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Looking for Atlantis REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg LOOKING FOR ATLANTIS Just about a year ago, magazine time Guanches, the prehistoric native race of —it was in the issue dated March 2012, the islands, long since absorbed into the but I write these columns well in ad- culture of the Spanish conquerors who vance—I told of my forthcoming trip to had arrived in the fifteenth century. Set- the Canary Islands, and expounded the tlements of Guanches, a race of tall, nineteenth-century theory that this handsome, fair-skinned people, were group of islands in the Atlantic is, in fact, found on all seven of the islands. (Strictly all that remains of the lost continent of speaking, only the people of the island of Atlantis. Tenerife used the name “Guanches” for Well, now it is actually March of 2012, themselves, or, more accurately, “Guan though this column will not appear un- Chenerfe,” meaning “son of Tenerife,” the til early in 2013, and I have returned other islanders using such names for from the Canary Islands and can share themselves as “Bimbaches,” “Mahos,” and with you the results of my efforts to dis- “Gomeros,” though they all had similar cover the surviving vestiges of that lost languages and cultural practices. Since continent. the Spanish conquest the term has been Atlantis, as I said in the earlier piece, applied generally to the entire indige- was first heard from about 355 B.C.in nous population.) Plato’s dialog Timaeus. In that work he The curious thing about the various tells a tale that he says goes back nine island groups lumped under the name thousand years, to a time when the vast of “Guanches” is that at the time of the and mighty land of Atlantis controlled Spanish invasion in the fifteenth cen- the entrance to the Mediterranean and tury they had no knowledge of the art dominated much of the territory east- of navigation. Each population group ward from there. Plato describes the was confined to its own island and had great palaces and temples of Atlantis, no contact with any of the others. Since its harbors and docks, and the huge de- they had similar languages and cultur- fensive wall surrounding its capital, al traits, they must all have had some fashioned of locally quarried stone, common ancestor, and it was reason- “one kind white, another black, and a able to assume that they once had had third red,” covered with plates of tin, of sufficient maritime skills to have been brass, and of the yellowish-red metal able to come across by boat from the called orichalcum, evidently some alloy mainland of Africa, but somehow had of copper. lost those skills as the centuries Belligerent, warlike Atlantis got its passed. comeuppance, Plato says, when it was as- The nineteenth century, a time of sailed by violent earthquakes and floods, great interest in the world’s prehistoric “and in a single day and night of rain . past, produced not only reasonable sci- the island of Atlantis disappeared, and entific assumptions but a great many was sunk beneath the sea.” unreasonable ones, and among them The notion that the Canary Islands were some odd theories of how the were the surviving mountaintops of At- Guanches got to the islands. One was lantis was first set forth in 1803 by a that they had crossed from the vicinity French scholar, Bory de Saint-Vincent, of what is now Morocco on a land bridge who focused his attention on the that later sank into the sea. (There is no 4 Asimov’s geological evidence for such a bridge.) tourist destination Tenerife because, Another, of an even higher order of im- aside from its pleasant winter weather, probability, is that the seven widely scat- it offered the finest botanical garden in tered islands making up the Canaries the islands, botany being a major inter- represent the highest peaks of what had est of mine, and a museum devoted to been the continent of Atlantis before it the prehistoric culture of the Canaries. was destroyed, nine thousand years ago, Gran Canaria turned out to be a dry, hot by that devastating earthquake and place, rugged and mountainous, with for- flood. The Guanches, so the notion goes, bidding cliffs of brown rock in the interi- were the surviving Atlanteans, who had or and a fringe of pretty beaches all along fled to the tops of the islands’ mountains its coast. No marble in sight. No orichal- when the cataclysm struck and had be- cum. I abandoned the Atlantis theory come stranded there, isolated from one forthwith. another by a sea that they eventually The museum of prehistory, though, in forgot how to cross. the capital city of Las Palmas, offered a Well, maybe so. But one big problem different