The Wars of Atlantis Page 8

  However, although the Proto-Athenians did not realize it, and the Shemsu Hor only had fearful suspicions, the counter-invasion was already creating trouble for itself. The Gorgones, given free access to captured temples and places of power, were allowing their dark impulses to run riot as their fastidious allies turned their gazes aside, and were conducting blasphemous rites that were outraging the powers of Olympus. The gods were growing tired of all these mortals.

  Proto-Athenian Infantryman. This figure is typical of Greek troops from early in the Atlantean Wars, before their armour and weapons began to show more influence from their Atlantean enemies. The banded bronze armour and ‘boar’s tusk’ helmet are both remarkably similar to designs from the Mycenaean Bronze Age, which may have been influenced by ancient folk memories or surviving Atlantean Age art. In combat, this man would fight primarily with a long spear, in a close formation with others similarly equipped.

  ASSAULT ON ATLANTIS

  In any case, the war was not yet over. The final stage came when the grand alliance, having regrouped and ensured that they had driven the Atlanteans from Europe and Africa completely, decided to end the threat for good and all. Despite the auguries that some of their priests were claiming to have read, which warned of dark consequences if they overreached themselves, they decided to launch another counter-invasion, this time against Atlantis itself. Hence, while the Atlanteans on their ‘invulnerable’ island were still deciding how to describe their defeat and who to blame for it, their enemies, full of brash confidence, prepared a great fleet, manned it with seasoned troops, and set sail across the Atlantic.

  This was not totally unexpected, of course; some of the lords of Atlantis had some idea how to run spy networks. However, the first line of defence of their homeland was never meant to be mere military strength; all of Atlantis was a land sacred to Poseidon, ruled by kings who were both demigods and high priests. Now, they called on their divine ancestor to punish the blasphemers on the horizon.

  And Poseidon did respond, in accordance with ancient pacts. The god of the sea and of monsters sent some of his creatures to scatter the invaders. However, the Atlanteans had overestimated their own standing in the eyes of the gods, and underestimated their enemies. The Proto-Athenians were great warriors, perhaps inspired by the power of their patron, the warrior goddess Athene, while the Shemsu Hor knew rituals and words of power which could ward off even monsters sent by Poseidon – they too had a god on their side, after all. And what greatly unnerved Proto-Athenians and Shemsu Hor was that the small group of masked Gorgones on their ships were also useful in this conflict; they used some kind of blood magic, and whenever one of the sea monsters was injured, the Gorgones could use its own blood to power spells which blasted these creatures with pain and terror.

  Hence, the invasion fleet reached the shores of Atlantis largely intact. The Atlanteans had expected Poseidon’s creatures to scatter it, and so were slow to respond, allowing the attackers to land largely unopposed. Worse, a determined and truly heroic Proto-Athenian force stormed ashore first and seized the fortifications at the entrance to the ship canal, where the capital of the Empire came down to the sea, granting the attackers a route directly into the city itself. This exposed the fatal weakness in the grandiose design of the city; a seaborne attacker who broke through at that one point was inside the place’s first line of defence before the battle had even really started, and even had the option to sail right up to the circular defences of the inner city.

  Of course, any such seaborne attack was likely to suffer harassment from the adjacent banks of the canal, unless those were cleared of Atlantean missile troops – but the resolute and capable Proto-Athenian soldiers were up to that task. Days of brutal street-fighting followed, but that gave the advantage to the best individual soldiers, who were the heroes from Greece. Meanwhile, the huge Atlantean army, potentially so formidable in set-piece battles on open ground, found itself having to make its way through the maze of streets of the outer city. Its greatest potential advantages – sheer numbers, the highly effective massed chariots, and the war-elephants – were largely neutralized.

  But the invading commanders knew that this advantage couldn’t last forever; eventually, the full weight of the nine other kingdoms of Atlantis would come bearing down on the beachhead in the city. So they resolved to keep up the momentum of their attack, aiming to seize the inner rings of the city and break the Empire’s resolve before numbers could tell. And, even against the best soldiers Atlantis could produce – the professional defenders of the capital, backed by the blessings of Poseidon himself – the attack ground forward. Even the metal-plated walls of the inner circles failed to hold them off, as Shemsu Hor diviners identified every weakness in the defence.

  Meanwhile, behind them, their Gorgones auxiliaries plundered temples and slaughtered civilians. Perhaps the Proto-Athenians and Shemsu Hor thought that this would break the spirit of the defenders; perhaps they were just past caring in their headlong charge towards victory or death. Unfortunately, they failed to recognize that, in a war which the gods themselves were watching closely, permitting such outrages was fatally bad tactics.

  THE ALLIANCE FLEET

  The invasion of Atlantis required a fleet, of course, but the Proto-Athenians and their allies had the core of one to hand. The Atlanteans, who simply had no idea how to manage when faced with defeat, had been careless enough to leave many of their vessels in harbour, intact, when their colonial ports were captured. Some rebuilding and expansion were required, but the Proto-Athenians were fair sailors and shipwrights themselves; also the Atlanteans had actually recruited a number of crews and workers from local populations, and these people were generally easy enough to bring over to what now looked like the winning side.

