After carefully examining the rest of the inner sanctum, they filed back into the main chamber. They assembled at the far end around the mysterious metallic orb. Dillen emerged last and picked up a chisel from the debris on the table.
“This is bronze,” he said. “An alloy of copper and tin, smelted sometime prior to the abandonment of this room in the middle of the sixth millennium BC. An extraordinary discovery. Before today, archaeologists would have said bronze was first made around 3500 BC, possibly in Anatolia, and only became widespread during the following millennium.”
Dillen replaced the chisel and put his hands on the table.
“The question is, why did it take so long for bronze to reappear after the Black Sea flood?”
“Presumably the civilization of Atlantis developed in isolation,” Costas said, “and much faster than anywhere else.”
Jack nodded, and started pacing up and down. “At the right time, in the right circumstances, progress can be phenomenal. When the Ice Age ended ten thousand years ago, the southern Black Sea region was already rich in flora and fauna. Because the Bosporus was blocked, the great melt had only a limited effect. The soil around the volcano was highly fertile, the sea teemed with fish and the land with aurochs, deer and boar. Add to this the other natural resources we know about: timber from the mountain forests; salt from the coastal evaporation pans; stone from the volcano; gold, copper and, perhaps most significant of all, tin. It was a cornucopia, a Garden of Eden, as if some power had concentrated all the ingredients for the good life in one place.”
Costas was staring pensively at the corpulent figure of the mother goddess. “So,” he said, “a particularly dynamic band of hunter-gatherers move into this area about forty thousand years ago. They discover the labyrinth inside the volcano. The animal paintings in the hall of the ancestors are theirs, and this chamber is their holy shrine. At the end of the Ice Age they invent agriculture.”
“Good so far,” Jack said. “Only agriculture probably emerged about the same time across the entire Near East, an idea that cropped up more or less simultaneously and spread rapidly. Sophisticated Neolithic settlements existed elsewhere as early as the tenth millennium BC, most famously at Jericho in Palestine and Catal Huyuk in southern Anatolia, the two sites that most closely parallel our Neolithic village off Trabzon.”
“OK,” Costas went on. “Like the people at the Anatolian site, the Atlanteans hammer copper but they take a giant leap forward and learn how to smelt and alloy the metal. Like the people of Jericho they create monumental architecture, but instead of walls and towers they build arenas, processional ways and pyramids. From about 8000 BC something incredible happens. A farming and fishing community transforms into a metropolis of fifty, maybe one hundred thousand people. They have their own script, a religious headquarters the equal of any medieval monastery, public arenas that would have impressed the Romans, a complex water supply system — it’s unbelievable.”
“And none of this happened anywhere else,” Jack said. He stopped pacing. “Catal Huyuk was abandoned at the end of the sixth millennium BC and never reoccupied, possibly a result of warfare. Jericho survived but the fabled walls of biblical times were a pale shadow of their Neolithic precursors. While the Atlanteans were building pyramids, most of the Near East was just beginning to grapple with pottery.”
“And bronze, above all, must have facilitated such a prodigious development.” Mustafa leaned forward over the table as he spoke, his bearded face caught in the torchlight. “Think of all the uses for hard, sharp-edged tools that could be made into virtually any shape and then recycled. Without adzes and chisels no ark would ever have made it off the drawing board. Bronze tools were crucial for quarrying and stone-working and agriculture. Ploughshares, picks and forks, hoes and shovels, sickles and scythes. Bronze truly spurred a second agricultural revolution.”
“In Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, it also spearheaded the world’s first arms race,” Hiebermeyer remarked, wiping his glasses as he spoke.
“An important point,” Dillen said. “Warfare was endemic in the early states of Mesopotamia and the Levant, often as a result of the avarice of the elite rather than any real competition for resources. It’s a dangerous modern fallacy that warfare accelerates technological progress. The benefits of advances in engineering and science are far outweighed by the exhaustion of human ingenuity in devising methods of destruction. Perhaps by exercising total control over the production and use of bronze, the priests of Atlantis could prevent it being used for weapons.”
