The Lost Empire of Atlantis Read online

  Timing is difficult to establish, for certain, and it involves a degree of analysis of the complex knots of peoples, races and historical figures who have passed through this ancient land. The Hyksos probably arrived in the late 12th Dynasty (Middle Kingdom) period. They may have come originally as shipbuilders, sailors, soldiers and craftsmen. It’s not difficult to imagine Avaris as the Dubai of its day, with a vast building workforce drafted in from overseas. The pharaohs settled them here deliberately in the late 12th Dynasty, to create a harbour town and perhaps even build the ships. But at a later time of political weakness the workmen established their own small but independent kingdom and had to be swatted back. Hyksos artefacts have been found in the Knossos labyrinth.14

  Thutmose III, also known as Thuthmosis, was the warlike stepson of the bearded lady ruler Hatshepsut. He created the biggest empire Egypt had ever seen, an empire that ran from Nubia to Syria. At Luxor, on the heavily decorated walls of the tomb of Thutmose’s valued vizier, Rekhmire, is a famous fresco. It shows a procession of men whose looks and dress are definitely Minoan (see first colour plate section). They come, as they say, bearing gifts. The painting is surmounted by a line of hieroglyphs. The translation reads: ‘The coming in peace by Keftiou chiefs and the chiefs of the islands of the sea, humbly, bowing their heads down because of His Majesty’s might, the king Thuthmosis III.’15

  Whatever this city’s name was – through time it has been Avaris, Piramesse or Peru-nefer – it was certainly a major port, bustling over the summer trading season and humming with the activity of many ships. And as I was about to find out, the Minoans, or Keftiu, were here in force.

  Avaris/Peru-nefer became a crucial military stronghold. The city was the starting point for the overland route to Canaan, the famous ‘Horus Road’. Known in the Bible as the ‘Way of the Philistines’ (Exodus 13:17), the road was used for military expeditions as well as for commercial traffic. The site appears to have been abandoned for a time, after the Hyksos were driven out. However, by the end of the 18th Dynasty, when the Egyptians were back in control, Avaris boasted three large palaces ringed by an enclosure wall. The whole complex was about 5.5 hectares (13 acres) in size. At least two of the palaces excavated here, Palace F and Palace G, held some truly extraordinary finds.

  When the Austrian archaeologist Professor Manfred Bietak first worked here in the 1960s, he was amazed to come across thousands of fragments of exotic wall paintings. They did not look remotely Egyptian. As he pieced them together, a somehow familiar work of art gradually unfolded before his eyes. It had a beautiful blue background. As he worked he realised that there were some human figures: one was jumping. He was leaping over a bull. The archaeologist was astounded. He had definitely seen that image before. But where?

  In fact Bietak’s boy – seen jumping over bulls on a blue background – was exactly the same image as that on a fresco unearthed by Arthur Evans, almost a century before. At Knossos. The electrifying discovery that Minoan artists had worked at foreign courts has had the art and museum worlds transfixed ever since. And now me.

  A number of different scenes showing bull hunts and acrobatics were discovered here, painted on the hard lime plaster favoured by the Minoans of Crete, rather than Thera. Some of them are set against a maze pattern. Hunting scenes, life-size male figures with staffs and heraldic griffins have been pieced together from the tiny fragments of plaster scattered across the site. The griffin is a typically Minoan motif and the Avaris griffins were as large as the ones painted at Knossos. There is also an intriguing painted figure of a woman, shown in a flowing white skirt similar to those of the priestesses of Knossos. Although it is impossible to establish with absolute certainty whether the patrons and the painters were from Crete, this is what the experts now believe. It looks strongly as if this was a Minoan trading outpost, a wing of the widespread empire I now suspected existed.

  If we think about today’s modern, multi-billion international trade in art, the thought prompts images of high fashion, of status, of rich people striving to create an ultra-sophisticated world that will impress those around them. The Minoans’ great artistic skills would have been in great demand, because they were of the highest order and were very rare in the Bronze Age world. Yet the colourful frescoes of Avaris are unlikely to have just been items of fashionable interior decor. On Crete, artists’ use of the bull-leaping scenes and the half-rosette symbols were tightly controlled. Many of the Tell el Dab’a scenes show motifs which the experts believe are specifically royal: they may also have had spiritual significance. The images were restricted to formal buildings, particularly at Knossos, indicating the city’s power. This outpost, therefore, must have had the same command and control-type role.

