the beginning of another?”
“Exactly.” Dillen beamed. “The word
“And in their citadels were bulls, so many that they filled the courtyards and the narrow corridors, and men danced with them. And then, in the time of Pharaoh Thutmosis, the gods smote the earth with a mighty crash and darkness came over the land, and Poseidon threw up a mighty rushing wave that swept away all before it. Such was the end of the island kingdom of the Keftiu. And next we will hear of another mighty kingdom, of the sunken citadel they called Atlantis.
“And now for the second section,” Dillen went on. He tapped a key and the image scrolled down below the gap. “Remember, this is pretty unpolished stuff. Solon was translating Egyptian into Greek as he wrote. So for us it’s relatively straightforward, with few complex phrases or obscure words. But there is a problem.”
Their eyes followed his to the screen. The text had scrolled to the end, the words petering off where the papyrus had torn away. Whereas the first paragraph had been well preserved, the second was progressively truncated as the ripped edges converged in a V shape. The final lines contained only fragments of words.
Katya now began to read.
“
“The first sentence is uncontentious.” She focused on the screen and spoke under her breath.
“Dia tn nson mechri hou h thalatta stenoutai.” The vowels almost sounded Chinese as she recreated the lilt of the ancient language.
Hiebermeyer frowned in puzzlement. “My Greek is good enough to know that
Dillen walked to the screen. “At this juncture we begin to lose whole words from the text.”
Katya again read. “
“A
“It was in fact highly variable,” Jack said. “
“Presumably it varied from place to place,” Hiebermeyer mused. “According to winds and currents and the time of year, taking into account seasonal changes in climate and daylight hours.”
“Precisely. A run was an indication of how long it would take you to get from A to B in favourable conditions.”
“
“Or bull’s horns,” Dillen suggested.
“Fascinating.” Hiebermeyer spoke almost to himself. “One of the most redolent symbols in prehistory. We’ve already seen them in Jack’s pictures of Knossos. They also appear in Neolithic shrines and all over the Bronze Age palaces of the Near East. Even as late as the Roman period the
Katya nodded. “The text now becomes fragmentary, but the professor and I agree on the likely meaning. It will be easier for you to understand if you see where the breaks occur.”
She switched the projector to overhead mode, at the same time placing a transparent sheet on the glass plate. The screen showed her neatly written words below the V shape of the lower part of the papyrus.
“
She aimed the pointer at the screen. “The next section was probably the beginning of a detailed description of Atlantis. Unfortunately there are just a few disconnected words. Here, we think, is
“And then these final words.” She pointed at the ragged tail of the document. “
Hiebermeyer was the first to speak, his voice quivering with excitement. “Surely that clinches it. The voyage through the islands, to a place where the sea narrows. That can only mean west from Egypt, past Sicily to the Strait of Gibraltar.” He slapped his hand down in affirmation. “Atlantis was in the Atlantic Ocean after all!”
“What about the cataract?” Jack asked. “The Strait of Gibraltar is hardly a raging torrent.”
“And the vast golden plain, and the salt lakes,” Katya added. “In the Atlantic all you would have is the sea on one side, high mountains or desert on the other.”
“Southern shore is also perplexing,” Jack said. “Since there is no obvious southern shore to the Atlantic, that would imply that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, and I can hardly imagine a citadel on the barren shore of the western Sahara.”
Dillen unhooked the overhead and flicked the projector to slide mode, reloading the digital images. A range of snow-capped mountains filled the screen, with a complex of ruins nestled among verdant terraces in the foreground.
“Jack was correct to associate Plato’s Atlantis with Bronze Age Crete. The first part of the text clearly refers to the Minoans and the eruption of Thera. The problem is that Crete was not Atlantis.”
Katya nodded slowly. “Plato’s account is a conflation.”
“Exactly.” Dillen stepped back behind his chair, gesticulating as he spoke. “We have fragments of two different histories. One describes the end of Bronze Age Crete, the land of Keftiu. The other is about a much more ancient civilization, that of Atlantis.”
“The dating difference is unambiguous.” Hiebermeyer mopped his face as he spoke. “The first paragraph on the papyrus dates the destruction of Keftiu to the reign of Thutmosis. He was a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in the sixteenth century BC, exactly the time Thera erupted. And for Atlantis ‘two hundred lifespans’ in the second paragraph is in fact a fairly precise calculation, a lifetime meaning about twenty-five years to the Egyptian chroniclers.” He made a swift mental calculation. “Five thousand years before Solon, so about 5600 BC.”
“Incredible.” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “A whole epoch before the first city states. The sixth millennium BC was still the Neolithic, a time when agriculture was a novelty in Europe.”
“I’m puzzled by one detail,” Katya said. “If these stories are so distinct, how can the bull symbol figure so prominently in both accounts?”
“Not a problem,” Jack said. “The bull was not just a Minoan symbol. From the beginning of the Neolithic it represented strength, virility, mastery over the land. Plough-oxen were vital to early farmers. Bull symbols are everywhere in the early agricultural communities of the region.”
Dillen looked pensively at the papyrus. “I believe we have discovered the basis for two and a half thousand years of misguided speculation. At the end of his account of Keftiu, the high priest, Amenhotep, signalled his intention for the next session, giving a taste of what was to come. He wanted to keep Solon in a high state of anticipation, to ensure he returned day after day until the final date allowed by the temple calendar. Perhaps he had an eye on that purse of gold, on ever more generous donations. I think we have a foretaste here of the story of