Rockall: the True Atlantis
Index
- Introduction
- Plato's story
- The “9000 Years”
- Atlantis and Athens
- Europe at the time of Atlantis
- Where was Atlantis?
- Atlantis: “larger than Libya and Asia”
- Miscellaneous
- About size
- The topography
- The climate
- The elephants
- Conclusions
Introduction
Probably everyone has heard of the lost island of Atlantis at least once. But perhaps not everyone knows the origin of this story, which was told for the first time by Plato, the famous Greek philosopher who lived between 428 and 347 BC. In his works Timaeus and Critias, structured in the form of dialogues, one of the characters, Critias (who really existed: he was his maternal grandfather's brother) tell us the birth, development and finally the ruinous disappearance of the civilization of Atlantis, caused by the sinking of the island into the sea.
Is what Plato says true? And if so, to what extent? In this little research we will assume that Plato told the truth; to what extent we cannot know exactly, since some details cannot be verified and could be the result of the imagination. But the "nucleus" of the story, as well as many details of it, as we will see are anything but improbable and can very well refer to real events and, above all, to a place that really existed: Atlantis, in fact.
Numerous researchers have believed Plato's story and have tried to locate the mythical disappeared island. By now hypotheses in the real location abound: just to name a few, Atlantis has been identified with the island of Thera (today Santorini), with Sardinia, with the Po Valley, with Greenland, with Bolivia, with Southeast Asia and even with Antarctica. Clearly, some of these hypotheses are decidedly unlikely: the hypothesized place is either not an island (for example the Po Valley), or has very different measurements compared to those indicated (for example Thera, too small), or it is too away from the places mentioned by Plato (for example Antarctica, located almost at the other end of the world), and so on.
Other places proposed, however, such as Sardinia or Greenland, seem to better reflect the characteristics of the island described in the two dialogues. However, as we will demonstrate, there is only one place on the globe that fits Plato's descriptions perfectly: it is the area of Hatton Rockall (henceforth, for simplicity Rockall), located in the North Atlantic north-west of Ireland and today completely submerged except for a single rock, the island of Rockall (certainly, once, a mountain top). Jonathan Northcote, a South African lawyer, has recently published an excellent book where he provides numerous arguments in support of this hypothesis; another interesting work, although rather "eccentric", is that of the American engineer Stuart L. Harris, which focuses on the events that would have led to the submersion of the island.
In this study we will mainly deal with the elements that allow to locate (in time and space) the city of Atlantis; we will not deal with submersion mechanisms, for which I refer you to the two works cited above.
Plato's story
Atlantis is mentioned both in the Timaeus (20 d -26 e), in a synthetic way, and in the Critias (108 d -121 c), more widely. In both dialogues the story is narrated by Critias, who had learned it from his grandfather (also named Critias), who in turn had learned about Atlantis from Solon, a relative of his father. Solon had come to know of these facts during a trip to Egypt, in the city of Sais, at the time of King Amasis (about 569 BC). There, speaking with the priests of ancient events, he had noticed that the Greeks were anything but "experts" on the subject. An old priest then explained to him that this was due to the numerous cataclysms that had occurred over the centuries, which had repeatedly erased civilization and therefore also the memory of the most ancient events. He added that once upon a time, well 9000 years before that time (therefore in about 9600 BC) the city of Athens (of which Solon was a native) was the seat of an evolved civilization that accomplished great feats: among these, a war against Atlantis, an island located beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which ended with the defeat of this last. Later, however, earthquakes and cataclysms destroyed both civilizations and Atlantis sank into the sea.
This, broadly speaking, is the story told in the Timaeus. The Critias briefly mentions the war between Athens and Atlantis and the subsequent cataclysms, but then dwells on the description of prehistoric Athens and, above all, on the history, geography and political-military organization of Atlantis. It is said that when the gods divided up the various terrestrial regions, Attica (where Athens would have arisen) fell to Hephaestus and Athena, while Atlantis to Poseidon. Poseidon fathered children (five pairs of twins in all) with Clito, a woman who lived on the island: the first of these children, Atlas, became king of the island, which took its name from him together with the sea that surrounded it, the Atlantic indeed. The other nine became princes and each was given a part of the island; they and their descendants inhabited the island "for several generations", extending their dominion over the neighboring territories. As long as "the divine element" prevailed in them, they behaved wisely and increased the prosperity of the country; when instead human nature began to prevail in them, they degenerated morally until Zeus, seeing their condition, decided to punish them so that they returned to the straight path, and for this purpose he summoned all the gods.
At this point the dialogue ends abruptly, precisely "at the climax": probably the story should have continued by describing in detail the war between Athens and Atlantis and the disasters that followed it. Unfortunately it seems that Plato never wrote the continuation of the story, which should perhaps have been part of a third dialogue. In any case, the information contained in the Timaeus and the Critias are, as we will see, more than sufficient to find the exact location of the disappeared island.
The “9000 Years”
Certainly the 9,000-year period mentioned by Plato is one of the most controversial and at the same time intriguing aspects of the story. Two questions arise spontaneously:
- Did Plato really mean 9000 years, or rather a shorter period (e.g. 900 years, 9000 months, etc.)?
- Would it be theoretically possible for a people to keep the memory of facts, places and characters dating back 9000 years before, also providing such a detailed description?
