Plato’s Atlantis—Background and Diversions
Product ID: VC5
Report Topics:
- Background history of Plato’s account of Atlantis and the principle speakers in the Dialogues
- The truthfulness of Plato’s story and its Egyptian source
- Old and new theories about when and where Atlantis once existed
- Atlantis located in Santorini, Carthage, Tartessos, Nigeria, Great Britain, Spitzbergen, Antarctica, Mexico, Peru, the Caribbean
Full Report:
It is said that over the past two millennia some twenty thousand volumes have been written about lost Atlantis, which is more than on any other subject. What all these works have in common, however, is that they take as their point of departure two very special works—the Timaeus and Critias dialogues of Plato, which constitute the most detailed sources left to us from antiquity on the Atlantis story. Any study of Atlantis must therefore begin with an analysis of the background of Plato’s accounts.
Plato was born with the name Aristocles, and lived from 427 to 347 B.C.E. Of Athenian nobility, he first wrote tragedies in his younger years, then later was introduced to philosophy by his teacher, Socrates. After Socrates’ death, Plato tutored under Euclid, and traveled to Cyene, Egypt, Italy and Sicily, and eventually studied the teachings of Pythagoras. Some time later after 387 B.C.E., he founded the Academy of Athens, and spent the rest of his life devoted to philosophy.
The Timaeus and Critias were composed about a decade after Plato had written his most famous dialogue, The Republic, and were clearly meant to be sequels to it. The same men of discussion found therein are assembled in the house of Critias the Younger, on the day following that conversation.
The time Plato placed in the year 421 B.C.E., and the participants of the dialogues were Critias the Younger, Timaeaus (a Pythagorean from Locri, in southern Italy), Hermocrates (an exiled Syracusan general), and Plato’s old teacher, Socrates. Plato himself was only a young boy at this time, but he was more than likely present. His account was thus partly based on firsthand knowledge. Also present was a tachygrapher who wrote down everything said on wax-coated wooden tablets—tablets to which Plato may have had access to years later. For yet further source material, an audience of good size was also present, for Critias twice refers to a “theater” of listeners. These, too, may have served as witnesses in recounting the day’s speeches.
In the narrative, Critias is the central figure. He was an historian and politician, leader of the Thirty Tyrants in the Spartan dictatorship over Athens. Most important, he was an orator and poet, and thus was capable in passing on the details of the Atlantis story, which we learn later in the dialogues were first collected and condensed into narrative form by Solon of Athens (639–559 B.C.E.). Solon, in turn, had received the story of Atlantis from priests at the Temple of Neith in the Nile Delta of Egypt, who read to him the account of the lost civilization off the columns of the sanctuary. Critias had learned the story as a recitation at the age of ten from his ninety year old grandfather, Critias the Elder, who had received it from his father, Dropides the Younger, the brother of Solon. Critias the Younger was Plato’s maternal uncle, so the story was part of the philosopher’s inheritance, and he naturally took special interest in it.
What this background reveals is that the participants of the dialogues were actual historical men, and not mythological figures as one would expect if the story to be unfolded was only fable. These were a group of serious thinkers, who were about to discuss a very serious subject.
The Timaeus opens with Socrates and Timeaus recounting Socrates’ discussion of the previous day, contained in the dialogue of the Republic. Hermocrates then announced that he, Timeaeus and Critias were prepared to offer dialogues of their own, complementary to Socrates’ speech in a special way. Socrates had presented the details of an ideal state; Critias revealed that he knew the history of a lost prehistoric age when Athens actually had a government very close to the one Socrates described.
From these opening remarks, we learn that the Timaeus and Critias were meant to be part of a trilogy of dialogues, in which Timaeus lectured on the creation of the world and Pythagorean philosophy, as well as introduced the Atlantis story; Critias followed with a detailed history of the lost isle; and Hermocrates presumable was to speak on the military aspects of a forgotten battle between the Atlanteans and prehistoric Athenians.
