Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (20 page)

“I cannot imagine they can do it deeply into the internal organs!” he said. “How much can you contaminate it?” Even if nicotine were ruled out, though, cocaine was still unexplained. Coca was definitely indigenous to South America. “This proves trade with America since at least the tenth century BC. Someone was going there in prehistoric times and knew where they were going. Repeatedly.”

As further evidence of ancient sea crossings, Papamarinopoulos cites several sixteenth-century maps that seem to show accurate depictions of the South American and Antarctic continents. Strangely, even though the sixteenth century was the greatest in history for worldwide exploration, the depictions of these continents became less accurate as the century progressed. To Papamarinopoulos, the reason was clear—an earlier civilization had mastered longitude long before its official discovery in 1773. It was a paradox of progress. The further cartographers moved away from their ancient maps and the destruction of Atlantis, the less precise their work became.

“You Don’t Buy It”

Patras, continued

P
apamarinopoulos seemed to sense that he was pushing the limits of my skepticism. He suggested a brief lunch recess. We took the mini elevator downstairs and walked a few blocks through the empty afternoon streets of downtown Patras. I asked if he had seen Richard Freund’s
Finding Atlantis
documentary, which leaned so heavily on Kühne’s original theory about Tartessos but didn’t mention any of Papamarinopoulos’s work. He hadn’t, though he had communicated with Freund during preproduction. “I sent him all the papers I did at the geological society. He told me, ‘It would take me two months to read all this.’”

Once we’d ordered lunch, I asked if there were parts of the Atlantis story that he hadn’t been able to explain. He nodded yes.

“Is it the elephants?” I asked.

The elephants were tricky. Some Atlantologists claimed Plato was referring to mammoths or dwarf elephants, fossils of which have been found on the islands of Cyprus, Sicily, and Malta. Tony O’Connell had shown me a theory that explained the presence of elephants in Malta as a transcription error. Someone had mistakenly written
elephas
,
Greek
for “elephant,”
rather than
elaphos
,
Greek for
“deer.” Except that Plato uses the elephants to illustrate the abundance of space in Atlantis, describing them as “the largest and most voracious of all” animals.

Papamarinopoulos wasn’t worried about the elephants. “The elephants exist in the zone of influence of Atlantis,” he said with a shrug, meaning that they were just across the Strait of Gibraltar in North Africa.

“No, I have two weak points,” he said. “The canals and the size of the valley. The size, maybe it’s a mistake with the numbers.” This referred to Plato’s incredible ten-thousand-stade perimeter. “The other thing which is a weak point for me—for the time being—is this.” He took my pen and drew a pattern of intersecting lines. “The checkerboard canals. We have not found this
yet
, but maybe in the future we can do it with satellite image processing. I can’t do everything. Now, I don’t want to make you crazy, but you can find this matrix in Guatemala and Bolivia.” He looked up and a half smile crept up the side of his mouth. “You don’t buy it.”

Of course I didn’t buy it. Why would an enormous navy make its way from the altiplano of landlocked Bolivia, which, the last time I visited anyway, was
two hundred miles from the nearest ocean and two miles above sea level
, sail down and around the notoriously difficult-to-navigate Cape Horn, cross the Atlantic Ocean, navigate into the Mediterranean, and engage Athens in a war? How would you feed the gigantic navy you’d need? A high-altitude Atlantis also failed to explain an island sinking below the waves and leaving behind muddy shoals. I asked Papamarinopoulos his opinion of a similar theory, that some concentric circles found in northwest Louisiana indicated that the Atlanteans had traveled up the Mississippi River.

“Do you know what the person who says this says the motivation was?” he asked.

“Let me guess. Copper?” This was typically the second part of the
Atlantis-meets-the-Mississippi theory; the supposed terminus of the journey was Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior, famous for its high-quality copper deposits. Millions of pounds of the metal seem to have been removed thousands of years ago, which no one has been able to account for. The natives of the Great Lakes region didn’t use copper. Where unexplained phenomena met the search for Atlantis, wild hypotheses were sure to follow. This one could be traced all the way back to Ignatius Donnelly.

“Yes, copper!”

“But isn’t the island of Cyprus basically one huge chunk of copper? Doesn’t the name Cyprus
mean
‘copper’? Wasn’t Cyprus about ten thousand times easier to reach from the Mediterranean than Lake Superior would have been?”

“Yes, but this is the purest deposit of copper in the world. And the Indians did not use it.” Another half smile. “You don’t buy it.”

Nope. I still didn’t buy it. “Where does that leave the nine thousand years?”

