The Gods of Atlantis (24 page)

‘And it’s the basis for the Old Testament deluge story?’

‘Or a parallel tradition, deriving from the same historical backdrop. And for my money, the Gilgamesh story is a lot more intriguing, with more pointers to the early Neolithic. Uta-napishtim, the flood hero, is a more ambiguous character than Noah. For a start, he isn’t the sole survivor of the flood, and he’s actually presented as more of an outcast. After the flood, the gods grant him immortality, but he lives on the mountain where his boat came ashore, far from the rest of humanity. It’s as if the gods’ favour comes at a price: we’ll grant you immortality and give you this mountain to live on, but don’t ever come back to our shores again. As if they owe him something, even feel guilty about him, but he’s a threat to the new world of men they lord it over and they don’t want him around. And so Gilgamesh, half-god himself, travels a
huge distance across the sea to find him, to try to discover the secret of immortality. It’s then that Uta-napishtim tells him the story of the flood.’

Costas looked at him shrewdly. ‘And you’re going to suggest that this flood story contains something about a survivor from Atlantis?’

Lanowski beamed at him. ‘The character of Uta-napishtim himself could be a clue. An outcast. A shaman perhaps, the last of the old order? Gilgamesh goes a huge distance across the water to get to him. And Uta-napishtim lives on a twin-peaked mountain, called Nisir.’

‘The mountain of Dû-Re was twin-peaked as well,’ Jack murmured. ‘That’s where the oldest Babylonian myths locate the birthplace of the gods.’

‘I think Dû-Re
was
Atlantis,’ Lanowski enthused. ‘Dû-Re was somewhere to the north, where the Babylonian scribes always placed their ancestors and the home of their gods, precisely where Atlantis and those other early Neolithic sites were located in relation to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But Nisir is a kind of alter-Atlantis, Atlantis reborn, a huge distance over the sea. The question is, was the sea simply a conceptual barrier, a barrier in the mind, or was it a real ocean, and if so which one?’

‘And?’

‘And that made me think of Jack’s lecture at the Royal Geographical Society last December, on prehistoric voyages of discovery. About his title, “Voyages of the mind, voyages of the body”.’

‘I missed it, I’m sorry to say,’ Costas said. ‘Too wrapped up getting Little Joey finished in time for the sea trials.’

‘Well, if I may,’ Lanowski said, looking questioningly at Jack. ‘The nub of his argument was this. We’ve had it all wrong. Great voyages of discovery didn’t begin after the rise of civilization, with trade and colonization. They began before that. Way before, as far back as the middle Palaeolithic, fifty thousand years ago or more, when we know people went great distances by sea to get to Australia, for example. Ergo, hunter-gatherers in deep prehistory had boats capable of long-distance
seafaring. Hunter-gatherers ranged over huge distances on land, so why not by sea as well? By the end of the Palaeolithic – at the end of the Ice Age – just as many people were living off the sea as off the land. But the advent of farming actually stifled exploration. People moved inland, settled in one place, turned in on themselves, were enslaved by agriculture as well as by new rulers who wanted to control them, to prevent them seeing the world outside their own narrow confines, a control maybe exerted using new religious beliefs based on fear.’

‘So why voyages of the mind?’ Costas asked.

Jack leaned back. ‘That title was prescient, given what we’ve been talking about here,’ he said. ‘Now I know why Jacob was in the audience looking at me as Professor Dillen used to when I stumbled my way through a passage of ancient Greek. I’d already been doing some thinking about Palaeolithic religion, about shamanism and altered consciousness. I looked at all that in relation to seafaring in two ways. First, I read about the common altered-consciousness hallucinations of being in water, and I imagined that a real sea voyage, especially an arduous one, would be something like that. Altered states of mind are often most easily achieved under duress, right? It might have been particularly easy when the imagery of the real-life experience and the dream world seemed so close. And I wasn’t thinking that Stone Age seafarers were floating around aimlessly in a psychedelic daze, but actually that they were purposeful and destination-conscious. They were doing what they did in those caves, navigating their way into the spirit world, but this time marrying it with a real-life voyage using the stars and even navigational aids such as quartz sunstones. I began to think that the idea of early seafarers being terrified of the open sea might be an inheritance from the establishment of sedentary living in the Neolithic. The sea wasn’t the great unknown in deep prehistory. It
became
the great unknown when it suited rulers to stoke up the fear factor. Before that, sea voyages had given people with shamanic beliefs an experience that would have seemed familiar to them. I argued that they wouldn’t have sailed off into the unknown in fear for their lives, but quite the opposite. They may actually have relished it, and looked
forward with huge excitement to what they might discover in a spiritual sense as well as in reality.’

