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SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
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THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
A
Other books by
EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
THE SOUL OF A CHILD
GATES OF LIFE
!
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THE
SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
EXCURSIONS BY A
LAYMAN AMONG OLD LEGENDS
AND NEW DISCOVERIES
IN THREE PARTS
BY
19
}
EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

NEW YORK
2 7
•
•
ALFRED A KNOPF PUBLISHER
•
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COPYRIGHT 19 27
BY ALFRED A. K N O P F, INC.
*
Manufactured in the United States of America
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RUTH CAMPBELL
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Libr.
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: ATLANTIS
[1]
PART TWO: SCHERIA
TARSHISH
[35]
PART THREE:
TARTESSsos
[71]
♫
!
..
A
PART ON E
ATLANTIS
t
}
·
1
THERE is romance in the very name, Atlantis,
so closely linked with the great ocean whose con-
quest inaugurated our modern era. Poets have built
dreams on the old tale, and students have puzzled
over it, ever since Plato first put it into writing.
His ablest translator, Benjamin Jowett, called it
world-famous fiction, second only in importance to
the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur." And
he pointed to the share it undoubtedly had in start-
ing the quest that led ultimately to the finding of
the New World.
66
a
66
The legend of Atlantis appears first in one of
Plato's dialogues, Timaeus," where the relation
of it forms a mere interlude. Critias tells it as com-
ing from his great-grandfather, Dropias, who was a
relative and friend of Solon, the second and greater
law-giver of Athens. Solon was a poet as well as a
statesman, and he abandoned poetry for politics
only at the urgent request of his fellow citizens, who
3
·
4
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
made him dictator to redeem Athens from the an-
archy caused by laws that gave us the word “dra-
conic for measures so severe that they defeat their
own purpose. We might call Solon the Mussolini
of his day, and, of course, then as now opinions
were divided as to whether his reforms were worth
the price paid for them in terms of public freedom.
The criticism they aroused was so bitter that Solon
left his country in disgust and stayed away for ten
years.
During that period he visited Egypt among other
countries, observing everything with an open eye,
and listening, like Herodotus later, to that mixture
of fairy-tale and fact which then formed man's
only historical record. This grand tour of his is com-
monly supposed to have taken place between 593
and 583 B.C. But Plato, who lived not quite two
centuries later, tells us that the Pharaoh of the time
was Amasis, and we know that Aahmes II, as he
was named in his native realm, reigned from 570
to 526 B.C. He was most friendly to the Greeks, and
particularly to the Athenians, whose tutelary god-
dess, Pallas Athene, was supposed identical with the
""
ATLANTIS
5
goddess Neith of his own city of Sais. He confirmed
and extended the privileges already enjoyed by the
important Greek settlement of Naucratis, near Sais,
traces of which have been found not far from the
present Rosetta channel of the Nile. All of which
tends to make that reported visit of Solon to Aahmes
II seem quite plausible, even if the dates given for
it should be somewhat mixed up.
This is the story which Plato got from Solon, via
Dropidas and Critias, and which he put down quite
briefly as an introduction to a dialogue otherwise
devoted to cosmogonic speculations and a debate of
the relationship between the body and the soul. Evi-
dently Solon was showing off a little to the Egyptian
priests by recounting various more or less mythical
Greek genealogies, and they were listening with po-
lite but slightly cynical smiles, until the thing got
too much for one of the oldest among them, who, in
so many words, charged the talker with repeating a
lot of children's tales. The Greeks, this wise old man
said, had no historical records worth speaking of,
because, just as they had advanced far enough in
writing to put down what happened, some natural
$
6
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
catastrophe in that country of theirs, which seemed
as restless as the men themselves, would wipe out
everything they had put down. Egypt was different.
There they had known the art of writing and had
used it since time immemorial, and there the dry
and steady climate left all records undisturbed and
undestroyed. In Greece, on the other hand, they had
had not only one deluge, as related in the myth
about Deucalion and Pyrrha, but any number of
them, together with earthquakes galore. And just to
prove that he knew what he was talking about, the
old priest, who had got a good start by that time,
proceeded to give some details concerning the great-
est and most sweeping of those disasters. . . one
which involved not only Greece, but the whole Medi-
terranean region as far as the Pillars of Heracles
and beyond.
It happened many thousand years before their own
day, the old priest went on. Of course, in that hoary
land of his, a few centuries or millennia more or
less did not make much of a difference, so that we,
who read about it to-day, need not take his figures
too literally. In those days of eld, he said, the Atlan-
ATLANTIS
7
tic was navigable, and outside the Pillars of Hera-
cles by which name the ancients were wont to
designate the juxtaposed cliffs of Calpe, our modern
Gibraltar, and Abyla, now Ceuta . . . there was a
large island called Atlantis. Beyond it were other
islands, and back of these lay the continent sur-
rounding what the old priest called "the real
ocean," the vast Atlantic. For the Mediterranean,
he said, was nothing but an inland sea, a harbor
with a narrow opening which is practically
what our own oceanographers think it.
•
Atlantis was the centre of a mighty empire, includ-
ing all those islands, and extending its power within
the Pillars, on both shores of the Mediterranean, as
far as Tyrrhenia, or modern Italy, on the Euro-
pean side, and all the way to the borders of Egypt
on the African side. The people of that empire
were a peaceful and virtuous and god-fearing lot
until they became so drunk with their own pros-
perity that the gods, offended by it, goaded them
into the fatal sin of hybris, or megalomania, as we
should call it to-day. Not satisfied with what they
possessed already, the rulers of Atlantis decided to
8
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
I
conquer all the rest of the Mediterranean region.
For this purpose they raised a mighty host repre-
senting all the countries under their sway, and with
this force they attacked Greece and Egypt. Athens
took the lead among the defenders, and at first it
was supported by all its sister states. Gradually,
however, these deserted basely to the enemy, and
Athens alone, with only the Egyptian forces back-
ing it, continued the fight so bravely that in the
end the invaders were ignominiously overcome and
driven back to their own shores.
Then, when victory had been achieved and the
danger was past, the great disaster occurred of
which the old priest chiefly wished to tell. In one
day and one night of unprecedented upheaval, with
earthquakes and floods like none ever witnessed by
man before, the entire army of Athens was swal-
lowed up by the earth, and simultaneously the whole
island of Atlantis disappeared utterly beneath the
waves of the ocean. In sinking, it seemed to spread
out and fill up the regions around it, so that the
sea outside the Pillars became shallow and filled
up with mud and impenetrable to navigators. Thus
i
ATLANTIS
9
Atlantis was lost for ever. Greece had to start all
over again. But Egypt went on in its wonted way,
piling century on century, and millennium on mil-
lennium, into an unbroken historical sequence not
equalled anywhere else on the globe, except possibly
in China.
Thus ends the story told by Plato in “Timaeus.” It
is resumed in the following dialogue of “Critias,"
and in far greater detail, but what we get there is
merely embroidery on the fundamental story pre-
viously told. Again it may be well to warn the
reader not to pay too much attention to the space of
one day and night assigned by the old priest to the
completion of that almost world-wide catastrophe.
In a country of such unfathomed past, it was equally
easy to extend or contract the telescope of time
to turn centuries into millennia, or, dramatically, to
compress a couple of centuries into the twenty-four
hours between the setting or rising of two suns.
2
Let us leave Atlantis itself alone for a few moments
in order to scrutinize certain other features of the
10
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
story told by the old priest and repeated by Solon,
who meant to make a poem of it, but never found
time to do so, thanks to the exactions of his Attic.
fellow citizens. He heard from the old priest about
a tremendous onslaught by western tribes against
Egypt, which was repelled by the latter country
with the help of Athens. He heard also about earth-
quakes and floods that changed the map of Greece,
caused appalling loss of human life, and forced at
least some of the Greek states to start all over again
from the beginning.
In the temple ruins of "hundred-gated " Thebes,
as Homer names the ancient capital of Upper Egypt,
dating back to a period preceding that of Solon's
friend, Aahmes II, by more than five hundred years,
modern scientific investigators have found certain
stelae, or huge slabs with inscriptions and carved
reliefs, commemorating two Egyptian victories over
invading hordes from the north and the west. The
first of these was won during the reign of Mineph-
tah, the feebler successor of the great Rameses II,
whom the Greeks called Sesostris, about 1230 b.c.;
the second, about thirty years later, in the reign
ATLANTIS
11
of Rameses III. The various tribes taking part in
those attacks are named and described, and we even
get pictures of their warriors and ships. Two names
are conspicuously missing. The Keftiu, or Minoan
Cretans, with whom Egypt had entertained friendly
and intimate relations for more than a millennium,
are not mentioned. Nor do we find any designation
applicable to the Athenians, though Ionians are
mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions as far back as
2600 B.C.
On this very account, as representing racial ele-
ments previously unknown to Egypt, those invaders
interest us the more. Their attacks are ascribed in
general to "the peoples of the sea." Literally, the
inscriptions call them "warriors from another land,
hailing from the great sea and from the encircling
ring," and "peoples come from the islands in the
great sea." The Egyptians were never happy at sea.
They employed Phoenicians and Greeks to com-
mand their fleets, and probably also to man them,
whether warlike or commercial. And so it is quite
possible that, in their mouths, the great sea
meant nothing but the Mediterranean. Yet it is also
66
""
12
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
possible that it meant something else. . . some-
thing beyond. The names of the tribes mentioned
suggest, on the whole, the former alternative. The
Teresh or Tursha are supposed to have been Tur-
seni, or Tyrrhenians, or Etruscans, all these being
names applied to the people along the northwestern
coast of Italy. The Sherden or Shardana have been
translated into Sardinians; the Shekelesh or Sha-
kalsha, into Sicels, one of the three principal tribes.
forming the earliest known population of Sicily;
the Ekwesh or Akkaiwasha, into Achaeans; the
Lukku, into Lydians; the Peleset or Pulishta, into
Pelasgians or, more probably, Philistines; the Tik-
kerai, into Teucrians from Salamis on Cyprus; and
the Denyu or Danauana, into the Danai of Homer.
In glancing over this list, it is interesting to re-
call the legendary peopling of Etruria by a tribe of
Lydians under Tyrrhenus, who gave his name to
their new home. Lydia itself, where the Ionians dur-
ing the Dorian invasion of Greece started the sea-
faring city of Phocaea, of which we shall hear more
later on, was repeatedly overrun by Hittites and
"Cimmerians " people from the north, but
•
ATLANTIS
13
not necessarily Nordic. And to this day the inhabi-
tents of Liguria, the Massa-Lucca region in north-
western Italy, the old Tyrrhenia, show a cranial type
differing from that of all other Italians. It is strange
how, as soon as you begin to delve into such matters,
you seem to go around in circles, just as did the
perennially wandering tribes of those unsettled
days.
If those identifications be correct, none of them
points beyond the shores of the Mediterranean, and
those shores may be regarded as implied when the
Egyptian scribe of Rameses III spoke of "the en-
circling ring of the great sea." The case stands dif-
ferently when we turn to the pictures of ships and
warriors given on that monument from 1200 B.C.
or thereabouts. In type, says Oswald Spengler in
his "Decline of the West," the ships "differ com-
pletely from those used by the Egyptians and the
Phoenicians, but they may resemble those which
Caesar found among the Veneti of Brittany." At
Tjängvide, on the Baltic island of Gothland, one
of the oldest cultural centres of the North, there
is a large stone with a well-manned ship carved on
14
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
it. This ship, with mast and sail, looks very much.
like the one of the stele of Rameses III. But when
we turn our attention to the men on board, the re-
semblance stops. John L. Myres, in his “Dawn of
History," describes the warriors on the Egyptian
relief as armed with "a round, parrying shield,
close-fitting helmet with horns and sometimes also
cheek-pieces, and strange body-armor of trans-
verse belts made flexible as a lobster's."
The moment I saw a picture of that relief, I rec-
ognized the horned helmet of the Gallic warriors
that fought against Rome in later ages. And a hel-
met of somewhat similar construction has been dug
out of the bottom of the Thames near Waterloo
Bridge. In other words, the head-gear of those
"well-armed warriors," as the Egyptian scribe po-
litely styled them for the greater enhancement of
his master's glory, had a decidedly Celtic appear-
ance, and nothing at all in common with the helmets
worn by any indigenous people around the eastern
Mediterranean. The men on board those ships of a
strange make may have started from within the
borders of that sea. But it seems possible, at least,
ATLANTIS
15
that some of them may have hailed from beyond the
Pillars marking the entrance to the "real ocean."
Of the Veneti, for instance, already mentioned in a
quotation from Spengler, and not to be confused
with the Veneti or Heneti who settled by the mouth
of the Po about the time of the Dorian invasion of
Greece, the Encyclopædia Britannica asserts that
they were the most powerful maritime people on
the Atlantic and carried on a considerable trade
with Britain." James Anthony Froude tells us, in
his "Caesar," that they had "ships capable of fac-
ing the seas which rolled in from the Atlantic, flat-
bottomed, with high bow and stern, built solidly of
oak "
. . . a description which suits the type of
ship on that Ramesian relief perfectly. The islands
of that coast, north of the mouth of the Loire, used
to be called the Venetian Islands in ancient days.
Were those some of the islands lying beyond the
larger one named Atlantis?
66
3
Where does this lead us? Nowhere for the present.
