Edwin Björkman
1927
|
NOTE |
Edwin Björkman (1866-1951) was a journalist and literary critic who immigrated from Sweden to the United States. He served as the literary editor of the Asheville Times at the time that he wrote The Search for Atlantis, something of an outlier in a literary output generally given over to social justice and civil rights. The short book is notable for advocating that Atlantis was the same as the Biblical city of Tarshish and that this city could be found near modern Cádiz in southwestern Spain. This claim would find new popularity in 2013 when Richard Freund recycled it wholesale for a National Geographic documentary and again in 2025 when a documentary production claimed to have proved the connection by discovering the remains of Atlantis off of Cádiz. The Search for Atlantis is an interesting and very brief volume, but the published version is highly eccentric. Björkman used ellipses where traditionally an em-dash would be preferred, giving it the appearance of being full of missing words and lacunae. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, compounded the confusion by choosing not to indent paragraphs, making it difficult to see where each began.
|
THE
SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
EXCURSIONS BY A
LAYMAN AMONG OLD LEGENDS
AND NEW DISCOVERIES
IN THREE PARTS
BY
EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
1 9 2 7
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A. · KNOPF · PUBLISHER
BY
EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
1 9 2 7
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A. · KNOPF · PUBLISHER
P A R T O N E
A T L A N T I S
1
A T L A N T I S
1
THERE is romance in the very name, Atlantis, so closely linked with the great ocean whose conquest inaugurated our modern era. Poets have built dreams on the old tale, and students have puzzled over it, ever since Plato first put it into writing. His ablest translator, Benjamin Jowett, called it “a world-famous fiction, second only in importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur.” And he pointed to the share it undoubtedly had in starting the quest that led ultimately to the finding of the New World.
The legend of Atlantis appears first in one of Plato’s dialogues, “Timaeus,” where the relation of it forms a mere interlude. Critias tells it as coming from his great-grandfather, Dropias, who was a relative and friend of Solon, the second and greater law-giver of Athens. Solon was a poet as well as a statesman, and he abandoned poetry for politics only at the urgent request of his fellow citizens, who made him dictator to redeem Athens from the anarchy caused by laws that gave us the word “draconic” for measures so severe that they defeat their own purpose. We might call Solon the Mussolini of his day, and, of course, then as now opinions were divided as to whether his reforms were worth the price paid for them in terms of public freedom. The criticism they aroused was so bitter that Solon left his country in disgust and stayed away for ten years.
During that period he visited Egypt among other countries, observing everything with an open eye, and listening, like Herodotus later, to that mixture of fairy-tale and fact which then formed man’s only historical record. This grand tour of his is commonly supposed to have taken place between 593 and 583 в.с. But Plato, who lived not quite two centuries later, tells us that the Pharaoh of the time was Amasis, and we know that Aahmes II, as he was named in his native realm, reigned from 570 to 526 в.с. He was most friendly to the Greeks, and particularly to the Athenians, whose tutelary goddess, Pallas Athene, was supposed identical with the goddess Neith of his own city of Sais. He confirmed and extended the privileges already enjoyed by the important Greek settlement of Naucratis, near Sais, traces of which have been found not far from the present Rosetta channel of the Nile. All of which tends to make that reported visit of Solon to Aahmes II seem quite plausible, even if the dates given for it should be somewhat mixed up.
This is the story which Plato got from Solon, via Dropidas and Critias, and which he put down quite briefly as an introduction to a dialogue otherwise devoted to cosmogonic speculations and a debate of the relationship between the body and the soul. Evidently Solon was showing off a little to the Egyptian priests by recounting various more or less mythical Greek genealogies, and they were listening with polite but slightly cynical smiles, until the thing got too much for one of the oldest among them, who, in so many words, charged the talker with repeating a lot of children’s tales. The Greeks, this wise old man said, had no historical records worth speaking of, because, just as they had advanced far enough in writing to put down what happened, some natural catastrophe in that country of theirs, which seemed as restless as the men themselves, would wipe out everything they had put down. Egypt was different. There they had known the art of writing and had used it since time immemorial, and there the dry and steady climate left all records undisturbed and undestroyed. In Greece, on the other hand, they had had not only one deluge, as related in the myth about Deucalion and Pyrrha, but any number of them, together with earthquakes galore. And just to prove that he knew what he was talking about, the old priest, who had got a good start by that time, proceeded to give some details concerning the greatest and most sweeping of those disasters which involved not only Greece, but the whole Mediterranean region as far as the Pillars of Heracles and beyond.
It happened many thousand years before their own day, the old priest went on. Of course, in that hoary land of his, a few centuries or millennia more or less did not make much of a difference, so that we, who read about it to-day, need not take his figures too literally. In those days of eld, he said, the Atlantic was navigable, and outside the Pillars of Heracles … by which name the ancients were wont to designate the juxtaposed cliffs of Calpe, our modern Gibraltar, and Abyla, now Ceuta … there was a large island called Atlantis. Beyond it were other islands, and back of these lay the continent surrounding what the old priest called “the real ocean,” the vast Atlantic. For the Mediterranean, he said, was nothing but an inland sea, a harbor with a narrow opening which is practically what our own oceanographers think it.
Atlantis was the centre of a mighty empire, including all those islands, and extending its power within the Pillars, on both shores of the Mediterranean, as far as Tyrrhenia, or modern Italy, on the European side, and all the way to the borders of Egypt on the African side. The people of that empire were a peaceful and virtuous and god-fearing lot until they became so drunk with their own prosperity that the gods, offended by it, goaded them into the fatal sin of hybris, or megalomania, as we should call it to-day. Not satisfied with what they possessed already, the rulers of Atlantis decided to conquer all the rest of the Mediterranean region. For this purpose they raised a mighty host representing all the countries under their sway, and with this force they attacked Greece and Egypt. Athens took the lead among the defenders, and at first it was supported by all its sister states. Gradually, however, these deserted basely to the enemy, and Athens alone, with only the Egyptian forces backing it, continued the fight so bravely that in the end the invaders were ignominiously overcome and driven back to their own shores.
Then, when victory had been achieved and the danger was past, the great disaster occurred of which the old priest chiefly wished to tell. In one day and one night of unprecedented upheaval, with earthquakes and floods like none ever witnessed by man before, the entire army of Athens was swallowed up by the earth, and simultaneously the whole island of Atlantis disappeared utterly beneath the waves of the ocean. In sinking, it seemed to spread out and fill up the regions around it, so that the sea outside the Pillars became shallow and filled up with mud and impenetrable to navigators. Thus Atlantis was lost for ever. Greece had to start all over again. But Egypt went on in its wonted way, piling century on century, and millennium on millennium, into an unbroken historical sequence not equalled anywhere else on the globe, except possibly in China.
Thus ends the story told by Plato in “Timaeus.” It is resumed in the following dialogue of “Critias,” and in far greater detail, but what we get there is merely embroidery on the fundamental story previously told. Again it may be well to warn the reader not to pay too much attention to the space of one day and night assigned by the old priest to the completion of that almost world-wide catastrophe. In a country of such unfathomed past, it was equally easy to extend or contract the telescope of time to turn centuries into millennia, or, dramatically, to compress a couple of centuries into the twenty-four hours between the setting or rising of two suns.
The legend of Atlantis appears first in one of Plato’s dialogues, “Timaeus,” where the relation of it forms a mere interlude. Critias tells it as coming from his great-grandfather, Dropias, who was a relative and friend of Solon, the second and greater law-giver of Athens. Solon was a poet as well as a statesman, and he abandoned poetry for politics only at the urgent request of his fellow citizens, who made him dictator to redeem Athens from the anarchy caused by laws that gave us the word “draconic” for measures so severe that they defeat their own purpose. We might call Solon the Mussolini of his day, and, of course, then as now opinions were divided as to whether his reforms were worth the price paid for them in terms of public freedom. The criticism they aroused was so bitter that Solon left his country in disgust and stayed away for ten years.
During that period he visited Egypt among other countries, observing everything with an open eye, and listening, like Herodotus later, to that mixture of fairy-tale and fact which then formed man’s only historical record. This grand tour of his is commonly supposed to have taken place between 593 and 583 в.с. But Plato, who lived not quite two centuries later, tells us that the Pharaoh of the time was Amasis, and we know that Aahmes II, as he was named in his native realm, reigned from 570 to 526 в.с. He was most friendly to the Greeks, and particularly to the Athenians, whose tutelary goddess, Pallas Athene, was supposed identical with the goddess Neith of his own city of Sais. He confirmed and extended the privileges already enjoyed by the important Greek settlement of Naucratis, near Sais, traces of which have been found not far from the present Rosetta channel of the Nile. All of which tends to make that reported visit of Solon to Aahmes II seem quite plausible, even if the dates given for it should be somewhat mixed up.
This is the story which Plato got from Solon, via Dropidas and Critias, and which he put down quite briefly as an introduction to a dialogue otherwise devoted to cosmogonic speculations and a debate of the relationship between the body and the soul. Evidently Solon was showing off a little to the Egyptian priests by recounting various more or less mythical Greek genealogies, and they were listening with polite but slightly cynical smiles, until the thing got too much for one of the oldest among them, who, in so many words, charged the talker with repeating a lot of children’s tales. The Greeks, this wise old man said, had no historical records worth speaking of, because, just as they had advanced far enough in writing to put down what happened, some natural catastrophe in that country of theirs, which seemed as restless as the men themselves, would wipe out everything they had put down. Egypt was different. There they had known the art of writing and had used it since time immemorial, and there the dry and steady climate left all records undisturbed and undestroyed. In Greece, on the other hand, they had had not only one deluge, as related in the myth about Deucalion and Pyrrha, but any number of them, together with earthquakes galore. And just to prove that he knew what he was talking about, the old priest, who had got a good start by that time, proceeded to give some details concerning the greatest and most sweeping of those disasters which involved not only Greece, but the whole Mediterranean region as far as the Pillars of Heracles and beyond.
It happened many thousand years before their own day, the old priest went on. Of course, in that hoary land of his, a few centuries or millennia more or less did not make much of a difference, so that we, who read about it to-day, need not take his figures too literally. In those days of eld, he said, the Atlantic was navigable, and outside the Pillars of Heracles … by which name the ancients were wont to designate the juxtaposed cliffs of Calpe, our modern Gibraltar, and Abyla, now Ceuta … there was a large island called Atlantis. Beyond it were other islands, and back of these lay the continent surrounding what the old priest called “the real ocean,” the vast Atlantic. For the Mediterranean, he said, was nothing but an inland sea, a harbor with a narrow opening which is practically what our own oceanographers think it.
Atlantis was the centre of a mighty empire, including all those islands, and extending its power within the Pillars, on both shores of the Mediterranean, as far as Tyrrhenia, or modern Italy, on the European side, and all the way to the borders of Egypt on the African side. The people of that empire were a peaceful and virtuous and god-fearing lot until they became so drunk with their own prosperity that the gods, offended by it, goaded them into the fatal sin of hybris, or megalomania, as we should call it to-day. Not satisfied with what they possessed already, the rulers of Atlantis decided to conquer all the rest of the Mediterranean region. For this purpose they raised a mighty host representing all the countries under their sway, and with this force they attacked Greece and Egypt. Athens took the lead among the defenders, and at first it was supported by all its sister states. Gradually, however, these deserted basely to the enemy, and Athens alone, with only the Egyptian forces backing it, continued the fight so bravely that in the end the invaders were ignominiously overcome and driven back to their own shores.
Then, when victory had been achieved and the danger was past, the great disaster occurred of which the old priest chiefly wished to tell. In one day and one night of unprecedented upheaval, with earthquakes and floods like none ever witnessed by man before, the entire army of Athens was swallowed up by the earth, and simultaneously the whole island of Atlantis disappeared utterly beneath the waves of the ocean. In sinking, it seemed to spread out and fill up the regions around it, so that the sea outside the Pillars became shallow and filled up with mud and impenetrable to navigators. Thus Atlantis was lost for ever. Greece had to start all over again. But Egypt went on in its wonted way, piling century on century, and millennium on millennium, into an unbroken historical sequence not equalled anywhere else on the globe, except possibly in China.
Thus ends the story told by Plato in “Timaeus.” It is resumed in the following dialogue of “Critias,” and in far greater detail, but what we get there is merely embroidery on the fundamental story previously told. Again it may be well to warn the reader not to pay too much attention to the space of one day and night assigned by the old priest to the completion of that almost world-wide catastrophe. In a country of such unfathomed past, it was equally easy to extend or contract the telescope of time to turn centuries into millennia, or, dramatically, to compress a couple of centuries into the twenty-four hours between the setting or rising of two suns.
2
Let us leave Atlantis itself alone for a few moments in order to scrutinize certain other features of the story told by the old priest and repeated by Solon, who meant to make a poem of it, but never found time to do so, thanks to the exactions of his Attic fellow citizens. He heard from the old priest about a tremendous onslaught by western tribes against Egypt, which was repelled by the latter country with the help of Athens. He heard also about earthquakes and floods that changed the map of Greece, caused appalling loss of human life, and forced at least some of the Greek states to start all over again from the beginning.
In the temple ruins of “hundred-gated” Thebes, as Homer names the ancient capital of Upper Egypt, dating back to a period preceding that of Solon’s friend, Aahmes II, by more than five hundred years, modern scientific investigators have found certain stelae, or huge slabs with inscriptions and carved reliefs, commemorating two Egyptian victories over invading hordes from the north and the west. The first of these was won during the reign of Minephtah, the feebler successor of the great Rameses II, whom the Greeks called Sesostris, about 1230 в.с.; the second, about thirty years later, in the reign of Rameses III. The various tribes taking part in those attacks are named and described, and we even get pictures of their warriors and ships. Two names are conspicuously missing. The Keftiu, or Minoan Cretans, with whom Egypt had entertained friendly and intimate relations for more than a millennium, are not mentioned. Nor do we find any designation applicable to the Athenians, though Ionians are mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions as far back as 2600 в.с.
On this very account, as representing racial elements previously unknown to Egypt, those invaders interest us the more. Their attacks are ascribed in general to “the peoples of the sea.” Literally, the inscriptions call them “warriors from another land, hailing from the great sea and from the encircling ring,” and “ peoples come from the islands in the great sea.” The Egyptians were never happy at sea. They employed Phoenicians and Greeks to command their fleets, and probably also to man them, whether warlike or commercial. And so it is quite possible that, in their mouths, the “great sea” meant nothing but the Mediterranean. Yet it is also possible that it meant something else … some thing beyond. The names of the tribes mentioned suggest, on the whole, the former alternative. The Teresh or Tursha are supposed to have been Turseni, or Tyrrhenians, or Etruscans, all these being names applied to the people along the northwestern coast of Italy. The Sherden or Shardana have been translated into Sardinians; the Shekelesh or Shakalsha, into Sicels, one of the three principal tribes forming the earliest known population of Sicily; the Ekwesh or Akkaiwasha, into Achaeans; the Lukku, into Lydians; the Peleset or Pulishta, into Pelasgians or, more probably, Philistines; the Tikkerai, into Teucrians from Salamis on Cyprus; and the Denyu or Danauana, into the Danai of Homer. In glancing over this list, it is interesting to recall the legendary peopling of Etruria by a tribe of Lydians under Tyrrhenus, who gave his name to their new home. Lydia itself, where the Ionians during the Dorian invasion of Greece started the seafaring city of Phocaea, of which we shall hear more later on, was repeatedly overrun by Hittites and “Cimmerians” ... people from the north, but not necessarily Nordic. And to this day the inhabitents of Liguria, the Massa-Lucca region in northwestern Italy, the old Tyrrhenia, show a cranial type differing from that of all other Italians. It is strange how, as soon as you begin to delve into such matters, you seem to go around in circles, just as did the perennially wandering tribes of those unsettled days.
If those identifications be correct, none of them points beyond the shores of the Mediterranean, and those shores may be regarded as implied when the Egyptian scribe of Rameses III spoke of “the encircling ring of the great sea.” The case stands differently when we turn to the pictures of ships and warriors given on that monument from 1200 в.с. or thereabouts. In type, says Oswald Spengler in his “Decline of the West,” the ships “differ completely from those used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, but they may resemble those which Caesar found among the Veneti of Brittany.” At Tjängvide, on the Baltic island of Gothland, one of the oldest cultural centres of the North, there is a large stone with a well-manned ship carved on it. This ship, with mast and sail, looks very much like the one of the stele of Rameses III. But when we turn our attention to the men on board, the resemblance stops. John L. Myres, in his “Dawn of History,” describes the warriors on the Egyptian relief as armed with “a round, parrying shield, close-fitting helmet with horns and sometimes also cheek-pieces, and strange body-armor of transverse belts made flexible as a lobster’s.”
The moment I saw a picture of that relief, I recognized the horned helmet of the Gallic warriors that fought against Rome in later ages. And a helmet of somewhat similar construction has been dug out of the bottom of the Thames near Waterloo Bridge. In other words, the head-gear of those “well-armed warriors,” as the Egyptian scribe politely styled them for the greater enhancement of his master’s glory, had a decidedly Celtic appearance, and nothing at all in common with the helmets worn by any indigenous people around the eastern Mediterranean. The men on board those ships of a strange make may have started from within the borders of that sea. But it seems possible, at least, that some of them may have hailed from beyond the Pillars marking the entrance to the “real ocean.” Of the Veneti, for instance, already mentioned in a quotation from Spengler, and not to be confused with the Veneti or Heneti who settled by the mouth of the Po about the time of the Dorian invasion of Greece, the Encyclopædia Britannica asserts that “they were the most powerful maritime people on the Atlantic and carried on a considerable trade with Britain.” James Anthony Froude tells us, in his “Caesar,” that they had “ships capable of facing the seas which rolled in from the Atlantic, flatbottomed, with high bow and stern, built solidly of oak” ... a description which suits the type of ship on that Ramesian relief perfectly. The islands of that coast, north of the mouth of the Loire, used to be called the Venetian Islands in ancient days. Were those some of the islands lying beyond the larger one named Atlantis?
In the temple ruins of “hundred-gated” Thebes, as Homer names the ancient capital of Upper Egypt, dating back to a period preceding that of Solon’s friend, Aahmes II, by more than five hundred years, modern scientific investigators have found certain stelae, or huge slabs with inscriptions and carved reliefs, commemorating two Egyptian victories over invading hordes from the north and the west. The first of these was won during the reign of Minephtah, the feebler successor of the great Rameses II, whom the Greeks called Sesostris, about 1230 в.с.; the second, about thirty years later, in the reign of Rameses III. The various tribes taking part in those attacks are named and described, and we even get pictures of their warriors and ships. Two names are conspicuously missing. The Keftiu, or Minoan Cretans, with whom Egypt had entertained friendly and intimate relations for more than a millennium, are not mentioned. Nor do we find any designation applicable to the Athenians, though Ionians are mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions as far back as 2600 в.с.
On this very account, as representing racial elements previously unknown to Egypt, those invaders interest us the more. Their attacks are ascribed in general to “the peoples of the sea.” Literally, the inscriptions call them “warriors from another land, hailing from the great sea and from the encircling ring,” and “ peoples come from the islands in the great sea.” The Egyptians were never happy at sea. They employed Phoenicians and Greeks to command their fleets, and probably also to man them, whether warlike or commercial. And so it is quite possible that, in their mouths, the “great sea” meant nothing but the Mediterranean. Yet it is also possible that it meant something else … some thing beyond. The names of the tribes mentioned suggest, on the whole, the former alternative. The Teresh or Tursha are supposed to have been Turseni, or Tyrrhenians, or Etruscans, all these being names applied to the people along the northwestern coast of Italy. The Sherden or Shardana have been translated into Sardinians; the Shekelesh or Shakalsha, into Sicels, one of the three principal tribes forming the earliest known population of Sicily; the Ekwesh or Akkaiwasha, into Achaeans; the Lukku, into Lydians; the Peleset or Pulishta, into Pelasgians or, more probably, Philistines; the Tikkerai, into Teucrians from Salamis on Cyprus; and the Denyu or Danauana, into the Danai of Homer. In glancing over this list, it is interesting to recall the legendary peopling of Etruria by a tribe of Lydians under Tyrrhenus, who gave his name to their new home. Lydia itself, where the Ionians during the Dorian invasion of Greece started the seafaring city of Phocaea, of which we shall hear more later on, was repeatedly overrun by Hittites and “Cimmerians” ... people from the north, but not necessarily Nordic. And to this day the inhabitents of Liguria, the Massa-Lucca region in northwestern Italy, the old Tyrrhenia, show a cranial type differing from that of all other Italians. It is strange how, as soon as you begin to delve into such matters, you seem to go around in circles, just as did the perennially wandering tribes of those unsettled days.
If those identifications be correct, none of them points beyond the shores of the Mediterranean, and those shores may be regarded as implied when the Egyptian scribe of Rameses III spoke of “the encircling ring of the great sea.” The case stands differently when we turn to the pictures of ships and warriors given on that monument from 1200 в.с. or thereabouts. In type, says Oswald Spengler in his “Decline of the West,” the ships “differ completely from those used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, but they may resemble those which Caesar found among the Veneti of Brittany.” At Tjängvide, on the Baltic island of Gothland, one of the oldest cultural centres of the North, there is a large stone with a well-manned ship carved on it. This ship, with mast and sail, looks very much like the one of the stele of Rameses III. But when we turn our attention to the men on board, the resemblance stops. John L. Myres, in his “Dawn of History,” describes the warriors on the Egyptian relief as armed with “a round, parrying shield, close-fitting helmet with horns and sometimes also cheek-pieces, and strange body-armor of transverse belts made flexible as a lobster’s.”
The moment I saw a picture of that relief, I recognized the horned helmet of the Gallic warriors that fought against Rome in later ages. And a helmet of somewhat similar construction has been dug out of the bottom of the Thames near Waterloo Bridge. In other words, the head-gear of those “well-armed warriors,” as the Egyptian scribe politely styled them for the greater enhancement of his master’s glory, had a decidedly Celtic appearance, and nothing at all in common with the helmets worn by any indigenous people around the eastern Mediterranean. The men on board those ships of a strange make may have started from within the borders of that sea. But it seems possible, at least, that some of them may have hailed from beyond the Pillars marking the entrance to the “real ocean.” Of the Veneti, for instance, already mentioned in a quotation from Spengler, and not to be confused with the Veneti or Heneti who settled by the mouth of the Po about the time of the Dorian invasion of Greece, the Encyclopædia Britannica asserts that “they were the most powerful maritime people on the Atlantic and carried on a considerable trade with Britain.” James Anthony Froude tells us, in his “Caesar,” that they had “ships capable of facing the seas which rolled in from the Atlantic, flatbottomed, with high bow and stern, built solidly of oak” ... a description which suits the type of ship on that Ramesian relief perfectly. The islands of that coast, north of the mouth of the Loire, used to be called the Venetian Islands in ancient days. Were those some of the islands lying beyond the larger one named Atlantis?