But, in its written form, only the Timaeus was completed, the Critias breaks off in mid-sentence, and the dialogue of Hermocrates was never begun. Plato appears to have left the work unfinished, to work on a dialogue of a more philosophical nature—the Laws—and died before he could return to finish the earlier works.
Another important aspect to consider is the day on which the dialogues took place. The occasion was the Lesser Panathenaea, a festival at Piraeus following the Bendidia in the month of Thargelion, honoring the Thracian goddess Bendis, the equivalent to Diana and Athena. The fact that the Atlantis account was offered to this important deity as a paean, gives it special weight and credibility. As researcher John V. Luce noted: “A eulogist of Athens had license to enhance the kudos of the citizens past and present, but he would be expected to take his starting point in something the city had done, or was generally believed to have done. It would have been no compliment to praise Athens for a completely fictitious exploit.”
One of Plato’s students later noted that the central object of the festival was the pepulum, or woman’s garment, and that it symbolized the ancient Athenian victory over the Atlanteans. The dialogues’ subject of the story of Atlantis and Athens was thus meaningful to the festivities. It is noteworthy that the Panathenaea dated back one hundred and twenty-five years before Plato’s time, adopted from local traditions much older—and thus constituted an historic folk-memory separate from that of Plato’s account.
The major points of Plato’s description of Atlantis are these:
1. Atlantis was located in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Straits of Gibraltar.
2. Toward the end of its existence, it was a large island approximately 400,000 square miles in size.
3. Atlantis was the home of a high civilization and an empire that includes the Caribbean islands, portions of the Americas, North Africa and Europe.
4. The land and its people were destroyed in a single day and night by earthquakes and submergence between 9500 and 10,000 B.C.E.
It is amazing that, in spite of all the information Plato supplied us with, there have been many authors who have either simply brushed aside the whole concept as fictitious, or—worse yet—have ignored or have sought to change the story’s facts, in order to locate Atlantis in almost every conceivable corner of the globe, and in every ancient time period.
The chief problem has been that investigators and researchers tend to concentrate on only a few details in Plato’s text, while rejecting the major framework—an island civilization situated in the Atlantic completely destroyed by an earth upheaval twelve thousand years ago. As T. H. Martin, in his edition of the Timaeus, noted: “Many scholars in quest of Atlantis with a more or less heavy cargo of book-learning, but without any compass except their imagination and compulsions, have voyaged at random. And where have they landed? In fifty different places.”
Charles Berlitz, in a survey of various theories on Atlantis made over the past two millennia, offered the following list of places (no updated) as being the burial ground of the lost land, and the number of authorities who have supported each site:
Sunken mid-Atlantic island/ land bridge — 97
Legend, never existed — 46
North and/ or South America — 21
Morocco, North Africa or Carthage — 15
Israel and/ or Lebanon — 9
Tartessos and southern Spain — 9
Crete and/ or Thera — 9
Gibraltar — 6
A Mediterranean isle — 6
Sunken continent in the Pacific — 4
Sahara desert — 3
Iran — 3
Antarctica — 3
Canary Islands — 2
Ceylon — 2
Mexico — 2
Greenland — 2
South Africa — 2
Crimea or southern Russia — 2
Netherlands — 2
Brazil — 2
Nigeria — 2
Cyprus — 2
Caribbean island or off Cuba — 2
Arabia, Belgium, East Prussia, Iraq, northern Europe, Ethiopia, a northern polar continent, Portugal, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Venezuela, West Indies, a sunken island in the Indian Ocean, in the Andes mountains of Peru, among the Mound Builders of North America — 1 each
It is noteworthy that a majority of Atlantis authors have remained true to Plato’s account, and have located the lost land where the ancient writer said it was—in the Atlantic. However, because of the recent popularity and exposure in the news media of other theories, we will take a passing look at these, to see just what kind of evidence they present.
