7

p Man’s discovery of the world can be divided into three main stages. The first relates to prehistoric times, when primitive tribes were spreading across the globe. The second is the Age of Great Geographical Discoveries, from the 15th to the 18th centuries, when Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Russian seafarers and travellers mapped new countries, seas, islands, mountain ranges and deserts. The third covers the 19th and 20th centuries, the Age of Great Historical Discoveries.

p Until the 19th century the only written records which European historians and philosophers had on early history were the Bible and the works of the historians of antiquity. But after the Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform scripts were deciphered the stream of source material swelled into a flood. The scholar of today has literally no time to read everything that has come down to us. In the Middle Ages the Bible was accepted without question. The sceptical 18th century regarded biblical accounts as fairy-tales. Today, Orientalists consider the sacred book of Christianity and Judaism a magnificent historical document—although requiring a special approach. Every proper name, geographical name, event and date in the Bible has to be deciphered, as it were, since actual happenings, personages, peoples and cities are refracted through a "prism of myths" enveloped in fantasy or poetry.

p The creativity and mythopoetic gifts of Judean preachers, prophets and poets over many centuries, beginning with the 13th century B.C., went into the making of the Bible. The Bible absorbed myths and legends of the more ancient culture of Mesopotamia, reflected actual events of that 8 period in the Middle East, and, as all sacred writings should, presented a universal picture of the world from its inception to its imminent end.

p The “deciphering” of biblical evidence has helped scholars to establish many historical events. Other sacred literature provides equally valuable source material. (Like the Bible this literature has to be painstakingly “deciphered”.) Take, for example, the Veda, the sacred books of the Hindus, particularly the Rig-Veda, the oldest, longest and most interesting of the books; the A vesta, the sacred book of the Parsic fire worshippers; the Popol Vuh, or Book of the Peoples of the Quiche; and the many myths, legends, and fairytales of the most diverse peoples. If we make allowances for the "prism of myths" through which actual events were refracted, all this can be a splendid record that helps us to pierce the veil of time.

p In the course of their work on ancient writings and sacred books, philologists came into contact with a great many languages. Reading the RigVeda and Avesta, they discovered that ancient Hindu and Persian words were astonishingly similar to words in the Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian and other languages, in short almost all European languages, including Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The similarity of words and roots was not accidental. It showed the ancient kinship of the languages that became known as the Indo-European family. The discovery laid the foundation of a new science, historical and comparative linguistics.

p Furthermore, this discovery proved just as important to the science of history. It showed that not only texts but language itself, its grammar and, particularly, vocabulary, can be an 9 excellent historical source, moreover, a source that has not been “edited” by rulers, priests, officials or scribes.

p Language data enable the historian to look far back to periods when written language did not yet exist and which have not left any other material evidence. There are cases when the words of a language can take the place of the archeologist’s spade and the annals of ancient chroniclers.

p Where was the birthplace of the Indo- European languages, and therefore of the tribes that spoke a single "parent Indo-European language" (or cognate dialects, as many scholars believe)? What was their cultural level? What were their occupations? Indo-European unity broke up long before writing was invented. Archeology, too, is still powerless to help. None of the cultures found on the vast expanses of Eurasia can be authentically linked to the Indo-Europeans. All that is left are linguistic data. By comparing words of the different Indo-European languages and searching for the oldest stratum of a common vocabulary, philologists have been able to tell historians a great deal.

p For instance, "language archeology" has revealed that while the Indo-Europeans knew the rudiments of agriculture the similarity in the names of domestic animals, including differentiated names—separate names for cow, calf, sheep, lamb, horse, colt and so on—shows that their chief occupation was cattle-raising.

p The discovery of this fact enabled scholars to narrow considerably the search for the original Indo-European homeland. It could not be the forests of Lithuania or the island of Ireland, as some scholars had supposed. The plains bordering on the Black Sea or the plains in Central 10 Asia appeared to be a more natural place. The latest findings in linguistics tell us that the most likely area is Asia Minor. For it has been found that some Caucasian languages and the Semitic languages have words in common that could not have been borrowed, since they belong to the basic vocabulary. This shows an underlying kinship of the above languages, and also that the most suitable territory for their “coexistence” was Asia Minor.

