“I now believe that was only part of the story. Amenhotep may have sensed the days of pharaonic Egypt were numbered, that the security which had allowed his forebears to carry their secrets for so many generations could no longer be counted on. Already the Greeks were establishing trading posts in the Delta, and only two centuries later Alexander the Great would storm through the land and sweep away the old order forever. Yet Amenhotep may also have looked hopefully at the Greeks. Theirs was a society on the cusp of democracy, one of enlightenment and curiosity, a place where the philosopher might truly be king. In the Greek world people might once again discover Utopia.”
“And the sight of the supplicant scholar may have rekindled memories of a fabled land over the northern horizon, an island civilization shrouded in legend that once held the greatest hope of resurrection for the priesthood.” Jack’s face lit up with excitement. “I too believe Amenhotep was a latter-day priest of Atlantis, a direct descendant of the holy men who guided a group of refugees five thousand years earlier to the shores of Egypt and shaped the destiny of that land. High priests, patriarchs, prophets, call them what you will. Other groups landed in the Levant, in western Italy where they were the forebears of the Etruscans and Romans, in southern Spain where the Tartessians were to flourish. But I believe the largest flotilla sailed no further than the Aegean.”
“The island of Thera,” Costas exclaimed.
“Before the eruption, Thera would have been the most imposing volcano in the Aegean, a vast cone dominating the archipelago,” Jack replied. “To the refugees the distant profile would have been startlingly reminiscent of their lost homeland. The latest reconstructions show the Thera volcano with twin peaks, remarkably similar to the view we first had of this island from Seaquest.”
“That monastery revealed in the cliffs of Thera after the earthquake last year,” Costas said. “Are you saying it was built by the Atlanteans?”
“Ever since the discovery of prehistoric Akrotiri in 1967 archaeologists have puzzled over why such a prosperous settlement had no palace,” Jack said. “Last year’s revelation proves what some of us thought all along, that the main focus on the island was a religious precinct that must have included a magnificent peak sanctuary. Our shipwreck clinches the matter. Its cargo of ceremonial accoutrements and sacred artefacts shows the priests possessed the wealth of kings.”
“But surely the wreck is Bronze Age, thousands of years later than the Black Sea exodus,” Costas protested.
“Yes, Akrotiri was a Bronze Age foundation, a trading emporium by the sea, but Neolithic pottery and stone tools have been found all over the island. The earliest settlement probably lay inland and upslope, a better location at a time when sea-raiding was rife.”
“What was the date of the monastery?” Costas asked.
“It’s astonishingly old, fifth to sixth millennium BC. You see how everything falls into place. As for the shipwreck, probably not just the gold disc but many other sacred artefacts on board will prove to have been much older, venerated heirlooms dating back thousands of years before the Bronze Age.”
“So how does Minoan Crete fit in?”
Jack gripped the edge of the table, his euphoria palpable.
“When people think of the ancient world before the Greeks and Romans, it tends to be the Egyptians, or the Assyrians and other Near Eastern peoples mentioned in the Bible. But in many ways the most extraordinary civilization was the one that developed on the island of Crete. They may not have built pyramids or ziggurats but everything points to a uniquely rich culture, wonderfully creative and perfectly attuned to the bounty of their land.” Jack could sense the mounting excitement in the others as they began to make sense of everything they had juggled in their minds since the conference in Alexandria.
“It’s difficult to visualize today, but from where we are now the Atlanteans controlled a vast plain that extended from the ancient shoreline to the foothills of Anatolia. The island of Thera is also highly fertile but too small to have sustained a population anything like this size. Instead the priests looked south, to the first landfall two days’ sail from Akrotiri, an immense stretch of mountain-backed coast that must have seemed like a new continent.”
“Crete was first occupied in the Neolithic,” Hiebermeyer commented. “As I recall, the oldest artefacts from under the palace at Knossos are dated by radiocarbon to the seventh millennium BC.”
“A thousand years before the end of Atlantis, part of the great wave of island settlement after the Ice Age,” Jack agreed. “But we already suspected another wave arrived in the sixth millennium BC, bringing pottery and new ideas about architecture and religion.”
He paused to marshal his thoughts.
“I now believe they were Atlanteans, colonists who paddled on from Thera. They terraced the valleys along the north coast of Crete, establishing vineyards and olive orchards and raising sheep and cattle from the stock they brought with them. They used obsidian which they found on the island of Melos and came to control as an export industry, just as the priests of Atlantis had controlled bronze. Obsidian came to be used in ceremonial gift exchanges that helped to establish peaceful relations all over the Aegean. For more than two thousand years the priests presided over the development of the island, exercising benign guidance from a network of peak sanctuaries as the population gradually coalesced into villages and towns and grew wealthy from agricultural surplus.”
“How do you explain the appearance of bronze more or less simultaneously across the entire Near East in the third millennium BC?” Costas asked.
Mustafa answered. “Tin was beginning to trickle into the Mediterranean from the east. It would have led to experimental alloying by coppersmiths all over the region.”
“And I believe the priests bowed to the inevitable and decided to reveal their greatest secret,” Jack added. “Like medieval monks or Celtic druids I think they were international arbiters of culture and justice, emissaries and intermediaries who linked together the developing nation states of the Bronze Age and maintained peace where they could. They saw to it that the legacy of Atlantis was a common currency in the culture of the region, with shared features as grandiose as the courtyard palaces of Crete and the Near East.”
“We know they were involved in trade from the shipwreck evidence,” Mustafa said.
“Before our wreck there had been three excavations of Bronze Age ships in the east Mediterranean, none Minoan and all of later date,” Jack went on. “The finds suggest it was the priests who controlled the lucrative metal trade, men and women who accompanied the cargoes on long-haul voyages to and from the Aegean. I believe that same priesthood first unveiled the wonders of bronze technology, a revelation orchestrated over the whole area but conducted in greatest earnest on the island of Crete, a place where careful nurture during the Neolithic had ensured conditions were right for a repetition of their grand experiment.”
“And then the multiplier effect.” Katya’s face seemed flushed in the torchlight as she spoke. “Bronze tools foster a second agricultural revolution. Villages become towns, towns beget palaces. The priests introduce Linear A writing to facilitate record-keeping and administration. Soon Minoan Crete is the greatest civilization the Mediterranean had ever seen, one whose power lay not in military might but in the success of its economy and the strength of its culture.” She looked across at Jack and nodded slowly. “You were right after all. Crete was Plato’s Atlantis. Only it was a new Atlantis, a utopia refounded, a second grand design that continued the age-old dream of paradise on earth.”
“By the middle of the second millennium BC, Minoan Crete was at its height,” Dillen said. “It was just as described in the first part of Solon’s papyrus, a land of magnificent palaces and exuberant culture, of bull-leaping and artistic splendour. The eruption of Thera shook that world to its foundations.”