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.All that existed had…”“…been annihilated to leave only mud.”She had done it! She had translated the remaining part of the tablet! Having translated the last lines of text fairly quickly and in her excitement at her achievement, she had not paused to think about what it actually said.Now that she had come to the end, she read back through each line piecing them together to form a complete story.She froze.It was the sentence “…the defeated foreign invaders met a similar fate and their capital island disappeared under water” that had caught her attention.She couldn’t believe it.This was as close as you could possibly get to a match of Plato’s Atlantis story! A power which had invaded parts of the Mediterranean is defeated and thereafter its capital island is flooded and disappears under water to leave only mud! The clear Atlantis reference in the tablet may have explained Paul’s increased interest in the lost city and it was probably also the starting point for Laura’s dissertation topic, ‘The strengths and weaknesses of the Crete-Atlantis theory’, which Paul had convinced her to take on.Emma recalled that Laura had realised something about Atlantis, in particular the identity of the Atlanteans.She had run into Laura a couple of weeks ago in Oxford and had asked her about it.Laura had offered to email her a draft of her dissertation.There had been no time for Emma to read it since then and frankly she had to admit that she had forgotten to check her emails.She felt guilty for being a lousy friend.She quickly opened her emails and true to her word Laura had sent it.With a slow connection the document took a moment to download and when she opened it she saw that it was lengthy.She unplugged her laptop and went to sit on Erik’s bed to read it.Emma found that almost every sentence was backed up by footnote references.Laura had done a thorough job supporting her assumptions and the findings were well presented and convincing.It was safe to say that Laura didn’t agree with the Crete-Atlantis theory.The conclusion she came to was that the mysterious Hyksos were the people which Plato had referred to as the ‘Atlanteans’.Looking again at her own translation of the tablet Emma realised that Laura must have been right.Because of the historical context, it was almost inevitable that the ‘foreign invaders’ in the tablet referred to the Hyksos.Plato never described the Atlanteans as friendly.Instead he had said they were intent on warfare and that they introduced the use of the horse and chariot.This corresponded well with the descriptions of Hyksos, who were also said to have brought the horse and chariot to Egypt; one of many characteristics about the Hyksos which fitted well with Plato’s story.Laura told a detailed story of how the Minoan royalty Tetisheri had married a weak Upper Egypt pharaoh to form a strategic union between Upper Egypt and the Minoans.The Minoans had then helped the Egyptians to expel the Hyksos from Lower Egypt by providing a powerful fleet, with manpower from the Greek islands and mainland Greece.In connection with this the Minoan civilisation was completely ruined by the gigantic catastrophe of the Thera Volcanic eruption.Emma recalled the silver pin with the reference to Tetisheri.She was glad that someone had taken that thought further.Laura then went on to describe the link to Plato’s Atlantis story.The main point was that the events and descriptions in Plato’s story corresponded well with the Hyksos conquest.According to Plato the ‘men of Atlantis’ had occupied most of the Mediterranean, including Egypt, as well as other parts of the world at the time.The Greeks defeated the Atlanteans and liberated everyone but after the defeat there were earthquakes and floods which sank the Greek army and flooded the island of Atlantis.Laura stated that the Hyksos period was one of only a few known periods where Egypt was occupied by another country.She also pointed out that the city from where the Atlantis story originated was very near Avaris in the Nile delta, the city of Ahmose and the old Hyksos capital where Ahmose later built his Minoan palace, making this region significant to the Atlantis story.It was also said at the beginning of Plato’s story that the people of that area were ‘in some way’ related to the Greeks.So Plato identified a link between the Egyptians there and the Greeks, long before any such link was known or proven.Laura then went on to give a number of similarities between Plato’s story and the Hyksos conquest, as well as references by Plato which gave further support to her conclusion.Emma was now convinced that Laura was right.The tablet had provided the final confirmation.Although she was disappointed that Laura had not gone one step further to try to identify the Hyksos.Emma knew from her studies that the identity of this people was far from clear.They were referred to as Asiatics and they probably came from the Lebanon area but there was no consensus on whether they necessarily originated from there.She also knew that a common understanding was that they were later referred to as ‘Phoenicians’.Funnily enough, she thought, the Phoenicians had also often been linked to Atlantis since they were believed to have suffered a great cataclysm.So even this corresponded with Laura’s conclusion.Emma found Laura’s dissertation very interesting, revolutionary even.She had to call her and tell her about the tablet as soon as possible.She felt sick when she thought about the fact that Paul had known all along what the tablet said.He had had the full tablet since August.He had been able to work on the decipherment of Linear A using the tablet for almost nine months.But she doubted that he had succeeded in that time.She only knew what Mary had told her and she did not know whether he had developed any further deciphering theories, whether he had found any patterns in the tablet which would confirm an existing or develop a new theory for the decipherment of Linear A or whether he had simply concluded that the tablet wasn’t lengthy enough to draw any wider conclusions.Perhaps the full tablet wasn’t much more help.There was only one way to find out, she reasoned.She had to start working through all the possibilities.She opened a document on her computer entitled ‘Half tablet decipherment’ where she had stored her analysis of the half tablet to date.It contained no revolutionary ideas or groundbreaking theories.Starting to work on the analysis of the complete tablet, she hoped that would change [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]