ATLANTIS, The story in the legend
“In front of that narrow mouth called the Pillars of Hercules, there was an island. And this island was bigger than Libya and Asia together, and from it one could pass to other islands and from these to the mainland opposite. [..] In later times [..], having occurred extraordinary earthquakes and cataclysms, in the turn of a day and a bad night [..] all en masse sank under the ground, and the island Atlantis similarly swallowed by the sea disappeared".
The myth
From the dialogues of Critias and Timaeus, written by Plato around 340 BC, to speak is Critias, a relative of the philosopher, who tells that about a century earlier, in 590 BC, the legislator Solon had stopped in the administrative capital of Egypt, Sais. Here he had tried to impress the Priests of the temple of the Mother Goddess Neith by illustrating the ancient Greek traditions, but one of them claimed that the Greek was a young people compared to another, about which the Egyptians had much written documentation. According to the priest, an evolved civilization had existed for centuries on an island that was destroyed nine thousand years earlier by a huge cataclysm together with all its inhabitants.
Critias describes the fertility of her lands also populated by elephants:
"From the sea, towards the middle of the whole island, there was a plain; the most beautiful and the most fertile of all the plains, and from the center rose a not very high mountain."
Atlas is not to be identified with the homonymous giant son of Iapetus and Climene, some aspects of the hero's life are interesting: according to mythology he is in the far west, in the land of the Hesperides. Zeus condemned him to bear the sky on his shoulders, after the victory over the giants. From this legend the Moroccan mountains were called Atlas. Herodotus was the first person to give this name to this mountains. The island was rich in metals and there were of all kind of metals, the most famous and mysterious one was the orichalcum. It is not known exactly what type of metal it is, some hypotheses have been advanced. According to a passage by Filopono, orichalcum was actually brass. According to others, it was a bronze alloy similar to gold, made up of copper and small parts of tin, lead and zinc.
... The island, in which the palace was located, had the diameter of five stadiums (888 meters). This of all around and the walls and the pewter wide bridge (29.60 meters) covered them on both sides with a stone wall, imposing towers and doors on the bridges along all the sea passages. And from all around under the island, which was in the middle, and under the outer and inner walls, they cut stones, some white, some black, some red, and so they dug two deep basins in the interior of the island. with the same rock for cover. And the buildings, some formed simple, others for pleasure with various mixture of stones, giving each its natural joy ...
The city was therefore well fortified and equipped with towers. This suggests that Atlantis was constantly at war for political and economic dominance. The white, black and red stones are typically volcanic stone colors that are abundant in Atlantis, being a volcanic island. We know thanks to Berlitz that: this particular reference to the stones with which the buildings of Atlantis were built finds an unexpected confirmation in the prevailing colors of the rocks present in the Azores islands: also white, black and red.
Aristotle, a disciple of Plato, did not give much importance to his Master, and this non-opinion had a decisive weight in the Christian Middle Ages. Aristotle, in fact, was considered an undisputed authority, and moreover the existence of a destroyed continent nine thousand years earlier did not coincide with the date of the creation of the world according to Genesis, calculated in 3760 BC.
Plato
Plato was born in Athens in 428 BC / 347 BC, period coinciding with the golden age crisis of Periclean Greece.
His real name was Aristocles.
His father boasted King Codro among his ancestors, his mother boasted a kinship with Solon. It is therefore obvious that Plato saw his own ideal in political life from an early age.
Aristotle tells us that Plato was first a disciple of Cratylus and then of Socrates. It is certain that Plato frequented Socrates, with the same intent with which most of the other young people frequented him, that is, to prepare for political activity.
According to Aristoxenus, in the years 409-407 (period of the ephebia) Plato took part in military campaigns three times: in Tanagra, in Corinth and in Delio.
The Peloponnesian war ends and the supremacy of Sparta is imposed; a first direct contact with political life Plato must have had in 404/403 BC. In Athens the oligarchists take over the government with the so-called "Thirty tyrants", among which there was just Critias, Plato's uncle, who invited him to participate in the oligarchic government, from which, however, he soon withdrew disappointed.
Disgust for the policy practiced in Athens must have reached its peak in 399 BC, when Socrates was sentenced to death. And the Democrats were responsible for the condemnation of Socrates.
After 399 BC Plato was in Megara with some other Socratics, a guest of Euclid.
In 388 BC, in his forties, he left for Italy.