3
Where does this lead us? Nowhere for the present. And so let us pass on to that great catastrophe which, according to the old Egyptian priest, introduced such a gap in the sequence of Athenian history. The simultaneous destruction of Atlantis itself we shall leave aside momentarily. Earthquakes and floods have been familiar things in the Aegean region since time immemorial. There is an old tradition that the island of Lesbos became separated from the mainland through an upheaval of that kind. One look at the map is enough to prove the plausibility of such a belief. And as it must have happened very long ago, if at all, it helps to show the capacity of such traditions for survival from a time when no written records can have existed.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian who lived at least as late as 21 B.C., and who wrote a sort of universal history in forty books under the name of Bibliotheca historica, tells of a tremendous seismic disturbance which in 1250 в.с. worked radical changes in the topography of northwestern Africa from the Gulf of Gabes to the Atlantic. His date coincides pretty closely with the time previously given for the first invasion of Egypt by those “warriors from the great sea.” The story is quoted by Paul Borchardt, the German geographer and explorer, in support of his recent efforts to re-discover the lost Atlantis within that country of salt swamps in southern Tunis which is commonly identified with the ancient Sea of Triton, and which has been described so entertainingly by Norman Douglas in his “Fountains in the Sand.” According to Professor Borchardt, the original name of the largest swamp, the dismal Shott el Jerid, was Bahr Atala, or the Sea of Atlas. Diodorus, however, like most ancient writers, was in the habit of borrowing freely from earlier authorities without always crediting his sources, and this story of his may be a Platonic echo, a modified version of the original Atlantic legend, testifying merely to the persistency of the cataclysmic tradition.
Strabo, on the other hand ... the famous geographer who wrote during the last quarter of the old era and the first of the new … is palpably independent of Plato when, quoting a certain otherwise quite unknown Demetrios of Callatis, he gives minute data of a disturbance that wrought havoc from Thessaly to Attica. Numerous cities were destroyed with great loss of human life. Promontories and islands vanished, some temporarily and others for ever. Rivers changed their courses, and the earth vomited floods of water in some places, while elsewhere noted springs ceased to flow. Finally the island of Atalanta, between Euboea and the Greek mainland, was either split in two or cut off from the coast of which until then it had formed a part. Ever since then the upper passage of the narrow straits between the mainland and Euboea has been known as the Channel of Atalantis … and so we seem to be moving in a circle again.
These tales of natural disasters dovetail logically with other facts of which we have become increasingly aware during the last half century. Important archaeological discoveries … in Asia Minor, on the islands of the Aegean, on the Peloponnesus, in Crete, in Cyprus … have radically changed our conceptions of Greek history. Of course, we are still groping. It is dangerous to be too definite about any one thing. But certain outlines of development may be regarded as pretty firmly established. We know that the nuclear point of that unprecedented blossoming which gave us “the glory that was Greece” must be sought not on the mainland, but in Crete. There it started not later than 3000 B.C., and there it developed more and more marvelously for nearly two millennia, spreading gradually to the islands of the Aegean and to Greece proper. During those ages, the Cretans, and not the Phoenicians, ruled the Mediterranean. They traded and had colonies far to the westward, we have now reason to believe. The high tide of this remarkable culture is closely identified with that great white palace of Cnossos so vividly pictured in Merezhkovsky’s recent novel, “The Birth of the Gods.” There reigned the king who probably was called Minos just as the Egyptian rulers were called Pharaoh. One Minos, perhaps the greatest and most famous of all, went on an expedition to Sicily from which he never returned. Later his subjects sent out a strong relief expedition, comprising the flower of their population. This venture ended as disastrously as the first one, the fleet being wrecked on the shores of the Gulf of Otranto in Italy. Crete was depopulated. The great palace of Cnossos was destroyed. The centre of Minoan civilization shifted to the mainland, to the palaces of Mycenae and Tyrins.
The earlier population of Greece seems to have been Pelasgian, belonging to the short, dark, longheaded Mediterranean race of Sergi, which may perhaps be found identical with the Ibero-Insular race of Deniker. Of that race the Ionians and the later Athenians seem to have formed parts. Then came the Achaeans … tall, blond “tamers of horses” ... the heroes of whom we read in Homer, and whom we may consider as the rulers of those wonderful palaces at Mycenae and Tyrins. Though of different race, they seem to have accepted and continued the culture transmitted from Crete. They were still supreme at the time of the Trojan war, which is generally placed near 1200 в.с. Their weapons and utensils were still of bronze, their ornaments of gold and silver. There was no break in the general line of development. It came after them … with the advent of the Dorians and the arrival of iron. From 3000 to about 1200 в.с. we get a picture of continuous rise, wave after wave. Then there is a sudden slump, a lowering of cultural values and cultural expressions. It is impossible to turn to any work dealing with this period without coming across evidence of a catastrophe of some kind, a line of demarcation sharp enough to connect with the tale told by the old Egyptian priest to Solon.
“The Mycenaean culture,” says John L. Myres, was wholly prior to that of historic Greece, and separated from it by a violent catastrophe, in which cities were sacked and deserted, palaces and tombs looted, and the whole distribution not only of political power, but of economic vigor, was fundamentally changed, in a ‘dark age’ of tumult and barbarism.” Thucydides, who wrote in the fifth century B.C., suggests the main features of the picture drawn by Professor Myres in the twentieth after Christ. Gustave Glotz, author of “The Aegean Civilization,” speaks of “a retrogression which took the nations of the Aegean back to the morrow of the Neolithic Age.” Greece was dead for a time … for a long time … dead and impoverished. Where there had been palaces, we find nothing but huts. Great kings were succeeded by petty chiefs. Until the wave rose once more, as if carried onward by some irresistible, ever renewed force, and classic Greece, as long known to us, emerged out of chaos and darkness.
It is also significant to note that, during the interregnum just described, the one part of Greece which did not share the fate of the rest was Attica, the country belonging to Athens. It was invaded by the iron-armed hordes, but never conquered. The pressure of the invasion, however, seems to have been sufficient to force an Ionian emigration to the coasts of Asia Minor, where one of the resulting colonies was Phocaea, mentioned already and to be mentioned again. Incidentally we may observe that the coming of those destructive Dorians synchronizes pretty well with the invasion of Egypt described on the stelae of Minephtah and Rameses III. If, in resisting those attacks, the Egyptians had Athenian assistance, is more than we can tell, but it is quite possible. Nor do we know where the Dorians came from, who they were, or what.
Old Strabo was a shrewd and sceptical commentator on the writings of his predecessors. He rather doubted those tales of earthquakes and floods told by the otherwise unknown Demetrius of Callatis, though the tales in question seem too precise in their details, and too logical in their arrangement, to permit their summary relegation into realms of mere fancy. His scepticism carried him too far more than once, as when he refused utterly to place any faith in the stories told by Pythias of Massilia about Britain and Ultima Thule … stories which have won the reluctant acceptance of our own day. But speaking of a passage in the writings of Posidonius of Rhodes, who lived between 130 and 50 в.с., and who spent a good deal of time at Gades, or Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, Strabo says: “He did well in citing the opinion of Plato, ‘that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis might be received as something more than mere fiction. “
It is with such an opinion in my mind that I have brought out here certain corroborative traditions, as well as proved facts, suggesting that other parts of the old priest’s story may not be quite as fanciful as they appear at first sight. Like everything else coming down to us in such a manner, his tale must not be taken too literally. The army of Athens may not have perished in a single night and day, but the power of Greece was broken for centuries as if the country had actually been destroyed. The friendly Keftiu and the equally friendly Ionians had vanished and given way to tribes of a different type, who came as enemies and conquerors. This may have been what the old priest meant to say. Such was the probable kernel of that part of his story. And perhaps there was a similar kernel to his story about the lost island of Atlantis.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian who lived at least as late as 21 B.C., and who wrote a sort of universal history in forty books under the name of Bibliotheca historica, tells of a tremendous seismic disturbance which in 1250 в.с. worked radical changes in the topography of northwestern Africa from the Gulf of Gabes to the Atlantic. His date coincides pretty closely with the time previously given for the first invasion of Egypt by those “warriors from the great sea.” The story is quoted by Paul Borchardt, the German geographer and explorer, in support of his recent efforts to re-discover the lost Atlantis within that country of salt swamps in southern Tunis which is commonly identified with the ancient Sea of Triton, and which has been described so entertainingly by Norman Douglas in his “Fountains in the Sand.” According to Professor Borchardt, the original name of the largest swamp, the dismal Shott el Jerid, was Bahr Atala, or the Sea of Atlas. Diodorus, however, like most ancient writers, was in the habit of borrowing freely from earlier authorities without always crediting his sources, and this story of his may be a Platonic echo, a modified version of the original Atlantic legend, testifying merely to the persistency of the cataclysmic tradition.
Strabo, on the other hand ... the famous geographer who wrote during the last quarter of the old era and the first of the new … is palpably independent of Plato when, quoting a certain otherwise quite unknown Demetrios of Callatis, he gives minute data of a disturbance that wrought havoc from Thessaly to Attica. Numerous cities were destroyed with great loss of human life. Promontories and islands vanished, some temporarily and others for ever. Rivers changed their courses, and the earth vomited floods of water in some places, while elsewhere noted springs ceased to flow. Finally the island of Atalanta, between Euboea and the Greek mainland, was either split in two or cut off from the coast of which until then it had formed a part. Ever since then the upper passage of the narrow straits between the mainland and Euboea has been known as the Channel of Atalantis … and so we seem to be moving in a circle again.
These tales of natural disasters dovetail logically with other facts of which we have become increasingly aware during the last half century. Important archaeological discoveries … in Asia Minor, on the islands of the Aegean, on the Peloponnesus, in Crete, in Cyprus … have radically changed our conceptions of Greek history. Of course, we are still groping. It is dangerous to be too definite about any one thing. But certain outlines of development may be regarded as pretty firmly established. We know that the nuclear point of that unprecedented blossoming which gave us “the glory that was Greece” must be sought not on the mainland, but in Crete. There it started not later than 3000 B.C., and there it developed more and more marvelously for nearly two millennia, spreading gradually to the islands of the Aegean and to Greece proper. During those ages, the Cretans, and not the Phoenicians, ruled the Mediterranean. They traded and had colonies far to the westward, we have now reason to believe. The high tide of this remarkable culture is closely identified with that great white palace of Cnossos so vividly pictured in Merezhkovsky’s recent novel, “The Birth of the Gods.” There reigned the king who probably was called Minos just as the Egyptian rulers were called Pharaoh. One Minos, perhaps the greatest and most famous of all, went on an expedition to Sicily from which he never returned. Later his subjects sent out a strong relief expedition, comprising the flower of their population. This venture ended as disastrously as the first one, the fleet being wrecked on the shores of the Gulf of Otranto in Italy. Crete was depopulated. The great palace of Cnossos was destroyed. The centre of Minoan civilization shifted to the mainland, to the palaces of Mycenae and Tyrins.
The earlier population of Greece seems to have been Pelasgian, belonging to the short, dark, longheaded Mediterranean race of Sergi, which may perhaps be found identical with the Ibero-Insular race of Deniker. Of that race the Ionians and the later Athenians seem to have formed parts. Then came the Achaeans … tall, blond “tamers of horses” ... the heroes of whom we read in Homer, and whom we may consider as the rulers of those wonderful palaces at Mycenae and Tyrins. Though of different race, they seem to have accepted and continued the culture transmitted from Crete. They were still supreme at the time of the Trojan war, which is generally placed near 1200 в.с. Their weapons and utensils were still of bronze, their ornaments of gold and silver. There was no break in the general line of development. It came after them … with the advent of the Dorians and the arrival of iron. From 3000 to about 1200 в.с. we get a picture of continuous rise, wave after wave. Then there is a sudden slump, a lowering of cultural values and cultural expressions. It is impossible to turn to any work dealing with this period without coming across evidence of a catastrophe of some kind, a line of demarcation sharp enough to connect with the tale told by the old Egyptian priest to Solon.
“The Mycenaean culture,” says John L. Myres, was wholly prior to that of historic Greece, and separated from it by a violent catastrophe, in which cities were sacked and deserted, palaces and tombs looted, and the whole distribution not only of political power, but of economic vigor, was fundamentally changed, in a ‘dark age’ of tumult and barbarism.” Thucydides, who wrote in the fifth century B.C., suggests the main features of the picture drawn by Professor Myres in the twentieth after Christ. Gustave Glotz, author of “The Aegean Civilization,” speaks of “a retrogression which took the nations of the Aegean back to the morrow of the Neolithic Age.” Greece was dead for a time … for a long time … dead and impoverished. Where there had been palaces, we find nothing but huts. Great kings were succeeded by petty chiefs. Until the wave rose once more, as if carried onward by some irresistible, ever renewed force, and classic Greece, as long known to us, emerged out of chaos and darkness.
It is also significant to note that, during the interregnum just described, the one part of Greece which did not share the fate of the rest was Attica, the country belonging to Athens. It was invaded by the iron-armed hordes, but never conquered. The pressure of the invasion, however, seems to have been sufficient to force an Ionian emigration to the coasts of Asia Minor, where one of the resulting colonies was Phocaea, mentioned already and to be mentioned again. Incidentally we may observe that the coming of those destructive Dorians synchronizes pretty well with the invasion of Egypt described on the stelae of Minephtah and Rameses III. If, in resisting those attacks, the Egyptians had Athenian assistance, is more than we can tell, but it is quite possible. Nor do we know where the Dorians came from, who they were, or what.
Old Strabo was a shrewd and sceptical commentator on the writings of his predecessors. He rather doubted those tales of earthquakes and floods told by the otherwise unknown Demetrius of Callatis, though the tales in question seem too precise in their details, and too logical in their arrangement, to permit their summary relegation into realms of mere fancy. His scepticism carried him too far more than once, as when he refused utterly to place any faith in the stories told by Pythias of Massilia about Britain and Ultima Thule … stories which have won the reluctant acceptance of our own day. But speaking of a passage in the writings of Posidonius of Rhodes, who lived between 130 and 50 в.с., and who spent a good deal of time at Gades, or Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, Strabo says: “He did well in citing the opinion of Plato, ‘that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis might be received as something more than mere fiction. “
It is with such an opinion in my mind that I have brought out here certain corroborative traditions, as well as proved facts, suggesting that other parts of the old priest’s story may not be quite as fanciful as they appear at first sight. Like everything else coming down to us in such a manner, his tale must not be taken too literally. The army of Athens may not have perished in a single night and day, but the power of Greece was broken for centuries as if the country had actually been destroyed. The friendly Keftiu and the equally friendly Ionians had vanished and given way to tribes of a different type, who came as enemies and conquerors. This may have been what the old priest meant to say. Such was the probable kernel of that part of his story. And perhaps there was a similar kernel to his story about the lost island of Atlantis.
4
In the dialogue named “Critias,” Plato resumes the story of Atlantis, but with an evident change of manner and purpose. Before he was merely relating a curious and interesting anecdote. Now he is laying the basis for a Utopia, thus being himself the first to start along the road later followed by many others … by Francis Bacon in his “New Atlantis,” for instance, and by our own Ignatius Donnelly of erratic memory, in “Atlantis: the Ante-Diluvian World.” For this reason the later dialogue has to be read with a much larger grain of salt than the earlier one. Yet there are many details in “Critias” that again suggest a possible core of truth, and that, consequently, have a direct bearing on the objective point of this discussion.
When, after a tendential description of Athenian conditions in those far-off days, “nine thousand years ago,” Critias turns to the main subject of his discourse, he apologizes first of all for the Greek names included in his story. These names, he explains, had been translated into Egyptian by the priests. Having made sure of their original meaning, Solon, in his turn, translated them into Greek. In one instance only is the translation paralleled by the original term. “If it be not true, it is at least well made up,” says the Italian. If Plato was merely spinning fancies out of his own brain, he certainly knew how to give them a fine patina of verisimilitude, for that single exception is the only one that could furnish us a possible clue to the real location of Atlantis.
When the Olympians divided the world among themselves, Critias went on, the island of Atlantis and the surrounding region fell to the share of Poseidon. There he met a mortal maid, with whom, Olympian fashion, he fell in love, and to whom he showed a constancy not quite Olympian. Their affair became so prolonged that she bore him five pairs of male twins. Among these Poseidon divided the country, every one of them becoming a king, and the ancestor of a long line of kings. But the eldest of the first pair of twins was the chief of all the rest and reigned in the principal city, which formed the cultural centre of the entire region. His name was Atlas, and after him the island, its capital, and the adjoining ocean were named. His younger twin brother … and this is so important that I shall quote Plato’s own words in the Jowett translation ... “obtained as his lot the extremity of the island towards the Pillars of Heracles, as far as the country which is still called the region of Gades.” He was named Eumelos in Greek, but “in the language of the country named after him, Gadeiros” … this being the single instance, already referred to, when we get both the Greek and the supposedly Atlantian version of a name.
The names and their connotations are highly significant. Atlas has no Greek root, I am told, in spite of the extent to which the giant of that name figures in Greek mythology and legend. It is supposed to be of Semitic origin, though I may mention, parenthetically, that an attempt actually has been made to trace it to the Mexican Nahuatlacas. There is an Arabic adjective, atlas, meaning “smooth, bare, blank.” As a noun, the same word was used during the Victorian era to denote a silk-like fabric. It is derived from the verb talasa, to make smooth, and it may or may not have something to do with thalassa, one of the Greek words for sea, which has now been proved of Cretan origin. Of Atlas, the giant who “upholds the pillars which keep earth and sky asunder,” we are told by Homer that “he knows the depth of every sea.” And the venerable Thomas Bulfinch described him as “rich in herds and flocks, with no neighbor or rival to dispute his state.” Strange to say, the word atl is also held to refer to the water and the seashore in the Nahua language of Mexico.
Gades was the Latin name for Cadiz, which the Greeks called Gadeira, and the Phoenicians Gadir. These mariners of many seas are supposed to have founded it, and in their tongue its name implied merely an enclosed or fortified place. E. A. Freeman, the historian, asserted of Cadiz that it had “kept its name and its unbroken position as a great city from an earlier time than any other city in Europe.” It is believed to date back to about 1100 в.с., and it has always stood where still it stands, not far beyond the strait connecting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic, also called at times the Strait of Gades. The city occupies the extreme point of a narrow strip of land running parallel to the main coast, so that a harbor is formed within, “capable of holding all the navies of the world.” The reference to Gades in the story about Atlantis, and to the realm of Gadeiros as lying nearest the Pillars of Heracles, are noteworthy circumstances to which we shall return further on. Eumelos, the alleged Greek equivalent of Gadeiros, should indicate one skilled in song or music, and this, too, may prove worth recalling. Critias then proceeded to describe the country and its chief city in detail. The outside shore of the island was lofty and precipitous. Within lay a vast and fertile plain, open to the south. To the north, at some distance, were mountains “celebrated for their number and size and beauty.” The country was particularly rich in metals. Among these are mentioned not only gold and silver, tin and copper, bronze and brass, but the famous orichalcum, the secret of which has been lost to us. It is described as red in color and shining or “fat” in appearance. Commonly it is thought to have been an alloy of silver and copper, though Strabo uses it for bronze, and though the word literally signifies “mountain-copper.” It was ranked in value with gold, and above silver. Cattle were plentiful in Atlantis, the bulls playing a prominent part in their religious ceremonies, as they did in Crete. Very remarkable is the statement that the island held a large number of elephants. In one way and another, its rulers were said to possess wealth beyond all other kings and potentates, and for this reason goods were drawn to them from marts all over the world.
The main city, reached from the sea by an enormously deep and wide artificial canal, was surrounded by three turreted walls of stone, the outermost coated with brass, the middle one with tin, while the innermost “flashed with the red light of orichalcum.” Apart from these walls, the city was noted for three things: its two springs, one hot and one cold, provided by Poseidon himself; its immense harbor and docks, full of vessels of every kind and of naval stores always ready for use, and crowded with merchants and sailors from every corner of the globe; and, finally, its great temple devoted to the worship of Poseidon, covered entirely with silver, and adorned with a statue of the deity in gold of such gigantic proportions that it reached up to the lofty ceiling. There were other statues, inside and outside, all of gold. The place glittered with gold everywhere … gold and silver and orichalcum and ivory. Plato, with his more refined taste, speaks of the tout ensemble as showing “a sort of barbaric splendor.” The total impression you get from Critias’ description is that of an unbelievably rich commercial centre, fond of display and good living, like Tyre or Carthage at the height of their prosperity, and possessing mercantile connections in all the known quarters of the globe. One minor detail of some interest remains to be mentioned. Sacred bulls ranged the yards of the great temple, and when one of these was to be sacrificed, it was hunted without weapons, but with staves and nooses … exactly as at Cnossos.
And eventually all this splendor vanished beneath the waves of the sea, leaving behind nothing but a mud bank … yes, something more: a memory and a dream, by which the western world has been haunted ever since the days of Plato. Innumerable and amusingly diversified have been the efforts to place or explain that lost island of Atlantis. Most of the ancients, beginning with Aristotle, considered it pure invention, though a good one. The learned Posidonius of Rhodes, himself something of a poet in temperament, judged it a fable built on truth. So did shrewd, sceptical Strabo, and so did Alexander von Humboldt eighteen centuries later. With the discovery of the New World, the long and seemingly futile search got a new start. The inference was inevitable.
A Spaniard, Francesco Lopez de Gamara, who published a “History of the Indies” in 1553, seems to have been the first one to make a definite identification of Atlantis with America. The coldly intellectual Bacon leaned toward the same view, and so did the painstaking Humboldt. Of actual knowledge on the part of Plato or his informants, those men had no idea, but they thought that echoes of tales by seafarers carried out of their well-known routes by winds and currents, like Odysseus or that Samian merchant mentioned by Herodotus, might have reached the Athenian philosopher and inspired his fertile mind. It remained for a German, Jakob Krueger, in 1855, to proclaim “America’s Discovery by the Phoenicians.” And thirty years after him, an American, Augustus le Plongeon, claimed to have found proof of that theory in certain Maya legends. He even knew the time when the discovery took place … eleven thousand years ago, which nearly tallies with the date given by the old Egyptian priest for the final disappearance of the island empire.
