The scholar and author Peter James, aware of the deficiencies in all other Bronze Age explanations for Atlantis, decided upon another approach. He chose to begin exploring the figure of Atlas, described as the first king of Atlantis.
In Greek myth Atlas had been banished to the west, condemned to forever hold up the sky. And it is his place in the west which gives rise to the Atlantic Ocean location for Plato’s story. James wondered whether this placement could be a later addition since Greek ships and merchants only reached the far west during the seventh century BC. Where, he asked, was Atlas banished from?15 No other modern scholars seems to have asked this question before.
The Greek poet Pindar, writing in the fifth century BC, described Atlas as having been ‘banished from his ancestral lands and possessions’.16 Where were these lands and possessions? James searched all the early traditions and found that they pointed unequivocally to Anatolia – to western Turkey.
Bronze Age Turkey was long ruled by a civilization known as the Hittites. Their mythology featured a figure who, like Atlas, held up the sky. In fact, this Hittite figure may well be the source for the Greek Atlas, for ancient Turkey is the ultimate source for much of Greek mythology.17
Furthermore this Hittite Atlas was connected to a bull cult: the figure is often depicted with a bull’s head and with hoofs instead of hands and feet. For the later Lydians – whose kingdom covered much of western former Hittite lands – their version of Atlas was the legendary king Tantalus who was reputed to have amassed fabulous wealth.
James discovered that traditions existed concerning Lydia which revealed clear parallels with the story of Atlantis.
The Greek geographer and traveller Pausanias wrote a detailed guide and history for all the places to which he travelled, thus recording many ancient traditions which would otherwise have been lost. One concerned a city upon the Lydian Mount Sipylus which, after a violent earthquake, had vanished into a chasm which then flooded, becoming a lake.18
The Roman writer Pliny, working during the first century AD, supplies a further crucial connection: that this vanished city, sunk by an earthquake, had been the old royal capital of Lydia, called Tantalis. The site where it vanished, in Pliny’s day, was no longer a lake but a marshland.19 Pausanias had apparently been unaware of the connection.
The parallels are clear between Atlas and Atlantis and Tantalus and Tantalis. Even the names of the capital cities are uncomfortably close. So has James, as he believed, solved the problem of Atlantis? In 1994 he travelled to the area, near to the modern Turkish city of Izmir. He managed to identify the most likely site for the vanished city, close to the northern slopes of Mount Sipylus where old maps show the presence of a lake or marsh. In front of the site an ancient, large, and very worn image of the goddess Cybele could still be seen carved into the rocky mountain face.20 She gazed over the site of Tantalis. All that now remains is to dig.
It is known that Solon, on his travels, not only resided in Egypt but also visited Lydia. It is possible that he could have heard the story of Tantalus there from which he created the story of Atlantis. Indeed, Plato reports that Solon, upon deciding to make use of the story in his poetry, translated the names into Greek.21 Did he translate Tantalus into Atlas?
It is a plausible suggestion and yet it leaves some important problems unsolved – in particular, the problem of the Atlantic Ocean location. Let us now look again at Plato’s story.
The Atlantic Ocean
There are two major objections to a Bronze Age Mediterranean setting for the story. Firstly, Plato specifically located Atlantis as being beyond the Mediterranean and half-way to a great continent. Secondly, he located it many thousands of years before his time, before even the 1st Dynasty of Egypt, which was about as far back as records went in those days. No one expects that every word of the story is literally accurate, but there are certain points about it which are anomalous and yet which ring true. The first such point is an extraordinary geographical one: it indicates that Plato – or the Egyptian priests at Saïs – knew of the existence of America.
Plato records the geographical location of Atlantis as being beyond the Pillars of Heracles, that is, beyond the entrance to the Mediterranean sea. Now he and any sailors of the time would have known well where this was; the Greeks and the Phoenicians were trading beyond the Mediterranean at the time and had done so for centuries. They traded down the coast of Morocco and also to southern England.
Plato states that, ‘it was possible for the travellers of that time to cross from [Atlantis] to the other islands…’. Could he mean the West Indies?
He continues, ‘and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean’.22 Is he speaking of America, the only continent which lies beyond Gibraltar, across the Atlantic, and past a line of islands?
Given that this is geographically the truth, it indicates that someone must have sailed across to America and back, and that knowledge of this reached Plato via the Egyptian priests. It makes us look again at his story and accept that it must contain a kernel of truth. The Egyptians perhaps sailed across the Atlantic at some early stage in their history. Herodotus reports that they sailed around Africa, a much longer trip.23
A second indication of the story’s validity is also related to seafaring knowledge. Plato records that during the time of Atlantis ‘the ocean there was at that time navigable’. And that after the sinking of Atlantis ‘that spot has now become impassable… being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down’. These words seem to echo sailor’s talk; perhaps advice given to those about to sail west for the first time.
It is difficult to explain away these explicit references to the Atlantic Ocean, the West Indies and the continent of America beyond. At least this part of Plato’s story must be accurate. And to have this accuracy associated with the lost continent of Atlantis’ geographical position must give even the Anatolian theorists pause for thought.
