The Lost Empire of Atlantis Read online

  I began my own Odyssey more than twenty years ago. It started with the discovery of a little-known Venetian map. Zuane Pizzigano’s carefully drawn 15th-century chart showed both Europe and the supposedly undiscovered islands of Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. Medieval history had become a consuming interest for me and that chance find eventually led me to believe that the history of the world – specifically the history of mankind’s navigation of its seas – would have to be radically rewritten. Pizzigano’s map was drawn in 1421 – and that’s what I called my first book.

  I found that the Portuguese who had embarked on Europe’s restless voyages of discovery, uncovering the partly cloaked face of the globe, were themselves relying on much older maps. This begged an obvious enough question: who drew them? The trail of evidence led me to the other side of the world, to a people we have long admired for their ingenuity and wisdom. There was only one nation at the time, I realised, which had the material resources and, most crucially, the ships to embark on an adventure of such ambition: China. The Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, I argued. They had discovered America – and had reached Australia 350 years before Britain’s Captain Cook. To a former sea captain, Pizzigano’s extraordinary chart held a hidden message, like a codex waiting to be uncovered. Although it was pure luck that I had found it at all, that first clue led me all over Europe and then beyond, to Asia, on a true voyage of discovery.

  Here I was again, this time in Crete, fascinated by a civilisation that appeared to have such depth, that must have been so important to the world, and yet was so little understood. In comparison to the impressive body of knowledge the world has accumulated about the lives of the ancient Egyptians, it seemed almost as if there was a giant conspiracy to keep the exotic, vibrant Minoan culture secret. On one level, I had already vaguely known about the remarkable archaeology of Crete. The brightness and brilliance of the culture that had produced it – of that I had simply no idea. The fact was that these fun-loving ancients – who lived so well, who went diving with porpoises and whose athletic young men leapt over bulls’ backs – had also made some of the finest jewellery ever seen. And they had painted frescoes to rival the best the European Renaissance was to offer. All of this had completely escaped me. As if to rub in the irony of this yawning gap in my knowledge, I was not entirely new to Crete.

  When I joined the Navy in the 1950s, Great Britain was still a world power. So in my early life as a sailor I had travelled with great fleets to sea bases all over the world – from the Americas to Australasia and China. In 1958, as a junior watch-keeping officer, I was on gun patrol around Crete’s neighbour island of Cyprus; our mission was to prevent weapons being smuggled in by terrorists. The EOKA Greek Cypriot nationalists were fighting against British rule, and we were kept remorselessly busy. When HMS Diamond was given a week’s leave on nearby Crete we anchored in Souda Bay and paid our respects to the fallen, at the magnificent Second World War memorial.

  Crete, placed strategically between Europe, Africa and Asia, is a rectangular island that measures 155 miles (or 250 kilometres) from east to west and between 7 and 37 miles north to south. During the Second World War HMS Orion, a cruiser which my father later commanded, lost hundreds of men here to attacks from German fighter bombers. The island is a strategic prize and has been fought over for thousands of years. First of all the Mycenaeans, a people from what is now the Greek mainland, seem to have displaced the Minoans. Then the Greeks battled the Romans; the Byzantines fought the Venetians; the Venetians gave way to the Ottomans; and the Ottomans were ejected by the Cretans. Finally, the Germans and the Allies each fought desperately for Crete, both sides acting with exemplary courage and barbaric ferocity. Even today there is a NATO port and a joint Greek/US airbase at Souda Bay.

  We marched up a disused railway track, which in spring was a carpet of glorious wild flowers. After the incessant rain of Cyprus the countryside made a vivid impression on us: the island’s fertile plains are warmed by Mediterranean sunshine for nine months a year. That night fifty years ago a local farmer allowed us to camp in his field. He provided a lamb and a barrel of local Cretan wine; we built a fire and had a traditional sailor’s sing-song. Cook Mifsud played the hurdy-gurdy; Chief Steward Vassalo recited poetry. Later, the farmer’s charming daughter, Maria, took me on a walk. She wanted to show me a ruined stone city, which she said was close by. ‘It is very old,’ she told me. ‘More than 2,000 years old – the other way in time.’