And so let us pass on to that great catastrophe which,
16
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
according to the old Egyptian priest, introduced
such a gap in the sequence of Athenian history. The
simultaneous destruction of Atlantis itself we shall
leave aside momentarily. Earthquakes and floods
have been familiar things in the Aegean region
since time immemorial. There is an old tradition
that the island of Lesbos became separated from the
mainland through an upheaval of that kind. One
look at the map is enough to prove the plausibility
of such a belief. And as it must have happened very
long ago, if at all, it helps to show the capacity of
such traditions for survival from a time when no
written records can have existed.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian who lived at
least as late as 21 B.C., and who wrote a sort of
universal history in forty books under the name of
Bibliotheca historica, tells of a tremendous seismic
disturbance which in 1250 B.C. worked radical
changes in the topography of northwestern Africa
from the Gulf of Gabes to the Atlantic. His date
coincides pretty closely with the time previously
given for the first invasion of Egypt by those
riors from the great sea." The story is quoted by
66
war-
ATLANTIS
17
Paul Borchardt, the German geographer and ex-
plorer, in support of his recent efforts to re-discover
the lost Atlantis within that country of salt swamps
in southern Tunis which is commonly identified
with the ancient Sea of Triton, and which has been
described so entertainingly by Norman Douglas in
his "Fountains in the Sand." According to Profes-
sor Borchardt, the original name of the largest
swamp, the dismal Shott el Jerid, was Bahr Atala,
or the Sea of Atlas. Diodorus, however, like most
ancient writers, was in the habit of borrowing freely
from earlier authorities without always crediting
his sources, and this story of his may be a Platonic
echo, a modified version of the original Atlantic
legend, testifying merely to the persistency of the
cataclysmic tradition.
Strabo, on the other hand. . . the famous geog-
rapher who wrote during the last quarter of the old
era and the first of the new . . . is palpably inde-
pendent of Plato when, quoting a certain otherwise
quite unknown Demetrios of Callatis, he gives mi-
nute data of a disturbance that wrought havoc from
Thessaly to Attica. Numerous cities were destroyed
18
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
with great loss of human life. Promontories and is-
lands vanished, some temporarily and others for
ever. Rivers changed their courses, and the earth
vomited floods of water in some places, while else.
where noted springs ceased to flow. Finally the is-
land of Atalanta, between Euboea and the Greek
mainland, was either split in two or cut off from the
coast of which until then it had formed a part. Ever
since then the upper passage of the narrow straits
between the mainland and Euboea has been known
as the Channel of Atalantis
and so we seem to
be moving in a circle again.
These tales of natural disasters dovetail logically
with other facts of which we have become increas-
ingly aware during the last half century. Important
archaeological discoveries in Asia Minor, on
the islands of the Aegean, on the Peloponnesus, in
Crete, in Cyprus have radically changed our
conceptions of Greek history. Of course, we are still
groping. It is dangerous to be too definite about any
one thing. But certain outlines of development may
be regarded as pretty firmly established. We know
that the nuclear point of that unprecedented blos-
ATLANTIS
19
soming which gave us "the glory that was Greece "
must be sought not on the mainland, but in Crete.
There it started not later than 3000 B.C., and there
it developed more and more marvelously for nearly
two millennia, spreading gradually to the islands of
the Aegean and to Greece proper. During those ages,
the Cretans, and not the Phoenicians, ruled the
Mediterranean. They traded and had colonies far to
the westward, we have now reason to believe. The
high tide of this remarkable culture is closely iden-
tified with that great white palace of Cnossos so
vividly pictured in Merezhkovsky's recent novel,
"The Birth of the Gods." There reigned the king
who probably was called Minos just as the Egyptian
rulers were called Pharaoh. One Minos, perhaps the
greatest and most famous of all, went on an expedi
tion to Sicily from which he never returned. Later
his subjects sent out a strong relief expedition, com-
prising the flower of their population. This venture
ended as disastrously as the first one, the fleet being
wrecked on the shores of the Gulf of Otranto in
Italy. Crete was depopulated. The great palace of
Cnossos was destroyed. The centre of Minoan civili-
20
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
zation shifted to the mainland, to the palaces of
Mycenae and Tyrins.
The earlier population of Greece seems to have
been Pelasgian, belonging to the short, dark, long-
headed Mediterranean race of Sergi, which may
perhaps be found identical with the Ibero-Insular
race of Deniker. Of that race the Ionians and the
later Athenians seem to have formed parts. Then
came the Achaeans tall, blond "tamers of
horses ... the heroes of whom we read in Homer,
and whom we may consider as the rulers of those
wonderful palaces at Mycenae and Tyrins. Though
of different race, they seem to have accepted and
continued the culture transmitted from Crete. They
were still supreme at the time of the Trojan war,
which is generally placed near 1200 B.C. Their
weapons and utensils were still of bronze, their
ornaments of gold and silver. There was no break
in the general line of development. It came after
them. .. with the advent of the Dorians and the
arrival of iron. From 3000 to about 1200 B.C. we
get a picture of continuous rise, wave after wave.
Then there is a sudden slump, a lowering of cultural
""
ATLANTIS
21
values and cultural expressions. It is impossible to
turn to any work dealing with this period without
coming across evidence of a catastrophe of some
kind, a line of demarcation sharp enough to connect
with the tale told by the old Egyptian priest to
Solon.
The Mycenaean culture," says John L. Myres,
was wholly prior to that of historic Greece, and
separated from it by a violent catastrophe, in
which cities were sacked and deserted, palaces and
tombs looted, and the whole distribution not only
of political power, but of economic vigor, was fun-
damentally changed, in a 'dark age' of tumult
and barbarism." Thucydides, who wrote in the
fifth century B.C., suggests the main features of the
picture drawn by Professor Myres in the twentieth
after Christ. Gustave Glotz, author of "The Aegean
Civilization," speaks of "a retrogression which
took the nations of the Aegean back to the morrow
of the Neolithic Age." Greece was dead for a
time for a long time . . . dead and impov-
erished. Where there had been palaces, we find
nothing but huts. Great kings were succeeded by
66
66
22
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
petty chiefs. Until the wave rose once more, as if
carried onward by some irresistible, ever renewed
force, and classic Greece, as long known to us,
emerged out of chaos and darkness.
It is also significant to note that, during the inter-
regnum just described, the one part of Greece
which did not share the fate of the rest was Attica,
the country belonging to Athens. It was invaded by
the iron-armed hordes, but never conquered. The
pressure of the invasion, however, seems to have
been sufficient to force an Ionian emigration to the
coasts of Asia Minor, where one of the resulting
colonies was Phocaea, mentioned already and to
be mentioned again. Incidentally we may observe
that the coming of those destructive Dorians syn-
chronizes pretty well with the invasion of Egypt
described on the stelae of Minephtah and Rameses
III. If, in resisting those attacks, the Egyptians
had Athenian assistance, is more than we can tell,
but it is quite possible. Nor do we know where the
Dorians came from, who they were, or what.
Old Strabo was a shrewd and sceptical commen-
tator on the writings of his predecessors. He
ATLANTIS
23
rather doubted those tales of earthquakes and
floods told by the otherwise unknown Demetrius of
Callatis, though the tales in question seem too pre-
cise in their details, and too logical in their ar
rangement, to permit their summary relegation
into realms of mere fancy. His scepticism carried
him too far more than once, as when he refused
utterly to place any faith in the stories told by
Pythias of Massilia about Britain and Ultima
Thule . . . stories which have won the reluctant
acceptance of our own day. But speaking of a pas-
sage in the writings of Posidonius of Rhodes, who
lived between 130 and 50 B.C., and who spent a
good deal of time at Gades, or Cadiz, on the At-
lantic coast of Spain, Strabo says: "He did well
in citing the opinion of Plato, 'that the tradition
concerning the island of Atlantis might be received
as something more than mere fiction.'
It is with such an opinion in my mind that I have
brought out here certain corroborative traditions,
as well as proved facts, suggesting that other parts
of the old priest's story may not be quite as fanci-
ful as they appear at first sight. Like everything
999
24
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
else coming down to us in such a manner, his tale
must not be taken too literally. The army of Athens
may not have perished in a single night and day,
but the power of Greece was broken for centuries
as if the country had actually been destroyed. The
friendly Keftiu and the equally friendly Ionians
had vanished and given way to tribes of a different
type, who came as enemies and conquerors. This
may have been what the old priest meant to say.
Such was the probable kernel of that part of his
story. And perhaps there was a similar kernel to
his story about the lost island of Atlantis.
4
In the dialogue named Critias," Plato resumes.
the story of Atlantis, but with an evident change of
manner and purpose. Before he was merely relat-
ing a curious and interesting anecdote. Now he is
laying the basis for a Utopia, thus being himself
the first to start along the road later followed by
many others. . . by Francis Bacon in his "New
Atlantis," for instance, and by our own Ignatius
Donnelly of erratic memory, in "Atlantis: the
66
ATLANTIS
25
Ante-Diluvian World." For this reason the later
dialogue has to be read with a much larger grain
of salt than the earlier one. Yet there are many de-
tails in "Critias
Critias" that again suggest a possible
core of truth, and that, consequently, have a direct
bearing on the objective point of this discussion.
When, after a tendential description of Athenian
conditions in those far-off days, "nine thousand
years ago," Critias turns to the main subject
of his discourse, he apologizes first of all for the
Greek names included in his story. These names,
he explains, had been translated into Egyptian by
the priests. Having made sure of their original
meaning, Solon, in his turn, translated them into
Greek. In one instance only is the translation par-
alleled by the original term. "If it be not true, it
is at least well made up," says the Italian. If Plato
was merely spinning fancies out of his own brain,
he certainly knew how to give them a fine patina of
verisimilitude, for that single exception is the only
one that could furnish us a possible clue to the real
location of Atlantis.
When the Olympians divided the world among
I
26
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
themselves, Critias went on, the island of Atlantis
and the surrounding region fell to the share of
Poseidon. There he met a mortal maid, with whom,
Olympian fashion, he fell in love, and to whom he
showed a constancy not quite Olympian. Their
affair became so prolonged that she bore him five
pairs of male twins. Among these Poseidon divided
the country, every one of them becoming a king, and
the ancestor of a long line of kings. But the eldest
of the first pair of twins was the chief of all the rest
and reigned in the principal city, which formed the
cultural centre of the entire region. His name was
Atlas, and after him the island, its capital, and the
adjoining ocean were named. His younger twin
brother . . . and this is so important that I shall
quote Plato's own words in the Jowett transla-
tion . obtained as his lot the extremity of the
island towards the Pillars of Heracles, as far as the
country which is still called the region of Gades."
He was named Eumelos in Greek, but "in the lan-
guage of the country named after him, Gadeiros
this being the single instance, already referred
to, when we get both the Greek and the supposedly
Atlantian version of a name.
66
}
""
ATLANTIS
27
The names and their connotations are highly
significant. Atlas has no Greek root, I am told, in
spite of the extent to which the giant of that name
figures in Greek mythology and legend. It is sup-
posed to be of Semitic origin, though I may mention,
parenthetically, that an attempt actually has been
made to trace it to the Mexican Nahuatlacas. There
is an Arabic adjective, atlas, meaning "smooth,
bare, blank." As a noun, the same word was used
during the Victorian era to denote a silk-like fabric.
It is derived from the verb talasa, to make smooth,
and it may or may not have something to do with
thalassa, one of the Greek words for sea, which has
now been proved of Cretan origin. Of Atlas, the
giant who "upholds the pillars which keep earth
and sky asunder," we are told by Homer that “he
knows the depth of every sea." And the venerable
Thomas Bulfinch described him as "rich in herds.
and flocks, with no neighbor or rival to dispute his
state." Strange to say, the word atl is also held to
refer to the water and the seashore in the Nahua
language of Mexico.
Gades was the Latin name for Cadiz, which the
Greeks called Gadeira, and the Phoenicians Gadir.
28
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
These mariners of many seas are supposed to have
founded it, and in their tongue its name implied
merely an enclosed or fortified place. E. A. Free-
man, the historian, asserted of Cadiz that it had
"kept its name and its unbroken position as a great
city from an earlier time than any other city in Eu-
rope." It is believed to date back to about 1100 B.C.,
and it has always stood where still it stands, not far
beyond the strait connecting the Mediterranean with
the Atlantic, also called at times the Strait of
Gades. The city occupies the extreme point of a nar-
row strip of land running parallel to the main coast,
so that a harbor is formed within," capable of hold-
ing all the navies of the world." The reference to
Gades in the story about Atlantis, and to the realm
of Gadeiros as lying nearest the Pillars of Heracles,
are noteworthy circumstances to which we shall re-
turn further on. Eumelos, the alleged Greek equiva-
lent of Gadeiros, should indicate one skilled in song
or music, and this, too, may prove worth recalling.
Critias then proceeded to describe the country and
its chief city in detail. The outside shore of the
island was lofty and precipitous. Within lay a vast
ATLANTIS
29
and fertile plain, open to the south. To the north, at
some distance, were mountains "celebrated for
their number and size and beauty." The country was
particularly rich in metals. Among these are men-
tioned not only gold and silver, tin and copper,
bronze and brass, but the famous orichalcum, the
secret of which has been lost to us. It is described as
red in color and shining or "fat" in appearance.
Commonly it is thought to have been an alloy of
silver and copper, though Strabo uses it for bronze,
and though the word literally signifies "mountain-
copper." It was ranked in value with gold, and
above silver. Cattle were plentiful in Atlantis, the
bulls playing a prominent part in their religious
ceremonies, as they did in Crete. Very remarkable
is the statement that the island held a large number
of elephants. In one way and another, its rulers were
said to possess wealth beyond all other kings and
potentates, and for this reason goods were drawn to
them from marts all over the world.