The Ice-free Antarctic
Any thought of early specialized maritime knowledge brings us to a consideration of the unexplained Piri Re’is map of 1513 and of that of Orestius Finnaeus of 1531. These maps, astonishingly, depict the Antarctic continent very accurately as it would be without its two-mile-thick cover of ice.24 They depict it as it has been known only since the careful surveys of the 1950s using highly technical equipment. The logical – and apparently only – conclusion is that these maps derive from the work of an unknown early people who were skilled seafarers and cartographers. It appears that somewhere in mankind’s unknown past there existed such a culture which traded across the seas beyond the Mediterranean.
What has not been noted, however, is the possible relevance of these maps to the story of Atlantis.
Plato describes Atlantis as being the centre of a great empire founded upon its maritime skills. He states that Atlantis ruled over many other islands in the sea beyond the Mediterranean.25 The city of Atlantis itself had great inland harbours and shipyards filled with vessels well protected by stone walls. In particular, the largest harbour was ‘filled with ships and merchants coming from all quarters, which by reason of their multitude caused clamour and tumult of every description and an unceasing din night and day’.26
Two Canadian writers, Rand and Rose Flem-Arth, have suggested that the once ice-free Lesser Antarctica might be the true site of Atlantis. They point out that its geographical position places it at the centre of a ‘world’ ocean, linking, as it does, the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, which, after all, are the same ocean split by the continents of America and Africa. They argue that this is the sense in which Plato writes of the ‘true’ or ‘real’ ocean which lies outside the narrow ‘Pillars of Heracles’. Plato writes that compared to this ‘true’ ocean the Mediterranean is but ‘a haven having a narrow entrance’.27 This is a very accurate description when viewed from the perspective of the Atlantic Ocean.
This is an extraordinary statement for a
fourth-century BC Greek to make. In those days the Mediterranean was the heart of the known world and to belittle it in this way again emphasizes the strength and importance of the maritime information to which Plato or Solon had access.
The Flem-Arths propose that the end of the Antarctic Atlantis came when the ice-caps melted catastrophically sending great tidal waves across the ‘world’ ocean. And with this sudden spread of cold water came a rapid drop in the world’s temperature which, in turn, caused a sudden freezing. They point to mammoths being found in Siberia, frozen with fresh grass in their stomachs. All life in Lesser Antarctica met with the same fate. Survivors spread to all the known world bringing their gift of knowledge: of agriculture, architecture and astronomy.
For sheer outrageousness this hypothesis has everything going for it. Everything, that is, except hard facts. But then this should not be allowed to stand in the way of such a delightfully heretical suggestion. Nevertheless, hard facts may be there: the Flem-Arths suggest that archaeologists should begin to dig in Antarctica; below the deep ice may lie, preserved for ever, the frozen remnants of a great city. It is enough to make one reach for one’s chequebook. Well, almost.
The Azores
There is one site left to consider, and that is the site at which Plato actually placed his continent of Atlantis. Oddly this seems to have become something of a politically incorrect area for recent theorists, even those working at the fringe.28 Plato put the island in the Atlantic, its. northernmost tip level with the Straits of Gibraltar; it was in the ocean but lay before the islands (the West Indies) and the continent (America).
It has long been known that a great range of undersea mountains runs from Iceland in the North Atlantic all the way to the South Atlantic, a distance of thousands of miles: the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Occasionally, the very highest peaks of this mountain range break the surface of the water: the Azores, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, all are the tips of these mountains. If Atlantis were a large mid-Atlantic island, it would certainly have included some part of this ridge. The problem is that there is no evidence of any subsidence; the ridge, by all accounts, is rising rather than falling.
There is, of course, another perspective: the land may not have sunk; rather, the sea may have risen.
We have seen in an earlier chapter that the sea-levels rose dramatically and catastrophically around 8000 BC, near the end of the last Ice Age, a date not too far off Plato’s date for the destruction of Atlantis. We have seen too how animal teeth brought up by fishermen from the continental shelf off the coast of the United States indicate a rise in sea-level of 400 feet or more.
Oceanographers have produced comprehensive charts of the world’s seabed from a century or more of depth soundings. These afford a general guide to the amount of land which would have been exposed during such a period of reduced sea-levels.
The Azores have always been a favourite choice for the residue of Atlantis since a large island in their position would stand level with the Straits of Gibraltar, just as Plato described. And, allowing a certain amount of support is the known fact of the area’s seismic activity. Since a major earthquake recorded in 1522 there have been sixteen further strong disturbances, the biggest being one in 1757 which is estimated at 7.4 on the Richter scale.
If we look at the charts for the Azores, a number of facts become evident. The first is that the Azores are most certainly the tops of very tall mountains, over 20,000 feet above the lowest seabed ‘plains’.