  It’s more than possible that a political encounter on the highest level took place between the courts of Knossos and Egypt.

  In Harold Evans’ rather old-fashioned, Edwardian take on the world, the throne room at Knossos was created for the male ruler, Minos. Now, after nearly a century of new finds and new palace digs, archaeologists think that the throne was made not for a king but for a queen. The Minoans’ gods were female. As in Egypt, the ruler was the gods’ representative on earth. At Knossos, that queen sat on her throne between two seated griffins – an allusion to her role as the Great Goddess, Mistress of Animals. Those griffins are exactly like the pair uncovered at Avaris, in Palace F.

  Could it be that the Minoan presence in Egypt was formalised in the time-honoured way, by marriage? Having this base would mean that the Minoans could not only trade en route, but provision themselves for a long voyage. They could load their ships with dates, fresh vegetables and salt fish for expeditions to the East.

  Digs at the surrounding settlement, dated by pottery and scarabs, place the palaces in the late reign of Thutmose III and that of his son, Amenhotep II. This fits in with the scenes on Thutmose’s vizier’s tomb. It all made perfect sense. A formalised pact with the Minoans would have provided a pathway for Egyptian traders to the southern Greek mainland and Greater Anatolia. It would also have given the Egyptians what we would now call in our modern-day terminology ‘knowledge transfer’ – access to the Minoans’ tremendous seafaring and shipbuilding abilities.

  Perhaps there was more besides. I’d arrived armed with the knowledge that the art world, at least, was convinced that even before the birth of Christ the art market was fully international. Gradually, I was forming a picture of the Minoans as trendsetters as well as globetrotters: the Damien Hirsts of their time, skilled practitioners who possessed ingenuity beyond price. After all, at Thera they had painted graceful and lifelike scenes of monkeys, antelope and lions: paintings so accurate that they had to have been copied from life. Minoan artists were not just skilled. They were celebrated.

  So in a sense it was no surprise for me later to find that their work appears on ancient palace walls not just here in Egypt but in a huge, south-sweeping arc through the eastern Mediterranean – at Mari in modern-day Syria, at Ebla about 34 miles (55 kilometres) away, at the ancient royal town of Qatna, which is currently being excavated by a German/Syrian alliance, at Alalakh in southern Turkey and at Tel Kabri in Israel. The ancient city-state of Alalakh is near Lake Antioch, in the Orontes River valley. Sir Leonard Woolley, who led the excavations in the 1930s and 1940s, uncovered royal palaces, temples, houses and town ramparts here. The discovery of what we would now interpret as Minoan frescoes came slightly later. At that time, archaeologists hadn’t built up an understanding of the Minoans’ cosmopolitan adventures, or of the no doubt complex relationship of Crete with Anatolia. The discovery of the frescoes came more or less out of the blue and threw the art world into consternation. The revelation caused archaeologists to speculate that Crete’s magnificent murals were in fact Asian. Woolley argued that:

  There can be no doubt but that Crete owes the best of . . . its frescoes to the Asiatic mainland. We are bound to believe that trained experts, members of the . . . Painters’ Guilds were invited to trav
el overseas from Asia, to . . . decorate the palaces of the Cretan rulers.16

  Yet the evidence that these were Minoan artists of great skill, exporting their talents in an arc reaching all the way to Babylon, has mounted inexorably with each new dig in the region. The excavators of Tel Kabri discovered fragments of a fresco that looked almost exactly like a reproduction of the beautiful miniature fresco in the West House on Thera.17

  Written archives found at the ancient Sumerian city of Mari show that King Zimri-Lim, who lived between 1775 and 1761 BC, prized his Minoan pieces so highly that he gave them as prestige gifts to other rulers. The poetry of Ugarit, an important city of the time that is today known as Ras Shamra, suggests that the Minoans didn’t just decorate foreign palace walls. They were architects of international renown, who built their clients’ buildings too.

