Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (7 page)

“So how do you explain the discrepancy with Plato’s figure of nine thousand years between the sinking and Solon’s trip to Saïs?” I asked.

“The measurements were a mistake in translation from the Egyptian,” he said. “That’s a very common thing with ancient sources.” Freund notes in his book that for the ancient Greeks, 9 was a very powerful and mythical number. He compares it to the use of 40 in the Hebrew Bible: Noah’s ark sailed through forty days and
nights of rain; Moses spent forty days atop Mount Sinai obtaining the Ten Commandments; the Israelites wandered forty years in the desert, and so on. Nine thousand years was simply Plato’s symbolic way of saying “once upon a time,” he said.

Having already introduced the smoking gun of the Astarte statuettes, Freund had wrapped up
Finding Atlantis
with what he later called “the most compelling evidence for the existence of Atlantis.” He paid a visit to Cancho Roano, a ritual site 150 miles north of Doñana first excavated in 1978. Unlike the area within Doñana, Cancho Roano is widely acknowledged as a Tartessian site, the finest ever uncovered. It seems to have been strictly ceremonial. The building has one entrance, is surrounded by a moat, and consists of a set of identically shaped rooms that radiate out from the center. To Freund, these echoed the single entrance canal, central island, and concentric rings that Plato had written about. When Freund visited a local archaeological museum and saw its collection of Bronze Age steles—slabs of stone decorated with carvings that serve as a marker or monument—he had what he called an aha moment. Several of the steles were inscribed with similar designs—that of a warrior standing next to an image of three concentric circles bisected by a single line leading from outside to the center. “I said to the archaeologist who brought me there, ‘Don’t you see? It’s a miniature version of Atlantis!’”

Then Freund stood abruptly and said that he had to hurry off to set up for an Atlantis presentation at a local synagogue. We walked up the stairs and into the sunshine. I asked how his Spanish colleagues from the documentary had reacted to the finished product.

“Well, the folks from Doñana weren’t very happy,” he said, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”

We shook hands and I watched him drive off. Only then did something occur to me: If Freund had made the most important archaeological discovery in history, why wasn’t he going back to Spain anytime soon?

A Second Opinion

Madrid, Spain

S
everal months later I was wandering the deserted halls of an enormous government building on the outskirts of Madrid, searching for Juan Villarias-Robles. Villarias is a historian and anthropologist who works at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, or CSIC, Spain’s multidisciplinary research council that is similar to the Smithsonian Institution. He had helped organize the research project in Doñana Park. His takeaway from the findings had been, to say the least, a little different from Freund’s.

I rapped on the door matching the number I’d written down and was greeted by a man in his midfifties with eyeglasses and a neat mustache, wearing a necktie. Villarias had a tidy, spacious office, one wall of which was lined with books organized by subject. Large windows looked onto a hideous mirrored-glass building across the street. With a “please, sit down,” Villarias motioned to a pair of low-slung chairs facing each other, like those on a highbrow 1970s talk show. I felt like a patient who was about to receive bad news from his doctor.

Almost no one who had appeared alongside Freund in the
Finding Atlantis
documentary was pleased with it. Part of the displeasure
was the distinct impression left that Freund, with his one week of filming in Doñana, was a modern-day Schliemann who’d orchestrated a major archaeological discovery.
6
Villarias and other members of the team had been working on what they called the Hinojos Project for six years. In the wake of the initial broadcast of
Finding Atlantis
, Villarias had posted a scathing fourteen-hundred-word rebuttal on the website of the
Hartford Courant
, in which he pointed out that Freund had piggybacked onto their research project and then had run off to tell the world he’d discovered Atlantis.

“We were interested in Tartessos, not Atlantis,” Villarias explained. “When Freund came to us, he had no interest in Atlantis at all: His interest was King Solomon. When he learned about our project, he thought—with justification—that we could get data that would date to the tenth century BC. That would be a way of confirming that those expeditions in the Bible to the mysterious land of Tarshish corresponded to the land of Tartessos.”

This made sense. After all, Freund was a historian who specialized in biblical history. I had expected Villarias to be what Spaniards call an
aguafiestas
, or a wet blanket, on the subject of Tartessos and Atlantis, and he certainly had the right to be cranky. Having made his point about Freund, though, Villarias was more interested in talking about the possibility of finding lost cities.

“Tartessos was probably . . . I say ‘probably’”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“because we don’t know very much about it. It was
probably
a Bronze Age society, materially not as advanced as Greece and Rome.
Probably
the oldest organized society in the western Mediterranean, going back to about 1000 BC. There is some argument but I do believe that Tartessos and Tarshish are basically the same.”

“How could you prove that?” I asked. “What sort of evidence would you need?”

