on the Bronze Age shipwreck and you took his call.’
Lanowski tapped the keyboard, then sat back and craned his head round at Costas. ‘Gladstone. William Ewart Gladstone.’
Costas stared back at him. ‘Huh?’
‘British prime minister in the late nineteenth century. Does that ring a bell?’
Costas screwed up his eyes, then peered at Lanowski cautiously. ‘The guy who was so fascinated with Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy, who helped push Schliemann to international fame.’
Lanowski nodded. ‘Well, like a lot of the Victorian intelligentsia, Gladstone was also fascinated by archaeological discoveries that might illuminate the Bible, especially with the wealth of clay tablets being found at ancient Mesopotamian sites that were seen as part of the backdrop to the Old Testament. One of the most famous discoveries was the Epic of Gilgamesh.’
‘It’s what we were talking about,’ Costas said. ‘About the tension it represents between the wild and the civilized, and how it might derive from conflict between the old shamans and the new priests in the early Neolithic.’
Lanowski nodded enthusiastically. ‘For the Victorians, the biggest revelation in the Epic of Gilgamesh was the story of a flood that paralleled the Biblical deluge. Gladstone attended a lecture in 1873 at the Society for Biblical Archaeology in London, where the tablet containing the flood account was first revealed. An obsessive genius named George Smith had been sifting through thousands of tablets from Nineveh in the British Museum, and when he came across the flood tablet, he was so excited he rushed about the room and stripped naked.’
‘Don’t get any ideas, Jacob,’ Costas muttered.
Lanowski’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve already had my eureka moment. What George Smith found was the flood tablet in the version of the epic written down in the early first millennium BC, but since the nineteenth century, fragments have been found that are a lot earlier, dating to the first period of cuneiform writing in Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC. The fact that the story of Gilgamesh seems to have been well formed that early strongly suggests that it had been passed down orally for a long time before then, conceivably from as far back as the early Neolithic.’
‘And it’s the basis for the Old Testament deluge story?’
‘Or a parallel tradition, deriving from the same historical backdrop. And for my money, the Gilgamesh story is a lot more intriguing, with more pointers to the early Neolithic. Uta-napishtim, the flood hero, is a more ambiguous character than Noah. For a start, he isn’t the sole survivor of the flood, and he’s actually presented as more of an outcast. After the flood, the gods grant him immortality, but he lives on the mountain where his boat came ashore, far from the rest of humanity. It’s as if the gods’ favour comes at a price: we’ll grant you immortality and give you this mountain to live on, but don’t ever come back to our shores again. As if they owe him something, even feel guilty about him, but he’s a threat to the new world of men they lord it over and they don’t want him around. And so Gilgamesh, half-god himself, travels a huge distance across the sea to find him, to try to discover the secret of immortality. It’s then that Uta-napishtim tells him the story of the flood.’
Costas looked at him shrewdly. ‘And you’re going to suggest that this flood story contains something about a survivor from Atlantis?’
Lanowski beamed at him. ‘The character of Uta-napishtim himself could be a clue. An outcast. A shaman perhaps, the last of the old order? Gilgamesh goes a huge distance across the water to get to him. And Uta- napishtim lives on a twin-peaked mountain, called Nisir.’
‘The mountain of Du-Re was twin-peaked as well,’ Jack murmured. ‘That’s where the oldest Babylonian myths locate the birthplace of the gods.’
‘I think Du-Re was Atlantis,’ Lanowski enthused. ‘Du-Re was somewhere to the north, where the Babylonian scribes always placed their ancestors and the home of their gods, precisely where Atlantis and those other early Neolithic sites were located in relation to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But Nisir is a kind of alter-Atlantis, Atlantis reborn, a huge distance over the sea. The question is, was the sea simply a conceptual barrier, a barrier in the mind, or was it a real ocean, and if so which one?’
‘And?’
‘And that made me think of Jack’s lecture at the Royal Geographical Society last December, on prehistoric voyages of discovery. About his title, “Voyages of the mind, voyages of the body”.’
