Interlude II: The True Origins of Civilization
Where could the answers be found? Indeed, what sort of evidence would constitute answers?
Marshack had an idea which, he felt, might allow this question of evidence to be resolved: our modern world is created and bound by a sense of time. Science studies things which occur over time, from the movement of the planets to the swing of a pendulum. And the way in which science conducts this study is also bound by time, for it collects results: summaries or averages leading to theories which predict the likelihood of repetition ahead in time. This sense of time, Marshack argued, begins with agriculture. A hunting lifestyle can be conducted on a day-by-day basis, but a settled agricultural life needs a sense of a year with its cycle of seasons.
Thus, Marshack concluded, in order for early man to change from the primitive hunting and gathering way of life to a settled agricultural existence, he needed to learn a concept of time. Any evidence, then, of a concept of time would also constitute the evidence for the origins of a settled agricultural culture.
He contacted experts with his thesis; in particular, he contacted the French expert on the cave art which dates from the Ice Age period. He asked if any of the art revealed evidence for seasonal or periodic time for the painting. He received the reply that it was suspected to do so, but there was no proof.
But in 1963, when his scientific book was virtually completed, he found a key piece of evidence which was to unsprocket his entire writing schedule. He belatedly looked at an article he had clipped from a scientific journal the year before. It dealt with a small bone tool, a prehistoric engraving tool – a bone handle with a sharp chip of quartz fixed to one end which had been found in a site at Ishango in Zaïre, near Lake Edward. It was dated to 6500 BC. The bone handle had a series of scratched markings down its length. The interpretation given for these markings seemed unconvincing to Marshack. Acting on a hunch, in fifteen minutes of study he had found the explanation.
The scratches, he could demonstrate, were a record of lunar phases: of the sets of new, quarter and full moons during the course of a few months.
Whoever constructed this, then, had a concept of time. Marshack began looking at all the published finds of prehistoric stones and bones which had been scratched, marked or engraved in any way. Hundreds of these, dating back to 35,000 years ago or more, had been found all over Europe but they remained enigmatic. Here, Marshack concluded, with the people who made these objects, were the true origins of our civilization.
Yet why did so many millennia pass before the apparent beginning of culture?
Commenting on this, the writer Colin Wilson throws his hands up in exasperation at the orthodox dating of the rise of urban centres. With man, he says
poised on the brink of civilisation 35,000 years ago, living in a community sufficiently sophisticated to need a knowledge of astronomy, we are asked to believe that it actually took him another 25,000 years before he began to take the first hesitant steps towards building the earliest cities. It sounds, on the whole, rather unlikely.22
Interlude III: The Conclusions
Alexander Marshack has argued that all the necessary elements of civilized culture were in place by 35,000 BC. It is obvious that if the elements were in place, then they were in use. Therefore at this time we can expect that somewhere there were settled farmers needing to understand the movements of the moon and sun in order to regulate their agricultural production.
The implications of his thesis are important. Settled farming means trade; trade means communities – villages or towns which in turn mean the specialization of trades, craftsmanship and art, for example. Language, laws and a primitive writing are not far away. In fact, a symbolic system of notation – primitive writing, in effect – seems to have been in use by the prehistoric cave painters.
Where might be the residues? Where might be the farms and towns we would expect? As we have already seen, the best lands for agricultural and trading settlements would be the well-watered river valleys and coastal delta regions.
The maximum amount of land of this type was available, as we have seen, for about 10,000 years during the greatest period of the Ice Age, from around 22,000 BC to 12,000 BC. At this latter date the sea’s rise would begin to cause serious disruption. With the rise of water levels, any remaining evidence of occupation – if it was in any form to survive – would be on the seabed.
Settlers of the River Valleys
If Marshack’s analysis is correct and a settled culture had developed at least by 35,000 BC, this would allow a very long period of development and refinement preceding the end of the Ice Age. The ice began to melt in 12,000 BC; the ice-cap collapsed catastrophically around 8000 BC, but had stabilized by 7000 BC. This would be a perfectly competent explanation for why we ‘suddenly’ find urban cultures around 9000 to 8000 BC in the Anatolian highlands – cultures founded by refugees from the flooded lowlands.
After this, with the stabilization of the sea at its new level, mankind perhaps dared venture back down to seek the fertile valleys. This would be one explanation of why the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley come after those of the Anatolian highlands, when the reverse would normally be expected.
These suggestions have received support from a recent study by Professor Tjeerd Van Andel of the University of Cambridge and Professor Curtis Runnels of Boston University. It focuses upon the colonization of the Larisa basin region in Greece, north-west of Athens.23 Here lie the plains of Thessaly, the legendary kingdom of Deucalion, survivor of the Flood.