  The invasion needed more than captured vessels and whatever could be built in a few months, of course, but it turned out that the alliance had more ships to hand. Both the Greeks and the Tyrrhenians of Italy had made some study of the Atlantean fleets which had attacked their lands, captured a few, and built some partial imitations; indeed, the Proto-Athenians had emulated the Atlantean strategy of supporting land forces with transport ships when marching the length of North Africa. Now, combining these with many more captured vessels, the alliance had an adequate invasion fleet.

  Perils on the Sea As the counter-invasion of Atlantis crosses the ocean, one of the ships – an oar-and-sail vessel, based on Atlantean designs but less sophisticated – is attacked by a sea monster, sent by Atlantean priests of Poseidon. However, it has its own supernatural protection. Proto-Athenian warriors on the deck fight back with swords and spears, although they have not had time to don full armour, while on the stern of the ship, a Greek priest is frantically calling on the goddess Athene for aid. More immediately effectively, though, a masked Gorgones sorceress is on deck, gathering blood-power from the battle itself to turn against the monster.

  DIVINE WRATH

  Unfortunately for all concerned, the gods of Olympus did not like what they were seeing at all. Poseidon disliked the way that mortals had assaulted his favoured island, while most of the other gods were equally annoyed that Poseidon’s descendants had become so decadent and attempted to conquer the rest of the world. Thanks to Atlantean arrogance in the early stages and the grim determination of their enemies later on, the war had proved brutal and absolute, with temples and sacred groves burned and sacked everywhere the fighting passed. Apparently worst of all for the standing of the alliance was the presence among their forces of those few, unreliable Gorgones – or indeed, perhaps, the mere fact of anyone else talking to the Gorgones at all. It seems that their style of magic in particular was somehow blasphemous, and offended the gods in some truly personal way. Perhaps they worshipped older deities – the Titans whom the Olympians had allegedly deposed, or something else ancient and inhuman – and their actions in the war threatened to return those dark powers to the world.

  The Closing of the Gates of Olympus. The total destr
uction of Atlantis was probably the greatest catastrophe ever caused by large-scale divine meddling in the mortal world. It certainly seems to have deterred the gods from further such interventions, and caused them to close the arcane portals between their world and our own, as seen here.

  Squabbles were raging across Olympus even before the alliance fleet had set out, distracting Poseidon from sending his worshippers enough aid to stop it. Eventually, Zeus himself lost his temper – always a terrifying event, even for other gods – and declared that it might be necessary to burn the problems down to the roots. Unfortunately, none of the other gods could talk their ruler back from his vow to himself to eliminate these problems, and when Gorgones plunderers ran amok in the temples of Atlantis, actually desecrating some of them into places of dark and blood-drenched power, few could find the impulse to try.

  Hence, by the time that an elite Proto-Athenian warrior band was smashing its way into the citadel of Atlantis, the gods were set on punishing all of the mortals involved. A council of the most powerful Olympians had declared that the Atlanteans, formerly considered the best of mortals, had become decadent and unworthy, with Zeus overruling Poseidon’s increasingly weak objections. Unfortunately, with the Atlanteans’ enemies being, as it seemed to the gods, blasphemous and hubristic, the consensus on Olympus was that both sides should face divine punishment. The Olympians, always prone to dramatic gestures and symbolism, chose the moment of apparent alliance triumph to chastise both sides.

  But even so, what followed seemingly ran out of hand. Much later, Plato would claim that Zeus only wanted to chasten the Atlanteans (and probably also the Proto-Athenians), so that they would learn better and return to their old, virtuous ways. If so, Zeus himself, working before all the other gods on Olympus, made a terrible error – because the dead learn no lessons.

  Perhaps divine anger overruled divine wisdom on this occasion. Perhaps, in seeking to punish an island which had been raised by divine patronage, the gods were playing with forces greater than even they could control. Perhaps the dark magic of the Gorgones had raised pre-human forces that the gods found it difficult to overcome, or perhaps that Gorgones magic amplified the power of divine punishment in ways that the gods did not anticipate. It may well not have helped that Zeus demanded that Poseidon should actively cooperate in the punishment – the Atlanteans were his responsibility, after all – and Poseidon was a god, not just of well-aimed thunderbolts like his brother, but of earthquakes and tidal waves. Perhaps Zeus insisted that Poseidon exert his full power, without quite appreciating what that implied. In any event, the exercise of power that was supposed to devastate Atlantis and scatter both sides’ armies instead destroyed the island entirely. In brief, the world shook, and Atlantis sank beneath the waves. The entire island vanished within hours (Plato says ‘within a single day and night’), and the onrushing ocean obliterated everyone, Atlantean and invader alike. Perhaps a few lucky ships from both sides managed to remain afloat; later accounts suggest that many of the city’s buildings remained recognizably intact beneath the sea, implying that the waters hit with only moderate force. The island eventually sank to the full depth of the surrounding ocean, although a few of the higher mountains seem to have survived to form small islands in the Atlantic, and Plato claimed that the process left shallow waters over muddy shoals just outside the Pillars of Hercules, rendering the ocean effectively unnavigable in that region. In fact, he rather curiously claimed that the shoals were still present in his time, although many Greek sailors could have told him that ships quite regularly ventured out into the Atlantic and returned safely.

