long-lost legendary cities
If you think of history as lists of facts, dates, battles, and key civilizations, you may memorize a lot, but you’ll never experience the thrill of the past. If, on the other hand, you’re able to make the leap to identify with people who are long dead and to imagine what their lives must have been like, you may be among those for whom the past becomes a passion — and perhaps even an addiction.
Maybe you read history, and your imagination brings the stories to life. Or maybe you need help. Hard evidence, the kind you can examine at historic sites or in museums, often works. Seeing what the people of the past left behind — what they made and built, and even their preserved bodies — can bridge the gap between then and now. These things are reminders that real people walked the Earth long ago, carrying within them dreams and fears not so unlike yours.
In this chapter, I look at two “lost” cities and discuss evidence for their actual existence. I also look at mummies and discuss the ways they can bring history alive.
Homing In on Homer
The Iliad and The Odyssey, ancient epic poems, tell fantastic stories about a long war between Greeks and Trojans and the journey home from that war. They’re so fantastic — full of vengeful gods and supernatural peril — that it’s hard for modern people to credit any part of them as true.
Yet a kind of history is in these poems. This history became more tantalizing in the late 19th century, when an eccentric German businessman dug up the city of Troy, revealing that it had been a real place, one of many ancient Troys built in just the place the poems describe. Each city rose and fell, and another rose on top of it while the old one was forgotten.
The Troy story
Greeks attacked Troy more than 3,200 years ago, in the 13th century BC. (In the next chapter, I explain BC, AD, CE, and BCE.) The stories about that decade-long war were already ancient by the time of the philosopher Aristotle and Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The Iliad and The Odyssey are supposedly the work of a blind singer–poet called Homer, but nobody knows for sure who he was, when he lived (maybe the ninth century BC), or even whether he lived. One widely respected theory is that, long before anybody wrote these stories down, storytellers and singers performed them, often set to music, over and over, each generation teaching the tales to the next.
As centuries and millennia went by, the real Trojan War faded so far into the past that these stories were all that was left — that is, until Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German enthusiast, decided to find Troy. With little to go on except his faith in Homer, he dug up not just one but a stack of nine Troys built one on top of another. Then he went to Greece and discovered the mighty civilization of Mycenae, which also figures in Homer’s saga.
Sure that The Iliad’s account of the Trojan War was true, Schliemann fixed on an ancient mound at a place called Hissarlik, on the southwest coast of modern Turkey.
Starting in 1870, Schliemann’s workers dug into a promising mound of dirt and rubble. What they couldn’t budge, they blasted with explosives. If you’ve seen documentaries about modern archaeologists painstakingly picking through an archaeological site with dental picks and soft brushes, put that image out of your head. These guys approached excavation with all the delicacy of a dog in a flower bed.
The crew hardly slowed down as they passed through what later archaeologists identified as the probable Troy of the Trojan War (about 1250 BC), only three levels down. Schliemann’s workers burrowed to an earlier layer of the ancient city, one from before 2000 BC — maybe 700 years earlier than the Troy in Homer’s stories. In 1874, Schliemann found gold artifacts that he erroneously thought had belonged to Priam, the Trojan king in The Iliad.
Not satisfied with his Trojan findings, Schliemann went back to Greece to look for the palace of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks in The Iliad. There, he not only made more finds (in the form of ancient tombs), but again came up with treasure, including a golden burial mask that he declared to be the Mask of Agamemnon. Later archaeologists dated it to about 1600 BC, too early for Agamemnon, and some modern archaeologists even think it’s a fake that Shliemann placed in the tomb so that he could “discover” it.
Inspiring archaeological finds
Schliemann’s enthusiastic work may not have been fraudulent, but it was clumsy and ill-informed. Yet he stumbled upon discoveries of real value, things found by archaeologists such as Arthur Evans (1851–1941), an Englishman who uncovered the remains of the great Minoan civilization. (The Minoans were a powerful people who thrived on Crete and other Aegean islands between 3000 and 1450 BC.) Such finds reminded both scientists and historians that ancient stories — even fantastical ones —can contain important clues to the foundations of history.
Raising Atlantis
Do Schliemann’s discoveries tell us every “lost” civilization was for real? No. I don’t think it means scientists or explorers will someday find the sunken nation of Atlantis. Oops. I shouldn’t have mentioned Atlantis. There isn’t room in this book to delve into even a small fraction of the theories and fantasies about where and what was Atlantis — if anything like it ever existed.
The story describes a land of peace and plenty, destroyed in an overnight cataclysm. It traces back to the writings of Greek philosopher Plato (about 428–347 BC), who used Atlantis to make a point about social order and good government. But Plato’s descriptions leave room for interpretation, and people have interpreted wildly for thousands of years.
Plato described Atlantis as in the Atlantic Ocean, just past Gibraltar on your way out of the Mediterranean Sea, but geology seems to dictate that it couldn’t have been there. Dueling historians, archaeologists, mystics, and self-appointed prophets have argued vociferously over an alternate site, putting the lost continent everywhere from Britain to Bermuda to Bolivia, from Colorado to the China Sea. One theory claims it was on another planet. Sci-fi movies, comics, and graphic novels depict Atlantis thriving in a giant plexiglass bubble on the ocean floor. Virtually every theory has to make allowances for Plato, who got the story of Atlantis indirectly from the Athenian statesman Solon, who supposedly got it from scholar–priests during a visit to Egypt in about 590 BC. Because Plato wrote his version almost two centuries later, in about 360 BC, details surely changed along the way.
Santorini (also known as Thera) lies about 45 miles north of the Greek island of Crete, which was the center of the Minoan culture. Minoan ruins are plentiful on what’s left of Santorini, but they’re only a small remnant of what was on the island until about 1600 BC, when the 5,000-foot volcano in its middle exploded and collapsed into the sea. Ever since, the island has been a crescent surrounding a volcanic-crater lagoon. The volcanic eruptions continued for 30 years, building up to a devastating climax:
