Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (19 page)

“I know ancient Greek,” he told me, leaning back in his chair. “I read and I write ancient Greek. In the sixth century, when Solon lived,
nesos
had five geographic meanings.” He began to count off on his fingers. “One, an island as we know it. Two, a promontory. Three, a peninsula. Four, a coast. Five, a land within a continent, surrounded by lakes, rivers, or springs.” By this definition, not only would Hawaii qualify as a
nesos
, but so would Utah, Florida, California, and Minnesota. For the 2008 Atlantis conference Papamarinopoulos had written a paper demonstrating that Pharos Island (aka Pharos Nesos), home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—Alexandria’s four-hundred-foot-high lighthouse—had actually been a peninsula. The land bridge I’d crossed on the bus from Athens that
morning was an even clearer example. The name
Peloponnesus
, arguably Western history’s most famous peninsula, literally means “Island of Pelops.”

“So if Atlantis wasn’t in the middle of the Atlantic, where was it?” I asked.

Papamarinopoulos shook his head. “Before we go to that,” he said, rising from his chair, “I want to answer a question—is there anybody else who mentions Atlantis before Plato? It’s a classic question.” Christos Doumas, among others, had stressed the significance of there being no references to Atlantis in the voluminous Egyptian archives. “May I close the window? It’s noisy.”

The room was suddenly as quiet as a library. Papamarinopoulos lowered his voice. “The experts and romantic archaeologists”—the Indiana Jones types who focus their efforts on finding precious artifacts and intact ancient structures—“are trapped by this question,” he said as he returned to his seat. “They try to find the word
Atlantis
in other cultures and they fail to find it. So what do they conclude? That there is no Atlantis, that it exists only in Plato’s mind. They don’t realize that Atlantis is a name
invented
by Plato.” Plato is pretty explicit on this point. In the
Critias
he explains that the priest at Saïs gave Solon names in Egyptian form. Solon then translated these names into Greek. Assuming that Plato really did receive the tale via Solon, he would have Hellenized the names.

“So who were the Atlanteans? Plato gave one name to a coalition of different nations that came and invaded the eastern Mediterranean. Twice. With a difference of thirty years. Plato doesn’t say two invasions; he talks about one. We don’t know which one. But we have the names of these people written in hieroglyphics in Medinet Habu, in a victorious granite stele.” Rainer Kühne had mentioned Medinet Habu. It’s one of the archaeological treasures of Egypt. It was built as the mortuary temple of the great pharaoh Ramses III,
who reigned from roughly 1186 BC to 1155 BC. Its walls contain some of the most spectacular hieroglyphics in existence.

“So who were they?” I asked.

“It’s interesting. All these countries were traditionally enemies for centuries, before the two invasions. The Libyans. The ancestors of some of the Italians. Others from the Middle East. But also
others
with peculiar boats. How do you call these in English?” He made a rowing motion.

“Oars?”

“Oars. They did not have oars. These people also had, in the front and the back of their boats, a bird, like a duck. And if you don’t have oars in the Nile and the wind is not favorable to you, your boat with a duck becomes a sitting duck! The Egyptians got them as prisoners and divided them into two categories. The punishment was unbelievable!” He brought his palm to his brow and laughed. “One group lost their hands. The other lost their penis!”

Shelley Wachsmann, a professor of biblical archaeology at Texas A & M University, had identified these boats as coming from central Europe. “So this coalition of Sea Peoples may also have had central Europeans and perhaps western Europeans,” Papamarinopoulos said. “And we have paintings of the warriors that connect them with certain northwestern European cultures.” Long pause. “Of which Spain is perhaps a part.”

Papamarinopoulos believed that the
nesos
Plato wrote of was not an island, but a giant peninsula, encompassing all of mainland Europe west of Italy. I may have let out a small groan.

“If you follow Plato, you go exactly to the Iberian Peninsula because this is where the text leads you. Literally! He describes a valley that is flat and elongated, surrounded by mountains. These mountains are the Sierra Nevada and Sierra Morena. The valley has the same position and orientation. It fits exactly with Plato’s description. Like a puzzle piece.”

