You're probably wondering what ancient navigation could possibly have to do with Atlantis. While I'd be the first to admit to being quite eccentric, particularly in my reading habits, there is a relationship that is easy to understand.

There are obvious architectural links between various parts of the globe, such as ancient pyramids which (so far) have been found in Egypt, China, India, the Maldives, throughout the Americas, and Europe. The European pyramids were mostly inspired by Egyptian models (particularly those in Italy, both the famous pyramid tomb of Cestius and the pre-Roman pyramids reportedly built by the Etruscans), either directly or indirectly. There are other cultural links, including agricultural ones. Some have used these for years as evidence for a common root civilization.

There is nothing racist or in any other way wrong with suggesting that there could have been a common root civilization. It just happens to ride on the assumption that between the destruction of Atlantis, possibly 12,000 years ago, and the voyages of either Leif Erickson or Christopher Columbus there was absolute isolation of the two hemispheres. There is a bias against the peopling of the Americas. Despite the high sounding rhetoric of isolationists, their exclusive approach has been denial. Evidence that is put forward is figuratively (or reportedly literally) dumped in the ocean, burned at the stake, branded a hoax, or disappears into the storerooms, never to be seen or heard again. Inquiries are met with pleas of ignorance or total silence. Isolationism was a career move by some prominent jackass in the 19th century, and has fit the American political landscape to a degree that has never been enjoyed by those who found evidence of contact. And politicians distribute the funding.

The conventional idea that the Americas, among all the inhabited lands, was peopled during a relatively brief window 11,500 years ago and developed wholly independently of the rest of the world is false. Period. People from all over the Earth have been going places by boat since prehistoric times. Australia was peopled by the Aborigines, and their ancestors didn't walk over. Likewise the Pacific Islands, which were obviously peopled by navigators, were discovered numerous times by various people.

Just like the rest of the world.

Rather than being a diffusionist, I'm a navigationist. Diffusion implies that complex ideas and inventions such as writing originated in one place and diffused outward. Diffusionism could easily have been the invention of an isolationist attempting in need of a straw man. To be a navigationist means to recognize that people have made regular trips by water for a very long time and have conducted commerce by water craft. In this kind of a past, the kind that we all share, there was a constant exchange of goods, services, and ideas in multiple directions. The diffusion of mythological ideas to a diffusionist would require that the myths are older than the alleged migration, or 11,500 years ago, or have disseminated since 1492.

As an analogy, in hominid paleontology the replacement theory seems diffusionist - that the Neandertal and earlier Homo Erectus, and any other human or prehuman primate didn't interbreed with our own ancestors, but rather went extinct. This makes the replacement theory isolationist. The assumption that replacement took place leads to a favorable interpretation of mtDNA sequence data, and leads to charges that those who do not hold the replacement view have no evidence that interbreeding took place. Since the replacement advocates hold that there was no interbreeding and won't accept anything but so called hard evidence, their conclusions take the form of their original assumptions.

Analogously, isolationists point to the similarities between Precolumbian cultures in each hemisphere as proof that they developed separately, and any evidence to the effect that contact was continual is rejected because the isolationist is certain that each hemisphere's cultures developed separately.

Thor Heyerdahl took the route of demonstration. First he and his team built a traditional balsa raft and sailed it across the Pacific on the Kon-Tiki expedition. Then he conducted archaeological digs on Easter Island and showed the links between the earliest stone carving culture there and that of Tiahuanaco in the Andes. The second set of voyages were the Ra Expeditions in which he and his second team built two successive reed boats and sailed across the Atlantic. The third idea was the construction of another reed boat and the Tigris expedition from the Euphrates to the shore of Africa. Others have followed Heyerdahl's lead and sailed the oceans using traditional craft of various kinds, showing that the ancients were better equipped than we think, and perhaps better equipped than we are. By way of illustration, who was better equipped, the passengers on the Titanic, who had every meal made for them and served to them, or the bands of ocean crossers who netted their three square a day by reaching a foot beneath their feet?

In other words, there is no reason to believe that every development came from the Mediterranean basin, or from Africa, or Europe, or from India, or China, or the Americas. There is also no reason to believe that there was no exchange of knowledge, plants, animals, or genes between all these places. We have good reason to believe that there was plenty of contact. Some of it is forensic, such as the traces of cocaine and tobacco in mummies such as that of Ramses II. Some of it is graphic, such as the Roman mosaics depicting the orangutan and the pineapple or the Danish carvings of the turkey. Some of it is scriptural, such as the Han dynasty record of at least one merchant from the contemporary Roman empire, or the hundreds or thousands of inscriptions in many scripts and tongues found all over the world, or the ancient Roman description of what seems to have been an American canoe paddled by Native Americans arriving at Ostia.

