decorated with exuberant wall paintings, provides an authentic blueprint for structures imagined beneath the Black Sea. The finds include clay and stone figurines of a grotesquely corpulent mother goddess, reminiscent of a stylized female image in clay recently found on the Black Sea coast of Turkey at Ikiztepe.
One of many extraordinary images from Catal Huyuk is a fresco found in a cult room dated to about 6200 BC showing a volcano venting a great plume of ash. With its twin cones and intervening saddle the volcano looks remarkably like the bull’s horn images from the shrines. Beneath it lies a town, extending outwards as if along a seashore, the buildings reminiscent of Catal Huyuk but separated into tightly packed rectilinear blocks. The volcano may represent a cinder cone in the Karapinar volcanic field, some fifty kilometres to the east, and the town may be Catal Huyuk itself; or it may instead be a distant scene where a seaside town really did nestle beneath the twin peaks of a volcano. The painting is the oldest known image of an active volcano and of a planned town.
Around the Black Sea the clearest evidence for precocious development comes from Varna in Bulgaria where a cemetery has produced an enormous cache of gold and copper artefacts alongside objects made from flint and bone. The finds reveal not only the extraordinary achievements of early metallurgists but also a society with stratification reflected in material wealth. The cemetery dates from the late Neolithic, a period also referred to as the “Chalcolithic” or Copper Age, and was in use by the middle of the fifth millennium BC.
Eighty kilometres north of Crete lies the volcanic island of Thera. Only part of the prehistoric town of Akrotiri has been uncovered, but as it emerges from its tomb of ash and pumice it looks like a Bronze Age Pompeii. The inhabitants had some forewarning of the eruption, probably a series of violent earthquakes. As yet no “monastery” has been unearthed, but the splendid marine fresco from Akrotiri, showing a procession of ships and a palatial seaside structure, suggests that religious observance and ceremony played a major part in island life.
Many archaeologists have placed the eruption around 1500 BC, based on evidence for the destruction of the palaces on Crete and the arrival of the Mycenaeans. However, scientists have recently suggested a “best fit” of 1628 BC in the acidity layers of Greenland ice, radiocarbon determinations and dendrochronological analysis of Irish oak and California bristlecone pine. Whatever the precise date, there can be no doubt of the colossal scale of the eruption that obliterated the settlement on Thera, smothered a huge swath of the east Mediterranean and caused tsunamis which pummelled the north coast of Crete and would have overwhelmed ships for miles around.
Alexandria, the great port founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, is the setting for the conference early in this book. It takes place in the Qaitbay Fortress, the fifteenth-century AD castle built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. Many fragments of masonry and sculpture have been charted on the seabed where the lighthouse collapsed in the fourteenth century.
More than two thousand kilometres to the west lies Carthage, location of the fictional Maritime Museum. Since 1972 the UNESCO “Save Carthage” programme has ensured that the city is among the most studied from antiquity, despite having been razed by the Romans in 146 BC and again by the Arabs almost nine hundred years later. Today an outstanding feature is the landlocked circular harbour where excavations have revealed slipways that once housed a fleet of war galleys.
Solon is a genuine historical character who lived from about 640 to 560 BC. He was chief archon of Athens in 594 BC and famous as a statesman whose reforms paved the way towards the democratic city-state of the Golden Age. Afterwards he travelled extensively in Egypt and Asia Minor and was revered as one of the “seven wise men” of Greece. His only writings to survive are a few fragments of poetry, but there can be no doubt that like Herodotus a century later he would have taken extensive notes from the priests and other informants he met on his travels.
The “Atlantis Papyrus” is fictional, though the circumstances of its discovery are inspired by a remarkable series of finds in western Egypt. In 1996 at the oasis of Bahariya a donkey broke through the sand into a rock-cut necropolis that had lain undisturbed for fifteen centuries. Since then more than two hundred mummies have been uncovered, many gilded and painted with portrait faces and religious scenes. They are from the Graeco-Roman period, dating after Alexander’s conquest in 332 BC, but in 1999 archaeologists digging beneath the oasis town of El Bawiti discovered the tomb of a governor of Bahariya during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664–525 BC), the period of Solon’s travels.