  Before I’d left for Egypt, the Metropolitan Museum of New York had mounted an exhibition named ‘Beyond Babylon’. The fascinating catalogue was written by a series of specialists, their expertise drawn together specially for the exhibition.18

  The experts believe that the discoveries at Tell el Dab’a testify to an Egyptian special relationship with Crete. As Joan Aruz wrote in the catalogue:

  The stunning discoveries of unquestionably Aegean-looking frescos around the Mediterranean littoral have dramatically enhanced our picture of cultural exchange during the 2nd millennium BC ... the presence of Minoan artists at foreign courts has transformed our view of cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean world.

  ‘Beyond Babylon’ also cites ‘Papyrus BM 10056’, a document in the British Museum that mentions Cretan ships being docked in an Egyptian harbour. The document refers to a place named ‘Perunefer’. The palace complex at Avaris/Peru-nefer had evidently had quite a history: Tell el Dab’a may well at one point have been home to the biblical figure Moses, as well as being the summer residence of the pharaohs. In short, prior to the Exodus of around 1446 BC,it was one of the most exciting places in the world; a totally cosmopolitan melting pot and a meeting place for world leaders. David O’Connor, Professor of Egyptian art and archaeology at New York University, wrote the following in the catalogue:

  The usual interpretation is that these ships, which are mentioned only during the reign of Thutmose III, were of Cretan type, or were sailing to Crete. However, it would be more logical to assume that Minoan ships were actually moored, and were repaired at Perunefer. If one can identify Tell el-Dab’a, with its palatial Minoan wall paintings as Perunefer, then it is conceivable that Egypt fostered its special connections with the Minoan Thalassocracy in order to build up its navy for military enterprises in the Near East.

  If Palace F was indeed a Minoan political base placed right within the beating heart of Pharaonic Egypt, the most powerful nation on earth, my case for a Minoan super-trading empire – beginning with this truly special strategic relationship – was getting stronger all the time. Avaris, with its repair facilities, food and water, in effect provided an ideal forward base for onward voyages. So – exactly how far across the world did the Minoans get?

  CHAPTER 12

  A SHIP IN THE DESERT

  My friends’ flight home was in a few days: I was due to go on to Mari. In the meantime, while I was still in Egypt I got a call from Marcella, already dutifully back at her work desk in London.

  By a stroke of luck, she had come across a report in USA Today that shed more light on my quest. It was a piece by Dan Vergano, the magazine’s science reporter, about a new discovery in the desert. She read the report out to me:

  Archaeologists generally downplay the Indiana Jones side of their discipline, full of derring-do and unexpected discoveries. But every once in a while, an amazing find surprises even the most experienced researchers . . . That’s just what happened when Boston University’s Kathryn Bard reached into a hole in the sand at the edge of the Egyptian desert . . . Her research team of Italians and Americans now knows those caves hold the most ancient ship stores ever discovered; perfectly preserved timbers, ropes and other fittings perhaps 4,000 years old.19

  Braving high temperatures and the poisonous vipers that are rife in the desert, in December 2005 Bard had found a hidden chamber in an area named Wadi Gawasis, along the Red Sea coast. Exploring the back of a cave, Bard’s fingers had met with thin air; making the team realise that there was a hidden chamber of some kind, waiting to be found. Later, her Italian colleague Chiara Zazzaro cleared some fallen rock – and exposed the back of a second cave. The cave had been expressly cut, by hand, from the rock. Here, on this dried-up ancient watercourse, the team had found a hidden, secret shipyard.

  Indiana Jones associations aside, this was genuinely an extraordinary moment. Finding an industrial site, one that tells us where everyday Egyptians worked, rather than a carefully preserved ceremonial one, is unusual enough. But finding a site like this, with many working materials still intact and untouched after perhaps 4,000 years, is absolutely unprecedented in Egypt. The amazed team opened up cave after cave and found ancient coils of rope, ship parts, jugs, trenchers and everyday linens; all deeply practical items which drew a lively real-life picture of Egypt’s ancient seafaring past. To date, the team have uncovered a complex of eight caves, a network of rooms filled with relics over 4,000 years old that proved that the Egyptians had mastered advanced ship technology. In the complex were dozens of nautical artefacts: limestone anchors, eighty coils of knotted rope, ship timbers and two curved cedar planks that seemed to be the steering oars from a 21-metre-long (70 feet) ship.