The main city, reached from the sea by an enor-
mously deep and wide artificial canal, was sur-
rounded by three turreted walls of stone, the outer-
30
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
most coated with brass, the middle one with tin,
while the innermost "flashed with the red light of
orichalcum." Apart from these walls, the city was
noted for three things: its two springs, one hot and
one cold, provided by Poseidon himself; its im-
mense harbor and docks, full of vessels of every
kind and of naval stores always ready for use, and
crowded with merchants and sailors from every
corner of the globe; and, finally, its great temple de-
voted to the worship of Poseidon, covered entirely
with silver, and adorned with a statue of the deity in
gold of such gigantic proportions that it reached up
to the lofty ceiling. There were other statues, inside
and outside, all of gold. The place glittered with
gold everywhere. gold and silver and orichal-
cum and ivory. Plato, with his more refined taste,
speaks of the tout ensemble as showing "a sort of
barbaric splendor." The total impression you get
from Critias' description is that of an unbelievably
rich commercial centre, fond of display and good
living, like Tyre or Carthage at the height of their
prosperity, and possessing mercantile connections
in all the known quarters of the globe. One minor
•
1
ATLANTIS
31
detail of some interest remains to be mentioned.
Sacred bulls ranged the yards of the great temple,
and when one of these was to be sacrificed, it was
hunted without weapons, but with staves and
exactly as at Cnossos.
nooses
And eventually all this splendor vanished be-
neath the waves of the sea, leaving behind nothing
but a mud bank . . . yes, something more: a
memory and a dream, by which the western world
has been haunted ever since the days of Plato. In-
numerable and amusingly diversified have been the
efforts to place or explain that lost island of Atlan-
tis. Most of the ancients, beginning with Aristotle,
considered it pure invention, though a good one. The
learned Posidonius of Rhodes, himself something of
a poet in temperament, judged it a fable built on
truth. So did shrewd, sceptical Strabo, and so did
Alexander von Humboldt eighteen centuries later.
With the discovery of the New World, the long and
seemingly futile search got a new start. The infer-
ence was inevitable.
A Spaniard, Francesco Lopez de Gamara, who
published a "History of the Indies " in 1553, seems
32
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
to have been the first one to make a definite iden-
tification of Atlantis with America. The coldly in-
tellectual Bacon leaned toward the same view, and
so did the painstaking Humboldt. Of actual knowl-
edge on the part of Plato or his informants, those
men had no idea, but they thought that echoes of
tales by seafarers carried out of their well-known
routes by winds and currents, like Odysseus or that
Samian merchant mentioned by Herodotus, might
have reached the Athenian philosopher and inspired
his fertile mind. It remained for a German, Jakob
Krueger, in 1855, to proclaim "America's Dis-
covery by the Phoenicians." And thirty years after
him, an American, Augustus le Plongeon, claimed
to have found proof of that theory in certain Maya
legends. He even knew the time when the discovery
took place . . eleven thousand years ago, which
nearly tallies with the date given by the old Egyptian
priest for the final disappearance of the island em-
pire.
In the meantime, however, other minds refused
what, after all, must appear a tempting solution of
the riddle. As far back as 1679, a Swedish scholar,
ATLANTIS
33
Olof Rudbeck, published a huge and in many ways
remarkable tome named "Atlantica sive Man-
heim," by which he tried to prove that Atlantis was
nothing but Sweden, the ancient "home of men,
which one of the monkish scribes of the Middle
Ages had termed "the womb of nations." Nor was
he the most fantastic theorist. A noted German stu-
dent of ancient geography, Dr. Richard Hennig, not
long ago published a most interesting work, the title
of which may be translated as "Realms of Mys-
tery.” In this he discusses Atlantis among many
other lost or fancied localities; and he gives a list of
suggested identifications of Plato's far-famed is-
land that includes such widely scattered regions as
South Africa, Spitzbergen, Caucasus, Ceylon, Pal-
estine, Attica, Sardinia, Persia, the Canary Islands,
and Crete. Another German geographer, Professor
A. Wegener, contends that the Atlantic ocean was
formed by the gradual moving away of the Ameri-
can continents from those of Europe and Africa.
And he believes that the legend of Atlantis may be a
reminiscence of the time when all of them were still
joined together. But if such a time ever existed, it
99
34
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
must have belonged to geologic periods far antedat-
ing the appearance of man as a human being pos-
sessed of verbally transmissible memories. Hennig,
in the work mentioned above, supports unreservedly
a quite different and more plausible theory, orig-
inally derived by Professor Adolf Schulten of Er-
langen from some recent archaeological discoveries
of his own. To this theory as well as to the dis-
coveries in question I shall return at length farther
on.
And so . . . for the time being
exit Atlantis:
enter Nausicaa, Princess of Scheria, land of the
Phaeacians!
+
PART TWO
SCHERIA
1
A MONG innumerable graceful or tragic female
figures created by the Greek striving toward physi-
cal and spiritual perfection, there are three which,
in my opinion, rise incomparably above the rest.
One is Helen, the embodiment of the highest beauty
imaginable by man. Another is Antigone, the em-
bodiment of complete womanly devotion. The third
is Nausicaa of the white arms, the embodiment of
maidenly grace and youthful charm. John Adding-
ton Symonds justly called her " the perfect maiden,
the purest, freshest, lightest-hearted girl of Greek
Romance." She steps into the old tale of the home-
coming hero like a spring breeze laden with the deli-
cate scent of apple blossoms. It is her we see when
we think of Scheria, rather than the magnificence of
its temple, its palace, and its crowded harbors. And
we cannot but regret that, after their first poetic
meeting on the sea-shore, she appears only once
more to Odysseus, and then for a minute, like a
37
38
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
flitting shadow, to bid him a slightly wistful fare-
well. We love her, and so did the poet evidently, but
to him, after all, Scheria itself meant more than its
fairest blossom.
It was the kingdom of Alcinous, the father of Nau-
sicaa, and the land of the Phaeacians, famous sea-
farers who had ships that steered by their own in-
stinct and moved over the waves more swiftly than
the hawk, swiftly as the human thought itself. It was
the place where Odysseus, one might say, spent a
large part of the "Odyssey " telling Nausicaa and
the rest what he had done and suffered elsewhere.
It was the final resting place before the gods per-
mitted his long delayed return to rocky and goat-
ridden Ithaca, to wife and son, and to his last great
adventure with the over-reaching suitors who had
been wasting his substance frivolously for so many
years. Its importance to the poet may be judged by
its strategic position in the plot, and by the number
of cantos given to the hero's stay within its bor-
ders seven out of a total twenty-four. Con-
cerning no other place visited by the sorely tried
wanderer has the poet given us quite so many exact
SCHERIA
39
details, though the time Odysseus spent in it may be
reckoned by hours, while he dwelt a whole year in
the enchanted hall of Circe, and no less than eight
years on Ogygia, the isle of Calypso. It is plain that
to Homer, or whoever wrote the "Odyssey," the
land of the Phaeacians meant more than, for in-
stance, the regions of the Lotophagi, or of the Laes-
trygones; that it stood apart in some way, a place
steeped in romantic glamor; and that next to it in
importance came the island home of the nymph
Calypso. Both spots were located at the end of the
known world, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, in the
outermost sea, with no other human habitations near
them. And, of course, this was the location of At-
lantis, too.
The resemblance of Scheria to Atlantis is an old
story, often commented on, and duly recorded in
such matter-of-fact works as the Encyclopædia Bri-
tannica. First of all, there is the geographical posi-
tion, to which I have already referred. Homer takes
pains to indicate in various ways that Ogygia, the
woodland home" of Calypso, was not within the
confines of the Mediterranean, the "inland sea,"
66
40
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
as the old Egyptian priest called it in his talk with
Solon. Hermes, on his way to the nymph, has to pass
wondrous spaces of brine " before he reaches her
island, which is described as "the navel of the
ocean." Near her is "no city of mortals that do
sacrifice to the gods." Odysseus speaks of the en-
veloping sea as so dread and difficult that even the
swift gallant ships do not cross it. And Calypso her-
self, we are told several times, was the daugh-
ter of Atlas, who, let us repeat, “knew the depths
of every sea.
From Ogygia, Odysseus travelled eighteen days on
a raft made by himself. And as he thus "cunningly
guided his craft with the helm," he did not steer
haphazardly, but in accordance with explicit direc-
tions given by Calypso. The passage concerned is
not quite clear, I gather, but the most plausible read-
ing of it seems to be that Odysseus was told to make
for a point lying to the right of the North Star . . .
that is, in a northeasterly direction . . . which cir-
cumstance we shall have cause to recall. Thus, on
the eighteenth day, he sighted Scheria, the land of
the Phaeacians. Right here we find ourselves en-
66
SCHERIA
41
gaged once more in one of those circular movements,
so puzzling to our minds. The word used in the
"Odyssey" for the vessel put together by the fugi-
tive from Poseidon's wrath is schedia, which, in the
eyes of a mere layman, has a frightfully suspicious
resemblance to the name given the country of Nau-
sicaa. Another German, Dr. Ernst Assmann, has
shown pretty conclusively that both the vessel of
Odysseus, as pictured in Greek art, and the term
applied to it, are of Phoenician origin. There was a
Phoenician colony named Schedia on the north coast
of Rhodes, and another place of the same name on
the coast of Egypt, not far from the present Alexan-
dria. The name Scheria itself, I am told, is made
from the Phoenician word schera, meaning a mart,
a centre for commercial exchange. In playing with
these queer coincidences, if such they be, it is
well to bear in mind that, while this philological
game is as intriguing as a good cross-word puz-
zle, it is also, according to many authorities, no
less futile.
The poem makes it quite clear that Odysseus had no
sight of land until that of the Phaeacians rose before
42
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
him in the distance, “like a shield in the misty
deep
which can only mean that it was moun-
tainous, as was Atlantis beyond its central plain. If
Ogygia lay outside the Pillars of Heracles, the
Phaeacians could hardly be living within them. For
while Homer availed himself freely of the licentia
poetica, we have reason to think with Strabo that he
rarely did so without a special purpose. That Odys-
seus could have navigated the narrow passage be-
tween Europe and Africa . . . a passage figuring
so extensively in the mind of the ancients . . .
and on a slow-moving raft at that, without becoming
aware of the close proximity of land, seems out of
the question in reality, and not required by the
scheme of the poem. And what follows his ultimate
landing indicates strongly that he was still as far
from men familiar to the Greeks as during the years
of his irksome, yet not uncompensated dawdling in
Calypso's snug cave.
The coast he approached was significantly unprom-
ising. Great breakers thundered against the outside
reefs and the rocky shore, "belching in terrible
wise," covering the sea with foam, and bringing
""
SCHERIA
43
66
back to our minds once more the characterization of
the outside coastline of Atlantis as "lofty and pre-
cipitous." The raft having been smashed to pieces.
by one of Poseidon's handy little storms, Odysseus
swam for two days along the shore, kept afloat by a
veil lent him by a marine divinity, Leucothea, the
white goddess," and looking vainly for a place
where he could land without being crushed against
the rocks. Finally he came to the mouth of a "fair-
flowing" river, which emptied itself into the sea
with such force that he could make no headway
against the current until, after he had prayed to the
river god, the latter "stayed his stream and with-
held his waves, and made the water smooth before
Odysseus, and brought him safely to the mouth of
the river." Finding himself on firm ground at
last, Odysseus unloosed the veil of Leucothea and
dropped it into the " salt-flowing" river, whereupon
"the great wave bare it back down the stream."
The meaning of all this is easy to get when you have
the key to it. which I received from Hen-
nig's book. Homer is simply describing a very com-
mon tidal phenomenon. Odysseus arrived in front
44
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
of an estuary about the turn of the tide, while the
river current was still noticeable pretty far out.
Then the rising flood checked the fresh flow and
pushed a salt wave up the river bed. When Odys-
seus was ready to return the veil of Leucothea, the
sea was ebbing once more a little quickly for
poetic purposes
and the river first of all dis-
charged the salt water received during the flood-tide.
Homer dwells at some length and with a certain
special interest on these phenomena because to him
they were strange and remarkable. There are no
high tides in the Mediterranean, and hardly any at
all in the eastern part of it. Yet he deals with them
in a manner indicating that he knew perfectly well
of what he was talking. The picture he gives us is in
every detail characteristic of what happens when a
river of considerable volume empties into the ocean
at a spot where the tides are high and strong . . .
as, for example, along the Atlantic coast of Spain.
Great poet that he was, it is pretty certain that the
author of the "Odyssey" could not have built up
such a complicated set of circumstances out of "his
inner consciousness." And even more certain it is
SCHERIA
45
that he could have had small chance of observing
them in the eastern part of his own sea, the Mediter-
ranean.
2
Prior to the meeting of Nausicaa and Odysseus on
the sea-shore, the poet tells us that the Phaeacians
once dwelt in Hypereia, an unknown place sugges-
tive of Hyperion, reputed father of the sun, the
moon, and the dawn; and near the Cyclopes, who
were popularly supposed to reside in Sicily. In other
words, the Phaeacians had lived farther eastward
before they settled in Scheria, the land said to be
lying outermost of all, or farthest to the west.
Thither they were brought by Nausithous, who was
said to be a son of Poseidon, the god of the sea, as
was the chief king of Atlantis; and whose name, like
that of Nausicaa, must have been derived from the
Greek word naus, a ship. Most of the names found
in Scheria have similar connotations. The body
servant of Nausicaa's father is called Pontonous,
from pontos, another Greek word for the sea, and
the name of her father, Alcinous, suggests a rela-
tion to Heracles, who was also called Alcides, and
46
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
whose divinity, we are told, had "a marine as well
as celestial aspect." It seems as if Homer could not
do enough to emphasize the inseparable connection
between the Phaeacians and the sea, and one won-
ders whether he would have taken the pains of doing
so if they had been imagined as living on a small
island off the Greek coast.
