Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

5

FOLLOW THE FISH!

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

—ALBERT SZENT-GYoRGYI

SHOCKED AND DEEPLY HURT, Rudbeck was also angry at the way the professors had behaved. All his hard work had been brushed aside, haughtily dismissed, and answered with little more than “one thousand curses,” hurled from the very center of the university that he had so energetically served. With his reputation stung and his pride wounded, Rudbeck retreated, as one said, like Achilles into his tent.

Resolved to leave the council to its deserved fate, Rudbeck threw himself into the search for the new world envisioned on the old maps. He worked day and night, chasing many “beautiful things.” One of the first discoveries would not only enlarge his vision of the past, but also transform it beyond all recognition. Rudbeck had reached the astonishing conclusion that Sweden must have been the original cradle of civilization.

It all started when he was out investigating the old burial mounds and runic stones in the countryside. He brought along a very special instrument that would soon accompany him everywhere he went, and would enable him to invent an extraordinary dating method. To understand Rudbeck’s theory, it is important to understand this method—one of the truly innovative, even pioneering results of his mad adventure.

Rudbeck had observed that the surface of the earth, whenever it remained undisturbed, was covered by a layer of fertile black soil (Latin humus, or colloquial Swedish matjord). This layer could never be found underground, but rather developed gradually as a result of decayed leaves, vegetation, dust, and other “contamination” deposited by snow, rain, or wind. Rudbeck explained that “no rain or snow is so pure as to be without soil, which I myself as well as other natural philosophers have observed and found out.”

This is not only an early awareness of the problem of air pollution and one of the first on record in the modern world, but it also offers a wonderful insight into how ordinary soil can help date objects from the distant past.

First, though, however perceptive this observation seemed, it had to be tested. To verify his hypothesis, Rudbeck placed a container in his garden at the beginning of winter. Several months later, after the snow had melted and the rain had evaporated, there was indeed a thin layer of dirt at the bottom of his vessel. If left untouched over a period of time, Rudbeck further concluded, this soil would, like the specimens he had found, continue to develop everywhere with “distinctions in color, thickness, and layer.” And if these distinctions, presumably a function of time, could be measured, perhaps they would provide clues to the age of any surrounding monuments.

So Rudbeck hunted down artifacts, stones, buildings, any significant structures, and then put his new device, a skillfully crafted measuring stick, to the test, trying to translate the nearby layers of soil into a more precise number of years. He searched the most distant places he could reach, far away from cultivated land, since regular working of the soil upset his method. He ventured out to remote mountains, cliffs, and crags, where it was “impossible for any human to live” and where he could reach only “with the greatest effort.” Everywhere he examined the soil, and measured the fine distinctions in its layers.

Rudbeck’s archaeological dating method assumed that the soil offers a key to discovering the age of nearby structures. His measuring stick is depicted on the right side.

All the while, too, Rudbeck was gradually refining his method. Comparing the data of constructions whose age he knew with those whose age he could reasonably deduce, Rudbeck proceeded to test his method thousands of times. The knowledge of elderly town residents was a valuable complement, Rudbeck thought, to his own rigorous approach. One nearly one-hundred-year-old man, Ingelbrecht Swensson, for instance, offered friendly assistance, pointing Rudbeck in the direction of likely places to find humus that had not been disturbed for a very long time. Varying his samples as much as possible, Rudbeck measured the distinctions, and again marveled at how gradually the humus actually developed.

Equipped with his measuring stick, Rudbeck hurried to an alluring site outside of the university town: the famous giant burial mounds of Old Uppsala. With the largest one standing twelve meters high and spanning fifty-five meters at the base, these monuments, most certainly tombs of dead kings, dominated the surrounding countryside. Objects of curiosity and romance for centuries, they are still today seen as royal resting places; in one theory enjoying wide currency, these mounds are the tombs of three pagan warrior kings, Aun (Onela), Egil, and Adils, mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.

By the end of a lengthy process, after some reported 16,000(!) tests, Rudbeck had found a ratio between the depth of the accumulated humus and the time that had passed. Thanks to the Great Flood, some four thousand years ago, which had swept away all existing humus and, as it were, reset the parameters of history, Rudbeck established his formula: one-fifth of a finger corresponded to one hundred years. Each tenth of a quarter on his measuring stick corresponded to five hundred years.

Later, when he announced this discovery to the world, Rudbeck would add specific instructions for the reader who wished to make his own measuring stick and put it to use reading the layers of the soil. For optimal results, Rudbeck advised choosing a dry day, long after any rain, and looking for surfaces of “red, gray, or white sand, or clay,” which provide much better contrasts to the black humus. One should learn, also, to tell it by touch: humus differed from the other soil, as it felt “like velvet,” a “fine cloth” compared with the coarse and hardy normal fare. Indeed, after applying Rudbeck’s dating method, natural philosophers on the Continent testified to its success in unraveling the secrets from inside the “black coat” that covered the earth.

As a result of his indefatigable efforts, Rudbeck came to the startling realization that there was “no more certain” way at our disposal to date the events in the past. Historians may make mistakes, and even deliberately mislead, but the dirt showed “clearer than the sun” how old an artifact actually was. Field archaeologists all over the world still rely on studying distinctions in layers of soil to reach an approximate age of surrounding objects, though geologists are commonly credited with inventing this method of stratigraphy. Yet, almost two hundred years before, Rudbeck, too, had measured the layers of the soil to date the ruins, runes, and relics dotting the Swedish countryside.

What’s more, this truly pioneering method confirmed that the history of Sweden stretched back to 2300 B.C.—some fifteen hundred years before the first Olympic games (776 B.C.). Founded supposedly by the mighty Heracles in honor of the god Zeus, this celebration of the games was traditionally one of the oldest dates in the accepted chronology of ancient history. Even more striking, Rudbeck’s dating method also showed that a civilization had flourished in Sweden well over one thousand years before the Trojan War!

The implications were immense. In an age still under the spell of the Renaissance, many humanists greatly admired the achievements of classical antiquity and praised its merits for the modern world. Ancient wisdom was found almost everywhere, encapsulated in pithy maxims, hidden in veiled allegories about the gods, and displayed in memorable portraits of great heroes. All of this legacy served to provide perfect models for attaining eloquence and excellence, master keys for unlocking the secret “treasure chest of wisdom.” Now Rudbeck was proudly proclaiming the discovery in the far north of a civilization that threatened to upset established traditions.

His claim meant that all the leading figures of the grand epics the Iliad and the Odyssey—Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, and Agamemnon, as well as Hector, Paris, and Aeneas—must have lived significantly more recently than the warriors buried in Old Uppsala. Since Homer’s accounts of the Trojan War were the earliest such narratives in European history—so early, indeed, that they were sometimes treated as history and at other times as mythology—this meant that Sweden had been populated well before those famous heroes rushed into the Trojan War, to sing along with Homer, like the “unnumbered flies that swarm round the cowsheds in the spring, when pails are full of milk.” In fact, given standard historical chronologies of the day, this meant that Sweden was the oldest known civilization in Europe—and possibly in the world.

At this time Rudbeck’s true colors shone through: his preference for reading what early natural philosophers often called “the Great Book of Nature”; his reliance on observation and his own experience over the evidence derived from authority, just as when he made his discovery of the lymphatic glands. No less important, Rudbeck