The Gods of Atlantis (14 page)

Costas leaned back, thinking. ‘I remember that the palaeoecological
study done by IMU five years ago showed an abundance of wild animals in this area, plenty for hunter-gatherer groups just after the Ice Age. If you’ve got enough meat that way, why try to domesticate animals?’

‘That’s the point,’ Jack said. ‘And when there’s no economic rationale, you look to other explanations. That’s where religion comes in.’

‘So what about these pillars?’ Costas asked.

Jack paused. ‘The most intriguing group of texts I studied were the early Babylonian flood and creation myths, first written down on clay tablets in the third millennium
BC
in Mesopotamia. They name gods, like Enlil the all-powerful and Ishtar, goddess of love, and it’s just possible that those names originate in this period of the Neolithic. The flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh seems to derive from an earlier story, called the Atrahasis, meaning “When the gods were men”. The Atrahasis and the other early creation myths contain a group of gods called the Annunu, and sometimes another group, the Iggigi. Later they take on more character and become an established part of the Mesopotamian pantheon, but to begin with they’re nameless, faceless, like inchoate beings. They’re like these pillars, which seem to have a human form within them, half in and half out of the spirit world.’

Costas leaned forward, staring at the image. ‘The famous cave paintings at Lascaux and the other Palaeolithic sites sometimes show human hands, created in outline by the artist pressing his hand on the wall and flicking paint around it. Look at the hands on those pillars. It’s as if the sculptors had rarely represented humans before, and these are like blanks for statues, roughly shaped, with just the hands appearing, the only part of the human form they were used to representing.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t that they’d never represented humans before,’ Jack said quietly. ‘Maybe they’d never represented
gods
before.’

‘But you talked of the bulls as sacred. Weren’t they gods?’

‘Not worshipped, but used as a conduit by the shaman to travel to the spirit world, real flesh-and-blood animals that could become spirit animals.’

Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘So you’re suggesting that the concept of god was a Neolithic invention?’

‘It’s been nagging at me for five years. I knew the story here was more than just a fabulous archaeological discovery, a dazzling view of the foundation of civilization. There’s something here that should make us question ourselves, question the very basis of the belief systems that have kept people going for the last ten thousand years.’

Costas let out a low whistle. ‘And this all begins here.’

‘The earliest Babylonian creation myths tell how agriculture and animal husbandry were brought from a sacred mountain, a place called Dû-Re, the home of the Annunu.’

‘The sacred mountain of Dû-Re,’ Costas repeated slowly. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Atlantis?’

Jack took a deep breath. ‘The Babylonian creation myths always seem to look north beyond the mountains towards the uplands of Anatolia, to the places where we know cereals were first cultivated and wild animals first tamed. It was in Mesopotamia that agriculture first took off in a big way, along the arid riverbanks of the desert where irrigation and cultivation really were an economic rationale, crucial to the expansion of population where there were few wild resources. But I don’t believe those ideas just trickled down from the nearest early farming communities in Anatolia like Çatalhöyük. Big ideas don’t trickle, they move quickly. And I believe those ideas could have come with a wave of refugees from the flood on the Black Sea, with a priesthood who were on the verge of obliterating their Stone Age past, who brought with them their new gods and their new ability to control people. As for the Annunu of Babylonian myth, I think we may just be looking at them right now.’ He pointed to the pillars on the screen, then tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘I want to find out where else they went. I want to find a place where we don’t have to look back at these people through their ancestors, through all the accreted layers of later civilization, in Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt, Mesopotamia. I want to find a place away from the cradle of civilization where some of the old priesthood may have gone, the shamans, where they may have tried to found a new Atlantis.’

