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The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus. Read the book that launched a legendary Atlantis expedition and caused a news sensation around the world.
After nearly a decade of research, the lost island of Atlantis has been located by author Robert Sarmast. At a location on the sea floor of the Eastern Mediterranean region, stretching between Cyprus and Syria, Sarmast has discovered a site that matches Plato?s famed account of Atlantis with astonishing accuracy. Discovery of Atlantis goes on to provide a stunning link between this hard scientific data and the biblical legend of the Garden of Eden -- and on to the entire mythological landscape of the planet. A documentary produced by NBC news called "Quest for Atlantis: Startling New Secrets" hosted by Natalie Morales features the Cyprus/Atlantis Project and will air on the Sci-Fi channel on July 7th, 2006. A second expedition is set for the summer of 2006 and the world may soon witness the filming of the colossal ruins of this once-mighty empire, changing history forever. |
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Table of Contents |
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Foreword by Colin Wilson Preface to the Second Edition Author's Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Inserts Epilogue Expedition Report Acknowledgments Appendix Footnotes Select Bibliography Picture Credits |
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Foreword |
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by Colin Wilson I have virtually no doubt that Robert Sarmast's conclusion that Plato's Atlantis was situated in the south part of the island of Cyprus, and now lies under the sea, is correct. The story of how I reached this rather startling conclusion is as follows: In August 2004 I received a phone call from a travel agent named Roy Bird, who organizes trips to exotic places. He told me that an American named Robert Sarmast was about to set out on an expedition from Limassol, Cyprus, with the aim of trying to locate Atlantis. He asked me what I thought of the notion that Atlantis might be found in that area. I replied that I could think of nothing less likely. Plato had said that Atlantis was "beyond the Pillars of Hercules," which are generally accepted to be the Straits of Gibraltar. Professor Galanapoulos, the chief advocate of the Santorini theory of Atlantis, argued that two capes of southern Greece, Maleas and Taenarum, were also known as the Pillars of Hercules. But as far as I could see, there was no possible way in which the island of Cyprus, in the extreme eastern Mediterranean, could be "beyond" the Pillars of Hercules on either interpretation. But, said Roy Bird, according to Sarmast the ends of the Bosphorus were also known as the Pillars of Hercules. And if you were observing these from Greece, you would be looking due east, and Cyprus would indeed be "beyond" them. I had to admit that if Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, it would explain another puzzle: Plato's assertion that the Atlanteans had been at war with the Athenians. If Atlantis had been somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean-or even, as my fellow author Rand Flem-Ath had suggested, on the continent of Antarctica- war between nations so far apart would have been next to impossible. The reason Roy Bird was ringing me was that he hoped I might interest The Daily Mail in the story, and tempt a few hundred tourists to pay cash to join the expedition. I rang a friend on the Mail features staff, who liked the idea and asked me to write an article about it. Which is what I did. However, the newspaper decided not to print the address of my website, which gave details of how potential customers could pay their money. And so, from Roy Bird's point of view, the whole exercise was a waste of time. But by then I had got hold of Sarmast's book, The Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus, and was so intrigued by his theory that I decided to take a holiday in Cyprus with my wife, Joy, and look into it myself. We had a friend who had retired to Limassol-psychic Robert Cracknel-and this would give us an opportunity to go and visit him. He obligingly booked us into a beach hotel in Limassol, and so in September we flew to Larnaca, and were met off the plane by Bob and his wife Jenny. From our hotel we rang Sarmast, who was staying in Limassol, and invited him to dinner the following day. We had already been told that the expedition would not sail on time, due to various problems to do with obtaining permits. So we did not expect to be able to sail on the ship. In fact, it had begun to look as if it might be months before it set out. But the following evening, when Sarmast arrived at our hotel for an early drink, he told us that things had suddenly improved dramatically and that it now looked as if they would be leaving that