‘I missed it, I’m sorry to say,’ Costas said. ‘Too wrapped up getting Little Joey finished in time for the sea trials.’
‘Well, if I may,’ Lanowski said, looking questioningly at Jack. ‘The nub of his argument was this. We’ve had it all wrong. Great voyages of discovery didn’t begin after the rise of civilization, with trade and colonization. They began before that. Way before, as far back as the middle Palaeolithic, fifty thousand years ago or more, when we know people went great distances by sea to get to Australia, for example. Ergo, hunter-gatherers in deep prehistory had boats capable of long-distance seafaring. Hunter-gatherers ranged over huge distances on land, so why not by sea as well? By the end of the Palaeolithic – at the end of the Ice Age – just as many people were living off the sea as off the land. But the advent of farming actually stifled exploration. People moved inland, settled in one place, turned in on themselves, were enslaved by agriculture as well as by new rulers who wanted to control them, to prevent them seeing the world outside their own narrow confines, a control maybe exerted using new religious beliefs based on fear.’
‘So why voyages of the mind?’ Costas asked.
Jack leaned back. ‘That title was prescient, given what we’ve been talking about here,’ he said. ‘Now I know why Jacob was in the audience looking at me as Professor Dillen used to when I stumbled my way through a passage of ancient Greek. I’d already been doing some thinking about Palaeolithic religion, about shamanism and altered consciousness. I looked at all that in relation to seafaring in two ways. First, I read about the common altered-consciousness hallucinations of being in water, and I imagined that a real sea voyage, especially an arduous one, would be something like that. Altered states of mind are often most easily achieved under duress, right? It might have been particularly easy when the imagery of the real-life experience and the dream world seemed so close. And I wasn’t thinking that Stone Age seafarers were floating around aimlessly in a psychedelic daze, but actually that they were purposeful and destination-conscious. They were doing what they did in those caves, navigating their way into the spirit world, but this time marrying it with a real-life voyage using the stars and even navigational aids such as quartz sunstones. I began to think that the idea of early seafarers being terrified of the open sea might be an inheritance from the establishment of sedentary living in the Neolithic. The sea wasn’t the great unknown in deep prehistory. It became the great unknown when it suited rulers to stoke up the fear factor. Before that, sea voyages had given people with shamanic beliefs an experience that would have seemed familiar to them. I argued that they wouldn’t have sailed off into the unknown in fear for their lives, but quite the opposite. They may actually have relished it, and looked forward with huge excitement to what they might discover in a spiritual sense as well as in reality.’
‘And your second point?’
‘Thinking about the prehistoric colonization of Australia led me to Aboriginal songlines, the dreaming tracks that were used to cross the outback. If hunter-gatherers could conceptualize land routes in that way, why not at sea as well? Memorized trackways are often the most practicable routes too, and that made me think about the predictability of ocean currents and winds. I ended my lecture with a picture of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Ra expedition reed boat in the mid-Atlantic in 1969, showing how it would have been difficult to avoid being swept out to sea and towards the Caribbean once you’d sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of west Africa. I argued that the sea isn’t a barrier, it’s a great complex of highways, and nowhere was that more the case than in deep prehistory. I quoted Heyerdahl’s famous last lines from his account of the Ra expedition, that his theory about prehistoric maritime contact came about because he and his crew had actually sailed on the ocean and not on a map.’
‘They’d tried it out rather than sitting in an armchair theorizing,’ Costas said approvingly.
Jack nodded. ‘And that gets us back to Atlantis. At the time of the Black Sea flood, the people of Atlantis may have been undergoing a religious revolution, but they were still not that far away from their Palaeolithic ancestors. If we’ve got it right, there were still shamans present in those final days before the flood, even if they were a beleaguered few. That knowledge of sea travel, that ability to sail off into the unknown, may not yet have been lost.’
Costas nodded. ‘Makes a lot of sense.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘So what’s your big revelation?’
