similar to the view we first had of this island from
“That monastery revealed in the cliffs of Thera after the earthquake last year,” Costas said. “Are you saying it was built by the Atlanteans?”
“Ever since the discovery of prehistoric Akrotiri in 1967 archaeologists have puzzled over why such a prosperous settlement had no palace,” Jack said. “Last year’s revelation proves what some of us thought all along, that the main focus on the island was a religious precinct that must have included a magnificent peak sanctuary. Our shipwreck clinches the matter. Its cargo of ceremonial accoutrements and sacred artefacts shows the priests possessed the wealth of kings.”
“But surely the wreck is Bronze Age, thousands of years later than the Black Sea exodus,” Costas protested.
“Yes, Akrotiri was a Bronze Age foundation, a trading emporium by the sea, but Neolithic pottery and stone tools have been found all over the island. The earliest settlement probably lay inland and upslope, a better location at a time when sea-raiding was rife.”
“What was the date of the monastery?” Costas asked.
“It’s astonishingly old, fifth to sixth millennium BC. You see how everything falls into place. As for the shipwreck, probably not just the gold disc but many other sacred artefacts on board will prove to have been much older, venerated heirlooms dating back thousands of years before the Bronze Age.”
“So how does Minoan Crete fit in?”
Jack gripped the edge of the table, his euphoria palpable.
“When people think of the ancient world before the Greeks and Romans, it tends to be the Egyptians, or the Assyrians and other Near Eastern peoples mentioned in the Bible. But in many ways the most extraordinary civilization was the one that developed on the island of Crete. They may not have built pyramids or ziggurats but everything points to a uniquely rich culture, wonderfully creative and perfectly attuned to the bounty of their land.” Jack could sense the mounting excitement in the others as they began to make sense of everything they had juggled in their minds since the conference in Alexandria.
“It’s difficult to visualize today, but from where we are now the Atlanteans controlled a vast plain that extended from the ancient shoreline to the foothills of Anatolia. The island of Thera is also highly fertile but too small to have sustained a population anything like this size. Instead the priests looked south, to the first landfall two days’ sail from Akrotiri, an immense stretch of mountain-backed coast that must have seemed like a new continent.”
“Crete was first occupied in the Neolithic,” Hiebermeyer commented. “As I recall, the oldest artefacts from under the palace at Knossos are dated by radiocarbon to the seventh millennium BC.”
“A thousand years before the end of Atlantis, part of the great wave of island settlement after the Ice Age,” Jack agreed. “But we already suspected another wave arrived in the sixth millennium BC, bringing pottery and new ideas about architecture and religion.”
He paused to marshal his thoughts.
“I now believe they were Atlanteans, colonists who paddled on from Thera. They terraced the valleys along the north coast of Crete, establishing vineyards and olive orchards and raising sheep and cattle from the stock they brought with them. They used obsidian which they found on the island of Melos and came to control as an export industry, just as the priests of Atlantis had controlled bronze. Obsidian came to be used in ceremonial gift exchanges that helped to establish peaceful relations all over the Aegean. For more than two thousand years the priests presided over the development of the island, exercising benign guidance from a network of peak sanctuaries as the population gradually coalesced into villages and towns and grew wealthy from agricultural surplus.”
“How do you explain the appearance of bronze more or less simultaneously across the entire Near East in the third millennium BC?” Costas asked.
Mustafa answered. “Tin was beginning to trickle into the Mediterranean from the east. It would have led to experimental alloying by coppersmiths all over the region.”
“And I believe the priests bowed to the inevitable and decided to reveal their greatest secret,” Jack added. “Like medieval monks or Celtic druids I think they were international arbiters of culture and justice, emissaries and intermediaries who linked together the developing nation states of the Bronze Age and maintained peace where they could. They saw to it that the legacy of Atlantis was a common currency in the culture of the region, with shared features as grandiose as the courtyard palaces of Crete and the Near East.”