Costas pressed one of the thumbnails showing a map, and stabbed a
finger at the eastern part of the Black Sea, at the site of Atlantis. ‘What about this for an idea? Before the flood seven-and-a-half thousand years ago, Atlantis was the most prominent volcano in the region, a classic symmetrical cone with the distinctive twin peak where the caldera had collapsed in some ancient eruption. The level area between was built up as a ceremonial platform in the early Neolithic, leading to the entrance to the cave complex that became the inner sanctum you saw this morning.’ He moved his finger down towards the southern border of Turkey. ‘Now to Çatalhöyük. I remember reading the geological report, which showed that obsidian knives and blades found there came from the nearby extinct volcanoes of Göllü and Nenezi Dag. The obsidian had some kind of ritual significance, right?’ He reached over and picked up the large hardback volume that had been lying beside the computer, Jack’s report on the discovery of Atlantis five years before. He pointed at the image on the cover, a Neolithic wall painting that seemed to show a complex of structures below a mountain. ‘And from Çatalhöyük we have this, a painting that may show Atlantis, with the twin peak of the volcano behind the town. All of this suggests the significance of volcanoes, and especially the one here.’

Jack nodded. ‘By choosing that cover, I wanted to show that Atlantis was not unique, but was part of a pattern, though one we didn’t fully understand five years ago. And it was an image of Atlantis as the people themselves saw it, the people whose minds I want to get into now.’

‘Okay. Then we move to that Babylonian story of the mountain of Dû-Re, the home of the gods,’ Costas continued. ‘The most prominent mountains in the region to the north of Babylonia are all volcanoes.’ He shifted his finger to the Aegean Sea to the left, between Turkey and Greece. ‘And here’s the island of Thera, the volcano that blew its top in the second millennium
BC
and destroyed Bronze Age civilization on Crete. Five years ago we thought that some of the priests of Atlantis could have escaped to Thera millennia before, where they may have established another sanctuary on the upper slopes of the volcano, trying to emulate what they had been forced to leave at Atlantis. You get my drift?’

‘We should be looking for more volcanoes.’

‘Not just natural volcanoes. Man-made ones.’ Costas reached for his tablet computer, ran his finger over the screen and handed it to Jack. ‘I was doing this as Macalister came in. Running a few alignments. It was just a hunch, but the similarities are striking.’ Jack glanced down at the screen. On the left was a classic volcano cross-section, showing a magma chamber coming up from the earth’s mantle with an eruption above it. On the right was a cross-section through a triangular structure, showing a horizontal passageway leading into a central chamber and above it a narrow vertical chute to a structure on the top. ‘Not just volcanoes, Jack. Pyramids.’

Jack stared at the image. ‘The Mayan pyramid of Palenque, in the Yucatán?’

‘It’s the best representation of what I mean.’ The ship’s phone beside the door rang. Costas walked over to it, spoke for a minute and then returned to Jack, sitting down and peering at him. ‘What’s eating you? I know that look.’

Jack stared at the screen a moment longer, his brow furrowed in thought. ‘There’s something momentous here, something that upsets our whole picture of the rise of civilization. It’s tied in with the origins of human conflict. Wild man versus civilized man. And I think it could have been all due to religion. At the dawn of the Neolithic, men began to turn against their ancestral ways. Until the gods won out, there must have been conflict. I’ve been thinking about the Garden of Eden again, Costas, and I’ve been seeing terrible bloodshed. To the first priest-kings, the old religion may have been a far greater threat to their power base than rival states. Religious war may be as old as civilization. And the cause was the newly created gods.’

‘What do you think happened here?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We have to try to understand Neolithic religion. What it was that frightened the new priests about the old.’

‘Well, this should help. Jeremy’s just arrived in the Lynx from Troy. Officially he’s come to do some radiocarbon dates in the lab on the
ship. He thinks they’ve found a really old layer at the site, possibly Neolithic. But he’s actually here to see us. At the moment, IMU’s best imaging facility is in the excavation house at Troy, so I sent him some of our raw video data from this morning to process. He’s hopping with excitement. Says you’ve got to see it.’

Jack glanced at his watch. ‘Okay. We’ve got just under an hour until Macalister boots me out. Just under an hour to solve the mystery of this place. Maybe to rewrite the origins of civilization.’

‘I’m just a simple submersibles expert, Jack. All I want is to build another ROV.’

Jack shot him a penetrating look. ‘This may be bigger than any treasure we’ve ever hunted, Costas. We’re talking about the origin of the gods.’

‘So what do I say to Jeremy?’

‘Call him in.’