In the meantime, however, other minds refused what, after all, must appear a tempting solution of the riddle. As far back as 1679, a Swedish scholar, Olof Rudbeck, published a huge and in many ways remarkable tome named “Atlantica sive Manheim,” by which he tried to prove that Atlantis was nothing but Sweden, the ancient “home of men,” which one of the monkish scribes of the Middle Ages had termed “the womb of nations.” Nor was he the most fantastic theorist. A noted German student of ancient geography, Dr. Richard Hennig, not long ago published a most interesting work, the title of which may be translated as “Realms of Mystery.” In this he discusses Atlantis among many other lost or fancied localities; and he gives a list of suggested identifications of Plato’s far-famed island that includes such widely scattered regions as South Africa, Spitzbergen, Caucasus, Ceylon, Palestine, Attica, Sardinia, Persia, the Canary Islands, and Crete. Another German geographer, Professor A. Wegener, contends that the Atlantic ocean was formed by the gradual moving away of the American continents from those of Europe and Africa. And he believes that the legend of Atlantis may be a reminiscence of the time when all of them were still joined together. But if such a time ever existed, it must have belonged to geologic periods far antedating the appearance of man as a human being possessed of verbally transmissible memories. Hennig, in the work mentioned above, supports unreservedly a quite different and more plausible theory, originally derived by Professor Adolf Schulten of Erlangen from some recent archaeological discoveries of his own. To this theory as well as to the discoveries in question I shall return at length farther on.
And so … for the time being … exit Atlantis: enter Nausicaa, Princess of Scheria, land of the Phaeacians!
When, after a tendential description of Athenian conditions in those far-off days, “nine thousand years ago,” Critias turns to the main subject of his discourse, he apologizes first of all for the Greek names included in his story. These names, he explains, had been translated into Egyptian by the priests. Having made sure of their original meaning, Solon, in his turn, translated them into Greek. In one instance only is the translation paralleled by the original term. “If it be not true, it is at least well made up,” says the Italian. If Plato was merely spinning fancies out of his own brain, he certainly knew how to give them a fine patina of verisimilitude, for that single exception is the only one that could furnish us a possible clue to the real location of Atlantis.
When the Olympians divided the world among themselves, Critias went on, the island of Atlantis and the surrounding region fell to the share of Poseidon. There he met a mortal maid, with whom, Olympian fashion, he fell in love, and to whom he showed a constancy not quite Olympian. Their affair became so prolonged that she bore him five pairs of male twins. Among these Poseidon divided the country, every one of them becoming a king, and the ancestor of a long line of kings. But the eldest of the first pair of twins was the chief of all the rest and reigned in the principal city, which formed the cultural centre of the entire region. His name was Atlas, and after him the island, its capital, and the adjoining ocean were named. His younger twin brother … and this is so important that I shall quote Plato’s own words in the Jowett translation ... “obtained as his lot the extremity of the island towards the Pillars of Heracles, as far as the country which is still called the region of Gades.” He was named Eumelos in Greek, but “in the language of the country named after him, Gadeiros” … this being the single instance, already referred to, when we get both the Greek and the supposedly Atlantian version of a name.
The names and their connotations are highly significant. Atlas has no Greek root, I am told, in spite of the extent to which the giant of that name figures in Greek mythology and legend. It is supposed to be of Semitic origin, though I may mention, parenthetically, that an attempt actually has been made to trace it to the Mexican Nahuatlacas. There is an Arabic adjective, atlas, meaning “smooth, bare, blank.” As a noun, the same word was used during the Victorian era to denote a silk-like fabric. It is derived from the verb talasa, to make smooth, and it may or may not have something to do with thalassa, one of the Greek words for sea, which has now been proved of Cretan origin. Of Atlas, the giant who “upholds the pillars which keep earth and sky asunder,” we are told by Homer that “he knows the depth of every sea.” And the venerable Thomas Bulfinch described him as “rich in herds and flocks, with no neighbor or rival to dispute his state.” Strange to say, the word atl is also held to refer to the water and the seashore in the Nahua language of Mexico.
Gades was the Latin name for Cadiz, which the Greeks called Gadeira, and the Phoenicians Gadir. These mariners of many seas are supposed to have founded it, and in their tongue its name implied merely an enclosed or fortified place. E. A. Freeman, the historian, asserted of Cadiz that it had “kept its name and its unbroken position as a great city from an earlier time than any other city in Europe.” It is believed to date back to about 1100 в.с., and it has always stood where still it stands, not far beyond the strait connecting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic, also called at times the Strait of Gades. The city occupies the extreme point of a narrow strip of land running parallel to the main coast, so that a harbor is formed within, “capable of holding all the navies of the world.” The reference to Gades in the story about Atlantis, and to the realm of Gadeiros as lying nearest the Pillars of Heracles, are noteworthy circumstances to which we shall return further on. Eumelos, the alleged Greek equivalent of Gadeiros, should indicate one skilled in song or music, and this, too, may prove worth recalling. Critias then proceeded to describe the country and its chief city in detail. The outside shore of the island was lofty and precipitous. Within lay a vast and fertile plain, open to the south. To the north, at some distance, were mountains “celebrated for their number and size and beauty.” The country was particularly rich in metals. Among these are mentioned not only gold and silver, tin and copper, bronze and brass, but the famous orichalcum, the secret of which has been lost to us. It is described as red in color and shining or “fat” in appearance. Commonly it is thought to have been an alloy of silver and copper, though Strabo uses it for bronze, and though the word literally signifies “mountain-copper.” It was ranked in value with gold, and above silver. Cattle were plentiful in Atlantis, the bulls playing a prominent part in their religious ceremonies, as they did in Crete. Very remarkable is the statement that the island held a large number of elephants. In one way and another, its rulers were said to possess wealth beyond all other kings and potentates, and for this reason goods were drawn to them from marts all over the world.
The main city, reached from the sea by an enormously deep and wide artificial canal, was surrounded by three turreted walls of stone, the outermost coated with brass, the middle one with tin, while the innermost “flashed with the red light of orichalcum.” Apart from these walls, the city was noted for three things: its two springs, one hot and one cold, provided by Poseidon himself; its immense harbor and docks, full of vessels of every kind and of naval stores always ready for use, and crowded with merchants and sailors from every corner of the globe; and, finally, its great temple devoted to the worship of Poseidon, covered entirely with silver, and adorned with a statue of the deity in gold of such gigantic proportions that it reached up to the lofty ceiling. There were other statues, inside and outside, all of gold. The place glittered with gold everywhere … gold and silver and orichalcum and ivory. Plato, with his more refined taste, speaks of the tout ensemble as showing “a sort of barbaric splendor.” The total impression you get from Critias’ description is that of an unbelievably rich commercial centre, fond of display and good living, like Tyre or Carthage at the height of their prosperity, and possessing mercantile connections in all the known quarters of the globe. One minor detail of some interest remains to be mentioned. Sacred bulls ranged the yards of the great temple, and when one of these was to be sacrificed, it was hunted without weapons, but with staves and nooses … exactly as at Cnossos.
And eventually all this splendor vanished beneath the waves of the sea, leaving behind nothing but a mud bank … yes, something more: a memory and a dream, by which the western world has been haunted ever since the days of Plato. Innumerable and amusingly diversified have been the efforts to place or explain that lost island of Atlantis. Most of the ancients, beginning with Aristotle, considered it pure invention, though a good one. The learned Posidonius of Rhodes, himself something of a poet in temperament, judged it a fable built on truth. So did shrewd, sceptical Strabo, and so did Alexander von Humboldt eighteen centuries later. With the discovery of the New World, the long and seemingly futile search got a new start. The inference was inevitable.
A Spaniard, Francesco Lopez de Gamara, who published a “History of the Indies” in 1553, seems to have been the first one to make a definite identification of Atlantis with America. The coldly intellectual Bacon leaned toward the same view, and so did the painstaking Humboldt. Of actual knowledge on the part of Plato or his informants, those men had no idea, but they thought that echoes of tales by seafarers carried out of their well-known routes by winds and currents, like Odysseus or that Samian merchant mentioned by Herodotus, might have reached the Athenian philosopher and inspired his fertile mind. It remained for a German, Jakob Krueger, in 1855, to proclaim “America’s Discovery by the Phoenicians.” And thirty years after him, an American, Augustus le Plongeon, claimed to have found proof of that theory in certain Maya legends. He even knew the time when the discovery took place … eleven thousand years ago, which nearly tallies with the date given by the old Egyptian priest for the final disappearance of the island empire.
In the meantime, however, other minds refused what, after all, must appear a tempting solution of the riddle. As far back as 1679, a Swedish scholar, Olof Rudbeck, published a huge and in many ways remarkable tome named “Atlantica sive Manheim,” by which he tried to prove that Atlantis was nothing but Sweden, the ancient “home of men,” which one of the monkish scribes of the Middle Ages had termed “the womb of nations.” Nor was he the most fantastic theorist. A noted German student of ancient geography, Dr. Richard Hennig, not long ago published a most interesting work, the title of which may be translated as “Realms of Mystery.” In this he discusses Atlantis among many other lost or fancied localities; and he gives a list of suggested identifications of Plato’s far-famed island that includes such widely scattered regions as South Africa, Spitzbergen, Caucasus, Ceylon, Palestine, Attica, Sardinia, Persia, the Canary Islands, and Crete. Another German geographer, Professor A. Wegener, contends that the Atlantic ocean was formed by the gradual moving away of the American continents from those of Europe and Africa. And he believes that the legend of Atlantis may be a reminiscence of the time when all of them were still joined together. But if such a time ever existed, it must have belonged to geologic periods far antedating the appearance of man as a human being possessed of verbally transmissible memories. Hennig, in the work mentioned above, supports unreservedly a quite different and more plausible theory, originally derived by Professor Adolf Schulten of Erlangen from some recent archaeological discoveries of his own. To this theory as well as to the discoveries in question I shall return at length farther on.
And so … for the time being … exit Atlantis: enter Nausicaa, Princess of Scheria, land of the Phaeacians!
P A R T T W O
S C H E R I A
1
S C H E R I A
1
AMONG innumerable graceful or tragic female figures created by the Greek striving toward physical and spiritual perfection, there are three which, in my opinion, rise incomparably above the rest. One is Helen, the embodiment of the highest beauty imaginable by man. Another is Antigone, the embodiment of complete womanly devotion. The third is Nausicaa of the white arms, the embodiment of maidenly grace and youthful charm. John Addington Symonds justly called her “the perfect maiden, the purest, freshest, lightest-hearted girl of Greek Romance.” She steps into the old tale of the homecoming hero like a spring breeze laden with the delicate scent of apple blossoms. It is her we see when we think of Scheria, rather than the magnificence of its temple, its palace, and its crowded harbors. And we cannot but regret that, after their first poetic meeting on the sea-shore, she appears only once more to Odysseus, and then for a minute, like a flitting shadow, to bid him a slightly wistful farewell. We love her, and so did the poet evidently, but to him, after all, Scheria itself meant more than its fairest blossom.
It was the kingdom of Alcinous, the father of Nausicaa, and the land of the Phaeacians, famous seafarers who had ships that steered by their own instinct and moved over the waves more swiftly than the hawk, swiftly as the human thought itself. It was the place where Odysseus, one might say, spent a large part of the “Odyssey” telling Nausicaa and the rest what he had done and suffered elsewhere. It was the final resting place before the gods permitted his long delayed return to rocky and goatridden Ithaca, to wife and son, and to his last great adventure with the over-reaching suitors who had been wasting his substance frivolously for so many years. Its importance to the poet may be judged by its strategic position in the plot, and by the number of cantos given to the hero’s stay within its borders … seven out of a total twenty-four. Concerning no other place visited by the sorely tried wanderer has the poet given us quite so many exact details, though the time Odysseus spent in it may be reckoned by hours, while he dwelt a whole year in the enchanted hall of Circe, and no less than eight years on Ogygia, the isle of Calypso. It is plain that to Homer, or whoever wrote the “Odyssey,” the land of the Phaeacians meant more than, for instance, the regions of the Lotophagi, or of the Laestrygones; that it stood apart in some way, a place steeped in romantic glamor; and that next to it in importance came the island home of the nymph Calypso. Both spots were located at the end of the known world, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, in the outermost sea, with no other human habitations near them. And, of course, this was the location of Atlantis, too.
The resemblance of Scheria to Atlantis is an old story, often commented on, and duly recorded in such matter-of-fact works as the Encyclopædia Britannica. First of all, there is the geographical position, to which I have already referred. Homer takes pains to indicate in various ways that Ogygia, the “woodland home” of Calypso, was not within the confines of the Mediterranean, the “inland sea,” as the old Egyptian priest called it in his talk with Solon. Hermes, on his way to the nymph, has to pass “wondrous spaces of brine” before he reaches her island, which is described as “the navel of the ocean.” Near her is no city of mortals that do sacrifice to the gods.” Odysseus speaks of the enveloping sea as so dread and difficult that even the swift gallant ships do not cross it. And Calypso herself, we are told several times, was the daughter of Atlas, who, let us repeat, “knew the depths of every sea.”
From Ogygia, Odysseus travelled eighteen days on a raft made by himself. And as he thus “ cunningly guided his craft with the helm,” he did not steer haphazardly, but in accordance with explicit directions given by Calypso. The passage concerned is not quite clear, I gather, but the most plausible reading of it seems to be that Odysseus was told to make for a point lying to the right of the North Star … that is, in a northeasterly direction … which circumstance we shall have cause to recall. Thus, on the eighteenth day, he sighted Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. Right here we find ourselves engaged once more in one of those circular movements, so puzzling to our minds. The word used in the “Odyssey” for the vessel put together by the fugitive from Poseidon’s wrath is schedia, which, in the eyes of a mere layman, has a frightfully suspicious resemblance to the name given the country of Nausicaa. Another German, Dr. Ernst Assmann, has shown pretty conclusively that both the vessel of Odysseus, as pictured in Greek art, and the term applied to it, are of Phoenician origin. There was a Phoenician colony named Schedia on the north coast of Rhodes, and another place of the same name on the coast of Egypt, not far from the present Alexandria. The name Scheria itself, I am told, is made from the Phoenician word schera, meaning a mart, a centre for commercial exchange. In playing with these queer coincidences, if such they be, it is well to bear in mind that, while this philological game is as intriguing as a good cross-word puzzle, it is also, according to many authorities, no less futile.
The poem makes it quite clear that Odysseus had no sight of land until that of the Phaeacians rose before him in the distance, “like a shield in the misty deep” ... which can only mean that it was mountainous, as was Atlantis beyond its central plain. If Ogygia lay outside the Pillars of Heracles, the Phaeacians could hardly be living within them. For while Homer availed himself freely of the licentia poetica, we have reason to think with Strabo that he rarely did so without a special purpose. That Odysseus could have navigated the narrow passage between Europe and Africa ... a passage figuring so extensively in the mind of the ancients … and on a slow-moving raft at that, without becoming aware of the close proximity of land, seems out of the question in reality, and not required by the scheme of the poem. And what follows his ultimate landing indicates strongly that he was still as far from men familiar to the Greeks as during the years of his irksome, yet not uncompensated dawdling in Calypso’s snug cave.
The coast he approached was significantly unpromising. Great breakers thundered against the outside reefs and the rocky shore, “belching in terrible wise,” covering the sea with foam, and bringing back to our minds once more the characterization of the outside coastline of Atlantis as “lofty and precipitous.” The raft having been smashed to pieces by one of Poseidon’s handy little storms, Odysseus swam for two days along the shore, kept afloat by a veil lent him by a marine divinity, Leucothea, the “white goddess,” and looking vainly for a place where he could land without being crushed against the rocks. Finally he came to the mouth of a “fairflowing” river, which emptied itself into the sea with such force that he could make no headway against the current until, after he had prayed to the river god, the latter “stayed his stream and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before Odysseus, and brought him safely to the mouth of the river.” Finding himself on firm ground at last, Odysseus unloosed the veil of Leucothea and dropped it into the “salt-flowing” river, whereupon “the great wave bare it back down the stream.”
The meaning of all this is easy to get when you have the key to it … which I received from Hennig’s book. Homer is simply describing a very common tidal phenomenon. Odysseus arrived in front of an estuary about the turn of the tide, while the river current was still noticeable pretty far out. Then the rising flood checked the fresh flow and pushed a salt wave up the river bed. When Odysseus was ready to return the veil of Leucothea, the sea was ebbing once more … a little quickly for poetic purposes … and the river first of all discharged the salt water received during the flood-tide. Homer dwells at some length and with a certain special interest on these phenomena because to him they were strange and remarkable. There are no high tides in the Mediterranean, and hardly any at all in the eastern part of it. Yet he deals with them in a manner indicating that he knew perfectly well of what he was talking. The picture he gives us is in every detail characteristic of what happens when a river of considerable volume empties into the ocean at a spot where the tides are high and strong … as, for example, along the Atlantic coast of Spain. Great poet that he was, it is pretty certain that the author of the “Odyssey” could not have built up such a complicated set of circumstances out of “his inner consciousness.” And even more certain it is that he could have had small chance of observing them in the eastern part of his own sea, the Mediterranean.
It was the kingdom of Alcinous, the father of Nausicaa, and the land of the Phaeacians, famous seafarers who had ships that steered by their own instinct and moved over the waves more swiftly than the hawk, swiftly as the human thought itself. It was the place where Odysseus, one might say, spent a large part of the “Odyssey” telling Nausicaa and the rest what he had done and suffered elsewhere. It was the final resting place before the gods permitted his long delayed return to rocky and goatridden Ithaca, to wife and son, and to his last great adventure with the over-reaching suitors who had been wasting his substance frivolously for so many years. Its importance to the poet may be judged by its strategic position in the plot, and by the number of cantos given to the hero’s stay within its borders … seven out of a total twenty-four. Concerning no other place visited by the sorely tried wanderer has the poet given us quite so many exact details, though the time Odysseus spent in it may be reckoned by hours, while he dwelt a whole year in the enchanted hall of Circe, and no less than eight years on Ogygia, the isle of Calypso. It is plain that to Homer, or whoever wrote the “Odyssey,” the land of the Phaeacians meant more than, for instance, the regions of the Lotophagi, or of the Laestrygones; that it stood apart in some way, a place steeped in romantic glamor; and that next to it in importance came the island home of the nymph Calypso. Both spots were located at the end of the known world, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, in the outermost sea, with no other human habitations near them. And, of course, this was the location of Atlantis, too.
The resemblance of Scheria to Atlantis is an old story, often commented on, and duly recorded in such matter-of-fact works as the Encyclopædia Britannica. First of all, there is the geographical position, to which I have already referred. Homer takes pains to indicate in various ways that Ogygia, the “woodland home” of Calypso, was not within the confines of the Mediterranean, the “inland sea,” as the old Egyptian priest called it in his talk with Solon. Hermes, on his way to the nymph, has to pass “wondrous spaces of brine” before he reaches her island, which is described as “the navel of the ocean.” Near her is no city of mortals that do sacrifice to the gods.” Odysseus speaks of the enveloping sea as so dread and difficult that even the swift gallant ships do not cross it. And Calypso herself, we are told several times, was the daughter of Atlas, who, let us repeat, “knew the depths of every sea.”
From Ogygia, Odysseus travelled eighteen days on a raft made by himself. And as he thus “ cunningly guided his craft with the helm,” he did not steer haphazardly, but in accordance with explicit directions given by Calypso. The passage concerned is not quite clear, I gather, but the most plausible reading of it seems to be that Odysseus was told to make for a point lying to the right of the North Star … that is, in a northeasterly direction … which circumstance we shall have cause to recall. Thus, on the eighteenth day, he sighted Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. Right here we find ourselves engaged once more in one of those circular movements, so puzzling to our minds. The word used in the “Odyssey” for the vessel put together by the fugitive from Poseidon’s wrath is schedia, which, in the eyes of a mere layman, has a frightfully suspicious resemblance to the name given the country of Nausicaa. Another German, Dr. Ernst Assmann, has shown pretty conclusively that both the vessel of Odysseus, as pictured in Greek art, and the term applied to it, are of Phoenician origin. There was a Phoenician colony named Schedia on the north coast of Rhodes, and another place of the same name on the coast of Egypt, not far from the present Alexandria. The name Scheria itself, I am told, is made from the Phoenician word schera, meaning a mart, a centre for commercial exchange. In playing with these queer coincidences, if such they be, it is well to bear in mind that, while this philological game is as intriguing as a good cross-word puzzle, it is also, according to many authorities, no less futile.
The poem makes it quite clear that Odysseus had no sight of land until that of the Phaeacians rose before him in the distance, “like a shield in the misty deep” ... which can only mean that it was mountainous, as was Atlantis beyond its central plain. If Ogygia lay outside the Pillars of Heracles, the Phaeacians could hardly be living within them. For while Homer availed himself freely of the licentia poetica, we have reason to think with Strabo that he rarely did so without a special purpose. That Odysseus could have navigated the narrow passage between Europe and Africa ... a passage figuring so extensively in the mind of the ancients … and on a slow-moving raft at that, without becoming aware of the close proximity of land, seems out of the question in reality, and not required by the scheme of the poem. And what follows his ultimate landing indicates strongly that he was still as far from men familiar to the Greeks as during the years of his irksome, yet not uncompensated dawdling in Calypso’s snug cave.
The coast he approached was significantly unpromising. Great breakers thundered against the outside reefs and the rocky shore, “belching in terrible wise,” covering the sea with foam, and bringing back to our minds once more the characterization of the outside coastline of Atlantis as “lofty and precipitous.” The raft having been smashed to pieces by one of Poseidon’s handy little storms, Odysseus swam for two days along the shore, kept afloat by a veil lent him by a marine divinity, Leucothea, the “white goddess,” and looking vainly for a place where he could land without being crushed against the rocks. Finally he came to the mouth of a “fairflowing” river, which emptied itself into the sea with such force that he could make no headway against the current until, after he had prayed to the river god, the latter “stayed his stream and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before Odysseus, and brought him safely to the mouth of the river.” Finding himself on firm ground at last, Odysseus unloosed the veil of Leucothea and dropped it into the “salt-flowing” river, whereupon “the great wave bare it back down the stream.”
The meaning of all this is easy to get when you have the key to it … which I received from Hennig’s book. Homer is simply describing a very common tidal phenomenon. Odysseus arrived in front of an estuary about the turn of the tide, while the river current was still noticeable pretty far out. Then the rising flood checked the fresh flow and pushed a salt wave up the river bed. When Odysseus was ready to return the veil of Leucothea, the sea was ebbing once more … a little quickly for poetic purposes … and the river first of all discharged the salt water received during the flood-tide. Homer dwells at some length and with a certain special interest on these phenomena because to him they were strange and remarkable. There are no high tides in the Mediterranean, and hardly any at all in the eastern part of it. Yet he deals with them in a manner indicating that he knew perfectly well of what he was talking. The picture he gives us is in every detail characteristic of what happens when a river of considerable volume empties into the ocean at a spot where the tides are high and strong … as, for example, along the Atlantic coast of Spain. Great poet that he was, it is pretty certain that the author of the “Odyssey” could not have built up such a complicated set of circumstances out of “his inner consciousness.” And even more certain it is that he could have had small chance of observing them in the eastern part of his own sea, the Mediterranean.