Nausicaa, again, tells Odysseus that they live" far
apart from others, in the wash of the waves, the
outermost of men, where never a mortal comes to
them from elsewhere." Here we meet with another
repeatedly accentuated suggestion.. . . that of
great distance. Whether Scheria existed in reality
or only in his own imagination, the poet wished evi-
dently to make it appear as far off as man's geo-
graphical knowledge could carry it. Afterwards
Nausicaa
tall, white-armed and young,” as
the Swedish version pictures her . . . goes on to
describe the city of her home in terms that I shall
quote verbatim, because they contain almost every-
thing we need to perceive the close resemblance to
Plato's Atlantis.
66
"By the city," she says, goes a high wall with
66
SCHERIA
47
towers, and there is a fair haven on either side of
the town, and narrow is the entrance, and curved
ships are drawn up on either hand of the mole, for
all the folk have stations for their vessels, each man
one for himself. And there is a place of assembly
about the goodly temple of Poseidon, furnished with
heavy stones, deep bedded in the earth. There men
look to the gear of the black ships, hawsers and
sails, and there they fine down the oars. For the
Phaeacians care not for bow or quiver, but for
masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques,
wherein rejoicing they cross the grey sea
66
the grey sea, note you, and not merely the
"violet-hued " Mediterranean.
When he arrived at the palace of Alcinous
for which Professor Glotz thinks that the Minoan
palace at Cnossos served Homer as a model, while
others have traced it to the Achaean palaces at Tyr-
ins and Mycenae Odysseus found that its
walls were of brass, with doors of gold. The door-
posts and the lintel were of silver, but the threshold,
more exposed to wear, was of brass. Animal figures
of gold and silver flanked the door, while within
""
•
99
48
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
golden youths on "firm-set bases " carried the
torches lighting the spacious hall. In other words,
gold and silver all around, as in Atlantis. The gar-
den outside held two fountains, reminding us of the
two springs created by Poseidon for Atlantis. Al-
cinous told him that the Phaeacians were ruled by
twelve kings, among whom he was the chief, as was
Atlas among the ten kings of Atlantis. Concerning
the habits of his people, Alcinous said that " dear to
them ever was the banquet, and the harp, and the
dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath,
and love, and sleep." In Judges 18:7, we are told
that the people" dwelt careless after the manner of
the Sidonians, quiet and secure." And this, Momm-
sen tells us, was the typical life of the great Phoeni-
cian merchant cities. Homer's frequent references to
the Phaeacian fondness for music should remind us
that the Greek translation of Gadeiros, the twin king
of Atlas, was Eumelos, which means "good music."
Whatever real people may have served as proto-
types for those imaginary dwellers in Scheria, they
certainly, like the Phoenicians, must have had a
great reputation as "good livers," so that we find
SCHERIA
49
Horace using the name of Phaeax to designate a
glutton.
This should suffice for our purpose. Once more it is
less a question of details, than of the total impres-
sion which the poet wished to convey. Like Plato,
he piled fact on fact to suggest a large commercial
centre of marvellous wealth, considerable culture,
and a far-reaching command of the sea. While it is
said in the poem that no other men came to Scheria,
it is clear that the Phaeacians themselves moved
about a great deal. We are told expressly that, once
upon a time, they had carried Rhadamanthus on a
visit to Euboea, which they reckoned farthest away
of all lands from themselves. This places Scheria
near the Islands of the Blessed, or the present
Canaries, where Rhadamanthus was supposed to
have his abode. And Euboea, of course, was farther
away from the Strait of Heracles than any other
part of Greece proper. The Euboeans are also
credited with being the first Greek colonizers of the
western Mediterranean, and near their principal
city of Calchis we have already discovered the
island of Atalanta, split or created by an earth-
50
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
quake, and the Channel of Atalantis named after it.
Again we become conscious of that disconcerting
circular movement so often spoken of.
3
66
The literature that has sprung up around the
"Odyssey" is of appalling volume, and quite a
considerable part of it is devoted to more or less
plausible identifications of the route followed by
the hero from Troy to Scheria and back to Ithaca.
Perhaps it will be as well to outline briefly this route
as given in the poem. After leaving Troy, Odysseus
with his twelve ships first of all made a piratical
excursion to the southern coast of Thessaly which
began famously and ended rather disastrously. He
carried away a good deal of loot, but lost a number
of his men. Then a storm forced him to seek shelter
for two days along the northeastern coast of Greece.
Sailing from there on the third day, he made good
headway to Cape Malea, now Malia, at the southern
point of the Peloponnesus. But when he tried to
double it, a northern wind combined with the pre-
vailing current to send him outside the island of
1
SCHERIA
51
Cythera, and after that he drifted westward for nine
days, until he reached the land of the Lotophagi, or
Lotus-eaters. This has generally been identified with
the present island of Jerba, in the Tunisian bay of
Gabes. From there he made his way to the land of
the Cyclopes, which, by common assent, has been
placed somewhere in Sicily.
Having had his adventure with the one-eyed giant
Polyphemus, which cost him six of his men and
brought down upon him the wrath of Poseidon,
whence all his subsequent troubles came, Odysseus
proceeded to the island of Aeolus, master of the
winds, which popular tradition as well as learned
research has connected with one of the Aeolian or
Liparian islands lying between Sicily and Italy.
Aeolus handed over to him a bag containing all the
winds but that of the west, Zephyr, which wafted
him within sight of his native Ithaca in nine days.
At that moment, when he could almost see his own
home, his men opened the bag and let loose the
whole lot of quarrelsome blow-hards, with the re-
sult that the road back to Aeolus took them no time
at all. The ruler of the winds having refused to help
52
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
again a man palpably in the bad graces of the gods,
Odysseus made the land of the man-eating Laes-
trygones in six days and there lost eleven of his
twelve ships with all their crews. Thucydides names
the Laestrygones among the earliest inhabitants of
Sicily, though with an ironic grin, and most of the
commentators have left it at that. Thence, with his
one saved ship, our hero came next to the island of
the enchantress Circe, with whom he spent a not un-
pleasant year. Becoming restless once more, he got
her permission to leave, but not until he had made
an excursion into Hades, which we are told also lay
beyond the Pillars of Heracles, by the outermost
sea.
An old tradition places the home of Circe at the
present Monte Circeo, a promontory on the western
coast of Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples.
It looks like an island from a distance, and Aldous
Huxley asserts that from its top, on a very clear
day, the shape of Vesuvius may be discerned on the
southern horizon, while to the north, beyond the
Alban hills, may be seen the dome of St. Peter's.
Very ingenious philological arguments have been
SCHERIA
53
advanced by Victor Berard, author of "The Phoe-
nicians and the Odyssey," in favor of this identifica-
tion, but we need not bother ourselves with them.
Circe may have been a more primitive or more spe-
cialized embodiment of Aphrodite, or Ashtaroth,
with a renowned temple at this singularly striking
location, whereby the place became fixed in the
delicately selective imagination of Homer. On his
way thence, Odysseus first passed the perilously
singing Sirens, and then, still further to the south,
the rival monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, mostly
sought at the narrowest point of the strait of Mes-
sina. Having again lost a few men in hideous fash-
ion, he arrived finally at the island of Thrinacia ...
undoubtedly Sicily, which was named Thrinacria
in the olden days
and there his men drew
upon them their final doom by slaughtering some of
the cattle of Helios. No sooner were they at sea
again, than a bolt from Zeus himself broke up the
ship and sank it with every one on board except
Odysseus, who saved himself by making a raft of
the mast and the keel. Having once more passed the
rhythmically gorging and disgorging Charybdis by
•
54
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
a clever trick, he drifted in nine days to the island
of Ogygia, where he was cordially welcomed by the
fair Calypso. Thence, after a stay of eight years, he
fared to Scheria and the Phaeacians, who in a single
night, while he lay asleep, carried him back to
Ithaca at last.
4
_
Quite an interesting story could be woven around
the more or less warranted guesses made by ancient
and modern theorizers concerning the identity of
the various stations of that ten-year tour of sup-
posedly uncharted waters. Samuel Butler, for ex-
ample, the highly gifted author of "The Way of
All Flesh" and "Erewhon," spent the larger part
of his last ten years and wrote a big volume, "The
Authoress of the Odyssey," trying to prove that the
poem was composed by a charming young woman
in the ancient Greek city of Drepanum, now Tra-
pani, at the extreme northwestern corner of Sicily;
that the route followed by the hero represented
nothing but a circumnavigation of this and adjoin-
ing smaller islands; and that the talented young
lady probably gave a picture of herself in the figure
SCHERIA
55
of Nausicaa. The persistence and ingenuity ex-
pended by Butler on that task deserved better than
the absolute indifference with which his radical con-
clusions have been received. His identifications are
frequently most plausible, and sometimes amus-
ingly so, as when he reveals a single point along the
northern coast of Sicily, the little town of Cefalu,
where the goats, common throughout the island, are
milked both evening and morning, instead of only
once a day as elsewhere. Thereby he explains a
much discussed Odyssean line about the land of the
Laestrygones," where herdsman hails herdsman as
he drives in his flock, and the other who drives forth
answers his call."
With equal ingenuity and even greater plausibility,
Professor Berard, who is one of the best informed
students of ancient and modern Mediterranean
geography, has placed the Laestrygones in Sar-
dinia. And when we consider, among other things,
that the name of the cannibalistic tribe is supposed
to mean "workers in stone," it seems reasonable to
believe them identical with the pre-historic builders
of those peculiar stone towers, the norighi, of which
56
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
the island is said to hold nearly 6,000. They cer-
tainly were a people wild and ferocious enough to
keep the greater part of Sardinia free from in-
vaders up to the time of its final conquest by the
Romans, and these could get peace only by cart-
ing off the inhabitants in untold thousands as slaves
to the mainland. In addition we know that
the Sardinians of to-day are of a different race
from those who peopled the island in the days of
Homer.
All such theories, however tempting, must be left
alone in order that we may deal exclusively with the
chief problem involved just now . . . the probable
or possible identity of Ogygia and Scheria. The
ancients used to think that Calypso had her home on
Malta, or on the little island of Gozo (then Gaulos
or Gaudos) near by it. Later scholars inclined to
seek it nearer the Greek coast. Scheria, on the other
hand, was until recently almost unanimously be-
lieved identical with the island of Corfu, which the
ancients named Corcyra, and which, perhaps, is
best known to American tourists as the former sum-
mer home of the Kaiser. The main basis for this
SCHERIA
57
identification was probably the proximity of Corfu
to Ithaca, now Thiaki, the little Ionian island gen-
erally regarded as the home of Odysseus. To-day
Corfu is almost as unanimously rejected as pre-
viously it was accepted, though some of the grounds
given for this change of mind can hardly be held
valid. Thus Hennig, for instance, brushes aside the
old claim of the island off the coast of Epirus
by declaring that it never had any commerce, and
by asking what could possibly induce its cattle-
raising inhabitants to engage in maritime pursuits,
as did the Phaeacians so conspicuously. But the
ancient Corcyra was an important commercial
centre while Minoan Crete still was in its heyday,
serving as an intermediary in the flourishing trade
on the upper Adriatic. During the "dark age
after the Dorian invasion, it may have been reduced
to mere cattle-raising, but the first naval battle re-
corded in Greek history took place between the
fleets of Corcyra and its mother city, Corinth. And
during the Persian invasion, the island equipped
the second largest fleet in Greece . . . a fully
manned fleet of sixty ships.
""
58
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
Of greater importance to our inquiry I hold the ab-
sence of any noticeable tide around the shores of
Corfu, and the lack of any river equalling even in
the remotest degree the one pictured in the Homeric
poem. It is dangerous, however, to base any definite
conclusions on topographical discrepancies. The
poet shuffled his facts, so to speak, either because he
had them a little uncertainly, or because he did not
care. The old identification of Ithaca itself, for in-
stance, has been questioned lately because, as E. A.
Gardner insists in the Encyclopædia Britannica,
66
no amount of ingenuity can reconcile the descrip-
tion given in the Odyssey' with the actual topog-
raphy of Thiaki." Odysseus speaks of it as lying
farthest westward of all the islands under his sway,
while the modern Thiaki lies to the east of two
larger islands, Cephalonia and Santa Maura. It has
been pointed out, on the other hand, that the Odys-
sean description fits the last mentioned of those
islands pretty closely. The ancient name of Santa
Maura was sometimes Neritum, by which it is men-
tioned in the poem, and sometimes Leucas or Leu-
cadia, the “white land," which reminds us of the
SCHERIA
59
"white goddess," Leucothea, whose veil saved
Odysseus from drowning off the coast of Scheria.
More circles!
The only thing that really matters, as I see it, is the
unmistakable insistency with which Homer em-
phasizes the extreme western location of the Phae-
acians and their lack of close neighbors, all of which
becomes ridiculous when associated with Corfu,
from which the coast of Epirus is plainly visible,
and to which visitors from other parts of Greece
must have come pretty frequently. Scheria marks
one of the climactic points of the poem. Leaving
the purely fabulous Hades alone . . . which is
also laid beyond the Pillars and on the shores of the
Atlantic . . . Scheria marks the farthest inhabited
region to which Odysseus penetrates, and it seems
reasonable to think that it does so because it
represented the farthest notable locality of which
Homer possessed fairly definite knowledge, whether
through Cretan, Phoenician, or purely Greek
sources. And when, for reasons of poetic expedi-
ency, he wishes to bring his hero home without
taking further account of the vast expanse of sea
60
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
and land between Scheria and Ithaca, he resorts to
magic.
