The Lost Empire of Atlantis Read online

  It took an astonishing eleven years and 22,000 dives to excavate the Uluburun. The ship had come to rest listing 15 degrees to starboard, facing east–west. A large piece of the hull had lain intact on the seabed for almost 3,500 years. It seemed incredible to me that it had survived at all.

  The ship was built of cedar in the ancient hull-first tradition, with pegged tenon joints securing planks to each other and then to the keel. To build her, a team of men would have cut down a tall cypress tree, stripped its bark and carved the length into a keel.2 Crete was covered with cypress forests in the Early Bronze Age: the wood is ideal for shipbuilding because it expands in water, making the seals between joints waterproof.

  The shipwrights then ‘edge-joined’ a long cleanly sawn plank of cypress to each side of the huge keel. Chiselling out deep rectangular matching mortises every 25 centimetres (10 inches), they worked along the length of the keel. They cut flat rectangular pieces of wood (tenons) to fit snugly into the matching mortise slots. Then they fitted another plank to the tenons that were sticking out of the slots on the keel.

  Methodically, the shipwrights added plank after plank to both sides of the keel, to build up a sturdy hull. The boat needed very little caulking given the edge-joined planking, although they did waterproof the seams with a resin mixture. The shipwright who worked for the mythological hero Jason, Argus, had cut his timber on Mount Pelion: but according to Thucydides, the search for wood for battle fleets meant that the plentiful forests of Greece were stripped bare as early as the 5th century BC. The Uluburun’s sturdy oak mast was about 16 metres (52 feet) tall and secured with rigging made of strong hemp ropes. As someone who had spent many years at sea, I was sure that boats like these were fully capable of surviving long and hazardous ocean voyages, despite this individual vessel’s fate.

  But could I prove it? Were the exploits of ancient adventurers simply the stuff of legend, or could they be close to the facts? Luckily, I had an ancient myth and a modern real-life explorer’s vessel to compare it with. Scholars say the legendary 1,500-mile voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, to win the Golden Fleece, happened during the Bronze Age, if it ever really took place. In the 1980s Tim Severin became obsessed with recreating a boat that could test the reality behind the myth.

  The myth itself is a sort of ancient Greek Mission Impossible. The hero’s kingdom is under threat from a usurper, his uncle, King Pelias. The gods command Jason to find a magical ram’s fleece before he can reclaim his father’s kingdom of Iolkos. So Jason has to embark on a treacherous sea voyage into an unknown land.

  To test whether the tale could ever have held any truth, Severin reconstructed an ancient galley with documentary precision. With oars as well as sails, a galley is the logical choice for a vessel that might have to fight its way through hostile waters. I seemed to remember that Severin had managed it as far as the Black Sea without sinking – although there had been some pretty tricky moments.

  The Uluburun ship would have fared even better. She was an altogether bigger and more seaworthy affair. The ship’s cargo alone told us that her owners felt she could travel far and fast. It included Baltic amber from the north; ebony wood, hippopotamus teeth and elephant tusks from equatorial Africa; and goods from both the eastern and the western Mediterranean. The voyage itself almost certainly included stops in Cyprus for copper, Egypt for gold and Syria for ostrich eggs and pomegranates. That involved steering to all parts of the compass. If Tim Severin could make it, then so could the ship I had in front of me in Bodrum. The Uluburun wreck may have gone down like the Titanic, but that was because the captain was negotiating a dangerous promontory, perhaps braving the greater dangers of sailing in winter. In normal conditions, she was definitely able to weather even high sea states.

  Archaeologists agree that the discovery of the Uluburun has pushed back the history of seafaring by centuries. I say that the evidence of the frescoes on Thera pushes that history back much, much further. Given the dating of the frescoes, which show ships of the exact same construction, there must have been a long tradition of sailing – and the know-how was alive and in use by the time the artists put paint to plaster. Shipbuilding technology changes, but it does so only slowly – or did, until the breakthroughs that came with the Industrial Revolution: steel and steam. Had he been alive, the expert mariner Sir Francis Drake – whose famous Golden Hind was a round-bellied Tudor ship – would still have been able to make a good fist of sailing Admiral Lord Nelson’s much larger and slimmer HMS Victory at Trafalgar in 1805, some two hundred years later.

