Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (10 page)

“What about teaching physics?”

“I have given up on finding work. Two years ago, I learned I have Asperger’s syndrome. It is a mild form of autism.”

Ah, okay. That explained Kühne’s ability to examine near-identical satellite photos for hours on end and pick out tiny bits of data. The memorized lists of names. The missed social cues. I thought of my
own autistic son and his habits that seemed odd to those who didn’t live with him. The last three hours were starting to make a lot more sense. The exasperation that had been building inside me gave way to embarrassment.

“That is why I can give a monologue on Atlantis for two hours but I can’t talk about the weather,” he continued. “I can’t make small talk. I can’t work with others in a group. When I was a boy I could focus on my exam for two hours like I was somewhere else. Then I would give it to my teacher and not remember what I had written.”

Kühne didn’t seem sad when he told me these things; he was just sharing some interesting facts. I asked what his reaction had been to the Freund documentary.

“The producer, Simcha Jacobovici, he is not a scientist. He does some speculations about a tomb of Jesus and so on.” That was another of Jacobovici’s documentaries,
The Lost Tomb of Jesus
, which sounded like the kind of film I would have loved in grade school. “First he asked Richard Freund, have you found Atlantis? And Freund said yes. ‘The circle here is Atlantis and this cross section here is the harbors,’ so he had the confirmation that this is Atlantis.

“Then he asked me: ‘Is this Atlantis?’ And I said, well, no. Maybe it was Tartessos and Tartessos was a model of Atlantis. Then, Jacobovici asked Juan Villarias-Robles and Sebastián Celestino: ‘Have you found Atlantis?’ They said, ‘NO! We have found something of the Middle Ages. Of the Muslim period.’

“Of course Jacobovici must have money to pay his film team. He cannot make a film about ‘We have found here some rectangles and a circle, maybe it is something of the Middle Ages.’ No one will see that film. So the film is made and they have to sell it somehow; they call it
Finding Atlantis
. Richard Freund says that it is Atlantis, so he is shown in front. I said Atlantis, no, but maybe Tartessos, so I am shown a bit smaller.”

“I think you were on for three seconds,” I said. Kühne makes one
brief appearance in the documentary, standing uncomfortably in the Andalusian sun wearing a dark baggy suit amid the empty dry-season marshes.

“I counted it, fifteen seconds. Yes. You see me walking for twelve seconds and for three seconds I say the sentence ‘I am standing here in Doñana.’ It sounds like the first sentence I ever spoke, when I was two and a half years old: ‘Rainer has fallen out of the bed.’ That is what ‘I am standing here in Doñana’ sounds like. It is so stupid! I have a theory about Tartessos and instead I say ‘I am standing here in Doñana.’”

Much of the appeal of Kühne’s original
Antiquity
article had been his demonstration that the shapes of Wickboldt’s satellite photos matched closely with Plato’s oddly specific measurements. It occurred to me that someone with Kühne’s brilliant mathematical mind and powers of concentration might have insight into Plato’s use of numbers. I asked what he saw in them.

“See this large plain?” he asked, sketching a rectangle with the numbers 3,000 and 2,000 along the sides. He traced the perimeter with his finger. “Ten thousand stades. The Greek word for 10,000 is
myriad
, which also means ‘largest possible number.’”

“And?” I leaned forward expectantly.

“I think Plato maybe made a joke.”

The Fundamentalist

Elsewhere in Braunschweig

S
hortly after Critias concludes the first part of the Atlantis tale in the
Timaeus
, Timaeus warns Socrates that he should not be surprised if certain topics—such as the gods or the creation of the universe—cannot be explained precisely. Humans are flawed. Unlike the tale of Atlantis, the account of the cosmos he’s about to give should be seen not as the truth but as “a likely story.” Only after my meeting with Kühne, as I rode a crosstown tram through central Braunschweig, did it occur to me that “a likely story” was the catchphrase of another famous cartoon waterfowl, Daffy Duck. The man I was meeting, Werner Wickboldt, had formulated a hypothesis that differed from Kühne’s in only one major respect—Wickboldt considered Tartessos-as-Atlantis to be an extremely likely story.

As with Kühne, Wickboldt was not quite what I had expected. I knew him only as a semiretired teacher of dental technology who had initially been reluctant to speak with me and was prone to leaving crabby rebuttals to the comprehensive comments Kühne posted whenever his
Antiquity
article was cited on Atlantis-related web pages. “Kühne adopted my hypothesis and made it for his own” was
the typical response to one encyclopedic Kühne post. “Inside his article he refers to me in an irritating manner.”

