Atlantis has captured the imaginations of authors and researchers throughout the whole of human history. Plato (c.486 BC) wrote about the island in his Timaeus and Critias, and since then countless attempts have been made to either verify or disprove its existence.
As archaeology improves, so too does our knowledge of the ancient past, and with it come ever-greater revelations about the building skill of our ancient ancestors, and the organisation and advanced nature of their cultures. Astonishing feats of ancient engineering, many of which we cannot recreate ourselves, scatter the globe; places like Sacsayhuaman in Peru, where irregular cut stones weighing several tonnes fit together so perfectly that one cannot slide a piece of paper between them, or Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a series of ancient temples made of huge blocks that predate farming, deliberately buried and dating back to roughly 11,000 BC.
Stone age structures like Carnac, Stonehenge, or Adam’s Calendar in South Africa, which onewriter suggests could be upwards of 75,000 years old, are shrouded in mystery. Why were our ancestors so obsessed with tracking the stars? Why go to such Herculean efforts to build these calendars, and then bury and rebuild them, as seems to have been done at Gobekli Tepe, just to track the movement of the heavens?
Countless authors have suggested reasons, and I will not add to their speculations (yet!), but it is clear that the “accepted” dates for civilisation’s origins are continually being challenged, erased and rewritten.
As archaeology begins to catch up with technology, more sites that were once thought myths have been uncovered. The Tower of Babel, long thought to be just an allegorical story, has now been proven to have its origins in fact. Legendary Dwaraka, sunken-kingdom and once home of the god-king Rama of Hindu myth, has now been discovered. Might we one day find proof of Atlantis?
In addition, every human culture has its own ancient flood myth, along with their own stories of otherworldly messengers or gods bringing with them civilising skills or our very origins. These myths tell a different story than the one that informs our current worldview.
Is this almost-identical story, told the world over by cultures with limited outside contact, just a coincidence? Or is it part of a much larger mystery about our ancient past that we are only just now beginning to solve?
Plato’s Atlantis
My story is partly inspired by Plato’s, part of which I will duplicate here, although the original text is much longer:
“In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito. The maiden had already reached womanhood, when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in love with her and had intercourse with her, and breaking the ground, enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe, each having its circumference equidistant every way from the centre, so that no man could get to the island, for ships and voyages were not as yet. He himself, being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm water and the other of cold, and making every variety of food to spring up abundantly from the soil.
He also begat and brought up five pairs of twin male children; and dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he gave to the first-born of the eldest pair his mother’s dwelling and the surrounding allotment, which was the largest and best, and made him king over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many men, and a large territory. And he named them all; the eldest, who was the first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean were called Atlantic. To his twin brother, who was born after him, and obtained as his lot the extremity of the island towards the Pillars of Heracles, facing the country which is now called the region of Gades in that part of the world, he gave the name which in the Hellenic language is Eumelus, in the language of the country which is named after him, Gadeirus. Of the second pair of twins he called one Ampheres, and the other Evaemon. To the elder of the third pair of twins he gave the name Mneseus, and Autochthon to the one who followed him. Of the fourth pair of twins he called the elder Elasippus, and the younger Mestor. And of the fifth pair he gave to the elder the name of Azaes, and to the younger that of Diaprepes.
All these and their descendants for many generations were the inhabitants and rulers of diverse islands in the open sea; and also, as has been already said, they held sway in our direction over the country within the Pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia.
He goes on to describe, in detail, the layout of the ringed city of land and water that I have named Tulan after the esoteric sources, who also call it the City of the Golden Gates; although our Tulan has a way to go in its history before it reaches the gleaming golden buildings and metal-clad walls described by Plato just yet.
The location of Atlantis, the flood, prehistoric geography
Countless authors have speculated about Plato’s lost continent, but certain factors are clear in his account and must therefore be considered when attempting to make an educated guess at the location of Atlantis.
Of course, what follows may be pointless speculation; there is every possibility that Plato made Atlantis up as an allegory for the state of politics in Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian war. However, let us never allow the truth to get in the way of a good story, and for that Atlantis is fertile ground.
Plato stipulates the following:
- that Atlantis existed 9000 years before his great-grandfather’s time (Solon lived c. 600 BC)
- that elephants, bulls and horses were present
- that it was outside the Pillars of Heracles (straits of Gibraltar)
- that it was “larger than Libya and Asia combined”
- that it is completely gone, with no trace of the island remaining
No such elephants exist on Minoan Crete, or Santorini, often cited as possible locations for the lost land, nor are they completely gone. Neither are in the remotest close timeframe of Plato’s story, which with the technology-enabled eyes of the 21st century does indeed correspond with the sea rising at the end of the younger dryas period, roughly 10,000 BCE. To the ancient Greeks, Libya was north Africa, while Asia (minor) was their name for Turkey. This suggests that we are looking for a large island roughly the size of the Iberian Peninsula, or thereabouts, outside the straits of Gibraltar.
The Celts claimed that the “land of the dead” lay in the ocean to the west; an eerie oral tradition of the tragedy of Atlantis. The Maya, the Hopi and many other native American tribes have tales of ancestors from a sunken red land to the east – they also claim ancestry from the “sky people”, but more of that shortly.
This can only put Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, and geological studies of the mid-Atlantic ridge suggest that it was indeed above sea level, for many thousands of years, before the end of the last ice age (strictly/ geologically speaking, we are still in an ice age, so the end of the last glacial maximum would be more accurate).
The ancient historians Herodotus and Diodorus Sicilus both mention a people called the Atlantes, living in northwest Africa; let us pretend that the fortress founded by Aatlae, Aatlas and Eumelus represents their origins. Homer’s Odyssey mentions the Gardens of the Hesperides, where the “daughters of the evening” or “nymphs of the west” tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located beyond the Atlas Mountains in the same region; it is after this that I have named Atlantis’ easternmost kingdom.
As for the geography of the rest of the world in 15,000 BC, NASA research shows that, before the end of the last glacial maximum, sea levels were at least 120 metres lower than they are now. Sonar and satellites have shown us that there are over 200 sunken cities in the Mediterranean alone. Ancient civilisations are being found underwater all over the world, notably at Dwaraka in India, off the coast of Cuba, in Egypt, and perhaps at Yonagumi in Japan. There was a great flood around 10,000 BC, when the ice covering much of the globe melted dramatically, causing sea levels to rise over a long period.
We now know, thanks to satellite imaging, that the inland sea or “mega-lake” I describe was indeed once located in the Sahara region, south of the Ahaggar mountains. Thanks to precession (the slight wobble of the earth on its axis), the rain belts in Africa travel alternately north and south every 7-10,000 years. These waters did indeed feed a huge inland sea, explaining the wealth of prehistoric remnants that have been found on its long-dried shores. There are reports of great galleries there, cut deep into the rock of the Ahaggar mountains, along with a secret city underground; one of many that esoteric lore suggests are hidden around the world. Author David Childress claims that huge megalithic port cities have been seen in the shifting sands of the Sahara, only for the winds and sands to cover them up once again, and make exploration impossible. Ground-penetrating radar and LIDAR may yet reveal the truth of this theory, just as it has revealed a huge network of hitherto-unknown ancient sites in the jungles of South America.
Next time: Dogma, science… and racism
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