Peter Daughtrey - Atlantis and the Silver City

ATLANTIS

and the

SILVER CITY

PETER DAUGHTREY

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER TWO

, p. 21: Timeline.

CHAPTER FOUR

, p. 33: Western Europe and North Africa.

, p. 36: The position of the Gorringe Bank.

CHAPTER FIVE

, p. 44: The seabed off the Algarve and Costa de la Luz coasts.

CHAPTER SIX

, p. 56: Libyan Temehu chieftain.

CHAPTER SEVEN

, p. 60: Southwest Iberia and the Straits of Gibraltar.

CHAPTER TEN

, p. 91: The fruit of the carob tree.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

, p. 127: The area around Silves.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

, p. 137: Tectonic fault line.

, p. 146: The probable extent of the Atlantis homeland.

CHAPTER FIVETEEN

, p. 150: Atlantic Islands.

, p. 158: The Bahama Islands.

, p. 159: The Bimini Road as it is today.

, p. 161: Artists impression of how the Bimini Road would have looked when in use.

, p. 162: Artists impression of how the Andros Platform would have looked when in use.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

, p. 172: Tribal groups in southwest Iberia in 200 B.C.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

, p. 181: Stone Age bone dagger engraved with ancient alphabet.

, p. 183: Ancient southwestern alphabet compared with others.

, p. 184: Phoenician alphabet.

, p. 187: The Goliath shard from 950 B.C.

, p. 188: Pottery shard from the Harappan era in Pakistan.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

, p. 209: The DNA symbol, the symbol on the egg, and other similar ancient ones.

CHAPTER TWENTY

p. 225: Reliefs from the Egyptian Hathor temple depicting electrical devices.

All other images are in the photo insert.

The photographs are by Peter Daughtrey and the illustrations, maps, and charts are by Peter Daughtrey and Maria Paula Duarte, unless otherwise accredited.

PART ONE

The Quest for the Atlantis Homeland

CHAPTER ONE

The Standing Stone

T o this day, I dont know what drew me to it. Most of the other visitors to the delightful little museum in Lagos, Portugal, just walked on by. It was another stiflingly hot day in early June 1991. Everyone else probably wanted to get outside to enjoy a cool drink in the town square. I didnt follow them. Instead, I stepped into one last dusty room. It was stuffed full of all the usual local artifacts from yesteryear. Cabinets of coins and bronze arrowheads leaned against one wall. A box of fossils stood alongside another. I love any and all historical objects. But, charming as the setting was, apart from a broken stone slab described later, little else in that room really grabbed my interest. My wife had already moved on, and I was about to join her, when I saw it. A huge oval-shaped rock lay damaged, broken, and all but forgotten in an alcove. Its pale limestone managed to shimmer slightly amidst the dullness of the room.

For some reason I was captivated.

The noise of the other tourists out in the exit corridor faded away as I approached the exhibit. The museums curators had labeled it as a menhira standing stone. Had it been standingas I so wished it had beenat around six feet tall, it would have been my height. Instead this beautiful, ethereal object was resting on its side. I looked closely at the new base. Parts of it had clearly been badly damaged long ago. I cant say why, but that almost broke my heart. If it had remained intact and been pulled up into its original position, the menhir would have been a perfect egg shape. It would have been magnificent.

What are you looking at? My wife was back at my side. It took me a while to reply.

Imagine how much work it would have taken to carve this, I said, standing back to take in every inch of it. Imagine how beautiful it would have been.

Its beautiful now. Look whats carved on it, she said softly.

I leaned forward. In three places, all around the stone, I could see a long, identical, and captivating motif. It must have stood out proud, through the centuries, on the cool, white shell of this ancient, oversized egg. But the beauty of the rough, worn carving wasnt the most intriguing thing about it. I caught my breath as I looked closer. The motif immediately brought to mind one of the most modern discoveries of twentieth-century science: the carvings on this stone egg bore an astonishing resemblance to the symbol of the DNA helix. How could that be? And what could it mean?

I barely said a word as we left the museum. I collapsed into a chair at the nearest caf and ordered a cup of the local strong, black coffeea bica.

That must be the stone the Bongards told us about, I said to my wife when I finally regained my voice. Many months earlier, we had been dinner guests at a beautiful Portuguese farmhouse that belonged to an elderly Swiss couple. They had befriended my wife and me shortly after we had left Wales and moved to the Algarve in the mid-1980s. The four of us had a mutual interest in antiques, unusual artifacts, and local history. We would talk for hours about our discoveries, our collections, our theories, and our latest research. On the evening in question, our host mentioned a strange object he had seen lying by the side of the road a few kilometers from our new home. He said it had resembled a huge stone egg. As far as he had been able to ascertain, a group of farmers had just unearthed it from a nearby field.

I went back a few weeks later to try to buy it for my collection, he had said. But by then it had already been taken to a museum in nearby Lagos.

I kept looking out across the countryside as my wife and I drove back up the coast to our home that night. Dozens of standing stones are scattered across the Algarve. Id seen plenty of them in the few years wed lived in the area. But Id never seen one like the stone egg in Lagos. The other menhirs were simply large, naturally formed rocks pulled up and displayed with little or no extra shaping. How long would it have taken, by contrast, to sculpt the egg Id just seen? With only the most primitive of tools, how hard would it have been to adorn its shell with such an intricate, intriguing design? And was there something else I should be asking as well? Something was nagging away at the back of my consciousness. Was it about a sculpted egg, the ancient symbol of creation since time immemorial? Or was it the image of the DNA helix, the ultimate representation of the very building blocks of life?

When we got home, I stood outside and gazed up into the night sky. Sometimes in the Algarve the stars are so bright that the planets seem alive. This was one of those most beautiful of nights. It was full of mystery and promise. I stood there and breathed deeply. Then I looked down. I stared at the stars reflection in the blackness of the river just beyond our garden. Then, suddenly, I smiled and my mind cleared. I realized what had been eating away at me. It was a history Id once read of an ancient Slavic culture. Legend had it that the people had migrated into northern and eastern Europe when their original homeland had sunk into the depths of some unnamed western ocean. More important still was the assertion that in their original homeland, this Slavic culture had worshipped a large white stone egg.

Could this have been the same egg? Had a civilization right here in southern Portugal once sunk into the sea?

Three further thoughts kept me awake that night. They have been in my thoughts for most of the subsequent two decades.