Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (6 page)

As Seen on TV

Hartford, Connecticut

L
ong before I ever took an interest in Atlantis, I traveled to Cusco, Peru, to interview a hard-core explorer with a reputation for finding lost cities. He’d recently returned from several months in the Amazon jungle and with his sunken cheeks and long beard looked as if he’d just stepped out of an El Greco painting. We talked a bit about ancient places that now existed only as mentions in old manuscripts, and I asked him which vanished site he’d most like to find. Without hesitation he said, “Tartessos.”

A few years later, when I was hit with the sudden burst of news alerts about an Atlantis discovery, I began scrolling through them skeptically until a magic word caught my eye:
Tartessos
. The reports turned out to be linked to a National Geographic documentary called
Finding Atlantis
, which claimed that Plato’s lost city had been found right where he’d said it was, outside the Pillars of Heracles. The unlikely star of the show was a history professor from the University of Hartford, Richard Freund. With his round face, wire-rimmed spectacles, and neat mustache, Freund looked less like a swashbuckling international adventure hero than a middle-aged Connecticut rabbi,
which was another of his identities. His lack of flash didn’t dim his confidence. At the documentary’s start, Freund made clear to his audience that the stakes of his quest were enormous. “This city of Atlantis is seen by many as the mother of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Israel and Europe and all the other civilizations that began in this area,” he explained, echoing Ignatius Donnelly’s diffusionism theory. “And if it began here, we may be looking at the single most important site for humanity.” He was standing in Doñana National Park, on the southwest coast of Spain.

Freund’s argument was based on a radically simple solution to the question of Atlantis’s location: When writing of Atlantis, Plato related a tale that Solon had heard from the Egyptians, who had in turn learned it from earlier sources. Thus, when speaking of the kingdom he called Atlantis, Plato had really been describing a
different
lost city, Tartessos.

The historical record for Tartessos is certainly much deeper than that for Atlantis. The early Greek geographer Hecataeus is quoted in a fragment of a lost work as referring to a “Tartessian polis,” or city-state. Herodotus, writing in the century before Plato, placed Tartessos “beyond the Pillars of Heracles” and wrote that the kingdom was ruled by a wealthy monarch named Arganthonios, a name that means “Silver-Locks.” (This may refer either to the area’s mineral riches or to the king’s advanced age. Herodotus claimed that Arganthonios reigned for eighty years and died at the age of 120.) Aristotle wrote that Tartessos was the name of a river that flowed from the Pyrenees Mountains between Iberia and Gaul to a spot outside the Pillars. Roman sources referred to a River Tartessos, now the Guadalquivir River, near the city of Cádiz, which sits, still, about sixty miles northwest of the Strait of Gibraltar. Where this river met the sea, it was split into two mouths by a large island. On that island, the second-century-AD geographer Pausanias wrote in his
Description of
Greece
, was built a city, also called Tartessos. To recap: a wealthy island city, opposite the Pillars of Heracles, in the very land, Gades/Cádiz, that Plato had mentioned in the
Critias
.

Richard Freund believed that Tartessos, in addition to being Plato’s source for Atlantis, was another name for the land of Tarshish, mentioned several times in the Old Testament, perhaps most famously as the distant place Jonah sails for prior to his miraculous encounter with a whale. In the tenth century BC, King Solomon of Israel (he of the famed let’s-cut-this-baby-in-half wisdom), in partnership with the Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre, owned a fleet of ships that sailed for Tarshish every three years. These returned “bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes and monkeys.” One group of Phoenician traders, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote, having carried olive oil and other wares to exchange in Tarshish, received so much silver in return that they cast new silver anchors to replace their lead ones—“and there still was a great quantity of the metal left over.” Freund notes in his book
Digging Through History
that the book of Isaiah, from the eighth century BC, contains this passage: “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for your strength is laid waste.” Might a maritime disaster that struck Tarshish be related to the one that demolished Atlantis?