The next largest group of investigators on the list claim that Atlantis did not exist at all, except in Plato’s imagination. The chief argument is that Plato made up Atlantis to serve as a philosophical model for his concepts of ideal government and society. Such models were often employed, and are well known in both ancient and modern literature. The Roman writer Iamblichus, for example, wrote of an island peopled by a race with flexible bones and double tongues (for carrying on two conversations at once), who lived according to the rule of classical Stoicism. More relatively recent works of a similar nature were Thomas More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Andraea’s Christianopolis, and Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
However, in every case, the island or country pictured is clearly revealed as being only an imagined place by either the fanciful nature of its description, or by the stated intent of the author. In contrast, Plato stated no less than four times in his dialogues that the account of Atlantis is not fable or allegory, but is absolutely true. What is more, Atlantis is present as a factual subject, discussed seriously among contemporary figures, with details as to history, geography and topography that are not only in every way believable, but are verifiable by modern research.
Several critics have sought to distinguish the Timaeus and Critias from the rest of Plato’s works, implying that the two are—in the words of L. Sprague de Camp—”an impressive yet abortive attempt at a political, historical and scientific romance—a pioneer science fiction story.” Yet we find in Plato’s purely philosophical dialogues, particularly the Laws, many of the same themes expounded upon as in the Atlantis dialogues. At the beginning of Book Three of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger asks his listeners if they agree or not that, “the old stories contain some truth.” When questioned as to which stories he means, he answers, “The accounts of many disasters through floods, plagues, etc., the result of which only small remnants of mankind survived.” The Stranger then continues by giving an account of the “shepherds in the mountains” who escaped the Great Flood—the same who, in the Timaeus and Critias, are described as surviving the cataclysm that annihilated Atlantis and Greece.
The Stranger also retells the old legend of Phaeton, who lost control of the sky-chariot of Helios, bringing the Sun out of its natural path and scorching the Earth. This, he said, even though it is in the form of a myth, embodies the fact that over long ages the heavenly spheres may deviate from their orbits and cause great destruction. This is an echo of what Solon learned from the Egyptian priest of Sais, who informed him that many times in the past the Earth has been convulsed by “the declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens,” causing tremendous conflagrations and floods. As Luce remarked, “In view of these similarities it is not, I think, sound to classify the Atlantis dialogues as ’fictional,’ while treating the Laws as ’historical.’ Both presentations embody a coherent theory of historical process.”
It is significant that most historians and chroniclers in the classical Greek and Roman world were in general agreement that the Atlantis dialogues were based on fact and not fiction. Sais, in Plato’s day as it had been in Solon’s, was a stronghold of Greek learning, and had the philosopher’s account had no foundation or authenticity, there would surely have come forth a denial that no such history was known among Saitic circles. According to Proclus Diadorchus, the early commentator on Plato, most of the first Platonists, such as Crantor, regarded Atlantis as fact. Only Aristotle stood alone in his belief that it was fable—a supposition expressed only because the lost island and its destruction did not fit well into his own philosophical scheme.
Herodotus had visited Egypt, and spoke to the priests of Sais, and though he mentioned nothing concerning the Atlantis story, he did note that Egyptian history extended back at least 11,340 years, a figure commensurate with Plato’s 9,000 years before Solon’s time as the date of Atlantis’ demise. It is possible Herodotus may have heard the full account of the sunken isle, but did not record it for personal reasons. Having been initiated into the sacred schools of the Egyptian Mysteries, he had taken an oath not to reveal many secrets of the past, secrets which may have had their original source in Atlantis.
In the first century B.C.E., and on into the early Christian era, Posidonius, Strabo and Pliny recounted that as there were no valid arguments against the existence of Atlantis, and evidence abounded in historical documents of the time pointing to violent geological alterations having taken place in antiquity, there was little reason to doubt Plato’s story. In the first century A.D., the question of the lost isle was debated in the academies of Alexandria, finding support in Proclus, Syrianus, and many leading teachers of the day. Two hundred years later, Longinus raised Artistotle’s objections once again, but was overshadowed by such proponents of Plato as Arnobius the Elder, Ammianus Marcellinus and Iamblichus. In the sixth century, before the advent of the Dark Ages, the Byzantine geographer Comas Indicopleustes likewise upheld Atlantis as an historical truth.
