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

Cádiz, which sits, still, about sixty miles northwest of the Strait of Gibraltar. Where this river met the sea, it was split into two mouths by a large island. On that island, the second-century-AD geographer Pausanias wrote in his
Description ofGreece
, was built a city, also called Tartessos. To recap: a wealthy island city, opposite the Pillars of Heracles, in the very land, Gades/Cádiz, that Plato had mentioned in the
Critias
.
    Richard Freund believed that Tartessos, in addition to being Plato’s source for Atlantis, was another name for the land of Tarshish, mentioned several times in the Old Testament, perhaps most famously as the distant place Jonah sails for prior to his miraculous encounter with a whale. In the tenth century BC, King Solomon of Israel (he of the famed let’s-cut-this-baby-in-half wisdom), in partnership with the Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre, owned a fleet of ships that sailed for Tarshish every three years. These returned “bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes and monkeys.” One group of Phoenician traders, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote, having carried olive oil and other wares to exchange in Tarshish, received so much silver in return that they cast new silver anchors to replace their lead ones—“and there still was a great quantity of the metal left over.” Freund notes in his book
Digging Through History
that the book of Isaiah, from the eighth century BC, contains this passage: “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for your strength is laid waste.” Might a maritime disaster that struck Tarshish be related to the one that demolished Atlantis?
    Freund wasn’t the first scholar to make a connection between Tartessos and Atlantis, nor to go hunting for Plato’s lost city along the coast of southwest Spain. The German archaeologist Adolf Schulten published a theory in 1922 that proposed Tartessos and Atlantis were one and the same. Working with the Anglo-French archaeologist George Bonsor, Schulten conducted excavations for several seasons in an area that is now part of the Doñana National Park, the marshland where Freund’s documentary was filmed. In 1923, the pair excavated at a site called Cerro del Trigo (“Wheat Hill”). They found old stone blocks that indicated the site had once been a Roman colony. Because the team saw no other stones nearby,Bonsor proposed that the Romans must have used stones from an older settlement as their building materials. Further excavations to find what lay beneath the Roman ruins were impossible due to the Doñana’s high water table. Any hole they dug more than a few feet deep was quickly flooded. Whatever archaeological secrets lay buried at the site would likely remain out of reach forever.
    After Schulten’s inconclusive digs, the Tartessos-as-Atlantis hypothesis largely lay dormant for several decades, overshadowed by the lingering influence of Ignatius Donnelly’s mid-Atlantic location theory. Then in 2004, the prestigious British scholarly journal
Antiquity
published a brief article titled “A Location for ‘Atlantis’?” The author, Dr. Rainer Kühne, a physicist at Dortmund University in Germany, noted that on satellite photos of the Doñana region one could see the outlines of two large rectangular structures—possibly remnants of the spectacular temples of Poseidon and Cleito that Plato had described—on what appeared to be a chunk of land roughly five stades (or three thousand feet) in diameter, the same size he had cited for the central island of Atlantis. 5
    As usually happens when someone floats a new Atlantis hypothesis, especially one with the implicit support of an eminent publication, the media went crazy. In an interview with the BBC, Kühne gave additional detail, pointing out how the faint outline of circles could be seen surrounding the rectangular shapes. “We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described,” Kühne told a reporter. Amazingly, both the rings and one of the rectangles also more