I've begun to consider that most things got invented or discovered by teenaged boys. Then as now, they're out on their own, unsupervised, unwise, fending for themselves, making their own way, and daring each other to do things. Curious, they play with naturally occurring fire. Curious, they grab on to a log or branch and drift with it down the river. But that's just a bit of fun.

The value of water craft may be more obvious to me since I live near the Great Lakes and plenty of streams, rivers, ponds, and small lakes. Transportation by water is always preferred, particularly for the sheer volume of cargo compared to the amount of labor required. Some terrain is only accessible by pack animal, and you can see the result - population is very low in such places. This is not merely the consequence of the difficulty of transport, but this plays a role. The earliest known civilizations, and all the successful ones, grew up in the river basins of the world's great rivers. Perhaps best known is the Egyptian, which was nurtured by the predictable Nile flood and the surplus harvests that came from it. The Egyptians were not know as great sailors, yet they are said to have transported massive stones by using the river, in some cases for hundreds of miles.

The movement of goods is best accomplished by water craft, particularly in the case of those bodies of water too wide to be crossed by bridge or tunnel. Consider also that stable political institutions are required to construct a system of roads and ensure public safety, but that also leads to taxes and tolls. Rather than deal with the uncertainty of crossing dozens or hundreds of different political entities, or areas in the grip of anarchy, the boat handlers and their descendants would sail routes found or founded by exploration.

This is not to suggest that no overland trade takes place or didn't used to take place. Trade is just greatly enhanced when conducted by water, and this has always been the case.

Consider that mapmaking grew out of the needs of navigators, and that the interiors of landmasses tended to be portrayed as unknown, or simply given imaginary characteristics. This also brings us to the second connection with Atlantis - Charles Hapgood and Rose and Rand Flem-Ath, and others, have made much of the oldest surviving maps and what they show. Since none of these are truly ancient, but merely purport to be based on then-extant earlier works, their value is greatly diminished. Furthermore, all they really imply is that navigation of the globe and mapmaking is tremendously old.

The Phoenicians regularly circumnavigated Africa. These voyages took about three years to complete because they were commercial trips, not exploration. While they didn't hug the coastline per se, these sailors went from town to town, visiting every river mouth and other harbor known to their captains. When the goods they carried were not in demand they might perchance resort to that even more ancient profession, fishing. Even when a catch was not needed for the next trading post it would be necessary for the crew to eat. With the many ports to visit and much work to do, the three year figure is easy to understand.

It was been said that Tartessos (the Tarshish of the Old Testament Book of Jonah) was located in the Iberian peninsula, simply because it is said to have been in the extreme west and some will not accept the fact that the Phoenicians went everywhere it was possible to go on Earth. A round trip to Tartessos was said to be about two years in duration. Obviously it would require a tremendous leap of faith to believe that the greatest of the known ancient navigators wouldn't be able to get from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and back in less than two years.

Tartessos has never been found. No site in the Iberian peninsula, including the favored location somewhere along the Guadalquivir, has even been identified. This is not surprising, because Tartessos probably wasn't in Iberia. This bring us to the third connection with Atlantis. Lyon Sprague de Camp, writing in 1953, [ref]equated the lost city of Tartessos with Atlantis, and devised a highly imaginative tale of its location and disappearance, with plenty of invented conversations between people who are also made up.

De Camp claimed that Herodotus wrote of the Samians as having made the first Greek contact with Tartessos, but what Herodotus wrote was that the Phocaeans were the first Greeks to make long voyages, and that the Samians arrived years later when Tartessos had become more or less isolated. Evidently this isolation was due to several centuries of continual warfare among the Phoenicians city states and later the Greeks. An interesting detail about the Phocaeans is found in The Histories:

...[King] Arganthonius reigned over the Tartessians for eighty years... [and] regarded the Phocaeans with so much favour as... to beg them to quit Ionia... finding that he could not prevail upon them to agree to this, and hearing that the Mede was growing great in their neighbourhood, he gave them money to build a wall about their town, and certainly he must have given it with a bountiful hand, for the town is many furlongs in circuit, and the wall is built entirely of great blocks of stone skilfully fitted together. The wall, then, was built by his aid. [ref]

It would be interesting to see how this wall was constructed, how closely the blocks of stone were fitted, and whether they were set without mortar.

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From PBS' NOVA series, the transcript of Secrets of Ancient Navigation

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