Today, the basis for opposition to the Atlantis story is rooted in certain of its aspects which conflict with modern concepts of human history and the Earth. Plato pictured Atlantis possessing an advanced civilization in circa 9500 B.C.E., yet conservative historians argue that at that time humankind was supposedly only just coming out of caves to discover farming. Plato describes a landmass of 400,000 square miles sinking into the ocean in a single day and night, while most modern geologists, of the prevailing uniformitarian school, state that earth movements on such a scale are impossible: lands do rise and sink, but only over millions of years, and not within the memory of human chroniclers.
These seeming impasses, however, are rapidly being overcome, because the historical-geological concepts are today being challenged by new discoveries. The archaeological record is uncovering “out-of-place” artifacts that are pushing the date of human civilization far back into the dim recesses of time, while geologic and fossil finds are revealing evidence that the history of our planet has on many occasions been truly violent and catastrophic. In the light of these new realizations, the prejudices to the Atlantis story are fast falling by the wayside—and the story of Atlantis, its culture and cataclysmic end, are now seen as being more in tune with our changing views of the past.
Among those who still cling to the conservative views concerning humanity and the Earth, however, there has been an attempt to “reinterpret” the Atlantis story in order to make it conform with these views. It is this attempt that has spawned the whole array of what might be called “divergent” theories on Atlantis. The fatal flaw in this type of thinking is that, once you begin changing the details, there is no telling where to stop. The end result is that many researchers have, unwittingly, transformed the factual Atlantis story into a modern myth of their own making, which is certainly not what Plato had intended it to become. A few of the more notable examples of these theories will suffice for our study.
The most popular divergent theory today—and ironically the one which does the most injustice to Plato’s account—identifies Atlantis with the Aegean island of Thera, also known as Santorini.
Recent geologic studies have shown that Thera is the caldera remains of a large volcano, and there is increasing evidence that about 1485 B.C.E. the island blew up with a violence unmatched by any eruption known on record, the blast equal to 2,000 megatons of force. Archaeological diggings show that at the time of the eruption, the island was the home of several Minoan nobles from neighboring Crete, who built beautiful three-story stucco villas decorated with mosaics of dolphins, ships and women gathering flowers.
In the mid-1960’s, Dr. Angelos Galanopoulos, a seismologist of the University of Athens, in collaboration with author-researcher James W. Mavor, enlarged upon a theory originally proposed by archaeologist Professor Spyrodin Maritanos, that the Thera catastrophe was the basis for Plato’s story. They noted that the circular nature of the island harbor suggested the rings of land and water of Atlantis City. Galanopoulos even discovered the remains of a moat construction under 1,300 feet of water—nothing less, he claimed, than the moat or water ring that surrounded the City’s citadel island.
According to Galanopoulos and Mavor, when Thera blew up it sent mountains of ash and one hundred-foot tidal waves across the Aegean, overwhelming and destroying the Minoan civilization of Crete. While Thera was the site of Atlantis City, Crete was the Atlantean “estate,” and its catastrophic death in 1485 B.C.E. is the real story remembered by the Egyptians, who passed it on to Solon and Plato.
But in order to explain the other details of Plato’s account in light of Thera and Crete, some real juggling of figures and facts had to be done. Galanopoulos argued that because of the similarity between the Egyptian symbols for 100 and 1,000, the priest who interpreted the story of Atlantis to Solon miscalculated the numbers, and therefore all values over a thousand in the story should be reduced to one-tenth. Thus Atlantis was destroyed not 9,000 years but 900 years before Solon—or in 1470 B.C.E., which is very close to the 1485 B.C.E. date of the Thera explosion.