2
Prior to the meeting of Nausicaa and Odysseus on the sea-shore, the poet tells us that the Phaeacians once dwelt in Hypereia, an unknown place suggestive of Hyperion, reputed father of the sun, the moon, and the dawn; and near the Cyclopes, who were popularly supposed to reside in Sicily. In other words, the Phaeacians had lived farther eastward before they settled in Scheria, the land said to be lying outermost of all, or farthest to the west. Thither they were brought by Nausithous, who was said to be a son of Poseidon, the god of the sea, as was the chief king of Atlantis; and whose name, like that of Nausicaa, must have been derived from the Greek word naus, a ship. Most of the names found in Scheria have similar connotations. The body servant of Nausicaa’s father is called Pontonous, from pontos, another Greek word for the sea, and the name of her father, Alcinous, suggests a relation to Heracles, who was also called Alcides, and whose divinity, we are told, had “a marine as well as celestial aspect.” It seems as if Homer could not do enough to emphasize the inseparable connection between the Phaeacians and the sea, and one wonders whether he would have taken the pains of doing so if they had been imagined as living on a small island off the Greek coast.
Nausicaa, again, tells Odysseus that they live “far apart from others, in the wash of the waves, the outermost of men, where never a mortal comes to them from elsewhere.” Here we meet with another repeatedly accentuated suggestion … that of great distance. Whether Scheria existed in reality or only in his own imagination, the poet wished evidently to make it appear as far off as man’s geographical knowledge could carry it. Afterwards Nausicaa ... “tall, white-armed and young,” as the Swedish version pictures her … goes on to describe the city of her home in terms that I shall quote verbatim, because they contain almost everything we need to perceive the close resemblance to Plato’s Atlantis.
“By the city,” she says, “goes a high wall with towers, and there is a fair haven on either side of the town, and narrow is the entrance, and curved ships are drawn up on either hand of the mole, for all the folk have stations for their vessels, each man one for himself. And there is a place of assembly about the goodly temple of Poseidon, furnished with heavy stones, deep bedded in the earth. There men look to the gear of the black ships, hawsers and sails, and there they fine down the oars. For the Phaeacians care not for bow or quiver, but for masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing they cross the grey sea” ... the “grey” sea, note you, and not merely the “violet-hued” Mediterranean.
When he arrived at the palace of Alcinous … for which Professor Glotz thinks that the Minoan palace at Cnossos served Homer as a model, while others have traced it to the Achaean palaces at Tyrins and Mycenae … Odysseus found that its walls were of brass, with doors of gold. The doorposts and the lintel were of silver, but the threshold, more exposed to wear, was of brass. Animal figures of gold and silver flanked the door, while within golden youths on “firm-set bases” carried the torches lighting the spacious hall. In other words, gold and silver all around, as in Atlantis. The garden outside held two fountains, reminding us of the two springs created by Poseidon for Atlantis. Alcinous told him that the Phaeacians were ruled by twelve kings, among whom he was the chief, as was Atlas among the ten kings of Atlantis. Concerning the habits of his people, Alcinous said that “dear to them ever was the banquet, and the harp, and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath, and love, and sleep.” In Judges 18:7, we are told that the people “dwelt careless after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure.” And this, Mommsen tells us, was the typical life of the great Phoenician merchant cities. Homer’s frequent references to the Phaeacian fondness for music should remind us that the Greek translation of Gadeiros, the twin king of Atlas, was Eumelos, which means “good music.” Whatever real people may have served as prototypes for those imaginary dwellers in Scheria, they certainly, like the Phoenicians, must have had a great reputation as good livers,” so that we find Horace using the name of Phaeax to designate a glutton.
This should suffice for our purpose. Once more it is less a question of details, than of the total impression which the poet wished to convey. Like Plato, he piled fact on fact to suggest a large commercial centre of marvellous wealth, considerable culture, and a far-reaching command of the sea. While it is said in the poem that no other men came to Scheria, it is clear that the Phaeacians themselves moved about a great deal. We are told expressly that, once upon a time, they had carried Rhadamanthus on a visit to Euboea, which they reckoned farthest away of all lands from themselves. This places Scheria near the Islands of the Blessed, or the present Canaries, where Rhadamanthus was supposed to have his abode. And Euboea, of course, was farther away from the Strait of Heracles than any other part of Greece proper. The Euboeans are also credited with being the first Greek colonizers of the western Mediterranean, and near their principal city of Calchis we have already discovered the island of Atalanta, split or created by an earthquake, and the Channel of Atalantis named after it. Again we become conscious of that disconcerting circular movement so often spoken of.
Nausicaa, again, tells Odysseus that they live “far apart from others, in the wash of the waves, the outermost of men, where never a mortal comes to them from elsewhere.” Here we meet with another repeatedly accentuated suggestion … that of great distance. Whether Scheria existed in reality or only in his own imagination, the poet wished evidently to make it appear as far off as man’s geographical knowledge could carry it. Afterwards Nausicaa ... “tall, white-armed and young,” as the Swedish version pictures her … goes on to describe the city of her home in terms that I shall quote verbatim, because they contain almost everything we need to perceive the close resemblance to Plato’s Atlantis.
“By the city,” she says, “goes a high wall with towers, and there is a fair haven on either side of the town, and narrow is the entrance, and curved ships are drawn up on either hand of the mole, for all the folk have stations for their vessels, each man one for himself. And there is a place of assembly about the goodly temple of Poseidon, furnished with heavy stones, deep bedded in the earth. There men look to the gear of the black ships, hawsers and sails, and there they fine down the oars. For the Phaeacians care not for bow or quiver, but for masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing they cross the grey sea” ... the “grey” sea, note you, and not merely the “violet-hued” Mediterranean.
When he arrived at the palace of Alcinous … for which Professor Glotz thinks that the Minoan palace at Cnossos served Homer as a model, while others have traced it to the Achaean palaces at Tyrins and Mycenae … Odysseus found that its walls were of brass, with doors of gold. The doorposts and the lintel were of silver, but the threshold, more exposed to wear, was of brass. Animal figures of gold and silver flanked the door, while within golden youths on “firm-set bases” carried the torches lighting the spacious hall. In other words, gold and silver all around, as in Atlantis. The garden outside held two fountains, reminding us of the two springs created by Poseidon for Atlantis. Alcinous told him that the Phaeacians were ruled by twelve kings, among whom he was the chief, as was Atlas among the ten kings of Atlantis. Concerning the habits of his people, Alcinous said that “dear to them ever was the banquet, and the harp, and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath, and love, and sleep.” In Judges 18:7, we are told that the people “dwelt careless after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure.” And this, Mommsen tells us, was the typical life of the great Phoenician merchant cities. Homer’s frequent references to the Phaeacian fondness for music should remind us that the Greek translation of Gadeiros, the twin king of Atlas, was Eumelos, which means “good music.” Whatever real people may have served as prototypes for those imaginary dwellers in Scheria, they certainly, like the Phoenicians, must have had a great reputation as good livers,” so that we find Horace using the name of Phaeax to designate a glutton.
This should suffice for our purpose. Once more it is less a question of details, than of the total impression which the poet wished to convey. Like Plato, he piled fact on fact to suggest a large commercial centre of marvellous wealth, considerable culture, and a far-reaching command of the sea. While it is said in the poem that no other men came to Scheria, it is clear that the Phaeacians themselves moved about a great deal. We are told expressly that, once upon a time, they had carried Rhadamanthus on a visit to Euboea, which they reckoned farthest away of all lands from themselves. This places Scheria near the Islands of the Blessed, or the present Canaries, where Rhadamanthus was supposed to have his abode. And Euboea, of course, was farther away from the Strait of Heracles than any other part of Greece proper. The Euboeans are also credited with being the first Greek colonizers of the western Mediterranean, and near their principal city of Calchis we have already discovered the island of Atalanta, split or created by an earthquake, and the Channel of Atalantis named after it. Again we become conscious of that disconcerting circular movement so often spoken of.
3
The literature that has sprung up around the “Odyssey” is of appalling volume, and quite a considerable part of it is devoted to more or less plausible identifications of the route followed by the hero from Troy to Scheria and back to Ithaca. Perhaps it will be as well to outline briefly this route as given in the poem. After leaving Troy, Odysseus with his twelve ships first of all made a piratical excursion to the southern coast of Thessaly which began famously and ended rather disastrously. He carried away a good deal of loot, but lost a number of his men. Then a storm forced him to seek shelter for two days along the northeastern coast of Greece. Sailing from there on the third day, he made good headway to Cape Malea, now Malia, at the southern point of the Peloponnesus. But when he tried to double it, a northern wind combined with the prevailing current to send him outside the island of Cythera, and after that he drifted westward for nine days, until he reached the land of the Lotophagi, or Lotus-eaters. This has generally been identified with the present island of Jerba, in the Tunisian bay of Gabes. From there he made his way to the land of the Cyclopes, which, by common assent, has been placed somewhere in Sicily.
Having had his adventure with the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, which cost him six of his men and brought down upon him the wrath of Poseidon, whence all his subsequent troubles came, Odysseus proceeded to the island of Aeolus, master of the winds, which popular tradition as well as learned research has connected with one of the Aeolian or Liparian islands lying between Sicily and Italy. Aeolus handed over to him a bag containing all the winds but that of the west, Zephyr, which wafted him within sight of his native Ithaca in nine days. At that moment, when he could almost see his own home, his men opened the bag and let loose the whole lot of quarrelsome blow-hards, with the result that the road back to Aeolus took them no time at all. The ruler of the winds having refused to help again a man palpably in the bad graces of the gods, Odysseus made the land of the man-eating Laestrygones in six days and there lost eleven of his twelve ships with all their crews. Thucydides names the Laestrygones among the earliest inhabitants of Sicily, though with an ironic grin, and most of the commentators have left it at that. Thence, with his one saved ship, our hero came next to the island of the enchantress Circe, with whom he spent a not unpleasant year. Becoming restless once more, he got her permission to leave, but not until he had made an excursion into Hades, which we are told also lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles, by the outermost sea.
An old tradition places the home of Circe at the present Monte Circeo, a promontory on the western coast of Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples. It looks like an island from a distance, and Aldous Huxley asserts that from its top, on a very clear day, the shape of Vesuvius may be discerned on the southern horizon, while to the north, beyond the Alban hills, may be seen the dome of St. Peter’s. Very ingenious philological arguments have been advanced by Victor Berard, author of “The Phoenicians and the Odyssey,” in favor of this identification, but we need not bother ourselves with them. Circe may have been a more primitive or more specialized embodiment of Aphrodite, or Ashtaroth, with a renowned temple at this singularly striking location, whereby the place became fixed in the delicately selective imagination of Homer. On his way thence, Odysseus first passed the perilously singing Sirens, and then, still further to the south, the rival monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, mostly sought at the narrowest point of the strait of Messina. Having again lost a few men in hideous fashion, he arrived finally at the island of Thrinacia … undoubtedly Sicily, which was named Thrinacria in the olden days ... and there his men drew upon them their final doom by slaughtering some of the cattle of Helios. No sooner were they at sea again, than a bolt from Zeus himself broke up the ship and sank it with every one on board except Odysseus, who saved himself by making a raft of the mast and the keel. Having once more passed the rhythmically gorging and disgorging Charybdis by a clever trick, he drifted in nine days to the island of Ogygia, where he was cordially welcomed by the fair Calypso. Thence, after a stay of eight years, he fared to Scheria and the Phaeacians, who in a single night, while he lay asleep, carried him back to Ithaca at last.
Having had his adventure with the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, which cost him six of his men and brought down upon him the wrath of Poseidon, whence all his subsequent troubles came, Odysseus proceeded to the island of Aeolus, master of the winds, which popular tradition as well as learned research has connected with one of the Aeolian or Liparian islands lying between Sicily and Italy. Aeolus handed over to him a bag containing all the winds but that of the west, Zephyr, which wafted him within sight of his native Ithaca in nine days. At that moment, when he could almost see his own home, his men opened the bag and let loose the whole lot of quarrelsome blow-hards, with the result that the road back to Aeolus took them no time at all. The ruler of the winds having refused to help again a man palpably in the bad graces of the gods, Odysseus made the land of the man-eating Laestrygones in six days and there lost eleven of his twelve ships with all their crews. Thucydides names the Laestrygones among the earliest inhabitants of Sicily, though with an ironic grin, and most of the commentators have left it at that. Thence, with his one saved ship, our hero came next to the island of the enchantress Circe, with whom he spent a not unpleasant year. Becoming restless once more, he got her permission to leave, but not until he had made an excursion into Hades, which we are told also lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles, by the outermost sea.
An old tradition places the home of Circe at the present Monte Circeo, a promontory on the western coast of Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples. It looks like an island from a distance, and Aldous Huxley asserts that from its top, on a very clear day, the shape of Vesuvius may be discerned on the southern horizon, while to the north, beyond the Alban hills, may be seen the dome of St. Peter’s. Very ingenious philological arguments have been advanced by Victor Berard, author of “The Phoenicians and the Odyssey,” in favor of this identification, but we need not bother ourselves with them. Circe may have been a more primitive or more specialized embodiment of Aphrodite, or Ashtaroth, with a renowned temple at this singularly striking location, whereby the place became fixed in the delicately selective imagination of Homer. On his way thence, Odysseus first passed the perilously singing Sirens, and then, still further to the south, the rival monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, mostly sought at the narrowest point of the strait of Messina. Having again lost a few men in hideous fashion, he arrived finally at the island of Thrinacia … undoubtedly Sicily, which was named Thrinacria in the olden days ... and there his men drew upon them their final doom by slaughtering some of the cattle of Helios. No sooner were they at sea again, than a bolt from Zeus himself broke up the ship and sank it with every one on board except Odysseus, who saved himself by making a raft of the mast and the keel. Having once more passed the rhythmically gorging and disgorging Charybdis by a clever trick, he drifted in nine days to the island of Ogygia, where he was cordially welcomed by the fair Calypso. Thence, after a stay of eight years, he fared to Scheria and the Phaeacians, who in a single night, while he lay asleep, carried him back to Ithaca at last.
4
Quite an interesting story could be woven around the more or less warranted guesses made by ancient and modern theorizers concerning the identity of the various stations of that ten-year tour of supposedly uncharted waters. Samuel Butler, for example, the highly gifted author of “The Way of All Flesh” and “Erewhon,” spent the larger part of his last ten years and wrote a big volume, “The Authoress of the Odyssey,” trying to prove that the poem was composed by a charming young woman in the ancient Greek city of Drepanum, now Trapani, at the extreme northwestern corner of Sicily; that the route followed by the hero represented nothing but a circumnavigation of this and adjoining smaller islands; and that the talented young lady probably gave a picture of herself in the figure of Nausicaa. The persistence and ingenuity expended by Butler on that task deserved better than the absolute indifference with which his radical conclusions have been received. His identifications are frequently most plausible, and sometimes amusingly so, as when he reveals a single point along the northern coast of Sicily, the little town of Cefalu, where the goats, common throughout the island, are milked both evening and morning, instead of only once a day as elsewhere. Thereby he explains a much discussed Odyssean line about the land of the Laestrygones, “where herdsman hails herdsman as he drives in his flock, and the other who drives forth answers his call.”
With equal ingenuity and even greater plausibility, Professor Berard, who is one of the best informed students of ancient and modern Mediterranean geography, has placed the Laestrygones in Sardinia. And when we consider, among other things, that the name of the cannibalistic tribe is supposed to mean “workers in stone,” it seems reasonable to believe them identical with the pre-historic builders of those peculiar stone towers, the norighi, of which the island is said to hold nearly 6,000. They certainly were a people wild and ferocious enough to keep the greater part of Sardinia free from invaders up to the time of its final conquest by the Romans, and these could get peace only by carting off the inhabitants in untold thousands as slaves to the mainland. In addition we know that the Sardinians of to-day are of a different race from those who peopled the island in the days of Homer.
All such theories, however tempting, must be left alone in order that we may deal exclusively with the chief problem involved just now … the probable or possible identity of Ogygia and Scheria. The ancients used to think that Calypso had her home on Malta, or on the little island of Gozo (then Gaulos or Gaudos) near by it. Later scholars inclined to seek it nearer the Greek coast. Scheria, on the other hand, was until recently almost unanimously believed identical with the island of Corfu, which the ancients named Corcyra, and which, perhaps, is best known to American tourists as the former summer home of the Kaiser. The main basis for this identification was probably the proximity of Corfu to Ithaca, now Thiaki, the little Ionian island generally regarded as the home of Odysseus. To-day Corfu is almost as unanimously rejected as previously it was accepted, though some of the grounds given for this change of mind can hardly be held valid. Thus Hennig, for instance, brushes aside the old claim of the island off the coast of Epirus by declaring that it never had any commerce, and by asking what could possibly induce its cattleraising inhabitants to engage in maritime pursuits, as did the Phaeacians so conspicuously. But the ancient Corcyra was an important commercial centre while Minoan Crete still was in its heyday, serving as an intermediary in the flourishing trade on the upper Adriatic. During the “dark age after the Dorian invasion, it may have been reduced to mere cattle-raising, but the first naval battle recorded in Greek history took place between the fleets of Corcyra and its mother city, Corinth. And during the Persian invasion, the island equipped the second largest fleet in Greece ... a fully manned fleet of sixty ships.
Of greater importance to our inquiry I hold the absence of any noticeable tide around the shores of Corfu, and the lack of any river equalling even in the remotest degree the one pictured in the Homeric poem. It is dangerous, however, to base any definite conclusions on topographical discrepancies. The poet shuffled his facts, so to speak, either because he had them a little uncertainly, or because he did not care. The old identification of Ithaca itself, for instance, has been questioned lately because, as E. A. Gardner insists in the Encyclopædia Britannica, no amount of ingenuity can reconcile the description given in the ‘Odyssey’ with the actual topography of Thiaki.” Odysseus speaks of it as lying farthest westward of all the islands under his sway, while the modern Thiaki lies to the east of two larger islands, Cephalonia and Santa Maura. It has been pointed out, on the other hand, that the Odyssean description fits the last mentioned of those islands pretty closely. The ancient name of Santa Maura was sometimes Neritum, by which it is mentioned in the poem, and sometimes Leucas or Leucadia, the “white land,” which reminds us of the “white goddess,” Leucothea, whose veil saved Odysseus from drowning off the coast of Scheria. More circles!
The only thing that really matters, as I see it, is the unmistakable insistency with which Homer emphasizes the extreme western location of the Phaeacians and their lack of close neighbors, all of which becomes ridiculous when associated with Corfu, from which the coast of Epirus is plainly visible, and to which visitors from other parts of Greece must have come pretty frequently. Scheria marks one of the climactic points of the poem. Leaving the purely fabulous Hades alone … which is also laid beyond the Pillars and on the shores of the Atlantic ... Scheria marks the farthest inhabited region to which Odysseus penetrates, and it seems reasonable to think that it does so because it represented the farthest notable locality of which Homer possessed fairly definite knowledge, whether through Cretan, Phoenician, or purely Greek sources. And when, for reasons of poetic expediency, he wishes to bring his hero home without taking further account of the vast expanse of sea and land between Scheria and Ithaca, he resorts to magic.
Time and again Homer emphasizes the miraculous character of the Phaeacian ships, which needed neither pilots nor rudders, but “understood the thoughts and intents of men” and “knew the cities and fat fields of every people,” so that, of their own intuition, they made straight for the spot on the Ithacan coast that would be most favorable to the secret landing of Odysseus. They moved with the swiftness of human thought, we are told, shrouding themselves in mist and clouds, without ever fearing “wreck or ruin.” Finally, on its return to Scheria, the ship that had carried Odysseus home was turned into a rock by the vengeful Poseidon, who also “over-shadowed the city with a great mountain,” causing Alcinous and his fellow kings to decree that never again should a stranger be helped by the Phaeacians in a similar manner. This intentional employment of a vast supernatural machinery for the return of Odysseus indicates strongly that, to Homer, the principal and commanding aspect of Scheria was its extreme distance from the familiar haunts of the Greeks.
With equal ingenuity and even greater plausibility, Professor Berard, who is one of the best informed students of ancient and modern Mediterranean geography, has placed the Laestrygones in Sardinia. And when we consider, among other things, that the name of the cannibalistic tribe is supposed to mean “workers in stone,” it seems reasonable to believe them identical with the pre-historic builders of those peculiar stone towers, the norighi, of which the island is said to hold nearly 6,000. They certainly were a people wild and ferocious enough to keep the greater part of Sardinia free from invaders up to the time of its final conquest by the Romans, and these could get peace only by carting off the inhabitants in untold thousands as slaves to the mainland. In addition we know that the Sardinians of to-day are of a different race from those who peopled the island in the days of Homer.
All such theories, however tempting, must be left alone in order that we may deal exclusively with the chief problem involved just now … the probable or possible identity of Ogygia and Scheria. The ancients used to think that Calypso had her home on Malta, or on the little island of Gozo (then Gaulos or Gaudos) near by it. Later scholars inclined to seek it nearer the Greek coast. Scheria, on the other hand, was until recently almost unanimously believed identical with the island of Corfu, which the ancients named Corcyra, and which, perhaps, is best known to American tourists as the former summer home of the Kaiser. The main basis for this identification was probably the proximity of Corfu to Ithaca, now Thiaki, the little Ionian island generally regarded as the home of Odysseus. To-day Corfu is almost as unanimously rejected as previously it was accepted, though some of the grounds given for this change of mind can hardly be held valid. Thus Hennig, for instance, brushes aside the old claim of the island off the coast of Epirus by declaring that it never had any commerce, and by asking what could possibly induce its cattleraising inhabitants to engage in maritime pursuits, as did the Phaeacians so conspicuously. But the ancient Corcyra was an important commercial centre while Minoan Crete still was in its heyday, serving as an intermediary in the flourishing trade on the upper Adriatic. During the “dark age after the Dorian invasion, it may have been reduced to mere cattle-raising, but the first naval battle recorded in Greek history took place between the fleets of Corcyra and its mother city, Corinth. And during the Persian invasion, the island equipped the second largest fleet in Greece ... a fully manned fleet of sixty ships.
