Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (11 page)

The Mysterious Island

Malta

A
question occurred to me staring down at the blue Mediterranean from my window seat on Air Malta. Even if someone proved tomorrow that the Maltese archipelago
had
been Plato’s Atlantis, would that discovery squeeze onto a list of the top five strange-but-true facts about Malta? Perhaps not. The oldest known structures in Europe can be found on Malta’s two main islands, although geologically the islands are actually part of Africa (and sit farther south than Tunis). Malta’s thriving population vanished around 2500 BC for unexplained reasons. The apostle Saint Paul, who’d been blinded by a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, shipwrecked in Malta in AD 60, on his way to what would be his martyrdom in Rome. The Knights of Saint John, a still-extant religious order that dates back to the eleventh-century Crusades, were granted Malta as their private headquarters in 1530 by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, to whom they paid an annual tribute of one Maltese falcon. The knights’ presence did not dissuade Turkish invaders from attacking the Maltese island of Gozo in 1551 and dragging all five thousand of its residents off into slavery. Even today, Malta is home to unsolved mysteries. Judging from my nonscientific
observations, it has the world’s highest per capita rates of fat men and beautiful women.

I was welcomed to Malta by a familiar face. Since the mental image I’d kept of Tony O’Connell was of him bundled up in a sweater against the chilly Irish spring, it was a little hard to recognize the man who greeted me in the blinding sunshine outside the baggage terminal in sandals and shorts. He seemed to be in an excellent mood. “I don’t suppose you’ve found Atlantis already,” he said. “If you have, Anton certainly won’t be too pleased.”

Anton was Dr. Anton Mifsud, full-time pediatrician and part-time Atlantologist. Mifsud was the preeminent proponent of the theory that Malta was the original site of Atlantis and had published a well-argued book to support it. Tony kept a small apartment in the Saint Julian’s Bay neighborhood (Malta’s climate was beloved by northern Europeans) and had become friends with Mifsud through their shared interest. Tony had sent me a copy of Mifsud’s book,
Malta: Echoes of Plato’s Island
.
He had arranged for the three of us to have dinner once Mifsud returned from his rounds.

At Tony’s apartment he and I looked through photos of his and Paul’s civil partnership ceremony. Tony pointed out the new $100 suit he’d purchased for the occasion. “Ah, look at that old potato-head,” he said, pointing to himself. “We went out to the pub that night and everyone was lovely. Even the village homophobe wished us well.”

Mifsud, I learned that evening, was the sort of pediatrician who got up each day at 4:00
A.M.
to ride his bike for two hours (he was an exception to my fat Maltese men theory), then made house calls for twelve hours, driving all over the main island. He was in his early sixties, bald with a neatly trimmed goatee, and wore small rimless eyeglasses. Even after a full day of battling Malta’s awful traffic and inoculating screaming toddlers, he vibrated with the energy of a teenage boy. Mifsud cackled at his own jokes and had the infectious
habit of affirming his own statements. A single “yes?” at the end of a sentence meant “Do you follow me?” The declarative “yes” served as an exclamation point. The double “Yes? Yes!” conveyed the feeling of “I know—I couldn’t believe it either!”

The evening was warm. We sat at a table near an open window and ordered drinks. I asked Mifsud how a busy physician had become attracted to Atlantis.

“There was a friend of mine; he told me he was investigating the angle that Malta was Atlantis. It had been ingrained in me the idea that Atlantis was a myth, yes? Of course I laughed in his face. I wasn’t expecting him to be such a nerd. He said, ‘I thought you were a scientist. Scientists are not biased.’ So I said, ‘In three weeks I will prove to you that Malta could never have been Atlantis.’ That was in 1999 and I have been investigating since!”

In 2000, Mifsud published
Echoes
with the help of his son and two friends. Its preface offers a sort of manifesto for serious, but uncredentialed, Atlantologists. The best type of archaeologist to search for Atlantis, he explains, is neither the quack nor the professional but the amateur whose “principal motivation is to search for the truth” rather than perpetuating the “preconceived notions” of the Establishment.

The truth as Mifsud had deduced it was this: Thousands of years ago, Malta had been a much larger landmass but had shrunk due to rising sea levels. Between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Mediterranean’s oldest known temple-building civilization lived in the Maltese archipelago. After this society’s sudden demise due to a probable natural disaster around 2200 BC according to Mifsud, the Egyptians recorded in their temples memories of the lost culture of Malta. These stories were then passed along to Solon as the accounts that became Plato’s Atlantis tale.