Freund wasn’t the first scholar to make a connection between Tartessos and Atlantis, nor to go hunting for Plato’s lost city along the coast of southwest Spain. The German archaeologist Adolf Schulten published a theory in 1922 that proposed Tartessos and Atlantis were one and the same. Working with the Anglo-French archaeologist George Bonsor, Schulten conducted excavations for several seasons in an area that is now part of the Doñana National Park, the marshland where Freund’s documentary was filmed. In 1923, the pair excavated at a site called Cerro del Trigo (“Wheat Hill”). They found old stone blocks that indicated the site had once been a Roman colony. Because the team saw no other stones nearby,
Bonsor proposed that the Romans must have used stones from an older settlement as their building materials. Further excavations to find what lay beneath the Roman ruins were impossible due to the Doñana’s high water table. Any hole they dug more than a few feet deep was quickly flooded. Whatever archaeological secrets lay buried at the site would likely remain out of reach forever.

After Schulten’s inconclusive digs, the Tartessos-as-Atlantis hypothesis largely lay dormant for several decades, overshadowed by the lingering influence of Ignatius Donnelly’s mid-Atlantic location theory. Then in 2004, the prestigious British scholarly journal
Antiquity
published a brief article titled “A Location for ‘Atlantis’?” The author, Dr. Rainer Kühne, a physicist at Dortmund University in Germany, noted that on satellite photos of the Doñana region one could see the outlines of two large rectangular structures—possibly remnants of the spectacular temples of Poseidon and Cleito that Plato had described—on what appeared to be a chunk of land roughly five stades (or three thousand feet) in diameter, the same size he had cited for the central island of Atlantis.
5

As usually happens when someone floats a new Atlantis hypothesis, especially one with the implicit support of an eminent publication, the media went crazy. In an interview with the BBC, Kühne gave additional detail, pointing out how the faint outline of circles could be seen surrounding the rectangular shapes. “We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described,” Kühne told a reporter. Amazingly, both the rings and one of the rectangles also more or less matched the precise dimensions that Plato had given in the
Critias
.

Freund’s documentary built on Kühne’s thesis, compiling a number of other compelling similarities between Plato’s Atlantis and the
Doñana Park site. Southwest Spain contains some of the world’s greatest copper deposits, which have been mined since Phoenician times. The narrator of
Finding Atlantis
points out that the ancient Greek word
orichalcum
, the mysterious metal that Plato wrote “flashed with . . . red light,” is often translated as “mountain copper.” The region’s geology shows evidence of having endured several of what scientists sometimes call “high-impact events.” The famously unstable Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault due west of the park could have caused tsunamis capable of laying waste to a coastal kingdom in a day and a night. A layer of methane found several meters below the ground at one spot in Doñana might be evidence that organic matter—flora, trash, or human remains—had decomposed after being smothered and trapped suddenly under debris carried by a tsunami. The existence of Kühne’s rings appeared to have been confirmed through electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), a geophysical method that uses electrical current to identify objects under the ground.

Having assembled this impressive trove of evidence, near the end of
Finding Atlantis
Freund offered what he called his “smoking gun”: two small figurines, discovered while searching inside the circular area identified by Kühne. “People wait a whole career to find just one of these little figurines, and we found two!” Freund exults in the documentary. He identified them as possible images of the ancient goddess Astarte, who was worshipped in various forms for nearly four thousand years. Freund saw a possible connection to the Phoenicians. This race of seafarers, based in the area in and around modern Lebanon, built up a massive trading empire between the second millennium BC and their conquest by Persia in 539 BC, with colonies stretching the length of the Mediterranean. One such colony was Gades/Cádiz. The Phoenicians are credited with spreading the use of the alphabet, but since almost none of their writing has survived,
their history is obscure. Based on the discovery of these figurines, Freund speculated that historians may have gotten the exploration of the Mediterranean backward—the Phoenicians might have actually originated in Spain and migrated
east
. A vanished Phoenician settlement on the southwest coast of Spain might have been the inspiration for Plato’s story. “That would make Atlantis the prototype for all other Phoenician outposts,” he writes in
Digging Through History
. Such an idea would rewrite the chronology of western civilization.

