In 2001 a hominid skull discovered at Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, was dated to an astonishing 1.8 million years BP, almost a million years before the earliest hominid fossils from Europe. A much later migration from Africa brought Homo sapiens sapiens, who began painting exquisitely lifelike animals on the walls of caves around 35,000 years ago.
The “hall of the ancestors” is based not only on the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, dated respectively to 20,000 BP and 17,000 BP, but also on two more recent finds. In 1994 at Chauvet in south France cavers discovered a complex which had been blocked off by a rock fall in prehistory. The paintings have been dated to 35,000 BP, making them among the oldest ever found; they show that Stone Age artists reached the pinnacle of their skill only a few thousand years after anatomically modern humans arrived in the region. The depictions include giant woolly mammoths and other Ice Age megafauna. Another cave reported in 1991 near Marseilles contained more than 140 paintings and engravings, a particularly remarkable discovery because the entrance lies 37 metres below sea level. The Cosquer Cave shows that other treasures may remain undiscovered in caves submerged at the end of the Ice Age.
It was to be many thousands of years before language was represented by a script, the earliest known being the cuneiform of Mesopotamia and the hieroglyphs of Egypt around 3200 BC. Yet finds from the Upper Palaeolithic (35,000–11,000 BP), contemporary with the cave art, include bones incised with lines and dots that may represent numerical sequences, possibly the passing of the days or the lunar calendar. The idea of writing may thus have been established well before the first need for extensive record-keeping in the early Bronze Age.
The fictional priests of Atlantis are an amalgam of the shamans and medicine men of hunter-gatherer societies with the priest kings of the early city states. They are also distant precursors of the druids, the elusive priests known largely from Caesar’s Gallic Wars. The druids may have been powerful mediators who bound together the disparate tribes of Celtic Europe. Their forebears may have worn the conical golden “wizard’s caps,” intricately embellished with astrological symbols, which have recently been identified among Bronze Age finds; the symbols suggest an ability to chart and predict the movement of the heavens, including the lunar cycle, a knowledge also revealed in the megalithic observatories such as Stonehenge. The earliest cap dates from about 1200 BC and so far none have been reported outside western Europe.
The first farmers on the Mediterranean islands had breeding pairs of domestic animals, including deer, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, that were not indigenous and must have been brought from the mainland in paddled longboats. Excavations on Cyprus suggest these migrations began as early as the ninth millennium BC, very soon after the inception of agriculture in the “Fertile Crescent” of Anatolia and the Near East.
The earliest dated wooden boats are dugout fragments from Denmark of the fifth to fourth millennium BC. Whereas the first Egyptian and Near Eastern boats may have been bundles of reeds, recalled in the “papyri-form” shape of later funerary vessels, the abundance of timber along the southern Black Sea shore suggests that vessels built there may have been wooden even before metal tools became available.
A model for Noah’s Ark is the “Dover Boat,” a remarkably well-preserved hull found in the English port of that name in 1992. Though it dates from the Bronze Age, it is a generic shape that may have been typical of the earliest seagoing vessels. It was about fifteen metres long and constructed of planks sewn together with yew withies which could be disassembled for repair and overland transport. With eighteen or twenty paddlers it could have transported passengers, livestock and other cargo across the English Channel. A fleet of such vessels is more likely for a Neolithic exodus than a single vessel the size of the Old Testament ark, especially if metal carpentry tools were absent and effective sailing rigs had yet to be developed.
The most important early Neolithic sites so far discovered are Jericho and Çatal Hüyük (also Çatalhöyük). Jericho, the biblical city identified as Tell es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley of Israel, was surrounded by a massive stone wall built about 8000 BC during the pre-pottery Neolithic. Elsewhere there is little direct evidence for warfare before the sixth millennium BC, in the form of fortifications, burned settlements or massacre sites and a recent reappraisal argues that the Jericho “defences” were in fact protection against floods.
Çatal Hüyük in south-central Turkey flourished from the late seventh to the mid-sixth millennium BC, when it was abandoned. The image of its pueblo-like buildings, their cult rooms furnished with bull’s horn symbols and decorated with exuberant wall paintings, provides an authentic blueprint for structures imagined beneath the Black Sea. The finds include clay and stone figurines of a grotesquely corpulent mother goddess, reminiscent of a stylized female image in clay recently found on the Black Sea coast of Turkey at Ikiztepe.
One of many extraordinary images from Çatal Hüyük is a fresco found in a cult room dated to about 6200 BC showing a volcano venting a great plume of ash. With its twin cones and intervening saddle the volcano looks remarkably like the bull’s horn images from the shrines. Beneath it lies a town, extending outwards as if along a seashore, the buildings reminiscent of Çatal Hüyük but separated into tightly packed rectilinear blocks. The volcano may represent a cinder cone in the Karapinar volcanic field, some fifty kilometres to the east, and the town may be Çatal Hüyük itself; or it may instead be a distant scene where a seaside town really did nestle beneath the twin peaks of a volcano. The painting is the oldest known image of an active volcano and of a planned town.
Around the Black Sea the clearest evidence for precocious development comes from Varna in Bulgaria where a cemetery has produced an enormous cache of gold and copper artefacts alongside objects made from flint and bone. The finds reveal not only the extraordinary achievements of early metallurgists but also a society with stratification reflected in material wealth. The cemetery dates from the late Neolithic, a period also referred to as the “Chalcolithic” or Copper Age, and was in use by the middle of the fifth millennium BC.
Eighty kilometres north of Crete lies the volcanic island of Thera. Only part of the prehistoric town of Akrotiri has been uncovered, but as it emerges from its tomb of ash and pumice it looks like a Bronze Age Pompeii. The inhabitants had some forewarning of the eruption, probably a series of violent earthquakes. As yet no “monastery” has been unearthed, but the splendid marine fresco from Akrotiri, showing a procession of ships and a palatial seaside structure, suggests that religious observance and ceremony played a major part in island life.
Many archaeologists have placed the eruption around 1500 BC, based on evidence for the destruction of the palaces on Crete and the arrival of the Mycenaeans. However, scientists have recently suggested a “best fit” of 1628 BC in the acidity layers of Greenland ice, radiocarbon determinations and dendrochronological analysis of Irish oak and California bristlecone pine. Whatever the precise date, there can be no doubt of the colossal scale of the eruption that obliterated the settlement on Thera, smothered a huge swath of the east Mediterranean and caused tsunamis which pummelled the north coast of Crete and would have overwhelmed ships for miles around.
Alexandria, the great port founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, is the setting for the conference early in this book. It takes place in the Qaitbay Fortress, the fifteenth-century AD castle built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. Many fragments of masonry and sculpture have been charted on the seabed where the lighthouse collapsed in the fourteenth century.