Despite their fatigue, Jack knew he had been right to call a press conference immediately. In little more than an hour the reporters would all be back at the IMU staging headquarters at Trabzon and news of the discovery would be flashed around the world in time to fill the next morning’s headlines.
As the first helicopter settled on the helipad and began to disgorge scurrying teams of cameramen, Jack stood up, his rugged features framed against the dying light of the day. Just before walking down the steps to face the limelight he turned to the others.
“I’m here with Sea Venture until the search is called off,” he said. “Peter wouldn’t have wanted it but I owe it to him. I brought him here and he was my friend.”
“He was a hero,” Katya said softly. “The world is a better place than it was five days ago.”
They looked over to where she still leaned on the rail, staring to the east. She turned to him and held his gaze. The emotions of the last few days were etched on her face, but the soft copper hues of the evening light seemed to wipe away her cares and radiate the warmth of a brighter future. She got up, and, smiling tiredly, came over and stood beside him.
Jack took a deep breath and then looked back at the others.
“Oh, and any of you are welcome to take some R & R at my expense.”
“Sorry, old boy.” Dillen smiled warmly at Jack, his pipe clenched firmly between his teeth. “I have a conference on palaeolinguistics to chair and this little diversion has disrupted my preparations completely. I’m afraid I have to get back to Cambridge tomorrow.”
“And I have Noah’s Ark to find,” Mustafa said nonchalantly. “Not on Mount Ararat but on the shoreline where the southern group beached their vessels before going overland. I need to organise an IMU survey team.”
Jack turned to Hiebermeyer and Aysha. “And I suppose you have some boring old mummies to excavate.”
Hiebermeyer allowed himself a rare smile. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Just don’t find any more treasure maps.”
“Now you mention it, we’ve just had an intriguing report of a discovery in the Hellenistic quarter of the necropolis. Something to do with Alexander the Great, a secret shipment across the Indian Ocean to a far-off mountain kingdom.”
They could see Jack’s interest was immediately excited, his mind already racing over the possibilities.
“And in case you’d forgotten, we still have a Minoan shipwreck to excavate.” Costas had put aside his drink and was surveying the latest reports on his palm computer. “They’ve just brought up some amazing artefacts, golden sheets covered with strangely familiar symbols.” He grinned and looked up at his friend. “So where’s our next project?”
“That’s another story.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The discovery that underpins this story is fictional. However, the archaeological backdrop is as plausible as the story allows, taking account of the current state of knowledge and debate. The purpose of this note is to clarify the facts.
The Black Sea Flood. The Messinian salinity crisis is an established event, a result of tectonic and glacio-eustatic processes which cut off the Mediterranean from the Atlantic; the crisis has been dated to 5.96 to 5.33 million years BP (Before Present), with inundation over the Gibraltar land bridge occurring rapidly at the end. The level of the Mediterranean rose about 130 metres further during the “great melt” at the end of the Ice Age some twelve to ten thousand years ago.
Recently evidence has been marshalled to suggest that the Black Sea was cut off from the Mediterranean for several thousand years more, and did not rise to the same level until a natural dam across the Bosporus was overwhelmed in the sixth millennium BC. Core samples from below the floor of the Black Sea suggest a change from freshwater to seawater sediments about 7,500 years ago, a date pinpointed by radiocarbon analysis of mollusc shells from either side of the horizon. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have experienced a rapid retreat phase about this time, and it could be that such an event, combined with tectonic activity, pushed the sea over the Bosporus.
In 1999 researchers using sonar and a dredge found a probable berm from an ancient shoreline 150 metres below sea level off northern Turkey near Sinope. Although there is much debate about the date, rapidity and volume of the Black Sea flood, its existence is widely accepted.
The Neolithic Exodus. Many experts believe that Indo-European language originated in the Black Sea region sometime between the seventh and fifth millennia BC. Well before the Black Sea flood hypothesis, leading archaeologists argued that Indo-European language evolved among the first farmers of Anatolia about 7000 BC, that it reached Europe about 6000 BC and that its spread went hand in hand with the introduction of large-scale agriculture and animal husbandry. This model has provoked much controversy, not least over whether diffusion primarily involved the spread of people or ideas, but it remains central to any debate over the origins of civilization.
Atlantis. The only source for the Atlantis story is the dialogues Timaeus and Critias written by the Greek philosopher Plato in the first half of the fourth century BC. The credibility of the story rests on two leaps of faith: first, that Plato was not simply making it up; second, that his avowed source, the Athenian scholar Solon several generations earlier, had not himself been spun a tale by the priests at Saïs in Egypt who were his supposed informants sometime in the early sixth century BC.
It seems likely that Egyptian priests did indeed have records stretching back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus, who gathered reams of information from the priests when he visited in the mid-fifth century BC, much of it verifiable, was shown a papyrus with the succession list of “three hundred and thirty” Egyptian monarchs (Herodotus, Histories ii, 100). He sounds a note of caution: “Such as think the tales told by the Egyptians credible are free to accept them for history” (ii, 122).
By the time of Solon, Mediterranean seafarers knew of distant shores beyond the Red Sea to the east and the Pillars of Hercules to the west. Yet there is no need to look so far afield for Atlantis. To the Egyptians in the sixth century BC, isolated for centuries following the collapse of the Bronze Age world, the island of Crete was a mysterious land beyond the horizon which had once housed a brilliant civilization. All contact had been lost following a cataclysm which they may have experienced in the pall of darkness and plague of locusts recorded in the Old Testament (Exodus, 10).
Today, many who accept the veracity of Plato’s story see Atlantis in the civilization of Minoan Crete and its disappearance in the eruption of Thera in the middle of the second millennium BC.
A Minoan shipwreck has yet to be excavated. However, several wrecks of later Bronze Age date have been found, including one in 1982 off south-west Turkey hailed as the greatest discovery in archaeology since the tomb of Tutankhamun. The finds include ten tonnes of oxhide-shaped copper and tin ingots; a cache of cobalt-blue glass ingots; logs of ebony, and ivory tusk; beautiful bronze swords; Near Eastern merchants’ seals; gold jewellery and a magnificent gold chalice; and an exquisite gold scarab of Nefertiti that pins the wreck to the late fourteenth century BC. The metal was enough to equip an entire army and may have been royal tribute. The finds even include items of religious significance interpreted as the accoutrements of priests. These treasures are now magnificently displayed in the Museum of Underwater Archaeology at Bodrum.