Monday - September 05, 2005

Atlantis

New Orleans: Modern-Day Atlantis?
(NEW YORK TIMES - Sept. 5)

Nothing lasts forever. Just ask Ozymandias, or Nate Fisher. Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt’s coast in the Mediterranean.

“Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place,” said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University. Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.

What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth. Some of them have grown larger in death than they ever were in life.

The most famous lost city of all is one that probably never really existed, Atlantis, the fabulous island civilization swallowed by the sea, which was referred to by Plato. Some scholars think he might have been inspired by one or more real events. Among them is the destruction of Helike, a city on the Corinthian coast, which was swallowed by an earthquake and a tsunami one winter night in 373 B.C., during Plato’s lifetime.  “For the sea was raised by an earthquake,” wrote the Greek geographer Strabo, “and it submerged Helike and the Helikonian Poseidon.” The city went down like the Titanic with its entire population on board. An expeditionary force sent from a nearby town the next day found no survivors and no bodies to recover.

Though not the seat of empire like fabled Atlantis, Helike was a significant and prosperous city. It was the head of a confederacy of 12 Greek city states, the First Achaean League, whose successor, the Second Achaean League, was recommended as a model of federalism by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in their Federalist Papers. It minted its own coins. Lured by the prospect of an underwater time capsule, archaeologists have long sought the remains of the sunken city.

Five years ago, after a dozen years of searching, a team of archaeologists led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Ancient Helike Society in Aigion, Greece, and Steven Soter, a geophysicist with New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies, said they had found the lost city - not in the sea but on the coastal plain next to it, near Aigion, about 45 miles northwest of Corinth. It may have been gradually raised by seismic activity, said Dr. Soter. Moreover, he said, three rivers feeding the coastal plain deposit sediment that helps build it up. In expeditions every summer, Dr. Soter and his colleagues have uncovered more and more of the city, including a road that goes almost a mile across the plain, walls, buildings, coins, pottery and a cemetery, although they have not found the center of the city yet.

Recently they have found a whole new and unknown city, dating from 2200 B.C., the early Bronze Age, near Helike. The sediments of this ruin contain marine and lagoonal microfauna, Dr. Soter said, suggesting that it too, may have been swallowed by an earthquake and a tidal wave like Helike, but 2,000 years earlier, only to rise again. It may be, he said, that there have been recurrent floods and abandonments on the plain, the land rising and sinking, cities blooming out of the reborn mud.

There is in the picture a kind of immortality for the dead, as well as for the perennials blooming on the flood plain. If Helike can give rise to the vision of an Atlantis, a collection of scrolls can forever change our concept of learning and memory and empty stones can inspire us to reveries, what can we expect from jazz, gumbo and soft air at one of the trading crossroads of the world, so blessed and cursed with water?

New Orleans will never die. It is already larger than life.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/05/2005 at 08:55 PM   
Filed Under: • History • Philosophy •  
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