Of greater importance to our inquiry I hold the absence of any noticeable tide around the shores of Corfu, and the lack of any river equalling even in the remotest degree the one pictured in the Homeric poem. It is dangerous, however, to base any definite conclusions on topographical discrepancies. The poet shuffled his facts, so to speak, either because he had them a little uncertainly, or because he did not care. The old identification of Ithaca itself, for instance, has been questioned lately because, as E. A. Gardner insists in the Encyclopædia Britannica, no amount of ingenuity can reconcile the description given in the ‘Odyssey’ with the actual topography of Thiaki.” Odysseus speaks of it as lying farthest westward of all the islands under his sway, while the modern Thiaki lies to the east of two larger islands, Cephalonia and Santa Maura. It has been pointed out, on the other hand, that the Odyssean description fits the last mentioned of those islands pretty closely. The ancient name of Santa Maura was sometimes Neritum, by which it is mentioned in the poem, and sometimes Leucas or Leucadia, the “white land,” which reminds us of the “white goddess,” Leucothea, whose veil saved Odysseus from drowning off the coast of Scheria. More circles!
The only thing that really matters, as I see it, is the unmistakable insistency with which Homer emphasizes the extreme western location of the Phaeacians and their lack of close neighbors, all of which becomes ridiculous when associated with Corfu, from which the coast of Epirus is plainly visible, and to which visitors from other parts of Greece must have come pretty frequently. Scheria marks one of the climactic points of the poem. Leaving the purely fabulous Hades alone … which is also laid beyond the Pillars and on the shores of the Atlantic ... Scheria marks the farthest inhabited region to which Odysseus penetrates, and it seems reasonable to think that it does so because it represented the farthest notable locality of which Homer possessed fairly definite knowledge, whether through Cretan, Phoenician, or purely Greek sources. And when, for reasons of poetic expediency, he wishes to bring his hero home without taking further account of the vast expanse of sea and land between Scheria and Ithaca, he resorts to magic.
Time and again Homer emphasizes the miraculous character of the Phaeacian ships, which needed neither pilots nor rudders, but “understood the thoughts and intents of men” and “knew the cities and fat fields of every people,” so that, of their own intuition, they made straight for the spot on the Ithacan coast that would be most favorable to the secret landing of Odysseus. They moved with the swiftness of human thought, we are told, shrouding themselves in mist and clouds, without ever fearing “wreck or ruin.” Finally, on its return to Scheria, the ship that had carried Odysseus home was turned into a rock by the vengeful Poseidon, who also “over-shadowed the city with a great mountain,” causing Alcinous and his fellow kings to decree that never again should a stranger be helped by the Phaeacians in a similar manner. This intentional employment of a vast supernatural machinery for the return of Odysseus indicates strongly that, to Homer, the principal and commanding aspect of Scheria was its extreme distance from the familiar haunts of the Greeks.
5
Strabo saw red when any one, like Callimachus of Cyrene, the founder of Greek literary history, tried to place Ogygia or Scheria within the confines of the Mediterranean. He classed Homer as the first geographer and repeatedly declared him familiar with the entire region between the Black Sea and the Atlantic coast of Spain. When the poet placed certain parts of his story outside the Strait of Heracles, he meant it and knew what he was talking about, Strabo averred. Plutarch agreed with him in this respect, and the trend of recent scholarship has been in the same direction. Butler, of course, held both Ithaca and Scheria identical with Trapani, because he had made up his mind about the female authorship of the poem, and because this was the only place his blue-stocking Nausicaa really knew and could write about. Ogygia he sought in the Aegadian island of Favignana, right outside Trapani, or in the isolated island of Pantelleria, which lies halfway between Africa and the Sicilian coast, and which seems to have been well populated during the Neolithic age. Its ancient name, by the by, was Cossyra, connecting curiously with the ancient name of Corfu, and thus again we get that disturbing sensation of a circular movement.
Strange it is to find such a thorough student of the subject as Berard accepting the identification of Scheria with Corfu without a qualm, although … to suggest only one factor … the struggle with the tide, which forms such a striking feature of the hero’s landing on the Phaeacian coast, would have been quite unthinkable where the difference between high and low water is estimated at four inches. No less strange is his location of Calypso’s home on the insignificant little islet of Perijil, near Ceuta, on the African shore inside the Pillars. It is an almost bare rock, destitute of water, and nestling so close to the overhanging cliffs of the adjoining shore that it is hardly distinguishable even from a ship in search of it. The term used by Homer to characterize the situation and appearance of Ogygia is omphalos thalasses, which, ordinarily, is translated into “the navel of the ocean.” But omphalos means also the central, dome-like boss on a shield, and Professor William B. Ramsay once pointed out that Homer undoubtedly used it in this sense … to indicate something that stood out conspicuously from a vast, flat surface. Such a description fits Pantelleria, after all. It also fits Madeira, which has the additional advantage of lying beyond the Strait of Heracles, far out in the “real” ocean, as the old Egyptian priest called the Atlantic, and in such a direction that, as indicated in the poem, Odysseus would have to keep a northeasterly course in travelling from Ogygia to what is now thought to have been the actual location back of Homer’s Scheria.
Like Butler, Berard seems a little too much guided by a preconceived idea. His dominant theory is that the Phoenicians furnished the geography found in the “Odyssey.” To him the poem is, above all, a periplus, or pilot’s guide, like the “Mediterranean Pilot” published by the British Admiralty, or like the Italian and Spanish portulans of an earlier age, but issued in a Semitic language by the old seafarers of Tyre and Sidon. The information contained in this guide, Berard believes, was put into the typical poetic form of a nostos, or homecoming from Troy, by a Hellenic bard living at Miletus about 850 в.с. Professor Gilbert Murray admits that there may be something to it, though he files reservations against many of the French writer’s applications of his theory. Glotz, in the work previously quoted, expresses the opinion that, when the Greek migrations “receded into the past and took on a marvellous color, all the tales of sea-journeys were fitted into returns from Troy, and especially into the adventures of Odysseus.” Even a layman can see that Homer wished, for the benefit of his readers, to make his hero take in all the main “sights” around the western and less known parts of the great inland sea which had played such a big part in the history of Greece before his day, and which was just beginning to play a similar part again.
The trouble with Berard is, first, that he overestimates the importance of the Phoenicians both as maritime pioneers and as disseminators of culture; and, secondly, that he under-estimates the scope of early Mediterranean navigation. This, however, is a time when, to quote Glotz again, “from day to day, new discoveries and new publications force the least conscientious painter of the most imperfectly known communities to continual recantations.” Once upon a time we were told that “all roads led to Rome,” and we knew that it meant Hellas. Then came days when, in quick succession, we visioned those selfsame roads as leading, first to Egypt, and later to those old Phoenician merchant cities which furnished King Solomon with so much precious material for his temple-building. Now it is Crete. Ever since Sir Arthur J. Evans began his epoch-making excavations of the Cnossian palaces of the Minoan kings, we have been forced, almost literally from day to day, to revise all our earlier ideas of what happened in those regions during ancient days. And this startlingly rapid unrolling of an all but forgotten, yet all-important page of man’s history has only just begun.
Strange it is to find such a thorough student of the subject as Berard accepting the identification of Scheria with Corfu without a qualm, although … to suggest only one factor … the struggle with the tide, which forms such a striking feature of the hero’s landing on the Phaeacian coast, would have been quite unthinkable where the difference between high and low water is estimated at four inches. No less strange is his location of Calypso’s home on the insignificant little islet of Perijil, near Ceuta, on the African shore inside the Pillars. It is an almost bare rock, destitute of water, and nestling so close to the overhanging cliffs of the adjoining shore that it is hardly distinguishable even from a ship in search of it. The term used by Homer to characterize the situation and appearance of Ogygia is omphalos thalasses, which, ordinarily, is translated into “the navel of the ocean.” But omphalos means also the central, dome-like boss on a shield, and Professor William B. Ramsay once pointed out that Homer undoubtedly used it in this sense … to indicate something that stood out conspicuously from a vast, flat surface. Such a description fits Pantelleria, after all. It also fits Madeira, which has the additional advantage of lying beyond the Strait of Heracles, far out in the “real” ocean, as the old Egyptian priest called the Atlantic, and in such a direction that, as indicated in the poem, Odysseus would have to keep a northeasterly course in travelling from Ogygia to what is now thought to have been the actual location back of Homer’s Scheria.
Like Butler, Berard seems a little too much guided by a preconceived idea. His dominant theory is that the Phoenicians furnished the geography found in the “Odyssey.” To him the poem is, above all, a periplus, or pilot’s guide, like the “Mediterranean Pilot” published by the British Admiralty, or like the Italian and Spanish portulans of an earlier age, but issued in a Semitic language by the old seafarers of Tyre and Sidon. The information contained in this guide, Berard believes, was put into the typical poetic form of a nostos, or homecoming from Troy, by a Hellenic bard living at Miletus about 850 в.с. Professor Gilbert Murray admits that there may be something to it, though he files reservations against many of the French writer’s applications of his theory. Glotz, in the work previously quoted, expresses the opinion that, when the Greek migrations “receded into the past and took on a marvellous color, all the tales of sea-journeys were fitted into returns from Troy, and especially into the adventures of Odysseus.” Even a layman can see that Homer wished, for the benefit of his readers, to make his hero take in all the main “sights” around the western and less known parts of the great inland sea which had played such a big part in the history of Greece before his day, and which was just beginning to play a similar part again.
The trouble with Berard is, first, that he overestimates the importance of the Phoenicians both as maritime pioneers and as disseminators of culture; and, secondly, that he under-estimates the scope of early Mediterranean navigation. This, however, is a time when, to quote Glotz again, “from day to day, new discoveries and new publications force the least conscientious painter of the most imperfectly known communities to continual recantations.” Once upon a time we were told that “all roads led to Rome,” and we knew that it meant Hellas. Then came days when, in quick succession, we visioned those selfsame roads as leading, first to Egypt, and later to those old Phoenician merchant cities which furnished King Solomon with so much precious material for his temple-building. Now it is Crete. Ever since Sir Arthur J. Evans began his epoch-making excavations of the Cnossian palaces of the Minoan kings, we have been forced, almost literally from day to day, to revise all our earlier ideas of what happened in those regions during ancient days. And this startlingly rapid unrolling of an all but forgotten, yet all-important page of man’s history has only just begun.
6
To-day we know things about early traffic in the Mediterranean and elsewhere which our fathers never dreamt of. To-morrow we shall know still more. An era of discoveries and revelations has opened that seems comparable to the great days of the Renaissance. Not in Crete alone, but on the islands of the Aegean, in Syria and Palestine, in Egypt, at the old Hittite capital of Boghaz Keui, in southern Spain, and in numerous other places, properly financed and equipped scientists are disclosing one fragment after another of life that was held buried and lost for ever. In the light of this new knowledge, the world of the ancients is becoming a great deal larger than we have thought it hitherto. And, in addition, we are forced to recognize the possible truthfulness of many statements by the classic writers of Greece and Rome which we used to brush aside as little better than fairy tales. This is true in regard to the works of Herodotus and Strabo and Pythias and many others. We no longer doubt that Phoenician sailors, commissioned by Pharaoh Necho, actually circumnavigated Africa about 600 в.с., or that, a century later, the Carthaginian Himilco pushed northward along the western coast of Europe until he reached the shores of Britain. It is with such facts in mind that we should read Homer and Plato, remembering also that the former especially was bound to modify the truth for the achievement of his auctorial purposes.
Disregarding its many gulfs and projecting peninsulas, the Mediterranean may be compared to a tall vase with a long neck at the Strait of Gibraltar. We used to believe that the Greeks of classic time knew only the inside of that vase, and that, until well toward our own era, they knew little about its shape and contents west of Sicily. That idea of ours has been smashed all to pieces. The Cretans had connections with Spain beyond all doubt. Furthermore, the vase has lips curving outward along the coasts of Africa and Spain, and the sailors groping their way along the shore of the inland sea would surely be tempted to follow the lead of those lips beyond the strait. Gades, or Cadiz of our own day, is credited with having existed eleven centuries before the beginning of our era, as I have mentioned previously. Tradition places a Greek colony at Tingis, the present Tangier, not so very much later. And in the sixth century B.C., the Carthaginians vetoed an Etruscan plan for the colonization of the Canary Islands.
We are convinced now that one maritime people after another in the eastern Mediterranean traded with those outlying regions near and beyond the Pillars of Heracles, bringing from Spain the highly cherished Baltic amber and the British tin so essential to the making of bronze, but also other materials of many kinds, as, for instance, gold, silver, and copper from the mines of Sierra Morena. Nor did this happen merely within what we call historic time, but long before, five thousand years and more ago, when the most advanced of the Mediterranean peoples still used implements and weapons of polished stone. A Belgian student of pre-historic Spain, Louis Siret, declared nearly thirty years ago that, “during late Neolithic times, maritime routes linked the south of the Iberian peninsula with the Baltic, the British Isles, the Cassiterides (or Tin Islands, probably identical with the Scillies) on one hand, and with Egypt and the East on the other.”
The identification commonly assigned to Ogygia by recent students of the question is, as I suggested a while ago, Madeira, and it seems quite probable that even the Cretans of the later Minoan ages may have known about the existence of that island, which truly may be described as the omphalos of the ocean shield. For Scheria, on the other hand, no equally definite or plausible theory was forth-coming until quite lately, when a group of German students, led by Professor Adolf Schulten of the Erlangen University, came to a conclusion no less fascinating than novel … a conclusion that has found a popular exposition in the work by Dr. Richard Hennig frequently referred to. Thus, at last, we have reached the third point sought by our process of triangulation in time and space … that place of wealth and mystery in the far west which was called Tarshish by the Hebrews and Tartessos by the Greeks.
Disregarding its many gulfs and projecting peninsulas, the Mediterranean may be compared to a tall vase with a long neck at the Strait of Gibraltar. We used to believe that the Greeks of classic time knew only the inside of that vase, and that, until well toward our own era, they knew little about its shape and contents west of Sicily. That idea of ours has been smashed all to pieces. The Cretans had connections with Spain beyond all doubt. Furthermore, the vase has lips curving outward along the coasts of Africa and Spain, and the sailors groping their way along the shore of the inland sea would surely be tempted to follow the lead of those lips beyond the strait. Gades, or Cadiz of our own day, is credited with having existed eleven centuries before the beginning of our era, as I have mentioned previously. Tradition places a Greek colony at Tingis, the present Tangier, not so very much later. And in the sixth century B.C., the Carthaginians vetoed an Etruscan plan for the colonization of the Canary Islands.
We are convinced now that one maritime people after another in the eastern Mediterranean traded with those outlying regions near and beyond the Pillars of Heracles, bringing from Spain the highly cherished Baltic amber and the British tin so essential to the making of bronze, but also other materials of many kinds, as, for instance, gold, silver, and copper from the mines of Sierra Morena. Nor did this happen merely within what we call historic time, but long before, five thousand years and more ago, when the most advanced of the Mediterranean peoples still used implements and weapons of polished stone. A Belgian student of pre-historic Spain, Louis Siret, declared nearly thirty years ago that, “during late Neolithic times, maritime routes linked the south of the Iberian peninsula with the Baltic, the British Isles, the Cassiterides (or Tin Islands, probably identical with the Scillies) on one hand, and with Egypt and the East on the other.”
The identification commonly assigned to Ogygia by recent students of the question is, as I suggested a while ago, Madeira, and it seems quite probable that even the Cretans of the later Minoan ages may have known about the existence of that island, which truly may be described as the omphalos of the ocean shield. For Scheria, on the other hand, no equally definite or plausible theory was forth-coming until quite lately, when a group of German students, led by Professor Adolf Schulten of the Erlangen University, came to a conclusion no less fascinating than novel … a conclusion that has found a popular exposition in the work by Dr. Richard Hennig frequently referred to. Thus, at last, we have reached the third point sought by our process of triangulation in time and space … that place of wealth and mystery in the far west which was called Tarshish by the Hebrews and Tartessos by the Greeks.
P A R T T H R E E
T A R S H I S H - T A R T E S S O S
1
T A R S H I S H - T A R T E S S O S
1
THE name of Tarshish occurs repeatedly in the Old Testament, mostly coupled with that of Tyre, and always in a manner suggestive of something very remote and fabulously wealthy. It had evidently laid a deep hold on Hebrew imagination, and their prophets used the name as Tennyson spoke of Cathay, shedding over it a glamor of romance without for a moment doubting its reality. The first time we find it in the Bible is as part of the list of nations given in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The sons of Javan, among whom were divided “the isles of the Gentiles,” are there said to be Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. Javan means Ionian, but the term seems to have been used indiscriminately to designate all the peoples north of the Mediterranean. Elishah corresponds to the Egyptian Alashiya and is now believed to indicate Cyprus, or at least the Cretan-Achaean parts of it. Kittim or Chittim is said to be derived from Kithion or Citium, the Phoenician settlement in eastern Cyprus known originally as Kart-hadshat, the New City. I have a strong suspicion, however, that one of these names may refer to Crete. Tarshish has been definitely identified with Tartessos of the Greeks. In Genesis there is nothing to suggest the greater remoteness of the last mentioned place, but such a suggestion is never absent from subsequent references to it.
When Jonah wished to escape “the presence of the Lord,” he went over to the port of Joppa and took passage on a ship leaving for Tarshish. In other words, he is represented as choosing the place supposed to be farthest removed from Nineveh, where he did not want to go. In I Kings 10:22 and II Chronicles 9: 21, we learn that King Solomon, as partner of King Hiram of Tyre and Sidon, had ships manned by Phoenician sailors keeping up regular communication with Tarshish, each voyage taking three years going and coming. The return cargoes consisted of gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. In this connection, the chronicler tells us rather irrelevantly, but quite significantly, that King Solomon “ passed all the kings of the earth in riches and wisdom.” Similarly the old Egyptian priest told Solon that the kings of Atlantis “had such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and potentates.” It was a formula employed to designate a great centre of power and prosperity.
The first line of the twenty-third chapter of Isaiah gives its title in highly dramatic and quite modern fashion: “The burden of Tyre.” It has much to say about the “howling of the ships of Tarshish” over the sad fate of the great city with which it seemed inseparably connected. “Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind,” we read in Psalms 48:7, which means that the ships from the far west could not make their destination against a strong contrary wind. Most notable, however, is the reference contained in the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, where the fall of Tyre is again proclaimed: “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs.” This is a pretty accurate list of the main products that made Tarshish-Tartessos what it was in the days of its glory. It was the port of exit for one of the richest mining centres known to the ancient world, and if copper is missing on that list, it is probably because it was the one metal that could be had with comparative ease nearer at hand. The term “Tarshish-ships” occurs elsewhere in the Bible much as East-Indiaman was employed at one time to designate any large ship equipped for an unusually long journey. But always, in one form or another, recurs that inalienable association of Tarshish, or Tartessos, with longdistance shipping and incredible wealth.
Stories of similar purport are told by Herodotus, who used to be called “the father of lies” as often as he was called “the father of history,” but whose reputation for accuracy has risen tremendously of late. He tells us that, some time about 630 в.с., a vessel from the Aegean island of Samos was driven beyond the Pillars of Heracles by one of those persistent eastern winds mentioned in the Psalms, and that it reached Tartessos while this city was still “a virgin port, unfrequented by merchants.” The profits of that involuntary voyage were the second largest known in the history of Greek commerce up to that time, amounting to something like $70,000 ... an enormous sum, considering the greater value of money at that time. This was an isolated incident, however, and no attempt was made to repeat it. Nevertheless it may have had a suggestive influence on the more audacious mariners of the Ionian city of Phocaea, near Smyrna, of which we have had to speak before.
They were the first ones, Herodotus tells us, to make the Greek world acquainted with the upper portions of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas, with Spain, and with Tartessos, substituting long, swift, fifty-oared penteconters, like those used by the Phaeacians of Scheria, for the round-built, slow-moving merchant vessels employed until then for purely commercial purposes. This means, we know to-day, that the priority of the Phocaeans applied only to that new Hellenic world which was emerging gradually from the chaos wrought by the Dorian invasion, for a thousand years earlier the Cretans had communications with the mouth of the Po, via the Elian port of Pylos and the Ionian islands. About 600 в.с., the Phocaeans founded Massalia, which has remained a great trading centre ever since, being the Massilia of the Romans and the Marseilles of our own time. Evidently they sought the route beyond the Pillars deliberately and frequently, gaining the favor of the king then ruling Tartessos to such an extent that he wanted them to transfer their entire community to his realm. Finding them unwilling to do so at the time, he provided them with sufficient funds to build a solid stone wall around their own city as a protection against the Persian Cyrus, who had just begun to make a big stir in the east. This generous Tartessian monarch, whose name, Arganthonios, smacks of the silver so plentiful in that region, was evidently famous throughout the ancient world for his long reign and longer life. Herodotus puts these at eighty and one hundred and twenty years, respectively. Anacreon, who was born nearly a century earlier than Herodotus, and before Cyrus finally drove the Phocaeans from their Asian homes to Corsica, tells us in one of his bibulous odes that he “desired neither the horn of Amalthea, nor to reign over Tartessos one hundred and fifty years.” This, of course, is poetic exaggeration, but also fairly good corroboration. When, in 546 в.с., the fatal blow was struck at Phocaea, those hardy seafarers at first considered making straight for Tartessos, we are told, but gave up this plan on learning that the long life of Arganthonios had come to an end at last.
If we wonder how Tartessos could be called a virgin port about the beginning of the sixth century в.с., and how the sailors of Phocaea could trade on that port without any interference, we have only to recall that Tyre just then was having a lot of trouble with Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, while Carthage had not yet broken with the mother city and started on its subsequent policy of monopolizing the whole western Mediterranean. It was a brief interregnum of opportunity which the enterprising people of Phocaea used to the utmost, and which they lost for ever when, in 536 в.с., а Pyrrhic victory over the combined Carthaginian and Etruscan fleets made them pull up stakes once more and exchange Corsica for a less exposed residence on the western coast of Italy. It is a wonder to us moderns how in those days whole cities and tribes could suddenly remove to a new location, kith and kin, bag and baggage. About the same time when the Phocaeans found peace at last, Tartessos passed out of sight for ever … vanished so entirely that a couple of centuries later the creators of the new science of geography could dispute about the spot where it had stood. The disappearance of that city full of untold wealth was as complete and almost as sudden as that of Atlantis.
When Jonah wished to escape “the presence of the Lord,” he went over to the port of Joppa and took passage on a ship leaving for Tarshish. In other words, he is represented as choosing the place supposed to be farthest removed from Nineveh, where he did not want to go. In I Kings 10:22 and II Chronicles 9: 21, we learn that King Solomon, as partner of King Hiram of Tyre and Sidon, had ships manned by Phoenician sailors keeping up regular communication with Tarshish, each voyage taking three years going and coming. The return cargoes consisted of gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. In this connection, the chronicler tells us rather irrelevantly, but quite significantly, that King Solomon “ passed all the kings of the earth in riches and wisdom.” Similarly the old Egyptian priest told Solon that the kings of Atlantis “had such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and potentates.” It was a formula employed to designate a great centre of power and prosperity.