If, as we are told, Plato have been also in Egypt and Cyrene, this must have happened before 388 BC; but he says nothing about these trips in his diary.
To push him to Italy must certainly be the desire to know the communities of the Pythagoreans, including Archita.
On his return to Athens he founded the Academy, in a gymnasium located in the park dedicated to the hero Academy, hence the name of the Academy, and the Meno is probably the first proclamation of the new school.
In 367 BC Plato went a second time to Sicily. Dionigi I had died and his son Dionigi II had succeeded him. But the new tyrant turned out to have the same nature as his father.
In 361 BC Plato went a third time to Sicily. In fact, when he returned to Athens, he found Dione who had taken refuge there, who convinced him to accept a new pressing invitation from Dionysius. But it was a grave mistake to believe in the changed sentiments of Dionysius. Plato would even have risked his life if Archita and the Tarantini had not intervened to save him.
In 360 Plato returned to Athens and remained there at the direction of the Academy, until his death in 347 BC.
Hypothesis on the site of Atlantis
A current of thought, composed of the seismologist Angelos Galanopoulos and the Greek archaeologist Spiridon Marinatos, together with the Irish J. V. Luce, has advanced the hypothesis that once Atlantis was the Greek island of Thira (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea, buried from a volcanic eruption around 1500 BC. The civilization of Akrotiri, on the Greek island, was effectively destroyed by a volcanic eruption. For a narrative expedient, Plato would have transported it beyond the Pillars of Hercules, would have enlarged it to the level of the continent and would have set the episode in a much earlier era.
Santorini, the most mysterious and evocative island of the entire Cyclades archipelago is the result of the largest volcanic explosion ever seen. Once circular in shape and dominated by the volcano, the island took the name of Stronghyle, the rotunda. Later it took the name of Kallisti, the most beautiful.
The Venetians called it Santa Irene, a name that it still retains today. The island presents the surreal lunar landscape of the caldera, the external lava crown of the volcano that runs along all the remaining crescent moon: inside, the deep sea.
Or according to the Italian researcher Flavio Barbero, Atlantis would have been found in Antarctica. In ancient times the climate of that territory was temperate, and a civilization could easily have developed there; then the glaciations would have completely destroyed it.
Another recent theory identifies Atlantis with Tartessus, a prosperous city-state of Phoenician origin built on an island at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. In the 5th century BC the city was completely destroyed, probably by a Carthaginian attack, certainly leaving behind the legend of a great civilization that suddenly disappeared. Around 1920 the German archaeologist Adolf Schulten identified its position: it would have risen near Cadiz, the ancient Gades, and, in fact, Plato writes in his diary of a king called Gadiro. Tartessus has some analogy with the city described by the Greek philosopher: it was irrigated by canals, it was fertile and rich in minerals, and above all it was destroyed in a very short time.
For France things went differently! The botanist D. A. Godron founded the "School of Atlantis" in Africa in 1868, placing the lost city in the Sahara desert. France owned many colonies in North Africa, and a possible location of Atlantis in that territory tickled their nationalism. This explains the numerous expeditions in search of the lost city in the Ahaggar massif. Coincidence or not, the famous nomads of the desert, the "Tuareg", are handed down from father to son a legend, in which it is said that they are the descendants of a people coming from the sea, whose homeland was destroyed by a terrible cataclysm and their queen was called "Antinea". Strangely, the name is identical to that of the queen of Atlantis, as it is described by Plato in his stories.
In England we locate Atlantis, off the coast of Cornwall where the mythical city of Lyonesse sank. Some Great Atlanteans, including the Wizard Merlin, who survived the destruction, found the magical center of Avalon, where they restore the ancient esoteric cults of the lost continent, choosing disciples like Arthur to carry on the Tradition. The Atlanteans mix with the Celts, and spread throughout Europe, where they raise megaliths to symbolize the cult of the Sun.
In 1935, the American medium Edgar Cayce claimed in a trance that Atlantis had been destroyed due to the misuse of dark forces by evil priests, and predicted that parts of the lost continent would resurface within a few years off the coast of Florida.
In fact, in May 1969, the underwater archaeologist Manson Valentine found some constructions submerged in the depths of Bimini, near the archipelago of the Bahamas the traces of a wide road made up of enormous blocks of perfectly interlocked rock, ran raised on the sandy bottom for a few hundreds of meters and was similar to a "saché", the ceremonial road of the Maya. According to some it would be an unusual geological formation; according to others, the testimony of an extremely advanced civilization from the technological point of view: the mythical Atlantis.