Costas got up to go back to the phone, then turned. ‘Oh. I forgot to say. Lanowski’s coming too. He’s going to try something at the ROV monitor station. It’s Little Joey. There’s a chance he might still be transmitting.’

Jack put his hand on Costas’ arm. ‘You’ve got to let it go.’

‘I’m being serious. You remember when we drove the submersible up after the dive this morning? We could see where the caldera had imploded, but I’ve looked at the mapping data that Lanowski and I did yesterday, and I reckon that the new rim lies just inside the point where you entered that chamber. It’s possible that the ROV is still intact. The volcano’s rumbling away, and the chances are the next little hiccup will take the chamber out, but it’s worth having a go.’

‘How could you get a signal from under all that lava?’

‘There might be a crack somewhere above the chamber. I remembered the electromagnetic disturbance we experienced and wondered whether that had clouded a signal. That’s where Lanowski comes in.’

‘Just as long as it doesn’t cause you more pain than gain.’

‘There’s a reason I’m doing this, Jack. When I was still tethered to the ROV while you were escaping from the chamber, I glanced
at the screen inside my helmet. As soon as you cut the tether, all of the recorded imagery was lost. That’s a fault Jeremy and I need to get right for the next model. But I swear I saw something at the back of the chamber. It wasn’t cave paintings or those pillars, it was something else. If Little Joey hasn’t gone walkabout from where you left him, he might still be seeing it.’

‘Okay. Good. Do what you can.’

‘And Lanowski’s got something else he wants to show you.’

‘Not with his trusty portable blackboard, I hope. We haven’t got time for three-hour explanations.’

‘Something about going back to first principles. About not seeing the wood for the trees. About how if we want to find out where the last shamans of Atlantis went, we need to go back to what got us to Atlantis in the first place. The evidence. The clues. How it’s been staring us in the face all the time.’

‘Sounds a little too straightforward for Lanowski.’

‘Wrong. He thinks it’s too complex for the computer. He’s going to have to do the analysis in his head.’

Jack raised his eyes. ‘
That
sounds like Lanowski.’ He turned back to the screen and clicked the mouse to zoom in on one of the pillars they had seen that morning, a white monolith rising starkly in front of the cave wall, the T-shaped arms extending outwards. He remembered five years ago in the flooded tunnels of Atlantis seeing lines of priests and priestesses carved in low relief on the walls, solemn, hieratic figures with braided beards and hair, wearing conical hats and carrying staffs, marching confidently forward. They had been freshly carved just before the flood, like the carvings on these pillars, and they had seemed familiar, a vision of the future, figures that would not have been out of place in Babylonia or Egypt or Bronze Age Europe. But what had happened to the old order, to the shamans who had painted images of animals in caves, a spirit world that seemed utterly at odds with those priests?

Then he remembered the swirling shape he had seen that morning near the top of one of the pillars, crudely carved where older images had been chiselled and abraded away, yet itself fresh, done even as
the flood waters rose. He moved the cursor to the top of the screen, found the carving and zoomed in. It seemed like an image from the past, from the deep prehistory of caves and shamans, yet he was convinced now that he had been right and there was a human face in it, a frightening visage like a dream image from a whirlpool. Had this been carved by those new priests to show the dark side of the spirit world, the grim tunnels that voyages of the mind could take; was it a warning to those who might wish to return to the old ways?

Or was it a cry for help, an image carved in the face of death, in moments of terrible overwhelming fear?

Jack felt his head reel, and closed his eyes. For a moment he had an extraordinary vision. The stone pillars no longer seemed like some ill-formed attempt at the human form, something abstract. Instead they appeared as figures half complete, as if that chamber had been inundated in the final act of transformation, as if those plastered skulls were about to be wrenched from the spirit world and placed atop the pillars, ancestors becoming gods. He saw a sudden act, a sweeping away of the past. He saw the spectral forms of those braided and bejewelled priests in the chamber, chipping and carving, erasing the old, and in the background the shadowy shapes of the shamans crouched against the cave wall, floating in and out of the rock like spirit animals. Then they disappeared and he saw the pillars complete, leering, terrifying: gods who now had faces, but instead of being born from the earth like those shapes in the lava, they arose from a seedbed of blood and fear.