This “ten-fold error” idea, it should be noted, is based on the assumption that the Saitic priests mistranslated numbers from the record columns on Atlantis. Now the fact that the record was incised on columns means that the script was in hieroglyphs, which was used by the Egyptians in all writing incorporated into stone engraving. Hieroglyphs were considered sacred, and as a result remained relatively unchanged during their long history, from before 3000 B.C.E. to about A.D. 400.
Because of this lengthy tradition and sacred nature, the Egyptian priests made every painstaking effort for accuracy in transcribing or translating their records, in much the same manner as the rabbinics recorded every “jot” of the Hebrew scriptures. This was especially true of translations from hieroglyphs to Greek. On the famed Rosetta Stone, for example, which contains a message in both glyphs and Greek, all the numeric values present are interpreted exactly and without error. In fact, under Pharaoh Psammetichos I, who reigned just before Solon’s visit, a school of interpreters to help facilitate communications between the Greeks and Egyptians was established at Naucratis, sixteen miles from Sais, in order to insure that no problems would arise through errors of translation.
Thus, to claim that an Egyptian priest carelessly and consistently misinterpreted every high number given on the Saitic column to his Greek guest contradicts what we know about the Egyptian art of writing and preserving knowledge.
Moreover, when take a look at the actual hieroglyphs for 100 and 1,000, we find that there is no “similarity” whatsoever by which the two could be confused. In not a single Egyptian manuscript or monument inscription known that was translated into Greek during the entire period from 600 B.C.E.on, was such a mistake every made.
Another blow to the “ten-fold error” concept is that it cannot be applied consistently to all numbers without causing major historical problems. Solon was told that the city of Sais had been established 8,000 years before his visit—a time period Galanopoulos would make ten times shorter, or 800 years. However, adding only 800 to 570 B.C.E. brings us to 1370 B.C.E., or the middle of the New Kingdom era. Yet historians know from Egyptian records and dated archaeological remains that Sais was already the capital of a nome or distict in the northwest Nile Delta during Predynastic times—circa 3200 B.C.E. Clearly, the “ten-fold error” concept has no foundation in fact.
A second area where the Thera-Atlantis theory breaks down is in Plato’s unmistakable location of the lost island not in the Mediterranean, but in the Atlantic Ocean. Karl Kilinski, a professor of classical art history, has pointed out that in the Timaeus, where Atlantis is described as being “larger than Libya and Asia combined,” the word mezon, translated “larger than,” may be a misprint for meson, which means “between.” This would make the line read that Atlantis was really “between Libya and Asia,” or somewhere in the Aegean Sea, exactly where Thera and Crete are situated. But this proposal falters because Plato also described the isle in the Timaeus as he Atlantis nesos, “the Atlantic island,” which sank beneath the “ocean” of the same name, and clearly distinguished the Atlantic as the “true ocean,” while the Mediterranean is by comparison only a “harbor.”
Galanopoulos tried to get around this difficulty by suggesting that, because the size of Atlantis was “exaggerated” on account of th “ten-fold error” in its dimensions, Plato was forced by necessity to “transport” Atlantis out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. But the dialogues are insistent that the island lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, or Gibraltar, and there are so many directions and events associated n the texts with going to and from the Pillars, that to ignore them, and an Atlantic location for Atlantis, would disrupt the whole fabric of the account.
Again, Galanopoulos attempted to rationalize this by proposing that the Pillars of Hercules was not Gibraltar, but were the Straits of Melea, off the Pelopponesus of Greece. This proposal makes very little sense in light of the Greeks and Egyptians knowing full well exactly where the Pillars of Hercules were located, in Solon’s time and in Plato’s.
Furthermore, as Atlantis researcher Terry Mahlman observed: “Plato states in his dialogues that the ’men of Atlantis had subjugated parts of Libya within the columns of Hercules as far as Egypt and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.’ So Libya, Egypt and Tyrrhenian (Italy) are all viewed by Plato as being “within the columns of Hercules.’ Using Galanopoulos’ interpretation for the location of the Pillars of Hercules being the Straits of Melea, it is then necessary to place Libya, Egypt and Italy all within the confines of the Aegean Sea near Greece, a situation which even the most vivid of imaginations cannot justify.”
