“She’s a little different from the comely maidens in the passageway,” Costas observed ruefully.
“She’s not meant to be a pin-up.” Katya’s tone was gently admonishing. “Look how they haven’t even bothered to finish the feet or the arms, and the head’s just a blank. Everything’s deliberately exaggerated to emphasize fecundity and good health. She may not conform to the modern western ideal of beauty, but for people living with the constant fear of starvation, an obese woman symbolized prosperity and survival.”
“Point taken.” Costas smiled. “How old is the lady?”
“Upper Palaeolithic,” Jack replied immediately. “All the Venus figurines fall between 40,000 and 10,000 BC, the same range as the paintings in the hall of the ancestors.”
“They used to be thought of as mother goddesses,” Hiebermeyer added pensively. “But there’s no certainty Stone Age European societies were matriarchal. They’re probably best seen as fertility idols, worshipped alongside male deities as well as animal spirits and inanimate forces.”
There was a brief silence, which Jack broke. “For hundreds of thousands of years hominids lived an unchanged existence during the Old Stone Age, right up to the Neolithic revolution. It’s no surprise the Atlanteans so soon after still revered the time-honoured gods of their ancestors, the hunter-gatherers who first painted wild beasts in the hall of the ancestors during the Ice Age.”
“The ancient Israelites of the Old Testament still worshipped a fertility god,” Efram Jacobovich interjected quietly. “Even the early Christians of the Mediterranean incorporated pagan fertility deities into their rituals, sometimes in the guise of saints or the Virgin Mary. The Venus of Atlantis might not be as far from our own beliefs as we might imagine.”
The stone table in front of the statue was massive. It extended almost to the entrance, terminating just in front of them in a raised ledge capped by an irregular globular shape about a metre across. In the light reflected off the gold it seemed preternaturally white, as if it had been burnished by the countless supplicants who had come to pray before the great goddess.
“It looks like a sacred stone,” Jack speculated. “What the ancient Greeks called a baetyl, a rock of meteoric origin, or an omphalos, a centre or navel. In Bronze Age Crete there were baetyls at the entrance to holy caves. In classical Greece the most famous omphalos was in front of the chasm where the oracle sat at Delphi.”
“Marking the threshold into the House of the Divine, like the bowl of holy water at the entrance to a Catholic church,” Efram suggested.
“Something like that,” Jack agreed.
“It’s definitely meteoric.” Costas was examining the bulbous form more closely. “But it’s curious, almost like a warped sheet of metal rather than a solid nodule.”
“The kind of thing Stone Age hunters might have picked up on the ice cap,” Jack mused. “Most fresh meteor fragments are found on ice because they’re easy to spot. This could be a sacred object passed down from their ancestors, another link to earliest prehistory.”
Aysha had edged her way along the far side of the table and stopped before reaching the goddess. “Come and look at this,” she exclaimed.
The two beams swept forward along the surface of the table. It was littered with slats of wood, some joined at right angles like the corners of boxes. They could make out a jumble of carpenter’s tools, familiar forms including chisels and files, awls and mallets. It looked like the paraphernalia of a cabinet-maker’s workshop, all hastily abandoned but immaculately preserved in the dust-free environment.
“This is more than it seems.” Dillen bent over beside Aysha and carefully swept the wood shavings from a raised surface facing him. It was a wooden frame like a portable lectern. As he straightened up they caught a glimpse of gold.
“It’s a copyist’s table,” he announced triumphantly. “And there’s a gold sheet on top.”
As they crowded round, they could see the upper third of the sheet was densely covered with Atlantean symbols, some aligned erratically as if done in a hurry but all separated into phrases like the Phaistos disc. From a small box at the side, Dillen held up three cigarsized stone punches, each terminating in an obverse instantly recognizable as the Mohican head, the sheaf of corn and the canoe paddle. Another one lying on the table terminated in the Atlantis symbol.
“It is identical to the inscription on the wall opposite,” Katya said. “The copyist was replicating the symbols on the second panel from the left.”
They looked where she indicated and could just make out the individual symbols, a sequence faithfully transcribed up to the twelfth line where it had been abruptly abandoned.
Efram Jacobovich remained at the head of the table. He was staring intensely at the clutter of wooden slats, clearly lost in thought. Without looking up he cleared his throat and began to recite.
“And it came to pass on the third day of the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount. And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.”
He closed his eyes and continued.
“And Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood; two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it; and he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about. And he cast for it four rings of gold, to be set by the four corners of it; even two rings upon the one side of it, and two rings upon the other side of it. And he made staves of shittim wood, and overlaid them with gold. And he put the staves into the rings by the sides of the ark, to bear the ark.”
There was a stunned silence. He looked up. “The Book of Exodus,” he explained. “Those of my faith believe God gave Moses the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, and inscribed them on tablets which were borne by the people of Israel in the Ark. Biblical references to the pharaohs put the event in the second half of the second millennium BC. But now I wonder whether the story contains the kernel of a much older account, of a people thousands of years earlier who were forced to flee their homeland, a people who took with them copies of their ten sacred texts from their holy sanctuary near the summit of a volcano.”
Jack looked up from where he had been examining a stack of blank gold sheets. “Of course,” he exclaimed. “Each of the migrating groups was to have a copy. Clay tablets would have been too fragile, stone inscriptions would have taken too long and copper would have corroded. Gold was in good supply from the Caucasus and was durable and soft enough for rapid inscription with punches. Each set of ten tablets was encased in a wooden crate just like the Ark of the Covenant. The priests worked right up to the last minute and abandoned the final copy only as the city was overwhelmed by the floodwaters.”
“These may be sacred texts but they are definitely not the Ten Commandments.” Katya had extracted her palm computer and was scrolling through the concordance of the Atlantis symbols with Minoan Linear A. “It’ll take time to translate them completely, but already I have a general sense of the meaning. The first tablet to the left refers to grains, legumes, even vines, and to seasons of the year. The second, the one our scribe was copying, refers to animal husbandry. The third is about copper and gold metallurgy and the fourth about architecture, the use of building stone.” She paused and looked up. “Unless I’m mistaken these tablets are a kind of encyclopedia, a blueprint for life in Neolithic Atlantis.”