The first line of the twenty-third chapter of Isaiah gives its title in highly dramatic and quite modern fashion: “The burden of Tyre.” It has much to say about the “howling of the ships of Tarshish” over the sad fate of the great city with which it seemed inseparably connected. “Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind,” we read in Psalms 48:7, which means that the ships from the far west could not make their destination against a strong contrary wind. Most notable, however, is the reference contained in the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, where the fall of Tyre is again proclaimed: “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs.” This is a pretty accurate list of the main products that made Tarshish-Tartessos what it was in the days of its glory. It was the port of exit for one of the richest mining centres known to the ancient world, and if copper is missing on that list, it is probably because it was the one metal that could be had with comparative ease nearer at hand. The term “Tarshish-ships” occurs elsewhere in the Bible much as East-Indiaman was employed at one time to designate any large ship equipped for an unusually long journey. But always, in one form or another, recurs that inalienable association of Tarshish, or Tartessos, with longdistance shipping and incredible wealth.
Stories of similar purport are told by Herodotus, who used to be called “the father of lies” as often as he was called “the father of history,” but whose reputation for accuracy has risen tremendously of late. He tells us that, some time about 630 в.с., a vessel from the Aegean island of Samos was driven beyond the Pillars of Heracles by one of those persistent eastern winds mentioned in the Psalms, and that it reached Tartessos while this city was still “a virgin port, unfrequented by merchants.” The profits of that involuntary voyage were the second largest known in the history of Greek commerce up to that time, amounting to something like $70,000 ... an enormous sum, considering the greater value of money at that time. This was an isolated incident, however, and no attempt was made to repeat it. Nevertheless it may have had a suggestive influence on the more audacious mariners of the Ionian city of Phocaea, near Smyrna, of which we have had to speak before.
They were the first ones, Herodotus tells us, to make the Greek world acquainted with the upper portions of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas, with Spain, and with Tartessos, substituting long, swift, fifty-oared penteconters, like those used by the Phaeacians of Scheria, for the round-built, slow-moving merchant vessels employed until then for purely commercial purposes. This means, we know to-day, that the priority of the Phocaeans applied only to that new Hellenic world which was emerging gradually from the chaos wrought by the Dorian invasion, for a thousand years earlier the Cretans had communications with the mouth of the Po, via the Elian port of Pylos and the Ionian islands. About 600 в.с., the Phocaeans founded Massalia, which has remained a great trading centre ever since, being the Massilia of the Romans and the Marseilles of our own time. Evidently they sought the route beyond the Pillars deliberately and frequently, gaining the favor of the king then ruling Tartessos to such an extent that he wanted them to transfer their entire community to his realm. Finding them unwilling to do so at the time, he provided them with sufficient funds to build a solid stone wall around their own city as a protection against the Persian Cyrus, who had just begun to make a big stir in the east. This generous Tartessian monarch, whose name, Arganthonios, smacks of the silver so plentiful in that region, was evidently famous throughout the ancient world for his long reign and longer life. Herodotus puts these at eighty and one hundred and twenty years, respectively. Anacreon, who was born nearly a century earlier than Herodotus, and before Cyrus finally drove the Phocaeans from their Asian homes to Corsica, tells us in one of his bibulous odes that he “desired neither the horn of Amalthea, nor to reign over Tartessos one hundred and fifty years.” This, of course, is poetic exaggeration, but also fairly good corroboration. When, in 546 в.с., the fatal blow was struck at Phocaea, those hardy seafarers at first considered making straight for Tartessos, we are told, but gave up this plan on learning that the long life of Arganthonios had come to an end at last.
If we wonder how Tartessos could be called a virgin port about the beginning of the sixth century в.с., and how the sailors of Phocaea could trade on that port without any interference, we have only to recall that Tyre just then was having a lot of trouble with Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, while Carthage had not yet broken with the mother city and started on its subsequent policy of monopolizing the whole western Mediterranean. It was a brief interregnum of opportunity which the enterprising people of Phocaea used to the utmost, and which they lost for ever when, in 536 в.с., а Pyrrhic victory over the combined Carthaginian and Etruscan fleets made them pull up stakes once more and exchange Corsica for a less exposed residence on the western coast of Italy. It is a wonder to us moderns how in those days whole cities and tribes could suddenly remove to a new location, kith and kin, bag and baggage. About the same time when the Phocaeans found peace at last, Tartessos passed out of sight for ever … vanished so entirely that a couple of centuries later the creators of the new science of geography could dispute about the spot where it had stood. The disappearance of that city full of untold wealth was as complete and almost as sudden as that of Atlantis.
2
Those two references of Herodotus to Tartessos are so casual that one may think he did not know much about it. But he was talking about the Phocaeans and other Greek venturers at the time, and for once he resisted the temptation to digress. In another part of his book occurs an otherwise insignificant remark, suggesting that he knew a lot more than he told. While enumerating the tribes living along the northern coast of Africa, he says concerning a certain part of our modern Tunis, where grew the much treasured spice known as Silphium, that it also contained weasels like those found in Tartessos ... gale Tartesiai, he calls them, I think. They were not weasels, of course, but ferrets or martens. And Isaac Taylor tells us in his “Words and Places,” that Spain first became known to the Phoenicians as a source of supply of those highly coveted furs. He even believed that the name Hispania may have been derived from a Phoenician word, sapan or span, suggesting an abundance of that kind of animals. It makes one wish that old Herodotus had talked more about Tartessos and less about the Phocaeans.
Way back in 1849, one of those thorough-going Germans, named Gustav Moritz Redslob, collected everything he could find in ancient and modern literature referring to the lost city. He used it to prove that Tartessos was the little Spanish city of Tortosa, on the Ebro, not far from Tarragona. This guess was unusually far off the mark. Commonly, when the place was mentioned at all by modern writers, they identified it with Cadiz. It was well known that the Guadalquivir, which the Romans named Baetis, had previously been called Tartessis by the Greeks, and as Cadiz lies somewhat to the south of the present outlet of that river, this was held to settle the matter. This mistake gained further credit from the constant biblical coupling of Tarshish with Tyre, generally recognized as the mother city of Gades, or Cadiz. Yet the ancient writers never failed to recognize the previous existence of two wholly distinct cities in the same region, even when some of them, mostly Romans of a late date, tried to identify Tartessos with the small community of Carteia, somewhat east of Calpe, or Gibraltar. Strabo knew better, and reading him makes one wonder at the blindness which caused learned men to disregard his very positive and quite accurate statements for so many centuries.
Let us then turn back to Strabo and compare what he tells us with the results of the investigations carried on for several years near the mouth of the Guadalquivir by Professor Adolf Schulten of Erlangen, assisted by an English archaeologist, George Bonsor, and by a German geologist, Professor Otto Jessen of Tuebingen. It is, as already stated, the achievements of these men which have furnished Dr. Richard Hennig with some of his main arguments on behalf of the theories about the identity of Atlantis and Scheria set forth in his repeatedly mentioned volume, “Realms of Mystery.”
Strabo tells us, first of all, that the Guadalquivir previously had another outlet further to the north, so that an island was formed between the two arms of the river. On this island, facing the mainland, stood the city of Tartessos. Jessen has verified the existence of another branch, now completely filled up. But he has made some still more significant discoveries. There used to be a bay of the ocean inside the island, where lies now the vast, waterlogged fen known as Las Marismas, and once upon a time, not so very long ago, geologically speaking, this bay reached as far inland as Seville. A geological map of Spain makes it easy to understand what has happened. From the coast north of the Guadalquivir, a wedge of alluvial plain stretches all the way to Seville and beyond a plain … “open to the south,” and framed along its northern border by the Sierras, those mountains of which the old Egyptian priest said that they were “celebrated for their number and size and beauty.” This plain is of comparatively recent date, belonging to the Quaternary age, in which we are still living, while the surrounding country shows much older formations. It was built up entirely by deposits from the rivers now composing the Guadalquivir system.
First of all the island of Tartessos was formed by the jamming of silt against a backbone of Tertiary rocks edging the coast from the present mouth of the Guadalquivir and northward as far as Huelva ... a line of rocks with sand dunes within, the Arenas Gordas, which may correspond to the “not very high mountain” along the outside shore of Atlantis, and perhaps also to the “ overshadowing mountain” raised by the wrath of Poseidon against Scheria. As the bay within began to fill up, smaller islands must have appeared, and these may help to explain the priest’s reference to islands between Atlantis and the continent beyond. And at that time, of course, when the bay still existed, the larger island must have seemed much farther removed from the mainland than later, when it was surrounded only by two arms of the river. The location of the continent to the eastward, instead of farther to the westward, need not bother us in dealing with a time when all mariners hugged the shore and had to sail without the guidance of a compass. Just when the filling up of the bay was completed, we cannot tell with certainty, but there are reasons to believe that parts of it still remained open toward the end of the second millennium B.C. The continuation of the process here indicated led ultimately to the closing up of the northern arm of the Guadalquivir as well. Simultaneously the other arm wore down its left bank by slow degrees and built up new land on the right, so that the course of the river moved sideways in a southerly direction, until at last the city of Tartessos was left facing a mud flat. There was good cause for Strabo’s mention of the shallows that made navigation difficult in and near the river. The same process is still going on. In the days of the Moors, fairly large vessels could get up the river as far as Cordova. To-day the Guadalquivir is navigable only to Seville, and only to vessels of less than 1200 tons.
Of the coast around the ancient Tartessos Strabo has some rather interesting details to relate. He speaks of the many reefs and sunken rocks outside, and makes a special point of the extraordinary force with which the ocean beats upon this particular part of the coast. Finally he adds that one of the worst dangers faced by the sailors in ascending or descending the river is the violence with which the rising tide meets and checks the downward flow of the river. All this gives us a picture which, in minutest detail, corresponds to that drawn by Homer of the perils encountered by Odysseus in trying to get ashore in Scheria. It indicates clearly a natural phenomenon which could hardly have been invented by the poet’s own fancy, and which impressed the mind of Homer the more powerfully because of its strangeness to the region where he himself lived. According to Professor Svante Arrhenius, the average difference between high and low water on the Atlantic coast of Spain is from five to six feet. Hennig, however, basing his statement on observations made on the spot by Jessen and Schulten, says that the tidal rise at the mouth of the Guadalquivir often exceeds ten feet. In the western Mediterranean, it is estimated by Arrhenius at two feet, though Butler claimed three for Trapani. At Corfu, as mentioned already, it is four inches. At Malta, according to Sir George Darwin, it is not noticeable to ordinary observers. In other words, the truth undoubtedly reflected in the Homeric scene of the hero’s landing in Scheria must be sought outside the Mediterranean. And every detail of that adventure may be duplicated by conditions proved to exist near the spot where once stood the proud city of Tartessos.
And our knowledge of its presence at that spot is no longer dependent on Strabo alone, or on any of the older authorities quoted by him. The excavations conducted by Schulten and his collaborators have, it is true, not yet brought any great archaeological harvest, but they seem to prove beyond all doubt that the ancient site of Tartessos has been found. In fact, Schulten feels certain of having discovered traces of two different cities on the same spot, one beneath the other. In his opinion, the older one of these dates back to about 3000 в.с., or before the arrival of the bronze age, which dovetails beautifully with Siret’s expressed belief in a Neolithic communication between southern Spain and the Baltic on one hand, and the eastern Mediterranean on the other. The founding of the later city is by Schulten placed about 1500 в.c., or at a time when Crete was the principal maritime power in the great inland sea.
The work of Schulten has been carried on at a spot known as Cerro del Trigo, halfway between the coast and the right bank of the Guadalquivir, where it makes a sharp southward bend some distance above its mouth. This spot is close to what used to be the inland shore of the island of Tartessos, and it is particularly characterized by the presence of large quantities of building stones which must have been brought there from a considerable distance. The work has been much delayed by the difficult nature of the ground and by the fact that any ruins still existing are likely to be found beneath the present level of the ground-water. Probably the most interesting find made so far is a curious ring, inscribed on both sides with letters unlike those of any known alphabet, but believed to have some connection with the signs observed on certain very ancient and not properly placed gold coins dug out of Spanish soil. And this leads us back to Strabo, and to what he has to say about the people of the region once ruled by the city of Tartessos.
Way back in 1849, one of those thorough-going Germans, named Gustav Moritz Redslob, collected everything he could find in ancient and modern literature referring to the lost city. He used it to prove that Tartessos was the little Spanish city of Tortosa, on the Ebro, not far from Tarragona. This guess was unusually far off the mark. Commonly, when the place was mentioned at all by modern writers, they identified it with Cadiz. It was well known that the Guadalquivir, which the Romans named Baetis, had previously been called Tartessis by the Greeks, and as Cadiz lies somewhat to the south of the present outlet of that river, this was held to settle the matter. This mistake gained further credit from the constant biblical coupling of Tarshish with Tyre, generally recognized as the mother city of Gades, or Cadiz. Yet the ancient writers never failed to recognize the previous existence of two wholly distinct cities in the same region, even when some of them, mostly Romans of a late date, tried to identify Tartessos with the small community of Carteia, somewhat east of Calpe, or Gibraltar. Strabo knew better, and reading him makes one wonder at the blindness which caused learned men to disregard his very positive and quite accurate statements for so many centuries.
Let us then turn back to Strabo and compare what he tells us with the results of the investigations carried on for several years near the mouth of the Guadalquivir by Professor Adolf Schulten of Erlangen, assisted by an English archaeologist, George Bonsor, and by a German geologist, Professor Otto Jessen of Tuebingen. It is, as already stated, the achievements of these men which have furnished Dr. Richard Hennig with some of his main arguments on behalf of the theories about the identity of Atlantis and Scheria set forth in his repeatedly mentioned volume, “Realms of Mystery.”
Strabo tells us, first of all, that the Guadalquivir previously had another outlet further to the north, so that an island was formed between the two arms of the river. On this island, facing the mainland, stood the city of Tartessos. Jessen has verified the existence of another branch, now completely filled up. But he has made some still more significant discoveries. There used to be a bay of the ocean inside the island, where lies now the vast, waterlogged fen known as Las Marismas, and once upon a time, not so very long ago, geologically speaking, this bay reached as far inland as Seville. A geological map of Spain makes it easy to understand what has happened. From the coast north of the Guadalquivir, a wedge of alluvial plain stretches all the way to Seville and beyond a plain … “open to the south,” and framed along its northern border by the Sierras, those mountains of which the old Egyptian priest said that they were “celebrated for their number and size and beauty.” This plain is of comparatively recent date, belonging to the Quaternary age, in which we are still living, while the surrounding country shows much older formations. It was built up entirely by deposits from the rivers now composing the Guadalquivir system.
First of all the island of Tartessos was formed by the jamming of silt against a backbone of Tertiary rocks edging the coast from the present mouth of the Guadalquivir and northward as far as Huelva ... a line of rocks with sand dunes within, the Arenas Gordas, which may correspond to the “not very high mountain” along the outside shore of Atlantis, and perhaps also to the “ overshadowing mountain” raised by the wrath of Poseidon against Scheria. As the bay within began to fill up, smaller islands must have appeared, and these may help to explain the priest’s reference to islands between Atlantis and the continent beyond. And at that time, of course, when the bay still existed, the larger island must have seemed much farther removed from the mainland than later, when it was surrounded only by two arms of the river. The location of the continent to the eastward, instead of farther to the westward, need not bother us in dealing with a time when all mariners hugged the shore and had to sail without the guidance of a compass. Just when the filling up of the bay was completed, we cannot tell with certainty, but there are reasons to believe that parts of it still remained open toward the end of the second millennium B.C. The continuation of the process here indicated led ultimately to the closing up of the northern arm of the Guadalquivir as well. Simultaneously the other arm wore down its left bank by slow degrees and built up new land on the right, so that the course of the river moved sideways in a southerly direction, until at last the city of Tartessos was left facing a mud flat. There was good cause for Strabo’s mention of the shallows that made navigation difficult in and near the river. The same process is still going on. In the days of the Moors, fairly large vessels could get up the river as far as Cordova. To-day the Guadalquivir is navigable only to Seville, and only to vessels of less than 1200 tons.
Of the coast around the ancient Tartessos Strabo has some rather interesting details to relate. He speaks of the many reefs and sunken rocks outside, and makes a special point of the extraordinary force with which the ocean beats upon this particular part of the coast. Finally he adds that one of the worst dangers faced by the sailors in ascending or descending the river is the violence with which the rising tide meets and checks the downward flow of the river. All this gives us a picture which, in minutest detail, corresponds to that drawn by Homer of the perils encountered by Odysseus in trying to get ashore in Scheria. It indicates clearly a natural phenomenon which could hardly have been invented by the poet’s own fancy, and which impressed the mind of Homer the more powerfully because of its strangeness to the region where he himself lived. According to Professor Svante Arrhenius, the average difference between high and low water on the Atlantic coast of Spain is from five to six feet. Hennig, however, basing his statement on observations made on the spot by Jessen and Schulten, says that the tidal rise at the mouth of the Guadalquivir often exceeds ten feet. In the western Mediterranean, it is estimated by Arrhenius at two feet, though Butler claimed three for Trapani. At Corfu, as mentioned already, it is four inches. At Malta, according to Sir George Darwin, it is not noticeable to ordinary observers. In other words, the truth undoubtedly reflected in the Homeric scene of the hero’s landing in Scheria must be sought outside the Mediterranean. And every detail of that adventure may be duplicated by conditions proved to exist near the spot where once stood the proud city of Tartessos.
And our knowledge of its presence at that spot is no longer dependent on Strabo alone, or on any of the older authorities quoted by him. The excavations conducted by Schulten and his collaborators have, it is true, not yet brought any great archaeological harvest, but they seem to prove beyond all doubt that the ancient site of Tartessos has been found. In fact, Schulten feels certain of having discovered traces of two different cities on the same spot, one beneath the other. In his opinion, the older one of these dates back to about 3000 в.с., or before the arrival of the bronze age, which dovetails beautifully with Siret’s expressed belief in a Neolithic communication between southern Spain and the Baltic on one hand, and the eastern Mediterranean on the other. The founding of the later city is by Schulten placed about 1500 в.c., or at a time when Crete was the principal maritime power in the great inland sea.
The work of Schulten has been carried on at a spot known as Cerro del Trigo, halfway between the coast and the right bank of the Guadalquivir, where it makes a sharp southward bend some distance above its mouth. This spot is close to what used to be the inland shore of the island of Tartessos, and it is particularly characterized by the presence of large quantities of building stones which must have been brought there from a considerable distance. The work has been much delayed by the difficult nature of the ground and by the fact that any ruins still existing are likely to be found beneath the present level of the ground-water. Probably the most interesting find made so far is a curious ring, inscribed on both sides with letters unlike those of any known alphabet, but believed to have some connection with the signs observed on certain very ancient and not properly placed gold coins dug out of Spanish soil. And this leads us back to Strabo, and to what he has to say about the people of the region once ruled by the city of Tartessos.
3
This region used to be called Turdetania. Its limits are uncertain but seem to have reached from the vicinity of Cadiz northward as far as the river Guadiana, and eastward as far as Cordova. The people were called Turdetanians or Turduli. Strabo thinks that these names may indicate two closely related tribes, one living between the coast and Seville, and the other farther inland, as far as Cordova. The Turdetani, Strabo asserts, were much superior to the rest of the population on the peninsula, and evidently of another race. They were more intelligent, and more advanced in culture. They had an alphabet of their own, quite distinct from what was found of that kind among other Iberian tribes, and they had also a large and diversified literature ... legends, epic poems, laws in metrical form, and so on … for some of which they claimed a very high age. This, of course, connects directly with the ring found by Schulten and so far vainly scrutinized by experts on old scripts.
It is also a noteworthy fact that, to this day, the population of the coast district from Cadiz to Huelva shows racial characteristics quite distinct from the rest of the Spanish people. Those maritime Spaniards, as they are sometimes called, are tall, dark, and medium-headed, while the vast majority of Spaniards throughout the peninsula are small, dark, and long-headed. The latter, in other words, belong to the Mediterranean or Ibero-Insular race prevailing also in Sicily, Sardinia, and the southernmost portions of the Italian peninsula. The people of the Guadalquivir district are classed by Deniker, the French anthropologist, as a separate race, named the Atlanto-Mediterranean, and found only there and at certain points along the Spanish, French, and Italian shores of the inland sea. Looking at Deniker’s racial map, as perfected by Professor Pittard and published in the latter’s “Race and History,” one gets an irresistible impression of a drive by some racial group coming from the north of the Balkans and moving in a southwesterly direction, so that, after leaving various deposits along the route, their main body finally landed in that old Turdetanian country around the lower parts of the Guadalquivir. There is a curious likeness, too, between the names of the Turdetanians and the Turduli, on one side, with their city of Tartessos, which the Hebrews called Tarshish, and, on the other, the Tyrrhenians, or Turseni, whom the Egyptians called Tursha. According to legend, the Tyrrhenians were of Lydian origin, and the Lydians of Asia Minor must have been a rather remarkable race. “The industrial power of the ancient world,” one writer calls them. They are credited with the invention of coined money. They had a literature of their own, now lost. And like the Phaeacians, they were greatly skilled in music and gymnastic games. They were, in a word, the very kind of people that, when backed by resources like those of Turdetania, might produce an exceptionally high and essentially peaceful state of culture. These, however, are speculations merely. The continued distinction of the people living in the district once ruled by the city of Tartessos remains an indisputable and salient fact, confirmed, for instance, by such a recent work as Professor Roland B. Dixon’s “The Racial History of Man.”
They were not indigenous to the region … of that much we seem sure. As far as can be judged by the few data at our disposal, they were not Phoenicians. Siret believes that the Neolithic culture of Spain came from the eastern Mediterranean, but that can mean many different things, we know now. Professor Ridgeway of Cambridge seems convinced that the Turdetani were of Celtic origin. Hennig inclines to the same opinion. We have no certainty in the matter, and guesses are of small use for the present.