In terms of the empire, resources, architecture and government of Atlantis, Galanopoulos has attempted to identify these with the land and civilization of Minoan Crete—only once more the facts do not fit the picture:
*There is very little evidence the Minoans ever traded with Libya and Italy, let alone conquered them.
*Like Atlantis, the Cretan isle was a kingdom of loosely allied princes and rulers, but this type of government was also characteristic of many other ancient societies as well.
*As archaeologist Peter James pointed out, “No matter how you juggle with the dimensions (given by Plato), they cannot be made to fit either island,” Crete or Thera.
*The island of Crete today, as it was in known antiquity, is barren of natural resources, the Minoans having imported most of their necessities and luxuries.
*One of the distinguishing features of the Minoan civilization is that it built no large temples like the Atlanteans, and no statues of gold have ever been unearthed from Cretan soil.
*Crete has no irrigation systems or canals on a scale described by Plato.
*Throughout its entire history, the Minoans never had either a fighting force or a navy of ships as large as depicted by Plato for Atlantis.
There are of course some features which do correlate, such as bull-worship, maritime power, hot and cold springs, extensive bathing, and richly decorated palaces. But these same features can also be found among many other cultures of antiquity, making the Atlantis identification with Crete not very meaningful.
Another major difference is that, while Atlantis was portrayed as being entirely destroyed in a single day and night, only Thera was obliterated by its volcanic explosion, while the island of Crete still remains very much above water. More recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Minoan civilization may have survived the Thera catastrophe for more than a century, and eventually died out over an even longer period. As Peter James noted: “The basic premise for the Crete/ Thera/ Atlantis connection has therefore been proven shaky, quite apart from all the other weaknesses in the evidence. The original story as told by the Egyptian priests cannot have been about the destruction of Minoan civilization by a volcano on Thera, because no such thing happened.”
Another well known civilization upon which the honor of being Atlantis has been bestowed was ancient Carthage. Descriptions of this powerful North African seaport found in ancient histories do bear resemblances to Plato’s Atlantean capital. For many centuries the Carthaginians battled the Greeks for control of Sicily, and Homerist Victor Berard suggested that Plato, in his visit to the Greek outpost of Syracuse, came in close contact with the avarice and material complacency of Carthaginian merchants, later to be translated into the moral and spiritual degeneracy of the Atlanteans. But Carthage could not have been Atlantis. It was a republic, not a monarchy; and it was still growing in power in Plato’s time, not destroyed millennia before. There are, too, the serious questions regarding time, size, location—and demise: Carthage eventually was leveled by the Romans, not by natural catastrophe.
One theory that seems to be revived from time to time places Atlantis not far from Carthage, out in the Sahara Desert. It has long been known that the Sahara was once a fertile country, for rock drawings throughout the region picture the land as well watered and heavily populated by cattle-herders in prehistoric times. French botanist D. A. Godron was the first to suggest that this was the home of Atlantis, which he claimed did not sink, but instead dried up.
In the 1920’s German geologist Paul Borchardt pinpointed Atlantis in Tunisia, in a region of salt marshes west of the Gulf of Gabes, called the Shott el Jerid. He eventually located ruins in this area he thought were of Atlantis City, but they later turned out to be the remains of a Roman fort.
About the same time, Albert Hermann thought Atlantis might exist a few miles farther to the south. He located ancient irrigation works of unknown origin at the village of Rhelissia. However, in order to bring Plato’s account in line with his theory, he altered the numbers like Galanopoulos, only went a little too far, by reducing all of them by a factor of thirty. This made Atlantis fit nicely in his corner of Tunisia—however, the reduction also shrank Atlantis’ mighty mountains and temples to small hills and huts.
