He paused and looked up.
“And then it happened. Perhaps a magma surge, maybe accompanied by a violent rainstorm, a combination that would have produced that remarkable vapour column and then a glorious rainbow. It was the long-awaited sign. A final mark was hastily scratched into the wall. Yahweh had not abandoned them after all. There was still hope. It convinced them to leave rather than await their doom.”
“And then they set off in their boats,” Costas said.
“Some took the shortest route to high land, east towards the Caucasus and south across the floodplain past Mount Ararat towards Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Others paddled west to the mouth of the Danube, some of their number eventually reaching the Atlantic coast. But I believe the largest group portaged round the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. They settled in Greece and Egypt and the Levant, some even as far west as Italy and Spain.”
“What did they take with them?” Efram asked.
“Think of Noah’s Ark,” Dillen responded. “Breeding pairs of domestic animals. Cattle, pigs, deer, sheep, goats. And bushels of seeds. Wheat, barley, beans, even olive trees and grape vines. But there was one item of immense significance they left behind.”
Costas looked at him. “Bronze?”
Dillen nodded gravely. “It’s the only possible explanation for the complete absence of bronze in the archaeological record for the next two thousand years. There would have been space in their boats to take their tools and implements but I believe the priests ordered them not to. Perhaps it was a final act of appeasement, an offering that would safeguard their passage into the unknown. They may even have thrown the tools into the sea itself, an offering to the force that had doomed their city.”
“But the priests took their knowledge of metallurgy,” Costas said.
“Indeed. I believe the high priests made a pact with their gods, a covenant if you like. After the omen gave them hope of escape they set to work with the greatest urgency copying out the words of their sacred text, transcribing the ten tablets onto sheets of beaten gold. We know their wisdom included the rudiments of agriculture and animal husbandry and stonemasonry, along with much else which will only be revealed when the translation is complete.” He glanced at Katya. “Each set of tablets was encased in a wooden coffer and entrusted to a high priest who accompanied each of the departing flotillas.”
“One group had an incomplete set,” Jack interjected. “The unfinished gold sheet in front of us, abandoned partway through copying the fourth tablet.”
Dillen nodded. “And I believe one group was larger than the others, including most of the high priests and their retinue. By despatching a copy of their sacred text with each group, the priests ensured their legacy would endure whatever befell the main flotilla. But their intention was to find a new holy mountain, a new Atlantis.”
“And you’re saying their descendants just sat on their knowledge for two thousand years,” Costas said incredulously.
“Think of the priests at Sais,” Dillen replied. “For generation after generation they concealed the story of Atlantis, a civilization that perished eons before the first pharaohs came to power. As far as we know Solon was the first outsider made privy to their secrets.”
“And the priests had plenty to offer besides the mysteries of metallurgy,” Jack said. “They could still use their astronomical knowledge to forecast the seasons and prescribe the most propitious dates for sowing and harvesting. In Egypt they may have transposed their authority to the annual flooding of the Nile, a miracle that required divine intervention. The same was true in the other cradles of civilization where rivers inundated the land, the Tigris- Euphrates in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in Pakistan.”
“And we should not overlook what could well be a more direct legacy of bronze,” Mustafa added. “During the sixth and fifth millennia BC, workers in chipped flint and polished stone reached their pinnacle, producing exquisite knives and sickles. Some are so similar to metal forms they could have been made with the memory of bronze tools. At Varna on the coast of Bulgaria a cemetery has produced a dazzling array of ornaments in gold and copper. The site dates to before 4500 BC, so the first settlers could have been Atlanteans.”
“Nor should we forget language,” Katya said. “Their greatest gift may have been the Indo-European inscribed on those tablets. Theirs was the true mother tongue, the basis of the first written languages in the Old World. Greek. Latin. Slavonic. Iranian. Sanskrit. Germanic, with its descendant Old English. Their extensive vocabulary and advanced syntax boosted the spread of ideas, not only abstract notions of religion and astronomy but also more mundane matters. The clearest common denominator among Indo-European languages is vocabulary for working the land and animal husbandry.”