  Bard and her colleagues now believe, from studying satellite images at the Wadi, that there may be another ancient structure needing investigation, in the form of a slipway or dock below what was the Pharaonic harbour.

  When they created this harbour, the Egyptians were almost certainly aiming to exploit the wealth of the famous Land of Punt. The actual location of this fabled place is a mystery, although Bard thinks it may have been in today’s Sudan. The pharaohs were organised, methodical and they thought for the long term. Although such expeditions were probably a rarity, they must have been occasions of great prestige. Sometimes Punt is referred to in Egyptian records as Ta netjer, the ‘land of the gods’: they must have prized it highly. All we really know is that the mysterious Land of Punt, or Pwnt, was fabled for its prized luxury goods such as wild animals, perfumes, African blackwood, ebony, ivory, slaves and gold. It may have been in today’s Somalia or around the hook of Africa in Ethiopia: but wherever it was, it was an entry point to the tremendous and exotic natural wealth of wider Africa.

  We know that the most famous ancient Egyptian expedition that sailed to Punt was made personally by the remarkable Egyptian queen, Hatshepsut. She is not the only female ruler in Egypt’s illustrious past, but she was certainly the only one regularly depicted wearing a beard. Hatshepsut built a Red Sea fleet to bring mortuary goods back to Karnak in exchange for Nubian gold. Details of her five-ship voyage to Punt are narrated on reliefs adorning her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, mentioned in chapter10. A voyage of this kind would have been a huge logistical undertaking, requiring scribes, quartermasters, pack animals, workmen and shipwrights, as well as sailors. This may have been the preparation point for one leg of her journey. Still, the new Wadi Gawasis find shows that enterprising Hatshepsut was by no means the first Egyptian ruler to target the riches of the land of the gods.

  The archaeologists suspect that the port at Wadi Gawasis was used by the Egyptians for centuries; perhaps from as early as the time of the Old Kingdom (2686 –2125 BC) and lasting until around 1500 BC. They discovered limestone stelae in niches bordering one of the cave entrances. Many were indecipherable, but one clear-asday inscription mentioned at least two early expeditions, one to Punt and one to Bia-Punt. They were commissioned by Amenemhat III (12th Dynasty), who reigned about 1860–1814 BC. The expedition was led by two brothers, one named Nebsu and the other Amenhotep. Another inscription found there romantically describes the sea the brother
s set out to conquer as ‘The Great Green’.

  The craft appear to have been up to 21 metres (70 feet) long, powered by rowers and sail. The cedar timbers used to build the ships were, as you would expect, cut and aged in Lebanon, then shipped to Egypt. It looks likely that they were built into boats on the Nile, at a port site near modern Qift, then disassembled and trekked on donkeys across the desert for ten days and reassembled at Wadi Gawasis, which was then the site of a lagoon, long since silted up. Now the Institute of Maritime Research and Discovery is supporting the visit of several nautical specialists to the Mersa/Wadi Gawasis expedition.

  It must have been an extraordinary moment when the archaeologists opened up this mysterious cave to find rope neatly coiled and knotted, stored exactly as some meticulous sailor left it, over 3,800 years ago. The team found forty large empty wooden boxes in the storage rooms – these were cargo boxes waiting to be packed up with exotic wares. Two of them were labelled with a painted inscription, like an advertising slogan. It read: ‘The Wonders of Punt’.

  CHAPTER 13

  NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

  So: it was extraordinary to think of it, but I now had proof positive. Far from the Bronze Age being a dark and obscure time, with little going on except hunting, trapping and some farming, I had discovered an international jet-setting scene; a glittering art world and a sophisticated world market for metals and luxury goods. Avaris had been a revelation to me. The convention of history was wrong: the Egyptians had definitely ventured off their own shores, voyaging on ships that their honoured Cretan guests might have captained or crewed, like a modern lease. The Minoans and their sailing skills were so highly regarded by the Egyptians that they had been given special dispensation to set up an outpost there. With their skills in art, design and metallurgy, the glamorous ‘Keftiu’ sat at the very centre of this cosmopolitan world.