  The Uluburun’s mast had a single boom about 10 metres (33 feet) long to hold the top of the sail. The centre of the boom was connected to the mast by a thick strong ring of rope, loosely wrapped around the shaft of the mast (see also Thera ship 6). This meant the boom could pivot freely about the mast in the wind. It could be easily raised or lowered with ropes running through a bronze fixture on the masthead. The orientation of the boom and the sail in the wind could be controlled from the deck with ropes, allowing the ship to tack quite well into a head wind.

  Thinking back to the frescoes, the evidence here in Bodrum confirmed what I had already noticed. Each of the long ships was a masterpiece: I was overwhelmed. All of the evidence told me that shipwrights were definitely capable of building ships fit for ocean travel as early as c.1450 BC. The sailors had sophisticated methods of hoisting, lowering and adjusting sails, not least the bronze fixture on the masthead. There is other evidence of this impressive development in technology: the mechanical principle is shown by two separate examples in the Egyptian Gallery in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Those fixings show that many centuries ago ships were confidently expected to sail into the wind as well as before it: the men knew they could lower sail very quickly in the event of an unexpected squall. By comparison with the Uluburun’s hold, I estimated that the cargo capacity of the admiral’s ship at Thera would have been about 50 metric tons.

  Using bronze tools, particularly the large two-handled saws that were almost 2 metres (6 feet 6 inches) long and a third of a metre (13 inches) wide, these ancient craftsmen had achieved levels of shipbuilding expertise that Renaissance Europe had taken centuries to rediscover. This was a Bronze Age civilisation. But making the most of Bronze Age technology, it seemed, was not exactly making the best of a bad job.

  The museum held another surprise. The Minoans have always been characterised by archaeologists as a wholly peaceful people. If so, their level of weaponry is highly surprising. Arthur Evans had bitter experience of violence, witnessing massacres in Crete as the Manchester Guardian’s war correspondent during the 1897 Greco-Turkish war. After discovering Knossos, Evans declared that by contrast his beloved Minoan civilisation had been totally peaceable. As Cambridge University research scholar Cathy Gere describes it:

  Evans had reported with fairly even-handed revulsion the terrible Muslim/Christian massacres on Crete. Keen to represent the past as a site of healing and reconciliation, Evans resurrected Bronze Age Crete as an unfortified idyll, internally peaceful under the benign reign of Knossos, and protected from its enemies without by the legendary seafaring skills of King Minos’ navy.3

  Since then, most academics have followed his lead and depicted Crete as a peaceful society, mainly because its cities didn’t have fortified walls. The Minoans lived a harmonious life in lush, civilised surroundings, they say, calmly governed in a democratic way. They didn’t need city walls. Their kingdoms resembled peaceful heavens on earth.

  Yet as I moved through the closeted dark of the exhibition rooms, I came upon case after case of weapons recovered from the wreck. Bronze weapons, manufactured in large quantities. Green and corroded as they were from centuries on the deep seabed, I could clearly see that this prehistoric ship had carried everything a troop of warriors would need – arrowheads, double-headed axes, spears, swords and daggers as well as the adzes, saw screws and razors that had more peaceable uses.

  Crete’s largest archaeolo
gical museum, at Heraklion, also has cases full of ordinary soldiers’ bronze weapons – from spears to daggers and nasty-looking rapiers. Some of them are obviously ceremonial – like the extraordinary dagger found at the town of Malia, its hilt decorated with gold leaf; but towards the end of the period it was plain that swords had been made for only one purpose: fighting. Short blades had been adapted for cutting, as well as thrusting strokes. They were made for warriors.

