The end of Atlantis
Imagine going back in time, 3300 years ago, around the year 1300 B.C.E. (that is, nine thousand months-not nine thousand years before Solon, from whose narrative the philosopher Plato drew his own information about Atlantis).
What today is the Mediterranean Sea must have been at that time distinguished into two seas, located at different heights and lacking mutual communications.
To the west, the basin formed by the Mediterranean west and from the Tyrrhenian Sea was - as it is today - in communication with the waters of the Ocean, through the Strait of what is now Gibraltar, which had opened more than a thousand years earlier, and its waters had by then reached a level similar to that of today, thanks to the constant input guaranteed by the opening of that communication mouth with oceanic waters.
A second sea, to the east, ran from the Little Sirte to the Syrian-Palestinian coast and included the Ionian Sea, the lower Adriatic, and the Sea of Candia (while the Aegean territory, all of which emerged, constituted a vast plain co-starred with mountainous reliefs of volcanic origin). It was well separated from the former because a rocky isthmus existed instead of the Strait of Messina, and what is now the Strait of Sicily was then a fertile plain, irrigated by rivers and protected by high mountains, sloping gently down to the shores of the lower sea.
The waters of the eastern Mediterranean have to be at an elevation about 300 m below today's elevation. We will refer to this elevation as "zero level" to measure relative altitudes.
To the far west of the Mediterranean east, not far from where the island of Malta now stands, two narrow inlets gave access to a large gulf, more than a thousand meters deep. Around that gulf, protected at its mouth by a vast island, had arisen a flourishing civilization, founded by a Libyan lineage that had perhaps descended all the way from the high mountains of the south.
Those coming from the east, from Crete or Egypt, would have seen a rocky, rather steep coastline in which two straits on either side of a large island, measuring between 11,000 and 17,000 km2, which rose up to a hill about 150 m high. The two straits to the north and west of the island measured between 15 and 30 km. However, it could also have been a peninsula, with a single strait at its northern end as the only access to the large gulf.
We can identify in this system of straits the "columns of Heracles" of ancient mitology (and one of the two "columns" appears identifiable in the rocky massif of the-present-day island of Malta).
The heights most high of that system still emerge from the sea of the Sicilian Channel and are: Pantelleria, the Pelagie islands (Lampedusa and Linosa), and the Maltese islands.
Along the northern shore of the gulf is erected a relief system, somewhat higher than 500 m, that dominated the landscape (today's Maltese islands); the southern coasts were somewhat gentler, but a long, flat elief rose close to the sea, up to over 400 m from the surface of the waves, and in front of it, not far away, a tall island rose from the waters of the basin (the present islands of Lampedusa - the first one - and Linosa, the one detached from the coast). In a northwesterly direction, at the bottom of the large gulf, stood an imposing volcanic peak, more than 1100 m high from the waters of the sea. To use a clear current reference, this was what we know today as the island of Pantelleria. Behind it, to the north, the coast rose to mark the horizon, to a height of al-minus 300 m. Beyond it was the other sea, which had been receiving water supply from the Ocean for centuries now, and from there "it was possible to reach the other islands for those who then made crossings and from the islands to the whole opposite continent, which was around that true sea (pontos)... For everything within the limits of the mouth of which I have spoken appears to be a harbor characterized by a narrow entrance: that other sea, on the other hand, you can actually call a sea, and that land which entirely surrounds it you can really and very rightly call a continent." (Plato).
That sea, which had been in connection with the waters of the Ocean through the mouth of Gibraltar for centuries, was very close to the edge on this side of its shore and to spread out to the gulf and the eastern Mediterranean, located at a lower elevation. This was the real curse hanging over the heads of the people (Atlanti-Tjehenu) who inhabited those lands, but they were perhaps convinced that the precarious situation of balance could last forever, as they had always experienced it.
West of the "harbor" or gulf we have described stretched a wide, fertile irrigated plain, which we return to describe in the words used by Plato. It received from the north the waters of the Medjerda, which today flow down to the sea not far from Tunis, while from the west it could be abbondantly irrigated thanks to the waters provided by the wide inland "sea," whose waters must have been rather sweet. That- extent of plain corresponds in misure and physical-climatic characteristics to the territorium described by Plato: the distance from the closure of the gulf, southward, to the sponde of the western Mediterranean, is 540 km (three thousand stadia), and that from the coast of the gulf to the reliefs behind the plain, which bordered the inland sea, 360 km (two thousand stadia).