My fears of spending an afternoon with some crotchety
Burgomeister
evaporated when Wickboldt rode up, smiling, on his bike. He insisted on taking me for a tour of downtown Braunschweig before talking about Atlantis. The city had suffered a day and night of Atlantis-caliber destruction courtesy of the Royal Air Force late in World War II, after which its charming medieval center had burned for almost three days. One building, easily identifiable from a photo in which Hitler attends an early Nazi rally, was actually a perfect replica completed in 2004, with a shopping mall inside. (This seemed like a nice reminder of Plato’s concerns about confusing perception with reality.) The rest of the modern city center built in its place looked like a case study of the sort of urban planning cautionary tale that keeps Jane Jacobs books in print. “They say that this part of the city was destroyed
after
the war,” Wickboldt told me with a snort.

As it turned out, the past decade’s Atlantology renaissance could be traced back to a single meeting—a play date held at Wickboldt’s home in 1988. “My son went to the same school as Kühne,” Wickboldt told me as we strolled past some buildings that someone, presumably under the influence of hallucinogens, had decided would look nice covered entirely with colorful pop art illustrations. “He visited my home once in the afternoon, and we began to talk about Atlantis. We talked from four to ten.” Wickboldt developed his ideas over the following years, and a local newspaper wrote about his theory in 2003. Kühne published his
Antiquity
article, based on very similar ideas,
in 2004.

Where the two men had once shared virtually identical hypotheses, they now differed on one key point. Wickboldt had not lost faith.

“I believe in the original text, even the part that someone got it from the priest of Egypt,” Wickboldt told me when I asked which
parts of the story he doubted. “I’m convinced that Plato reported true European history.” Wickboldt saw no reason to think Plato’s numbers shouldn’t be taken literally. The shapes he’d identified on the satellite photos were probably vanished temples, no matter what Juan Villarias-Robles and his team had found there.

Wickboldt’s literal rendering of the
Timaeus
and
Critias
reminded me of strict constructionist judges who believe the US Constitution is a sacred document that should be interpreted only as its writers intended. This isn’t to say he, like certain Supreme Court justices, didn’t have his own esoteric explications of key passages. He believed that Plato used the word
island
to describe a river delta, such as the one at the mouth of the Guadalquivir where ancient sources had located Tartessos. When the standard Greek stade didn’t quite match up with the measurements of Doñana Park, he found an old Portuguese stade that did fit. One of the more interesting of Wickboldt’s adjustments was the idea that Plato’s nine thousand years was correct, but that “the Egyptians used a calendar of twelve thirty-day periods plus five separate days,” he explained to me in a loud second-story café. “Out of ancient texts referring to Manetho we learn that the Egyptians call thirty days a year.”

Manetho was a great third-century-BC Egyptian historian. If one divides 9,000 by 12 and counts back from the date Solon probably visited Egypt, the result falls within the thirteenth century BC—roughly the same time period as the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the earthquake at the Acropolis. “It’s possible that this was the time of Atlantis’s collapse and that Tartessos was built on top of it,” Wickboldt said.

Wickboldt invited me to his home for dinner, but I was fading fast after a long day. I still needed to find my way to Hanover for my morning flight. He listed a bunch of obscure German sources that I might want to investigate, then mentioned one that sounded familiar. “You should really take a look at the Parian Marble,” he said
as I paid the check. Wickboldt was an enthusiastic talker, but he became even more excited by this new topic. “Part of it is at Oxford University, and the oldest part is now lost, but they have a drawing of it. There’s an English translation.”

Tony O’Connell had told me about the Parian Marble, or Parian Chronicle, with much less skepticism than he had for most such evidence. The stele was a chronology of important events that had been carved on the Greek island of Paros, probably in the year 263 BC. (The two oldest chunks had been sold to a British earl in the early seventeenth century. The older of these was subsequently lost, a fact that never seemed to be raised by British politicians who insisted that the Elgin Marbles taken from the Parthenon in Athens couldn’t possibly be returned because the Greeks didn’t know how to properly care for them.) Its timeline goes all the way back to Cecrops, the mythical first king of Athens, dating his accession to approximately 1581 BC. Like most things regarding Cecrops, though, that date probably was not meant to be taken as truth. According to legend he had been born from the earth rather than human parents and had a tail like a snake.

The reason the Parian Chronicle was so interesting to Wickboldt was that its chronology seems to match several names and events that Plato mentions in the
Timaeus
and
Critias.
The priest at Saïs also names Cecrops as the oldest of Athenian kings and reports that Athens had been drowned three times since the sinking of Atlantis. The second of these floods was that of Deucalion, which the Parian Marble dates to 1478 BC. Even if the Parian dates aren’t precisely correct—as seems extremely likely—one of these deluges might be linked to the inundations of Athens and Atlantis. And if that were the case, other important details might be found outside of Plato’s work. But first one had to know where to look.