If anything, the press response to Freund’s documentary exceeded the reaction to Kühne’s
Antiquity
article. The natural historian Simon Winchester, author of respected books on the Krakatoa cataclysm and the Atlantic Ocean, wrote in
Newsweek
of Freund’s claim to have found Atlantis: “Beguiling new research into one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries appears to have thrown up remarkably persuasive evidence that remains of the ancient city are to be found in the great Hinojos marsh on the southwestern coast of what is today’s Spain.” He invited readers to plug in a set of GPS coordinates and have a look at the site on Google Earth. “It is a remarkable site, and you will gasp.”

I entered the coordinates. I squinted. I saw a brown smear. I did not gasp. Had Freund really solved the twenty-four-hundred-year-old mystery?

•   •   •

Freund’s offices were located in the basement of a building that looked like an Eisenhower-era recreation center. As I waited at his assistant’s desk—Freund is the director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies—I admired some photographs of artifacts he’d uncovered at digs in the Middle East. The subterranean air was swampy; a dehumidifier hummed in one corner. Eventually, I was waved in to an inner office. Freund sat behind a large, messy desk
covered in papers and very-old-looking books in several languages. He was obviously relishing his sudden fame as the world’s most famous Atlantologist.

“I’ve received about five thousand e-mails!” he told me, handing over a thick folder. “Here’s a selection of five hundred. From kids, from crazies. National Geographic was just overwhelmed.” He read aloud from a couple of letters and then handed these to me as well. “This might be something you and I could collaborate on—
Letters to and from Atlantis
. A whole book!” Freund wanted to make sure I knew I was missing out on a potentially hot property: A writer for
The
New Yorker
had contacted him about doing a book together. “Anne Rice’s agent says she’s working on a nonfiction book about Atlantis!” The organizer of the triennial Atlantis conferences in Greece was all but begging him to attend, but Freund had prior plans to oversee the archaeological dig of an ancient city port in Israel.

Reaction to
Finding Atlantis
may have been enthusiastic, but it had not been universally positive. In the documentary Freund appears to be the decisive leader of the expedition, shepherding a team of Spanish scholars through the dusty landscapes of Doñana in a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers. Long after watching it I learned that Freund’s role was the result of careful editing. The Spaniards worked for their country’s national research council and had invited Freund primarily because he had access to expensive equipment they needed. They’d been working in Doñana Park for years. Freund had been at the location for a week. The Emmy Award–winning producer of
Finding Atlantis
, Simcha Jacobovici, was famous for making the sorts of sensational documentaries that mainstream scholars despise, including one History Channel special purporting to have found the nails from Jesus’s cross. And as usual when the name
Atlantis
was raised, critics howled that Freund couldn’t have found it because Plato’s Atlantis was a fiction.

Freund remained convinced that he’d located the true Atlantis. “This is like finding the
Titanic
or King Tut’s tomb,” he said, shaking his head. “There are too many things that are accurate to discount. He ticked off the evidence on his fingers: the Astarte figurines, the ERT readings (which he compared to “MRI readings for the ground”), the satellite photos. When I asked why no stones had been found during the team’s subterranean soundings, which would seem to contradict Plato’s description of a red, white, and black stone wall that surrounded the innermost circle of Atlantis, Freund explained that this absence was actually a
good
thing—evidence that a tremendous tsunami had obliterated the site and swept everything out to sea. A team of marine archaeologists had found the remains of enormous stone walls in the water off of the Bay of Cádiz, near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

“There’s debris going all the way down the coast!” he told me excitedly. “Ancient walls and pillars deposited in front of the marsh—things that are nine, eleven, fifteen, eighteen meters down!”

Carbon 14 dating of core samples taken from within Rainer Kühne’s innermost circle, where the figurines had been found, uncovered a sample of local oak—possibly remains of a ship—buried under forty feet of debris. To Freund, this indicated an ancient settlement suffocated by a sudden influx of sea matter. “Only in that one area of the marsh do the cores date back four thousand years,” he said. That could mean a disaster around 2000 BC.