weekend. Sarmast was a good-looking man in his late thirties who was born in Iran but had spent most of his life in America. As we sat on the terrace drinking cold beer, he told me about his background and how he had become interested in Atlantis. When he left university, he said, he had felt that his priority was to "find himself," and so he bought a one-way ticket to India to avoid the temptation of changing his mind. There he found various gurus, but ended by feeling basically dissatisfied. His story reminded me of so many "religious Outsiders" I have written about - for example, P. D. Ouspensky, who went to India before the First World War in search of a guru who could teach him the meaning of life, but failed to find one until he returned to Russia and met Gurdjieff. In Robert Sarmast's case the search continued after his return to America. One of the things he came across was a teaching that identified Atlantis with the Biblical Eden. It was in pursuing this odd clue that he came to feel that Eden had been to the west of Syria, in the days when the Mediterranean was far lower than it is today, and when the island of Cyprus had been joined to the mainland. Like Galanapoulos, he concluded that Plato's figures had been exaggerated by the copyist (even Plato expressed doubts about them), who mistook the symbol for ten for the very similar symbol for a hundred, resulting in size and distance descriptions that were ten times too large. Sarmast went on to point out that: (1) Plato says that the fertile plain was used by farmers to grow food for the Atlanteans. But such an area is about half the size of England and would certainly provide more food than any city could eat, even London. So anyone can see that these figures would be more convincing if divided by ten. Besides, said Sarmast, maps show a vast undersea plain twenty-three miles long by thirty-four miles wide. Knock off two noughts from Plato's Atlantis plain and you have these exact dimensions. He managed to persuade some French oceanographers to let him have a small section of their recent survey of the sea bed covering that area. He found a hill in the exact spot where Plato's Acropolis Hill should have been, as well as what appeared to be a long wall at its foot-again, as Plato described. In fact, as Plato said, the whole hill seemed to be boxed in by walls, as far as one could judge from surveys taken a mile deep. Later, in the restaurant, Sarmast showed us a computer simulation of the sea breaking through the mountain barrier that once separated Gibraltar from North Africa. Now it was during the 1960s that geologists first learned that the earth's surface is not a continuous sheet, like the skin of an orange, but consists of tectonic plates which move about separately. Then scientists learned that the Mediterranean is a fairly young sea that was created about seven million years ago, when the plate containing Africa drifted north and collided with Europe. The sea was trapped into a kind of gigantic pond, which extended from Gibraltar to Lebanon. Gradually, this pond evaporated in the hot sun until the floor of the basin was covered with gleaming salt flats. Geologists have always assumed that the Atlantic began to break through a gap near Gibraltar five million or so years ago, as stated in this book. But since salt beds cannot be carbon dated, no one knows for certain. All we know is that the last great ice age began about a hundred and fifteen thousand years ago, and came to an end about fifteen thousand years ago. We also know there have been many tremendous floods since it ended, as vast northern lakes melted and poured billions of gallons of fresh water into the sea. Plato, of course, stated that Atlantis was submerged nine thousand years before his own time, which would make it about 9400 BC. Sarmast suggests that about this time, or even thousands of years before it, the shifting of the tectonic plates caused a breach and the Atlantic Ocean broke through what used to be the Gibraltar dam, rushing into the island-dotted salt lake we now call the Mediterranean. The day after our dinner, Sarmast was having a press conference on board the ship the Flying Enterprise, and we were invited -together with Bob and Jenny Cracknell. A television crew interviewed Sarmast on the bridge, and I later did a short televised interview for the local news, explaining why I thought it conceivable that this search for Atlantis, which was being partly financed by the government of Cyprus (mainly for its anticipated effect on the tourist trade), might well produce interesting results. We also looked at the robot camera that could be used to scan at a depth of a mile. That weekend, Joy and I returned home. In fact, the Flying Enterprise failed to leave Limassol the day it was supposed to, apparently still on account of permits. After several weeks I more or less gave up wondering when the expedition would finally set out. But on Sunday, November 