“Basically, goods—material remains from tenth-century Israel or Tyre. Pottery or other artifacts that date to the tenth century would be good evidence. Perhaps King Solomon would have said, ‘I’ll give you some nice clothes and crafts and you give me gold and silver from Tarshish.’” No evidence had yet surfaced that would prove the exchange of precious metals for luxury goods, but Villarias was optimistic that something might turn up in the future.

Villarias’s Hinojos Project was a major undertaking, a team of nine Spanish specialists in fields ranging from geology to cartography to archaeology assembled to explore the Tartessos-Atlantis hypothesis put forth in Rainer Kühne’s
Antiquity
article and its accompanying satellite photos. A friend of Villarias had seen a Spanish news story about Kühne’s hypothesis and remembered that Villarias had written his BA thesis on Tartessos.

“Actually, there were two German scholars,” Villarias clarified, raising two fingers. “Kühne, and also Werner Wickboldt, who originally identified the two rings and two rectangles.”

Villarias recalled having been intrigued by 1990s satellite photos Wickboldt produced, but also confused. As far as he could recall, the area in the photos that contained the temples had been a lake in Roman times. Prior to that, it was a large estuary that formed where the Guadalquivir River met the Atlantic Ocean. One of Spain’s most celebrated geologists had established in the 1930s that the marsh had once extended all the way to the present city of Seville, which is sixty miles inland. It seemed unlikely that a majestic port city trading gold and monkeys would have been built in a gigantic swamp.

When Villarias collected a bunch of geological reports to review, though, he came across a reference to a fourth-century-AD poem by a Roman named Rufus Festus Avienus, titled “Ora Maritima” (“Sea Coasts”). The parallels between the transmission of the Atlantis
story from Egypt to Plato and Avienus’s reliance on ancient sources are interesting.

Avienus drew heavily on a document known as the
Massaliote Periplus
, a long-lost guide for merchant sailors, written around the sixth century BC. (The historian Rhys Carpenter defined a periplus as “a Greek literary tradition of versified marine handbooks for navigators, notably headlands, rivers, harbors, and towns along a given route.” Basically, a poetic set of point-to-point directions using landmarks.) The
Massaliote Periplus
, as transmitted through “Ora Maritima,” describes a sea voyage starting in Brittany near the English Channel, then tracing the perimeter of the Iberian Peninsula counterclockwise en route to Massalia, modern Marseille. Along the way, the poem provides a wealth of information about the location of the city of Tartessos.

“It’s just a fragment of the poem, maybe twenty pages,” Villarias said. We stood up and walked over to a map of ancient Spain that he had tacked to his wall. “Adolf Schulten”—the German archaeologist who with George Bonsor excavated in Doñana Park in the 1920s, trying to find evidence of Tartessos and Atlantis—“made the argument that because Avienus mentions names, he is copying old texts. Some of them, such as Hecataeus of Miletus’s
Journey Round the World
, may have been written at the time Tartessos existed. Others, like Bakoris of Rhodes, we don’t even know who that guy is.”

Historian Rhys Carpenter made a convincing argument that Avienus’s primary source, unmentioned in the poem, was the pioneering Greek geographer Pytheas, who had made the long sea voyage to the frozen north somewhere between the years 325 BC and 300 BC, a few decades after Plato wrote the
Timaeus
. Two short sections of “Ora Maritima” give the location of Tartessos and convey the fact that it had been destroyed sometime between Hecataeus’s
Journey
, written in the fifth century BC and probably based on earlier information, and Pytheas’s eyewitness account of the late fourth century BC.

. . . This is the Atlantic Gulf

And here is Gadir, once Tartessos called,

Here too the Pillars of persistent Heracles . . .

Tartessos—prosperous and peopled state

In ancient periods, but now forlorn,

Tiny, deserted, heap of ruined mounds!

Villarias traced his finger on the map, from Cádiz/Gades (a name derived from the Phoenician
Gadir
, meaning “walled city”) past the marshes of Doñana Park and through the Pillars of Heracles at Gibraltar. “Avienus must be interpreted, though,” he said. “Ora Maritima” can’t be read as a Rand McNally map any more than the Atlantis story can be read as pure history. Adolf Schulten’s interpretation of Avienus had led him to the Roman ruins at Cerro del Trigo, where the high water table had prevented him from searching for older ruins. No one followed up, and by the 1960s, Villarias explained, the use of ancient texts as archaeological sources had fallen out of fashion as scientific methods such as carbon dating, stratigraphy probes, and aerial photography took precedence.
“Ora Maritima” was largely forgotten.