“Imagine a society with no warfare yet abundant access to bronze so soon after the Ice Age,” Hiebermeyer said. “It would have accelerated the development of civilization like nothing else.”
“So if the Atlanteans were alone in discovering how to produce bronze, was the knowledge somehow lost when Atlantis flooded?” Costas asked.
“Not lost, but kept secret,” said Dillen. “We need to return to Amenhotep, the Egyptian high priest in the temple scriptorium at Sais. I believe he was a caretaker of knowledge, one in an unbroken succession stretching back five thousand years to the time of Atlantis. The first priests of Sais were the last priests of Atlantis, descendants of the women and men who fled this very chamber and embarked on a perilous journey west to the Bosporus. Their role was to regulate human behaviour according to their interpretation of divine will. This they achieved not only by enforcing a moral code but also as guardians of knowledge, including knowledge they knew could be destructive. After Atlantis disappeared, my guess is they kept the secret of bronze for generation after generation, master to novice, teacher to pupil.” Dillen gestured towards the shimmering plaques on the walls.
“Here we have the entire corpus of knowledge of the priesthood of Atlantis, codified as a sacred text. Some knowledge was open to all, like the rudiments of agriculture. Some was the preserve of the priests, perhaps including medicinal lore.” He swept his arm towards the untranslated plaques to his left. “The rest we can still only guess at. There may be ancient wisdom in these writings the high priests kept exclusively to themselves, to be revealed only at a time appointed by the gods.”
“But surely the rudiments of bronze technology would have been common knowledge, available to all,” Costas insisted.
“Not necessarily.” Jack was pacing behind the orb. “When I flew the ADSA over the eastern quarter of the city I noticed something strange. I saw woodworking areas, stonemasons’ yards, pottery manufactories, kilns for drying corn and baking bread. But no forges or metalsmiths’ workshops.” He looked questioningly at Mustafa, whose doctoral thesis on early metallurgy in Asia Minor was the benchmark for the subject.
“For a long time we thought the tin used in the Bronze Age all came from central Asia,” Mustafa said. “But trace-element analysis of tools has pointed to mines in south-eastern Anatolia as well. And now I believe we are looking at another source, one that could never have been guessed at before this discovery.”
Jack nodded enthusiastically while Mustafa continued.
“Smelting and forging are not household activities. Jack is right that a community of this size would have required a substantial metal-working facility well away from the residential districts. A place where intense heat could be harnessed, heat conceivably from a natural source.”
“Of course!” Costas cried. “The volcano! The minerals brought up in the eruption must have included cassiterite, tin ore. It was a mine, a honeycomb of galleries that followed veins of ore deep into the bowels of the mountain.”
“And since the mountain was already hallowed ground,” Dillen added, “the priests could control access not only to the means of producing bronze but to an essential ingredient of it as well. They could erect a further barrier, too, a wall of piety. A priesthood exists because it professes an understanding of truths beyond the grasp of lay people. By consecrating bronze they could elevate metallurgy to a rarefied art.”
Jack stared intently at the table in front of him. “We’re standing on a catacomb of ancient technology, a protean forge worthy of the fire god Hephaistos himself.”
“So what actually happened at the time of the Black Sea exodus?” Costas asked.
“Now we come to the nub of the matter,” Dillen answered. “When the Bosporus was breached and the floodwaters rose, the people must have assumed the worst, that the end was nigh. Even the priests could not have come up with a rational explanation for the relentless approach of the sea, a phenomenon as supernatural as the rumblings of the volcano itself.”
He began to pace, his gesticulations throwing strange shadows onto the walls.
“To appease the gods they fell back on propitiatory sacrifice. Perhaps they dragged a giant bull up the processional way and cut its throat on the altar. When that failed they may have turned in desperation to the ultimate offering, to human sacrifice. They slew their victims on the preparation slab in the mortuary chamber and flung their bodies from the funerary ledge into the heart of the volcano.”