Noting a distinct lack of relics on land, Hermann’s contemporary, F. Bulavand, moved Atlantis back into water, by placing it a few miles west, beneath the Gulf of Gabes. Chilean scientist L. T. Ojeda supported this view, and demonstrated that in 9500 B.C.E. the Mediterranean was much lower than at presen—-due to waters still locked up in the northern European glaciers—and that the Gulf of Gabes was then dry land. But the question of the site being east of Gibraltar, and not west of it as Plato stipulated, was not adequately answered.
In 1977, geologist Dr. Robert Schmalz shoved Atlantis back into the desert, locating it in salt marshes 500 miles from the coast, in an area northeast of the city of Gabes. This time, however, he gave no references to alleged ruins or remains. Where Atlantis will be shifted to next in Tunisia—or whether it will remain sunk in the sand dunes—is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile another school of researchers has gathered their evidence supporting the view that Atlantis was Tartessos, a lost maritime city that once existed in southern Spain, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Several points about Tartessos parallel Plato’s account: It was an island city surrounded by the three mouths (three rings?) of the Guadalquivir; Tartessos was situated west of Gibraltar; to the north of Tartessos was an Iberian lowland, bordered by mountains, somewhat like Plato’s Atlantis; the peoples of Tartessos mined the Sierra Morena, one of the richest deposits of silver and other minerals in the ancient world, matching the wealth of Atlantis; the fame of Tartessos’ maritime trade was remembered in the Bible as the “ships of Tarshish;” and like the Atlanteans these people had written laws. The Greek geographer Strabo said of the Tartessians: “They are the most civilized of the Iberians. They know writing and have ancient books, also poems and laws in verse which are seven thousand years old.” And while Atlantis sank into the sea, the remains of Tartessos are believed to exist beneath the delta silt deposits of the Guadalquivir.
While these parallels are indeed striking, the one problem remaining is that, according to Plato, Atlantis City existed on a large island, and both City and island were inundated together. Tartessos is gone—but Spain remains very much afloat. While it is possible that Tartessos could have been at one time a colony of Atlantis (legends say that one of the sons of Poseidon once ruled over it), it was not itself the lost land of antiquity.
The Tartessos theory shares company with a host of other chosen localities that could be called the “Atlantic Circle.” All are known lands around the Atlantic coasts that could be loosely identified as “beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” which did not sink, but for one reason or another merely “disappeared” from view. Explorer Leo Frobenius pinpointed Atlantis in Nigeria, identifying it with the Yoruba culture that flourished there as early as 1600 B.C.E. At least one elment in its favor is that the country has elephants—a feature of Plato’s Atlantis most often ignored by other divergent theorists. The Yorubans did not succumb to floods, however; their civilization simply collapsed.
Arthurian researcher Geoffrey Ashe sought after Atlantis in Great Britain. Britain of course is above water, and Ashe explains Plato’s allusion to Atlantis sinking as merely a dense fog having once covered the British Isles, hiding it from the outside world. More recent theorists have located Atlantis in the Irish Sea or off of Wales, going back to a time before the end of the last Ice Age when the Sea was only a valley full of rivers, before being flooded by the melting glaciers to the north. Other researchers have attempted to identify Atlantis with the mythical sunken kingdoms of Ys and Lyonesse.
One ingenious theorist was German writer Jurgen Spanuth, who located Atlantis off the coast of Denmark, near the rocky coastal island of Heligoland. Playing games again with Plato’s numbers, Spanuth explained that Solon had misunderstood years for months, so that actually Atlantis sank 9,000 months, but years, before Solon. This put the date at about 1200 B.C.E. Spanuth then suggested that Plato’s story of the Atlantean invasion of the east Mediterranean could be identified with the invasion of the Sea Peoples, which indeed took place about 1200 B.C.E. These mysterious people, a group of whom later became the Philistines of the Old Testament, overran Crete, destroyed the Hittite empire, and in 1196 B.C.E. fought a sea battle off the Egyptian coast against the forces of Ramses III. At Medinet Habu, Ramses set up a memorial to his victory, which he narrowly won. Spanuth claimed the Sea Peoples were proto-Vikings from his Danish Atlantis, but his claim is not based on an adequate comparison: In Plato’s story, a prehistoric Athens saved the day against the invaders—in the thirteenth century B.C.E. the Sea Peoples utterly defeated the Mycenaean Greeks and destroyed their cities. The final flow to Spanuth’s theory came in 1953, when a diving team discovered that sunken blocks off Heligoland which Spanuth identified as being from Atlantis, turned out to be Neolithic ruins instead.