“Ah, now we come to the date! Serious
experts
”—he spat out the word—“take for granted the nine thousand years. They try to ridicule Plato, but they ridicule themselves! Solon talked only to the priests of Saïs. We know from the ancient Greek literature and from Egyptology that the priests used lunar calendars. So you take a solar year and divide it by 12.37, the number of full moons.” If one does so, as Werner Wickboldt had demonstrated in Braunschweig, the date of the Atlantis disaster catapults forward from 9600 BC to around 1200 BC.

The revised date would not only yank Atlantis out of the murky, post–Ice Age era, but also conveniently place its end roughly alongside the destruction of Mycenaean Athens and the start of the Greek Dark Ages, as evidenced by the earthquake findings at the Acropolis: the time when cities and towns throughout Greece were abandoned
and writing in Linear B ceased. In fact, Papamarinopoulos noted, “We have three collapses occurring—Atlantis, Athens, and Troy. Not in the same month, but in the same century.”

The period around 1200 BC was one of sudden, and still unexplained, upheaval in the Mediterranean. The two great empires that had dominated the region, the Egyptians and the Hittites of Asia Minor, suffered vicious attacks. Egypt seems to have barely survived, while the Hittites vanished altogether. A letter survives from the king of Ugarit, an important port city in Syria, pleading with his trading partners in Cyprus to send aid to fight the mysterious sea raiders who have attacked his city. “The enemy ships are already here, they have set fire to my towns and have done great damage in the country,” he wrote. Ugarit, too, was burned to the ground.

“Do you really think Solon got the story from the priest, undiluted?” I asked.

“I like this question of yours, saying do you trust only one priest?” Papamarinopoulos said, tapping a finger on the table. He summoned the waiter and ordered coffees. By this point in my odyssey I was mixing caffeine and strange conversations with the regularity of a Stieg Larsson character. “No, I trust the priests because they were the antiquarians of Egypt. And I trust Plato, who possibly deduced something from stories he heard from the Greek mariners in Syracuse” during his visits with Dionysius I and II. In one of his papers, Papamarinopoulos cites a fragment from Hesiod, written before Solon’s time, that describes a sea route from Gadeira to Taras in southern Italy to Ionia in Asia Minor. Stories from beyond Gibraltar would surely have traveled east toward Greece. It’s possible that Plato or Solon or both would have been familiar with these tales. As for the incredible numbers in Plato’s story, Papamarinopoulos argued that they were the opposite of a mistake.

“You’re dealing with a person who is a genius, Mark! A genius works in a way that we cannot understand. The large numbers of
occupants in Atlantis, the large number of soldiers, the gigantic fleets, and all this. Plato, because he was a naughty boy, added mathematical exaggerations for his own purposes to this real story. Here, I will explain.” He motioned for my pen again and began drawing on a paper napkin. He handed the napkin back to me and said, “I want you to keep this as a memento.”

The picture he had drawn (and signed, and dated) was of three concentric circles, but not those of Atlantis. It was a graph that looked like an avocado cut widthwise. The innermost circle (the avocado pit) was the nucleus of a historical event. This was the
logos
. “It is like a signal, but it has a cloud of noise around it,” he said. In order to get to the historic truth at the center of the story, one had to filter out the fantastic elements in the middle ring (the avocado’s flesh). Papamarinopoulos called these fabrications the paramyths. The outermost, third ring (the rind) was composed of mathematical and musicological information invented by Plato.

“Plato likes you to dig, to search to find the mathematical theory,” he said. He circled the outermost ring with the pen. “The thin black sector here is truth, but not historically, only mathematically. He tells you to try and play with the numbers. He invites you to decode it. And if you decode it, you will find something useless for historians and archaeologists but useful for mathematicians. He was obsessed with music. And with mathematics. Remember, the Greek language—the alphabetic Greek language—was used by an intelligent person three times. Written script, numbers, musical notes.”

Incredibly, this seemed to be possible. A British philosophy professor had recently published a theory, quickly dubbed “The Plato Code” by the media, which claimed to have identified a twelve-note Pythagorean musical scale hidden in some of Plato’s most famous works. The discovery, he told
The Guardian
, “unlocks the gate to the labyrinth of symbolic messages in Plato.”

“So if I want to communicate with you in music,” Papamarinopoulos said, “I would use the same symbols, and I will send you a poem with music. Or I will encrypt a mathematical formula through the same symbols. Or I will send a report from my work in Egypt as a script. So you have a language which could be used three ways.”

The check arrived. I sat in stunned silence.

“You have questions on this?” Papamarinopoulos asked.

“I can’t say I understand it entirely,” I said. So he was saying not only were the enormous numbers exaggerations, but they also hinted at a secret code buried in the Atlantis story, which also happens to cryptically mention ancient sea crossings to America? Oh, and the Atlantis story was more or less true? One afternoon in Patras and I had enough material for my own BBC miniseries.

