From their work I found that there were largely six categories of goods for which there is substantial proof of trade. That exchange was between India, Egypt, the Minoan lands and North America, in the era of Hatshepsut’s expeditions to the East: that is, during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. They have documented: (1) maize transported from the Americas to Egypt and India; (2) descriptions of the origins of this maize given by Indian and African peoples; (3) cotton taken from India to the Americas; (4) tobacco and drugs transported from the Americas to Egypt via Thera; (5) squashes and fruit shipped from America to India; (6) gourds exported from India to America. This will, of course, only be relevant if it can be demonstrated that it was Minoan ships in particular that traded with the Americas as well as with Egypt and India.
To concentrate on a few specifics that clearly illustrate local Indian knowledge of ‘exotic’ produce: in a highly detailed work of scholarship, Professors Carl L. Johannessen and Professor Anne Z. Parker contend that stone carvings of maize exist in at least three pre-Columbian Hoysala stone temples near Mysore (see second colour plate section). Professor Johannessen has also found the sunflower, another New World crop, in pre-Columbian Indian temple sculptures.30
Their conclusions are supported by a separate research project undertaken by the Indian botanist Professor Shakti M. Gupta,31 of Delhi University, who agrees:
Different varieties of the corn cob (Zea Mays Linn) are extensively sculpted on the Hindu and Jain temples of Karnataka. Various deities are shown as carrying a corn cob in their hands, as on the Chenna Kesava Temple, Belur.
Professor Gupta continues:
The straight rows of the corn grains can be easily identified. In the Lakshmi Narasimha temple, Nuggehalli, the eight-armed dancing Vishnu in his female form of Mohini is holding a corn cob in his left hand and the other hand holds the usual emblems of Vishnu . . . .a 12th century sculpture of Ambika Kushmandini sitting on a lotus seat under a canopy of mangoes holds in his left hand a corn cob . . ..
The number of instances is overwhelming. Professor Gupta identifies sunflowers, pineapples, cashews, custard apples and monstera – all of them New World species – in the pre-Columbian art of India. Carvings depicting the sunflower, a native of Central and South America, are found for example in the Rani Gumpha cave, Udayagiri (2nd century BC). As Professor Gupta reports, a pineapple is clearly depicted (see second colour plate section) in the Udayagiri core temple, Madhya Pradesh (5th century AD); a cashew in the Bharhut stupa (2nd century BC) and monstera – a climber native to Central America – in Hindu and Jain temples in Gujarat and Rajas-than (11–13th centuries BC).
As for dating the era when maize first appeared, Professor Gupta implies that it may have been in existence long before it appeared in the carvings described above:
. . . it is quite conceivable that maize was present in the subcontinent [India] for many centuries before the Hoysala dynasty [described by Professor Johannessen], and that distinctively Asian varieties were developed early on.
Indian and African people believed maize was first brought to their countries ‘from Mecca’ in the case of Indians and ‘from Egypt’ in the case of Africans. These descriptions would make sense if my suspicion that the Minoans had known exactly how to get to America was true. Perhaps now was the moment to investigate the little Lasioderma serricorne beetle in more detail.
THE TOBACCO BEETLE
If, as it appears, the Minoans carried tobacco from the Americas to Egypt, then there should be evidence of American tobacco in Crete itself or on Thera, the principal Minoan base. Finding such evidence may be complicated by the destruction visited on both islands by the volcanic eruption.
There is, nevertheless, such evidence – in the form of the tobacco beetle, which I suspected would also be found in ancient Egypt. The first specimen I had encountered was buried beneath the 1450 BC volcanic ash of a merchant’s house in the Minoan town of Thera, modern-day Akrotiri.
Lasioderma serricorne was indigenous to the Americas. Yet, as Sir Walter Raleigh, who brought tobacco to 16th-century England as a prize for his queen and sponsor Elizabeth I, would have testified, the plant is not indigenous to Europe. Nor did it grow there in 1450 BC.