  Without doubt, the Minoans’ military strength came from their fleet. Coupled with the sophisticated design of their ships, it seemed to me that far from being entirely peaceable, the Minoans had possessed formidable military might. The warlike Mycenaeans on the mainland of Greece would later wage war against the Trojans, as described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet the Minoans seemed to live at peace with them. In fact, much of the archaeological record points to the idea that the mainlanders were either a Minoan colony or a compliant ally of the Minoans – until the point at which Crete was fatally weakened by the devastating loss of its wooden fleet in the tsunami.

  Of course the Minoans may have preferred not to use force: who knows? They were certainly as interested in trade as they were in weapons. Yet it was noticeable that their fast, sturdy ships were the type that could be mobilised speedily, carrying soldiers armed to the teeth with a lethal array of bronze weapons of war.

  Like most British citizens of my age, whose parents had been through a war, I understood the strategic value of being ‘an island nation’. The sailors of Atlantis were already the world’s top naval power. With ships that were far in advance of any others in Europe or the Near East, the result must have been that the Minoans feared no one. Their remarkable cities had few defensive walls precisely because they had the sea instead. Leaving them wide open to the biggest tidal wave the world had ever seen.

  At least one of Thera’s marvellous frescoes shows soldiers in battle helmets getting ready for war, along with an admiral commanding a sea battle. And winning it. They’d evidently had the might to control the entire Mediterranean. Maybe they’d used it.

  And that’s what I was determined to find out next.

  In construction, the Uluburun wreck had been almost identical to ship 5 on the fresco in the West House. That meant one thing was certain: the Minoans had similar, deep-sea trading ships – at least a hundred years before the ship that had gone down off the coast of Turkey. I left the calm and quiet gloom of the museum with the blood spinning in my head. Ostrich eggs from Syria; gold from Egypt; precious amber from the Baltic; hippopotamus teeth from equatorial Africa . . . all of the riches of the world. All here.

  Here in Bodrum I felt I was looking at positive proof that the Minoans, these highly creative, ingenious and artistic people, were also the world’s first explorers.

  CHAPTER 9

  SAILING FROM BYZANTIUM

  I’d left Turkey and the Uluburun wreck with a sense of sadness. The captain’s book, that simple writing tablet in folding wood, dominated my thoughts. The captain had loaded all of the riches of the world on to that boat – from tortoise shells for making musical instruments, and the much prized blue cobalt glass, to the smelly murex shells that were collected in their millions on Crete, and which produce the world’s most brilliant purple dye. But nothing could protect either him or his passengers and crew from the perils of the sea. Even those with the most extraordinary sailing skills must wrestle with the elements, and rocky reefs, from time to time. And sometimes they will lose the fight.

  The world’s oldest book was made of two boxwood leaves, joined by a three-piece cylindrical hinge in ivory. The cavity was inlaid with wax. But again, like the Phaestos Disc, the words themselves escaped me. The captain was mute, his writing scoured away by the seas that had killed him. I could tell nothing whatever about his journey, or the skills he had as a sailor. The very fact that he had set out, though, was proof paramount that Bronze Age sailors had considered themselves capable of ambitious and wide-ranging journeys at sea.

  The book must have held instructions from the ship’s owner, or even from the ruler, I thought, about the cargo and where it was headed. It would read something like this: ‘The captain is to proceed to Byblos from Thera and unload the cargo. This special cargo is the property of X, and consists of 340 ingots of copper, and 60 of tin . . .’. Then would follow a detailed list, written with a bronze stylus, of all the valuable articles on board, as well as weights, measures and destinations. I fell to thinking: if a thief had wanted to steal that captain’s cargo, or if the captain himself had been dishonest, then wax is not exactly the ideal recording medium. A heated spatula would easily smooth it out, making the figures easy to alter.

  The log – for that’s what it must have been – was tied closed. It would also have been sealed with the owner’s personal seal. And so that the system was foolproof, the owner and the captain used a common system of weights. On that fateful day the weights and at least three sets of balances were on the ship, suggesting that there were a number of different merchants taking passage on the journey. Already, in the Bronze Age, a single mass standard was used across the Mediterranean, based on a unit weight of 9.3 to 9.4 grams.