It is also a noteworthy fact that, to this day, the population of the coast district from Cadiz to Huelva shows racial characteristics quite distinct from the rest of the Spanish people. Those maritime Spaniards, as they are sometimes called, are tall, dark, and medium-headed, while the vast majority of Spaniards throughout the peninsula are small, dark, and long-headed. The latter, in other words, belong to the Mediterranean or Ibero-Insular race prevailing also in Sicily, Sardinia, and the southernmost portions of the Italian peninsula. The people of the Guadalquivir district are classed by Deniker, the French anthropologist, as a separate race, named the Atlanto-Mediterranean, and found only there and at certain points along the Spanish, French, and Italian shores of the inland sea. Looking at Deniker’s racial map, as perfected by Professor Pittard and published in the latter’s “Race and History,” one gets an irresistible impression of a drive by some racial group coming from the north of the Balkans and moving in a southwesterly direction, so that, after leaving various deposits along the route, their main body finally landed in that old Turdetanian country around the lower parts of the Guadalquivir. There is a curious likeness, too, between the names of the Turdetanians and the Turduli, on one side, with their city of Tartessos, which the Hebrews called Tarshish, and, on the other, the Tyrrhenians, or Turseni, whom the Egyptians called Tursha. According to legend, the Tyrrhenians were of Lydian origin, and the Lydians of Asia Minor must have been a rather remarkable race. “The industrial power of the ancient world,” one writer calls them. They are credited with the invention of coined money. They had a literature of their own, now lost. And like the Phaeacians, they were greatly skilled in music and gymnastic games. They were, in a word, the very kind of people that, when backed by resources like those of Turdetania, might produce an exceptionally high and essentially peaceful state of culture. These, however, are speculations merely. The continued distinction of the people living in the district once ruled by the city of Tartessos remains an indisputable and salient fact, confirmed, for instance, by such a recent work as Professor Roland B. Dixon’s “The Racial History of Man.”
They were not indigenous to the region … of that much we seem sure. As far as can be judged by the few data at our disposal, they were not Phoenicians. Siret believes that the Neolithic culture of Spain came from the eastern Mediterranean, but that can mean many different things, we know now. Professor Ridgeway of Cambridge seems convinced that the Turdetani were of Celtic origin. Hennig inclines to the same opinion. We have no certainty in the matter, and guesses are of small use for the present.
4
Strabo dwells at length on the vast natural resources and high material development of this region, which Posidonius, in his highfalutin manner, compared to an inexhaustible treasury of nature, or the unfailing exchequer of some potentate.” It was particularly rich in metals. Gold, silver, copper, and iron (though not mined during the bronze age, of course) were found in the sierras to the north and east … in quantities and qualities “not having been hitherto discovered in any other part of the world,” Strabo says. When Hamilcar Barca made his excursion into Spain in 236 в.с., he found those people using not only goblets but casks of silver, and there is a still older tradition that the ships returning from Tartessos used to have anchors of silver in order to be able to carry a greater load of the precious metal. During the second century в.с., the Roman silver mines near Carthagena, in the southeastern part of the peninsula, employed 40,000 men and gave a daily yield of 25,000 drachmae, which represented an immense amount in those days. The copper mines of Rio Tinto are still judged among the most important in the world, and one of the mining towns of that region is still called Tharsis, which is one of the several forms under which the name of Tartessos appears.
Tin, probably the most important of all the metals exported by Tartessos, and specially mentioned in the Bible, came at first from the district of the Artabri, to the north of the present Portugal, where, in the earliest time, it seems to have been scraped from the ground with silver and so-called “white gold,” or silver and gold mixed. This has been doubted, just as the similar appearance of surface gold in California has begun to seem questionable by this time. This native supply of tin gave out comparatively early, however, as it gave out later in Brittany, so that quite far back in time it had to be brought all the way from the Scillies, known to the ancients as the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, and from Cornwall. It is quite likely that, in the trade with this metal, so essential to the bronze age, the Veneti of the Breton coast may have formed another link in the chain reaching from Britain via Tartessos to Egypt and Phoenicia … or, in the case of the hardly less treasured amber, all the way from the distant Baltic.
Nor were metals the only exports which Tartessos could boast. The soil and the sea around the ancient mart vied with each other in productiveness, so that on the list given by Strabo we find such different items as corn, wine, wax, honey, pitch, kermesberries for the making of scarlet dye, vermilion, salt, and, last but not least, salted fish … a trade of which Huelva is still an important centre. There was an abundance of cattle … bulls like those that ran loose in the temple yard of Poseidon at Atlantis. There were olive trees in large numbers and of high quality … like those huge twin trunks that furnished Odysseus with his first night’s refuge on the Scherian coast. The oil they gave, Strabo says, was famous, and surpassed in quality only by the still more famous one coming from Venefrum in the Italian Campania … a place still known to us as Venefro. Richard Ford, by the by, spoke of olive trees as particularly numerous in the Guadalquivir region when he wrote his “Gatherings in Spain” about the middle of the last century. Finally the Turdetanians, like the Phaeacians, had many proud ships which they built out of timber grown in their own woods, as did the Atlantians in the story told by the old Egyptian priest.
Thus, in three different places … Atlantis, Scheria, and Tartessos-Tarshish ... we come across numerous details that correspond or overlap ... details regarding the coast, the country within it, the produce of that country, and the people living in it. To be sure, the elephants mentioned in the priest’s story of Atlantis are as completely missing in Strabo’s description of Turdetania as they are undiscoverable in the Spain of our own day. But even in this respect the old legend gets a startling background of fact from recent discoveries by a Spanish anthropologist, the Marquis de Cerralbo. On the slopes of the Sierra Minestra, between Madrid and Saragossa, he has dug out large quantities of elephant tusks under circumstances proving that, once upon a time, such pachyderms lived side by side with man in that country. This must have been long ago, of course, even before the Neolithic days of Proto-Tartessos, as Schulten has named the earlier of the two cities traced by him. But we have just begun to realize the marked persistency with which traditions are passed on from age to age, so that the race mind will preserve memories of conditions long outlived. What, however, counts for more than the verification of any one detail in the various stories under discussion, is the unmistakable identity of the total impression conveyed by Plato of Atlantis, by Homer of Scheria, by Strabo, Herodotus, and Ezekiel, of Tarshish-Tartessos … the impression of an amazingly wealthy and highly cultured merchant city with far-flung commercial connections.
Tin, probably the most important of all the metals exported by Tartessos, and specially mentioned in the Bible, came at first from the district of the Artabri, to the north of the present Portugal, where, in the earliest time, it seems to have been scraped from the ground with silver and so-called “white gold,” or silver and gold mixed. This has been doubted, just as the similar appearance of surface gold in California has begun to seem questionable by this time. This native supply of tin gave out comparatively early, however, as it gave out later in Brittany, so that quite far back in time it had to be brought all the way from the Scillies, known to the ancients as the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, and from Cornwall. It is quite likely that, in the trade with this metal, so essential to the bronze age, the Veneti of the Breton coast may have formed another link in the chain reaching from Britain via Tartessos to Egypt and Phoenicia … or, in the case of the hardly less treasured amber, all the way from the distant Baltic.
Nor were metals the only exports which Tartessos could boast. The soil and the sea around the ancient mart vied with each other in productiveness, so that on the list given by Strabo we find such different items as corn, wine, wax, honey, pitch, kermesberries for the making of scarlet dye, vermilion, salt, and, last but not least, salted fish … a trade of which Huelva is still an important centre. There was an abundance of cattle … bulls like those that ran loose in the temple yard of Poseidon at Atlantis. There were olive trees in large numbers and of high quality … like those huge twin trunks that furnished Odysseus with his first night’s refuge on the Scherian coast. The oil they gave, Strabo says, was famous, and surpassed in quality only by the still more famous one coming from Venefrum in the Italian Campania … a place still known to us as Venefro. Richard Ford, by the by, spoke of olive trees as particularly numerous in the Guadalquivir region when he wrote his “Gatherings in Spain” about the middle of the last century. Finally the Turdetanians, like the Phaeacians, had many proud ships which they built out of timber grown in their own woods, as did the Atlantians in the story told by the old Egyptian priest.
Thus, in three different places … Atlantis, Scheria, and Tartessos-Tarshish ... we come across numerous details that correspond or overlap ... details regarding the coast, the country within it, the produce of that country, and the people living in it. To be sure, the elephants mentioned in the priest’s story of Atlantis are as completely missing in Strabo’s description of Turdetania as they are undiscoverable in the Spain of our own day. But even in this respect the old legend gets a startling background of fact from recent discoveries by a Spanish anthropologist, the Marquis de Cerralbo. On the slopes of the Sierra Minestra, between Madrid and Saragossa, he has dug out large quantities of elephant tusks under circumstances proving that, once upon a time, such pachyderms lived side by side with man in that country. This must have been long ago, of course, even before the Neolithic days of Proto-Tartessos, as Schulten has named the earlier of the two cities traced by him. But we have just begun to realize the marked persistency with which traditions are passed on from age to age, so that the race mind will preserve memories of conditions long outlived. What, however, counts for more than the verification of any one detail in the various stories under discussion, is the unmistakable identity of the total impression conveyed by Plato of Atlantis, by Homer of Scheria, by Strabo, Herodotus, and Ezekiel, of Tarshish-Tartessos … the impression of an amazingly wealthy and highly cultured merchant city with far-flung commercial connections.
5
One important point still remains with only two legs to stand on, so to speak: the gorgeously equipped temple of Poseidon that figures so conspicuously in Plato’s dialogue and Homer’s poem … the temple that was the innermost heart of Atlantis as of Scheria. Strabo mentions nothing of the kind in Tartessos. But he makes a wholly unexplained reference to a “port of Menestheus” which comes next after Gades.” And later, in speaking of the island formed by the two arms of the Guadalquivir, he adds that “hereabouts is the Oracle of Menestheus.” This is the name of the king who, in the ancient legend, drove Theseus from Athens, and who, according to Homer, led the men of Attica in the war against Troy. Nothing more is known about him. But in the Odes of Bacchylides, recovered piecemeal from Egyptian soil in 1896, we find Theseus represented as a son of Poseidon. Have we here to do with one of those funny transpositions that occur in legend as in language? Or may we look for a clue in another passage of Strabo’s, where he says that, “when Troy was overthrown, the victors, and still more the vanquished, who had survived the conflict, were compelled by want to a life of piracy; and we learn that they became the founders of many cities along the sea-coast beyond Greece”? To-day we have no answers to those questions, but they may be furnished by future discoveries at Cerro del Trigo and elsewhere.
While Strabo has nothing to say about any temple of Poseidon at Tartessos, he does mention that of Heracles at Gades, and here we have another clue, more immediately promising. It is the more interesting because of the wells or springs connected with it. Polybius, according to Strabo, mentioned only one such source of water within the sacred structure. Posidonius, who had been on the spot, called his predecessor a liar almost in so many words ... learned controversies were as heated in those days as in ours ... and asserted that there were two wells within the temple itself, and one in the city outside. The temple in question was, of course, not dedicated to Heracles at all, but to the Phoenician Melkarth, from whom the Greek hero-god was derived. Its location has long been assigned to the little rock island of Santi Petri, lying at the extreme southern end of the land spit on which stands Cadiz, and right opposite the mouth of the Rio Santi Petri. There Schulten has found not only the remains of the temple itself, but the two wells which Posidonius had seen within its walls.
Melkarth means “the king of the city.” He was not the greatest of the three principal Phoenician deities, but the one, evidently, to whom most attention was paid, except at certain seasons. Wherever they went, a temple was erected in his honor, with two pillars forming an essential part of it... the Pillars of Heracles. He was, as his name indicates, the protector of the city ... primarily of Tyre, and then of all those numerous trading communities that sprang from its fruitful loins. But he was also … and here lies perhaps the main cause of the worship granted him so unanimously … the god of shipping, travelling, and commerce. On old Phoenician coins his image frequently occurs beside the prow of a vessel. The tablets on which Hanno engraved the description of his journey down the west coast of Africa, about 500 в.с., were hung in the temple of Melkarth at Carthage. To this we may add that the Greek Heracles likewise was regarded as a guardian deity of shipping and travelling. Many of his exploits may be interpreted as legendary reminiscences of early and epoch-making commercial or piratical excursions, rather than as sun myths. What wonder then, if Melkarth became confused not only with Heracles, but also with Poseidon, the god of the sea, whose trident has been found on Cretan palace walls from the Middle Minoan age as well. And Professor Ridgeway says that “all the ancient dynasties traced their descent from Poseidon, who at the time of the Achaean conquest was the chief male divinity of Greece and the islands.” With the Dorians came Zeus as divine overlord, and it is in perfect keeping with this circumstance that, in the “Odyssey,” which must have been written after the invasion, but with the Mycenaean traditions still preserved, we find Zeus ruling the Olymp, while Poseidon claims the Phaeacians as “of his own lineage.”
Heracles was closely identified with the region around Tartessos. Three of his principal exploits took him into that country: the capture of the oxen of Geryon in Erythia; the fetching of the golden apples of the Hesperides; and the bringing of Cerberus from Hades. Erythia was the name given sometimes to the tongue of land on which Gades stood, and sometimes to the whole surrounding district. It means “the red” and is supposed to suggest the sunset as well as the extreme western position of the city. The Greek name for the people of the Syrian coast, phoiniki, “redskins,” also came from a word, phoenix, meaning red, and it was given to the Cretans and Carians before it became applied exclusively to the Punites. The cattle of Geryon may have been the clouds, as the late John Fiske maintained in his “Myths and Myth-makers,” but they indicate also the prominent part played by the bovine tribe in that portion of the globe, whether it be named Erythia, Tartessos, or Atlantis. Geryon appears in the legend as a monster with three bodies. But Stesichorus of Himera, a poet who lived in Sicily between 640 and 555 в.с., and who has been described as nearest to Homer,” mentions a “pastoral” poet named Geryon, who “was born almost opposite to the renowned Erythia, in a rocky cave near the abundant springs of the silver-bedded Tartessis.” Finally the Heraclean legend says that, after he had obtained possession of the cattle of Geryon, the hero paid a visit to Tartessos, which incident of his journey can hardly have had anything to do with clouds or the sunset.
It is of no use to attempt a definite interpretation of any one part of this confused medley of facts and fancies, of legend and history, of tradition and invention. The only conclusion we safely may draw from it is that the Greeks of the classic period … the period from Homer to Strabo … were familiar with a vast body of more or less authentic traditions about earlier direct communications with the region indicated by the names of Tartessos and Gades, twin cities corresponding to Atlas and Gadeiros, the twin monarchs of the Atlantian legend. Of course, it was the fashion at one time, as did John Fiske, to class most of the ancient heroes, like Heracles and Odysseus, as so many sun myths. But while poetic transfigurations of this sort probably intermingled with old legends of another origin, they can never dispose of the strange lands and seas viewed by the sun in its westward course. It is of these sights that Homer gives us a poetic account in his “Odyssey,” and it is with their identification, not with that of the hero himself, we are concerned here. Strabo was convinced that Heracles and Odysseus originally were real persons, and that both had visited the region in question. For confirmation of this belief, he even points to the name of Lisbon, which in his day was Olisipo, and which he interprets as meaning the city, or walled town (Phoenician hippo) of Ulysses. These ideas of his have long been construed as symptoms of a credulity not tempered by the wider knowledge of a more modern day. Yet other statements of his, equally scorned, have lately appeared in quite a new light.
No one, for instance, paid much attention to what he had to say about “the sovereignty of the seas exercised by Minos,” until the Cretan discoveries of Evans suddenly revealed the fact that the ancient Minoan kingdom actually must have been the first “thalassocracy,” the first empire of the sea, as an early Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, called it. The same Eusebius speaks in his “Chronicon” of two other maritime powers that followed Crete prior to the emergence of the Phoenicians … those of Cyprus and Rhodes, the Elishah and Dodanim of the Bible … and again a disregarded or contemned tradition has been proved true by ultra-modern revelations of a long forgotten past. It looks, indeed, as if the whole body of classic literature would have to be re-read in this new light, and as if it might pay for anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, to follow up all sorts of hitherto slighted clues in that literature. This, of course, is just what is being done now. But it takes time, and the results will come only by slow degrees and piecemeal.
That, in the traditions referred to above, we find Tartessos and Gades frequently confused, does by no means preclude a good deal of knowledge among the ancients concerning both. Nor need any external fabulations or exaggerations prevent us from recognizing the kernel of truth within. This is particularly true in regard to Homer, who, like every other poet, used details familiar to himself for the purpose of lending an equal aspect of familiarity to scenes never witnessed by him in the flesh. When, for example, he drew his picture of Charybdis, “thrice a day spouting forth black water, and thrice a day sucking it down in terrible wise,” he may have been helped by an actual phenomenon much nearer home and better known to his readers. At the narrowest point of the long strait between Euboea and the Greek mainland, the extraordinary changes of the tide have been a cause of wonder since the days of Homer. Without any marked rise, the current one moment runs like a fast river in one direction, and a moment later it runs with equal velocity in the opposite direction. Strabo says that this sudden turn takes place seven times a day, and a modern observer has found this to be true on certain days of every month, while otherwise the water of the channel behaves in ordinary fashion. This may also have assisted Homer to grasp the effects of the tides in a river, without lessening the likelihood of his having heard about the exceptional tides at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, or about some strange action by the waters along the Strait of Messina which so impressed Phoenician mariners that they named the spot hur obed, “the hole of perdition” … whence the Greek Charybdis.
Furthermore, it is fairly easy to prove how the confusion between Tartessos and Gades became more or less inevitable, and how the island of Atlantis-Scheria-Tartessos came to be lost for ever beneath the waves of a sea on which Gades was left to reign in unrivalled splendor, so that to its own crown of glory and fame was added what students had recorded and poets dreamt of the other city that had ceased to exist. This brings us to the ultimate phase of our quest, which is to show just what historical happenings seem to underlie this sudden and complete vanishing of a community described by Schulten as “an Hesperian counterpart to the ancient cultural centres of the Orient … one of the greatest marts of olden times, and the connecting link between two worlds nearly two thousand miles apart.”
While Strabo has nothing to say about any temple of Poseidon at Tartessos, he does mention that of Heracles at Gades, and here we have another clue, more immediately promising. It is the more interesting because of the wells or springs connected with it. Polybius, according to Strabo, mentioned only one such source of water within the sacred structure. Posidonius, who had been on the spot, called his predecessor a liar almost in so many words ... learned controversies were as heated in those days as in ours ... and asserted that there were two wells within the temple itself, and one in the city outside. The temple in question was, of course, not dedicated to Heracles at all, but to the Phoenician Melkarth, from whom the Greek hero-god was derived. Its location has long been assigned to the little rock island of Santi Petri, lying at the extreme southern end of the land spit on which stands Cadiz, and right opposite the mouth of the Rio Santi Petri. There Schulten has found not only the remains of the temple itself, but the two wells which Posidonius had seen within its walls.
Melkarth means “the king of the city.” He was not the greatest of the three principal Phoenician deities, but the one, evidently, to whom most attention was paid, except at certain seasons. Wherever they went, a temple was erected in his honor, with two pillars forming an essential part of it... the Pillars of Heracles. He was, as his name indicates, the protector of the city ... primarily of Tyre, and then of all those numerous trading communities that sprang from its fruitful loins. But he was also … and here lies perhaps the main cause of the worship granted him so unanimously … the god of shipping, travelling, and commerce. On old Phoenician coins his image frequently occurs beside the prow of a vessel. The tablets on which Hanno engraved the description of his journey down the west coast of Africa, about 500 в.с., were hung in the temple of Melkarth at Carthage. To this we may add that the Greek Heracles likewise was regarded as a guardian deity of shipping and travelling. Many of his exploits may be interpreted as legendary reminiscences of early and epoch-making commercial or piratical excursions, rather than as sun myths. What wonder then, if Melkarth became confused not only with Heracles, but also with Poseidon, the god of the sea, whose trident has been found on Cretan palace walls from the Middle Minoan age as well. And Professor Ridgeway says that “all the ancient dynasties traced their descent from Poseidon, who at the time of the Achaean conquest was the chief male divinity of Greece and the islands.” With the Dorians came Zeus as divine overlord, and it is in perfect keeping with this circumstance that, in the “Odyssey,” which must have been written after the invasion, but with the Mycenaean traditions still preserved, we find Zeus ruling the Olymp, while Poseidon claims the Phaeacians as “of his own lineage.”
Heracles was closely identified with the region around Tartessos. Three of his principal exploits took him into that country: the capture of the oxen of Geryon in Erythia; the fetching of the golden apples of the Hesperides; and the bringing of Cerberus from Hades. Erythia was the name given sometimes to the tongue of land on which Gades stood, and sometimes to the whole surrounding district. It means “the red” and is supposed to suggest the sunset as well as the extreme western position of the city. The Greek name for the people of the Syrian coast, phoiniki, “redskins,” also came from a word, phoenix, meaning red, and it was given to the Cretans and Carians before it became applied exclusively to the Punites. The cattle of Geryon may have been the clouds, as the late John Fiske maintained in his “Myths and Myth-makers,” but they indicate also the prominent part played by the bovine tribe in that portion of the globe, whether it be named Erythia, Tartessos, or Atlantis. Geryon appears in the legend as a monster with three bodies. But Stesichorus of Himera, a poet who lived in Sicily between 640 and 555 в.с., and who has been described as nearest to Homer,” mentions a “pastoral” poet named Geryon, who “was born almost opposite to the renowned Erythia, in a rocky cave near the abundant springs of the silver-bedded Tartessis.” Finally the Heraclean legend says that, after he had obtained possession of the cattle of Geryon, the hero paid a visit to Tartessos, which incident of his journey can hardly have had anything to do with clouds or the sunset.
It is of no use to attempt a definite interpretation of any one part of this confused medley of facts and fancies, of legend and history, of tradition and invention. The only conclusion we safely may draw from it is that the Greeks of the classic period … the period from Homer to Strabo … were familiar with a vast body of more or less authentic traditions about earlier direct communications with the region indicated by the names of Tartessos and Gades, twin cities corresponding to Atlas and Gadeiros, the twin monarchs of the Atlantian legend. Of course, it was the fashion at one time, as did John Fiske, to class most of the ancient heroes, like Heracles and Odysseus, as so many sun myths. But while poetic transfigurations of this sort probably intermingled with old legends of another origin, they can never dispose of the strange lands and seas viewed by the sun in its westward course. It is of these sights that Homer gives us a poetic account in his “Odyssey,” and it is with their identification, not with that of the hero himself, we are concerned here. Strabo was convinced that Heracles and Odysseus originally were real persons, and that both had visited the region in question. For confirmation of this belief, he even points to the name of Lisbon, which in his day was Olisipo, and which he interprets as meaning the city, or walled town (Phoenician hippo) of Ulysses. These ideas of his have long been construed as symptoms of a credulity not tempered by the wider knowledge of a more modern day. Yet other statements of his, equally scorned, have lately appeared in quite a new light.