“One day is not enough to talk about this, Mark. I have lived with this for forty years! Atlantis might look like a tale for a child, but it isn’t. Because it has layers with philosophical meanings, with mathematical meanings, musicology, even morality. But we take all that out and what we have left is the germ of the story.”

Church bells rang six o’clock. We had been talking since noon. We stopped to get a beer at a noisy bar filled with college students celebrating their triumphant day on strike. I was jittery and mentally exhausted, and Papamarinopoulos looked wiped out, too. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes as we talked. I remembered the one question I’d forgotten to ask. Why are so many people interested in finding Atlantis?

He opened his eyes and turned to me.

“Because their minds are fired with a continuous fever,” he said. “They get possessed by this.”

The Power of Myth

New York, New York

I
suppose at this point it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when I telephoned one of the world’s leading experts on myth, hoping to get a little more clarity on Papamarinopoulos’s three-ring logos/paramyth/naughty-boy-secret-mathematical-code diagram, we wound up talking about vampires. This was actually a good thing. Elizabeth Wayland Barber is an emerita professor of linguistics and archaeology at Occidental College and author of several books, including
When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth
, which she cowrote with her husband, Paul Barber. She was also a world-renowned expert on everything from prehistoric textiles to folk dancing and had once written a book with footnotes in twenty-six languages. After five minutes on the phone, I could tell she’d be delightful company on a long car trip. When I asked her if fellow archaeologists were a little reluctant to dip into mythology, she snorted and said, “A
little
bit? Uh, yeah.”

It was Barber who had raised the subject of vampires, as a way to illustrate how myths are created. “The human brain demands explanations,” she told me. “For my husband’s first book he looked at all
the original vampire descriptions from the archives of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” which existed from 1867 to 1918. “They would have an outbreak of vampires in some remote Transylvanian village. People don’t like their neighbors digging up their relatives’ corpses, so the central administration would send out a doctor to keep an eye on things and report back on what he saw.” The doctors looked at the recently deceased and saw bodies showing early signs of decomposition. The peasants looked at those same corpses and saw engorged bodies with blood dripping around the mouth. When stakes were driven through the hearts of some of these suspected vampires, they groaned and bled.

“Bodies bloat” from gases that form during decomposition, Barber explained. “After rigor mortis, the blood liquefies again after some period of time and is forced out through any available cavities,” such as the mouth. A stake plunged into a bloated corpse’s chest can expel air past the voice box, causing the dead man to groan audibly. “So the peasants observed things quite accurately,” she said. “But their
explanation
of what happened was completely off the mark.” To get to the original kernel (or avocado pit) of truth, Barber subjects myths to something that she calls the Stripping Procedure: “In order to understand the true original events, we have to see clearly what the events are. In order to do that, we must strip the explanations from the story.” Good-bye, Poseidon.

In the time before recorded history, Barber explains in
When They Severed
, the only way to transmit important information was through myth. Now that writing is the norm, “we have forgotten how nonliterate people stored and transmitted information and why it was done that way,” she writes. “We have lost track of how to decode the information often densely compressed into these stories, and they appear to us as mostly gibberish.” Humans are susceptible to what the Barbers call the Memory Crunch: Our brains have only so much storage capacity. “You’re working in a very constricted
channel when you’re having to remember information,” she told me. “The great advantage of writing is you can put it down and have it later; you don’t have to remember it.”

Yet the Barbers found multiple instances where information has been passed down orally and faithfully for up to thousands of years as long as three criteria are met. The information must be considered important enough to merit preservation, such as the massive volcanic explosion that formed Crater Lake in Oregon circa 5700 BC—a story that was still being passed down by the local Klamath Indians into the nineteenth century as the tale of an unpleasant visit from the Chief of the Below World. Second, the information must relate to something still visible to those who hear the myth (again, Crater Lake, which the Klamath had been taught to avoid so as not to incite the powerful subterranean deity). And third, the myth must be memorable; it has to be a good story. If the first two standards were uncertain in relation to Plato’s Atlantis tale—we don’t know if Plato was passing along ancient information—the third was an obvious match. The Atlantis story was certainly memorable.

Barber believes that the Thera explosion, which volcanologists have estimated to have been more than double the size of the Crater Lake blast, was large enough to have inspired myths in several ancient Mediterranean cultures. The myth of the flood that Poseidon sends against Attica is one possible result of the blast. “Poseidon is really the god of the great unchained forces of nature, whereas Athena is the goddess of what human beings can do to combat that: with
techne
,
know-how. When Athena wins the contest for ownership of Athens, Poseidon is a bad loser and he sends a tidal wave that comes up all the way to the foot of the Acropolis.” Once the supernatural battle-of-the-gods explanation is stripped away, what remains sounds like an account of an ancient tsunami. “There’s only one wave that could have been that big,” she said. Thera.

