Atlantis Lost in Translation - Part 3

Things are getting really exciting. In Part 1, we found Atlantis. Plato goes out of his way to clarify that the story originated in Egypt, and that the names were translated into Greek according to their meanings. So we tracked down Atlantis’ Egyptian version, and discovered that the story of the island-kingdom was the story of Egypt’s mythological homeland, which they locate in the Atlantic near the Strait of Gibraltar.

More often than not, mythology has a kernel of truth, therefore, in Part 2 we took a look at some potential evidence that would confirm Egypt’s recollection of its ancestry. Such evidence is provided by a humble cave located on the southwest Atlantic coast of Spain overlooking precisely the Strait of Gibraltar. Its enigmatic rock art, dated several hundred years earlier than the rise of ancient Egypt, contains imagery I claim is consistent with future Egyptian iconography and hieroglyphs.  

So, if I unraveled the secrets of Atlantis and changed the historical dawn of civilization to another place and time, what could possibly be left to accomplish?  

A lot! I’m just getting started. In this post, I’d like to complete the study of the cave’s rock art. Aside from solidifying my Atlantis hypothesis, it provides precious insight into the inception of a great civilization. But this cave is by no means the only remnant of Egyptian ancestry on the Atlantic seaboard. We’ll address some other fascinating evidence in combination with recent archaeological discoveries, all of which will add up to yet another awesome historical surprise.

AN ANCIENT STORY UNRAVELS

Imagine living several thousand years ago and stumbling upon a modern book of Romeo and Juliette. English did not exist nor the alphabet we know today. You’d look at the squiggles on the pages, probably with a blank face, unable to fathom for a moment the intense love story they tell. The same applies to the strange strokes on the walls of Laja Alta Cave. Dated to ca. 4000 BC, it’s difficult for the untrained eye to gauge the extraordinary story they tell; that of peoples who had mastered the waves and winds, who pondered about life and death, able to organize for elaborate funerary rituals, and build temples. But most impressive of all, we know this because they developed a time machine, a code of communication able to transmit information through a time-tunnel 6000 years-long; the same code that would become one of the most enthralling archives of human historical records, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs; and the precursor to the precise alphabet that one day would bring Romeo and Juliette to life. Thus is the vital importance of this unassuming cave.

In Part 2, we focused on the boats. We learned they looked a whole lot like future Egyptian papyrus boats, and that they seemed to be performing a religious or funerary procession, as would become common practice later in Egypt. We also discovered that the square with the flag on its corner, image #29, was suspiciously identical to the future temple-hieroglyph, and that Egyptian temples indeed housed sacred boats (sacred barks), like image #30, in their inner sanctuaries.

Now, let’s find out if this iconography is merely a cosmic coincidence or a solid pattern of evidence.
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IMAGE #1 – THE CELESTIAL FERRYMAN

​Please take a moment to study this image. Blank face? That’s okay. Allow me to do my magic and reveal its profound and extraordinary significance. It appears to be a schematic human figure (barely a stick on the right side) attached to a disproportionately long arm with three large fingers at the end. That much, most scholars agree. As for what is crossing it, of that no one is sure, though a variety of reasonable suggestions have been put forward. What’s clear is that the artist wanted to bring our attention precisely to this mysterious item, and its relationship to the arm. 

Now, if like me, you look at it from an Egyptian perspective, its intended message suddenly becomes vaguely comprehensible.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a person holding something can represent, among other things, an occupation or a task defined by the item or tool being held. A good example would be a man holding an oar, which defines a sailor or the action of sailing. It makes sense; there is a logical link between the image and what it signifies. However, there are other hieroglyphs that evolved into codes; symbols that represent ideas (ideograms), words (logograms) or sounds (phonograms) beyond or unrelated to its image. For example, a quail chick does not represent a quail chick but rather the semi-vowel w/u. The two types of hieroglyphs coexisted.

So going back to image #1, we see that the human figure is not a “realistic” image, nor is it actually holding the item. Rather the composition seems to have evolved into a schematic construct with the focus on the arm, purposely positioned to overlap the item. This evolution is not yet complete though. Let's take a look at the finished product.

​In addition to the more realistic sailor holding an oar, I add a selection of hieroglyphs containing arms overlapping an assortment of items. The arm came to represent, the sound a, among other things. It becomes apparent that image #1 is in a transitional phase between the two: the human figure is still attached to the arm, albeit reduced to a stick soon to disappear.

