“Exactly.” Dillen beamed. “The word Atlantis is a heading, the start of a new chapter.” His fingers tapped the laptop he had connected to the multimedia projector. They could now follow a digitally enhanced image of the Greek text alongside his English words. He began to read the translation he and Katya had been working on since they had arrived the previous day.
“And in their citadels were bulls, so many that they filled the courtyards and the narrow corridors, and men danced with them. And then, in the time of Pharaoh Thutmosis, the gods smote the earth with a mighty crash and darkness came over the land, and Poseidon threw up a mighty rushing wave that swept away all before it. Such was the end of the island kingdom of the Keftiu. And next we will hear of another mighty kingdom, of the sunken citadel they called Atlantis.
“And now for the second section,” Dillen went on. He tapped a key and the image scrolled down below the gap. “Remember, this is pretty unpolished stuff. Solon was translating Egyptian into Greek as he wrote. So for us it’s relatively straightforward, with few complex phrases or obscure words. But there is a problem.”
Their eyes followed his to the screen. The text had scrolled to the end, the words petering off where the papyrus had torn away. Whereas the first paragraph had been well preserved, the second was progressively truncated as the ripped edges converged in a V shape. The final lines contained only fragments of words.
Katya now began to read.
“Atlantis.” Her accent gave the syllables added emphasis, somehow helping to bring home the reality of what they had before them.
“The first sentence is uncontentious.” She focused on the screen and spoke under her breath.
“Dia t
n n
son mechri hou h thalatta stenoutai.” The vowels almost sounded Chinese as she recreated the lilt of the ancient language.
“Through the islands until the sea narrows. Past the Cataract of Bos.”
Hiebermeyer frowned in puzzlement. “My Greek is good enough to know that katarrakts means a down-rushing or waterfall,” he said. “It was used to describe the rapids of the upper Nile. How could it refer to the sea?”
Dillen walked to the screen. “At this juncture we begin to lose whole words from the text.”
Katya again read. “And then twenty dromoi along the southern shore.”
“A dromos was about sixty stades,” Dillen commented. “About fifty nautical miles.”
“It was in fact highly variable,” Jack said. “Dromos means ‘run,’ the distance a ship could sail in one day while the sun was up.”
“Presumably it varied from place to place,” Hiebermeyer mused. “According to winds and currents and the time of year, taking into account seasonal changes in climate and daylight hours.”
“Precisely. A run was an indication of how long it would take you to get from A to B in favourable conditions.”
“Under the high bucranion, the sign of the bull,” Katya went on.
“Or bull’s horns,” Dillen suggested.
“Fascinating.” Hiebermeyer spoke almost to himself. “One of the most redolent symbols in prehistory. We’ve already seen them in Jack’s pictures of Knossos. They also appear in Neolithic shrines and all over the Bronze Age palaces of the Near East. Even as late as the Roman period the bucranium is everywhere in monumental art.”
Katya nodded. “The text now becomes fragmentary, but the professor and I agree on the likely meaning. It will be easier for you to understand if you see where the breaks occur.”
She switched the projector to overhead mode, at the same time placing a transparent sheet on the glass plate. The screen showed her neatly written words below the V shape of the lower part of the papyrus.
“Then you reach the citadel. And there below lies a vast golden plain, the deep basins, the salt lakes, as far as the eye can see. And two hundred lifetimes ago Poseidon wreaked vengeance on the Atlanteans for daring to live like gods. The cataract fell, the great golden door of the citadel shut for ever, and Atlantis was swallowed beneath the waves.” She paused. “We believe these last sentences were a way of linking the story with the end of the land of Keftiu. Perhaps the high priest’s theme was the wrath of the sea god, the vengeance taken by Poseidon on men for their hubris.”
She aimed the pointer at the screen. “The next section was probably the beginning of a detailed description of Atlantis. Unfortunately there are just a few disconnected words. Here, we think, is golden house or golden-walled. And here you can clearly read the Greek letters for pyramid. The full phrase translates as immense stone pyramids.” She glanced questioningly at Hiebermeyer, who was too stunned to comment and could only gawp at the screen.
“And then these final words.” She pointed at the ragged tail of the document. “House of the gods, perhaps hall of the gods, which is again kata boukers, meaning under the sign of the bull. And there the text ends.”
Hiebermeyer was the first to speak, his voice quivering with excitement. “Surely that clinches it. The voyage through the islands, to a place where the sea narrows. That can only mean west from Egypt, past Sicily to the Strait of Gibraltar.” He slapped his hand down in affirmation. “Atlantis was in the Atlantic Ocean after all!”
“What about the cataract?” Jack asked. “The Strait of Gibraltar is hardly a raging torrent.”
“And the vast golden plain, and the salt lakes,” Katya added. “In the Atlantic all you would have is the sea on one side, high mountains or desert on the other.”
“Southern shore is also perplexing,” Jack said. “Since there is no obvious southern shore to the Atlantic, that would imply that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, and I can hardly imagine a citadel on the barren shore of the western Sahara.”
Dillen unhooked the overhead and flicked the projector to slide mode, reloading the digital images. A range of snow-capped mountains filled the screen, with a complex of ruins nestled among verdant terraces in the foreground.
“Jack was correct to associate Plato’s Atlantis with Bronze Age Crete. The first part of the text clearly refers to the Minoans and the eruption of Thera. The problem is that Crete was not Atlantis.”
Katya nodded slowly. “Plato’s account is a conflation.”
“Exactly.” Dillen stepped back behind his chair, gesticulating as he spoke. “We have fragments of two different histories. One describes the end of Bronze Age Crete, the land of Keftiu. The other is about a much more ancient civilization, that of Atlantis.”
“The dating difference is unambiguous.” Hiebermeyer mopped his face as he spoke. “The first paragraph on the papyrus dates the destruction of Keftiu to the reign of Thutmosis. He was a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in the sixteenth century BC, exactly the time Thera erupted. And for Atlantis ‘two hundred lifespans’ in the second paragraph is in fact a fairly precise calculation, a lifetime meaning about twenty-five years to the Egyptian chroniclers.” He made a swift mental calculation. “Five thousand years before Solon, so about 5600 BC.”
“Incredible.” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “A whole epoch before the first city states. The sixth millennium BC was still the Neolithic, a time when agriculture was a novelty in Europe.”
“I’m puzzled by one detail,” Katya said. “If these stories are so distinct, how can the bull symbol figure so prominently in both accounts?”