‘So why voyages of the mind?’ Costas asked.
Jack leaned back. ‘That title was prescient, given what we’ve been talking about here,’ he said. ‘Now I know why Jacob was in the audience looking at me as Professor Dillen used to when I stumbled my way through a passage of ancient Greek. I’d already been doing some thinking about Palaeolithic religion, about shamanism and altered consciousness. I looked at all that in relation to seafaring in two ways. First, I read about the common altered-consciousness hallucinations of being in water, and I imagined that a real sea voyage, especially an arduous one, would be something like that. Altered states of mind are often most easily achieved under duress, right? It might have been particularly easy when the imagery of the real-life experience and the dream world seemed so close. And I wasn’t thinking that Stone Age seafarers were floating around aimlessly in a psychedelic daze, but actually that they were purposeful and destination-conscious. They were doing what they did in those caves, navigating their way into the spirit world, but this time marrying it with a real-life voyage using the stars and even navigational aids such as quartz sunstones. I began to think that the idea of early seafarers being terrified of the open sea might be an inheritance from the establishment of sedentary living in the Neolithic. The sea wasn’t the great unknown in deep prehistory. It became the great unknown when it suited rulers to stoke up the fear factor. Before that, sea voyages had given people with shamanic beliefs an experience that would have seemed familiar to them. I argued that they wouldn’t have sailed off into the unknown in fear for their lives, but quite the opposite. They may actually have relished it, and looked forward with huge excitement to what they might discover in a spiritual sense as well as in reality.’
‘And your second point?’
‘Thinking about the prehistoric colonization of Australia led me to Aboriginal songlines, the dreaming tracks that were used to cross the outback. If hunter-gatherers could conceptualize land routes in that way, why not at sea as well? Memorized trackways are often the most practicable routes too, and that made me think about the predictability of ocean currents and winds. I ended my lecture with a picture of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Ra expedition reed boat in the mid-Atlantic in 1969, showing how it would have been difficult to avoid being swept out to sea and towards the Caribbean once you’d sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of west Africa. I argued that the sea isn’t a barrier, it’s a great complex of highways, and nowhere was that more the case than in deep prehistory. I quoted Heyerdahl’s famous last lines from his account of the Ra expedition, that his theory about prehistoric maritime contact came about because he and his crew had actually sailed on the ocean and not on a map.’
‘They’d tried it out rather than sitting in an armchair theorizing,’ Costas said approvingly.
Jack nodded. ‘And that gets us back to Atlantis. At the time of the Black Sea flood, the people of Atlantis may have been undergoing a religious revolution, but they were still not that far away from their Palaeolithic ancestors. If we’ve got it right, there were still shamans present in those final days before the flood, even if they were a beleaguered few. That knowledge of sea travel, that ability to sail off into the unknown, may not yet have been lost.’
Costas nodded. ‘Makes a lot of sense.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘So what’s your big revelation?’
‘Plato.’ Lanowski laughed quietly to himself, pushed up his glasses, looked at Jack intently and chuckled again. ‘Plato, Plato, Plato.’
Costas glanced anxiously at Jack, and then narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘All right, Jacob,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me guess. The Atlantis myth? Plato is the only surviving source. That is, except for the fragment of papyrus Maurice found in the desert that we’re looking at on the screen right now, the bit by Solon about where to find Atlantis that never got to Plato.’
‘Plato,’ Lanowski repeated to himself, shaking his head as if he were in the throes of some private rapture. He suddenly stared at Costas. ‘And Pythagoras.’
Costas held his gaze. ‘Pythagoras. Let me see. Pythagoras is about geometry, right? Triangles, pyramids? Pyramids, early civilizations, Atlantis?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me.’
Lanowski beamed at him. ‘We know from Aristotle that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras. What that means is that Plato believed there was a mathematical and even a musical structure behind everything. But instead of taking an interesting idea into hard science, the Greeks made it esoteric, using it in a mystical way and seeing Pythagorean logic in weird places. They also used it to create hidden messages of meaning. Some scholars have come to believe that Plato embedded codes in his writing to reveal his beliefs to other Pythagoreans. We’re not talking about hidden messages as we might understand a code, but about arrangements of letters and words that had a mathematical logic or – in the case of letters – could be related to the musical scale. Other Pythagoreans might recognize them, like a symbol on a ring or a secret handshake.’
Costas looked puzzled, and jerked his finger at the screen. ‘But if it’s this papyrus you’re on about, Solon wrote it about 580 BC. Isn’t that a couple of decades before Pythagoras was even born?’
‘Often the names we associate with a theory are not those who invented it, and there’s good reason for thinking that ideas we call Pythagorean had their origins much earlier in Greece. If they were floating around already in Solon’s time, then a clever polymath like him would have lapped them up.’
Jack stared at Lanowski. ‘So you think Solon may have put some kind of code in his text?’
Lanowski pointed at the screen, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Thanks to my friend Maurice Hiebermeyer, we’ve got a scan of the very papyrus in front of us. Usually what I’m talking about can only be revealed by stichometric analysis, taking the medieval texts that are our only surviving copies of ancient works and trying to reconstruct how they would have looked on the original papyrus, based on the regular length of lines ancient scribes used. But we’ve actually got an original papyrus, with the lines exactly as Solon composed them. Almost immediately I matched his layout to the twelve-note musical scale. Look, you can see where I’ve highlighted the text, the letters alpha to lamda for the musical notes in the first letters of a line of words running diagonally through that last paragraph. That was my eureka moment. I realized that Solon had been doing what Plato later did, that there was more to this papyrus than meets the eye. So now I’ve been looking at the letters along the right and left margins, and then at criss-cross patterns, and all the other obvious geometric possibilities, and then I’ve been applying basic cryptographic analysis using letter codes. I’m convinced there are words embedded in the text.’
‘You know ancient Greek?’ Costas asked.
‘Yeah. Easy. Did it at school.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve tried about five hundred different letter codes.’
‘In your head.’
Lanowski looked nonplussed. ‘Of course. Computers can’t actually think, you know.’