  Sceptics may think that, surely, this skill with sailing could not have come suddenly, from nowhere, as if by magic. True enough: long-distance sailing is demanding. It takes great skill, intimate knowledge of the seas and constant vigilance, not forgetting bravery, perseverance and a certain amount of luck. When Tim Severin set out on the trail of the Golden Fleece, pessimists calculated that unless they had favourable winds to help them, the crew would have to row more than a million oar strokes each to reach Georgia. A testing mission.

  This scepticism would be misplaced. When we ‘discover’ a new city, a new monument, or a new wreck, we don’t manage to do it in neat, chronological order. To early archaeologists and explorers the ancient Egyptians must have seemed to have had almost preternatural abilities. To many of us, they still do. Yet their technology wasn’t sent down to earth by aliens, as some have claimed. The truth is that those achievements look surprisingly sudden to us because we are missing the various stages of development in between. In the case of the Egyptians, many sites dating from before Old Kingdom Egypt simply hadn’t been dug up – or recognised for what they really were – until relatively recently.

  Just like the hidden passages and chambers in the great Valley of the Kings tombs of the Egyptians, the Minoans’ seafaring skills didn’t come from thin air. This resourceful culture had built up a body of knowledge over the centuries, as I’d found when tracing their DNA trail back to the Hittites. Just as in Egypt, the longer we wait, the more evidence of early Cretan seafaring we will find.

  I had to know more about Minoan sail-power.

  Ships were essential to move the raw materials on which Minoan civilisation was based. They had to shift their finished works for export and they also needed to transport the raw materials for their products: whether that meant copper from Cyprus, elephant and hippopotamus ivory from India and Africa, gold from Upper Egypt, gypsum and glass from the Levant or the mysterious substance amber from the Baltic. They therefore needed ships that could travel hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean and, in the case of the precious amber, to the Baltic. Could they possibly have done that?

  So I turned my thoughts back towards the actual task of sailing and to Tim Severin.

  VOYAGE TO THE BLACK SEA BY REPLICA SHIP

  A Harkness Fellow at the universities of California, Minnesota and Harvard, Tim Severin has written many books on exploration, from Tracking Marco Polo to Vanishing Primitive Man and, most importantly for me, The Jason Voyage.4

  When Homer wrote the Odyssey, around the 8th century BC, he said that Jason and the Argonauts’ brave and epic voyage in search of the Golden Fleece was already ‘a tale on all men’s lips’. This would have been a generation before the Trojan War. Critics have been sceptical. The voyage couldn’t have had any basis in reality, they argued, because this was too f
ar back in time; the technology simply wasn’t in existence. Severin’s aim had been to find out if Jason could have really sailed to the Baltic in 1300 BC. To quote him:

  . . . we hoped to track them [the Argonauts] in reality. So we rowed aboard the replica of a galley of Jason’s day, a twenty oared vessel of 3,000 year old design, in order to seek our own golden fleece . . .

  He based his reconstructed ship upon drawings on Bronze Age pots and frescoes, as well as carvings on armour, jewellery and seals. For reasons of cost it was a half-scale model, 16.5 metres (54 feet) long ‘from the tip of her curious snout-like ram in the bows to the graceful sweep of her tail’. Later pictures of ships dating from the 7th to the 4th centuries BC gave Severin further technical details to follow, such as the way the sails were rigged and controlled.

  In Homer’s writings, Greek ships are measured by the number of oars. They came in three sets of twenty, thirty and fifty oars. To save money, Severin chose the smallest.

  Severin was going against the currents all the way, with no help from the prevailing wind. The ship he would sail would be some two centuries younger than those shown on Thera’s frescoes. It was a difficult task: although his ship was just half the length and breadth of ships 5 and 8 at Thera, with half the number of oars, its volume would be just one eighth of that of the Thera ships. This placed a considerable strain on cargo capacity, water and food – and on the crew. Because of the lack of space, sleeping was hard and the crew were permanently exhausted as a result.