More than two thousand kilometres to the west lies Carthage, location of the fictional Maritime Museum. Since 1972 the UNESCO “Save Carthage” programme has ensured that the city is among the most studied from antiquity, despite having been razed by the Romans in 146 BC and again by the Arabs almost nine hundred years later. Today an outstanding feature is the landlocked circular harbour where excavations have revealed slipways that once housed a fleet of war galleys.
Solon is a genuine historical character who lived from about 640 to 560 BC. He was chief archon of Athens in 594 BC and famous as a statesman whose reforms paved the way towards the democratic city-state of the Golden Age. Afterwards he travelled extensively in Egypt and Asia Minor and was revered as one of the “seven wise men” of Greece. His only writings to survive are a few fragments of poetry, but there can be no doubt that like Herodotus a century later he would have taken extensive notes from the priests and other informants he met on his travels.
The “Atlantis Papyrus” is fictional, though the circumstances of its discovery are inspired by a remarkable series of finds in western Egypt. In 1996 at the oasis of Bahariya a donkey broke through the sand into a rock-cut necropolis that had lain undisturbed for fifteen centuries. Since then more than two hundred mummies have been uncovered, many gilded and painted with portrait faces and religious scenes. They are from the Graeco-Roman period, dating after Alexander’s conquest in 332 BC, but in 1999 archaeologists digging beneath the oasis town of El Bawiti discovered the tomb of a governor of Bahariya during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664–525 BC), the period of Solon’s travels.
The ruins of Saïs lie under the modern village of Sa el-Hagar in the western Delta near the Rosetta branch of the Nile, less than thirty kilometres from the Mediterranean. Like Carthage and Alexandria, little remains of the riverside metropolis, its masonry plundered and its foundations lying beneath metres of silt. Nevertheless, Saïs was probably an important cult centre at the dawn of Egyptian history, even before the Early Dynastic Period (circa 3100 BC). By the time of Solon’s visit it was the Royal Capital of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, a place the Greeks would have known well from their nearby emporium of Naucratis.
Pilgrims came from far and wide to pay their respects at the temple of the goddess Neith, a vast complex described by Herodotus when he visited the following century. He met with the “scribe,” his term for the high priest, who “kept the register of the sacred treasures of Athene (Neith) in the city of Saïs,” a man who regrettably “did not seem to me to be in earnest” (Histories ii, 28). The temple had towering obelisks, colossal statues and human-headed sphinxes (ii, 169–171, 175). Today it requires a leap of the imagination to envisage anything like this at the site, but a low limestone wall suggests a precinct as large as the famous complex at Karnak in Upper Egypt.
The excavations which produced the early hieroglyphs and the priest list are fictional. However, by extraordinary chance the name of the man who may have been the very priest met by Solon is known: Amenhotep, whose impressive statue, in greywacke sandstone, probably from Saïs, probably dedicated in the temple and of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, is in the British Museum (no. EA41517). He holds a naos, a shrine containing a cult image of the goddess Neith.
Bronze Age sailors intent on reaching the Nile from Crete may have departed from the recently excavated port of Kommos, on the south coast within sight of the palace of Phaistos. From its magnificent position the palace dominates the Mesara plain and abuts Mount Ida with its sacred caves and peak sanctuaries. Three kilometres away lies the complex known as Hagia Triadha, traditionally interpreted as a royal villa but perhaps some form of seminary for the Minoan priesthood. It was here in 1908 that the famous Phaistos disc was discovered. The 241 symbols and 61 “words” have so far defied translation but may relate to an early language spoken in western Anatolia, and thus to the Indo-European spoken in the early Neolithic. The shape of marking termed here the “Atlantis symbol” actually exists, uniquely on this disc: several of them from one die are clearly visible, one close to the centre on one side.
No second disc has been discovered. However, visitors can ponder the existing disc close up in the Archaeological Museum at Heraklion, where it is displayed alongside other treasures of the Minoan world.
Hagia Triadha in Crete also produced a painted sarcophagus depicting a bull trussed on an altar, its neck bleeding into a libation vessel. Some fifty kilometres north at Arkhanes archaeologists found evidence for a different kind of offering: a youth bound on a low platform inside a hilltop temple, his skeleton propping up a bronze knife incised with a mysterious boar-like beast. Moments after his death the temple collapsed in an earthquake and preserved the only evidence yet found for human sacrifice in the Bronze Age Aegean.
Arkhanes lies under Mount Juktas, the sacred peak overlooking the valley leading to Knossos. Among the many extraordinary finds at Knossos were several thousand baked clay tablets, the majority impressed with symbols christened Linear B but several hundred with Linear A. Linear B was brilliantly deciphered as an early form of Greek, the language spoken by the Mycenaeans who arrived in Crete in the fifteenth century BC. They adopted the script but rejected the language; Linear A is similar, also being syllabic with a number of shared symbols, but dates from before the Mycenaean arrival and remains substantially untranslated.
Two other Bronze Age sites mentioned are Athens and Troy. On the Acropolis one of few survivals from prehistory is a rock-cut tunnel leading to a subterranean spring; it was this that inspired the idea that there may yet be hidden chambers from the classical period. At Troy, palaeogeographical research has pinpointed the line of the ancient beaches and may one day reveal evidence of a Bronze Age siege.
The Black Sea is indeed dead below about 200 metres, a result of huge accumulations of hydrogen sulphide caused by the biochemical process described in this book. In its deep recesses are deposits of brine which formed when the sea was cut off from the Mediterranean and began to evaporate, causing the salt to precipitate.
To the south the sea lies astride one of the world’s most active geological boundaries, one which came to world attention in 1999 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake devastated northwest Turkey. The North Anatolian Fault between the African and the Eurasian plates runs as far east as Mount Ararat, itself an extinct twin-peaked volcano, and could be associated with imaginary features in this book including the volcanic island, the tectonic rift and the hydrothermal vents.
Several wrecks of ancient merchantmen have been found in the coastal waters of the Black Sea, including one located by a submersible off Bulgaria in 2002. In 2000 the team that pinpointed the ancient shoreline near Sinope found a shipwreck from late antiquity in 320 metres of water, its wonderfully preserved hull an indication of the archaeological marvels that may lie elsewhere in the anoxic depths of the sea.
With the exception of the fictional EH-4, “magic sludge,” and some aspects of laser application, most of the technology presented in this book is grounded in current developments, including matters relating to diving and archaeology. Kazbek is a fictional variant of the Akula-1 class Soviet SSN attack submarine, and thus an imaginary addition to the six boats of this class known to have been commissioned between 1985 and 1990.