Time and again Homer emphasizes the miraculous
character of the Phaeacian ships, which needed
neither pilots nor rudders, but "understood the
thoughts and intents of men" and "knew the cities
and fat fields of every people," so that, of their own
intuition, they made straight for the spot on the Itha-
can coast that would be most favorable to the secret
landing of Odysseus. They moved with the swift-
ness of human thought, we are told, shrouding them-
selves in mist and clouds, without ever fearing
"wreck or ruin." Finally, on its return to Scheria,
the ship that had carried Odysseus home was turned
into a rock by the vengeful Poseidon, who also
over-shadowed the city with a great mountain,'
causing Alcinous and his fellow kings to decree that
never again should a stranger be helped by the
Phaeacians in a similar manner. This intentional
employment of a vast supernatural machinery for
the return of Odysseus indicates strongly that, to
Homer, the principal and commanding aspect of
Scheria was its extreme distance from the familiar
haunts of the Greeks.
66
-
SCHERIA
61
5
Strabo saw red when any one, like Callimachus of
Cyrene, the founder of Greek literary history, tried
to place Ogygia or Scheria within the confines of the
Mediterranean. He classed Homer as the first geog-
rapher and repeatedly declared him familiar with
the entire region between the Black Sea and the At-
lantic coast of Spain. When the poet placed certain
parts of his story outside the Strait of Heracles, he
meant it and knew what he was talking about,
Strabo averred. Plutarch agreed with him in this
respect, and the trend of recent scholarship has been
in the same direction. Butler, of course, held both
Ithaca and Scheria identical with Trapani, because
he had made up his mind about the female author-
ship of the poem, and because this was the only
place his blue-stocking Nausicaa really knew and
could write about. Ogygia he sought in the Aega-
dian island of Favignana, right outside Trapani, or
in the isolated island of Pantelleria, which lies half-
way between Africa and the Sicilian coast, and
which seems to have been well populated during the
Neolithic age. Its ancient name, by the by, was Cos-
62
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
syra, connecting curiously with the ancient name of
Corfu, and thus again we get that disturbing sensa-
tion of a circular movement.
Strange it is to find such a thorough student of
the subject as Berard accepting the identification
of Scheria with Corfu without a qualm, although
. . to suggest only one factor . . . the struggle
with the tide, which forms such a striking feature of
the hero's landing on the Phaeacian coast, would
have been quite unthinkable where the difference
between high and low water is estimated at four
inches. No less strange is his location of Calypso's
home on the insignificant little islet of Perijil,
near Ceuta, on the African shore inside the Pillars.
It is an almost bare rock, destitute of water, and
nestling so close to the overhanging cliffs of the
adjoining shore that it is hardly distinguishable
even from a ship in search of it. The term used by
Homer to characterize the situation and appear-
ance of Ogygia is omphalos thalasses, which, ordi-
narily, is translated into “the navel of the ocean.'
But omphalos means also the central, dome-like
boss on a shield, and Professor William B. Ramsay
""
SCHERIA
63
¿
once pointed out that Homer undoubtedly used it in
this sense. . . to indicate something that stood
out conspicuously from a vast, flat surface. Such a
description fits Pantelleria, after all. It also fits
Madeira, which has the additional advantage of
lying beyond the Strait of Heracles, far out in the
"real" ocean, as the old Egyptian priest called the
Atlantic, and in such a direction that, as indicated
in the poem, Odysseus would have to keep a north-
easterly course in travelling from Ogygia to what is
now thought to have been the actual location back
of Homer's Scheria.
Like Butler, Berard seems a little too much guided
by a preconceived idea. His dominant theory is that
the Phoenicians furnished the geography found
in the "Odyssey." To him the poem is, above all,
a periplus, or pilot's guide, like the "Mediter-
ranean Pilot" published by the British Admiralty,
or like the Italian and Spanish portulans of an
earlier age, but issued in a Semitic language by the
old seafarers of Tyre and Sidon. The information
contained in this guide, Berard believes, was put
into the typical poetic form of a nostos, or home-
64
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
T
coming from Troy, by a Hellenic bard living at
Miletus about 850 B.C. Professor Gilbert Murray
admits that there may be something to it, though
he files reservations against many of the French
writer's applications of his theory. Glotz, in the
work previously quoted, expresses the opinion that,
when the Greek migrations "receded into the past
and took on a marvellous color, all the tales of
sea-journeys were fitted into returns from Troy, and
especially into the adventures of Odysseus." Even
a layman can see that Homer wished, for the benefit
of his readers, to make his hero take in all the main
sights around the western and less known parts
of the great inland sea which had played such a big
part in the history of Greece before his day, and
which was just beginning to play a similar part
again.
66
The trouble with Berard is, first, that he over-
estimates the importance of the Phoenicians both as
maritime pioneers and as disseminators of culture;
and, secondly, that he under-estimates the scope of
early Mediterranean navigation. This, however, is
a time when, to quote Glotz again, "from day
""
SCHERIA
65
to day, new discoveries and new publications force
the least conscientious painter of the most imper-
fectly known communities to continual recanta-
tions." Once upon a time we were told that "all
roads led to Rome," and we knew that it meant
Hellas. Then came days when, in quick succession,
we visioned those selfsame roads as leading, first
to Egypt, and later to those old Phoenician mer-
chant cities which furnished King Solomon with so
much precious material for his temple-building.
Now it is Crete. Ever since Sir Arthur J. Evans
began his epoch-making excavations of the Cnos-
sian palaces of the Minoan kings, we have been
forced, almost literally from day to day, to revise
all our earlier ideas of what happened in those re-
gions during ancient days. And this startlingly
rapid unrolling of an all but forgotten, yet all-
important page of man's history has only just begun.
6
To-day we know things about early traffic in the
Mediterranean and elsewhere which our fathers
never dreamt of. To-morrow we shall know still
66
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
more. An era of discoveries and revelations has
opened that seems comparable to the great days of
the Renaissance. Not in Crete alone, but on the
islands of the Aegean, in Syria and Palestine, in
Egypt, at the old Hittite capital of Boghaz Keui, in
southern Spain, and in numerous other places,
properly financed and equipped scientists are dis-
closing one fragment after another of life that was
held buried and lost for ever. In the light of this
new knowledge, the world of the ancients is becom-
ing a great deal larger than we have thought it
hitherto. And, in addition, we are forced to recog-
nize the possible truthfulness of many statements
by the classic writers of Greece and Rome which we
used to brush aside as little better than fairy tales.
This is true in regard to the works of Herodotus and
Strabo and Pythias and many others. We no longer
doubt that Phoenician sailors, commissioned by
Pharaoh Necho, actually circumnavigated Africa
about 600 B.C., or that, a century later, the Car-
thaginian Himilco pushed northward along the
western coast of Europe until he reached the shores
of Britain. It is with such facts in mind that we
SCHERIA
67
should read Homer and Plato, remembering also
that the former especially was bound to modify the
truth for the achievement of his auctorial pur-
poses.
Disregarding its many gulfs and projecting penin-
sulas, the Mediterranean may be compared to a tall
vase with a long neck at the Strait of Gibraltar. We
used to believe that the Greeks of classic time knew
only the inside of that vase, and that, until well
toward our own era, they knew little about its shape
and contents west of Sicily. That idea of ours has
been smashed all to pieces. The Cretans had connec-
tions with Spain beyond all doubt. Furthermore, the
vase has lips curving outward along the coasts of
Africa and Spain, and the sailors groping their way
along the shore of the inland sea would surely be
tempted to follow the lead of those lips beyond the
strait. Gades, or Cadiz of our own day, is credited
with having existed eleven centuries before the be-
ginning of our era, as I have mentioned previously.
Tradition places a Greek colony at Tingis, the pres-
ent Tangier, not so very much later. And in the
sixth century B.C., the Carthaginians vetoed an
68
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
Etruscan plan for the colonization of the Canary
Islands.
We are convinced now that one maritime people
after another in the eastern Mediterranean traded
with those outlying regions near and beyond the Pil-
lars of Heracles, bringing from Spain the highly
cherished Baltic amber and the British tin so essen-
tial to the making of bronze, but also other mate-
rials of many kinds, as, for instance, gold, silver,
and copper from the mines of Sierra Morena. Nor
did this happen merely within what we call historic
time, but long before, five thousand years and more
ago, when the most advanced of the Mediterranean
peoples still used implements and weapons of pol-
ished stone. A Belgian student of pre-historic Spain,
Louis Siret, declared nearly thirty years ago that,
during late Neolithic times, maritime routes
linked the south of the Iberian peninsula with the
Baltic, the British Isles, the Cassiterides (or Tin
Islands, probably identical with the Scillies) on one
hand, and with Egypt and the East on the other."
The identification commonly assigned to Ogygia by
recent students of the question is, as I suggested a
66
SCHERIA
69
while ago, Madeira, and it seems quite probable
that even the Cretans of the later Minoan ages may
have known about the existence of that island, which
truly may be described as the omphalos of the ocean
shield. For Scheria, on the other hand, no equally
definite or plausible theory was forth-coming until
quite lately, when a group of German students, led
by Professor Adolf Schulten of the Erlangen Uni-
versity, came to a conclusion no less fascinating
than novel . . . a conclusion that has found a
popular exposition in the work by Dr. Richard
Hennig frequently referred to. Thus, at last, we
have reached the third point sought by our process
of triangulation in time and space . . .
that place
of wealth and mystery in the far west which was
called Tarshish by the Hebrews and Tartessos by
the Greeks.
.
PART THREE
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
1
THE name of Tarshish occurs repeatedly in the
Old Testament, mostly coupled with that of Tyre,
and always in a manner suggestive of something
very remote and fabulously wealthy. It had evi-
dently laid a deep hold on Hebrew imagination, and
their prophets used the name as Tennyson spoke of
Cathay, shedding over it a glamor of romance with-
out for a moment doubting its reality. The first time
we find it in the Bible is as part of the list of nations
given in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The sons of
Javan, among whom were divided "the isles of the
Gentiles," are there said to be Elishah, Tarshish,
Kittim, and Dodanim. Javan means Ionian, but the
term seems to have been used indiscriminately to
designate all the peoples north of the Mediter-
ranean. Elishah corresponds to the Egyptian Ala-
shiya and is now believed to indicate Cyprus, or at
least the Cretan-Achaean parts of it. Kittim or
Chittim is said to be derived from Kithion or Cit-
73
74
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
ium, the Phoenician settlement in eastern Cyprus
known originally as Kart-hadshat, the New City. I
have a strong suspicion, however, that one of these
names may refer to Crete. Tarshish has been defi-
nitely identified with Tartessos of the Greeks. In
Genesis there is nothing to suggest the greater re-
moteness of the last mentioned place, but such a
suggestion is never absent from subsequent refer-
ences to it.
66
When Jonah wished to escape " the presence of the
Lord," he went over to the port of Joppa and took
passage on a ship leaving for Tarshish. In other
words, he is represented as choosing the place sup-
posed to be farthest removed from Nineveh, where
he did not want to go. In I Kings 10: 22 and II
Chronicles 9: 21, we learn that King Solomon, as
partner of King Hiram of Tyre and Sidon, had
ships manned by Phoenician sailors keeping up
regular communication with Tarshish, each voyage
taking three years going and coming. The return
cargoes consisted of gold, silver, ivory, apes, and
peacocks. In this connection, the chronicler tells us
rather irrelevantly, but quite significantly, that
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
75
King Solomon "passed all the kings of the earth in
riches and wisdom." Similarly the old Egyptian
priest told Solon that the kings of Atlantis "had
such an amount of wealth as was never before pos-
sessed by kings and potentates." It was a formula
employed to designate a great centre of power and
prosperity.
over
The first line of the twenty-third chapter of Isaiah
gives its title in highly dramatic and quite modern
fashion: "The burden of Tyre." It has much to say
about the "howling of the ships of Tarshish
the sad fate of the great city with which it seemed
inseparably connected. "Thou breakest the ships
of Tarshish with an east wind," we read in Psalms
48:7, which means that the ships from the far west
could not make their destination against a strong
contrary wind. Most notable, however, is the refer-
ence contained in the twenty-seventh chapter of
Ezekiel, where the fall of Tyre is again proclaimed:
Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the mul-
titude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin,
and lead, they traded in thy fairs." This is a pretty
accurate list of the main products that made Tar-
66
وو
76
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
66
shish-Tartessos what it was in the days of its glory.
It was the port of exit for one of the richest mining
centres known to the ancient world, and if copper is
missing on that list, it is probably because it was the
one metal that could be had with comparative ease
nearer at hand. The term " Tarshish-ships
Tarshish-ships" occurs
elsewhere in the Bible much as East-Indiaman was
employed at one time to designate any large ship
equipped for an unusually long journey. But always,
in one form or another, recurs that inalienable
association of Tarshish, or Tartessos, with long-
distance shipping and incredible wealth.
Stories of similar purport are told by Herodotus,
who used to be called "the father of lies" as often
as he was called "the father of history," but whose
reputation for accuracy has risen tremendously of
late. He tells us that, some time about 630 B.C., a
vessel from the Aegean island of Samos was driven
beyond the Pillars of Heracles by one of those per-
sistent eastern winds mentioned in the Psalms, and
that it reached Tartessos while this city was still "a
virgin port, unfrequented by merchants." The
profits of that involuntary voyage were the second
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
77
largest known in the history of Greek commerce
up to that time, amounting to something like
$70,000 . . . an enormous sum, considering the
greater value of money at that time. This was an
isolated incident, however, and no attempt was
made to repeat it. Nevertheless it may have had a
suggestive influence on the more audacious mar-
iners of the Ionian city of Phocaea, near Smyrna, of
which we have had to speak before.
