David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

‘It was for the ancient Trojan palladion,’ Heidi said. ‘At first I thought the palladion must be another fake, but I came to believe it was genuine. We all knew the swastika was an ancient shape, and had been found decorating pottery at Troy. Himmler told me that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the palladion in the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where it had been looted from a temple at Troy. It was the most sacred Trojan object, dating back thousands of years before the fall of Troy, supposedly a gift from the sky god. It was meteoritic on one side, gold on the other. It’s gone now, though I don’t know where. But I brought you here to see the symbols around the edge of the hollow.’

Jack peered more closely. There were two circular rings of symbols, the first one close to the lip of the hole, the second inside and below the first ring, obscured in shadow. The symbols on the upper ring were similar to the ones they had seen in the hall above. ‘They’re runes,’ he murmured. ‘Eight of them altogether. Some look like the Futhark, the Scandinavian runes of the Middle Ages. But there are other symbols too, presumably Nazi additions. I can see two swastikas.’

Heidi pointed with her stick. ‘They’re the creation of Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s occult guru. He retained some of the original Scandinavian runes, but added some with no historical precedent as runes but based on other ancient symbols. As well as the swastikas, you can see those two symbols of a crossed ring, derived from the Phoenician symbol t th.’

Hiebermeyer looked at Heidi. ‘These SS runes have Roman letter equivalents, don’t they?’

She nodded. ‘Entirely made up by Wiligut, but applied consistently. The t th symbol means T, and the Hakenkreuz, the swastika, means A. And you can see the Sig rune for the letter S, familiar enough from the SS insignia. The other three symbols are the Heilszeichen rune for L, the Odal rune for N and the Leben rune for I.’

Jack stared again, panning his torch from symbol to symbol, then running over it again. ‘Good God,’ he said under his breath. ‘They spell out ATLANTIS.’

‘Now look at the second ring of symbols,’ she said.

Jack panned his torch deeper into the hole and stared, his heart pounding. ‘It’s incredible,’ he whispered.

‘What is it?’ Hiebermeyer said.

Jack sat back, his mind racing. ‘The symbols Costas’ ROV photographed two days ago on that cave wall in Atlantis, the ones that Katya is working on intepreting.’ He took out his iPhone, pressed a few keys and passed it to Hiebermeyer, who stared at the image on the screen and then squatted down, looking at the rock-cut symbols in the marble and then at the screen again. ‘There are twenty-six symbols on your screen. Each one of the eight symbols here in the rock is represented. They’re the same.’

‘You recognize them?’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s the Stone Age code.’ He looked at Heidi. ‘These symbols are found on cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic, most extensively in the famous caves in France and Spain. What does seem incredible is that they are virtually identical across the world.’ He showed her the screen, pointing. ‘The zigzag lines, the clusters of dots, the parallel lines are all found in rock art in North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia. Some scholars have tried to argue that these are just common jottings that the artists could have invented independently, but that doesn’t wash with me.’

‘You think these symbols could have spread around the world from one origin?’ she murmured.

Hiebermeyer nodded emphatically. ‘We know people moved huge distances in the Ice Age: across the Bering Strait and to South America at least twenty thousand years ago, and from Asia to Australia at least thirty thousand years before that. Armchair scholars who dispute the idea look at maps and see apparently insurmountable barriers in the seas and deserts and mountain ranges, whereas those like Jack who’ve tried to retrace the routes realize that the sea especially is often an aid rather than a hindrance to long-distance travel.’

‘What’s the date range of the symbols?’ she asked.

‘Towards the end of the last Ice Age, from about twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. But they could have survived as relic symbols after the Ice Age, maybe in rituals.’

‘At least until 6000 BC,’ Jack said quietly, getting down on his knees and shining his Maglite at the far side of the recess. He took his iPhone back from Hiebermeyer, stared at it and then shone the torch again. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

He straightened up and smiled broadly. Hiebermeyer pushed up his little round glasses and peered back. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’

‘I’ve just seen one I recognize above all others. It’s astonishing.’

Hiebermeyer followed his gaze. The torch lit up a symbol like a garden rake, a single slash with four lines coming off it at right angles. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

Jack scrolled down his screen. ‘It’s symbol number twenty-three in the Stone Age alphabet, what they call “pectiform”, from the Latin for comb-shaped, with short lines extending off a single line. According to Katya’s email to me summarizing the code, it’s quite rare, only occurring at five per cent of the cave sites. But it first occurs in the oldest groups, twenty-five thousand years ago.’ He tapped the screen again, and showed it to Heidi. ‘That’s why I’m so excited.’

The screen showed the cover of Jack’s monograph publication on Atlantis, based on their discovery of the site five years before. In the centre was the symbol they had first seen on the papyrus that Hiebermeyer had discovered in the Egyptian desert, the account by the ancient Greek traveller Solon of his visit to the Egyptian high priest who had told him the story of Atlantis. It was the symbol that Jack and Costas had found on the golden disc from the Bronze Age shipwreck, a disc they realized had been created in Atlantis more than five thousand years earlier, before the citadel had been drowned by the rising waters of the Black Sea. Heidi peered at it, then at Jack. ‘The symbol here is a mirror image of the Stone Age symbol. It’s as if that pectiform symbol had been flipped over.’

Jack nodded. ‘You won’t believe it, but my colleague Costas and I saw this very symbol underwater at Atlantis during our dive, on a stone pillar at the entrance to a tunnel into the site. We call it the Atlantis symbol. We believe it was shaped like that in the form of two wings, and was meant to represent an eagle or a vulture, a sacred bird. And it also served as a map, like a labyrinth. Five years ago, we were able to follow the shape of the symbol in the tunnels and galleries in the rock of the volcano that formed the summit of the citadel, until we reached the holy of holies.’

‘The place you and Costas revisited a few days ago,’ Hiebermeyer said.

Jack nodded. ‘Unfortunately the volcano decided to heat up just as we were about to enter the chamber. But we did manage to photograph a section of the wall containing these other symbols, clearly much older. I believe that this older Stone Age code and the newer Atlantis script were the preserve of priests and shamans, rather than a widespread writing system. That these two scripts should exist side by side fits in with some extraordinary ideas we’ve been developing about the dawn of civilization. On the one hand, the Atlanteans would have retained something of the rituals and beliefs of their Ice Age ancestors, particularly shamanistic rituals involving animals and the hunt. That’s what we see in the Palaeolithic cave art, where the symbols first appear. On the other hand, early farmers were developing new belief systems. The old animal gods of the spirit world were being eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods, created when people were beginning to see that they could determine their own destiny. The new script, its sacred meaning, may have been tied up with that. The period when Atlantis was destroyed may have been a time of tension and even bloody conflict between the two belief systems, between shamans of the old ways and priests of the new. When we went back to Atlantis, I wanted to find out who those new gods were.’