Part of what made Mifsud’s theory intriguing was the extraordinary amount of original research he’d done. If he had a native
Maltese’s tendency to root for the home team, he also had a philologist’s passion for finding the earliest possible sources. “No one ever looks at the original Greek,” Mifsud said. “Unfortunately, every time a manuscript is copied, the editor puts his own interpretation on it. Plato wrote in 360 BC. His manuscript probably ended up in the library at Alexandria. In 400 AD, it was transferred to Constantinople”—the new capital of Western thought after the fall of Rome and banning of pagan temples in Alexandria—“and stayed there until about 1450, when Constantinople was taken and the manuscripts returned to Europe. Most of them were taken by the Medicis and they commissioned this guy, Marsilio Ficino, to translate the Greek into Latin.” The Medicis had sponsored a school in Florence, based on Plato’s Academy, that was one of the primary catalysts of the Italian Renaissance. Its members, led by Ficino, produced new Latin translations of all Plato’s works. “And I have that one now, the earliest version. Yes? Yes! I saw it at an exhibition in Florence.”

The most obvious problem with the Malta-as-Atlantis theory is the location of the Pillars of Heracles. Malta sits much closer to Athens than to the Strait of Gibraltar. Mifsud asked a classics professor at the University of Malta for his interpretation of Plato’s description and was very pleased with the result. “The words Plato uses are
Steles of Hercules
,” Mifsud told me. A stele is a stone slab, inscribed or decorated, like the warrior stele Richard Freund had gotten excited about in Spain. “The proper word for
pillars
is something else. So the Steles of Hercules are not the Pillars of Hercules. Even if they were the Pillars of Hercules, the Pillars are only recently situated at the Strait of Gibraltar.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you where I got it from—I went to Herculaneum!” Because even the most durable papyrus becomes brittle and disintegrates after a few centuries, the Herculaneum papyri are some of the few premedieval manuscripts that exist. Hundreds of blackened
cylinders were found during the excavation of a wealthy Roman’s villa that was buried under a hundred feet of ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. (The same eruption smothered Pompeii.) These rolls turned out to be a vast library of Greek and Roman literature. Since the villa was excavated in the 1750s, hundreds of these delicate manuscripts have been deciphered. “Three of the papyri”—by authors other than Plato—“show that the Pillars of Hercules were situated in the central Mediterranean,” Mifsud said.

Appetizers arrived. “Dig in, lads, and grab something,” Tony said, pushing the plate in our direction. “Whoever wants the prawn can have it.”

Mifsud continued. “There is another manuscript that confirms Plato, yes? Yes! Eumalos of Cyrene.”

“It’s true; he did,” Tony said, nodding in agreement. Eumalos of Cyrene was an obscure source who aside from a few brief mentions in nineteenth-century literature, only Mifsud, of all the Atlantologists, seemed to know about. (Mifsud had discovered him in an appendix to an 1830 guide to Malta, written in Italian.) Eumalos was a Greek copyist living in North Africa two or three generations after Plato’s lifetime. According to the 1830 appendix, Eumalos once transcribed a text stating that “the famous . . . Ogyge was the king of Atlantis, the island that once existed between Libia and Sicily and was submerged. This large island was known as Decapolis, Atlantika, by our forefathers of Cyrene as well as by the ancient Greeks.” Ogyge (usually called Ogyges) lent his name to Ogygia, the island where Odysseus is kept by the nymph Calypso in the
Odyssey
. Several ancient writers hypothesized that Ogygia was actually Malta, which the guidebook’s translation of Eumalos notes “is nothing more than the summit of the Mount of Atlantika.”

If the translation of the Eumalos manuscript was real, it was an incredible piece of evidence—a contemporary of Plato sending a certified letter from twenty-four hundred years ago saying, essentially,
“Atlantis was real, and it was Malta. Best regards, Eumalos of Cyrene.” Unfortunately, there was no way to confirm the credibility of Eumalos any more than one could confirm Solon’s notes from Saïs, regardless of how enthusiastic Mifsud was about him. The good doctor may have been a man of science, but he did gravitate toward interpretations that favored Malta. I later called a retired classics professor who’d written a book about the Pillars of Heracles. He’d never heard of Eumalos, he insisted
stele
and
pillar
meant the same thing for the purposes of Atlantis, and he saw only two logical reasons for Plato to refer to the Pillars of Heracles: Either he literally meant the Strait of Gibraltar or he metaphorically meant a spot beyond the edge of the known world.

