Atlantis My Happy Home
By GLYN E. DANIEL THERE have always been cranks in archeology and the increase in the popular interest in archeology in the last five years has naturally meant an increase in all those people whose minds dwell lovingly and longingly in the loose lunatic fringes of the subject. I have by now a very long shelf of what can only be described, with charity, as marginal archeological literature whose main value is entertainment rather than instruction, and a large box of letters and pam- phlets labelled, also charitably, 'Strange Follow-Up Correspon- dence.' Because that is what happens after any archeological lecture I give, and any archeological broadcast in which I take part. The follow-up letters pour in full of all the many archeo- logical crankeries—the Pyramidiots, the orientationists, the old straight-trackers, those who believe in the Phoenician origin of the Anglo-Saxons or the Trojan origin of the Welsh, those who see fertility goddesses in every hole and corner post, who believe in floods and girdle-tides and captured planets, who see the signs of the Zodiac in the hedgerows of the English countryside and Jehovah witnessed in rocking-stones and shells. And with the letters come the pamphlets—little books explaining that the Margate grotto is the oldest structure in Britain, that there are alignments of conglomerate track-stones over East Anglia. that the long man of Wilmington is the god Baal, pamphlets from fundamentalists (I treasure Rationalists in Retreat from the Evolution Protest Society), pamphlets about Druids and deneholes and the devil, about lands under the sea and lost continents.
Ah, there it is : lost continents. No subject seems to attract the curious marginal archeologist so much as lost continents, and no lost land so much as Atlantis. It is often said that over twenty thousand books and articles have been written about Atlantis. Mr. Jtirgen Spanuth has no hesitation in adding one more, and the reason is his sub-title; he proclaims joyously that he has solved the problem.* What is it? Plato said that Solon said that the Egyptians said there was once a rich land, civilised and well populated, which sank under the sea in a day and a night. Plato put this land outside the Pillars of Hercules. Where was it, if it was anywhere, and not a myth or a confused memory of many things? It has been put in the Mediterranean, in the Sahara, at Tartessos, in the Canary Islands, the Azores, the West Indies, Greenland, Crete, America. In the summer of 1950 no fewer than three expedi- tions were looking for Atlantis—in different places, naturally. Egerton Sykes was using radar and depth charges near the Azores, Henri Lhote was at work in the middle of the Sahara, a descendant of Tolstoy was looking off the Bermudas. If this was not enough, Donelly was calling on the navies of the world 'instead of waging wars, to achieve useful cultural work by searching for the relics of. Atlantis on the bed of the ocean.' Mr. Spanuth also went on a voyage of reconnaissance in 1950: but his journey was in the North Sea. By his researches he had decided that Atlantis was six miles east of Heligoland and that it was destroyed in 1226 Be (precise dating, indeed. even in this modern archeological world of Carbon 14 dates, but easy to arrive. at if you assume Plato meant eight thousand months when he said eight thousand years). His first recce was disturbed by British bombing trials on Heligoland, but that November he lectured on Atlantis to what he describes as 'an eminent club in London.' A member of his audience afterwards said, 'Never have 1 approached a lecture with so much scep- ticism, and never have I been so convinced of the correctness of the course of investigation than by your lecture. How can we help?' Funds poured in and Mr. Spanuth took a new expe- dition into the North Sea in 1952; he had divers and the divers found stone walls. Here was the archeological proof of Atlan- tis. And need we add that orichalc is of course amber? Mr. Spanuth sets it all out here; his juggling with texts and maps and place-names, his echograms of the ramparts and ruins of the Stoneground off Heligoland; the whole mixed up with maps of the kingdom of the Atlanteans in the thirteenth century BC, a map of tanged swords, and talk of Swedish rock-engravings. Swabian knots, bronze shields, and the periods into which Kossinna and Montelius divided the Bronze Age. A wonderful camouflage net of apparent scholarship has been thrown over the subject in this neat, well-produced, well-illustrated book, to catch the unwary who hope for salvation through Atlanto- mania.
Why do they do it, the people who write these books, and read them? Contributors and the Atlantis problem 'have often been treated as cranks and their work dismissed as merely another fact to be chronicled in the history of human folly' (I quote from Spanuth's preface). Why are there all these archeological cranks and curiosities? There are many reasons. First, it would be so nice to prove the experts wrong, as experts often are. What about Piltdown and Glozel and those Dutch paintings? Well, I mean to say, can you really believe them? And if the professionals are busy digging and describing the standard sites, here, on the edge of things and time, is some- where we can all work—a fine field for the amateur. But in the end it is the single explanation these people are looking for. The story of the human past built up by archeology is a bit too complicated, don't you think, for the ordinary man, with its periods and cultures and phases and the rest of it? What We• want is a nice, simple explanation that tells us all in one go— a single people responsible for most things: and it doesn't really matter whether they come from Troy or Egypt or Easter Island or Atlantis. What we want is a named people we can trace round the world. Let's trace them and deck out our work with scholarship. The real difficulty to the seriouS student of the past is not with such works as Spanuth's but with works like those of Elliot Smith and Perry that contained many truths and half-truths which were set out in a most scholarly way and often in most scholarly publications and were backed by the weight of high authority which these distinguished men had. It is these difficulties that make the ordinary interested reader unable to distinguish between controversy between scholars and controversy between writers who have thrown away all vestiges of scientific method they ever knew in their eagerness to prove the points they have already decided upon.
*ATLANTIS: TIIL' MYSTERY UNRAVELLED. By J. Spanuth. (Arco Pub- lishers, 21s.)
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