Atlantis and the Silver City (9 page)

Contrary to contributing to my research, their dubious achievements would have hindered it. They destroyed cities, towns, and records.

Before them, the Phoenicians had developed into one of the Old World’s greatest-ever maritime nations. They first appeared as a cohesive group toward the end of the second millennium
B.C.
along the coast of modern Lebanon.

They did not try to conquer, but reached agreements with local inhabitants to allow them to establish trading posts, often at the mouths of rivers such as that at Cádiz, and initially enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the trade with southwest Iberia. Centuries before they arrived, the area was already one of the biggest producers of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, which was much sought after for making weapons, being considerably harder and more durable and more suitable for warfare.

At one time so much silver was shipped from the area by them that it flooded the Babylon bullion market and caused it to crash.
²⁴

Some historians think that much earlier, prior to 1500
B.C.
, long before the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Minoans had traded in the area’s metal wealth, bronze in particular, and wholesaled it en masse back in the Middle East from their empire based on Crete.

One way or another, this semiforgotten area of southern Iberia exerted massive influence over the rise and fall of city-states, countries, empires, and individuals. This fact is little appreciated and not adequately credited in the “standard” annals of European history.

But during the Phoenician era, there was another mysterious power at work in southwest Iberia: Tartessos. The Tartessians, as the inhabitants were called, crop up in several historic accounts, particularly those by ancient Greeks. But that is all we have: enigmatic references and allusions—no firm
facts about how big their territory was, where the capital city was located, or how long their state had existed.

Other accounts refer to a place called Tarshish, but there is even disagreement about whether it was the same territory as Tartessos or was the name of the capital city of Tartessos or whether it was somewhere quite different, located at the other end of the Mediterranean.

It must have been of some importance, as it carries the unique distinction of being the only place outside the Middle East mentioned in the Old Testament—and several times—as follows:

•  1 Kings 10:22: “Ships of Tarshish brought gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”

•  1 Kings 22:48: “Ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold that were broken at Ezion Geber.”

•  Jonah 1:3: “But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.”

•  Isaiah 23:1: “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish for it is laid waste, so there is no house, no entering in.”

There is, however, very little hard fact upon which to build any persuasive hypothesis about this mysterious state and its capital.

As these Tartessians were thought to have been the font of much of the metal production, their territory is generally assumed to have been the area around Cádiz, west to Huelva and inland to Seville. This trade, however, was not exclusive to them; there are a few reports of a legendary king who ruled somewhere west of the Straits of Gibraltar at the end of the Phoenician era and during the period when the Carthaginians were beginning to flex their muscles. It must have been considerably west of Cádiz, as it is recorded that he defeated that city in a sea battle when it may have been no more than a city-state, populated largely by remnants of the Phoenicians. It has been suggested that his capital was Huelva, but this is uncomfortably close to Cádiz. His name was King Arganthonius, and he is reported to have had a particular fondness for the Greeks. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, a mariner named Kolaios from the Greek island of Samos was reputed to have been hopelessly blown off course through
the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic and, eventually, have made port at Arganthonius’s capital. He enjoyed the king’s hospitality for a few months before being sent home, loaded to the gunwales with a fortune in silver.
²⁵

Apparently old Arganthonius, who is said to have lived to be 120 years old, was famous for owning huge amounts of the metal. The reason behind his generosity with Kolaios was an attempt to entice footloose Greeks to settle in his kingdom. Wisely, he saw the Carthaginians as the rising power and their greed as a serious threat, and he probably wanted men and allies to bolster his defenses. It proved a well-founded fear: some time after his death, his kingdom was overrun by the Carthaginians. How he died and the fate of his city are not known. This occurred around the sixth century
B.C.

It has been speculated that at the time he may even have been the ruler of Tartessos and that it extended west into the Algarve. Perhaps it overlaid the area of an earlier civilization. Cádiz was almost certainly just a remnant Phoenician city-state sitting in one corner of the kingdom and a thorn in his side competing for the metal trade.

If his kingdom was that extensive, Tartessos would also have embraced the Conii and the Turdetani. The history is confusing and our knowledge imprecise. The latter were reported by the Romans to have inhabited the Spanish Costa de la Luz (Coast of Light) over the Portuguese border with Spain, but it is thought that they were also Tartessians.

It has often been proposed that Seville was Arganthonius’s capital; but in that case, that mariner from Samos would have made port first at Cádiz, which is many kilometers downriver on the coast and unavoidable, before reaching Seville. This again indicates that the elusive city was farther west.

Interestingly, the famous Strabo (circa 63
B.C.
to circa
A.D.
24), known as The Geographer, stated that the Turdetani had written records dating back to 6000
B.C.
²⁶
So they had invented (or inherited) an alphabet and writing. Could the ancient script mentioned earlier be one and the same? That would imply that they were a very old race, certainly ancient enough for memories of them to have been muffled by the mists of time. It would seem that they and the Conii were one and the same. This investigation into the area’s past was starting to prove very worthwhile.

Whatever, it is undeniable that great wealth existed in the area—and had done so for a good few thousand years. It would be surprising, with the amount of trade and outside contact that this generated, if it had not inspired a power of some significance.