hypothesis, nearly as exciting, is that Plato’s Atlantis was just a fanta- for the presence of the Guanches in the sy, a pretty fable that he had brought Canaries. forth to illustrate certain philosophical Ancient burial mounds are found all points. As his own pupil Aristotle said, over the islands, particularly on Gran “He who invented it destroyed it.” The Canaria and Tenerife. Archaeologists lost continent has, of course, been a sta- have uncovered more than a thousand ple of speculative fiction for a long time. well-preserved Guanche skeletons in Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo took his them, and even some mummies, pre- submarine, the Nautilus, to the sunken served by a process not very different ruins of Atlantis (“vast heaps of stone, from the one used in ancient Egypt. One amongst which might be traced the rather grim room in the Las Palmas mu- vague and shadowy forms of castles seum provides a comprehensive display and temples”), and located it roughly in of them: hundreds of skulls in cases the vicinity of the Canaries. Many a lat- along the walls, plus some complete er novelist, including the author of this skeletons and a few mummies. From column, has written novels of fantasy these one can see that the prehistoric in- telling of the glory and destruction of habitants of the Canaries were, just as Atlantis. But modern undersea explo- the early Spanish conquerors said, a tall ration has failed to produce any evi- race, the men averaging more than six dence that the seas beyond the Straits feet in height, with high foreheads, long of Gibraltar hold the ruins of a lost con- skulls, relatively short arms, wide, tinent. The tale of Atlantis remains just prominent cheekbones, and red or blond that—a tale. hair. Well, I liked the idea that the Canary The interesting thing about that is Islands were the mountains of Atlantis, that it could be a description of the pale- rising above the sea like the masts of a olithic Cro-Magnon race that occupied sunken ship, and while I was there last southern France some thirty thousand month I searched diligently for some years ago and left us such remarkable vestige of the lost continent, a bit of mar- things as the painted caves of Lascaux. ble frieze sticking up somewhere, a frag- We have no Cro-Magnon mummies, so ment of orichalcum siding, a quarry that we have no idea what color their hair might have yielded the various-colored might have been, but otherwise the stone of the great wall. Alas, I found Guanche skeletons are an anatomical none of that. The island I visited was match for the “cave-man” bones that Gran Canaria, one of the two largest; I have been found in France’s Dordogne picked it rather than the more popular region and points southward from there: Reflections: Looking for Atlantis 5 February 2013 a tall, long-skulled people, with those One can still see Canarians with Cro- markedly jutting cheekbones. Magnon faces in the island towns today. The resemblance between the Guanch- (There is even a painted cave, dating es and the Cro-Magnons was noticed al- from the twelfth century A.D., on Gran most as soon as the Cro-Magnons them- Canaria. Its murals look nothing like selves had been re-discovered during those of the celebrated Lascaux cave of railway excavations in France in 1868. ancient Cro-Magnon times, but, well, Nine years later, the French archaeolo- artistic styles do change over the course gist Rene Verneau (1852-1938) spent a of twenty-five thousand years.) year in the Canary Islands, studying the So I didn’t find Atlantis in the Ca- relationship between the Guanches and nary Islands, but I did, it seems, find the Cro-Magnons by exploring burial the last outpost of the Cro-Magnons. mounds, habitable caves, ancient monu- One aspect of that that I particularly ments, and even funeral parlors, where like is that a Spanish priest of the late he could examine the bodies of the re- sixteenth century jotted down about a cently dead (for, although Guanche cul- hundred Guanche words while their ture was suppressed by the Spaniards, language was still a living thing. Those the Guanches themselves were only hundred words are all that is left of the partly assimilated into the conquering Guanche tongue. They are interesting race by intermarriage, and much of their enough for that, but what if they are original gene pool survives on the is- also, by some tenuous line of descent, lands even today.) words that the Cro-Magnons spoke? To Verneau there was little doubt that We know nothing at all of the language the Guanches had been a surviving out- of the ancient cave-painters. But the lier of the vanished Cro-Magnon race.
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