He tapped the keyboard and the image of a boat appeared on the central screen. “This is what Jack and I came up with.”
“It’s based on Neolithic timbers dug up last year at the mouth of the Danube,” Jack explained. “Ours is an open boat, about twenty-five metres long and three metres in beam. Rowing only became widespread at the end of the Bronze Age, so it’s got fifteen paddlers on either side. It could take two oxen, as we’ve depicted here, several pairs of smaller animals such as pigs and deer, about two dozen women and children and a relief crew of paddlers.”
“You’re sure they had no sails?” Macleod asked.
Jack nodded. “Sailing was an early Bronze Age invention on the Nile, where boats could float to the delta and then sail back upstream with the prevailing northerly wind. The Egyptians may in fact have introduced sailing to the Aegean, where paddling was actually a better way of getting round the islands.”
“The program indicates the vessel would make six knots in dead calm,” Mustafa said. “That’s six nautical miles per hour, about seven statute miles.”
“They would have needed daylight to beach their vessel, tend to their animals and set up camp,” Jack said. “And the reverse in the mornings.”
“We now know the exodus took place in late spring or early summer,” Macleod revealed. “We ran our high-resolution sub-bottom profiler over an area of one square kilometre next to the Neolithic village. The silt concealed a perfectly preserved field system complete with plough furrows and irrigation ditches. The palaeoenvironmental lab has just completed their analysis of core samples we took from the ROV. They show the crop was grain. Einkorn wheat, Triticum monococcum to be precise, sown about two months prior to the inundation.”
“Grain is usually sown in these latitudes in April or May,” Jack remarked.
“Correct. We’re talking June or July, around two months after the Bosporus was breached.”
“Six knots means forty-eight nautical miles over an eight-hour run,” Mustafa continued. “That assumes a relief crew as well as water and provisions and a working day of eight hours. In placid seas our boat would have made it along the southern shore in a little over eleven days.” He tapped a key eleven times, advancing the miniature representation of the boat along an isometric map of the Black Sea. “This is where the CAN program really comes into play.”
He tapped again and the simulation subtly transformed. The sea became ruffled, and the level dropped to show the Bosporus as a waterfall.
“Here we are in the summer of 5545 BC, about two months after the flood began.”
He repositioned the boat near the Bosporus.
“The first variable is wind. The prevailing summer winds are from the north. Ships sailing west might only have made serious headway once they reached Sinope, midway along the southern shore where the coast begins to trend west-south-west. Before that, coming up the coast west-north-west, they would have needed oars.”
“How different was the climate?” Katya asked.
“The main fluctuations today are caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation,” Mustafa replied. “In a warm phase, low atmospheric pressure over the North Pole causes strong westerlies which keep Arctic air in the north, meaning the Mediterranean and Black Sea are hot and dry. In a cold phase, Arctic air flows south, including the northerlies over the Black Sea. Basically it’s windier and wetter.”
“And in antiquity?”
“We think the early Holocene, the first few thousand years after the great melt, would have corresponded more closely to a cold phase. It was less arid than today with a good deal more precipitation. The southern Black Sea would have been an optimal place for the development of agriculture.”
“And the effect on navigation?” Jack asked.
“Stronger northerlies and westerlies by twenty to thirty per cent. I’ve fed these in and come up with a best-fit prediction for each fifty nautical mile sector of the coast two months into the flood, including the effect of wind on water movement.”
“Your second variable must be the flood itself.”
“We’re looking at ten cubic miles of seawater pouring in every day for eighteen months, then a gradual fall-off over the next six months until equilibrium is reached. The exodus took place during the period of maximum inflow.”
He tapped the keyboard and a sequence of figures appeared on the right-hand screen.
“This shows the speed of the current east from the Bosporus. It diminishes from twelve knots at the waterfall to just under two knots in the most easterly sector, more than five hundred miles away.”
Costas joined in. “If they were only making six knots, our Neolithic farmers, they would never have reached the Bosporus.”
Mustafa nodded. “I can even predict where they made final landfall, thirty miles east where the current became too strong. From here they would have portaged up the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus to the Dardanelles. The current through the straits would also have been very strong, so I doubt whether they would have re-embarked before reaching the Aegean.”
“That would have been a hell of a portage,” said Macleod. “Almost two hundred nautical miles.”
“They probably disassembled the hulls and used yoked oxen to pull the timbers on sledges,” Jack replied. “Most early planked boats were joined by sewing the timbers together with cord, allowing the hulls to be easily dismantled.”
“Perhaps those who went east really did leave their vessels at Mount Ararat,” Katya mused. “They could have disassembled the timbers and hauled them to the point where it was clear they weren’t going to need them again, unlike the western group who were probably always within sight of the sea during their portage.”
Costas was peering at the Dardanelles. “They could even have set off from the hill of Hissarlik. Some of our farmers may have stayed on to become the first Trojans.”
Costas’ words brought home again the enormity of their discovery, and for a moment they were overwhelmed by a sense of awe. Carefully, methodically they had been piecing together a jigsaw which had confounded scholars for generations, uncovering a framework which was no longer in the realm of speculation. They were not simply building up one corner of the puzzle but had begun to rewrite history on a grand scale. Yet the source was so embedded in fantasy it still seemed a fable, a revelation whose truth they could hardly bring themselves to acknowledge.
Jack turned to Mustafa. “How far is twenty dromoi in these conditions?”
Mustafa pointed to the right-hand screen. “We work backwards from the point of disembarkation near the Bosporus. In the final day they only made half a knot against the current and wind, meaning a run of no more than four miles.” He tapped a key and the boat moved slightly east.
“Then the distances are progressively greater, until we reach the run past Sinope where they covered thirty miles.” He tapped twelve times and the boat hopped halfway back along the Black Sea coast. “Then it becomes slightly more arduous for a few days as they head north-west against the prevailing wind.”
“That’s fifteen runs,” said Jack. “Where do the final five take us?”
Mustafa tapped five more times and the boat ended up in the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, exactly on the predicted contour of the coast before the flood.
“Bingo,” Jack said.
After printing out the CAN data Mustafa led the others into a partitioned area adjacent to the chart room. He dimmed the lights and arranged several chairs around a central console the size of a kitchen table. He flipped a switch and the surface lit up.
“A holographic light table,” Mustafa explained. “The latest in bathymetric representation. It can model a three-dimensional image of any area of seabed for which we have survey data, from entire ocean floors to sectors only a couple of metres across. Archaeological sites, for example.”