Facts were becoming increasingly hard to come by, but I persisted in digging ever deeper. There is a superb museum in the Algarve, on Portimão’s waterfront, housed in a refurbished sardine-canning factory. The area once dominated that industry throughout Europe, until the shoals of sardines— like tuna—inexplicably migrated farther out to sea. A significant part of the museum is dedicated to an exposition about a large necropolis (burial chamber) and the community that lived around it, built in approximately 3500
B.C.
, long before the Romans, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians. The necropolis lies about fifteen kilometers northwest of Portimão. Archaeologists have discovered evidence that the inhabitants who lived in the settlement surrounding it were well organized under a hierarchy, with centrally pooled storage facilities for grain and other essential goods. It was active around a thousand years before England’s Stonehenge was constructed. The southwestern Algarve is particularly rich in standing stones (
menhirs
) and other relics from this period. They are indistinguishable from others found all the way up Portugal’s west coast, around Brittany in northwest France, and in the British Isles. As elsewhere, who exactly the people living near the necropolis were, where they had come from, and exactly how their society was organized and related to others still have historians and archaeologists scratching their heads.

The similarity of these monuments throughout the entire Atlantic seaboard of western Europe indicates that they were all erected by the same culture—or at least by closely related cultures. Their knowledge of astronomy was extraordinary and could only have been gleaned from many previous years spent observing the night sky. Could they have sprung from the remnants of an earlier knowledgeable race that had been largely destroyed in a great disaster?

At some stage, the “Libyans,” as they were then called, from the now-Moroccan Atlas mountains, were also present in southwest Iberia and probably merged with the local population.
²⁷
One of their most distinguishing features was the hairstyle of the ruling classes. They wore a lock of hair
falling down as a side lock on one side of their head, curling in front of the ear. They also wore one or two large ostrich feathers at an angle from the top of the head. We know this from clear illustrations of them in the Mortuary Temple at Medinet Habu in Egypt, as prisoners of Pharaoh Rameses III. They had invaded and overrun the Mediterranean as part of a loose confederation of other peoples, largely from the eastern Mediterranean (Cyprus, for example). Collectively dubbed “The Sea Peoples,” in 1178
B.C.
they were decisively defeated by Rameses III in epic battles on land and at sea.
²⁸

It has been suggested that some members of this confederation were southern Iberians. This has not been proved, but I mention those Libyans here because, a few years ago, a large stone funerary slab was unearthed just over the northern mountains of the Algarve. Circling its perimeter is writing in the ancient alphabet mentioned above; but, uniquely, there is a crude depiction of the deceased in the center. He holds a spear in one hand and a shield in the other—and has a simple representation of the Libyan side lock. It has been dated to the Iron Age, around 600 or 700
B.C.
, clearly indicating a Libyan presence in southern Portugal at that time. (
SEE IMAGE
5
BELOW AND
37
IN THE PHOTO INSERT
.)

(
IMAGE
5)
A drawing of a Libyan Temehu chieftain
.

I now felt that I had dug down to the bedrock, that nothing else could be discovered about the Algarve’s ancient past; but as my theory also embraced Spain as far as Gibraltar, I was keen to extend my history search there. It
seemed logical that any ancient civilization would have included the two regions. The combined coastline is only around 360 kilometers long, and the natural boundaries seem to be from the entrance to the Mediterranean at Gibraltar in the east to Portugal’s Cape St. Vincent in the west. The Atlantic seaboard is the bond, coupled with all that wealth from metals.

I had heard of a little-appreciated Spanish fortress town called Niebla about a half-hour’s drive over the border into Spain—not far north of Huelva and toward the mountains where those vast quantities of metal were mined. Nothing I had read prepared me for its imposing presence when, turning a final corner, I saw Niebla for the first time. The walls are immense, encompassing no less than fifty towers. It is not on a hill of any great height and cannot be seen from the Huelva-Seville motorway that passes close by. It was built on a bluff overlooking the now-sluggish Rio Tinto, obviously sited there for a specific purpose. (
SEE IMAGE
6
IN THE PHOTO INSERT
.)

Its importance was revealed thanks to the efforts of an intrepid English archaeologist, Mrs. Elena Wishaw. She spent more than fourteen years, during and after the First World War, suffering great hardships in a small house adjacent to Niebla’s mighty walls. Initially she worked in tandem with her equally eminent husband, Bernhard, from Oxford, but he died not long into the project. The couple had already published several classic books on Spanish history. Both of them were fascinated by the awesome grandeur of Niebla and what little was then known of its history. They were determined to uncover what they suspected was a tumultuous past.

Mrs. Wishaw almost achieved sainthood in the eyes of the impoverished townsfolk by discovering and restoring a fresh water supply into the town square, via a very ancient conduit, built many millennia ago to link to a supply in the hills. Before this achievement, the locals had an arduous trip outside the walls, down many steps to a well across the river, to avail themselves of water that, at the best of times, was of inferior quality. The existence of the conduit alone indicated that the town was of great age.
²⁹

I will return to Elena Wishaw—and Niebla—in later chapters, but I mention both here because it was she who originally drew attention to the amazing volume of metals mined in the region and to the important role Niebla played in that. She arranged for a well-respected mining engineer to
examine the slag heaps at the huge Rio Tinto mine; he confirmed that they represented many thousands of years of toil. Significantly, he was emphatic that the oldest slag, at the bottom of the heaps, showed clear evidence that its extraction process was the most sophisticated of all. Amazingly, those very early miners were extracting gold at levels of only half an ounce per ton. The sophistication and efficiency of the process slowly deteriorated with time. It may seem extraordinary, but this was a clear indication that the people who worked these mines originally, many thousands of years ago, were far more advanced than those who worked them later. Clearly, their civilization had declined for whatever reasons, and their knowledge dissipated with it.