  What she meant was that the site dated from 2,000 years before Christ.

  That seemed extraordinary to me. I dimly remembered from my schoolboy studies that the heyday of ancient Greece had been some 1,500 years later than that, at around 500 BC. Much later on in life I worked out that Maria and I must have walked to Archanes, a village which may have been the summer retreat for those Minoans who lived sumptuously at Knossos. But as the next two months were a whirl of anchoring off remote islands, swimming with the local girls and absorbing as much of the local culture and the dópio krasi, or local Marisini wine, as we could find, I had soon forgotten about an abstract-sounding series of ancient dates.

  Now here I was again, with our oak-coloured local guide insisting, as Maria had before him, that the civilisation behind his tiny island had been as important to the world as that of the Egyptians. What if they were both right?

  It was a local businessman and amateur archaeologist, Minos Kalokairinos, a namesake of the fabled King Minos, who discovered the first and most famous of the ancient palaces of Crete – Knossos – in 1878. Kalokairinos initially uncovered a large storeyard containing pithoi – huge, almost man-height vessels used to store olive oil. At a time when archaeology was in its infancy, Kalokairinos had brought up find after find, wonders that had been buried for centuries in the dark earth. Unfortunately for him, some local landowners stepped in and stopped his work. When the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy and Mycenae, attempted to purchase the ‘Kefala hill’ he was put off by what he thought was an exorbitant price. Then in 1894 the pioneering British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans heard about what was happening and applied for a licence, investing profits from his family’s paper mill to win the right to excavate. The ruins Evans extracted from Crete’s baked earth were those of a palace whose magnificence could scarcely be imagined.

  Discoveries of other ancient palaces, towns and ports would follow that of Knossos over the course of the next century. Evans seemed to have uncovered an entire ancient civilisation; an entrancing race with an advanced and exotic culture. He dubbed them ‘the Minoans’. Why had he opted for that name? Like others before him, Evans was seduced by the power of Greek myth.

  Before 1900, when Evans began to uncover the spectacular palace, our only real knowledge of this ancient civilisation came from the extraordinary substratum of myth that surrounds the island, as well as the awed references to it by classical poets. By ancient Cretan tradition, the peak of Mount Juktas, which dominates the skyline looking south from Knossos, is said to hold the imprint of the upturned face of the mighty Zeus. It is as if he is buried there and supports the island with his slumbering body. Famously, the mythical home of the controlling ruler, King Minos, contained a vast underground labyrinth. The formidable Minos had been the patron of the great inventor, Daedalus – and, more alarmingly, according to legend, was the tyrant who exacted human tribute from the Athenian mainland. Within the labyrinth the King Minos of myth kept the terrifying Minotaur, a half-bull, half-man monster. Every year, Minos demanded youths from Athens as tribute and imprisoned them in the labyrinth for the beast to feed upon.

  As Evans was excavating at Knossos one of the workmen gave a terrified cry. The myth was surfacing from the dust. He had found a ‘black devil’, he shouted, shying away in horror from the object he had plucked out from the soil. In fact what he had uncovered was a remarkable, red-eyed bust of a bull’s head – a sculpture of monumental power and menace, crowned by a huge set of horns. The
sculpture was detailed, lifelike. It is said that when they pulled it from its ancient resting place, the bull’s fierce eyes moved in their sockets. As they dug deeper, Evans and his team were amazed to discover that this beautiful hilltop palace did seem to have at its heart a genuine labyrinth – a maze of deep, underground tunnels – buried beneath it. Frescoes showing charging bulls added to the archaeologist’s growing conviction: all of the evidence suggested that the people here had worshipped a bull god.

