Atlantis the Story

Precious little is known of Atlantis in the aftermath of it sinking. In the middle of the 1700s a small, private collaborate of rogue explorers discovered 12 metal scrolls buried several miles into a vast network of caves. Many of the men on that expedition were members of the same family, my family and I want to tell their story.

Three members of that clandestine excursion were brothers that were my great-great uncles. They had academic educations that allowed them to translate the first two scrolls and make notes on the remainder. They believed the first scroll, written in obscure prose, was the author’s own words and experiences.

What if anything is time against time.

From tomorrow, a child, a crow envisioned in passing clouds.

Dark eagle wings scatter closed thoughts and closed eyes as buildings shook.

All dissolved into silent passing shadows.

Come Camario, time doesn’t reflect my mind.

Given? Did I not just hear? Timeaus echo.

Company coming now, coming urgent.

All listen…tumm

Lonely child with hollow eyes rest his dark head on his pillow.

Rolling time, torrent sea. Boat lottery.

Crost, this is it for me.

Brekwhee, I can reach there in the meantime.

I try to leave, but I can’t walk anymore.

Time is come, cornering clast.

In the second scroll, an account of survival was told. It spoke of nine ships that survived, ark type ships that held passengers chosen by lottery because Atlantis’ entire population couldn’t be saved. Many of the ships were not adequately provisioned, they lacked sustainable amounts of food and water for both humans and animals.

The philosophies within the nine ships varied as much as their number. Some of the arks agreed to aggressively conquer indigenous people and settle their land. Other vessels wanted to repopulate uninhabited lands as per ancient aerial balloon survey maps. A select ark held a minority of Atlantean's that wanted to keep separate from all other races of man, respecting their special heritage and vast wealth of scientific knowledge and magic. This ark, the ninth ark set off in a fog never to be heard of again. The explorers speculated that ark’s occupants could have begun the nucleus of Briton Druids.

Another ship elected to pioneer new lands, work with the indigenous tribes and create minor societies of high intelligence and cultural wealth.

One ship, the first to flee with military armaments and the least prepared, forged into river waters and waged war against overwhelming odds. This ark held politicians and arrogant city planners who believed in the might of superior weapon technology, but succumbed to fear and were defeated.

Atlantis had paled in centuries before it sinking. Complacency, abundance, arrogance had made them forgetful. Their society fractured. Once forced from their sanctuary, the privileged refugees were faced with surviving as their long ago ancestors did. But many of the survivors were only diluted shadows of former Atlantean greatness.

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Notes from the next eight scrolls went into detail about the fabled city. They described how Atlantis was designed in concentric circles and held a culturally advanced society. The center of the rings held the original buildings that were designed to emulate the original temple in the middle of Eden. In attempts to recreate Eden, Atlantis’ society divided, between what the scrolls called the ‘deserving and undeserving’. Because of this attitude, more circles began to form in Atlantis. The inner circle became isolated and out of touch. The outer circles became less reverent of the society’s original teachings, later to separate their rings, more with rhetoric than mortar and stone.

The next circle outward acted as a protective perimeter to the center. Dwellers in that second circle felt privileged but missed the finer, beatific points of life in the center. The third circle was built stronger and higher than the first two. They began a school of learning and a library to collect and hold the founder’s sacred teachings exampled by the center and first circles. The fourth circle housed and manifested a government to oversee the collection and distribution of the teachings for both the outside world and subsequent rings of Atlantis. This circle suffered from confusion brought on by separation from the inner walls and distracted by the social gap growing outside city walls. The fifth circle was originally built for fortification and established a doctrine. Atlantis now stood for something other than its original sacred manifest. The fifth ring became something onto itself. From its high towers and parapets it could look back into the idyllic center and smile believing it was still connected and represented that knowledge, while at the same time it could look out across surrounding lands, high above the rest of humanity, separating itself and raising itself over the masses flocking in awe to it's towering gates and spires. Residences of the fifth circle considered it their duty, their responsibility to hide the revered center and to also mete out distant interpretations of Atlantean teachings to a select few outside the gates. This served for a short period of time, but the gap widened, the flocks retreated back into the natural lands surrounding Atlantis and it was decided that more circles had to be built, to protect against those that fled. These outer most rings did not represent inner teachings of Atlantis other than by proximity. Trade, Labor, basic sustainable crafts were the product of the outer circles. Those that inhabited these structures were born of both Atlantean and outlander blood. A working class that did not benefit directly from nor were privy too the secret lives of those closer to the center.

The fifth circle although the highest built had the least vision as to the original purposes of Atlantis in the days after Pandora. Their obtuse attitudes caused deterioration in the inner circles. Their clandestine usage of advanced technology increased the ills let out of the box. Until one fateful day, the earth moved, the sky broke and the waters poured in to wash the stain away. More Atlantean's could have survived if it wasn't for governmental bureaucracy and demigod attitudes projected by the fifth circle. Discussions were held, lotteries were devised and all acted individually against the greater good until their towers crumbled, sending broken stone and cleaved earth to meet each other and the waters of the sea inundated the debris and sunk the land into oblivion.