p Since languages change it is obvious that the earlier the stage at which the historian finds a language the more valuable the information he can obtain from it. Discovery of the secret of ancient scripts has enabled scholars to study more than thirty centuries of the Greek language. (It was inscribed on clay tablets one thousand years before Homer!) The history of the Egyptian and the Akkadian languages covers an equally long span. Whole branches of Indo-European languages that have vanished from the face of the earth have been brought to light, as have new families of languages like the Hurri Urartic language that was spoken in Mitanni and Urartu, great kingdoms of the ancient East.

p The historian widely uses ancient texts and the data provided by the vocabularies of cognate languages. But if he has neither texts nor vocabularies he can turn to toponymy, a science that combines history with linguistics and geography, for help. The names of cities, settlements, mountains and, particularly, rivers endure after countries, peoples and languages have vanished. No wonder they are sometimes called "history on the surface of the map”. The names of the rivers Don, Dnieper, Danube, Dniester and Donets tell us that Scythians once lived on the territory of Southern 11 Europe and along the Black Sea, for the Scythian word “don” means “water” or “river”.

p Toponymy is helping modern scholars to make new discoveries in such thoroughly studied fields as the history of the ancient world. They have found, for example, that Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea were once inhabited by peoples (or one people) who spoke a language which has nothing in common with the Indo-European languages and has been tentatively named “Aegean”. Then the Hittites and other kindred peoples penetrated into the Aegean area from the east. Next, or perhaps at the same time, from the north came the Pelasgians, whose language was cognate with the now vanished Thracian language,the native tongue of the famous Spartacus. The first Greeks appeared in the Aegean area around 2000 B.C. An analysis of geographical names has enabled scholars to distinguish four strata belonging to four different cultures and peoples: the Aegean, Hittite, Pelasgian and Greek.

p These strata emerge not only from an analysis of place-names, of course. But toponymy helps historians to determine to which ethnos inhabitants of the Aegean area belonged. The excavations carried on in Greece and the Aegean Islands through the centuries have brought to light thousands of material records left by their early inhabitants.

p Excavations there began in antiquity, when collecting became a passionate hobby of wealthy men of the Hellenic kingdoms and the Roman empire. Actually, it was not excavation as we understand the word. It was sooner plunder of ancient Greek temples, tombs and burial vaults. In the Middle Ages all material records of antiquity were considered “pagan” and were 12 barbarously destroyed. But the Renaissance brought with it a remarkable revival of interest in classic culture, and excavation started again. Unfortunately, the chief purpose was to find statues, basreliefs and other works of art, or at any rate, coins and inscriptions. Nothing else interested collectors and connoisseurs of antiquity.

p Early in the 18th century the ruins of the Roman town of Herculaneum, which had been buried by an eruption of Ml Vesuvius, were uncovered. Pompeii, a cily buried by the same eruption, was discovered in the middle of the same century. By forcing scholars to pay careful attention to every detail, to each seemingly insignificant object, the excavation of these lowns, which wenl on for many years, stimulated the establishment of modern melhods of archeological excavalion. In Ihe second half of the 18th century Eduard Winkelmann, a brilliant authority on the culture of antiquity, was able to link up passages from ancient writings with works of art unearthed by archeologists. He showed that the history of art styles was inseparably connected with the overall cultural development of the lands of classical antiquity. (That is why Winkelmann is sometimes called both "the father of archeology" and "the father of the history of art".)

p In the second half of the 19th century archeologists carried out a series of excavations on the lerrilory of ancienl Greece and “hellenised” Asia Minor; they restored Olympia, sacred site of the ancient Olympic games, where they discovered 130 marble statues and bas-reliefs, 1,000 inscriptions, 6,000 coins, 13,000 bronze objects, and many thousands of terra-cotta objects. Digging went on at Alhens and Delphi. Pergamum yielded its famous altar. At Halicarnassus they found one 13 of the seven wonders of the world, the monumental tomb of King Mausolns of Garia.

p While archeologists wereworkingwithphilologists and historians to reconstruct the world of classical antiquity, Jleinrich Schliemann, enthusiastic archeological amaleur and a dedicated admirer of Homer, discovered an entirely new culture, one that preceded classical antiquity by many centuries.