The life-cycle of this little beetle, averaging forty to ninety days, is highly dependent on temperature and food source. Females lay ten to a hundred eggs in the tobacco and the larvae emerge in six to ten days. The larvae cannot hatch below seventeen degrees Celsius and they die when the temperature falls to four degrees Celsius. In short, the beetles can only breed in warm conditions. In the right season, Minoan ships would have had a warm hold, with sailors sleeping in it off watch.
After a period of further desk research, I knew that this tobacco beetle had also been found in the tombs of pharaohs who had clearly smoked the weed – Anastase Alfieri reported finding them in King Tutankhamun’s tomb (1931 and 1976) and J.R. Steffan (1982) in the visceral cavity of Ramses II. Alfieri (1976, 1982) reported specimens from Alexandria, Cairo, the Nile Delta and the Fayum and Luxor regions – all places visited by the Minoan fleet. So I believe that the carriage of tobacco and the tobacco beetle is another ‘signature card’ of Minoan voyages to the Americas and back; as well as to Egypt and the Mediterranean. It is a card just as distinctive as the Minoans’ cult of the bull. It also dates at least some of their travels to the specific era between Tutankhamun and Ramses II. The date range would have been 1336 BC (Tutankhamun) to 1260 BC (Ramses II at the age of about 38), and in Thera to before 1450 BC (the possible date of the volcanic eruption) – a 200-year spread.
Yet there was another obstacle in the way of this theory. It came very literally, in the shape of Africa. From Crete’s position in the Mediterranean; from the Egypt of the pharaohs; from India, it was all the same. The vast looming land mass of Africa is dominant on any modern map. From both Egypt and India, the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ is right in the way of anyone attempting to get to the Americas. It appeared to me that there was only one way that North American produce could ever have reached India. The Minoans can only have gone west, not east. They must have braved the perils of the North Atlantic ocean and breached the Straits of Gibraltar, passing the landmark that the ancient Greeks, believing that the two magnificent peaks were the gates to the end of the world, called ‘The Pillars of Hercules’. The pillars beyond which, according to Plato, lay the lost realm of Atlantis.
NOTES TO BOOK II
1. Homer, Iliad 16.221–30; 23.196, 219, trans. Robert Eagles. Penguin Classics, 1998
2. G. F. Bass, ‘Cargo From the Age of Bronze’, in Beneath the Seven Seas, Thames & Hudson, 2005
3. Cathy Gere, The Tomb of Agamemnon, Profile Books, 2006
4. Tim Severin, The Jason Voyage, Hutchinson, 1985
5. Ibid. p. 161
6. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
7. D. Grimaldi, ‘Pushing Back Amber Production’ in Science, 2009 p 51–52
8. Hans Peter Duerr, GEO Magazin, no. 12/05. Dienekes 8/2008
9. Joan Aruz, Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium BC, Barnes & Noble, 2008
10. A. Hauptmann, R. Maddin, M. Prange, ‘On the Structure and Composition of Copper and Tin Ingots Excavated from the Shipwreck of Uluburun’ in Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 328, pp. 1–30
11. William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters, John Hopkins University Press, 1992
12. Joan Aruz, Beyond Babylon, p. 167
13. Bernard Knapp, ‘Thalassocracies in Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Trade: Making and Breaking a Myth’, in World Archaeology, vol. 24, No.3, Ancient Trade: New Perspectives, 1993
14. Rodney Castleden, Minoans, p. 32
15. D. Panagiotopoulos, ‘Keftiu in context: Theban tomb-paintings as a historical source’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 20, 2001, pp. 263–4
16. Leonard Woolley, A Forgotten Kingdom, Penguin, 1953, pp. 74–75
17. The Thera Foundation 2006, Heaton 1910; 1911; Forbes 1955, pp. 241–242; C
ameron, Jones and Philippakes 1977; Hood 1978, p. 83; Immerwahr 1990a, pp. 14–15. Aegean Frescoes in Syria-Palestine
18. Joan Aruz, Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium BC, Barnes & Noble, 2008
19. From USA Today, 5th March, © 2006 USA Today. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited
20. André Parrot, 1958a, 165 n.2, Samaria: the Capital of the Kingdom of Israel, SCM Press, 1958
21. The Teaching Company User Community Forum Index, Alexis Q. Castor. ‘Between the Rivers: The History of Ancient Mesopotamia,’ Teaching Co. Virginia, USA
22. Jack M. Sasson, in Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millenium B.C. Yale University Press, 2008
