait for the annual Nile floods to fertilise and water their land. Naturally, this fertility has meant that the land has been ploughed up mercilessly. But the wetter atmosphere has also made the old cities of the Delta crumble, while the great works of art of the old civilisation have long since disappeared back into the soil. Ashes to ashes.

  To begin with, we simply mu
nched croissants and sipped strong Egyptian coffee, watching farmers set off to work on their donkeys. Skeins of geese migrate in the sky high above us. Each house has its dovecote. Now and then an old railway train chugs across the flat land, belching black smoke over the people hanging from its roof.

  It was market day and the village was full of women in black burkas carrying their shopping on their heads. Their baskets look like a cover for one of Claudia Roden’s beautiful Middle Eastern cookbooks: loaded down with beans, cucumbers, lentils, chickpeas, dates, olives and cabbages.

  But personally I’ve been drawn here not by the delicious food, but by a geographical survey by the Austrian Archaeological Institute. The survey revealed the existence of a buried harbour basin about 450 metres square (540 square yards), with a canal connected to the Pelusiac branch of the Nile.

  This region is where the biblical Jacob is said to have brought his family. All that’s left to see today are a few flattened, dusty ruins in the farming villages round about. The rest, like much archaeology, stays firmly hidden underneath the modern town. But in c.1783– 1550 BC this whole area must have been a hive of commercial activity. Radar imaging by the team of Austrian archaeologists shows that in the Bronze Age not only were there two islands and a tributary of the Nile running through Avaris, but a second harbour once sat alongside Palace F/II of the Middle Hyksos period. Historians have always thought that Egypt was no sailing nation. If this is true, then why the harbours? A third harbour or dry dock lies north of Avaris, at the Nile branch itself.

  Bronze Age Egyptians are probably best known for their remarkable building achievements and their elaborate cult of the dead, especially the art of mummification. Until very recently, it was assumed that the Egyptians knew little of boatbuilding, despite the obvious importance of the Nile. Yet after the Hyksos period, Avaris became a famous naval base. It was built primarily by Thutmose III and Amenhotep II and was at times called Peru-nefer.