p Monuments of that civilisation are still being found. Each new archeological expedition produces unexpected results, forcing us to view Aegean history from a new angle. Yet this appeared to be the best studied area. So it is natural that historians and archeologists could makeslill moreunexpected discoveries elsewhere.

p The Egyptian pyramids were known to writers of anliquily as "the world’s first wonder”. After the brilliant French scholar Francois Champollion found the key to the mysterious hieroglyphics of the land of the pyramids (1822), Egyptology was born. This new science resurrected a unique, ancient and majeslic civilisation.

p All that scholars of previous centuries knew about Babylon, "mother of cities”, and Assyria, the “lions’den”, had come from the embellished accounts of Herodotus, the still more fantastic composition of the Babylonian priest Berossus, and stories from the Bible, distinguished by equally far-fetched flights of the imagination. Then archeologists started digging in the Holy Lands, as they are called,and to mankind’s astonishment, brought to light the ruins of lall lemples and big palaces, Ihe most famous of them being the Tower of Babylon. Thousands of cuneiform tablets were carefully studied, and when they were finally deciphered a new science, Assyriology, which 14 is the study of the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, came into being. Assyriology led to Sumerology after it was^ found that Babylon and Assyria had been preceded by the civilisation of the Sumerians, who spoke a language of their own and used a written language of drawings that later developed into the Mesopotamian cuneiform.

p Early in the 20th century it became clear that a third great civilisation, the Hittite, had existed in the ancient East along with Egypt and Mesopotamia. During World War I the eminent Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny finally deciphered the mysterious language of the Hittites. It proved to be an Indo-European language, related to Greek, Russian and other tongues. This gave rise to still another science, Hittology.

p In the nineteen twenties and thirties British and Indian archeologists discovered a completely unknown culture to which they gave the name “proto-Indian”. It seems that the bellicose nomad Aryan tribes, mentioned in the Rig-Veda, that invaded the Indian subcontinent did not enter a wild country. On the contrary, they found the proto-Indian civilisation, from which they borrowed the basic elements of the great culture that flourished in ancient India.

p In the 19th century the American traveller John Stephens intrigued the world with his accounts of amazing sculptures and temples lost in the jungles of Central America. Since the last century archeologists have found dozens of ancient cities there. They have dug up hundreds of statues, temples and steles with calendric and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Spanish chroniclers recorded how Aztec cities in the valley of Mexico and cities of the Mayan tribes on the peninsula of Yucatan were plundered and wrecked. Now we know that 15 the Aztecs and the Yucatan Mayas were the heirs of earlier and still higher civilisations that existed in Central America. And not only in Central America. Numerous works of art, written records, temples and statues which the Indians created hundreds of years before Europeans reached the New World have been found in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. All these cultures come within the province of the science of Americanology.

p Another new science, Africanology, is resurrecting the ancient and medieval cultures of Africa. The magnificent frescoes of Tassili and the less well known cave paintings at Fezzan and in Tanganyika and South Africa; the amazing complex of buildings at Zimbabwe, where King Solomon’s mines were once sought, and the equally magnificent Inyangeni mountain complex whose construction involved as much labour as the Egyptian pyramids; the bronze masterpieces of Benin; the mysterious ruins on the shores of East Africa and the no less mysterious drawings of South Africa; the great Axumite kingdom in Ethiopia and the still greater and more ancient Meriotic kingdom—all these are merely separate pages in the long history of the Black Continent.

p Until the middle of this century Australia and Oceania remained terrae incognitae to archeologists; chance finds by geologists, gold prospectors and farmers do not count. Today these remote corners of the globe are beginning to attract the attention of archeologists. Excavations in Australia show that the continent was settled many thousands of years earlier than had been believed. Digs on the Fiji Islands and in Micronesia, on the Hawaiian and Marquesas islands, on Easter Island and in New Zealand are only the initial steps in another young science studying Oceania.