  Thirty years earlier, Evans’ fellow archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had shocked the world when he had dramatically declared that he had ‘gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’. He had been excavating at the citadel of Mycenae, while in search of the legendary heroes of the Trojan War. The claim that the German had found the actual body of the heroic figure of legend gave weight to a compelling idea – that the much loved ancient texts of Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad, if not literally true, had a strong basis in reality. A romantic, Arthur Evans was convinced that he had done the same thing for ancient Greek myth that Schliemann had done for Virgil and Homer’s epics. He firmly believed that he had found the true home of the mythical King Minos and his evil Minotaur.

  Legend may have surrounded the island, but it was a very real people that Evans had plucked from the ancient shadows; a people who at their peak of prosperity around 2160 to 1500 BC had plainly commanded fabulous wealth and power. What was also intriguing was the society’s high level of sophistication – almost modernity. Men and women appear to have been equal. More than that, the Minoans seem to have worshipped a female goddess, as well as the bull.

  Now here I was clutching a booklet that was making the astounding claim that Phaestos was as old as the oldest Egyptian pyramids: the palace was contemporary with the time of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686–2125 BC). It had been first built in the era of the pharaohs Khufu and Khafre and the Great Pyramid at Giza.

  THE PALACES

  Few civilisations have been so completely lost to history as that of the Minoans. This is partly because their remarkable palaces were destroyed not once, but twice. The principal palace of Knossos was first destroyed by fire around 1700 BC. The new palace built after that was more like an urban complex than a single palace, with parts of it five storeys high. It was not only a royal residence, but the heart of religious ceremony and political life on the island. It was also a manufacturing base for exports such as swords and pottery. It was a busy place: there were olive and wine presses and grain mills. The need for water was dealt with by an aqueduct that carried water from springs about 6 miles (10 kilometres) away, at Archanes.

  The magnificent buildings and terraced gardens were grouped around a vast central courtyard, which was used for sacred nocturnal festivals, bull-jumping and torch-lit ecstatic dances, as the islanders worshipped their deities. The whole complex stretched out for 5 acres (2 hectares). An ingenious system of bays and light-wells brought cool, dappled light into the magnificent, colonnaded palace. They even had window panes, made of thin sheets of translucent alabaster. The buildings’ columns were made from the trunks of cypress trees, which were painted red and then mounted on a plinth.

  The double-headed axe, a symbol of the minos, or king, appears on many of its walls. The Greek term for the axe is a labyros, which gives the labyrinth its name. The palace, which contained 1,300 rooms, was so complex – such a mass of halls, corridors and chambers with vast underground storage chambers running beneath – that some speculate that the dark, oppressive labyrinth of fame and legend was in fact Knossos itself. The second destruction, which was originally thought to be by earthquake, happened around 1450 BC.

  Life doesn’t appear to have been too grim for the ordinary Minoan citizen. Heraklion Museum has a ceramic model that depicts delightful rows of cheerful houses in the town below, banded with bright colour. They played board games, such as a version of draughts, and barbecued food was prepared outdoors on charcoal braziers. In the countryside the better-off also had summer mansions.

  The major palace complexes discovered on Crete to date are at Knossos, Phaestos, Malia and Kato Zakros. Zakros is a fifth of the size of Knossos. Most of the palaces seem to be oriented with the landscape. The immense age of the palaces poses a problem with dating them. One dating system is based on the architectural development of the palaces, dividing the Minoan period into the Prepalatial, Protopalatial, Neopalatial and Postpalatial periods.

  There was more. Reading Professor Alexiou’s book I discovered that the remarkable Egyptian sun king Akhenaten had owned many pieces of Minoan pottery and had installed them at his palace at Amarna. The implications of this idea halted me in my tracks. The professor, a highly distinguished figure in his field, was saying that the Minoans had not only travelled to ancient Egypt: they had even traded with the pharaohs. (See first colour plate section.)