My relatives speculated that some escaped, some survived, some reverted back to original teachings and small nomadic bands traveling over land and sea, scattered Atlantis’ surviving knowledge. They postulated that Pandora’s box, ‘filled with all things known to man’ had originated in Atlantis, or rather proto-Atlantis. Initial sharing of Atlantis survivors knowledge at first lifted the common peoples, helping them, but it was a matter of too little too late. The great city’s sinking was like opening Pandora’s box. The strength of the seven sins was too strong and Atlantean teachings were bastardized into greater ills. War, Famine, Pestilence, death. So it was that Atlantean sages withdrew their knowledge all together. Seeing their own time long past, they dissolved into the landscape, silent, invisible, yet ever vigilant. Waiting in hope for a new paradigm to wash the land, to suckle offspring, to raise the soul and spirit to a higher plane so they could once again establish a beacon of inner light for all.

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Two revolutions on different continents and two world wars scarred the earth and the discovery of my great great uncles and their expedition were lost. Modern societies and empires had to rebuild, so interest in mythological antiquity waned into obscurity.

But, under and back of the universe of time, space, and change, is ever to be found the Substantial Reality, the Fundamental Truth. After hearing stories about my uncles and reading copies of letters handed down through generations of our family, I became inspired to dedicate my life to the study of archeology and antiquity.

I wondered if Atlantis could have been an advanced culture’s attempt at mimicking Eden, if the ancient mecca Gobeckli Tepe was the start of another Atlantis. The modern world had changed. I could smell change in the air. Who living today remembers anything about Gobleki Tepi? Some hypothesize it was built before the days of Abraham, possibly the center of biblical Eden. Some say it’s a temple complex honoring Noah after the flood. Some think these ruins share the same time as the fabled Atlantis. Some hesitate to speculate at all. It is a hallowed ground to be sure.

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There’s something about being in a foreign land, a scent on the air, a stirring of curiosity beneath the surface of conscious thought or maybe an exotic, unknown excitement of being out of your country, away from familiar circles.

I stood outside my tent in the early evening and breathed that exotic air, six miles out of Urfay Turkey where the Gobleki Tepi excavation site made camp. I was living my dream come true. Being able to join Dr. Schmidt’s archeological dig in uncovering the single most important site know to modern man.

Originally discovered in 1963, Gobleki Tepi is well over 11 thousand years old, some say over 20 thousand. First theorized to have been crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. Dr. Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, has been working here more than a decade, he’s convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple. Although I respected the Dr. my personal instincts and family history told me there was far more to this discovery.

The camp sat on a perch a thousand feet above the valley. From this perch we can see to the horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asked me to imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today. Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals, gently flowing rivers, fruit and nut trees and rippling fields of wild barley and wheat varieties such as Emmer and Einkorn.

"This area was like a paradise!” Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute exclaimed. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sat at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent, arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt. The bountiful land would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant.

Schmidt believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill.” In any case, my great uncles felt it was a location of rebirth for a lost surviving culture; but I’d never argue this with Dr. Schmidt.

"There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the 3300CE Sumerian clay tablets than from Sumer to today.Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility.”said over an empty cup of coffee.

The old archeologist studied me a moment longer in the fading light of the sunset, then refilled his cup and returned to his tent. I suddenly wanted to be closer to the ruins, touch the carvings on the megaliths and soak up any spiritual messages this prehistoric place of worship could bestow upon me.

As I walked on the well worn path to the ruins I thought of my aunt Gretchen, a Romany gypsy who claimed she was a distant descendent of Marco Polo. She once gave me a rare, first edition hardbound volume on his life. A quote attributed to the explorer came to mind.

”When a man is riding through this desert by night and for some reason he gets separated from his companions and wants to rejoin them, he hears spirit voices talking to him as if they were his companions, sometimes even calling him by name. Often these voices lure him away from the path and he never finds it again, and many travelers have got lost and died because of this. Even by daylight men hear these spirit voices, and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. For this reason bands of travelers make a point of keeping very close together. Before they go to sleep they set up a sign pointing in the direction in which they have to travel, and round the necks of all their beasts they fasten little bells, so that by listening to the sound they may prevent them from straying off the path."

I wanted to stay on my chosen path to find out the real truth behind the evolution of human civilization. I wasn’t interested in the academic politics or how many times archeological discoveries ended up academic dead ends because of disputes and cover-ups over truth. Gobleki Tepi was truly controversial in that manner.

I stood under a towering T-shaped megalithic whose surface was decorated with uniquely stylized animal and plant carvings. It all seemed so mythical, magical, hinting at a capability of man long lost to history or legend.

A night breeze picked up and like Marco Polo I thought I heard whispers on the wind. I ran my hands gently over the forms of the stylized plants and traced my finger around strange animal reliefs, trying to imagine who carved these images, and how the site was erected. Residential foundations hadn’t been unearthed yet. Again a breeze gently swept through the ruins and this time I distinctly heard a voice.

“The lips of wisdom are closed except to the ears of understanding. He who knows the seven principles of truth possesses a magic key before whose touch, all doors of the temple fly open. All is mind, the universe is mental. As above so below, as below so above.”

The last words echoed in my head. I wearily leaned my shoulder against the tall stele as I sank to my knees. A thought entered my mind, that if super power nations with atomic and digital technology exist side by side with aboriginal people living with only primitive survival techniques today, then why not too in the time of Atlantis? A humming grew in my head as meteors and comets blazed in my mind just before I lost consciousness.

#Challenge Atlantis #short story #fiction #legend #sinking #creative archeology #fabulism #william calkins