16

p Ruins of vanished cities and traces of dead civilisations are very often found in places that are now either deserts or jungles. The Mayan culture, one of the highest pre-Columbian civilisations in the New World, was discovered by John Stephens after a long and arduous search in the nearly impassable jungles of Central America. The "dead city" or Kara Hoto, capital of the once powerful Tangut kingdom, was found by the Russian traveller Ivan Kozlov after exhausting treks across the barren sands of the Gobi Desert.

p Today, aerial photography pinpoints sites of ancient buildings and towns. The ruins of ancient Khwarizm, almost completely buried in the sand, were photographed from the air before digging started..The photographs helped Soviet archeologists to make careful and thorough excavation plans that led to the discovery of the unique ancient civilisation of Khwarizm.

p The sciences of criminology, nuclear physics, cybernetics, genetics and chemistry are helping archeology more and more. Egyptian scholars are now trying to make gigantic X-ray pictures of the great pyramids of Khefren and Cheops in the hope of finding secret bricked-up chambers and premises that might be hidden behind the thick slabs of stone.

p A full account of the present-day methods used in archeology, a science which with the help of other disciplines is becoming an exact science, would take hundreds of pages. In this book I shall dwell on only one aspect of modern archeology, the connection between the discovery of " submarine outer space" and the Great Historical Discovery of our globe, in which archeologists, linguists, ethnographers and anthropologists are taking part. At the junction of these two great 17 discoveries a new science, underwater archeology, has come into being.

p With the invention of the aqualung archeologists were able to start exploration and excavation of the sea bottom. The first steps in underwater archeology were made, however, long before the aqualung was invented. Like “land” archeology, underwater archeology originated in Greece, or rather, off the coast of Greece.

p This was in the year 1802, when Greek divers salvaged cases filled with priceless friezes of the Parthenon from the Mentor, a ship which was wrecked near the island of Antikythera. Nearly a century later, at the end of 1900, sponge-divers noticed the hand of a statue sticking out of the silt not far from the Mentor shipwreck. They went down again and again, discovering a whole cemetery of works of ancient art. Next, the Greek government outfitted an expedition to work there at a depth of 60 metres between November 1900 and September 1901. This was the world’s first underwater archeological expedition.

p Archeologists conducted their next big underwater exploration near the Tunisian port of Mahdia in 1907. Here, by chance, they found the wreck of an ancient ship carrying a cargo of marble columns, bronze and marble statues, clay vessels and slabs of marble. Salvaging proceeded for five seasons until 1913. Magnificent sculptures and a large quantity of handicraft wares were raised from the bottom of the sea.

p Underwater archeological exploration was also conducted in the period between the two world wars, in the twenties and thirties. But large-scale work did not begin until after the aqualung was invented in 1943. Skin divers have found dozens of ships in the Mediterranean and have salvaged 18 a vast number of ancient amphoras, statues, household articles and marble slabs and columns.

p This branch of archeology does not limit itself to finding and studying wrecked ships. Archeologists have also excavated sunken settlements, and not only settlements. American archeologist Edward Herbert Thompson conducted one of the first underwater explorations in 1904 when he set out to find Mayan treasure lying at the bottom of a sacred well in the ancient city of GhichenItza. His work was continued in 1961 by a large and excellently-equipped expedition including archeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, skin divers from a Mexican water sports club, and diving experts from the United States.

p Using an ordinary dredging shovel, Thompson salvaged thousands of the most diverse objects, from priceless gold discs depicting battles and ritual scenes to the bones of unfortunate sacrificial victims thrown into the sacred well. In 1961 a suction pipe 25 centimetres in diameter was used to suck up water from the well, and silt and small objects together with it. The first day’s finds included potsherds and chunks of fragrant yellow resin which the ancient Mayas used in their rituals.

p There was work for skin divers too. They explored depths which the dredge pump could not reach. Their efforts were generously rewarded with a clay bowl and the figure of an idol made of pure rubber. In four months of intensive, painstaking work Mexican archeologists found a tremendous number of all kinds of articles made not only by the Mayas but also by Indians who inhabited Central Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama and the other regions of Central America.