Since then, expeditions to find Atlantis have followed one another in the Atlantic Ocean. The last, led by Boris Asturua, would have identified in 400 miles off the coast of Portugal a series of architectural structures that, however, almost all of the archaeologists interviewed continue to consider simple volcanic formations. Before Boris Asturua, another researcher, Maxine Asher, had had the same answer for a series of underwater "pyramids", located a hundred kilometers off the Yucatan.
According to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Atlantis would instead have been an alien base, destroyed due to the misuse of nuclear energy.
Further Atlantides have been placed in even more imaginative places: in Brazil, North America, Ceylon, Mongolia, South Africa, Malta, Palestine, East Prussia, Crete.
Russian say that Atlantis would have been a real bridge between two worlds. In fact, according to these theories, where the oceans are today, there could once have been large strips of land that later sunk.
Atlantis, the return
In October 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered that, beyond the Atlantic, there was indeed a land: the English philosopher Francis Bacon suggested that it could have been the continent described in Critias.
Many opinions began to change, so much so that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Guillaume Postel, John Dee, Sanson, Robert de Vangoudy and many other cartographers called the Americas with the name of Atlantis.
After the Conquest, it was also discovered that an ancient legend of the indigenous people of Mexico, transcribed in the Aubin Code, began with these words:
"The Uexotzincas, the Xochimilacas, the Cuitlahuacas, the Matlatzincas, the Malincalas left Aztlan and wandered aimlessly."
Aztlan was an island in the Atlantic, and the ancient tribes had had to leave it because it was sinking into the ocean. The survivors had taken the name from the island: they called themselves Aztecs, or "Inhabitants of Aztlan".
For the record, this theory is taught in school in Mexico; Many ancient drawings describing migration are exhibited at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
In 1815, Joseph Smith, a 15-year-old farmer from Manchester, Ontario County in New York, had a first meeting with an angel named Moroni who promised him extraordinary revelations. Many years later the angel showed him the hiding place of some precious tablets written in an unknown language, which Smith diligently began to translate. In 1830 The Book of Mormon was published, a real bible of the sect of Mormons, which describes a destruction with characteristics very similar to the hypothetical destruction of Atlantis.
"In the thirty-fourth year, in the first month, on the fourth day, a great hurricane arose, such that no one like it had ever been seen on earth; and there was also a great and horrible storm, and a horrible thunder that shook the whole earth as if it were about to split open (...). And many large and important cities sank, others were in flames, several were shaken until the buildings collapsed, and the inhabitants were killed and the places reduced to desolation (...) Thus the surface of the whole earth was deformed, and a dense darkness descended over the whole land, and because of the darkness they could not light any lights, neither candles nor torches"
... The survivors, the people of Nephi, had taken refuge in time "in the land of Plenty", where they had built temples and cities, including that of Palenque and a large fortress later identified with Machu Picchu.
Someone begins to notice some similarities between the civilization of ancient Egypt and those of Central America: pyramid constructions, embalming, year divided into 365 days, legends, linguistic affinities. Atlantis would therefore have been a sort of natural bridge between the two civilizations, probably extended between the Azores and the Bahamas.
In 1847 a French scientist, Abbot Charles-Etienne Brasseur, discovered "definitive proof" of the connection between the Mediterranean, Atlantis and Central America.
His theories were immediately discredited, but inspired Ignatius Donnelly to write Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882). According to Donnelly, Atlantis was the biblical Paradise on Earth, and the first civilizations had developed there. Its inhabitants had scattered across America, Europe and Asia; its kings and queens had become the gods of ancient religions. Then, about thirteen thousand years ago, the entire continent was submerged by a volcanic cataclysm.
For the researcher Nikolaj Jirov, the most probable site for the location of Atlantis is the current underwater plateau on which the Azores islands are located, this place in fact seems to correspond to the description made by Plato.
Details of the story told by Plato are acquiring verisimilitude as the bottom of the sea reveals his secrets to man; moreover, as we have already anticipated, coincidences, cultural, architectural, linguistic and biological affinities bind the peoples of the "new" and "old" world, so much so that many scientists affirm that in a period preceding the biblical "numbered days" (from 3500 onwards Christ to date) a civilization actually moved from one side of the Atlantic to the other, passing through the islands of the "vanished continent".