‘And your second point?’

‘Thinking about the prehistoric colonization of Australia led me to Aboriginal songlines, the dreaming tracks that were used to cross the outback. If hunter-gatherers could conceptualize land routes in that way, why not at sea as well? Memorized trackways are often the most practicable routes too, and that made me think about the predictability of ocean currents and winds. I ended my lecture with a picture of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Ra expedition reed boat in the mid-Atlantic in 1969, showing how it would have been difficult to avoid being swept out to sea and towards the Caribbean once you’d sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of west Africa. I argued that the sea isn’t a barrier, it’s a great complex of highways, and nowhere was that more the case than in deep prehistory. I quoted Heyerdahl’s famous last lines from his account of the Ra expedition, that his theory about prehistoric maritime contact came about because he and his crew had actually sailed on the ocean and not on a map.’

‘They’d tried it out rather than sitting in an armchair theorizing,’ Costas said approvingly.

Jack nodded. ‘And that gets us back to Atlantis. At the time of the Black Sea flood, the people of Atlantis may have been undergoing a religious revolution, but they were still not that far away from their Palaeolithic ancestors. If we’ve got it right, there were still shamans present in those final days before the flood, even if they were a beleaguered few. That knowledge of sea travel, that ability to sail off into the unknown, may not yet have been lost.’

Costas nodded. ‘Makes a lot of sense.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘So what’s your big revelation?’

‘Plato.’ Lanowski laughed quietly to himself, pushed up his glasses, looked at Jack intently and chuckled again. ‘Plato, Plato, Plato.’

Costas glanced anxiously at Jack, and then narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘All right, Jacob,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me guess. The Atlantis myth? Plato is the only surviving source. That is, except for the fragment
of papyrus Maurice found in the desert that we’re looking at on the screen right now, the bit by Solon about where to find Atlantis that never got to Plato.’

‘Plato,’ Lanowski repeated to himself, shaking his head as if he were in the throes of some private rapture. He suddenly stared at Costas. ‘And Pythagoras.’

Costas held his gaze. ‘Pythagoras. Let me see. Pythagoras is about geometry, right? Triangles, pyramids? Pyramids, early civilizations, Atlantis?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me.’

Lanowski beamed at him. ‘We know from Aristotle that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras. What that means is that Plato believed there was a mathematical and even a musical structure behind everything. But instead of taking an interesting idea into hard science, the Greeks made it esoteric, using it in a mystical way and seeing Pythagorean logic in weird places. They also used it to create hidden messages of meaning. Some scholars have come to believe that Plato embedded codes in his writing to reveal his beliefs to other Pythagoreans. We’re not talking about hidden messages as we might understand a code, but about arrangements of letters and words that had a mathematical logic or – in the case of letters – could be related to the musical scale. Other Pythagoreans might recognize them, like a symbol on a ring or a secret handshake.’

Costas looked puzzled, and jerked his finger at the screen. ‘But if it’s this papyrus you’re on about, Solon wrote it about 580
BC
. Isn’t that a couple of decades before Pythagoras was even born?’

‘Often the names we associate with a theory are not those who invented it, and there’s good reason for thinking that ideas we call Pythagorean had their origins much earlier in Greece. If they were floating around already in Solon’s time, then a clever polymath like him would have lapped them up.’