They were the first ones, Herodotus tells us, to make
the Greek world acquainted with the upper portions
of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas, with Spain,
and with Tartessos, substituting long, swift, fifty-
oared penteconters, like those used by the Phaea-
cians of Scheria, for the round-built, slow-moving
merchant vessels employed until then for purely
commercial purposes. This means, we know to-day,
that the priority of the Phocaeans applied only to
that new Hellenic world which was emerging gradu-
ally from the chaos wrought by the Dorian invasion,
for a thousand years earlier the Cretans had com-
munications with the mouth of the Po, via the
Elian port of Pylos and the Ionian islands. About
$
78
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
600 B.C., the Phocaeans founded Massalia, which
has remained a great trading centre ever since,
being the Massilia of the Romans and the Marseilles
of our own time. Evidently they sought the route be-
yond the Pillars deliberately and frequently, gain-
ing the favor of the king then ruling Tartessos to
such an extent that he wanted them to transfer their
entire community to his realm. Finding them un-
willing to do so at the time, he provided them with
sufficient funds to build a solid stone wall around
their own city as a protection against the Persian
Cyrus, who had just begun to make a big stir in the
east. This generous Tartessian monarch, whose
name, Arganthonios, smacks of the silver so plenti-
ful in that region, was evidently famous through-
out the ancient world for his long reign and longer
life. Herodotus puts these at eighty and one hun-
dred and twenty years, respectively. Anacreon, who
was born nearly a century earlier than Herodotus,
and before Cyrus finally drove the Phocaeans from
their Asian homes to Corsica, tells us in one of his
bibulous odes that he " desired neither the horn of
Amalthea, nor to reign over Tartessos one hundred
66
TARSHISH J
TARTESSOS
79
and fifty years." This, of course, is poetic exaggera-
tion, but also fairly good corroboration. When, in
546 B.C., the fatal blow was struck at Phocaea, those
hardy seafarers at first considered making straight
for Tartessos, we are told, but gave up this plan on
learning that the long life of Arganthonios had
come to an end at last.
If we wonder how Tartessos could be called a virgin
port about the beginning of the sixth century B.C.,
and how the sailors of Phocaea could trade on that
port without any interference, we have only to re-
call that Tyre just then was having a lot of trouble
with Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, while Carthage
had not yet broken with the mother city and started
on its subsequent policy of monopolizing the whole
western Mediterranean. It was a brief interregnum
of opportunity which the enterprising people of
Phocaea used to the utmost, and which they lost for
ever when, in 536 B.C., a Pyrrhic victory over the
combined Carthaginian and Etruscan fleets made
them pull up stakes once more and exchange Cor-
sica for a less exposed residence on the western
coast of Italy. It is a wonder to us moderns how in
80
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
those days whole cities and tribes could suddenly
remove to a new location, kith and kin, bag and
baggage. About the same time when the Phocaeans
found peace at last, Tartessos passed out of sight
for ever
vanished so entirely that a couple of
centuries later the creators of the new science of
geography could dispute about the spot where it
had stood. The disappearance of that city full of
untold wealth was as complete and almost as sud-
den as that of Atlantis.
2
Those two references of Herodotus to Tartessos are
so casual that one may think he did not know much
about it. But he was talking about the Phocaeans
and other Greek venturers at the time, and for once
he resisted the temptation to digress. In another
part of his book occurs an otherwise insignificant
remark, suggesting that he knew a lot more than he
told. While enumerating the tribes living along the
northern coast of Africa, he says concerning a cer-
tain part of our modern Tunis, where grew the
much treasured spice known as Silphium, that it
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
81
SOS
also contained weasels like those found in Tartes-
gale Tartesiai, he calls them, I think.
They were not weasels, of course, but ferrets or
martens. And Isaac Taylor tells us in his "Words
and Places," that Spain first became known to the
Phoenicians as a source of supply of those highly
coveted furs. He even believed that the name His-
pania may have been derived from a Phoenician
word, sapan or span, suggesting an abundance of
that kind of animals. It makes one wish that old
Herodotus had talked more about Tartessos and less
about the Phocaeans.
Way back in 1849, one of those thorough-going
Germans, named Gustav Moritz Redslob, collected
everything he could find in ancient and modern lit-
erature referring to the lost city. He used it to prove
that Tartessos was the little Spanish city of Tortosa,
on the Ebro, not far from Tarragona. This guess
was unusually far off the mark. Commonly, when
the place was mentioned at all by modern writers,
they identified it with Cadiz. It was well known that
the Guadalquivir, which the Romans named Baetis,
had previously been called Tartessis by the Greeks,
82
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
and as Cadiz lies somewhat to the south of the pres-
ent outlet of that river, this was held to settle the
matter. This mistake gained further credit from
the constant biblical coupling of Tarshish with
Tyre, generally recognized as the mother city of
Gades, or Cadiz. Yet the ancient writers never failed
to recognize the previous existence of two wholly
distinct cities in the same region, even when some
of them, mostly Romans of a late date, tried to
identify Tartessos with the small community of
Carteia, somewhat east of Calpe, or Gibraltar.
Strabo knew better, and reading him makes one
wonder at the blindness which caused learned men
to disregard his very positive and quite accurate
statements for so many centuries.
Let us then turn back to Strabo and compare what
he tells us with the results of the investigations car-
ried on for several years near the mouth of the
Guadalquivir by Professor Adolf Schulten of
Erlangen, assisted by an English archaeologist,
George Bonsor, and by a German geologist, Pro-
fessor Otto Jessen of Tuebingen. It is, as already
stated, the achievements of these men which have
TARSHISH -
83
TARTESSOS
furnished Dr. Richard Hennig with some of his
main arguments on behalf of the theories about the
identity of Atlantis and Scheria set forth in his
repeatedly mentioned volume, "Realms of Mys-
tery."
Strabo tells us, first of all, that the Guadalquivir
previously had another outlet further to the north,
so that an island was formed between the two arms
of the river. On this island, facing the mainland,
stood the city of Tartessos. Jessen has verified the
existence of another branch, now completely filled
up. But he has made some still more significant dis-
coveries. There used to be a bay of the ocean inside
the island, where lies now the vast, waterlogged fen
known as Las Marismas, and once upon a time, not
so very long ago, geologically speaking, this bay
reached as far inland as Seville. A geological map
of Spain makes it easy to understand what has hap-
pened. From the coast north of the Guadalquivir, a
wedge of alluvial plain stretches all the way to Se-
ville and beyond a plain "open to the south,"
and framed along its northern border by the Sier-
ras, those mountains of which the old Egyptian
84
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
priest said that they were celebrated for their
number and size and beauty." This plain is of com-
paratively recent date, belonging to the Quaternary
age, in which we are still living, while the surround-
ing country shows much older formations. It was
built up entirely by deposits from the rivers now
composing the Guadalquivir system.
First of all the island of Tartessos was formed by
the jamming of silt against a backbone of Tertiary
rocks edging the coast from the present mouth
of the Guadalquivir and northward as far as
Huelva a line of rocks with sand dunes
within, the Arenas Gordas, which may correspond
to the "not very high mountain" along the outside
shore of Atlantis, and perhaps also to the
shadowing mountain " raised by the wrath of Posei-
don against Scheria. As the bay within began to fill
up, smaller islands must have appeared, and these
may help to explain the priest's reference to islands
between Atlantis and the continent beyond. And at
that time, of course, when the bay still existed, the
larger island must have seemed much farther re-
moved from the mainland than later, when it was
over-
66
TARSHISH-TARTESSOs
85
surrounded only by two arms of the river. The loca-
tion of the continent to the eastward, instead of
farther to the westward, need not bother us in deal-
ing with a time when all mariners hugged the shore
and had to sail without the guidance of a compass.
Just when the filling up of the bay was completed,
we cannot tell with certainty, but there are reasons
to believe that parts of it still remained open toward
the end of the second millennium B.C. The continua-
tion of the process here indicated led ultimately to
the closing up of the northern arm of the Guadal-
quivir as well. Simultaneously the other arm wore
down its left bank by slow degrees and built up new
land on the right, so that the course of the river
moved sideways in a southerly direction, until at
last the city of Tartessos was left facing a mud flat.
There was good cause for Strabo's mention of the
shallows that made navigation difficult in and near
the river. The same process is still going on. In the
days of the Moors, fairly large vessels could get up
the river as far as Cordova. To-day the Guadal-
quivir is navigable only to Seville, and only to ves-
sels of less than 1200 tons.
86
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
Of the coast around the ancient Tartessos Strabo
has some rather interesting details to relate. He
speaks of the many reefs and sunken rocks outside,
and makes a special point of the extraordinary
force with which the ocean beats upon this particu-
lar part of the coast. Finally he adds that one of the
worst dangers faced by the sailors in ascending or
descending the river is the violence with which the
rising tide meets and checks the downward flow of
the river. All this gives us a picture which, in mi
nutest detail, corresponds to that drawn by Homer
of the perils encountered by Odysseus in trying to
get ashore in Scheria. It indicates clearly a natural
phenomenon which could hardly have been invented
by the poet's own fancy, and which impressed the
mind of Homer the more powerfully because of its
strangeness to the region where he himself lived.
According to Professor Svante Arrhenius, the aver-
age difference between high and low water on the
Atlantic coast of Spain is from five to six feet.
Hennig, however, basing his statement on observa-
tions made on the spot by Jessen and Schulten, says
that the tidal rise at the mouth of the Guadalquivir
TARSHISH-TARTESSOs
87
often exceeds ten feet. In the western Mediterra-
nean, it is estimated by Arrhenius at two feet,
though Butler claimed three for Trapani. At Corfu,
as mentioned already, it is four inches. At Malta,
according to Sir George Darwin, it is not noticeable
to ordinary observers. In other words, the truth un-
doubtedly reflected in the Homeric scene of the
hero's landing in Scheria must be sought outside the
Mediterranean. And every detail of that adventure
may be duplicated by conditions proved to exist
near the spot where once stood the proud city of
Tartessos.
And our knowledge of its presence at that spot is no
longer dependent on Strabo alone, or on any of the
older authorities quoted by him. The excavations
conducted by Schulten and his collaborators have,
it is true, not yet brought any great archaeological
harvest, but they seem to prove beyond all doubt
that the ancient site of Tartessos has been found.
In fact, Schulten feels certain of having discovered
traces of two different cities on the same spot, one
beneath the other. In his opinion, the older one of
these dates back to about 3000 B.C., or before the
88
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
arrival of the bronze age, which dovetails beauti-
fully with Siret's expressed belief in a Neolithic
communication between southern Spain and the
Baltic on one hand, and the eastern Mediterranean
on the other. The founding of the later city is by
Schulten placed about 1500 B.C., or at a time when
Crete was the principal maritime power in the great
inland sea.
The work of Schulten has been carried on at a spot
known as Cerro del Trigo, halfway between the
coast and the right bank of the Guadalquivir, where
it makes a sharp southward bend some distance
above its mouth. This spot is close to what used to
be the inland shore of the island of Tartessos, and
it is particularly characterized by the presence of
large quantities of building stones which must have
been brought there from a considerable distance.
The work has been much delayed by the difficult
nature of the ground and by the fact that any ruins
still existing are likely to be found beneath the
present level of the ground-water. Probably the
most interesting find made so far is a curious ring,
inscribed on both sides with letters unlike those of
TARSHISH-TARTESSOs
89
any known alphabet, but believed to have some con-
nection with the signs observed on certain very an-
cient and not properly placed gold coins dug out of
Spanish soil. And this leads us back to Strabo, and
to what he has to say about the people of the region
once ruled by the city of Tartessos.
3
This region used to be called Turdetania. Its limits
are uncertain but seem to have reached from the
vicinity of Cadiz northward as far as the river
Guadiana, and eastward as far as Cordova. The
people were called Turdetanians or Turduli. Strabo
thinks that these names may indicate two closely
related tribes, one living between the coast and
Seville, and the other farther inland, as far as
Cordova. The Turdetani, Strabo asserts, were much
superior to the rest of the population on the penin-
sula, and evidently of another race. They were
more intelligent, and more advanced in culture.
They had an alphabet of their own, quite distinct
from what was found of that kind among other
Iberian tribes, and they had also a large and diver-
90
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
sified literature . . . legends, epic poems, laws in
metrical form, and so on for some of which
they claimed a very high age. This, of course,
connects directly with the ring found by Schulten
and so far vainly scrutinized by experts on old
scripts.
It is also a noteworthy fact that, to this day, the
population of the coast district from Cadiz to
Huelva shows racial characteristics quite distinct
from the rest of the Spanish people. Those maritime
Spaniards, as they are sometimes called, are tall,
dark, and medium-headed, while the vast majority
of Spaniards throughout the peninsula are small,
dark, and long-headed. The latter, in other words,
belong to the Mediterranean or Ibero-Insular race
prevailing also in Sicily, Sardinia, and the southern-
most portions of the Italian peninsula. The people
of the Guadalquivir district are classed by Deniker,
the French anthropologist, as a separate race,
named the Atlanto-Mediterranean, and found only
there and at certain points along the Spanish,
French, and Italian shores of the inland sea. Look-
ing at Deniker's racial map, as perfected by Profes-
TARSHISH-TARTESSos
91
sor Pittard and published in the latter's "Race and
History," one gets an irresistible impression of a
drive by some racial group coming from the north
of the Balkans and moving in a southwesterly direc
tion, so that, after leaving various deposits along
the route, their main body finally landed in that old
Turdetanian country around the lower parts of the
Guadalquivir. There is a curious likeness, too, be-
tween the names of the Turdetanians and the Tur-
duli, on one side, with their city of Tartessos, which
the Hebrews called Tarshish, and, on the other, the
Tyrrhenians, or Turseni, whom the Egyptians called
Tursha. According to legend, the Tyrrhenians
were of Lydian origin, and the Lydians of Asia
Minor must have been a rather remarkable race.
