It had been sitting out the centuries, but it was there, written in the colourful script of the Minoans.” Yes, in this book Menzies does indeed raise his pursuit of historical bull to an epic new level.

“ What I’d been witnessing – had I stopped to think about it – was a calling card.

This struck me most strongly in Menzies’ mercifully brief Chapter 21, where he is transfixed in the Prado by the similarities between a 19th century AD drawing of bullfighting by Goya (Sketch No.90) and another image of bullfighting he had previously seen at Knossos. In pretty much every chapter, Menzies jumps on a plane or boat with his wife Marcella to some vaguely-connected place, looks out of a hotel window while musing to himself on how much it had all changed since he had last visited it while still in the Royal Navy, and then trolls round a local museum or historical site, where he is suddenly struck by the ineffable kindness of the ancients to have left him yet another glaringly obvious clue to add to his list – another cookie crumb in his global trail. I think the main things just about any reader would notice are the book’s relentless stylistic tics and its metronomic structure. Oh, and that the Egyptian Pharaohs basically outsourced sea-trading to the Minoans, and that you can (if you squint at all the evidence) see evidence of the Minoans on the Red Sea and even in India, too. For one, he thinks not only that it was they who were the first Europeans to discover North America, but also that they mined and shipped out millions of tons of extraordinarily high-purity copper from beside Lake Superior. However, Menzies’ particular new shine on all that rusty metal is that he has a vastly grander vision of the Minoans’ geographic sprawl. So far, so nondescript – nothing that isn’t already in a thousand books (and disputed or disproved by ten thousand more).

Hence Menzies’ book is entitled “ The Lost Empire of Atlantis“. Yes, and he thinks that it was the volcanic eruption on Thera / Santorini that destroyed the Minoans ( though via a tsunami), and that this is what Plato was talking about when he talked about “Atlantis”. And now he’s moved onwards and backwards to the Minoans, an ancient Mediterranean civilization he proposes were in fact the sea-faring glue holding European Bronze Age trade together. Ex-submariner Gavin Menzies attracted global attention with his eye-catching farragos “1421” and “1434”, books laying out how he imagined 15th century Chinese fleets sailed through a dried-up Egyptian canal to reach Renaissance Europe and beyond.

Gavin menzies books