In 2005, Villarias helped assemble a multidisciplinary team. The Hinojos Project had two simple objectives: to see if the shapes that the Germans Wickboldt and Kühne had seen in satellite photos were man-made (assuming they existed at all). Second, if these shapes were man-made, was it possible to determine how old they were? The team looked at detailed aerial photos taken in 1956, after dictator Francisco Franco agreed to allow the United States to build military bases in Spain. They gathered the oldest known maps, going back to Catalan and Italian sea charts of the fourteenth century, centuries before longitude had been discovered. They recruited a biologist to analyze prehistoric pollen samples. They arranged for a
new set of aerial photographs. The initial results were intriguing. Where Wickboldt and Kühne had seen two rings and two rectangles hiding under the marshes, the Hinojos team found
fifteen
forms. “Because of their geometrical and well-proportioned outlines,” Villarias-Robles wrote in a follow-up report, ten of the shapes “look especially suggestive of man-made structures.” This wealth of promising evidence was enough to merit further investigation.

In 2009, the team conducted an ERT test of what Freund describes in
Digging Through History
as “a distinctive marking in the ground in the places where the concentric circles of the inner city of Atlantis would have been located.” Such gaps often indicate a chemical “shadow” of old building materials that have since disintegrated. The ERT results showed that the rings seen on the satellite photos were real. “It took us all by surprise,” Freund recounts in his book. “The intermittent breaks in the ERT layer were the remnants of the ancient walls of a Bronze Age city that had been there thousands of years before.”

“We got very excited,” Villarias told me as we sat down again. He didn’t sound especially excited. “The trouble is, when we finally obtained all the carbon 14 dates, from even deeper samples, the age of those anomalies cannot be more than two thousand years old.” In other words, at least four hundred years younger than Plato himself. Villarias’s best guess was that the shapes were caused by animal enclosures made of degradable materials like wood or mud brick, that had held horses or cattle belonging to the caliph of Córdoba. “When the Christian reconquest took place in the thirteenth century, we know there was a very dramatic depopulation of the area,” he said.

“But what about the ancient figurines?” I asked of the Astarte statues whose discovery might rewrite ancient history.

“That’s a funny story,” Villarias said. The corners of his mouth turned slightly upward beneath his mustache. The figurines were found while the documentary was filming, one by historian Ángel León and one by Sebastián Celestino, one of Spain’s leading
archaeologists and an authority on Tartessian culture. “Richard Freund and the camera people got very excited. Freund came up with this interpretation that these figurines were representations of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who is the Roman goddess Venus more or less. Astarte was probably very important in the time of Tartessos. So while you saw Freund making the point that these were representations of Astarte, Sebastián, who is an expert and knows much more than Freund, was touching the figurines and telling me in Spanish, ‘I don’t think so. These figures are too round.’ Whereas Phoenician statuettes have more straight lines. The figures are broken, so we don’t have the complete features, but similar statuettes have been found in Andalusia. These could be late Roman or even later, from the baroque.” That would mean they had been created about two thousand years after Plato died.

“Did you mention this to Freund?”

“We couldn’t reach the producers before the documentary was released to warn them. And he didn’t bother to check with us.”

“Let me guess—the Cancho Roano stuff doesn’t hold up, either,” I said. This was Freund’s “most compelling evidence” that Tartessos had been Atlantis.

“Cancho Roano is a Tartessian site—no question about it. Sebastián has been working there for like twenty years. It was begun in about 600 BC, which is late in the history of Tartessos. We know from Avienus and from Greek sources that Tartessos was on an island, and so of course surrounded by water. Freund came up with the idea—which I think is bright—that Cancho Roano is a replica or a microcosmic representation of a city surrounded by water. But it’s very, very, very far-fetched to bring Atlantis there.” The three concentric rings bisected by a line weren’t a symbol for Plato’s lost city but for a warrior’s shield. Similar symbols had been found throughout Europe.

One thing that the Hinojos Project had been able to confirm is
that some sort of cataclysm struck the southwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 BC and repeatedly over the years. The model is the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755: earthquakes followed by floods. “Our geologist doesn’t like to call it a tsunami because he might be labeled a sensationalist, but to me it’s a tsunami,” Villarias said.

“We checked the records and it so happens that a big disaster like the Lisbon one took place exactly 400 years earlier in 1356. The previous one was in 881. And before that in the fourth century. So every 350 to 450 years there is a big one. People forget until it happens to them. If that rule is accurate, and I think it is, the next one will be around the year 2150.”

As for Freund’s hiring divers to search for stones in the Bay of Cádiz outside the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, Villarias agreed that it was a great idea. But the CSIC team had determined that after a series of seismic events, the loose, wet ground in the Hinojos Marsh had subsided, dropping like a failed soufflé. Water, as well as any debris such as stones and dead bodies, would have been trapped in the estuary rather than being flushed into the ocean. This entombment of organic material might have caused the methane they found, but they couldn’t be certain. Each year during the rainy season, the Guadalquivir floods the plain and leaves behind a layer of sediment. Any traces of Tartessos—or, why not? Atlantis—were likely buried under many meters of silt and clay, probably forever. Schulten and Bonsor had given up when they hit the water table in the 1920s. Nowadays, no sane bureaucrat was going to authorize massive excavations in the middle of a nature sanctuary.