  The Catastrophe When the gods chose to punish both Atlantis and its invading enemies, the ensuing destruction was absolute. Most accounts and depictions show the island being devastated piecemeal by volcanic eruptions or earthquakes before sinking beneath the waves more or less intact, but this image shows something even more cataclysmic.

  Apparently, part of Atlantis, adjacent to the capital city, has already sunk dramatically, and the rest will soon follow; meanwhile, eruptions are throwing up clouds of volcanic ash as the sea pours into the new abyss. If this is an accurate depiction of the last moments of the city, none of the invading force which had been plundering the citadel just moments before could conceivably have survived.

  GLOBAL DEVASTATION

  The consequences of this divine act were obviously devastating – but actually much more so, it seems, than the gods themselves expected, and on a very much wider scale. The Olympians did not always have judgement to match their power, and on this occasion, they misjudged spectacularly.

  Basically, the disaster caused the complete collapse of civilization throughout the Mediterranean region, in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and elsewhere. Curiously, the ultimate consequences did not involve much change in sea levels, which should logically have fallen with the removal of such a mass of land – but perhaps the gods attempted to compensate for this effect somehow, and the very act of adding more water caused more problems. Certainly, it seems that Greece suffered catastrophic floods, so that the city that would one day be called Athens had to be re-founded later by refugees and country folk returning to the region from the high mountains. On the other hand, Sais largely survived, along with other Egyptian cities, although the Shemsu Hor government apparatus took a bad mauling. And perhaps the people of adjacent coastal lands took their famous flood legends from this time.

  The worst devastation outside of Atlantis itself, though, was not surprisingly suffered by the Amazon-dominated regions of North Africa, many of which were shattered by what would nowadays be called tsunamis. The Amazon heartlands suffered especially badly, as the Marsh Tritonis was torn apart by a combination of giant waves, sea level shifts, and earthquakes. The geological activity initiated by the gods triggered a series of volcanic eruptions on Hespera, which then partly sank like an echo of Atlantis; the remnants fragmented into a cluster of small rocky islands, which in turn sank or were eroded away in the next few centuries. The site is no longer identifiable, and Kherronesos and all the other Amazon cities on the island were lost. With the Atlantean trade-towns doing little better, and with the region already being on the verge of collapse in the wake of conquest by Proto-Athenians and pillaging by their barbarian allies, civilization in the area was reduced to rustic, semi-nomadic tribalism.

  The Decline of Civilizations. The annihilation of an entire island continent and of the military forces of its enemies, with ensuing seismic and climatic side-effects, brought about the total collapse of Atlantean Age civilization. Here, wanderers erect ragged tents in the ensuing wilderness.

  ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATIONS

  The account given in this book represents the best ideas we have about the history of Atlantis and the Atlantean Wars, as affirmed by the father of western philosophy and the secret records beneath the Sphinx. But it’s possible that there has been some distortion in the transmission, and that some of the details are wrong.

  Some modern writers certainly think that references to ‘gods’ in classical texts actually refer to something else, seen through the distorting lens of superstition. At the simplest, the fall of Atlantis may have been a natural disaster, with ‘the gods’ being blamed after the event by people who couldn’t believe that some things were just accidents. Was there a war? Who were the two sides? Did the disaster happen at such a crucial moment? Who knows? Coincidences do happen. On the other hand, losing a large island, without leaving much evidence of geological catastrophe, and so completely that little evidence is left for later generations, is quite a dramatic and unusual natural disaster.

  So an alternative might make more sense. Those ‘gods’ may not have been paternalistic supernatural shapeshifters, but actually technologically highly advanced space aliens, manipulating primitive human society as an experiment or for some obscure reasons of their own. A sufficiently advanced technology could influence the Earth’s geology on a large scale, and the ‘Children of Poseidon’ may have been the pr
oducts of advanced genetic engineering. Perhaps the aliens carefully located that experiment in a geologically unstable area, to make disposing of the results of failure much simpler.

  The ‘ancient astronauts’ may have tinkered only with Atlantean society and biology, and then become annoyed when their products misused their enhanced abilities to pick fights with other humans (which they didn’t even win) – or they may have been running multiple experiments. If they were experimenting on the Proto-Athenians, it was probably just with their society, but their meddling in Egypt may have been even more overt than it was in Atlantis; after all, the Shemsu Hor, with their masks, their ‘misshapen’ skulls, and their claims to companionship with a sky-god, sound as if they may themselves have been alien.

  And what were the Gorgones? The products of a rival alien race or faction, with their (inhuman?) leaders concealing their nature behind masks? Or humans who had the temerity to recognize what the aliens were doing, thanks to their own mastery of psychic powers, and who refused to play any part in this scheme, but who instead stood for human independence?