Free Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City by Mark Adams

exploration to the west was going on. Homer, who probably composed his works in the eighth century BC, describes Odysseus passing through Scylla and Charybdis—likely the Strait of Messina—sailing for the west until approaching the Oceanus, a deep-flowing river that encircled all the lands of the earth and marked the boundary of the world. Around 630 BC, a sailor named Kolaios from the island of Samos claimed to have been blown by a powerful easterly wind through the Pillars of Heracles and into the great sea beyond. According to Herodotus, Kolaios returned home with a vast fortune in silver from a land called Tartessos. Herodotus also related the story of the pharaoh Necho II (ruler of Egypt from 610 to 595 BC), who dispatched an expedition of Phoenician sailors to circumnavigate the African continent, departing southward through the Red Sea. During their third year at sea, Herodotus wrote, they “rounded the Pillars of Heracles” and sailed for home. “On their return home, they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing around Libya they had the sun upon their right hand.” Herodotus couldn’t even imagine what had actually happened. They had passed through the unknown Southern Hemisphere and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope.
    Plato’s effort in the
Timaeus
to chart the earth’s location in the cosmos seems even bolder when one considers that attempts to map the known world were rudimentary. In the sixth century BC, the Greek philosopher Anaximander drew what may have been the first map of the known world. The Mediterranean was placed at thecenter of the world (hence its name in Latin, “middle land”) and was surrounded by the three continents, Europe, Libya, and Asia. The Nile flowed south into the southern part of the outer ocean. The western ocean was named the Atlantic and was linked to the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Heracles. Anaximander believed that the earth was a cylinder with a diameter three times its height, roughly the proportions of a can of tuna. More than a century later, Herodotus agreed that the world was flat. By that time, though, the geometry-mad philosopher Pythagoras had—according to much later histories—deduced that the earth was a sphere. Contrary to the legend of Christopher Columbus, many educated Greeks agreed that the earth was round. In the
Timaeus
Plato himself fixed the earth in the center of the universe and said that the creator had “made the world in the form of a globe . . . having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the center, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures.”
    The Greeks began to colonize the western Mediterranean starting around 600 BC, with the founding of Massalia, a trading outpost that has since grown into the French city of Marseilles. Herodotus credits seafaring Greeks who lived in Asia Minor with making the first trips deep into the western Mediterranean. “It was they who made Adria known, and Tyrrhenia, and Iberia and Tartessos,” he writes. Adria is the northeastern coast of Italy, which shares its name with the Adriatic Sea. Tyrrhenia was the land of the Etruscans on Italy’s west coast. Iberia was the Mediterranean shore of what is now the Spanish peninsula.
    The fourth place that Herodotus lists, Tartessos, is something of a mystery, even today. Kolaios the Greek was not the only sailor to report back on its mind-blowing riches. While Plato is the only writer known to have written about Atlantis, many ancients mentioned Tartessos by name. Yet it has never been found, either.
    The historian Rhys Carpenter explained how the first Greeksailors would likely have made their way west over time. Rowing their state-of-the-art penteconters, fifty-oared warships, they would have sailed from the Tyrrhenian coast to the isle of Elba and on to Corsica, from whence they would have sailed south to Sardinia. Here they would likely have encountered Iberian sailors who