Atlantis

Atlantis, originally mentioned by Plato, was supposedly an ancient culture and island that he said was destroyed by a natural disaster (probably an earthquake) about 9,000 years before Plato's own time. Plato's Timaeus and Critias are the only written mentions of Atlantis, in which he gives some information on the size and location of the Atlantis island. Atlantis might be a work of pure fiction, however, possibly intended to illustrate Plato's philosophy on the ideal government. Plato's account purports to be based on a visit to Egypt by the Athenian lawgiver Solon. Sonchis, priest of Thebes, translated it into Greek for Solon.

With rare exceptions, such as Francis Bacon's book The New Atlantis, interest in Atlantis then languished for 2,200 years until the 1882 publication of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by Minnesota politician and sometime crankish writer Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly took Plato's account of Atlantis seriously and attempted to establish that all known ancient civilizations were descended from its high-neolithic culture.

Aristotle wrote of a large island in the Atlantic that the Carthaginians knew as Antilia. It is interesting that this name makes sense in Portuguese: ante-ilha meaning before/against-island. Proclus, the commentator of "Timaeus" mentions that Marcellus, relying on ancient historians, stated in his Aethiopiaka that in the Outer Ocean (the Atlantic) there were seven small islands dedicated to Persephone, and three large ones; one of these, comprising 1,000 stadia in length, was dedicated to Poseidon. Proclus tells us that Crantor reported that he, too, had seen the columns on which the story of Atlantis was preserved as reported by Plato: the Sais priest showed him its history in hieroglyph characters. Some other writers called it Poseidonis after Poseidon. Plutarch mentions Saturnia or Ogygia about five days' sail to the west of Britain. He added that westwards from that island, there were the three islands of Cronus, to where proud and warlike men used to come from the continent beyond the islands, in order to offer sacrifice to the gods of the ocean.

An important Greek festival of Pallas Athene, the Panathenaea was dated from the days of king Theseus. It consisted of a solemn procession to the Acropolis in which a peplos was carried to the goddess, for she had once saved the city, gaining victory over the nation of Poseidon, that is, the Atlanteans. As Lewis Spence comments, this cult was in existence already 125 years before Plato, which means that the story could not be invented by him. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that "the intelligentsia of Alexandria considered the destruction of Atlantis an historical fact, described a class of earthquakes that suddenly, by a violent motion, opened up huge mouths and so swallowed up portions of the earth, as once in the Atlantic Ocean a large island was swallowed up. Diodorus Siculus recorded that the Atlanteans did not know the fruits of Ceres. In fact, cereals were unknown to American Indians. Pausanias called these island "Satyrides," referring to the Atlantes and those who profess to know the measurements of the earth . He states that far west of the Ocean there lies a group of islands whose inhabitants are red-skinned and whose hair is like that of the horse. (Christopher Columbus described the Indians similarly.)

A fragmentary work of Theophrastus of Lesbos tells about the colonies of Atlantis in the sea. Hesiod wrote that the garden of the Hesperides was on an island in the sea where the sun sets. Pliny the Elder recorded that this land was 12,000 km distant from Cadiz, and Uba, a Numidian king intended to establish a stock farm of purple Murex there. Diodorus declares that the ancient Phoenicians and Etruscans knew America, the enormous island outside the Pillars of Heracles. He descibes it as the climate is very mild, fruits and vegetables grow ripe throughout the year. There are huge mountains covered with large forests, and wide, irrigable plains with navigable rivers. Scylax of Caryanda gives similar account.

Marcellus claims that the survivors of the sinking Atlantis migrated to Western Europe. Timagenes tells almost the same, citing the Druids of Gaul as his sources. He tries to classify the Gallic tribes according to their origins, and tells about one of them that they were colonists who came there from a remote island. Theopompus of Chios, a Greek historian called this land beyond the ocean as "Meropis". The dialogue between King Midas and the wise Silenus mentions the Meropids, the first men with huge cities of gold and silver. Silenus knows that besides the well-known portions of the world there is another, unknown, of incredible immensity, where immeasurably vast blooming meadows and pastures feed herds of various, huge and mighty beasts (perhaps buffaloes?). Claudius Aelianus cites Theopompus, knowing of the existence of the huge island out in the Atlantic as a continuing tradition among the Phoenicians or Carthaginians of Cadiz. Perhaps the Byzantine friar Cosmas Indicopleustes understood Plato better than the ancient and modern "Aristotelians", says Merezhkovsky. In his Topographica Christiana he included a chart of the terrestrial globe: it showed an inner sphere, a compact mainland surrounded by sea, having no visible support and being suspended, as it were, in the air; and this was surrounded by an outer sphere, with the inscription, "The earth beyond the Ocean, where men lived before the Flood."

Later esoteric writers such as Helena Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts/Seth proposed that Atlantis was an ancient, now-submerged, highly-evolved civilization. The metaphysical significance being that it was a land from which many of us continue to reincarnate, with Cayce adding that the Atlanteans also had ships and aircraft powered by a mysterious form of energy crystal.

The work Toward the Light has some description of Atlantis, including its exact geographical location.

Location Hypotheses

Yet another theory that fits in with geography of 11,000 years ago sites Atlantis in the Antarctic archipelago - technically in the South Atlantic Ocean - where it would have been drowned by the rise in sea level after the last Ice Age. How cold the local climate would have been is a matter for speculation. Troy, Minoan Crete (or possibly Santorini) and other ancient port cities are asserted to be colonies.

In Films

Other "Lost Lands"

External links

• Google: Atlantis
• Jim Allen's Historic Atlantis in Bolivia. Atlantis: The Andes Solution
• BBCNews, 20 September, 2001, Atlantis 'obviously near Gibraltar'
• Project Gutenberg Presents: Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly
• earthfiles.com: for more information (Password required).

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Frequency of Internet Keywords: Atlantis

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Modern Translation: Atlantis

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Misspellings: Atlantis

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Anagrams: Atlantis

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