The first discovery dates back to 1898, and it happened by chance: during the laying of a telegraph line one of the cables, laid at 2800 meters of depth on an Atlantic seabed, since then called "Platea del Telegrafo", broke. Its extremities were fortunately recovered from the abyss with special equipment that also brought a strange rock to the surface. A few years later, Paul Tremier, director of the Oceanographic Institute of France, gave a lecture in Paris that caused a sensation: that rock was of clear volcanic origin but had a peculiarity: it had not solidified in deep waters but in the open air; that is, it must have come from a volcano with an outlet above sea level. Furthermore, it had sharp edges, not yet smoothed by marine erosion: analyzing its profile, Tremier estimated that it should not have been more than 15,000 years old. Further submarine samples confirmed that the same type of rock was present in a very large area of those Atlantic bottoms.
To support this thesis, the fact that the structure of the ocean floors coinciding with the submerged North Atlantic chain is mainly composed of basalt, a compound of volcanic rock which, in proximity to an ocean, tends to be unstable. The oldest continents, on the other hand, are composed of granite, a much more solid rock.
Soon the academic world was clearly divided between those who asserted that scientific proof had finally been found of the sinking of Atlantis and those who, on the other hand, claimed that those igneous rocks came from the Icelandic coasts, engulfed by icebergs that had then melted. The controversy was abating when drilling carried out south of the Azores by the research vessel Gauss in the so-called "Fossa di Romanche", at a depth of 7300 meters, revealed the presence of layers of red clay containing numerous fossils of globigerine, microscopic protozoa that normally live in depths between 2000 and 4500 meters. Therefore, that layer of clayey sediments must have sunk, in a relatively recent period, by at least 2800 meters: the same value found by Paul Tremier for the "Platea del Telegrafo".
Even biology seems to want to confirm the hypothesis of the natural bridge, butterflies, earthworms and ants typical of the Azores and the Canaries are in fact also found in Central America, not to mention the enigma of elephants. It is Plato himself who speaks of the pachyderms in Atlantis. In the ancient world this species did not exist, while it appears later in Africa.
The cataclysm
Granted the existence of Atlantis, the Atlantidists are quite in agreement in arguing that the destruction of Atlantis occurred around 10.000 years ago, more or less in the period described by Plato.
As for the causes, the hypotheses are many: from the volcanic eruption, to a nuclear war, to the fall of an asteroid.
It is now certain that with the end of the last glaciation, there have been many climatic and geographical upheavals all over the earth. The melting of the ice must have submerged many lands in many places on the planet and caused the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people to other dry areas (for example, the British Isles, Scandinavia and Europe were united, Sicily was united with Calabria, the Bahamas islands consisted of a large mass of land, etc ...).
This great melting of the ice, with consequent enormous rise of the waters and these apocalyptic floods have been remembered by man as the universal flood. The legend of the flood is present in almost all the cultures of the world exist, artifacts that cannot be classified in a canonical way as products of known civilizations.
Myths say that before the flood "the sky fell to the earth" and that "the earth had tilted". Furthermore, a large object of fire is said to have crossed the sky bringing great catastrophes and destruction. All this can lead to the hypothesis that a meteorite fell on the earth with consequent melting of the ice.
As can be read in the "Timaeus", the priest of Sais and Solon discussed the myth of Phaeton and the first told Solon that this myth only wanted to explain how a comet, deviated from its original orbit, had fallen to earth.
The meteorite, coming from the Asteroid Zone, should have fallen in the northern hemisphere, probably in the North Atlantic Ocean it would have caused the end of the last ice age. Otto Muck, has reconstructed with complex calculations based on the Mayan calendar even the exact day of the catastrophe: June 5, 8498 BC. The impact of the meteorite with the ocean would have created a huge tsunami and the heat of the same would have caused very violent and devastating perturbations that would have hit the whole world. The <<survivors>> went to safer places for example in Central and South America, where they probably gave a first impulse to future civilizations.
The disappearance of a continent due to a cataclysm hypothesized above would first of all modify the ocean currents, radically changing the climatic situations, creating new glaciations and new desert areas.
In short, if Atlantis had been destroyed in a day and a night, as Plato asserts, the Earth would necessarily have known an era of barbarism, and a new civilization could not have evolved before five to six thousand years.
Apart from some insights from Plato's tale (for example that of a real continent beyond the ocean), the only evidence in favor is purely circumstantial.
If the pro-Atlantean evidence is unconvincing, so is the anti-Atlantean evidence.
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