‘What was the subject of the text of the Periplus of Hanno beside the note?’ Jack asked.
‘It was the first sentences of the Periplus, where the text describes Hanno sailing past the Pillars of Hercules with fifty large ships and thirty thousand settlers. The erased note is opposite the line where Hanno talks about cities of the “Libyo-Phoenicians”. He lists city names that occur nowhere else and can’t be precisely identified, though several of them probably correspond to the known Phoenician outposts of Lixus and Mogador on the Moroccan coast facing the Atlantic. There’s a clue in that note to which one of those cities he’s referring to.’
‘I’ve been there,’ Jack murmured. ‘My undergraduate study tour, examining evidence for Phoenician exploration along the coast of west Africa. The archaeology of the very early period is pretty elusive, difficult to pin down. Go on.’
Schoenberg picked up a Mini Maglite, held the vellum vertically and shone the light through it. Jack gasped as saw the faint imprint of letters. Schoenberg moved the torch and shone it on one side at the bottom. Jack could clearly see letters in Greek, lower-case letters with the words separated, like modern cursive script. ‘I’ve transcribed it,’ Schoenberg murmured, ‘but you should he able to make out the original Greek. It’s quite clear.’
Jack stared into the halo of light coming through the vellum, then reached out and held a corner to keep it still. He realized that he was looking at the obverse side, seeing the text the correct way round, rather than the mirror imprint on the reverse. He counted twenty-one words in the note, in three lines. Costas took out his notepad and pencil, and stared. ‘Holy cow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you see what I see?’
Schoenberg peered at Costas. ‘Of course. Your name, Kazantzakis. You read Greek too.’
Jack stared at the writing. That word. His heart was pounding, but he tried to stay focused. Costas wrote it down, keeping the lower-case script of the Greek minuscules: . He held the notepaper up so Jack could see it. Atlantis. Jack’s mind flashed back to five years before, to the fragment of papyrus that Maurice Hiebermeyer had found in the mummy necropolis in Egypt, the words that had set in motion their quest for the lost city. That papyrus had been an original text of the early sixth century BC, written by the Greek traveller Solon after his visit to the high priest in the Egyptian temple at Sais, the account that led Plato almost two centuries later to write about the legend of Atlantis in the book that became the basis for all modern speculation. Jack stared at the word, trying to remain analytical. This was a marginal note written by an unknown monk in the tenth century AD. Many monks in the Byzantine world would have known of Plato, and could have read the Atlantis story in his Critias and Timaeus. He thought of other ways the monk could have known that word. ‘The Greek word Atlantis, that exact spelling, first appears in the Histories of Herodotus in the fifth century BC. But for him it meant Atlas, and was his name for the Western Ocean, Atlantis Thalassa, the Sea of Atlas. That’s the first time in history that the ocean is called the Atlantic, and the monk could simply have been using the word Atlantis in that sense.’
‘That’s what I thought at first,’ Schoenberg said. ‘But despite its appearance so early in Herodotus, the more common Greek and Roman name for the Atlantic was simply Ocean. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History in the first century AD calls it that, Oceanus. The ancients of course knew about the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the Maris Erythraei of the other periplus, but to them there was only one Ocean, the huge expanse to the west beyond the Pillars of Hercules.’
Costas had been peering closely at the vellum. Now he sat back up, clearing his throat. ‘What if all the scholars got it wrong? What if Herodotus too had heard the legend of Atlantis passed down from Solon, or at least part of it? What if Atlantis Thalassa really does mean the Sea of Atlantis, not the Sea of Atlas?’
Jack stared at him. ‘Because we know Atlantis was in the Black Sea. We found it.’
Costas shook his head. ‘No. I don’t mean the original Atlantis. I mean Atlantis refounded.’
‘The new Atlantis,’ Schoenberg said triumphantly. ‘My conclusion precisely. Now you see why I was so excited.’
Jack leaned over and peered closely, letting his eyes adjust to the faint smudges left by the ink. He took the notepad from Costas and wrote down each letter of the Greek: . Then he sat up and read it aloud.
Schoenberg looked at him intently. ‘As well as the word Atlantis, there are three proper names. The first two, Noe and Alkaios, are individuals. Alkaios was a common enough Greek name, the original name of Heracles before he became a demigod and took his mother Hera’s name. When I saw that, I wasn’t surprised, as the deeds of Heracles would have been in the mind of anyone thinking about those western extremities of the known world visited by Hanno. It was there that Heracles supposedly took the Golden Apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the “Ladies of the West”. But it was the first of those two names, Noe, that really intrigued me. The accent shows that it should be read with the last letter emphasized, as “ah”.’
‘Noah,’ Costas said.
Jack looked at him, stunned. Noah. It was not possible.
Schoenberg nodded. ‘Noah of course is a name familiar from the Hebrew Old Testament, though it probably has a much older Indo-European origin.’
Costas turned to Jack. ‘Do you remember five years ago at Atlantis joking that we’d also found the basis for the story of Noah’s Ark? You speculated that an organized exodus from Atlantis as the flood waters rose would have included breeding pairs of livestock, even the giant aurochs that they bred for sacrifice.’
Jack stared at the notebook. ‘I don’t think I was joking. This is extraordinary.’ He slowly translated the first sentence: ‘ From here, Noah and Alkaios from Atlantis set sail to the west, to found a new city.’
Schoenberg pointed at the vellum. ‘The word you’ve translated as “city”, polu, the Greek word polis, can mean “city-state” or “state”. The word apo, “from”, before the word Atlantis, is unambiguous, as is the word nea, “new”, before the word for city. They were going from Atlantis, to found a new city. When I saw that in 1942, I believed that the only rational explanation was that the Atlantis myth harked back to the fall of Minoan Crete in the Aegean Sea towards the end of the Bronze Age in the second millennium BC. Geographically this note seemed to make sense, that these two men, Noah and Alkaios, were refugees sailing west from the Aegean through the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic Ocean, to seek lands for a new city. In classical antiquity that would have been a familiar concept, with many Greek cities in the western Mediterranean being founded as colonies of their mother city. But now, with your discovery of a Neolithic Atlantis, I revise my theory. The direction of travel remains the same, from the Mediterranean to the west, but it is vastly older than I could have imagined then, as old as the sixth millennium
BC.’
‘That is, if this comment isn’t just a bit of fantasy made up by a medieval monk,’ Costas said.