So we were back to Spain. Hoping to convey skepticism through body language, I took a huge, slow swig of my tepid coffee, realizing too late it had been made Greek-style, with an inch of grounds at the bottom of the cup. “So the Pillars of Heracles really were at Gibraltar,” I finally said, dislodging bits of coffee from my teeth with my tongue. “Did you consider other possible locations?”

“Of course! There are eight others. None of them has a Gadeiriki peninsula.” This was a new twist on the Gades/Cádiz clue from the
Critias. Gadeiriki
is a diminutive variant of
Gadeira
,
the ancient Greek name for Gades/Cádiz; the suffix denotes a small peninsula.
Gadir
is the old Phoenician name meaning “walled city,” such as the one situated on a tiny spit of land northwest of the Rock of Gibraltar. Plato wrote that Gadeirus, one of the ten twin sons of Poseidon, “obtained as his lot the extremity of the island toward the Pillars of Heracles, facing the country which is now called the region of Gadeira in that part of the world.”

Atlantis doubters have seized on the tortured geography in this sentence as evidence that Plato must have invented such a place. There are no islands west of modern Cádiz, so it would be impossible to stand on one while looking back toward Cádiz and the Pillars. Such a location would
need
to be in the Atlantic Ocean.

But if the entire Iberian peninsula is counted as a
nesos
, then just up the coast from Cádiz is another lost city that could have been the original Atlantis. Tartessos.

Plato evidently had no firsthand knowledge of Tartessos. Other ancient Greek writers mention it by name and—possibly—by description. It took me several weeks after returning home to untangle all the threads of Papamarinopoulos’s explanation of pre-Platonic evidence, so here’s a watered-down version. Several Greeks who lived in the centuries before Plato and were familiar with details of the western Mediterranean, including Homer and Hesiod, described an obscure circular shape that was believed to be the work of
Poseidon. This “circularity,” as Papamarinopoulos called it, was once located on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia.

There was certainly a history of seismic activity in that area. The wave that barreled through Cádiz during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake has been estimated at more than sixty feet tall—comparable to the height of 2011’s devastating Fukushima tsunami. If Juan Villarias-Robles’s estimates about the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault are correct, the location Papamarinopoulos suggests would have gotten walloped.

“In Greek there is a word
cymatosyrmos
. It is a better word than the Japanese
tsunami
,” he said. “Because
tsunami
means simply a wave in the coast.
Cymatosyrmos
is a train with wagons. Imagine a train with wagons, rushing with some hundreds of kilometers per hour of velocity, one after the other. Those are the extraordinary floods that followed the extraordinary earthquakes. So whatever was there in the coast was in a day and night destroyed. That is the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis.”

Papamarinopoulos believed that Plato had given the name
Atlantis
to a place with three distinct elements: the giant
nesos
, the horseshoe-shaped plain that fit like a puzzle piece, and the concentric rings. He thought the rings had been located “in the southern part of the valley going out into the Atlantic Ocean”—before being buried by sediment.

The creation of these rings, Papamarinopoulos told me, was likely the product not of superhuman labor but of an earlier natural disaster. “There are three ways of interpreting this system of concentric circles,” he said. “First, a concentric volcano, like Santorini or Kilimanjaro.” I had just seen Santorini’s bull’s-eye-shaped circularity. Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, is a dormant volcano with a three-ringed crater at its peak.

Another prospect was an impact crater, a circular depression caused
by a high-velocity object from space—like a meteorite—crashing into a planet’s surface. The moon’s face is pocked with round impact craters, some large enough to be seen on a clear night with the naked eye. There are plenty of craters on Earth, too. They’re just a lot harder to spot because of the effects of erosion and the Earth’s gradually shifting crust. Meteor Crater in Arizona, three-quarters of a mile across and 550 feet deep, is only fifty thousand years old, young enough to have survived the ravages of time.