The philosopher narrates that the inhabitants of Atlantis grew - among other things - dates and bananas, amidst a fauna in which elephants stood out.
From the coast, the plain rose gently westward, in the direction of a ridge of hills of volcanic origin, rich in metal oil deposits, with a morphological structure in tuffaceous prevalence. Beyond the ridge, about 450 km away from the waters o f the Mediterranean, lay an enormous water basin: a real sea, the surface of which was set at an altitude of about 650 m higher than that of the Mediterranean. That sea collected the waters of a vast pluvial basin, stretching from the present Aurès massif in the north, south to the Tassili and Ahaggar massifs (the "Atlas mountain," according to Herodotus' text), from which descended the river that today has the name Wed Igharghar. Its waters, in turn, fed an emissary that descended eastward to the Mediterranean: a perennial river that irrigated the lands of the vast plain.
When the water touched the maximum level that sea could reach a depth of about 350- 380 m and had an almost circular shape, with an area of more than 280,000 km2, comparable in size to that of the entire Italian peninsula. At the bottom of its basin today is a large sandy sediment, the Eastern Grand Erg (Igharghar): one of the most extensive sandy deserts in the world. It can be assumed that that great sea was given the primitive name "Atlantic Ocean (pelagos)" in ancient times. For the sake of convenience, since ancient myth placed the Garden of the Hesperides in that region and its desiccated bottom is still called "Chott el Djerid" (desiccated garden swamp, palm grove), we will call it "the Sea of Gardens."
Southwest of the Sea of Gardens, at a distance of another 500 kilometers, rose toward the sky the great rocky massif of the-Atlas-this is the mountain known today by the Berber name of Ahaggar, "noble." Let us resort to the description offered by Herodotus: "It is narrow and circular on all sides and high - reportedly - so high that its peaks cannot be seen: for never do the clouds abate them, either in summer or winter. The natives say it is a column of the vault of heaven."
The highest peaks of that massif, in the mountain now called Atakor, were almost 2800 m higher than the water level of the ocean (that is, 3400 above the level of the Mediterranean at that time). On the slopes of that mountain tells Herodotus the people of the Atlantes once lived:
"From this mountain the inhabitants of the country have derived their name; they are in fact called Atlantes. It is said that they do not feed on any animate being and have no dreams.
Two main routes, traditionally, lead from the shores of the Mediterranean toward the Ahaggar Mountains, and run one along the west bank of the ancient Sea of Gardens (this is the road leading to the oases of El Goléa and Ghardaia, "high places" of Saharan tourism, whose wed when they carry water still point in the direction of the great desiccated sea), the other along its eastern shore, and it is the great "chariot road," sprinkled with paintings and rock graffiti, described in its stages and oases by Herodotus' account, also traveled in its time by Roman troops who penetrated Africa as far as the Niger Basin. The northern shore was rocky, of the same kind of rocks that shattered in the disaster that brought about the end of Atlantis: these are the gorges and canyons that furrow the southern slope of the Aurès Mountains and that, in the vicinity of Bou Saada, go to the first sands of the- the ancient great sea. The desiccated bottom of that great sea is still occupied today by an impenetrable sand desert. To the west, within the primitive basin, still runs from south to north an aquifer of water rich enough to provide life and nourishment for the Souf oases: in this region rose El Wed and at a higher elevation, toward the ancient western shore, are Wargla and the petroliferi of Hassi Messaoud.
There lived in that region a Libyan or "pre-Libyan" people, prosperous in agriculture and trade, endowed with their own states "confederated" into a kind of empire. Those men were great builders and great navigators and used a script, presumably similar to Libyan-Berber writing; in Egyptian hieroglyphics they were called Tjehenu and in Greek texts Atlantói. Several popoles were their confederates or vassals (and we will find some of them in the list of sea peoples who swarmed to Egypt after the final catastrophe).
If we are to try to bring together the clues offered by various authors from the classical period, that people could have come to the shores of the Mediterranean from the great mountain in the interior, called the Atlas, across the "suspended" sea, with a migration of more than 2,000 km. Since at least 3000 B.C.E. the Atlantes were capable of building fortified cities with large blocks of stone and lived in constant confrontation with the empire of the Pharaohs, in that long confrontation that some scholars have- called "the Bronze War." Among the products of vital importance for the spread of technology, they held the monopoly of important deposits of obsidian, a lithic material (volcanic glass) highly prized for the production of blades and other objects of use. Among the main sources of obsidian in the Mediterranean were in fact Pantelleria the high volcanic peak, located right at the bottom of their great gulf) and the Aeolian islands, which had to be part of the territori under their control.