The ruins of Sais lie under the modern village of Sa el-Hagar in the western Delta near the Rosetta branch of the Nile, less than thirty kilometres from the Mediterranean. Like Carthage and Alexandria, little remains of the riverside metropolis, its masonry plundered and its foundations lying beneath metres of silt. Nevertheless, Sais was probably an important cult centre at the dawn of Egyptian history, even before the Early Dynastic Period (
Pilgrims came from far and wide to pay their respects at the temple of the goddess Neith, a vast complex described by Herodotus when he visited the following century. He met with the “scribe,” his term for the high priest, who “kept the register of the sacred treasures of Athene (Neith) in the city of Sais,” a man who regrettably “did not seem to me to be in earnest” (
The excavations which produced the early hieroglyphs and the priest list are fictional. However, by extraordinary chance the name of the man who may have been the very priest met by Solon is known: Amenhotep, whose impressive statue, in greywacke sandstone, probably from Sais, probably dedicated in the temple and of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, is in the British Museum (no. EA41517). He holds a
Bronze Age sailors intent on reaching the Nile from Crete may have departed from the recently excavated port of Kommos, on the south coast within sight of the palace of Phaistos. From its magnificent position the palace dominates the Mesara plain and abuts Mount Ida with its sacred caves and peak sanctuaries. Three kilometres away lies the complex known as Hagia Triadha, traditionally interpreted as a royal villa but perhaps some form of seminary for the Minoan priesthood. It was here in 1908 that the famous Phaistos disc was discovered. The 241 symbols and 61 “words” have so far defied translation but may relate to an early language spoken in western Anatolia, and thus to the Indo-European spoken in the early Neolithic. The shape of marking termed here the “Atlantis symbol” actually exists, uniquely on this disc: several of them from one die are clearly visible, one close to the centre on one side.
No second disc has been discovered. However, visitors can ponder the existing disc close up in the Archaeological Museum at Heraklion, where it is displayed alongside other treasures of the Minoan world.
Hagia Triadha in Crete also produced a painted sarcophagus depicting a bull trussed on an altar, its neck bleeding into a libation vessel. Some fifty kilometres north at Arkhanes archaeologists found evidence for a different kind of offering: a youth bound on a low platform inside a hilltop temple, his skeleton propping up a bronze knife incised with a mysterious boar-like beast. Moments after his death the temple collapsed in an earthquake and preserved the only evidence yet found for human sacrifice in the Bronze Age Aegean.
Arkhanes lies under Mount Juktas, the sacred peak overlooking the valley leading to Knossos. Among the many extraordinary finds at Knossos were several thousand baked clay tablets, the majority impressed with symbols christened Linear B but several hundred with Linear A. Linear B was brilliantly deciphered as an early form of Greek, the language spoken by the Mycenaeans who arrived in Crete in the fifteenth century BC. They adopted the script but rejected the language; Linear A is similar, also being syllabic with a number of shared symbols, but dates from before the Mycenaean arrival and remains substantially untranslated.
Two other Bronze Age sites mentioned are Athens and Troy. On the Acropolis one of few survivals from prehistory is a rock-cut tunnel leading to a subterranean spring; it was this that inspired the idea that there may yet be hidden chambers from the classical period. At Troy, palaeogeographical research has pinpointed the line of the ancient beaches and may one day reveal evidence of a Bronze Age siege.
The Black Sea is indeed dead below about 200 metres, a result of huge accumulations of hydrogen sulphide caused by the biochemical process described in this book. In its deep recesses are deposits of brine which formed when the sea was cut off from the Mediterranean and began to evaporate, causing the salt to precipitate.
To the south the sea lies astride one of the world’s most active geological boundaries, one which came to world attention in 1999 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake devastated northwest Turkey. The North Anatolian Fault between the African and the Eurasian plates runs as far east as Mount Ararat, itself an extinct twin-peaked volcano, and could be associated with imaginary features in this book including the volcanic island, the tectonic rift and the