The Pillars of Heracles

Gibraltar

I
f the concentric circles are Atlantis’s defining geological characteristic, then Plato’s careful placement of the lost kingdom opposite (or outside, or
pro
—Tony O’Connell had been correct when he warned me the translation of ancient Greek is not an exact science) the Pillars of Heracles is the number one geographic clue. Hard evidence of Atlantis was proving so difficult to come by—even evidence which, like the location of the Pillars, is debated by Atlantologists—that when I’d found myself with an extra day before departing Spain I couldn’t resist a sudden compulsion to see them.

The trip south from Seville was strangely dreamlike, as long drives sometimes are when one travels alone. After an hour on a brand-new, empty toll road, I had passed fewer cars than I had gigantic windmills that looked like upturned boat propellers. I stopped for a coffee at a roadside cafe where at 9:00
A.M.
a dozen men were drinking large brandies over ice and the proprietor’s wife was doing a brisk business selling bunches of fresh-picked asparagus as thick as my thigh.

I followed the road signs toward Cádiz
8
until the highway forked east, away from the Atlantic coast. Eventually, the hills of Andalusia flattened out into a road that wound through a series of southern Spanish towns: Los Barrios, San Roque, La Línea. And then suddenly, through the windshield, appeared one of the strangest sights on Earth: a fourteen-hundred-foot-high chunk of shale towering over the flat sea. I parallel-parked my car in Spain, dropped a few euros in the parking meter, and walked across the border into the United Kingdom.

Gibraltar’s three square miles of overseas British territory are occupied primarily by the giant rock, with the remaining space essentially a 1950s London theme park. Double-decker buses carry British retirees around in circles, past red telephone booths and baton-twirling bobbies. Restaurants advertise fish and chips and full English breakfasts. On the day I arrived, banners everywhere saluted Queen Elizabeth II on her Diamond Jubilee. The British had been here for three hundred years; it was hard to imagine Gibraltar occupied by anyone else. But this coveted spot had been taken from the Spanish, who had in turn pushed out the Moors, the Islamic invaders who’d swept across the strait from Morocco and named the rock Jebel Tariq, or Mount of Tariq. Over time that name was corrupted into Gibraltar. The Vandals and Visigoths had taken the rock from
the Romans, who’d taken it from the Carthaginians; Hannibal crossed his elephants near here on his way to attacking Rome.

The first recorded occupiers of Gibraltar were the mysterious Phoenicians, who built nearby a temple to the legendary Melqart, a hero associated with voyages to distant lands. The Greeks adopted Melqart as the god they called Heracles for their own worship before passing him on to the Romans. To the Greeks, Heracles was not just a traveler but also a strong man, a son of Zeus who was required to fulfill twelve labors as penance for a horrible crime. Among these labors was one with possible links to Atlantis: a journey to an island in the far west called Erytheia—a land that several pre-Platonic writers had equated with Tartessos and the lands beyond the Pillars. Here Heracles defeated the three-bodied giant Geryon and stole his cattle. In one Greek version of the Geryon myth, the Pillars mark the farthest and westernmost point of all Heracles’s travels.

In the spirit of Herculean tasks, I decided to walk up to the top of the Rock rather than take the cable car. Halfway up, I was greeted by a group of small Gibraltar apes, the only such primates on the European continent and, some have suggested, possible descendants of those that King Arganthonios once sent from Tartessos back to Hiram of Tyre. Seeing that I had no food to share, they turned heel and abandoned me for a minivan discharging a load of sunburned Brits. At the very top of the Rock I paid five euros to enter the special Pillars of Hercules viewing area, marked by the ugliest piece of public statuary I’d ever seen. It appeared to be a gigantic two-columned Soviet bowling trophy.

The view across, however, was astounding. Through a light haze I could see Jebel Musa, the twin pillar of rock on the coast of Morocco. (Some believe that Gibraltar’s less famous African partner was Monte Hacho, a similar rock farther east.) It wasn’t hard to imagine that this spot would have marked the end of the known world, or that whoever held it would have possessed a huge strategic
advantage at a time when most great Mediterranean powers were built on strong navies. Greek knowledge of what lay beyond the Straits was certainly limited in Plato’s time. Herodotus wrote, “I have never seen nor, despite my efforts, been able to learn from anyone whether there is an ocean beyond Europe.” This ignorance was due at least in part to the Carthaginians severely restricting their access to passage through the Pillars starting around 500 BC. It’s possible that Plato heard false information that the Carthaginians, who ruled the western Mediterranean during his lifetime, had spread about what lay in the unknown ocean. Plato could have heard these tales while visiting Syracuse, since Carthage also controlled half of Sicily.

There was another possibility that I knew I had to face. Perhaps Plato was talking about another of the many sets of Pillars that Tony O’Connell had mentioned. If Plato had been referring to, say, the Bosphorus connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, or the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the toe of Italy’s boot (which Tony thought was likely), then Atlantis could have existed much farther east. If that were true, it would be hard to find a stronger candidate than one particular group of islands just south of Sicily, rich in myth and history, that had been well-known to the ancient Greeks centuries before Plato’s time.