“We know from the geologists that the wind was blowing
southeast that day. That’s very nice for Western civilization, because had it been blowing to the northwest, it would have wiped out the Greeks. As it was, they had a ringside seat of watching Thera explode. Hesiod talks about how the sea was so hot it boiled and the sound was so loud it was as though the sky had fallen and was hitting upon earth.”

In Hesiod’s
Theogony
(the name means “Birth of the Gods”),
written about a hundred years before Solon, he tells the story of the epic battle between the gods and the giants. The Barbers cite fascinating research by the geology historian Mott Greene at the University of Puget Sound, who is a pioneer in the relatively new field of geomythology, which seeks out the geological phenomena, especially natural catastrophes, that have found their way into folklore. “Mott Greene was looking at Hesiod and the other Greek myths and saying, you know, each volcano erupts in its own way,” Barber told me. “It has its own signature type of eruption, as a result of the kind of magma and the temperatures underneath it. So Thera has its style, Etna has its style, Stromboli has its style, and so forth.” Greene noted a sequence of fifteen events in Hesiod that, based on a close examination of Thera’s geology, closely parallel the Thera eruption. The early trembling of Mount Olympus corresponds with powerful earthquakes at Thera. Missiles screeching through the air correspond to the discharge of “pyroclastic ejecta,” such as lava and volcanic rocks. Zeus’s arrival hurling thunderbolts that scorch the earth corresponds with Thera’s volcanic lightning.

The Egyptians, being farther away from the blast than the mainland Greeks, would have had a different perspective. Like the Greek seismologist Galanopoulos, Barber believes that the stories from Exodus—whether they took place at the same time as the Thera blast or were combined with other stories from various centuries—match up with the volcanic explosion. Darkness falls over Egypt for three days (possibly the result of ash in the atmosphere obscuring the sun),
and the Lord sends a pillar of cloud by day followed by a pillar of fire at night, which echoes the appearance of an eruption at different times of day. The Hittites in Asia Minor had a myth of a giant who emerged from the sea to grow thousands of miles tall. He was vanquished only when scythed off at the base—a detail that mirrors the detachment of an ash pillar from its volcano once an eruption ceases.

Barber believes that Solon was the first Greek to take written notes “to stockpile information regularly for his own use.” If he wrote down the story of an island that sank beneath the waves that had been told to him by an Egyptian priest, one of his descendants could very well have come across his musings decades later. After using her Stripping Procedure, we come away with an original source that is identical to Marinatos’s theory: The Egyptians witnessed the natural destruction of the Thera eruption, followed by a disruption in their trade with Crete. The story of a rich, vanished island kingdom is passed along to Solon by the priests at Saïs.

I asked Barber, a student of ancient Greek, if she thought Plato had believed the story was true.

“Plato really treats it as though he believed that he had read this in his family archives and that he believed that Solon had indeed written it down from the Egyptian. I think Plato had a lot of respect for the written word, and if he found this in the family archives, I can just imagine the look on his face the day he found the thing. Like, ‘Oh my God, look at this. This. Is. Amazing.’ And that there were probably some hiccups in it, but that basically it was telling him something about the early world that had happened.”

“Maybe it’s a conflation of Thera and what Plato heard about Tartessos,” I said.

“Or that the Egyptian priest had conflated. There are so many sources of possible hiccups in here. We just need to find a suitable inscription in Egypt, or a papyrus!”

The idea that such things might one day be found was not
impossible. While the great temples and statues that Herodotus described seeing in Saïs have long since disappeared—carted away by looters and builders—a British team has been excavating the old city with some success. An ancient garbage dump from the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus has yielded important papyrus fragments of Greek classics, such as the
Republic
, as well as previously unknown works.

“There are a couple points where Critias says, ‘I know this is going to sound crazy, but this is what I heard . . . ,’” I said.

“Right right right right! And so Plato was taking it with a little grain of salt but basically thought that he had a valuable document there which told him some real, true things about the early world, even if he couldn’t quite see all the details.”

“So what would the purpose of Plato telling the story be? Assume it’s from Solon. Why, and telling it to whom?”

“And he tells it at least twice. This presumably was something Plato was using to teach at the Academy. And calling on the things of greatest antiquity that he had within his grasp to make his point.” According to another of Barber’s key tenets, what she calls the Silence Principle, that audience would not have required an explanation of the sorts of details in the Atlantis story that befuddle us today. Such omissions lead to what she calls the Lethe Effect: “What is never said may eventually be forgotten entirely.”

Did she have any recommendations on where I might go from here?

“Follow the details!” she shouted. “The devil’s in the details!”