Native copper mines (oréi-chalkos) are located in the hills behind the Atlantean plain, but a major technological innovation was the use of bronze, an alloy between copper and tin, with better hardness and strength characteristics.
The strategic goal to achieve monopolio of bronze was control of the tin mines, which Africa lacked. The Pharaohs sustained the long war against the Hittites for this and gained control of the mines in Anatolia. The Atlantes had to look elsewhere; their tin came from the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and perhaps from Cornwall. Indeed, the network of their trade rapports may have been connected with the spread of "megalytic cultures" in Europe and the western Mediterranean.
According to the account developed by Plato in his Dialogues, the Atlantean society was structured into a state system (a confederation of small monarchies, as far as we seem to be able to interpret the philosopher's account), which practiced agriculture, built cities, smelted metals (gold, copper, and tin) and had discovered ways to alloy them to obtain bronze, knew writing, had practiced expansionism of conquences extending as far as Tyrrhenia (present-day Latium and Tuscany), had been fighting for 2,000 years against the lords of Egypt, and had come into conflict with pelasgic peoples who lived on the shores of the Aegean plain... its comblishers were depicted in Egyptian bas-reliefs and in the rock paintings of the Saharian slopes, they used horse-drawn war and hunting chariots, and Plato dwells at length on a number of customs of that people about which, today, we cannot express much doubt...
According to Plato, the priests of Sais had told Solon that great droughts, never seen before, had calcified the whole earth, immense fires had raged over the districts and destroyed the forests, lightning had fallen from the sky, earthquakes had shaken the planet, causing great and considerable destruction, drying up springs and rivers. Droughts would be succeeded by floods and huge waterspouts would sweep over the earth, engulfing-among other things-the island of the Atlantes. Those cataclysms seemed to mark a transitional phase, the transition from a period with a warmer climate to another phase, with harsher living conditions.
Corresponding such descriptions to changes climates that might have actually occurred in the 13th century B.C.?
According to other contemporary documents (the Egyptian inscriptions of Medinet Habu, the biblical Exodus), the catastrophes described occurred veramently. It was around the 13th century B.C. that Libya (North Africa) experienced the climax of A major phase of desertification.
An inscription from Karnak specifies, "Libyans come to Egypt to try to support life." The myth of Phaeton can also recurgive a series of dramatic droughts that struck the Mediterranean, "the origin of the history of the Greeks."
All that world we described ended in the space of twenty-four hours, on a day in a year between 1235 and 1220 BC. A series of violent earthquakes seriously cracked the consistency of the rocky barrages (made of tuff and therefore quite friable, perhaps already weakened by water infiltration) and opened some breaches, which soon gave way in the face of the pressure of the waters of the two great basins located at the h i g h e r elevations: the Saharan Sea and the western Mediterranean, constantly replenished by the waters of the Ocean. The waters impetuously made their way into gullies tens of kilometers wide, with truly immense flood waves, not even remotely comparable to the Vajont flood, which has dramatically remained in the memory of Italians. Although we calculate the volume of the Saharan Sea by default, we said that it in ancient times contained at least 50,000 cubic kilometers of water, up to a maximum elevation of 650 m above the level of the eastern Mediterranean. To determine the potential energy of that wave, we could schematically identify the center of gravity of the ververate water mass at + 350 m. This would result in the impact of an energy equivalent to at least 17.5 x 1015 kgm = 17 x 1016 joules.
Let us assume that t h e water level in the original reservoir may have already dropped a great deal by the time of the catastrophe due to the intervening climatic changes, but certainly a massive l l wave could rovescy on the plain below. To destroy and wipe out Atlantis completely, a surge consisting of less than one-tenth of the volume of the upper sea, poured from the then-existing difference in height with the lowlands, would have sufficed. The huge waterfall went on to directly impact the island with the capital of Atlantis, which was at a distance of about 600 km from the barrage.
Even today, to those who look carefully on a map or on a satellite photo the region of the eastern Grand Erg, the Gulf of Gabès and Little Sirte, the ancient catastrophy shines through "between the lines": the Gulf of Gabès appears as a veritable "imbute," and it is not difficult to imagine the enormous mass of water that drained into it, to rivering, in large quantities with mud and sand, into the lowlands in front of it, which once must have constituted a fertile plain. We still have to explain, however, why on earth that area then remained, over the centuries, andenied under water.