“We know they were involved in trade from the shipwreck evidence,” Mustafa said.
“Before our wreck there had been three excavations of Bronze Age ships in the east Mediterranean, none Minoan and all of later date,” Jack went on. “The finds suggest it was the priests who controlled the lucrative metal trade, men and women who accompanied the cargoes on long-haul voyages to and from the Aegean. I believe that same priesthood first unveiled the wonders of bronze technology, a revelation orchestrated over the whole area but conducted in greatest earnest on the island of Crete, a place where careful nurture during the Neolithic had ensured conditions were right for a repetition of their grand experiment.”
“And then the multiplier effect.” Katya’s face seemed flushed in the torchlight as she spoke. “Bronze tools foster a second agricultural revolution. Villages become towns, towns beget palaces. The priests introduce Linear A writing to facilitate record-keeping and administration. Soon Minoan Crete is the greatest civilization the Mediterranean had ever seen, one whose power lay not in military might but in the success of its economy and the strength of its culture.” She looked across at Jack and nodded slowly. “You were right after all. Crete was Plato’s Atlantis. Only it was a new Atlantis, a utopia refounded, a second grand design that continued the age-old dream of paradise on earth.”
“By the middle of the second millennium BC, Minoan Crete was at its height,” Dillen said. “It was just as described in the first part of Solon’s papyrus, a land of magnificent palaces and exuberant culture, of bull-leaping and artistic splendour. The eruption of Thera shook that world to its foundations.”
“Bigger than Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens combined,” Costas said. “Forty cubic kilometres of fallout and a tidal wave high enough to sink Manhattan.”
“It was a cataclysm that reached far beyond the Minoans. With the priesthood all but extinguished, the entire edifice of the Bronze Age began to crumble. A world that had been prosperous and secure slid into anarchy and chaos, torn apart by internal conflict and unable to resist the invaders who swept down from the north.”
“But some of the priests escaped,” Costas interjected. “The passengers in our shipwreck perished but others made it, those who left earlier.”
“Indeed,” Dillen said. “Like the inhabitants of Akrotiri, the priests in the monastery took heed of some forewarning, probably violent tremors which seismologists think shook the island a few weeks before the cataclysm. I believe most of the priesthood perished in your ship. But others reached safe haven in their seminary at Phaistos on the south coast of Crete, and a few fled further to join their brethren in Egypt and the Levant.”
“Yet there was to be no new attempt to revive Atlantis, no further experiment with utopia,” Costas ventured.
“Already dark shadows were falling over the Bronze Age world,” Dillon said grimly. “To the north-east the Hittites were marshalling in their Anatolian stronghold of Boghazkoy, a gathering storm that was to scythe its way to the very gates of Egypt. In Crete the surviving Minoans were powerless to resist the Mycenaean warriors who sallied forth from the Greek mainland, the forebears of Agamemnon and Menelaus whose titanic struggle with the east was to be immortalized by Homer in the siege of Troy.”
Dillen paused and eyed the group.
“The priests knew they no longer had the power to shape the destiny of their world. By their ambition they had rekindled the wrath of the gods, provoking once again the heavenly retribution that had obliterated their first homeland. The eruption of Thera must have seemed apocalyptic, a portent of Armageddon itself. From now on the priesthood would no longer take an active role in the affairs of men, but would closet itself in the inner recesses of sanctuary and shroud its lore in mystery. Soon Minoan Crete like Atlantis before it would be no more than a dimly remembered paradise, a morality tale of man’s hubris before the gods, a story that passed into the realm of myth and legend to be locked for ever in the mantras of the last remaining priests.”
“In the temple sanctum at Sais,” Costas ventured.
Dillen nodded. “Egypt was the only civilization bordering the Mediterranean to weather the devastation at the end of the Bronze Age, the only place where the priesthood could claim unbroken continuity back thousands of years to Atlantis. I believe Amenhotep’s was the last surviving line, the only one still extant at the dawn of the
