The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  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 Saïs 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 Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, the excavations in the 1960s revealed a substantial town of the eighth millennium BC. Çatalhöyük 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 Çatalhöyük, 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 Göbekli 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 Göbekli 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 Çori, and a third temple is at Çayönü. The finds from these sites discussed in this novel are all actual discoveries. The Çayönü 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 Çatalhöyük, 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 Çatalhöyük 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 deprivat
ion – 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 Göbekli 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 Çatalhöyük; 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.

  The new religion

  As people moved from ‘wild’ to ‘civilized’, as ‘man made himself ’ – in another memorable phrase of Gordon Childe – we may see the first glimmerings of anthropomorphic gods. Ancestors who had been sought in the spirit world became ancestors who were venerated, and permanent sites of ritual meant that specific ancestors could be remembered in association with a particular place. The altered consciousness of the voyage to the spirit world was transferred to piety and worship, so that the religious experience remained similar even if the belief had changed. In looking at the crucial step from venerating ancestors to the creation of named gods, it is impossible not to see deliberate human agency at work, driven by the psychology of power and control. The faceless pillars of Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Çori may represent the very threshold of the gods, not the result of a gradual process but an act of creation by a group of ambitious priests.

  Veneration can quickly change to awe and fear, and the tiered cosmology of the old spirit world transmutes into heaven and hell – where people are trapped between fear of hell and a need to fulfil the requirements of reaching heaven. These changes were reflected in dramatically evolving lifestyles, from the unpredictability and excitement of the hunter-gatherer to the tedium and toil of the agriculturalist, where the new priesthood could present the promise of a better afterlife as a goal. It was these priests whose descendants would be the first kings, and it was they who were responsible for the birth of modern religion; the first acts of worship may in truth have been the first acts of obeisance to a new class of priest-kings. To paraphrase Gordon Childe, man not only made himself; he also made his gods.

  The move from the natural world to a man-made world may also be seen on a much grander scale in a shift from sacred caves and mountains to burial mounds and pyramids. Whereas the ‘old’ religion may have carried on into the Neolithic in the private context of houses – much as older rituals were to do in later periods, for example in the continuance of pagan worship in Christian times – the new religion was focused on monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe, which took over the function of caves and mountains as the focus for communal religious activity. The manipulation of belief by a new breed of priests may be the beginning of the tension between centralized, state-controlled religion and private belief and ritual, something I explored with early Christianity in my novel The Last Gospel. Throughout history this tension has been the cause of bloody persecution and conflict, and the possibility that this can be traced back to a violent dislocation at the dawn of civilization is suggested by the disturbing nature of the rituals revealed in the archaeological evidence, another part of the extraordinary revelation of the ‘new’ Neolithic.

  Altered-consciousness visions

  A common altered-consciousness experience is of travelling through a tunnel or vortex; the interpretation of this vision as a ‘portal’ into the spirit world may be seen in the swirling spirals of Neolithic rock art, and in the circular shape of prehistoric monuments ranging from Göbekli Tepe and Stonehenge to the huge concentric earthworks of prehistoric Britain. The strange swirling shape seen by Jack on one of the monoliths in Atlantis is inspired by a carving on a stone inside the Neolithic passage tomb at Knowth, Ireland, dating from the fourth millennium BC, believed by some to represent a face and by others to be a chance arrangement of circular and semicircular motifs. Although Knowth and the other ‘Megalithic’ sites of western Europe date four or five millennia after the earliest Neolithic sites of the Near East, they may represent societies at a comparable stage of development with similar belief systems, including rituals based on altered-consciousness experiences and the use of rocks and underground places as portals into the spirit world.

  Human sacrifice

  The stone basins in the inner sanctum of Atlantis in this novel were inspired by several beautifully decorated basins from the Irish passage tomb at Knowth, where they have been interpreted as receptacles for cremated remains or as water basins that may have been windows into the spirit world. At the Anatolian site of Çayönü, a stone basin was found with possible traces of human blood on its rim, the inspiration for Jack’s idea that the basins may have been filled not with water, but with human blood. Another structure at Çayönü known as the ‘House of the Dead’ contained a flat stone with residues of human blood, as well as aurochs and sheep blood; and yet another building held a slab decorated with a carving of a human head, also with traces of human blood. Beneath the House of the Dead were no fewer than sixty-six human skulls and bones from four hundred additional people. A disproportionately large number of the skulls were from young adults, male and female, suggesting that they may have been selected for killing. The possibility that human sacrifice was widespread is suggested by finds at Çatalhöyük, where infants were found buried under the thresholds and in the walls of houses, and at Jericho, where several infant skulls were found with vertebrae still in place, showing that the heads had been cut from intact bodies rather than taken from skeletons. At Çayönü, one of the most telling finds was a long flint knife with traces of human blood on the blade, suggesting that the obsidian blades found in cached deposits in houses at Çatalhöyük – long thought to have some symbolic meaning – may well have serve
d this chilling function.

  Whether sacrifice was an invention of the new religion or an inheritance from the old is unclear. The religion of the hunter-gatherers may have involved shamans or ‘seers’ transporting themselves into the spirit world, using sacred animals – for example, bulls – as vehicles to aid their journey. The inception of the Neolithic may have seen a step from imagination to reality, from the dream animals portrayed in the cave paintings to real animals sacrificed so that the moment of their death opened the portal. It has even been suggested that the first large-scale animal husbandry may have been to provide bulls for sacrifice. The shift from caves to open-air sites for communal ritual may have been associated with developing rituals of excarnation, where human bodies were exposed to be eaten by birds, a possibility suggested by depictions of vultures with body parts in a carving at Göbekli Tepe and a wall painting at Çatalhöyük. The step from this to human sacrifice may have been associated with the emergence of the new priestly elite who could use it to instil awe and fear and exert control. The idea of sacrifice as an ‘offering’ may have come about as religious practice shifted from the spirit travel of the shaman to the worship of gods closely associated with that new elite. If this interpretation is correct, then the early Neolithic ‘Garden of Eden’ may have been not only a place of revelation and creativity, but also one of bloodshed and terror.