23. Zephaniah 2:13 (Destruction of Syria and Nineveh)
24. Homer, Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler, Longmans, 1900
25. Enuma Anu Enlil 17.2
26. The Canal Builders, Payn, Robert, MacMillan, New York, 1959
27. Herodotus, Histories, trans. George Rawlinson, Penguin Classics, 1858. p. 109
28. Paul Lunde, The Navigator Ahmed Ibn Majid, Saudi Aramco, 2004
29. Professor Cherian and colleagues, ‘Chronology of Pattanam: a multi-cultural port site on the Malabar coast’
30. ‘Maize Ears Sculptured in 12th and 13th Century A.D. India as Indicators of Pre-Columbian Diffusion’, Economic Botany, 43
31. Shakti M. Gupta, Plants in Indian Temple Art, B.R. Publishing, 1996
BOOK III
JOURNEYS WEST
CHAPTER 19
NEC PLUS ULTRA:
ENTERING THE ATLANTIC
Helen of Troy’s face is said to have launched 1,000 ships. Plato, meanwhile, claimed that the kings of his fabled Atlantis had 1,200 ships.
Even by the time of the Trojan War, Homer was still able to describe ancient Crete as the provider of eighty ships for the joint campaign to avenge Paris’ abduction of fair Helen. We’ve established that the Minoans were a mighty sea power until the volcano struck. Thera alone, at the time of the admiral’s fresco, seems to have had at least ten ships, and possibly more. Minoan power and reach expanded steadily as the Bronze Age developed.
I was now searching for the answers to two major questions. The tobacco beetle Lasioderma serricorne must have been brought to Thera somehow: exactly how? I also suspected that at least some of the near-pure copper found in the Uluburun wreck originated at Lake Superior. How could two so very different items from America have surfaced so far away, in the exotic island culture of the ancient Mediterranean? Geography dictated that it was almost impossible that anything from North America could have reached Minoan Crete via Egypt, or even through India. There was no other answer: sailors, not necessarily the Minoans themselves, must have crossed the Atlantic – and to meet up with them, the Minoans must have made their way west as well.
Yet to brave the unknown, voyaging through the Pillars of Hercules, which the ancient Greeks believed held up the very sky, would have taken real courage. There is much dispute about the location of the pillars – and indeed, about what exactly they were. Although some scholars believe that the mythic hero Hercules performed his labours in the Greek Peloponnese, and dispute that the pillars lay between Spain and Morocco, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence in favour of the Straits of Gibraltar.
What would have tempted the Minoans to sail westwards in the first instance? Surely the answer has to be something to do with finding, or producing, the substance that ignited the whole age – bronze? The Uluburun wreck, much smaller than the ships shown in the Thera frescoes, carried 10 tons of copper in its hold: a vast amount.
Crete, the birthplace of Minoan civilisation and the lynchpin of the Bronze Age, had no copper in usable amounts. The island had some small amounts of surface copper, but not enough to fuel the huge amount being smelted and worked on a grand scale in Minoan Crete, not least in the palaces themselves. Intriguingly, at Chrysokamino on the northeast coast of Crete there is evidence of smelting activity stretching as far back as c.4500 BC. Crete had no tin. It had to be imported by sea.1 The surrounding, colonised islands were also engaged in smelting: after all, the magical metal of bronze was the crude oil of its day, as valuable as the gold that made Croesus rich. So where did the raw materials that fuelled the Minoan brilliance in bronze actually come from?
Copper, and later on in time the finished bronze, must have been imported by sea.2 The nearest copper mines were at Lavrion in mainland Greece and on the island of Kythnos in the Cyclades.
Bronze, to recap, ideally contains around 90 per cent copper. The other 10 per cent is made up of tin or arsenic. Mediterranean traders could definitely find arsenic-alloyed copper, but no tin. Almost all copper ores contain some level of arsenic. Arsenic ores are more common than tin ores and are generally found in mines in western Asia. And, in fact, since 3000 BC, Cretan and western Mediterranean bronzes had been made with arsenical copper. So there was no real need for tin – or so it might appear on the face of things. The deadly drawback in working with arsenical bronze, however, is a major one: the risk of death by poisoning. Perhaps it was partly as a result of this danger that bronze-making carried with it a strange allure.
