Page 386 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
years been paid to the violent waves that must have caused disaster
on all Mediterranean island and mainland shores about 2000-1400
bc, when the volcano on Santorini exploded and buried the whole
surface of the island with all its people and buildings. The discovery
of a truly lost island civilisation beneath the volcanic ash on this
island between Crete and Greece caused many serious scientists to
revive the long discredited story of Atlantis. One may wonder at
this revival of a much disputed Greek account of an allegedly
Egyptian tradition, the more so since the island of Santorini never
sank, nor is it in the Atlantic, the two basic points of the Atlantis
myth. But the lost Atlantis has a grip on all our imaginations, for no
other reason than that it was written down by a noted Greek almost
2400 years ago. It certainly reflects thoughts or notions concerning
the ‘beginnings’, as put down in writing by men who cared about
the past in that early period of documented history.
As to myself, I cracked many silly jokes about the possibility of
rediscovering Atlantis when we strove to keep afloat on the
papyrus ship Ra, built in Egypt, over the very locality where the
Egyptians were said to believe their Atlantis had sunk. Hopefully,
we said we were to discover how far early Mediterranean civilisa­
tion might have spread, not where the Egyptians said civilisation
had originated.
As distinct from the Ra experiments, we had sailed in Tigris to
trace the beginning of history, according to Sumerian writings.
This had brought us to Dilmun, where the Sumerians said their
forefathers had settled after the world catastrophe when most of
mankind drowned. When listening to ancient man’s opinion about
our beginnings, we can nowhere get past the stories of a flood. Long
before Christianity reached Hellas, the Greeks had three different
versions of this disastrous flood: they had their own original
deluge-myth, in which it was their own supreme god Zeus who had

61. Abandoning ship in Africa, Rashad, youngest crew member,
walks ashore in Djibouti, as we are not permitted to land m any other
area due to wars or for security reasons. With the African hills at the
entrance to the Red Sea beside us we prepare Tigris for a proud end.
62-63. Farewell Tigris, you proved a good ship and we would no
leave you here to rot. You ended as a flaming torch, with an appeal t
all industrialised nations to stop unrestricted armament delive y
the part of the world that first gave us our civilisation.

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