  Fictional representations of Cretans, the famous Keftiu as the Egyptians called them, carrying zoomorphic rhyta (ritual vases for pouring) and other works of art typical of the Neo-Palatial period as gifts from Crete, decorate the tombs of dignitaries of the same dynasty. Finally fragments of Post-Palatial [Cretan] pottery [1400– 1100 BC] found in the Palace of Amenophis IV or Akhenaten at Amarna (inhabited from 1375 BC) help to determine the beginning of the Post-Palatial era and also the date of the destruction of the palace [of Phaestos] since similar pottery was found on its floors.

  Since starting research for my first book, 1421, in 1988, nothing in those twenty years has surprised me more than Professor Alexiou’s evidence of the long-standing maritime trade between Crete and Egypt from 1991 BC to 1400 BC. My own thesis had been that the Chinese had been the first navigators of the world, in the year 1421– AD!. But evidence of international trading many centuries and more before the birth of Christ put an entirely different perspective on my proposed book about Chinese voyages to the Americas. According to solidly researched and established archaeological evidence, the Minoans had travelled far beyond their native shores. What’s more, said our guide proudly, the Minoans had achieved another significant ‘first’. They had invented writing. This struck me as unlikely. Hadn’t the Egyptians or the Sumerians got there before them?

  When I challenged him, the guide pointed proudly to his hand-held notes, covered with slightly crumpled pictures. On his papers you could see a picture of a strange red ceramic plate, covered in clear, white markings. It was an enigma, like nothing else I’d ever seen. The symbols didn’t go right to left, or even left to right, like Chinese script. The path of this language, if that’s what it was, went round and round, in a labyrinthine circle.

  ‘It’s a mystery: it’s something we cannot understand.’ Our guide traced the symbols with his finger.

  ‘What is it called?’ I asked, truly intrigued.

  ‘The Phaestos Disc,’ he replied. He explained that these impenetrable ancient letters or words could be man’s first linear writing: perhaps they could be better described as the first use of printing, given the fact that the symbols were stamped into the clay surface before it was fired, around 1700 BC. Here then was a hidden language; a secret history written in ceramic. The disc could be the key to understanding an entire, lost civilisation. But it was totally unintelligible, he said, even to the experts. Looking closely, I could see that the circular plate had 241 symbols imprinted on its surface. Some of the pictograms looked just like sticks, or maybe they were a form of basic counting. Others were strange, involved and full of what looked like symbolic meaning; images of fish, fruit and even human heads.

  The disc was discovered in a small basement room in 1903, near the depositories of the ‘archive chamber’ in the northeast apartments of the Phaestos palace. A few inches away from it lay a tablet known as PH-1, which carried the first discovery of a mysterious Cretan written language. It is now known as ‘Linear A’. Like the disc, it has so far completely eluded translation, although the script has since been found on many other objects and artefacts at various sites in Crete. Linear A’s first
known use was here at Phaestos, and some experts believe that Linear A and the strange pictographic language of the disc are closely related. How extraordinary: to hold the key to a lost civilisation right there in your hands, but to be unable to make sense of it. To view the Phaestos disc, please go to the first colour plate section.

  Another overriding thought was troubling me: if the Minoans were so advanced – as educated and artistic as the ancient Egyptians, a civilisation which had invented both writing and printing, as well as employing an astonishing realism in art many centuries before classical Greece – why was it that the world knew so little about them? The next, inevitable question was: what happened to the Minoans?

  Our guide’s dramatic response to that question was to start me on my new quest. Phaestos, its sister palace-city of Knossos and the other Minoan cities were all ‘destroyed in a massive earthquake’, he told us. It seems that this captivating society had abruptly disappeared from view around 1450 BC. Ever since Knossos re-emerged from the fertile soil of Crete people have wondered what on earth could have happened to extinguish the life force of those exotic cities of long ago, each with a palace culture so powerful that it inspired the enduring myths of the ancient Greeks. Now I too was fired up to find out more.

  ‘Are you sure it was an earthquake?’ we asked the guide. ‘Because it says in this book that the island of Santorini, or ancient Thera, about 90 miles away from here, was destroyed at the same time, by a huge volcano.’ We had to follow the trail.