Jack shook his head in wonder. “Aslan would have been disappointed. No royal cache, no fortune in works of art. Only the greatest treasure of them all, priceless beyond measure. The keys to civilization itself.”
While Katya and Dillen busied themselves translating in Jack’s torchlight, Costas made his way beyond Aysha to the goddess and the bulls. The gap between the front legs of the right-hand bull and the voluminous thigh of the goddess formed a low entryway worn smooth by generations of use. Costas crouched down and disappeared from sight, his presence only revealed by the beam of light that silhouetted the bulls where they reared up towards the head of the goddess.
“Follow me.” His voice was muffled but distinct. “There’s more.”
They all scrambled through and stood with their backs against the far side of the statues. They were inside a narrow annexe in front of an irregular rocky face.
“This must be the holy of holies.” Dillen’s eyes darted around as he spoke. “Like the cella in a Greek temple or the sanctuary in a Christian church. But it’s surprisingly bare.”
“Except for that.” Costas trained his beam on the rock face.
It was adorned with three painted figures, the central one almost as large as the mother goddess and the other two slightly smaller. They seemed to mimic the arrangement of the goddess and the bulls. They were dull red, identical to the pigment used in the hall of the ancestors, except here the colour had faded. Stylistically they were also reminiscent of Ice Age art, with broad, impressionistic strokes that gave a strong sense of animation yet were essentially outline representations. But in their form the figures were like nothing else they had seen in Atlantis.
Instead of powerful animals or statuesque priests they were scarcely recognizable as earthly beings, abstract renditions that barely captured the essence of the corporeal. Each had a bulbous, pear-shaped body with limbs jutting awkwardly sideways, the hands and feet terminating in ten or twelve digits that splayed out. The heads seemed grossly out of proportion to the bodies. The eyes were outsized lentoids edged in black, reminiscent of the kohl marks of ancient Egyptian portraits. They were like a child’s attempt at the human form, yet with something oddly deliberate about the shared characteristics of all three.
“These are old, very old,” Jack murmured. “Late Ice Age, maybe five thousand years before the flood. They’re executed on the living rock, just like the animals in the hall of the ancestors. There are plenty of minimalist depictions of the human form in rock art around the world, in the petroglyphs of Africa and Australia and the south-western United States. But I’ve never seen prehistoric figures like this.”
“These cannot be serious attempts at the human form.” Costas was shaking his head in disbelief. “There’s no way Ice Age art was this primitive. Those animals in the hall of the ancestors are amazingly naturalistic.”
“They’re probably humanoid rather than anthropomorphic,” Jack countered. “Remember, these are thousands of years older than the Atlanteans carved in the passageway, really more like shamans or spirits, or gods who had no defined physical form. In some societies the human form was sacrosanct and portraiture was never attempted. The Iron Age artists of Celtic Europe were wonderfully accomplished, but if you saw the representations of humans they began producing under the Romans you’d think they were primitive in the extreme.”
Jack’s beam rose to a small carved device atop the central figure. It was a single cartouche half a metre long and contained two of the Atlantean symbols, the perched eagle and the vertical paddle.
“That’s more recent than the paintings,” Jack commented. “The surface is cleaner and the carving would have required metal tools. Any idea of the translation?”
Katya knew most of the syllabary and did not bother to consult her computer. “It’s not in the concordance,” she asserted confidently. “It could be a verb or noun we haven’t encountered. But in the context I’d say it’s most likely a proper name.”
“How is it pronounced?” Efram spoke from the far corner of the room.
“Each of the Atlantean symbols represents a syllable, a consonant preceded or followed by a vowel,” Katya replied. “The perched eagle is always Y and the vertical paddle W. I’d suggest one word reading ye-we or ya-wa, the vowel sounds short rather than long.”
“The Tetragrammaton!” Efram sounded incredulous. “The name that shall not be spoken. The First Cause of all things, the Ruler of Heaven and Earth.” As if by instinct he shied away from the images on the wall, his eyes averted and his head bowed reverentially.
“Yahweh.” Dillen sounded scarcely less astonished. “The principle name of God in the Hebrew Old Testament, the divine name only to be uttered by the high priest in the Tabernacle, in the holy of holies, on the Day of Atonement. In Greek it was ‘The Four-Lettered Word,’ the Tetragrammaton. The early Christians translated it as Jehovah.”
“The God of Moses and Abraham.” Efram slowly recovered his composure as he spoke. “A tribal god of the Sinai at the time of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, but he may have revealed himself much earlier. Unlike the other gods who tempted the Israelites, he was highly interventionist, uniquely effective on behalf of his worshippers and able to alter current events in their favour. He led them in battle and exile and gave them the Ten Commandments.”
“And saved them from the flood.”
The words came from Costas, who unexpectedly began to recite from the Book of Genesis.
“And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth. And the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth; and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah; and of them was the whole earth overspread.”
Jack was aware of his friend’s Greek Orthodox upbringing and nodded slowly, the gleam of revelation in his eyes as he spoke.
“Of course. The Jewish God caused the land to be inundated and then signalled his pact with the chosen by revealing the rainbow. It’s just as we thought. The building of the ark, the selection of breeding pairs of animals, the diaspora of Noah’s descendants around the world. The ancient flood myths not only tell us about river inundations and the great melt at the end of the Ice Age. They also tell of another cataclysm, of a flood in the sixth millennium BC that consumed the world’s first city, extinguishing a precocious civilization unequalled for thousands of years to come. Plato is not the only source of the Atlantis story after all. It’s been staring at us all along, encoded in the greatest work of literature ever written.”
CHAPTER 32
After carefully examining the rest of the inner sanctum, they filed back into the main chamber. They assembled at the far end around the mysterious metallic orb. Dillen emerged last and picked up a chisel from the debris on the table.
“This is bronze,” he said. “An alloy of copper and tin, smelted sometime prior to the abandonment of this room in the middle of the sixth millennium BC. An extraordinary discovery. Before today, archaeologists would have said bronze was first made around 3500 BC, possibly in Anatolia, and only became widespread during the following millennium.”
Dillen replaced the chisel and put his hands on the table.
“The question is, why did it take so long for bronze to reappear after the Black Sea flood?”
“Presumably the civilization of Atlantis developed in isolation,” Costas said, “and much faster than anywhere else.”