​I must stress the extreme importance of this detail and what it implies. On one hand, if I’m right, it would be a priceless piece of archaeological evidence of the birth of an Egyptian hieroglyph. Second, let’s put it in chronological perspective: Egyptian hieroglyphs were considered a comprehensive written language as of ca. 3100 BC, whereas image #1 is dated to ca. 4000 BC. This not only relocates the birth of hieroglyphs to the other side of the Mediterranean, which we have already discussed, but furthermore, it actually confirms they developed earlier and independently from the Sumerian cuneiform script. And this is beyond priceless, it’s huge! You see: Both Egypt and Sumer (Mesopotamia) are considered the cradles of civilization in the traditional sense*, largely due to their invention of writing. Though hieroglyphs and the cuneiform script are very different, both appeared roughly at the same time in relatively close geographical proximity. Consequently, it is inevitable to suspect that one influenced or, at least, inspired the rise of the other.

*Ancient civilizations present such a variety of characteristics or lack-thereof in some cases, that no one knows how to define civilization anymore. Some had no writing at all.

​Sumer tends to get the lead credit because there is “evidence” of proto-cuneiform writing that predates available “evidence” for the development of hieroglyphs, such as the Kish Tablets seen on the left. Found in Kish (in current-day Iraq), and dated to around 3500 BC, they are the earliest known precursors to the cuneiform script. The earliest proto-hieroglyphs found so far, in Abydos, Egypt, are date to 3,250 BC. ​Image #1 turns everything on its head.

​Note: Evidence of proto-writing, in general, understood as a physical form of a language, has been around for tens of thousands of years. It consisted largely of markings displaying some basic patterns repeated across different supports such as cave paintings or mobile artifacts like carved bones. To date, the oldest of such ‘painted markings’ has been found in Spain in the Cave of the Castle, in Cantabria and is dated to 40,000+ years ago. The oldest engraved marking is 70,000+ years old from Blombos Cave, South Africa. I recommend anthropologist Genevieve von Petsinger’s book, The First Signs, on this subject.

Back to image #1, what might it mean? Since it is in a transitional phase, there’s a good chance the meaning is still somewhat related to the image, and in keeping with the cave’s funerary boat theme, I think it is reasonable to identify the mysterious item as an oar or a rudder. Consequently, the human figure would be a sailor or steersman. However, its evolved construct tells us there has to be more to it, otherwise a realistic depiction of a human figure holding an oar would have been sufficient. Let’s cut to the chase, I think I know what it is:

In Egyptian funerary lore there is an important figure that fits the bill: the Celestial Ferryman. He was the steersman of the papyrus boat that carried the dead to the afterlife. In later Egyptian funerary texts, the journey became somewhat complex with a list of spells that had to be uttered for save passage. In this more ancient cave, his presence might simply be a symbolic well-wish of safe travel to the deceased for whom the boat procession is being performed. 

MORE HIEROGLYPHS AND SOME ENIGMATIC FINDINGS
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Don’t worry; we will not be interpreting every stroke, circle and dot on the cave wall. I’ll leave that for the book. For the remainder of this post, I’ve selected three more images, #5, #6 & #7, because I think they make excellent samples of the tremendous amount of information a stroke, circle and dot can contain. Found together in the upper, right side of the cave, at first sight they seem to be placed side-by-side intentionally to form a grouping of sorts, but they weren’t, at least not initially. You see, technology is a wonderful thing. Dr. García Alonso’s team, when dating the cave, also performed a spectroradiometric analysis on 34 of the figures in order to obtain a spectral signature of their pigment and its binder.

​Translation: Not all the figures were painted at the same time, and since the pigment’s particular reflection of light is unique, the team was able to identify which figures had similar pigment composition, thus had been drawn by the same artist. 

Figures #5, #6 and #7 present different signatures. In fact, it’s evident at plain sight. If you take a close look at the real picture, you’ll notice the arrow’s pigment, image #7, clearly differs from the other two. Interestingly, what the spectral analysis also tells us is they each match up with other figures in the cave, making their interpretation all the more interesting.

IMAGE #5 – GOD ATUM?

I admit this one is a little uncertain. Its spectral signature pairs the sun up with boats #22, #23 and #30. Curiously, of all the boats, these three happen to be the most faithful representations of a sacred bark. #22 is an accurate reproduction of a papyrus boat (the traditional depiction of a sacred bark); #23 depicts a sacred bark ferried as one would be in a procession, and #30 was framed —at a different time— with a temple hieroglyph, converting it into to the ultimate sacred bark. 
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So how does the sun add value to this iconography? Here is my hunch: If you recall, according to Shu’s version of Creation, his father, God Atum, rises (as if Poseidon) from the waters of chaos (the Atlantic Ocean) to stand upon the original mound (Atlantis?) to birth his first pair of twins, the eldest being Shu (as was Atlas). God Atum happens to be a solar deity, and the oldest Egyptian one at that. The Egyptian religion was eminently a solar religion, and over time the sun was worshiped under several aspects. God Ra, competing with Amun, Khepri, and Aten, eventually took over as the more prominent solar deity representing the sun born anew in the East and/or high in the sky at noon. Atum, however, retained for himself without competition an exclusive relationship with the West as the setting sun. Over three thousand years of Egyptian history, that is quite an accomplishment, denoting the profound meaning this must have borne. 