Jack stared at Lanowski. ‘So you think Solon may have put some kind of code in his text?’

Lanowski pointed at the screen, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Thanks to my friend Maurice Hiebermeyer, we’ve got a scan of the
very papyrus in front of us. Usually what I’m talking about can only be revealed by stichometric analysis, taking the medieval texts that are our only surviving copies of ancient works and trying to reconstruct how they would have looked on the original papyrus, based on the regular length of lines ancient scribes used. But we’ve actually got an original papyrus, with the lines exactly as Solon composed them. Almost immediately I matched his layout to the twelve-note musical scale. Look, you can see where I’ve highlighted the text, the letters alpha to lamda for the musical notes in the first letters of a line of words running diagonally through that last paragraph. That was my eureka moment. I realized that Solon had been doing what Plato later did, that there was more to this papyrus than meets the eye. So now I’ve been looking at the letters along the right and left margins, and then at criss-cross patterns, and all the other obvious geometric possibilities, and then I’ve been applying basic cryptographic analysis using letter codes. I’m convinced there are words embedded in the text.’

‘You know ancient Greek?’ Costas asked.

‘Yeah. Easy. Did it at school.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve tried about five hundred different letter codes.’

‘In your head.’

Lanowski looked nonplussed. ‘Of course. Computers can’t actually think, you know.’

Costas leaned back. ‘But surely all you’re going to find is more patterns, more word games. Where does that get us?’

‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I remembered how easy it was for me to find that musical scale. Way too easy for an intellectual like Solon. I think he wanted some successor like Plato to see it and then look for what else was hidden, something we know Plato never had the chance to do because this fragment of papyrus was lost in the desert before Solon left Egypt, and he never replicated it. I love the idea that Solon might have been robbed of the gold he was going to use to pay the priest and that he suffered some kind of permanent amnesia, losing this part of his papyrus during the scuffle as well. But I think I’m
taking up where Plato should have been, as someone who immediately recognizes that there must be something else hidden in the text.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how a hidden code could be anything other than wordplay, mathematical games.’

Lanowski looked at Costas. ‘The technique
could
also have been used to conceal actual words, as a code in the way we might expect.’

‘It makes sense,’ Jack added. ‘Why on earth would Solon bother to embed a word game in a script he’s writing in the flickering torchlight at the foot of an old priest, telling him one of the most extraordinary tales he’s ever heard? There must have been a particular purpose for concealment, and Solon wasn’t a mystic like some of those later Pythagoreans.’

‘There’s geometry in that page,’ Lanowski said, pointing at the screen. ‘Not in the section at the top of the papyrus, where I think he was hastily copying down a dictation from the high priest, but in that final crucial paragraph. It’s much more carefully written. Remember, Solon was translating from Egyptian into Greek as he was listening. So he was already thinking hard about language, about words. He was good at composing fast. I’ve really got to like the guy and I can see where he was coming from. He enjoyed making clever geometry out of his writing. It’s really no different from the way a creative writer today uses metaphor and simile, alliteration and assonance. Only here I think the artistry had a special reason. Imagine this: the high priest is speaking slowly, carefully, giving Solon time to transcribe what he’s saying. This was really important stuff, about the end of Atlantis, coveted information normally only passed from priest to priest. The high priest is taking a bit of a gamble telling him, perhaps induced by the promise of gold. But then he oversteps the boundary and tells Solon something really coveted, something sacred. Maybe he then regrets it and instructs Solon not to write it down.’

‘But Solon finds a way,’ murmured Costas.

‘And maybe the high priest still doesn’t trust him, and it was the priest who arranged for Solon to be robbed and knocked on the head after leaving the temple that final night.’

Costas shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. We know from what’s openly in the text that the priest told Solon a phenomenal story, something passed down over almost seven thousand years. There’s incredible detail in the descriptions of Atlantis. What else could he reveal that might suddenly seem beyond the pale, too secret to tell Solon?’