All over Europe during the latter part of the Ice Age, from 12,000 to 8000 BC, great rivers, swollen by the melting ice and rain, carried large quantities of gravel and silt down from the glaciers and ice-caps. These overloaded rivers regularly silted up, flooded and changed their course. Over the years they filled in the valleys with many yards of debris creating wide flood plains.
Greece during the high glacial period was markedly different from the Greece of today. The greatest difference was that prehistoric Greece had many huge coastal plains; today such land is very rare.24 After the inundation of these Greek lowlands the only inhabitants were small roaming groups of nomadic hunters, killing game with their distinctive bows and arrows tipped with very small sharp pieces of flint.
Around 7000 BC, following the time that the coastline stabilized, there was an influx of a completely new type of people leading a completely different way of life. These immigrants chose, overwhelmingly, to live upon what remained of the fertile and well-watered flood plains which had never been settled by the hunters.
These new people were farmers; they led a settled life, domesticated animals and cultivated crops. They chose the flood plains because the soil was light, easily tilled and well-watered. In addition to their own animals and the crops, there were many local sources of food such as deer, wild boar and water fowl; fish and shellfish also abounded.
But this evidence confronts us with a mystery: we have no idea where these people came from. No artefacts, no pottery, fabrics, nor any other archaeological remains have ever been found which would allow an identification of their origins. All we know is that they came by sea, and they brought their skills with them.
Van Andel and Runnels consider that the most likely source for these immigrants is either from the highlands of Palestine or from southern Anatolia. The latter is considered the most likely since the terrain around Çatal Hüyük, they say, being on a flood plain, is very similar to the area in Greece where these immigrants first settled.
The results of this study opened more questions for its authors: why, they asked, since there was no pressure over land use in Anatolia, did anybody choose to emigrate from what must have been a successful and comfortable situation? And how did they find this particular Greek plain on which to settle? How did they even suspect it existed?
The authors speculate that the Anatolian farmers may have had contact with early traders and seafarers.25 Something of
this sort must be the case since living in a landlocked site such as Çatal Hüyük would not promote the skills associated with building, sailing and navigating boats. It is more likely that they had good, presently unknown, contacts with these mysterious early mariners.
There were, it seems, even at this early era just following the last Ice Age, competent seafarers already exploring the Mediterranean, and perhaps even further afield, perhaps beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar).26
The Earliest Settlers of Greece
The whole episode of the early settlement of Greece suggests less a gratuitous emigration from an already comfortable home than that of a long-awaited return to a lost homeland. One which was far beneath the sea off the coast of Greece. The refugees from the rising seas and destructive rivers had fled when the seas tumbled across their lands after 8000 BC. They took with them to their refuges in the highlands which border the eastern Mediterranean their skills in farming and animal husbandry.
There, their communities survived and it is the remains of these which archaeologists have excavated. It is only due to the destruction of their former homes that these new communities, like Çatal Hüyük, are considered to be the earliest by the archaeologists. When the changes had ceased, when the sea coast had arrived at its more or less modern level, around 7000 BC, the descendants of the original refugees acted upon a long-awaited plan and returned home; rather like the European Jews returning to the Holy Land after 1,800 years of exile.
At about the same time immigrant farmers moved into Crete. It is thought that they also came from the Anatolian highlands.27 Such maritime colonization both in Crete and in mainland Greece reveals a considerable degree of long-term planning and organization. At the least, they would need to use boats that were competent, to make certain that the seed stock was not ruined by water, as well as large enough to transport livestock.
Archaeologists emphasize that such colonization reveals a completely different mental perspective to that held by the primitive hunter-gatherers who were the earlier inhabitants in the region. It cannot be explained as a natural or accidental development of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.28
Amongst the academics who have studied this phenomenon there
Possible source for the immigration of farmers into Greece and Crete around 7000 BC.
is a growing suspicion that there might be much more going on than they have suspected. Speaking of the Cretan immigration, one study asks whether, on the one hand, it is perhaps unique and so just a local oddity of little importance, or whether it might be ‘the tip of a largely invisible iceberg’?29 Are we seeing just a fragment of what was a widespread and planned immigration and relocation? One which might have been a major factor in the settlement of Greece itself? If this proves true, then the history of early civilization will need rewriting.
The maritime skills by which these travellers reached their destination could not have been recently learned; they must have been part of a sea-going culture for hundreds of years, perhaps millennia.
If a competence in sailing had developed, so too would a competence in navigation and the mapping of routes. We can expect some very early geographical knowledge to have been recorded, somewhere. And, indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, there are some ancient records which suggest the existence of geographic knowledge which is very extensive indeed.
8
The Story of Atlantis
No one knows when the ancient Egyptian city of Saïs was founded; it has been recorded since at least 3000 BC. It rested unobtrusively beside the Nile, in the delta region, through the millennia until it gained a short period of prominence in the seventh century BC. It became the royal capital for the 26th Dynasty of pharaohs.