“The industrial power of the ancient world,” one
writer calls them. They are credited with the inven-
tion of coined money. They had a literature of their
own, now lost. And like the Phaeacians, they were
greatly skilled in music and gymnastic games. They
were, in a word, the very kind of people that,
when backed by resources like those of Turdetania,
might produce an exceptionally high and essentially
92
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
peaceful state of culture. These, however, are specu-
lations merely. The continued distinction of the
people living in the district once ruled by the city
of Tartessos remains an indisputable and salient
fact, confirmed, for instance, by such a recent work
as Professor Roland B. Dixon's "The Racial His-
tory of Man."
They were not indigenous to the region . . . of
that much we seem sure. As far as can be judged by
the few data at our disposal, they were not Phoeni-
cians. Siret believes that the Neolithic culture of
Spain came from the eastern Mediterranean, but
that can mean many different things, we know now.
Professor Ridgeway of Cambridge seems convinced
that the Turdetani were of Celtic origin. Hennig
inclines to the same opinion. We have no certainty
in the matter, and guesses are of small use for the
present.
4
Strabo dwells at length on the vast natural resources
and high material development of this region, which
Posidonius, in his highfalutin manner, compared
to “an inexhaustible treasury of nature, or the un-
TARSHISH -
93
TARTESSOS
east
failing exchequer of some potentate." It was par-
ticularly rich in metals. Gold, silver, copper, and
iron (though not mined during the bronze age, of
course) were found in the sierras to the north and
in quantities and qualities "not having
been hitherto discovered in any other part of the
world," Strabo says. When Hamilcar Barca made
his excursion into Spain in 236 B.C., he found those
people using not only goblets but casks of silver,
and there is a still older tradition that the ships re-
turning from Tartessos used to have anchors of sil-
ver in order to be able to carry a greater load of the
precious metal. During the second century B.C., the
Roman silver mines near Carthagena, in the south-
eastern part of the peninsula, employed 40,000
men and gave a daily yield of 25,000 drachmae,
which represented an immense amount in those
days. The copper mines of Rio Tinto are still
judged among the most important in the world, and
one of the mining towns of that region is still called
Tharsis, which is one of the several forms under
which the name of Tartessos appears.
Tin, probably the most important of all the metals
•
94
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
exported by Tartessos, and specially mentioned in
the Bible, came at first from the district of the Ar-
tabri, to the north of the present Portugal, where, in
the earliest time, it seems to have been scraped from
the ground with silver and so-called "white gold,"
or silver and gold mixed. This has been doubted,
just as the similar appearance of surface gold in
California has begun to seem questionable by this
time. This native supply of tin gave out compara-
tively early, however, as it gave out later in Brit-
tany, so that quite far back in time it had to be
brought all the way from the Scillies, known to the
ancients as the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, and
from Cornwall. It is quite likely that, in the trade
with this metal, so essential to the bronze age, the
Veneti of the Breton coast may have formed another
link in the chain reaching from Britain via Tartes-
sos to Egypt and Phoenicia or, in the case of
the hardly less treasured amber, all the way from
the distant Baltic.
Nor were metals the only exports which Tartessos
could boast. The soil and the sea around the ancient
mart vied with each other in productiveness, so that
TARSHISH-TARTESSOs
95
on the list given by Strabo we find such different
items as corn, wine, wax, honey, pitch, kermesber-
ries for the making of scarlet dye, vermilion, salt,
and, last but not least, salted fish . . a trade of
which Huelva is still an important centre. There was
an abundance of cattle . . . bulls like those that
ran loose in the temple yard of Poseidon at Atlan-
tis. There were olive trees in large numbers and of
high quality like those huge twin trunks that
furnished Odysseus with his first night's refuge on
the Scherian coast. The oil they gave, Strabo says,
was famous, and surpassed in quality only by the
still more famous one coming from Venefrum in
the Italian Campania a place still known to
us as Venefro. Richard Ford, by the by, spoke of
olive trees as particularly numerous in the Guadal-
quivir region when he wrote his "Gatherings in
Spain "about the middle of the last century.
Finally the Turdetanians, like the Phaeacians, had
many proud ships which they built out of timber
grown in their own woods, as did the Atlantians in
the story told by the old Egyptian priest.
Thus, in three different places
•
•
Atlantis,
96
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
we come
Scheria, and Tartessos-Tarshish
across numerous details that correspond or over-
lap . . . details regarding the coast, the country
within it, the produce of that country, and the
people living in it. To be sure, the elephants men-
tioned in the priest's story of Atlantis are as com-
pletely missing in Strabo's description of Turde-
tania as they are undiscoverable in the Spain of our
own day. But even in this respect the old legend gets
a startling background of fact from recent dis-
coveries by a Spanish anthropologist, the Marquis
de Cerralbo. On the slopes of the Sierra Minestra,
between Madrid and Saragossa, he has dug out
large quantities of elephant tusks under circum-
stances proving that, once upon a time, such pachy-
derms lived side by side with man in that country.
This must have been long ago, of course, even
before the Neolithic days of Proto-Tartessos, as
Schulten has named the earlier of the two cities.
traced by him. But we have just begun to realize the
marked persistency with which traditions are passed
on from age to age, so that the race mind will pre-
serve memories of conditions long outlived. What,
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
97
however, counts for more than the verification of
any one detail in the various stories under discus-
sion, is the unmistakable identity of the total im-
pression conveyed by Plato of Atlantis, by Homer
of Scheria, by Strabo, Herodotus, and Ezekiel,
of Tarshish-Tartessos. . . the impression of an
amazingly wealthy and highly cultured merchant
city with far-flung commercial connections.
5
One important point still remains with only two legs
to stand on, so to speak: the gorgeously equipped
temple of Poseidon that figures so conspicuously in
Plato's dialogue and Homer's poem. . . the tem-
ple that was the innermost heart of Atlantis as of
Scheria. Strabo mentions nothing of the kind in Tar-
tessos. But he makes a wholly unexplained refer-
ence to a port of Menestheus" which " comes
next after Gades." And later, in speaking of the
island formed by the two arms of the Guadalquivir,
he adds that "hereabouts is the Oracle of Menes-
theus." This is the name of the king who, in the
ancient legend, drove Theseus from Athens, and
66
98
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
who, according to Homer, led the men of Attica in
the war against Troy. Nothing more is known about
him. But in the Odes of Bacchylides, recovered
piecemeal from Egyptian soil in 1896, we find
Theseus represented as a son of Poseidon. Have we
here to do with one of those funny transpositions
that occur in legend as in language? Or may we
look for a clue in another passage of Strabo's, where
he says that, "when Troy was overthrown, the vic-
tors, and still more the vanquished, who had sur-
vived the conflict, were compelled by want to a life
of piracy; and we learn that they became the
founders of many cities along the sea-coast beyond
Greece "? To-day we have no answers to those ques-
tions, but they may be furnished by future dis-
coveries at Cerro del Trigo and elsewhere.
While Strabo has nothing to say about any temple
of Poseidon at Tartessos, he does mention that of
Heracles at Gades, and here we have another clue,
more immediately promising. It is the more inter-
esting because of the wells or springs connected
with it. Polybius, according to Strabo, mentioned
only one such source of water within the sacred
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
99
structure. Posidonius, who had been on the spot,
called his predecessor a liar almost in so many
words ... learned controversies were as heated in
those days as in ours and asserted that there
were two wells within the temple itself, and one in
the city outside. The temple in question was, of
course, not dedicated to Heracles at all, but to the
Phoenician Melkarth, from whom the Greek hero-
god was derived. Its location has long been assigned
to the little rock island of Santi Petri, lying at the
extreme southern end of the land spit on which
stands Cadiz, and right opposite the mouth of the
Rio Santi Petri. There Schulten has found not only
the remains of the temple itself, but the two wells
which Posidonius had seen within its walls.
Melkarth means "the king of the city." He was
not the greatest of the three principal Phoenician
deities, but the one, evidently, to whom most atten-
tion was paid, except at certain seasons. Wherever
they went, a temple was erected in his honor, with
two pillars forming an essential part of it. . . the
Pillars of Heracles. He was, as his name indicates,
the protector of the city. . . primarily of Tyre,
.....
100
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
and then of all those numerous trading communities
that sprang from its fruitful loins. But he was
also... and here lies perhaps the main cause of
the worship granted him so unanimously . . . the
god of shipping, travelling, and commerce. On old
Phoenician coins his image frequently occurs be-
side the prow of a vessel. The tablets on which
Hanno engraved the description of his journey
down the west coast of Africa, about 500 B.C., were
hung in the temple of Melkarth at Carthage. To this
we may add that the Greek Heracles likewise was
regarded as a guardian deity of shipping and travel-
ling. Many of his exploits may be interpreted as
legendary reminiscences of early and epoch-making
commercial or piratical excursions, rather than as
sun myths. What wonder then, if Melkarth became
confused not only with Heracles, but also with Po-
seidon, the god of the sea, whose trident has been
found on Cretan palace walls from the Middle
Minoan age as well. And Professor Ridgeway says
that "all the ancient dynasties traced their descent
from Poseidon, who at the time of the Achaean con-
quest was the chief male divinity of Greece and the
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
101
islands." With the Dorians came Zeus as divine
overlord, and it is in perfect keeping with this cir-
cumstance that, in the "Odyssey," which must have
been written after the invasion, but with the Myce-
naean traditions still preserved, we find Zeus ruling
the Olymp, while Poseidon claims the Phaeacians
as "of his own lineage."
Heracles was closely identified with the region
around Tartessos. Three of his principal exploits
took him into that country: the capture of the oxen
of Geryon in Erythia; the fetching of the golden
apples of the Hesperides; and the bringing of Cer-
berus from Hades. Erythia was the name given
sometimes to the tongue of land on which Gades
stood, and sometimes to the whole surrounding dis-
trict. It means "the red" and is supposed to sug-
gest the sunset as well as the extreme western posi-
tion of the city. The Greek name for the people of
the Syrian coast, phoiniki, “redskins," also came
from a word, phoenix, meaning red, and it was
given to the Cretans and Carians before it became
applied exclusively to the Punites. The cattle of
Geryon may have been the clouds, as the late John
102
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
66
Fiske maintained in his " Myths and Myth-makers,"
but they indicate also the prominent part played by
the bovine tribe in that portion of the globe, whether
it be named Erythia, Tartessos, or Atlantis. Geryon
appears in the legend as a monster with three bodies.
But Stesichorus of Himera, a poet who lived in
Sicily between 640 and 555 B.C., and who has been
described as 66
nearest to Homer," mentions a pas-
toral" poet named Geryon, who " was born almost
opposite to the renowned Erythia, in a rocky cave
near the abundant springs of the silver-bedded Tar-
tessis." Finally the Heraclean legend says that,
after he had obtained possession of the cattle of
Geryon, the hero paid a visit to Tartessos, which
incident of his journey can hardly have had any-
thing to do with clouds or the sunset.
It is of no use to attempt a definite interpretation of
any one part of this confused medley of facts and
fancies, of legend and history, of tradition and in-
vention. The only conclusion we safely may draw
from it is that the Greeks of the classic period
the period from Homer to Strabo . . .
were fa-
miliar with a vast body of more or less authentic
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
103
traditions about earlier direct communications with
the region indicated by the names of Tartessos and
Gades, twin cities corresponding to Atlas and
Gadeiros, the twin monarchs of the Atlantian leg-
end. Of course, it was the fashion at one time, as
did John Fiske, to class most of the ancient heroes,
like Heracles and Odysseus, as so many sun myths.
But while poetic transfigurations of this sort prob-
ably intermingled with old legends of another
origin, they can never dispose of the strange lands
and seas viewed by the sun in its westward course.
It is of these sights that Homer gives us a poetic
account in his “Odyssey," and it is with their iden-
tification, not with that of the hero himself, we are
concerned here. Strabo was convinced that Heracles
and Odysseus originally were real persons, and that
both had visited the region in question. For con-
firmation of this belief, he even points to the name
of Lisbon, which in his day was Olisipo, and which
he interprets as meaning the city, or walled town
(Phoenician hippo) of Ulysses. These ideas of his
have long been construed as symptoms of a cre-
dulity not tempered by the wider knowledge of a
104
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
1
more modern day. Yet other statements of his,
equally scorned, have lately appeared in quite a
new light.
No one, for instance, paid much attention to what
he had to say about "the sovereignty of the seas ex-
ercised by Minos," until the Cretan discoveries of
Evans suddenly revealed the fact that the ancient
Minoan kingdom actually must have been the first
thalassocracy," the first empire of the sea, as an
early Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea,
called it. The same Eusebius speaks in his " Chroni-
con" of two other maritime powers that followed
Crete prior to the emergence of the Phoeni-
cians . . . those of Cyprus and Rhodes, the Eli-
shah and Dodanim of the Bible . . . and again a
disregarded or contemned tradition has been
proved true by ultra-modern revelations of a long
forgotten past. It looks, indeed, as if the whole body
of classic literature would have to be re-read in
this new light, and as if it might pay for anthro-
pologists, archaeologists, and historians, to follow
up all sorts of hitherto slighted clues in that litera-
ture. This, of course, is just what is being done now.
૮.
TARSHISH-TARTESSOs
105
But it takes time, and the results will come only by
slow degrees and piecemeal.
That, in the traditions referred to above, we find
Tartessos and Gades frequently confused, does by
no means preclude a good deal of knowledge among
the ancients concerning both. Nor need any external
fabulations or exaggerations prevent us from recog-
nizing the kernel of truth within. This is particu-
larly true in regard to Homer, who, like every other
poet, used details familiar to himself for the pur-
pose of lending an equal aspect of familiarity to
scenes never witnessed by him in the flesh. When,
for example, he drew his picture of Charybdis,
"thrice a day spouting forth black water, and thrice
a day sucking it down in terrible wise," he may
have been helped by an actual phenomenon much
nearer home and better known to his readers. At
the narrowest point of the long strait between Eu-
boea and the Greek mainland, the extraordinary
changes of the tide have been a cause of wonder
since the days of Homer. Without any marked rise,
the current one moment runs like a fast river in
one direction, and a moment later it runs with equal
106
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
velocity in the opposite direction. Strabo says that
this sudden turn takes place seven times a day, and
a modern observer has found this to be true on
certain days of every month, while otherwise the
water of the channel behaves in ordinary fashion.