“Those abstract ideas included monotheism, the worship of one god.” Efram Jacobovich seemed in the throes of another revelation as he spoke, his voice tremulous with emotion. “In Jewish tradition we are taught that the Old Testament stories derive mainly from events of the late Bronze and early Iron Age, from the second and early first millennium BC. Now it seems they must incorporate a memory almost inconceivably older. The Black Sea flood and Noah. The golden tablets and the Ark of the Covenant. Even the evidence for sacrifice, possibly human sacrifice, as the ultimate test of fealty to God, evoking the story of Abraham and his son Isaac on Mount Moria. It’s all too much for coincidence.”
“Much that was once held true will need to be revised, much rewritten,” Dillen said solemnly. “A series of remarkable chances led to this discovery. The uncovering of the papyrus in the desert. The excavation of the Minoan shipwreck and the discovery of the golden disc, with its precious concordance of symbols. The translation of the clay disc from Phaistos.” He looked at Aysha and Hiebermeyer, Costas and Jack and Katya in turn, acknowledging the contribution of each. “A common thread runs through all of these finds, something which at first I dismissed as mere coincidence.”
“Minoan Crete,” Jack responded immediately.
Dillen nodded. “The garbled version of the Atlantis story from Plato seemed to refer to the Bronze Age Minoans, to their disappearance after the eruption of Thera. But by great good fortune the surviving fragment of papyrus showed Solon had recorded two separate accounts, one that did indeed refer to the cataclysm in the Aegean in the mid-second millennium BC but the other describing the disappearance of Atlantis in the Black Sea four thousand years earlier.”
“Events that were completely unconnected,” Costas interjected.
Dillen nodded. “I had assumed Amenhotep was giving Solon an anecdotal account of great natural catastrophes in the past, a list of civilizations lost to floods and earthquakes, something that pandered to the Greek taste for the dramatic. A century later the Egyptian priests fed Herodotus all manner of stories about bizarre goings-on in far-off places, some of them clearly spurious. But now I think differently. I have come to believe Amenhotep had a higher purpose.”
Costas looked perplexed. “I thought the only reason the priests were interested in Solon was his gold,” he said. “They would never have divulged their secrets otherwise, especially to a foreigner.”
“I now believe that was only part of the story. Amenhotep may have sensed the days of pharaonic Egypt were numbered, that the security which had allowed his forebears to carry their secrets for so many generations could no longer be counted on. Already the Greeks were establishing trading posts in the Delta, and only two centuries later Alexander the Great would storm through the land and sweep away the old order forever. Yet Amenhotep may also have looked hopefully at the Greeks. Theirs was a society on the cusp of democracy, one of enlightenment and curiosity, a place where the philosopher might truly be king. In the Greek world people might once again discover Utopia.”
“And the sight of the supplicant scholar may have rekindled memories of a fabled land over the northern horizon, an island civilization shrouded in legend that once held the greatest hope of resurrection for the priesthood.” Jack’s face lit up with excitement. “I too believe Amenhotep was a latter-day priest of Atlantis, a direct descendant of the holy men who guided a group of refugees five thousand years earlier to the shores of Egypt and shaped the destiny of that land. High priests, patriarchs, prophets, call them what you will. Other groups landed in the Levant, in western Italy where they were the forebears of the Etruscans and Romans, in southern Spain where the Tartessians were to flourish. But I believe the largest flotilla sailed no further than the Aegean.”
“The island of Thera,” Costas exclaimed.
“Before the eruption, Thera would have been the most imposing volcano in the Aegean, a vast cone dominating the archipelago,” Jack replied. “To the refugees the distant profile would have been startlingly reminiscent of their lost homeland. The latest reconstructions show the Thera volcano with twin peaks, remarkably