The third possibility was a geologic formation known as a mud volcano, caused by pressure from below the Earth’s surface. “Steam and methane escape sometimes and produce concentric circles,” Papamarinopoulos explained. Like most geologic concepts, this one is a little hard to convey with words, but I’d seen a photograph in one of the Atlantis essay collections of a possible mud volcano, the Richat Structure in Mauritania. For anyone interested in Atlantis, the image is jaw-dropping: a twenty-five-mile-wide set of naturally formed concentric rings that look like ripples from a stone tossed into God’s koi pond.

Depending on the local geology, Papamarinopoulos said, the creation of all three types of crater can result in the formation of black, red, and white rock, as well as hot and cold springs, just as Plato said existed in Atlantis. Several craters, some of them circular, have been located underwater in the Bay of Cádiz near the spot where Tartessos is believed to have vanished. (One of these craters is quite close to shore but seems thus far to have attracted less interest from geologists than from people interested in crater-causing extraterrestrials.) Whatever the type of crater, Papamarinopoulos said, it was something that the Atlanteans “found in nature and they added on it. They did some engineering or built monuments or whatever. It doesn’t take supertechnology to do these things. If you know how the Egyptians built giant things, you can see how other people could
do it. So the ancient Greek visitors in this area saw this thing and they interpret it as Poseidon’s work. Later writers presented it with different mythological variants.”

Papamarinopoulos wasn’t especially concerned with the Saïs priest’s claim that “the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together.” The territory of Atlantis’s empire could have included most of the western Mediterranean. Or he could have meant that Egypt was describing the size of the threat they felt on their borders. The next part of Plato’s text, however, had always confused me. Atlantis, he wrote,

was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbor, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

“Plato did not use the word
ocean
; he called it a
panpelagos
, an infinite sea,” Papamarinopoulos said. “When he goes into the hypothetical crossing of the
panpelagos
, then you have a continent.” Contrary to popular belief, Plato never uses the word
continent
to describe the vanished Atlantis. But he uses for the first and only time three adverbs to describe the boundless continent across the
panpelagos
:
totally
,
correctly
, and
truly
. “If you go west of Atlantis,” Papamarinopoulos said, “you find—totally, correctly, and truly—a gigantic land. And it is your country.”

I stopped scribbling in my notebook midsentence and looked up. “What? Plato was talking about America?”

“Absolutely. Plato says also that Atlantis had relationships with other islands, which could be any of the five meanings of
nesos
.
It is a very crude way of presenting the two Americas and Antarctica
together. Plato is the very first person who mentions the existence of this land. Other historians, the
real
historians, say nothing about this land.”

Had we shaken hands and said good-bye five minutes earlier, I’d have departed Patras convinced that I’d found the answer to the Atlantis mystery. We suddenly seemed to be veering into
Ancient Aliens
territory. “I suppose there are other sources besides Plato that talk about these crossings?”

“Wait! Let me finish, Mark! In Paris, I met a woman, Michelle Lescot-Layer, a member of the Musée de l’Histoire, who in the early 1980s had found minute pieces of nicotine in the mummy of Ramses II. Her results produced a world sensation! She got many enemies.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Later, I communicated with Svetlana Balabanova in Munich, who analyzed ancient mummies and found 30 percent had nicotine and cotinine and cocaine.” Cotinine is a by-product of the body metabolizing nicotine. “Balabanova also produced a world sensation and many enemies.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I would accept that
Nicotiana tabacum
could be found as a wild species in South Africa. I find it rather unlikely that the Egyptians knew it, brought it to Egypt, cultivated it, and used it in ceremonies. But it is a possibility. But there is
no
possibility to find cocaine anywhere else but in South America.”

It was true that Svetlana Balabanova had published such studies in the 1990s, but she had been pilloried by mainstream historians and archaeologists after doing so. Two decades later, attempts to repeat her experiment had been inconclusive. Balabanova stood behind her results and the argument had reached a stalemate. “Cocaine mummies” was a favorite topic of alternative history websites. Was it possible that the mummies had been contaminated? As for Lescot-Layer’s findings, skeptics had raised the possibility of nicotine-based
insecticides having been used in museums. Judging from my personal experience with Egyptians, heavy smoking was also not exactly unknown in the greater Cairo area. I floated this possibility.