No one, for instance, paid much attention to what he had to say about “the sovereignty of the seas exercised by Minos,” until the Cretan discoveries of Evans suddenly revealed the fact that the ancient Minoan kingdom actually must have been the first “thalassocracy,” the first empire of the sea, as an early Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, called it. The same Eusebius speaks in his “Chronicon” of two other maritime powers that followed Crete prior to the emergence of the Phoenicians … those of Cyprus and Rhodes, the Elishah and Dodanim of the Bible … and again a disregarded or contemned tradition has been proved true by ultra-modern revelations of a long forgotten past. It looks, indeed, as if the whole body of classic literature would have to be re-read in this new light, and as if it might pay for anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, to follow up all sorts of hitherto slighted clues in that literature. This, of course, is just what is being done now. But it takes time, and the results will come only by slow degrees and piecemeal.
That, in the traditions referred to above, we find Tartessos and Gades frequently confused, does by no means preclude a good deal of knowledge among the ancients concerning both. Nor need any external fabulations or exaggerations prevent us from recognizing the kernel of truth within. This is particularly true in regard to Homer, who, like every other poet, used details familiar to himself for the purpose of lending an equal aspect of familiarity to scenes never witnessed by him in the flesh. When, for example, he drew his picture of Charybdis, “thrice a day spouting forth black water, and thrice a day sucking it down in terrible wise,” he may have been helped by an actual phenomenon much nearer home and better known to his readers. At the narrowest point of the long strait between Euboea and the Greek mainland, the extraordinary changes of the tide have been a cause of wonder since the days of Homer. Without any marked rise, the current one moment runs like a fast river in one direction, and a moment later it runs with equal velocity in the opposite direction. Strabo says that this sudden turn takes place seven times a day, and a modern observer has found this to be true on certain days of every month, while otherwise the water of the channel behaves in ordinary fashion. This may also have assisted Homer to grasp the effects of the tides in a river, without lessening the likelihood of his having heard about the exceptional tides at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, or about some strange action by the waters along the Strait of Messina which so impressed Phoenician mariners that they named the spot hur obed, “the hole of perdition” … whence the Greek Charybdis.
Furthermore, it is fairly easy to prove how the confusion between Tartessos and Gades became more or less inevitable, and how the island of Atlantis-Scheria-Tartessos came to be lost for ever beneath the waves of a sea on which Gades was left to reign in unrivalled splendor, so that to its own crown of glory and fame was added what students had recorded and poets dreamt of the other city that had ceased to exist. This brings us to the ultimate phase of our quest, which is to show just what historical happenings seem to underlie this sudden and complete vanishing of a community described by Schulten as “an Hesperian counterpart to the ancient cultural centres of the Orient … one of the greatest marts of olden times, and the connecting link between two worlds nearly two thousand miles apart.”
6
Again the mystery is simple when you have the key to it. First of all, let us bear in mind that Homer is supposed to have lived about 800 в.с.; that Solon was born in 638, Herodotus in 484, and Plato in 429 в.с. These dates refer to the periods when, as far as we can tell, the legends and traditions concerning Scheria, Atlantis, and Tartessos were first put into writing in Greece. The Jahvist portions of Genesis, with the list of nations where the name of Tarshish first appears, are believed to have been collected and edited about 800 в.с., but in such a manner that a large quantity of much earlier material was included practically unchanged. Solomon, finally, is supposed to have lived from 970 to 933 в.с., and his friend, King Hiram of Tyre, from 970 to 936 в.с.
The next thing to bear in mind is that all our previous conceptions of the earliest maritime developments in the Mediterranean must be revised on the basis of recent discoveries in the Aegean region. The pathbreakers in those waters were not the Greeks, nor even the Phoenicians, but the Cretans, and these were followed by the Cyprians, the Rhodians, and the Achaeans of the Mycenaean age, before the Phoenicians reached the ascendancy shown by them during historic times. The Cretan or Minoan predominance seems to have lasted from 3000 to some time about 1400 в.с. During this earliest period, they are believed by the foremost experts in the field to have had regular direct communications not only with Sicily and Sardinia, but with Spain. Glotz records visible traces of their presence at Argar in southeastern Spain. Evans thinks that the Iberian alphabet, not to be confused with that of Tartessos, was of Cretan origin. “It is not impossible,” says Glotz, “that they supplied Egypt with the products of the furthest countries, such as tin and amber.” The opinion of Louis Siret concerning very early commercial relations between the Baltic, Britain, and the eastern Mediterranean, may be recalled in this connection. The link between the southeast and the northwest must have been in Spain, every one agrees.
During those early ages, there seems to have existed a commercial centre, capable of acting as such a link, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. It may have existed as early as 3000 B.C., and it appears to have attained considerable cultural prominence as early as 1500 в.с. That the knowledge of its existence was fairly well disseminated among the principal shipping centres of the eastern Mediterranean, seems quite likely. Whether the exchange of commodities was conducted all the time by Cretan ships only, or also by those of Tartessos, we do not know, but there is reason to believe that the latter concentrated on the trade with the north, leaving the Cretans and others to come for what they wanted. The Minoan kingdom fell about 1400 в.с. Shortly afterwards Achaean kingdoms are recorded by newly deciphered Hittite inscriptions, in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in Lesbos. Glotz says that the Mycenaeans followed the Cretans everywhere, and at the same time the Phoenicians pushed more and more to the forefront. But while the Cretans and the Phoenicians were peaceful traders, the Achaeans were more interested in piracy than in trade, and while they may have penetrated as far as Tingis, or Tangier, and Tartessos, the likelihood is that they came as conquerors rather than as merchants. Their dominance did not last long either. The Dorians appeared about 1200 B.C., and that was the end temporarily of all Greek communications with the western Mediterranean and the regions beyond. The “dark ages” had descended on the lands where the great Minoan kings and the heroes of Homer had ruled so gloriously. The invasions of Egypt recorded on the stelae of Minephtah and Rameses III may have been made by Achaeans under Dorian pressure.
With the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations came the big chance of the Phoenicians, and they made use of it to the utmost. Their colonies spread from Cyprus to the Atlantic. Gades was founded quite early, the date of 1100 в.с. seeming quite plausible. But of the Phoenicians Mommsen says in his “History of Rome “: “ Their colonies were factories. It was of more moment in their view to deal in buying and selling with the natives than to acquire extensive territories in distant lands, and to carry out there the slow and difficult work of colonization. They avoided war even with their rivals.” The result of this policy was that Gades and Tartessos continued for a long time to flourish side by side, as twin cities, one being the gateway to the north, the other to the south, and the exchange of commodities passing through both. There was no rivalry between them. They were like agents of closely allied firms meeting on neutral ground for transactions equally important and profitable to both. To home-sitting people at a distance, they may well have appeared as one. This must have been going on from the establishment of Gades to about 600 в.с., and this is also the state of affairs reflected in the Biblical references to Tarshish. The turning point came when, about the time just indicated, the great powers of the farther Orient began to extend their supremacy to the shores of the Mediterranean, and when those cities of which Isaiah said that “their merchants were princes, their traffickers the honorable of the earth,” had in self-defense to exchange the oar and the sail for the sword and the spear. The year 573 в.с., when Tyre first had to submit to Nebuchadrezzar, marks the dividing line between two ages as far as Mediterranean shipping is concerned.
In the meantime Carthage had become established and had begun to flourish mightily, but it was still tied to the mother city and the old policies of the Phoenicians. The western Mediterranean was still open to whosoever might care to venture that far, and of this fact the re-awakened Greeks were beginning to take advantage. But with the increasing decline of Tyre and the simultaneous rise of Rome, a change took place in the policy of Carthage. It broke loose from the mother city, and instead of accepting meekly whatever might fall to its share of the trade in the western regions, the Carthaginians proceeded to close those regions to everybody but themselves. First the Greeks were driven out of the waters west of Sicily. Then, in 509 в.с., a treaty was forced on Rome establishing once for all the complete monopoly of Carthage in those same waters and whatever might lie beyond them. About the same time a Carthaginian admiral, Himilco, took a large fleet northward along the Atlantic coast, and from that moment nothing more is heard about the once so famous city of Tartessos. What was the objective of Himilco? Undoubtedly to establish Carthaginian supremacy over Gades; to put an end for ever to Tartessos, which had already begun to suffer decline on account of the gradual clogging up of the waterways in its immediate vicinity; and, finally, to make sure of the old Tartessian trading connections with the farther north. Henceforth all communication in that direction passed through Gades alone, acting on behalf of Carthage. On his return, Himilco published one of those periploi, or “circumnavigations,” which John R. Spears, in his “Master Mariners,” characterizes as wholly incredible. It was a weird concoction of deliberate falsehoods, manufactured to discourage outsiders from ever again attempting the passage between the Pillars of Heracles, which thus became, indeed, the Strait of Melkarth. Special pains were taken to present the sea beyond as closed to all navigation by the mud shallows prevailing everywhere. It is too bad that we know the mendacities of this work only from quotations. Even lies may prove instructive at times. That it formed a basis for the legend about the sinking of Atlantis in the sea, and about the consequent closing of that sea to navigation, may be taken for granted. Effective as this report must have proved, the Carthaginians were far too thorough-going to rely exclusively on fairy tales in such a matter. Erathosthenes, called “the father of geography,” and living between 275 and 194 в.с., informs us that any foreign mariners sailing towards Sardinia or the Strait of Heracles were mercilessly put to death if captured by the Carthaginians. These stern measures undoubtedly proved still more effective. Atlantis was lost as completely as if it had perished beneath the waves.
Even after the power of Carthage had slipped into the hands of Rome, every conceivable trick was practiced to prevent the victor from discovering the sea-way to the northern supplies of tin and amber. Strabo tells the story of a Carthaginian shipmaster who found himself pursued along the Atlantic coast by a prying Roman galley. Unable to escape by speed or trick, he finally drove his ship into shallow water, thus luring his pursuers to destruction with himself. Having saved his own life as by a miracle and returned to Carthage, this daring mariner was reimbursed by the state for the loss of his ship and accorded high honors for his patriotic act. Publius Licinius Crassus, or Dives, proconsul of Spain in 93 в.с., seems to have been the first Roman who succeeded in establishing direct communication with the Cessiterides, or Tin Islands, of which Herodotus scrupulously wrote that he did not know whether they existed or not. And once more the irrepressible Gades, freed from Carthage and holding the rank of a Roman ally, became the principal port of interchange between the northwest and the southeast, though in the meantime the land connections across the European continent had steadily increased in importance and regularity.
With these facts in mind, it is easy to see both how the legends of Tartessos and of a mysterious realm beyond the Pillars came to linger in the Greek mind, and how they became merged in a later legend about the total disappearance of that whole region … a disappearance partly true, though less dramatic than pictured by Carthaginian cunning and Greek imagination. That Homer’s poetic representation of Scheria, the land of sweet Nausicaa and the swift-sailing Phaeacians, as well as Plato’s legend of Atlantis, must be traced to the ancient mart at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, seems practically certain in the light of what we now know. Characteristically, Scheria is threatened with being “overshadowed by a great mountain” … the intruding sand dunes, perhaps ... but is still flourishing. Herodotus, who lived just after the closing of the western Mediterranean, knew Tartessos well, but had heard nothing about its destruction. Plato, living still later, added the last touch of poetry to the old legend by also describing the end of what had once figured as a part of the Elysian Fields and the Islands of the Blessed. But the surviving power of the legend itself can only be grasped fully when we realize that its origin went back beyond the days of Hellenic colonization; beyond the age of darkness in Greece, which was also the age of Phoenician expansion; beyond the rise of the Homeric Achaeans, to the millennial period of Minoan supremacy, when the Mediterranean was just emerging from the age of stone. This antiquity of the legend helps to account not only for its persistency, but for any incongruity of detail manifested by its various resurrections.
Just how much Homer and Plato knew or did not know, we cannot tell. Nor does it matter very much to us. Whether or no, to some extent or wholly, they confused Gades and Tartessos with each other, is a matter of equal indifference. The important thing is to have discovered where both of them received their inspiration for what has become two of the world’s principal sources of inexhaustible romance. Tartessos is dead. The shadow of it may or may not be summoned back into retrospective existence by the work now progressing on its former site. But Atlantis can never be really lost, and in immortal Scheria, the white arms and maidenly grace and winning smile of Nausicaa have lost none of the charm that caused clever Odysseus, a good judge of women, to liken her unto a goddess.
In discovering a certain amount of truth back of these much admired fictions, we have also unearthed another chapter in the history of the race which was supposed to be as lost as the island of Atlantis in the tale told by the old Egyptian priest … so completely lost, in fact, that its onetime existence was not even suspected until quite recently. It is as if we had just begun to read a serial full of exciting adventure, and rendered the more attractive by being in reality our own story during a period of childhood wiped out of our memory by the passing of many crowded years. For the story of Atlantis and Scheria and Tartessos, of that mysteriously vanished cultural centre near the southwestern corner of Spain, is more or less the story of Europe during the third and second millennia before our own era … the story, we may say, of the comings and goings and doings of long dead men from whom we ourselves have sprung with all of what to-day we call civilization. Of that fascinating story the next installment is now awaited with eager curiosity.
The next thing to bear in mind is that all our previous conceptions of the earliest maritime developments in the Mediterranean must be revised on the basis of recent discoveries in the Aegean region. The pathbreakers in those waters were not the Greeks, nor even the Phoenicians, but the Cretans, and these were followed by the Cyprians, the Rhodians, and the Achaeans of the Mycenaean age, before the Phoenicians reached the ascendancy shown by them during historic times. The Cretan or Minoan predominance seems to have lasted from 3000 to some time about 1400 в.с. During this earliest period, they are believed by the foremost experts in the field to have had regular direct communications not only with Sicily and Sardinia, but with Spain. Glotz records visible traces of their presence at Argar in southeastern Spain. Evans thinks that the Iberian alphabet, not to be confused with that of Tartessos, was of Cretan origin. “It is not impossible,” says Glotz, “that they supplied Egypt with the products of the furthest countries, such as tin and amber.” The opinion of Louis Siret concerning very early commercial relations between the Baltic, Britain, and the eastern Mediterranean, may be recalled in this connection. The link between the southeast and the northwest must have been in Spain, every one agrees.
During those early ages, there seems to have existed a commercial centre, capable of acting as such a link, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. It may have existed as early as 3000 B.C., and it appears to have attained considerable cultural prominence as early as 1500 в.с. That the knowledge of its existence was fairly well disseminated among the principal shipping centres of the eastern Mediterranean, seems quite likely. Whether the exchange of commodities was conducted all the time by Cretan ships only, or also by those of Tartessos, we do not know, but there is reason to believe that the latter concentrated on the trade with the north, leaving the Cretans and others to come for what they wanted. The Minoan kingdom fell about 1400 в.с. Shortly afterwards Achaean kingdoms are recorded by newly deciphered Hittite inscriptions, in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in Lesbos. Glotz says that the Mycenaeans followed the Cretans everywhere, and at the same time the Phoenicians pushed more and more to the forefront. But while the Cretans and the Phoenicians were peaceful traders, the Achaeans were more interested in piracy than in trade, and while they may have penetrated as far as Tingis, or Tangier, and Tartessos, the likelihood is that they came as conquerors rather than as merchants. Their dominance did not last long either. The Dorians appeared about 1200 B.C., and that was the end temporarily of all Greek communications with the western Mediterranean and the regions beyond. The “dark ages” had descended on the lands where the great Minoan kings and the heroes of Homer had ruled so gloriously. The invasions of Egypt recorded on the stelae of Minephtah and Rameses III may have been made by Achaeans under Dorian pressure.
With the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations came the big chance of the Phoenicians, and they made use of it to the utmost. Their colonies spread from Cyprus to the Atlantic. Gades was founded quite early, the date of 1100 в.с. seeming quite plausible. But of the Phoenicians Mommsen says in his “History of Rome “: “ Their colonies were factories. It was of more moment in their view to deal in buying and selling with the natives than to acquire extensive territories in distant lands, and to carry out there the slow and difficult work of colonization. They avoided war even with their rivals.” The result of this policy was that Gades and Tartessos continued for a long time to flourish side by side, as twin cities, one being the gateway to the north, the other to the south, and the exchange of commodities passing through both. There was no rivalry between them. They were like agents of closely allied firms meeting on neutral ground for transactions equally important and profitable to both. To home-sitting people at a distance, they may well have appeared as one. This must have been going on from the establishment of Gades to about 600 в.с., and this is also the state of affairs reflected in the Biblical references to Tarshish. The turning point came when, about the time just indicated, the great powers of the farther Orient began to extend their supremacy to the shores of the Mediterranean, and when those cities of which Isaiah said that “their merchants were princes, their traffickers the honorable of the earth,” had in self-defense to exchange the oar and the sail for the sword and the spear. The year 573 в.с., when Tyre first had to submit to Nebuchadrezzar, marks the dividing line between two ages as far as Mediterranean shipping is concerned.
In the meantime Carthage had become established and had begun to flourish mightily, but it was still tied to the mother city and the old policies of the Phoenicians. The western Mediterranean was still open to whosoever might care to venture that far, and of this fact the re-awakened Greeks were beginning to take advantage. But with the increasing decline of Tyre and the simultaneous rise of Rome, a change took place in the policy of Carthage. It broke loose from the mother city, and instead of accepting meekly whatever might fall to its share of the trade in the western regions, the Carthaginians proceeded to close those regions to everybody but themselves. First the Greeks were driven out of the waters west of Sicily. Then, in 509 в.с., a treaty was forced on Rome establishing once for all the complete monopoly of Carthage in those same waters and whatever might lie beyond them. About the same time a Carthaginian admiral, Himilco, took a large fleet northward along the Atlantic coast, and from that moment nothing more is heard about the once so famous city of Tartessos. What was the objective of Himilco? Undoubtedly to establish Carthaginian supremacy over Gades; to put an end for ever to Tartessos, which had already begun to suffer decline on account of the gradual clogging up of the waterways in its immediate vicinity; and, finally, to make sure of the old Tartessian trading connections with the farther north. Henceforth all communication in that direction passed through Gades alone, acting on behalf of Carthage. On his return, Himilco published one of those periploi, or “circumnavigations,” which John R. Spears, in his “Master Mariners,” characterizes as wholly incredible. It was a weird concoction of deliberate falsehoods, manufactured to discourage outsiders from ever again attempting the passage between the Pillars of Heracles, which thus became, indeed, the Strait of Melkarth. Special pains were taken to present the sea beyond as closed to all navigation by the mud shallows prevailing everywhere. It is too bad that we know the mendacities of this work only from quotations. Even lies may prove instructive at times. That it formed a basis for the legend about the sinking of Atlantis in the sea, and about the consequent closing of that sea to navigation, may be taken for granted. Effective as this report must have proved, the Carthaginians were far too thorough-going to rely exclusively on fairy tales in such a matter. Erathosthenes, called “the father of geography,” and living between 275 and 194 в.с., informs us that any foreign mariners sailing towards Sardinia or the Strait of Heracles were mercilessly put to death if captured by the Carthaginians. These stern measures undoubtedly proved still more effective. Atlantis was lost as completely as if it had perished beneath the waves.
Even after the power of Carthage had slipped into the hands of Rome, every conceivable trick was practiced to prevent the victor from discovering the sea-way to the northern supplies of tin and amber. Strabo tells the story of a Carthaginian shipmaster who found himself pursued along the Atlantic coast by a prying Roman galley. Unable to escape by speed or trick, he finally drove his ship into shallow water, thus luring his pursuers to destruction with himself. Having saved his own life as by a miracle and returned to Carthage, this daring mariner was reimbursed by the state for the loss of his ship and accorded high honors for his patriotic act. Publius Licinius Crassus, or Dives, proconsul of Spain in 93 в.с., seems to have been the first Roman who succeeded in establishing direct communication with the Cessiterides, or Tin Islands, of which Herodotus scrupulously wrote that he did not know whether they existed or not. And once more the irrepressible Gades, freed from Carthage and holding the rank of a Roman ally, became the principal port of interchange between the northwest and the southeast, though in the meantime the land connections across the European continent had steadily increased in importance and regularity.
With these facts in mind, it is easy to see both how the legends of Tartessos and of a mysterious realm beyond the Pillars came to linger in the Greek mind, and how they became merged in a later legend about the total disappearance of that whole region … a disappearance partly true, though less dramatic than pictured by Carthaginian cunning and Greek imagination. That Homer’s poetic representation of Scheria, the land of sweet Nausicaa and the swift-sailing Phaeacians, as well as Plato’s legend of Atlantis, must be traced to the ancient mart at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, seems practically certain in the light of what we now know. Characteristically, Scheria is threatened with being “overshadowed by a great mountain” … the intruding sand dunes, perhaps ... but is still flourishing. Herodotus, who lived just after the closing of the western Mediterranean, knew Tartessos well, but had heard nothing about its destruction. Plato, living still later, added the last touch of poetry to the old legend by also describing the end of what had once figured as a part of the Elysian Fields and the Islands of the Blessed. But the surviving power of the legend itself can only be grasped fully when we realize that its origin went back beyond the days of Hellenic colonization; beyond the age of darkness in Greece, which was also the age of Phoenician expansion; beyond the rise of the Homeric Achaeans, to the millennial period of Minoan supremacy, when the Mediterranean was just emerging from the age of stone. This antiquity of the legend helps to account not only for its persistency, but for any incongruity of detail manifested by its various resurrections.
Just how much Homer and Plato knew or did not know, we cannot tell. Nor does it matter very much to us. Whether or no, to some extent or wholly, they confused Gades and Tartessos with each other, is a matter of equal indifference. The important thing is to have discovered where both of them received their inspiration for what has become two of the world’s principal sources of inexhaustible romance. Tartessos is dead. The shadow of it may or may not be summoned back into retrospective existence by the work now progressing on its former site. But Atlantis can never be really lost, and in immortal Scheria, the white arms and maidenly grace and winning smile of Nausicaa have lost none of the charm that caused clever Odysseus, a good judge of women, to liken her unto a goddess.
In discovering a certain amount of truth back of these much admired fictions, we have also unearthed another chapter in the history of the race which was supposed to be as lost as the island of Atlantis in the tale told by the old Egyptian priest … so completely lost, in fact, that its onetime existence was not even suspected until quite recently. It is as if we had just begun to read a serial full of exciting adventure, and rendered the more attractive by being in reality our own story during a period of childhood wiped out of our memory by the passing of many crowded years. For the story of Atlantis and Scheria and Tartessos, of that mysteriously vanished cultural centre near the southwestern corner of Spain, is more or less the story of Europe during the third and second millennia before our own era … the story, we may say, of the comings and goings and doings of long dead men from whom we ourselves have sprung with all of what to-day we call civilization. Of that fascinating story the next installment is now awaited with eager curiosity.