Secondly, if the sea-level were reduced by 400 feet or more, then, certainly, significantly more land would be exposed. The central islands of Pico and Faial would be joined together and most of the others doubled in size. In addition, up to ten new islands would appear, none very large, but creating a complex archipelago in the area. Probably a good place to live but not providing a very close fit for Plato’s description of Atlantis. Curiously, and perhaps significantly, the Piri Re’is map of 1513 which we have already mentioned depicts the Azores, and depicts them in the correct geographical latitude and longitude. But instead of the nine small islands which exist today, it shows seventeen islands, several of them relatively large, up to ten times the size of the present largest island, São Miguel, perhaps about the size of Cyprus.30 Is this map an accurate rendition of the Azores pre-inundation? From before 8700–9000 BC? It seems very likely.
To join the Azores into one island would take a drop in sea-level of almost 6,000 feet. This would, however, produce an extremely large island indeed. A more modest drop of 3,000 feet would also give a large amount of land above water but the Azores would be a collection of islands.31 Of course, it may be, as Plato described, that a massive earthquake lowered the land itself. If this is indeed the case, then the Azores are, without question, the best potential site in the entire Atlantic.
The situation around the remainder of the Atlantic does not reveal any other possible site. While the sea is comparatively shallow in parts of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, these ‘shallows’ are still at least 3,000 feet deep.32 There are, however, curious features called seamounts between the ridge and the African continent. A number of these exist today with spot depths as shallow as sixty-five feet. A fall in sea-level would certainly expose them but the islands they would form would be small.33
The situation near the Straits of Gibraltar, however, reveals features which render at least part of Plato’s geographical comments plausible.
With the sea-level reduced to its Ice Age minimum, extensive lands would reach thirty miles or more out from the Atlantic coast of Portugal, Spain and Morocco. This would give in excess of 8,000 square miles of habitable coastal plains in the Gulf of Cadiz and northern Morocco alone. The Straits of Gibraltar would become a narrow channel about sixty miles long with two small islands at its Atlantic entrance. Some 300 miles due west into the Atlantic, along the site of the present-day Gorringe Ridge, would be a larger island, perhaps the size of present-day Menorca. This is now beneath the sea but parts of it are, even today, as little as sixty-five feet beneath the surface.34
The rapid rise in sea-levels at the end of the last Ice Age, would have devastated the wide plains bordering the narrow Gibraltar channel. The entrance to the Mediterranean might very easily have been blocked by hundreds of feet of mud. This then, is one explanation of the impassable mud banks beyond the Straits which Plato mentions.
Survivors of the inundation would have fled, each carrying a story of disaster; through this the story would have entered the oral tradition in those countries of refuge. An oral tradition which was eventually passed on to Solon.
But would this area have had such a technical competence to account for Plato’s Bronze Age setting? If we think of it as a description simply of an early but complex society, then it makes sense. The town of Çatal Hüyük had sophistication enough and it dates back to at least 8000 BC. And, as we shall see, the people who built the Sphinx did so thousands of years before the official beginning of the Bronze Age, yet they too lacked little in ability. They may have lacked metal but they had everything else a culture needs – a command of astronomy, mathematics and architecture.
In the end, Atlantis may prove too mysterious and too enigmatic
The entrance to the Mediterranean: showing submerged land and present depth soundings. (The soundings are given in metres.)
to be placed in any normal Bronze Age setting. Solon’s response may have been correct when he found himself driven to make a great epic poem out of the story. But even with his direct access to the source of the story he found himself unable to deal with it and passed the story on to somebody else to complete.
It appears that we cannot yet know the truth about Atlantis. Nevertheless, the idea that its story along with other elements, perhaps even from across the Atlantic, contains a folk memory of the inundation which occurred at the end of the Ice Age is plausible. This focuses attention upon the sunken lands beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, which we can assume held an active population. Or even,
a
s has been suggested by the Russian classical scholar V. Kovdriavtsev, upon the edge of the continental shelf off the Scilly Isles.35
However, we cannot entirely dismiss a massive cataclysmic earthquake in the Atlantic, for it is certainly possible, however remote this might be. And this would focus attention upon the Azores. For it seems that Plato’s report of the Atlantic as the ‘real’ ocean and his awareness of the limitations of the Mediterranean contain an inescapable element attesting to an Atlantic placement for the heart of the Atlantis story; nowhere else will do.
9
Are the Pyramids and Sphinx More Ancient than We Think?
For thousands of years the pyramids and Sphinx have reached upwards from their rocky plateau at Giza, their presence seeming to convey an enigmatic message from epochs long since vanished – a message which has exerted an extraordinary compulsion upon many, who arrived simply to gaze but who departed with reluctance carrying a vivid sense that something vital once existed in the world, something now lost to modern life. But precisely what, no one can articulate.
In the early 1990s a storm of controversy hit the world of Egyptology: authors John Anthony West, Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert, Graham Hancock and Colin Wilson all went into print on the subject. They fired off an astonishing broadside at the archaeological establishment. The story these authors had to tell was dramatic, always compelling, and often outrageous. Once upon a time, they said, there was a continent called Atlantis…
Ancient Traces Page 16