The same series of earthquakes broke other rocky diaphragms: first of all, the one that bordered the great sloping plain to the north and bordered a sea at a lower level, but far more dangerous: for that sea was now collinked with the Oceans, and received a constant influx of water from them. When those waters also began to pour over the plain of Atlantis, the history of that civilization was permanently submerged under hundreds of feet of salt water. The two Mediterraneans merged into one sea. The Aegean plain, dotted with mountain ranges, which remained transformed into archipelagos, was permanently submerged. For several centuries, the Achaeans and other ancestors of Mediterranean cultures saw the water rising, covering their harbors, coastal cities and taking away their best arable land... Some of them attempted to conquer the only possible refuge, the great plain that rose along the course of the great Nile River, sheltered from the rise of the sea...but they were repelled or absorbed by the great civilization that already, along those shores, had built an empire, destined to last through the centuries and leave an immortal imprint of itself...
All this remained imprinted in the origin myths of the Greek lineage, with the flood of Deucalion and Pyrrha, with the great epics of Heracles and the Argonauts.
The cataclysmic picture appears complete if imagine that the same series of telluric tremors caused the diaphragm (rocky isthmus) connecting Italy and Sicily to collapse, resulting in the opening of the Strait of Messina.
The rush of the current dug a furrow deep, winding bed in the center of the canal of Sicily, eroding and disintegrating the rocks of lesser resistance, and went forking, violently, against the more consistent rocks of the imposing volcanic peak of Pantelleria. The result of the cataclysms of that period must have been an eastward flow of current, of much greater magnitude than that which, through Gibraltar, fed the level of the Mediterranean; a flow that lasted for a long time, the effect of which was probably rafforced by that coming from the Strait of Messina. It can be calculated that the rise of the waters in the Mediterranean up to the present level, however, took several centuries. The waters flowed as a swift current through the sands and muds that had poured into the Gulf of Little Sirte from the great Saharan Sea, and rose in level as far as the Dardanelles, the Syrian coast, and the Nile Delta, covered all the ports of the ancient Minoan culture, transformed Ilio into a seafaring city, and pushed the Achaean conquistors as far as there, well determined to seize the powers and riches that the new sea made accessible to them. Others of them participated to the submerged ruins of ancient Atlantis and encountered other vicissitudes (the Argonauts in the region of the Hesperides...).
They ended up submerged all the portuali then existing in the eastern Mediterranean area. It ended up under water what remained of the civilization of Thera, already badly affected by the gigantic volcanic explosion two centuries earlier; it ended up under water the Maltese temples, carved into the great sacred rock that had been, until then, the "sentinel" of Atlantis. The Maltese stronghold appears to us as one of the two primitive "pillars of Heracles," and perhaps its placement in this context can help shed new light on the wealth of sacred settlements, hypogean constructions and underwater findings that the present island and its seabed still offer today.
The muds, currents, and shallows of the Little Sirte and the Sicilian Channel long made navigation difficult, as is reported by Plato and other classical authors (including the narratives of the Argonauts myth).
If what we have laid out is credible, Sunk into no oceanic abyss. It was shocked by immense waves, its ruins covered by tens of meters of mud and sand and then by several hundred meters of water.
The destruction of the economic-cultural center of Atlantis may appear related to the "mysterious" interruption of construction activities of complexes megalithic, which around that time occurred in the whole area of the Western Mediterranean: in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as in Sardinia and Corsica, and we might add as far as the Britanniche islands. An important pole of wealth and reference had disappeared, a country of great navigators, who traded with more westerly countries to import tin, essential to casting bronze, and in return exported obsidian and other Middle-terranean products. The peoples connected with it, for whom the main economic partner had failed, thus found themselves suddenly thrown into a condition of "barbarism," or at least into the new need to rely on a subsistence food regime.
The complete emptying of the great sea African, initiated by the sudden catastrophe, was the coup de grace for the desertification of North Africa. The phenomenon continued as the climate dried up and the waterways that fed the Igharghar basin dried up, and lasted more than a millennium: the level dropped due to increased evaporation, and the people of classical antiquity knew a large Tritonid lake, with a Triton River, flowing down from the slopes of the Ahaggar into the bed of the present Wed Igharghar, the total length of which reached 2,000 km, according to calculations made by Butavand.
Thus take on tragic color the events of that land of Atlantis which, according to the Platonic account, had been "assigned to Poseidon": literally, in that it was placed below sea level (in the meaning that such an expression takes today).