14, 2004, Bob Cracknell rang me from Cyprus to say that Sarmast had sailed the previous Monday, and was now back in Limassol, announcing that he had found Atlantis-or something very like it. I lost no time in ringing Sarmast, who told me he had a press conference in an hour but would ring me back later in the day. He kept his promise, and I recorded the conversation. It seemed that, in spite of initial difficulties, the Flying Enterprise had reached the area of the "Acropolis Hill," then released the sonar device on three miles of steel cable, which was towed behind the ship, about fifty feet above the sea bed. Then the winch releasing the cable broke down, and it took a whole night to repair. (This was done by technicians, one of whom had just returned from working on the Titanic.) After another long day making long sweeps over the area of the temple mount, the team went to bed very tired. Robert was awakened with the discouraging news that the generator, which provided the energy for the winch, had failed. It looked at that point as if the expedition was over, and there was nothing to do but return to Limassol. However, without the winch, the cable could not be wound in. There was only one thing to do-get another generator. This had to be brought from Limassol, and it was even bigger than the one that had broken down (which was about the size of a small room). And, of course, the ship had to keep moving, otherwise the sonar device would sink down to the seafloor and might well get snagged on some obstacle. So they continued to steam ahead, waiting for the arrival of the ship (the EDT Ares) with the new generator. When this finally happened, both ships had to steer a parallel course while the new generator was transferred to the deck of the Flying Enterprise on a steel cable. Sarmast said that he was terrified that, if the cable snapped while the generator was swinging aloft, the expensive sonar equipment would be lost and people would get seriously injured by the flying cable. Finally, the transfer was made and the new generator installed. The Ares sailed back to Limassol, while the Flying Enterprise turned in a huge circle, with its trailing cable, and went back over the mound that they thought to be Plato's Acropolis Hill. What they were doing, in effect, was using the sonar to "film" long strips of sea bed. But as Sarmast looked at the first results, he was discouraged. They seemed to show very little. When he went to bed that night, he had come to accept that the whole expedition had been a failure and that he was no nearer to proving that the undersea mound was Plato's Acropolis hill. He awoke to good news. While he had been asleep, the technicians had been working on the long "strips" of map, placing them side by side. And what had finally emerged was a great hill, about three kilometers long, with a plateau on top and unmistakable signs of a great wall surrounding it. He had recognized the signs of a wall at the southern foot of the hill on the original sonar maps provided by the French, but "experts" he had consulted had told him it was probably a mud slide. He had replied that a mud slide that long, and in a straight line, was unlikely, but they had declined to be convinced. Now he had been proved right. Two weeks later Robert came to London, and he and I appeared together in a television interview about his discovery. While having dinner at Bertorelli, in Soho, I asked him what would happen now. "Now," he said, "we start the long, slow business of raising money for a second expedition with an ROV that can get down there on the sea bed, and see what we've really found." POSTSCRIPT In August 2005 the BBC website published a recent discovery that seemed to confirm that Sarmast is correct.The story begins: A submerged island that could be the source of the Atlantis myth was hit by a large earthquake and tsunami 12,000 years ago, a geologist has discovered. It went on: Spartel Island now lies 60m under the sea in the Straits of Gibraltar, but some think it once lay above water. The finding adds weight to a hypothesis that the island could have inspired the legend recounted by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago. Evidence comes from a seafloor survey published in the journal Geology. The report concludes: But the mapping of the island carried out by Dr. Gutscher failed to turn up any man-made structures and also showed that the island was much smaller than previously believed. This is only to be expected. Spartel Island is too small to have been Plato's Atlantis. But if, in 10,000 BC, it exploded like the island of Santorini eight and a half millennia later, then it would have triggered a tsunami that would have devastated the southern part of the island of Cyprus. Sarmast understandably regards this event as an extremely powerful piece of evidence for his Cyprus theory of Atlantis. March 2006 |
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