This may also have assisted Homer to grasp the
effects of the tides in a river, without lessening
the likelihood of his having heard about the ex-
ceptional tides at the mouth of the Guadalquivir,
or about some strange action by the waters along
the Strait of Messina which so impressed Phoe-
nician mariners that they named the spot hur
obed, "the hole of perdition" . . . whence the
Greek Charybdis.
Furthermore, it is fairly easy to prove how the con-
fusion between Tartessos and Gades became more
or less inevitable, and how the island of Atlantis-
Scheria-Tartessos came to be lost for ever beneath
the waves of a sea on which Gades was left to reign
in unrivalled splendor, so that to its own crown of
glory and fame was added what students had re-
corded and poets dreamt of the other city that had
ceased to exist. This brings us to the ultimate phase
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
107
*
of our quest, which is to show just what historical
happenings seem to underlie this sudden and com-
plete vanishing of a community described by Schul-
ten as an Hesperian counterpart to the ancient
one of the great-
est marts of olden times, and the connecting link
between two worlds nearly two thousand miles
apart."
cultural centres of the Orient
66
6
Again the mystery is simple when you have the key
to it. First of all, let us bear in mind that Homer is
supposed to have lived about 800 B.C.; that Solon
was born in 638, Herodotus in 484, and Plato in
429 B.C. These dates refer to the periods when, as
far as we can tell, the legends and traditions con-
cerning Scheria, Atlantis, and Tartessos were first
put into writing in Greece. The Jahvist portions of
Genesis, with the list of nations where the name of
Tarshish first appears, are believed to have been
collected and edited about 800 B.C., but in such a
manner that a large quantity of much earlier mate-
rial was included practically unchanged. Solomon,
finally, is supposed to have lived from 970 to
108
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
933 B.C., and his friend, King Hiram of Tyre, from
970 to 936 B.C.
The next thing to bear in mind is that all our pre-
vious conceptions of the earliest maritime develop-
ments in the Mediterranean must be revised on the
basis of recent discoveries in the Aegean region.
The pathbreakers in those waters were not the
Greeks, nor even the Phoenicians, but the Cretans,
and these were followed by the Cyprians, the Rho-
dians, and the Achaeans of the Mycenaean age, be-
fore the Phoenicians reached the ascendancy shown
by them during historic times. The Cretan or Mi-
noan predominance seems to have lasted from 3000
to some time about 1400 B.C. During this earliest
period, they are believed by the foremost experts in
the field to have had regular direct communica-
tions not only with Sicily and Sardinia, but with
Spain. Glotz records visible traces of their presence
at Argar in southeastern Spain. Evans thinks that
the Iberian alphabet, not to be confused with that of
Tartessos, was of Cretan origin. “It is not impos-
sible," says Glotz, "that they supplied Egypt with
the products of the furthest countries, such as tin
TARSHISH-TARTESSOs
109
and amber.” The opinion of Louis Siret concern-
ing very early commercial relations between the
Baltic, Britain, and the eastern Mediterranean, may
be recalled in this connection. The link between the
southeast and the northwest must have been in
Spain, every one agrees.
During those early ages, there seems to have existed
a commercial centre, capable of acting as such a
link, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, at the mouth of
the Guadalquivir. It may have existed as early as
3000 B.C., and it appears to have attained con-
siderable cultural prominence as early as 1500 B.C.
That the knowledge of its existence was fairly well
disseminated among the principal shipping centres
of the eastern Mediterranean, seems quite likely.
Whether the exchange of commodities was con-
ducted all the time by Cretan ships only, or also by
those of Tartessos, we do not know, but there is
reason to believe that the latter concentrated on the
trade with the north, leaving the Cretans and others
to come for what they wanted. The Minoan kingdom
fell about 1400 B.C. Shortly afterwards Achaean
kingdoms are recorded by newly deciphered Hittite
110
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
inscriptions, in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of
Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in Lesbos. Glotz says that
the Mycenaeans followed the Cretans everywhere,
and at the same time the Phoenicians pushed
more and more to the forefront. But while the Cre-
tans and the Phoenicians were peaceful traders, the
Achaeans were more interested in piracy than in
trade, and while they may have penetrated as far as
Tingis, or Tangier, and Tartessos, the likelihood is
that they came as conquerors rather than as mer-
chants. Their dominance did not last long either.
The Dorians appeared about 1200 B.C., and that
was the end temporarily of all Greek communica-
tions with the western Mediterranean and the re-
gions beyond. The "dark ages" had descended on
the lands where the great Minoan kings and the he-
roes of Homer had ruled so gloriously. The inva-
sions of Egypt recorded on the stelae of Minephtah
and Rameses III may have been made by Achaeans
under Dorian pressure.
With the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean
civilizations came the big chance of the Phoeni-
cians, and they made use of it to the utmost. Their
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
111
colonies spread from Cyprus to the Atlantic. Gades
was founded quite early, the date of 1100 B.C.
seeming quite plausible. But of the Phoenicians
Mommsen says in his "History of Rome ": " Their
colonies were factories. It was of more moment in
their view to deal in buying and selling with the
natives than to acquire extensive territories in dis-
tant lands, and to carry out there the slow and diffi-
cult work of colonization. They avoided war even
with their rivals." The result of this policy was that
Gades and Tartessos continued for a long time to
flourish side by side, as twin cities, one being the
gateway to the north, the other to the south, and the
exchange of commodities passing through both.
There was no rivalry between them. They were like
agents of closely allied firms meeting on neutral
ground for transactions equally important and
profitable to both. To home-sitting people at a dis-
tance, they may well have appeared as one. This
must have been going on from the establishment of
Gades to about 600 B.C., and this is also the state of
affairs reflected in the Biblical references to Tar-
shish. The turning point came when, about the time
112
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
just indicated, the great powers of the farther
Orient began to extend their supremacy to the
shores of the Mediterranean, and when those cities
of which Isaiah said that "their merchants were
princes, their traffickers the honorable of the earth,"
had in self-defense to exchange the oar and the sail
for the sword and the spear. The year 573 B.C.,
when Tyre first had to submit to Nebuchadrezzar,
marks the dividing line between two ages as far as
Mediterranean shipping is concerned.
In the meantime Carthage had become established
and had begun to flourish mightily, but it was still
tied to the mother city and the old policies of the
Phoenicians. The western Mediterranean was still
open to whosoever might care to venture that far,
and of this fact the re-awakened Greeks were begin-
ning to take advantage. But with the increasing de-
cline of Tyre and the simultaneous rise of Rome, a
change took place in the policy of Carthage. It
broke loose from the mother city, and instead of ac-
cepting meekly whatever might fall to its share of
the trade in the western regions, the Carthaginians
TARSHISH-TARTESSOS
113
proceeded to close those regions to everybody but
themselves. First the Greeks were driven out of the
waters west of Sicily. Then, in 509 B.C., a treaty
was forced on Rome establishing once for all the
complete monopoly of Carthage in those same
waters and whatever might lie beyond them. About
the same time a Carthaginian admiral, Himilco,
took a large fleet northward along the Atlantic
coast, and from that moment nothing more is heard
about the once so famous city of Tartessos. What
was the objective of Himilco? Undoubtedly to es-
tablish Carthaginian supremacy over Gades; to put
an end for ever to Tartessos, which had already be-
gun to suffer decline on account of the gradual clog-
ging up of the waterways in its immediate vicinity;
and, finally, to make sure of the old Tartessian
trading connections with the farther north. Hence-
forth all communication in that direction passed
through Gades alone, acting on behalf of Carthage.
On his return, Himilco published one of those peri-
ploi, or circumnavigations," which John R.
Spears, in his " Master Mariners," characterizes as
66
66
......
114
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
wholly incredible. It was a weird concoction of de-
liberate falsehoods, manufactured to discourage
outsiders from ever again attempting the passage
between the Pillars of Heracles, which thus became,
indeed, the Strait of Melkarth. Special pains were
taken to present the sea beyond as closed to all
navigation by the mud shallows prevailing every-
where. It is too bad that we know the mendacities
of this work only from quotations. Even lies may
prove instructive at times. That it formed a basis
for the legend about the sinking of Atlantis in the
sea, and about the consequent closing of that sea to
navigation, may be taken for granted. Effective as
this report must have proved, the Carthaginians
were far too thorough-going to rely exclusively on
fairy tales in such a matter. Erathosthenes, called
"the father of geography," and living between 275
and 194 B.C., informs us that any foreign mariners
sailing towards Sardinia or the Strait of Heracles
were mercilessly put to death if captured by the
Carthaginians. These stern measures undoubtedly
proved still more effective. Atlantis was lost as com-
pletely as if it had perished beneath the waves.
TARSHISH -
115
TARTESSOS
Even after the power of Carthage had slipped into
the hands of Rome, every conceivable trick was
practiced to prevent the victor from discovering the
sea-way to the northern supplies of tin and amber.
Strabo tells the story of a Carthaginian shipmaster
who found himself pursued along the Atlantic
coast by a prying Roman galley. Unable to escape
by speed or trick, he finally drove his ship into shal-
low water, thus luring his pursuers to destruction
with himself. Having saved his own life as by a
miracle and returned to Carthage, this daring mar-
iner was reimbursed by the state for the loss of his
ship and accorded high honors for his patriotic act.
Publius Licinius Crassus, or Dives, proconsul of
Spain in 93 B.C., seems to have been the first Roman
who succeeded in establishing direct communica-
tion with the Cessiterides, or Tin Islands, of which
Herodotus scrupulously wrote that he did not know
whether they existed or not. And once more the ir-
repressible Gades, freed from Carthage and hold-
ing the rank of a Roman ally, became the principal
port of interchange between the northwest and the
southeast, though in the meantime the land connec-
116
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
tions across the European continent had steadily in-
creased in importance and regularity.
With these facts in mind, it is easy to see both how
the legends of Tartessos and of a mysterious realm
beyond the Pillars came to linger in the Greek mind,
and how they became merged in a later legend
about the total disappearance of that whole re-
gion a disappearance partly true, though less
dramatic than pictured by Carthaginian cunning
and Greek imagination. That Homer's poetic repre-
sentation of Scheria, the land of sweet Nausicaa
and the swift-sailing Phaeacians, as well as Plato's
legend of Atlantis, must be traced to the ancient
mart at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, seems prac-
tically certain in the light of what we now know.
Characteristically, Scheria is threatened with being
"overshadowed by a great mountain " . the
intruding sand dunes, perhaps. .. but is still
flourishing. Herodotus, who lived just after the clos-
ing of the western Mediterranean, knew Tartessos
well, but had heard nothing about its destruction.
Plato, living still later, added the last touch of
poetry to the old legend by also describing the end
TARSHISH-TARTESSO s
117
of what had once figured as a part of the Elysian
Fields and the Islands of the Blessed. But the sur-
viving power of the legend itself can only be
grasped fully when we realize that its origin went
back beyond the days of Hellenic colonization; be-
yond the age of darkness in Greece, which was also
the age of Phoenician expansion; beyond the rise
of the Homeric Achaeans, to the millennial period
of Minoan supremacy, when the Mediterranean was
just emerging from the age of stone. This antiquity
of the legend helps to account not only for its per-
sistency, but for any incongruity of detail mani-
fested by its various resurrections.
Just how much Homer and Plato knew or did not
know, we cannot tell. Nor does it matter very much
to us. Whether or no, to some extent or wholly, they
confused Gades and Tartessos with each other, is a
matter of equal indifference. The important thing
is to have discovered where both of them received
their inspiration for what has become two of the
world's principal sources of inexhaustible romance.
Tartessos is dead. The shadow of it may or may not
be summoned back into retrospective existence by
118
THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS
the work now progressing on its former site. But
Atlantis can never be really lost, and in immortal
Scheria, the white arms and maidenly grace and
winning smile of Nausicaa have lost none of the
charm that caused clever Odysseus, a good judge of
women, to liken her unto a goddess.
In discovering a certain amount of truth back of
these much admired fictions, we have also un-
earthed another chapter in the history of the race
which was supposed to be as lost as the island of
Atlantis in the tale told by the old Egyptian
priest . . . so completely lost, in fact, that its one-
time existence was not even suspected until quite
recently. It is as if we had just begun to read a serial
full of exciting adventure, and rendered the more
attractive by being in reality our own story during
a period of childhood wiped out of our memory by
the passing of many crowded years. For the story of
Atlantis and Scheria and Tartessos, of that myste-
riously vanished cultural centre near the south-
western corner of Spain, is more or less the story of
Europe during the third and second millennia be-
fore our own era the story, we may say, of
"
TARSHISH ·
119
TARTESSOS
¡
the comings and goings and doings of long dead
men from whom we ourselves have sprung with all
of what to-day we call civilization. Of that fascinat-
ing story the next installment is now awaited with
eager curiosity.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN
WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET
This book is composed on the Linotype in Bodoni, so-called
after its designer, Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813), a
celebrated Italian scholar and printer. Bodoni planned his
type especially for use on the more smoothly finished papers
that came into vogue late in the eighteenth century and
drew his letters with a mechanical regularity that is readily
apparent on comparision with the less formal old style.
Other characteristics that will be noted are the square serifs
without fillet and the marked contrast between
the light and heavy strokes.

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BY W. F. ETHERINGTON & CO.,
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