19

p This indicates that the Mayas traded extensively with other Indian tribes and peoples. Finds salvaged from the bottom of the sacred well have helped to throw light on the history of the city of Chichen-Itza. Sacrifices to ancient gods continued to be made there even after the city was abandoned. The richest archeological yields date back to the time when the city was ruled by the belligerent Toltec-Aztec conquerors from Central Mexico, between the 10th and 13th centuries A.D.

p Mexican underwater archeologists believe that neither Thompson nor their own multipurpose expedition have exhausted the treasures of the sacred-well. But scholars are interested in more than the treasures lying at the bottom of the well. They feel that it is far more important to establish the sequence of the strata. The objects found in the well, brought there from all over Central America,! will help archeologists to determine the age of the Central American cultures. Such stratigraphy will have to be left for future study, after at least part of the well has been drained and more precise and reliable tools than a dredging pump are used.

p Besides comparing the strata in a single well, archeologists may in future be able to conduct strata comparison on a broader scale. The results of the underwater excavations of sacred wells in Central America have already made a valuable contribution to the young science of Americanology.

p In Guatemala, statues of Mayan gods and colourfully decorated pottery have been found at the bottom of Lake Amatitlan.

p Interesting discoveries await underwater archeologists in Lake Guatavita, Colombia, which lies 20 in the crater of an extinct volcano. Legend has it that subjects of the fabulous El Dorado, the "king of gold”, flung precious gifts into this lake. The future will show whether there is any truth in the legend. Meanwhile, skin divers are reconnoitering lakes in the Old World, including the Soviet Union, as well as the New World.

p Not long ago the science department of the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta organised an expedition to search for Kitezh, a city supposed to have sunk to the bottom of Lake Svetoyar. Nothing has been found there so far. But at other lakes in the Soviet Union archeologists have discovered many interesting things, including the ruins of a settlement of the second century A.D. at the bottom of Lake Paleostomi, near Poti, in the Georgian Bepublic.

p Ruins of ancient settlements have been discovered in Lake Issyk Kul high in the mountains of the Kirghiz Republic. Chichu Gen, the capital of the Usuni, contemporaries and rivals of the warlike Huns, and cities mentioned by Marco Polo may lie at the bottom of this lake. The waters of Lake Sevan, in the Armenian Republic, concealed the ruins of one of the oldest cities on the territory of the Soviet Union. It was built by Urartu rulers in the third millennium B.C. Underwater archeological research at the bottom of Lake Chudskoye (Lake Peipus) has helped historians to reconstruct important details of the famous Battle on the Ice there in the Middle Ages.

p Many discoveries have been made at the bottom of other lakes in Europe and Asia. Hungarian archeologists have found the walls of a building dating back to the Roman Empire and a smithy of the fourth century A.D. on the floor of Lake Balaton. On the bed of Lake Pulaki Polish 21 archeologists have found a military settlement of the Prussian tribes, ancient inhabitants of the Masurian forest, that goes back 2,500 years. Some 50 Stone Age sites and 12 Bronze Age sites have been found in Boden See, Switzerland. All of the sites were built on piles.

p In the German Democratic Republic villages on piles have been located by skin divers in lakes in the environs of Berlin and in the state of Mecklenburg. West German archeologists have discovered, in the bed of the Rhine, the remains of an ancient fortress, of a military camp of a Roman legion, and of a town that grew up beside the camp in the reign of Emperor Trajan. Interesting finds have been made at the bottom of Rupkund, a small mountain lake in the Himalayas.

p An even larger number of underwater finds will undoubtedly be made at the bottom of seas and oceans. Investigation into dwellings of primitive man is in progress on the floors of the Baltic and North seas. Searches are being made for sunken cities at the bottom of the Mediterranean, Black, Caribbean, Aegean, Adriatic and other seas. And this is only the beginning.

p Geology and oceanography tell us that the earth’s crust rises and falls, that seas and oceans alternately advance on the land and retreat. These movements went on millions of years ago and also during the time when Homo sapiens was developing, when he started his triumphant march across the globe, and when the early civilisations arose. These movements continue to take place literally before our eyes.

p At the bottom of the seas and oceans archeologists are seeking, and finding, monuments of antiquity that have been safely protected against destruction by a thick layer of water. Each year 22 they are discovering more and more traces’of " sunken cities and villages, evidence that primitive man once lived in places now covered by water.

p The future obviously promises many new geological, oceanographic, archeological, historical and ethnographic discoveries.

The first part of this book deals with the Pacific Ocean, the world’s greatest ocean in size, importance, depth and volume. Can the underwater archeologist expect to come upon traces of Homo sapiens at the bottom of this ocean, or its adjoining seas,” either in the shape of ruins of sunken cities or as crude stone tools fashioned by Paleolithic man?