However, I should also point out that Atum was never depicted in the form of an actual sun as we see in the cave, but rather in a human form with the traits of a king (more like Poseidon was in Atlantis). Could this mean that the sun evolved into an anthropomorphic royal figure a thousand years later? Or is the cave depiction of the sun something else altogether? This one, I can’t answer yet.  

Let’s move on to the next image. It is more conclusive and exciting, to say the least.  

IMAGE #6 – GOD’S HOUSE
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I love this one. Not only because it is clearly another priceless proto-hieroglyph, but because it should erase any doubts still harbored they are precursors to future hieroglyphs.

​Image #6 is actually two hieroglyphs in one. First, we have a reed shelter, which came to function as the letter h, but also represented a house or manor. And, remember image #29? It was a square with a flag on its top, right-hand corner. We saw in Part 2 that the flag-hieroglyph was symbolic of ‘divine’ or ‘god’, so attached to the square, representative of an enclosure, together they came to signify “temple”. It works the same with image #6. With the flag attached to the house’s top, left-hand corner, image #6 becomes the hieroglyph for “God’s House or Dwelling”.

​So what we have in Spain are two synonyms for “temple” depicted exactly as both would also be depicted hundreds of years later in Egypt! That can be no coincidence.  

​Also, image #6 belongs to a fascinating spectral grouping, which is too long to explain here. Just know that among the other images we have #24, the divine flag, which with the one on boat #15 totals 4 divine flag-hieroglyphs in this cave. I think #14 might well be the earliest image of the Red Crown of Egypt, and image #34, is so cool, it merits its own post. 

IMAGE #7 - MYSTERIOUS ARROWS EVERYWHERE

Let’s remember what I’m attempting to do here. I am trying to prove that Atlantis existed, that it was located on the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, and that its peoples may have been the ancestors of ancient Egypt. With this in mind, please note what Plato tells us about the vast geographical domain of the ‘mythical’ Atlantis:

“Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.” -Timaeus

If you recall from Part 1, the term ‘Island’ (nesos) in Greek could mean any land surrounded totally or partially by water, so the reference to ‘the whole island’ in this instance could be referring to the whole Iberian Peninsula for all we know (e.g.: Peloponnesus, Island of Pelops, is a Greek peninsula). Think about it, this passage makes more sense if it read: “... this island of Atlantis... which had rule over the whole peninsular... and over parts of the continent (rest of Europe)...”

Please bear in mind that this confusion with the term ‘island’ seemed to be a common thing in those days. In Egyptian, ‘island’ could even stand for foreign land, and the same applies in Hebrew. In the Bible, the term ‘isles’ is translated as ‘islands’, ‘coasts’, or ‘nations’ depending on the passage.  As for Libya, in those days it referred to the entirety of North Africa from Egypt to the Atlantic, and Tyrrenia meant Italy.

In sum, Plato is telling us that Atlantis dominated a large part of the European continent, and its tentacles reached well into the Mediterranean (within the columns of Heracles=Strait of Gibraltar) as far east as Egypt to the south and Italy to the north. This information is of extreme importance and relevance to our cause, because there is indeed a mysterious Atlantic civilization that fits this geographic description exactly, and the link between it and Atlantis is provided to us by our unsuspecting arrow, image #7. It’s amazing the amount of information a simple arrow can pack!

​If we zoom out a little on image #7, we see there are in fact a total of 5 arrows, though please note their archaeological term is ‘anchor-form’ as they tend to have a curvy top. In schematic cave art, these anchors are considered anthropomorphic in nature, meaning they are understood to be simplified representations of a human body reduced to the arms and the torso (there is evidence of this evolution, and they are often found next to equivalent-style, full body figures). Anchors start to appear around the 5th millennia across the Iberian Peninsula and the European Atlantic front.

Castillo de Montfragüe, Caceres, Spain

​To be totally accurate, schematic art has been around for tens of thousands of years, side-by-side stunning realistic masterpieces like the Altamira bison on the right. The schematic type is intended to be symbolic, and therefore minimized to its simplest form to be easily repeated, while still identified. 

Cueva de Altamira, Cantabria, Spain

​There is an ample variety of schematic figures, but regarding the anchors specifically, and despite their abundance, little is known about them other than they tend to appear in a funerary context coinciding with the rise of the megalithic culture (builders of massive stone structures) in Western Europe. 

​Initially, the first wave of megaliths (the pink bubbles on the map) is dated to the mid-5th millennia BC. They oddly popped-up as distant clusters along the French, Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic front, with isolated traces in the Mediterranean as far as Egypt to the south and Italy to the north... sound familiar!?
 
