Jack grinned. ‘He and I have been planning it for years. It’s so big, we’ve never quite wanted to go for it, both of us waiting until the time was right.’
‘That statue with the inscription Maurice found at Troy?’
‘That was the clue he needed. If I tell you this could be bigger than the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, far bigger, you’ll see where I’m coming from. It’s about Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father, the most mysterious and terrifying of the pharaohs, about where he came from and where he went. About what happened to his treasure. About finding his tomb.’
‘Any diving?’ Costas mumbled, now half asleep.
‘Like you wouldn’t believe. The most astonishing find has been made in the Red Sea.’
‘No more deadly toxins? Doomsday weapons?’
‘I swear.’
‘Erupting volcanoes?’
‘The dive site is beside a beach, one of those ones with parasols and reclining chairs and a little bar at the back serving cocktails.’
Costas tipped his hat up and squinted at Jack. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope.’
He leaned back again, sighing contentedly. ‘For the first time ever, you think of me.’
‘Only after you do your duty at Lanowski’s wedding.’
Costas groaned and pulled his hat back over his face. Jack smiled at Rebecca, who raised her eyes and shook her head. He remembered the message he had written to her on the scrap of plastic when he thought he was going to die in the cavern below. He reached down to his buoyancy compensator pocket, felt for it, then discreetly took it out and dangled his hand over the pontoon, releasing the scrap into the sea and letting the waves wash through his fingers. The message would be there for her forever, in the sea, Jack’s spirit world, though the words would be erased by sun and water and would only ever be known to him. He felt a dawning happiness, as if that act had been the final release he had needed to throw off the burden that had weighed on him since Rebecca had been drawn into the nightmare of kidnapping and violence that had dogged their quest.
He lifted his hand from the water and shielded his eyes, looking up. The sound of the helicopter became louder, increasing to a roar as it took up position overhead. The downdraught kicked up a spray of water around the boat that sparkled as the sun shone through it, and for a moment it was as if they were in a vortex, one that would lift them to ever more fabulous places. Jack was suddenly coursing with excitement. He shaded his eyes and looked up, seeing Jeremy’s helmeted figure leaning out of the door. Costas reached up and caught the winch line, then looked at Jack and Rebecca, making a whirling motion with his free hand and pointing up. ‘Good to go?’ he yelled.
Rebecca draped her arm over Jack’s shoulders. Jack beamed at Costas, then tilted his head towards Rebecca, waiting. She turned and looked at him expectantly. Then she understood. She shook her head again, grinning, and they both shouted together.
‘Good to go.’
Background to the novel
When my first novel Atlantis was published in 2005, it was against a backdrop of extraordinary real-life discoveries that were transforming our view of the rise of civilization. A century ago, most scholars would have put that formative period at the beginning of the Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago; now we know that many of the key developments – the first towns, with walls, towers and even temples – had appeared more than five thousand years before that, soon after the end of the Ice Age. Cambridge University, where I completed my PhD in archaeology in 1991, had long been a centre of expertise in this era, and by the time I left my academic teaching career ten years later to write full-time, it was clear that the Neolithic period was where the most exciting breakthroughs were being made in understanding the past. Not only were amazing new sites being excavated – mainly in modern Turkey, on the Anatolian plateau – but archaeologists were thinking in daring new ways, using finds to question long-held assumptions about the transformation from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Most excitingly, they had begun to address the belief systems of our distant ancestors, to try to get inside their minds, something long thought beyond the scope of archaeology but where the new finds were shedding dazzling light. Was this a time of conflict, as the old beliefs of the hunter-gatherers were replaced by the new? Was it the birthplace of the gods? Much remains uncertain, but this sea change in archaeological thinking provides the backdrop to The Gods of Atlantis.
Atlantis revisited
My novel Atlantis was based on the premise that the sunken city, uniquely known from the fifth century BC Greek philosopher Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, was not Plato’s fictional creation but was truly derived – as he claims – from an account by the early sixth century BC Greek traveller Solon, who had heard it from an Egyptian priest in the temple at Sais in the Nile delta. The Egyptian priests had an unbroken tradition of knowledge extending far back into prehistory, and my novel began with the fictional discovery of a papyrus containing Solon’s original account of his visit to the temple. However, instead of basing the story in the Bronze Age, on the second-millennium BC eruption of the Aegean volcano of Thera and its effect on Minoan civilization – as do many archaeologists who take Plato’s story at face value – my Atlantis dated thousands of years earlier, a distant memory of a devastating flood and a lost city at the dawn of civilization, not in the Aegean, but in the Black Sea to the north-east. This placed Atlantis in the Neolithic – the ‘New Stone Age’ – at the time when agriculture was first developed, a period dating from soon after the end of the Ice Age about twelve thousand years ago until the widespread adoption of copper technology from about the fifth millennium BC.
My inspiration derived from remarkable evidence published during the 1990s that the Black Sea may have been cut off during the last Ice Age from the Aegean by a land bridge across the Bosporus Strait, and that the Black Sea remained at its Ice Age level – a hundred metres or more below the present shoreline – until the global sea level rise caused the waters of the Aegean to breach the land bridge and flood the Black Sea basin. During the Ice Age, the glaciers themselves had not reached as far south as the Black Sea, but the great melt had a global effect on coastal settlement. The possibility that the Black Sea flood did not occur until the sixth millennium BC, more than three millennia after the beginning of the Neolithic, meant that the flood could have inundated early farming communities that may now lie underwater off the northern shore of Turkey. Evidence for the fecundity of this region suggests that it should be included within the ‘fertile crescent’ where agriculture first developed, stretching from present-day Israel up through Anatolian Turkey and down into the Zagros mountains of Iran.
The idea that there could have been a city with monumental structures was inspired by real-life evidence from the early Neolithic: Jericho, in present-day Palestine, had city walls and a tower as early as the ninth millennium BC, and at Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, the excavations in the 1960s revealed a substantial town of the eighth millennium BC. Catalhoyuk even produced a famous wall painting that may show a town on the slopes of a double-peaked volcano, an image that appears in The Gods of Atlantis. I was also inspired by a theory that associated the spread of farming with the spread of Indo-European language, which had been sourced by many scholars to the Black Sea region about the seventh millennium BC. I could therefore imagine groups of early farmers fleeing the flood, some going overland to Mesopotamia and the Levant and Egypt, others by boat into the Aegean and further west – taking their animals with them, as we know happened in the Neolithic and may be remembered in the Old Testament account of Noah – and spreading agriculture, a common language and new technology far across Asia and Europe, and perhaps beyond.
The Neolithic revolution
The phrase ‘Neolithic revolution’ was coined in the 1950s by the prehistorian Gordon Childe to describe the dramatic changes that took place in the Near East after the Ice Age. As recently as 1980, when I first studied archaeology as an undergraduate, the Neolithic was still being approached in his terms, as a time when the invention of agriculture led to the first towns. This approach – in which economic rationale was the driving force behind change – and the rapidity of the ‘revolution’ seemed to be borne out by the evidence of Jericho and Catalhoyuk, towns that dated very soon after the first evidence for agriculture. But this picture has been turned on its head by new discoveries in eastern Turkey. It is less clear now that hunter-gatherers would have seen the
