Read Online Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City by Mark Adams - Free Book Online Page A
Book: Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City by Mark Adams
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Adams
Ads: Link
reciting a prayer. No one snickered when Coleman talked about Donnelly’s progressively less successful literary works, including
Caesar’s Column
, a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in 1988, and
Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
, a sort of sequel to his Atlantis book, in which he amped up the catastrophism to propose that ancient myths had been inspired by a comet striking the earth.
Finally, Coleman addressed what he called Donnelly’s “black helicopters” opus,
The Great Cryptogram
, presumably the source of much guffawing and drink spilling at humanities department cocktail parties. This book, which followed
The Antediluvian World
by six years, marked Donnelly’s shift from revisionist historian to all-out conspiracy theorist. It was Donnelly’s attempt to decipher the code embedded in what he named “the so-called Shakespeare plays.” His theory posited that Sir Francis Bacon, the English statesman and philosopher whose prodigious career included serving as lord chancellor, helping develop the empirical method in science, and authoring dozens of influential essays and books—including the utopian classic
The New Atlantis
—had also managed to secretly write the collected works of Shakespeare. If composing the greatest dramas ever written in English weren’t enough to occupy a man’s time,Bacon also, according to Donnelly, embedded them with subtle clues about his true identity.
When Coleman finished his talk, I walked up to the front of the room to take a look at Donnelly’s copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume lay open to a pair of annotated pages. Each had dozens of numbers scribbled on it, occult-looking calculations, underlined passages, and chaotic notations in the margin. For all I could tell, these pages demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was an inside job and that Paul McCartney’s secret twin brother really had written “Helter Skelter.”
It was a reminder that if you bent the facts enough, you could convince yourself of anything.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Secrets of the Wine-Dark Sea
On the Mediterranean
I n 1982, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Çakir surfaced from a plunge near a rocky promontory off Kas, on Turkey’s southern coast, with a confusing bit of information to report. About 150 feet down on the seafloor, he’d spotted a pile of unusual “metal biscuits with ears.” Çakir’s captain, who had recently attended a briefing about the emerging field of underwater archaeology, quickly understood what the objects were: oxhide ingots, slabs of copper cast in uniform shapes for easy sea transport. What Çakir had found was a Bronze Age shipwreck that dated to approximately 1300 BC.
Scientific American
later named the Uluburun wreck one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.
What made the discovery so extraordinary was the cornucopia of goods the boat had been carrying when it presumably smashed against the rocks. Over the next decade, divers pulled seventeen tons of artifacts from the site. The cargo had originated in ports all around the eastern Mediterranean. The boat was Syro-Palestinian, built of Lebanese cedar and operated by the ancestors of the Phoenicians who lived along the Levant. Its ten tons of copper had been mined in Cyprus. One ton of tin, the other element essential in themanufacture of bronze, had likely originated in Afghanistan. Elephant ivory and ostrich eggs had journeyed from Africa. Mycenaean pottery had come from the Greek mainland. Gold and silver jewelry, including a gold scarab inscribed with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, dated to the reign of Tutankhamen. Here in one spot was ample evidence of a highly advanced ancient trading network that spread across three continents.
For modern geographers, the Uluburun provided rare material evidence of where people were traveling, and why, in the time before Golden Age Greece. The Uluburun sank around 1300 BC, before
Caesar’s Column
, a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in 1988, and
Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
, a sort of sequel to his Atlantis book, in which he amped up the catastrophism to propose that ancient myths had been inspired by a comet striking the earth.
Finally, Coleman addressed what he called Donnelly’s “black helicopters” opus,
The Great Cryptogram
, presumably the source of much guffawing and drink spilling at humanities department cocktail parties. This book, which followed
The Antediluvian World
by six years, marked Donnelly’s shift from revisionist historian to all-out conspiracy theorist. It was Donnelly’s attempt to decipher the code embedded in what he named “the so-called Shakespeare plays.” His theory posited that Sir Francis Bacon, the English statesman and philosopher whose prodigious career included serving as lord chancellor, helping develop the empirical method in science, and authoring dozens of influential essays and books—including the utopian classic
The New Atlantis
—had also managed to secretly write the collected works of Shakespeare. If composing the greatest dramas ever written in English weren’t enough to occupy a man’s time,Bacon also, according to Donnelly, embedded them with subtle clues about his true identity.
When Coleman finished his talk, I walked up to the front of the room to take a look at Donnelly’s copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume lay open to a pair of annotated pages. Each had dozens of numbers scribbled on it, occult-looking calculations, underlined passages, and chaotic notations in the margin. For all I could tell, these pages demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was an inside job and that Paul McCartney’s secret twin brother really had written “Helter Skelter.”
It was a reminder that if you bent the facts enough, you could convince yourself of anything.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Secrets of the Wine-Dark Sea
On the Mediterranean
I n 1982, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Çakir surfaced from a plunge near a rocky promontory off Kas, on Turkey’s southern coast, with a confusing bit of information to report. About 150 feet down on the seafloor, he’d spotted a pile of unusual “metal biscuits with ears.” Çakir’s captain, who had recently attended a briefing about the emerging field of underwater archaeology, quickly understood what the objects were: oxhide ingots, slabs of copper cast in uniform shapes for easy sea transport. What Çakir had found was a Bronze Age shipwreck that dated to approximately 1300 BC.
Scientific American
later named the Uluburun wreck one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.
What made the discovery so extraordinary was the cornucopia of goods the boat had been carrying when it presumably smashed against the rocks. Over the next decade, divers pulled seventeen tons of artifacts from the site. The cargo had originated in ports all around the eastern Mediterranean. The boat was Syro-Palestinian, built of Lebanese cedar and operated by the ancestors of the Phoenicians who lived along the Levant. Its ten tons of copper had been mined in Cyprus. One ton of tin, the other element essential in themanufacture of bronze, had likely originated in Afghanistan. Elephant ivory and ostrich eggs had journeyed from Africa. Mycenaean pottery had come from the Greek mainland. Gold and silver jewelry, including a gold scarab inscribed with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, dated to the reign of Tutankhamen. Here in one spot was ample evidence of a highly advanced ancient trading network that spread across three continents.
For modern geographers, the Uluburun provided rare material evidence of where people were traveling, and why, in the time before Golden Age Greece. The Uluburun sank around 1300 BC, before
Similar Books