One could attempt to identify the different submerged coastal levels, corresponding to the progression of the waters from the time of the Atlantis catastrophe until the Mediterranean Sea was completely filled to its present height. But, of course, this today appears only as a utopian dream. An important confirmation, related to ancient sea levels, could come from the deep-sea search for ancient Minoan harbors, which might be identifiable in the seabed around the island of Crete in a certainly less complex and cumbersome way than a search aiming directly at finding remains in the area of ancient Atlantis.
If we now try to reread the Dialogues of Plato and to compare them with "our" map of Atlantis, we will have the distinct feeling that things correspond and fall into place. The waters of the sea gradually rose and flooded the fertile plains of the Aegean, leaving only the tops of the reliefs to emerge, which became islands, smaller and smaller... we will realize that Plato's "nine thousand years" must really correspond to a long period, yes, but "to the measure" of the lineage of the Achaeans and Greeks, after they settled in the Mediterranean basin.
Happened therefore many and great inondactions for nine thousand years (so many have run from that time until now), the earth, which in those times and events descended from the heights, did not mass up as elsewhere in mounds worthy of mention, but always flowing disappeared into the depths of the sea: therefore, as is the case in small islands, there remained in comparison with those of that time these bones almost of an infirm body, being cast away the fat and soft earth, and only the lean body of the earth remained. But then that it was intact, it had as mountains high hills, and the plains now called of Felleo were full of fat earth, and on the mountains there was much forest, of which there still remain manifest signs. Of the mountains there are now some that provide nourishment only for bees, but it is not so long ago that trees were cut there to cover the larger buildings, and these roofs still sussist. There were also many tall cultivated plants and vast pastures for livestock. Every year the water from heaven was collected, and it was not dispersed, as now, that which from the dry land flows into the sea, but the earth, having received much of it, retained it in its bosom, and brought it back into the clay hollows, and from the heights it spread it into the valleys, forming in every place wide whirlpools of springs and rivers, of which the ancient springs still remain as sacred clues, attesting to the truth of my words.
The end of the center of Atlantis, which based the own power over commercial and cultural hegemony in the Western Mediterranean basin and Northwest Africa (we would say today, with an Arabic term, Maghreb), had to cause several serious consequences, traces of which have remained in the "mysteries" of those areas:
- For a long time the tin trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Cornwall collapsed, until it was revived by Phoenician and Carthaginian traders. Egypt, in fact, was satisfied with the monopoly on bronze it had obtained through its wars against the Hittites, and the end of Atlantis constituted for the Pharaohs an unhoped-for aid in the abolition of dangerous competition over the production of the precious alloy (although the arrival in the Mediterranean area of the Achaeans, equipped with iron weapons, had considerably reduced the strategic importance of bronze);
- Megalith co-structures "mysteriously" disappeared throughout the western Mediterranean arc. Once economic resources dwindled, the local population had fallen back into a regime of poverty and food subsistence, which certainly did not allow for the conception and realization of major works;
- Subsequent occupations of the large islands (Sardinia and Corsica) by sea peoples caused the origins of the "megalith people" who had preceded them to be increasingly sprofounded in mystery;
- A small group of survivors of the Tjehenu people perhaps preserved the memory of some of the ancient myths. The mythical Queen Tin Hinan, buried in the Ahaggar massif in the heart of the Sahara, may be a trace of this, at least in the permanence of the name, as well as the Typhinagh alphabet, used in the oldest Libyan-Berber languages. Certainly, however, the extent and manner of the catastrophe described above was such as to exterminate the entire ruling group, which was to inhabit the capital city and the vast and fertile plain, devastated by the overflow wave of the "Sea of Gardens."
An objection made by several interlocutors in the course of the conduct of this investigation was, "but if the whole story was so evident, why has no one written it before?" The answer is very simple: "It is precisely because someone wrote it that we can tell this story. He has
Plato wrote, and with great precision; it have written important parts Eudoxus of Cnidus, Diodorus Siculus and other ancient authors, wrote and depicted other parts the chroniclers of Ancient Egypt, with a precision that would be enviable by many modern chroniclers... it was a matter of collecting a series of "scattered pieces," putting them together, and setting off on the trail of a disaster whose survivors are not left to tell the tale... a "Vajont" of ancient times, occurring in a space and time incredibly close to us, much more than any of our imaginations would allow us to imagine.
We should be grateful for the attention of Plato who handed down with such a wealth of detail Solon's account of Atlantis: a memory that would have potured to disappear, buried in oblivion, like so many other forgotten events, throughout human history.