The many temples of Saïs were tended by a jealous priesthood who maintained the rituals and guarded the historical writings. For the Egyptians believed that all wisdom and knowledge had been given to them by the gods at the very beginning of their civilization; all subsequent innovation, all rewriting, could only move them further away from that original pure truth.
According to tradition, it was here, in one of the temples of Saïs, that a mysterious story from the distant past was carved in hieroglyphics upon great stone pillars. This was the story of the first empire known to mankind: that of Atlantis. The priest of the Temple explained
Nine thousand years ago in the Atlantic Ocean, the true ocean, beyond the Pillars of Heracles was an island larger than Libya and Asia together. Its kings were allied in a great confederation which ruled not only their own island but many other countries; in Africa as far as Egypt and in Europe as far as Tuscany.1
He described Atlantis: for most of its coastline, it rose sheer out of the sea, its high cliffs affording good protection both from the stormy Atlantic and any invading army. Beyond its cliffs were forests, lakes, rivers and, rising above them all, wide ranges of mountains with volcanoes and numerous hot springs which were exploited by the populace. In size Atlantis was similar to Spain; about 500 miles long with its northern border level with the Straits of Gibraltar.
It was rich in natural resources: its forests, lakes and marshes harboured a wide range of wildlife, the most prominent – according to the story – being large numbers of elephants. These latter reports could perhaps refer to the extinct mastodon, a variety of elephant very common during the last Ice Age.
The southern half of the island was quite different. There the mountains stopped; they protected a broad and fertile plain almost 250 miles deep and 370 miles wide. This was the agricultural heartland of the nation. Countless farms, villages, towns and temples dotted the landscape, all linked by a network of canals to the capital city. Vessels plied the canals carrying timber from the inland forests and the farm produce for sale in the city or for export through its port.
The capital of Atlantis stood at the southern tip of this great plain. It was built on a circular plan with at its very centre a temple for the god Poseidon and his human wife, Cleito. The immediate surroundings comprised the royal precinct which contained the king’s palace. Beyond was the first of the wide concentric canals which surrounded and divided the city. There were three of these canals and each provided harbours for the naval and commercial fleets for which Atlantis was renowned.
The chief god and founder of civilization upon Atlantis was Poseidon. The records claim that he came down from above and chose to marry, from amongst the native population who were then living a simple life on the island, an orphaned girl, Cleito. His eldest son, Atlas, he appointed as first king.
The continent and empire of Atlantis as illustrated by Donnelly in 1882.
Poseidon’s cult was celebrated by the sacrifice of bulls. In the centre of the island was his temple and sacred grove within which wild bulls roamed freely. On a regular basis – every fifth or sixth year – the king and his relatives who were the provincial rulers would gather here to renew their covenant with Poseidon and to pass judgement upon affairs of state.
First they were required to hunt and capture a bull: forbidden to use iron weapons they used wooden staves and rope nooses. Once they had taken a bull they would lead it to a metal pillar which stood inside the temple. Upon this pillar were engraved the earliest records and laws of the country. The bull was then sacrificed over the pillar, its blood spilling down over the inscription. The rulers then swore an oath that they would remain true to their law and, to seal this covenant, they all drank from a cup containing a mixture of this blood with some wine. Following this ritual of renewal they would hold court and give their judgements.
For many centuries wisdom and moderation held sway over Atlantis. But, in time, such virtues fell by the wayside and were replaced by avarice and ambition. The wealth and pride of the people lost them the favour of their gods and led them to utter ruin.
They succumbed to the enticements of power; their armies invaded, and sought to hold, a wide empire: the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, North Africa and northern Italy were theirs. Th
en they tried to take Egypt and Greece. They were finally checked in a great battle in which the Athenians took a leading role.
At some time subsequent to this defeat the gods seemed finally to despair, and utterly destroyed them. Great earthquakes and floods struck the earth. Atlantis, in a sudden and catastrophic manner, was swallowed entirely by the sea.
All that remained was a vast shoal of thick mud which rendered the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean impossible.2
The Source of the Story
The story of Atlantis, its period of greatness and its violent destruction was first made public by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. He was one of the earliest and certainly one of the greatest philosophers of all. He was born around 427 BC, and wrote and taught in Athens until his death some eighty years later. To express his ideas he usually wrote his books in the form of discussions or arguments between friends and associates. While he pressed many historical stories and legends into service in this way, he has never been found to have invented them. He took what he found, as he found it, in order to illustrate his philosophy further.
Late in his life, when his reputation was already at its peak, he wrote two related dialogues, his Timaeus and Critias. In both of these he depicts Critias – who in reality was an older relative of Plato – telling the story of Atlantis as he had heard it.