“Anyway, I know that Tony favors the Michael Hübner hypothesis,” Mifsud said, and winked at me. Hübner was the German Atlantologist who had used data analysis of Plato’s descriptions to narrow down the possible locations for Atlantis. I’d seen his presentation online, and it was impressive. Hübner believed Atlantis had existed along Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

Tony sighed and tilted his head toward Mifsud. “What I
said
was that Hübner presented his case very well. There is one thing in there that really annoys me. Well, a number of things.”

One of the things Hübner’s theory lacked—that virtually all Atlantis theories lacked—was a reasonable explanation for the checkerboard canals that Plato describes. For Mifsud, this was an ace to play. One of Malta’s chief mysteries is an enormous network of crisscrossing tracks, known as cart ruts, etched deep into its soft limestone. They are believed to be at least four thousand years old and are found all over the main island and its satellite, Gozo. Some cart ruts appear to run between temples; others disappear into the sea. They have defied explanation for centuries. (
Chariots of the Gods
author Erich von Däniken suggested they are evidence of alien takeoffs and landings. Perhaps Malta was a hub for extraterrestrials making
connecting flights to Mu.) Mifsud was convinced that these were the remnants of the incredible irrigation system that brought water from the mountains to Atlantis’s fertile plain, as Plato described it.

“In Malta there are two archaeologists who give a function to the cart ruts,” Mifsud said. “One says they were used for the transport of agricultural produce. The other says they were also used for the transport of water, exactly as Plato said. Yes!”

“I don’t care what she said,” said Tony. “We’ve been over this. She’s wrong.”

“If archaeologists are stating something that fits into the theory, why fight with the archaeologists?” Mifsud said.

“How can water flow
uphill
?” Tony asked.

“An uphill is also a downhill!”

“Here’s a question for both of you,” I said. “Did the dates we got from Plato arrive to us uncorrupted, or did someone screw them up a little along the way?”

“No, no, no,” said Mifsud. “I think Plato meant what he said about the nine thousand years, and this I say on the strength of a manuscript I found in the Vatican Secret Archives. I can’t talk about it but it was
really
trustworthy.” The Vatican Secret Archives, while not actually as secret as their cloak-and-dagger name implies (researchers can petition for access), are said to contain more than fifty miles of shelving containing items going back to the early Middle Ages.

“You also have the fact that Plato mentions nine thousand or eight thousand years, two or three times,” Tony said. “So it would have had to be corrupted or interfered with on a number of occasions rather than just a slip of a pen.”

“What if Solon or the priest at Saïs just got it wrong?” I asked. “Maybe one of them hadn’t slept well or had whatever awful food poisoning you could get in 600 BC. The ancient Egyptians drank beer, right? Maybe they were hungover.”

“Basically, we have to work with what we’ve got: Plato’s writings,”
Tony said. “You can speculate all you like and still it’s only speculation. Obviously some degree of reinterpretation is required, and that’s it. There’s nothing else you can do. Anton is bringing in corroboration from other sources that enhances his interpretation.”

“There are people who say, ‘Plato didn’t mean this; he meant something else,’” Mifsud said. “And if we do that we can make a dog into a cat. So I wouldn’t want to tinker with anything that Plato said.”

This wasn’t
entirely
accurate. As with his reinterpretations of Plato’s words
Pillars of Heracles
and their location, Mifsud was willing to correct information that he felt others had gotten wrong. His explanation for the nine thousand years was that Plato had actually used the Greek word for seasons.

“Plato says Egyptian art started ten thousand years ago, but it didn’t. It started at the beginning of the dynasties, 2900 BC, yes?” The start of the Second Dynasty, which most people would recognize as “classical” Egypt, has been dated to approximately 2890 BC. (Mifsud had spent several weeks traveling in western Egypt and coauthored an engrossing book about a mysterious Egyptian statuette found in Malta in 1713. His output as a part-time writer was enviable, and I half hoped his productivity was pharmaceutically induced, and that he might have some extra samples of whatever he was taking.) Mifsud had also sponsored three carbon datings on Malta that showed some sort of cataclysm, possibly a tsunami, had hit the islands in 2200 BC.