Then, during the following 4th millennia BC, the coastal areas and islands connecting the isolated clusters filled in (green bubbles), resulting in an uninterrupted civilization that ran the gamut of the Atlantic seaboard from Morocco to Sweden, eventually spreading throughout the rest of the Mediterranean.

​This map is part of a paper published by Dr. Bettina Schulz Paulsson as recently as February 2019. It is the result of a comprehensive ‘statistical’ study of 2,410 European megaliths (out of 35,000+); a praiseworthy enterprise that was way overdue. A few things were surmised from it. These peoples had a cohesive culture since the settings and designs of the megaliths were similar when not identical, but distinct from the Near East tradition. They must have been knowledgeable seafarers with a vast trade network. And Brittany, France, was identified as the original source due to the high concentration —in numbers and age— of megalithic and pre-megalithic structures in the region. With this last conclusion, I respectfully digress. The purely ‘statistical’ analysis warps a fundamental fact: The oldest megaliths are not in France. There are, in general, three types of stone monuments —the single standing stone (menhir or monolith); circles of standing stones (cromlech); and burials made of massive stones (dolmens)—, and it just so happens that the oldest one of each type is found on the southwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula. A menhir in Portugal is older than the oldest French ones by three thousand years (that’s three zeros, three times over). 

​1. Oldest menhir: Quinta da Queimada (Portugal), 8000 BC, making it the 2nd oldest stone structure in the world.
 
2. Oldest cromlech: Almendres, Evora (Portugal), 6000 BC
 
3. Oldest dolmen: Alberite, Villamartin (Spain), 4500 BC

Note: Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a stone temple dated ca. 9000 BC, is hands down the oldest megalithic structure in the world.

​Be that as it may, the point is that there was an advanced ancient Atlantic civilization, with signs of a solid well-ordered social organization, capable of building massive stone monuments and sophisticated stone calendars, able to write and express exquisite artistry, while maintaining a rich, wide-spread trade network connected over land, but especially sea. A “great and wonderful” civilization, as Plato put it, with an important center exactly where Plato put it. And these Atlantic peoples definitely left their mark across the Mediterranean as far as Italy to the north, Egypt to the south*, and beyond...

*Update 05/03/2019 – According to a paper published on June 12, 2018 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), genetic studies indicate that there was either a population replacement or an important genetic influx into Morocco from Iberia through the Strait of Gibraltar between 5000 and 3000 BC.

Until now we’ve studied evidence located in the west that foreshadowed the advent of another great civilization in the East. And trust me, there is plenty more, but I’ll be wrapping it up with evidence located in the East. 

​The pictures on the left were taken in two other caves not far from image #7 on the Mediterranean side of the Strait of Gibraltar. As mentioned earlier, anchor-forms proliferated on the Iberian Peninsula as of the 5th millennia, usually in a funerary context, and more often than not near or engraved in dolmens.

The image on the right belongs to a dolmen found as recently as 2015 on the other side of the Mediterranean, in the Golan Heights of Israel. There are hundreds of them in the Middle East, most dated around 2000 BC, and believed to derive from the regional stone tradition. But this one dolmen has stabbed a wrench into the traditional thought. It is the only one in all the Middle East containing art, and that art just so happens to be a bunch of anchors engraved on the stone lid. But there’s more.

​In this same area, there is another grave just as extraordinary in its uniqueness. Rujm el-Hiri is a 3rd millennia megalithic monument, consisting of a central tumulus burial surrounded by several concentric rings. Elements of the design seem to align with important calendar events, and Atlantis enthusiasts want to see in it lingering traces of Plato’s lost island.
 
Well, they may be on to something, for guess where there is one like it, but older, larger and more elaborate, and discovered even more recently? In Atlantis, of course.  

​Located in the ancient town of Carmona, Seville, there are, in fact, two concentric-circled, stones structures. Unfortunately, both are greatly damaged. The one shown here, known as The Rings of Alcores, was discovered recently by Manuel Ruiz Pineda. Counting eight concentric circles, the highlight of this structure is the 312 meter-long ellipse (1023.62 feet) that surrounds it, indicative of its sophisticated alignment with astronomical events.
 
This town of Carmona is one of the richest archaeological sites in Tartessian findings, and is located on the shores of the ancient bay of Lacus Lingustinos, now a marshland where Atlantis, the capital-island, is suspected to be buried.
 
Also, coincidentally, Plato’s depiction of the Celestial Spheres in Timaeus, following his presentation of Atlantis, describes the universe in terms of 8 concentric bands with Earth in its center. Atlantis seemed to have a thing for concentric circles.

​I trust you have picked up on how recent most of the archaeological findings are. And just today, I read of yet another exciting discovery that furthers my case.  Stay tuned, there is much more to come!