Two other researchers, the French astronomer-mathematician Bailly, and the Italian author Barbiero, explained the tragedy of Atlantis as land overwhelmed by ice—only in opposite ends of the world. Bailly sought after Atlantis on the Arctic island of Spitzbergen, while Barbiero saw Atlantis in Antarctica. According to the latter investigator, the South Pole was once in the South Pacific Ocean, leaving the southern continent facing the Atlantic ice-free and habitable. When the Pole shifted, so did the ice, and Atlantis was ground into dust by the glaciers. However, nothing about glaciers appears in Plato’s account.
A more recent revival of the Atlantis-in-Antarctica theory has been promulgated by researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath. Their explanation for the destruction of Atlantis involves a shifting of the entire crust of the planet over the more liquid mantle beneath, causing Antarctica to “slip” into its present icebound climes, causing the destruction of any civilization within its precincts. While such a concept is intriguing at best, where the theory falls apart is in linking such a cataclysm to Plato’s account. The Flem-Aths try to relate Plato’s description of Oceanus that lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules as being all the oceans of the world, and that Atlantis’ being in the middle of Oceanus points to Antarctica, because that continent holds a unique position as being in the “center” of a map projection that shows all oceans joined in one body of water.
Unfortunately, in Plato’s account of the geography of twelve thousand years ago, the movement of his description is always westward—and there is nothing in the Greek narrative which says you turn toward the left in the middle of the Atlantic and travel six thousand miles before you get to Atlantis. Instead, Plato makes it very clear you find Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic, and from there pass to the islands of the Caribbean, and finally reach the “opposite continent” of the Americas.
While it is true that Antarctica indeed once was the home of lost civilizations—Polaria extending back eighteen million years, and a much later ice-free civilization that mapped the world after the end of the last Ice Age up to as late as 6000 B.C.E.—it was not the home for Atlantis. Trying to put Atlantis at the bottom of the world is mixing apples and oranges historically.
The Americas have also been a prime target for divergent theorists, ever since mapmaker Sebastian Munster labeled South America as “Insula Atlantica” on his chart of 1540. Some of the American theories are unique, to say the least. One school claims that Atlantis was actually Mexico or Peru (rich in gold and silver), and explains Plato’s geography this way: America is Atlantis, the “islands” west of it are the Pacific islands, and the “opposite continent” is Asia. Only Asia does not “surround” the Pacific Ocean; neither did the Americas “sink” into it. Another school explains Atlantis’ submergence as North America drifting away over the horizon from Europe, as the continents split and drifted apart. In this case, however, Plato’s date for the event is not too high but too low--the last splitting of the continents are dated geologically to have occurred 220 million years ago, not a mere 12,000 years ago.
We have touched upon only the better known of the divergent theories on Atlantis; the list goes on and on, and to describe each and every one would be pointless. In the last analysis, there is one conclusion we can come to when looking over all these colorful but fanciful theories. It is this: Plato’s account of Atlantis cannot be accepted only in part; it must be accepted wholly or not at all.
The believable and factual nature of the story suggests that it is based on truth; therefore, we must seek to verify its truthfulness in its entirety, as a single whole, its parts being integral and not separable. As L. Sprague de Camp argued, “You cannot change the details of Plato’s story, and still claim to have Plato’s story.”
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