All of the evidence suggests that in the Bronze Age the actual bronze-maker, or master, was respected – lionised, almost – as if he were a magician. In some cultures, the actual bronze-making process was top secret: given the alloy’s huge value, the knowledge may also have been regarded as sacred, and could even have been restricted in some societies to kings or shamans. Yet king or not, the unfortunate Bronze Age coppersmith’s lot would have been an unhealthy one. For all his status, he could not have avoided breathing in the fumes of arsenic as he heated, cast and hammered the hot arsenical bronze.
The smiths’ illnesses have come down to us through legend – both the Greek god Hephaestus and his Roman counterpart Vulcan were crippled. So this must be at least one reason why tin bronze had become the Minoans’ metal of choice by about 2600 BC. When it comes to making desirable objects such as swords, tin bronze also has the technical edge; while arsenical copper melts at 1,084 degrees Celsius, tin bronze melts at 950 degrees Celsius, making it much less prone to cracking in the mould.
There were some sources of base metals in established trade areas near to Crete. Göltepe in the Taurus mountains, in what is now Turkey, had tin mines producing substantial quantities of ore from 3290 BC until 1840 BC, when the town was sacked and tin production ceased.3 So from 2600 BC up until 1840 BC there was theoretically a tin source readily available in the Mediterranean. Yet the records of King Sargon of Akkad say that Minoan ships had been sailing to the Atlantic to obtain Iberian and English tin since 2350 BC. Once again, why bother to look westwards in the five centuries before Göltepe ceased tin production?
The answer, I think, lies in the third material required to make bronze – wood. To produce just 1 kilogram (2 pounds) takes around 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of charcoal, smelting 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of ore. The Bronze Age may have opened up almost limit- less opportunities for civilisations to grow and develop, but like the Minotaur it was a ravenous beast to feed, devouring acres and acres of trees. The evidence is in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Archaeology owes a lot to a Victorian Londoner with the unassuming name of George Smith. Only a few months before, in my journey to the Near East, I’d sought to the great city of Nineveh to track down Aššurbanipal’s library. Where I had found only mounds of earth and ruptured walls, however, George Smith had found real words, real stories and real history – and in translating them, told us much of what we now know about ancient Mesopotamia and the Middle East, and the region’s lost legions of precious trees.
Nineveh was first rediscovered by the French Consul General at Mosul, Paul-Émile Botta, in the 1840s. By the time the British adventurer Sir Henry Austen Layard
had later uncovered the fabled library, Nineveh was still less of a city than an ancient conundrum, shrouded in mystery. With archaeology still in its infancy, academics were at a loss. They could not interpret what had been found – although they knew they had at least one source of information: the Bible. Nineveh is first mentioned in the Old Testament, in Genesis 10.11. By the time we get to the Book of Jonah, though, things have gone very badly wrong for its citizens; God has brought down destruction upon a corrupt society. Rigorous historical knowledge about the city, however, was almost completely lacking. Smith is the rather unexpected figure who let us in through the Assyrian city’s gates by translating the cryptic cuneiform inscriptions – and the stories – left us by the ancients. The translator was from a poor family, so he had received little education: and he certainly had no background as a linguist. Even so, he was both determined and dedicated. In 1876, Smith became ill and died while he was searching for more missing tablets around Nineveh. But not before translating the first written poem in history – the stone tablets that together form the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The epic tells us that in antiquity vast forests grew in the Middle East. That can be hard to believe today, when what we so often see, particularly on the news or in documentaries about the Middle East, is an unrelentingly barren and unforgiving landscape of hard earth, baked dry by the sun. Yet in the early part of the 3rd millennium BC, the mountain slopes of the region were covered with massive cedar forests. In the resource-hungry millennium before Christ’s birth those millions of trees, including many of the much prized cedars of Lebanon, essential for building ships, were to disappear totally.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 17