Answering the first question is quite simple. A period (clearly approximate) of 9000 years, exaggerated as it may seem, is perfectly consistent with what is stated several times in the two dialogues: "Many destructions of men have taken place" (Timaeus, 22c); “Do not remember [referring to the Greeks] that only one terrestrial deluge, while many others occurred before” (ibid. , 23b); “Frightful earthquakes and cataclysms occurred then [after the war between Atlantis and Athens]” (ibid. , 25c); "Many and terrible cataclysms took place during these nine thousand years - such is in fact the time that has elapsed from that epoch to ours" (Critias, 111a). It is unthinkable that these cataclysms, such as to make entire civilizations regress, took place starting from the 2nd millennium BC (a period which could be traced back by interpreting years as months). Moreover, Solon tries to obtain from the Egyptian priests information concerning precisely the most ancient events of which memory could have survived (Timaeus , 22 a), so ancient that those remembered in Greek mythology, in comparison, were like "children's tales" (ibid . , 23 b): therefore it is not credible that the facts exposed by the priests dated back to just a millennium before the time in which Solon lived.
Moreover, the Timaeus and the Critias are not the only works of Plato in which mention is made of a very remote past. In Laws, for example, with regard to the Egyptian civilization, it is said that "if you do an investigation, you will find that there sculptures and paintings of ten thousand years ago - and not ten thousand years ago so to speak, but really - are no longer beautiful, they are no more ugly than those of today, because they are always made with the same technique" (656 and -657 a). And the Egyptian chronologies themselves seem to agree with this statement, placing the origin of this civilization even further back in time.
As for the second question, the answer is yes. Northcote in his book mentions several cases in which geological events dated to centuries or even millennia before our time were still present in the memory of local populations, their memory having been handed down from generation to generation. Furthermore, let us not forget that important texts of antiquity (for example the Homeric poems or the Vedas) were transmitted orally for centuries before being put into writing. This might seem like an impossible feat for us men of the third millennium, but it was perfectly normal in antiquity, when writing didn't exist. Moreover, still today in the West, stories, nursery rhymes, proverbs are often transmitted orally.
In theory, therefore, even oral transmission alone may have been sufficient to preserve the memory of Atlantis. However, I believe that in this case the fundamental role was played precisely by the written documentation of the events. It is the same priest of Sais who tells us: "If something beautiful, great, remarkable, in short, has happened, everything has been written here since ancient times in the temples, and the memory has been saved " (Timaeus, 23 a). And a little further on (before starting the story): "We will see the details of everything later, at our ease, having the same texts at hand " (ibid. , 23e). It's still: "In our scriptures it is reported that your city [Athens] annihilated a great power [Atlantis] which had together overrun all Europe and Asia” (ibid. , 24e). So the Egyptians had written down what had happened. But why, then, hadn't the Greeks done the same? It is always the old priest who answers us: "With you [the Greeks], as soon as there has been a certain evolution in writing and in all that cities need, here again, at regular intervals of time, the cataracts of heaven are opened, and of you only the illiterate and the ignorant survive. And so every time you come back young, without knowing anything of what was here, of what happened among you, in ancient times” (ibid. , 23a-b).
Although the invention of writing is traced back to around 3500 a. C., therefore over 6000 years after the disappearance of Atlantis, it is actually unlikely that such a developed civilization did not possess even a rudimentary form, and the same is true for the Egyptian and Greek civilizations, described by Plato as contemporary to the Atlantean one (both actually "ancestors" of those historically known to us). Writing, as well as other knowledge, would have been lost with the "resets" caused by natural catastrophes, and only in "historical" times would civilizations like the Greek one have definitively re-appropriated it, as elsewhere asserted by Plato himself (Read, 677 c - d , 680 BC). Among the Egyptians, however, according to what the priest affirms (Timaeus , 22 d-e), the cataclysms would never have made a tabula rasa of civilization, and this would have allowed to preserve the memory of the most ancient events.
In my opinion, therefore, Plato's affirmation about the "9000 years" is plausible, just as it is plausible that facts of a certain importance, such as those relating to Atlantis, have been transmitted intact, orally or in writing, through various millennia.
Atlantis and Athens
The history of Atlantis, as we have seen, is doubly linked to that of Athens. Critias (110 d -111 e) describes the territory surrounding this city in great detail: “The land of our country surpassed all the others in fertility ... it produced an infinite abundance of fruit ... there were also many cultivated trees, and the earth gave the flocks, inexhaustible pastures ... everywhere the waves of springs and rivers flowed generously”.
This geography, however, does not at all reflect that of the Greek region of Attica, where Athens is located. Plato is aware of this and attributes these differences to natural catastrophes which, over the course of 9,000 years, would have "scarred" the earth little by little (Critias , 111 a-b).
But are we sure that this very ancient Athens was the same city that gave birth to Plato in the 5th century BC? Or perhaps it was Homeric Athens, which Felice Vinci, in his revolutionary book placed in southern Sweden (precisely in correspondence with today's Karlskrona)? This region seems to reflect the characteristics of this "prehistoric" Athens: it is in fact very large, flat and full of lakes and rivers. Not only that: the study of fossil floral finds has shown how, around 12,000 years ago, this region enjoyed relatively mild summers, more than previously believed.
The south of the Scandinavian peninsula therefore represented a decidedly favorable environment for the development of civilization. Of course, civilization also flourished in other places, for example Egypt, Mesopotamia and perhaps Atlantis itself. With regard to Scandinavia, it would have been the south of the peninsula that played a privileged role, since, as we will see shortly, the northernmost regions were entirely covered by ice.
Europe at the time of Atlantis
To understand where to locate the island of Atlantis, it is necessary to have an idea of how Europe (and in particular Northern Europe) appeared in the period Plato speaks of: this period could coincide with the Recent Dryas, which is roughly placed between 10,800 and – curious coincidence – 9600 BC
During the Late Dryas the sea level was more than 60 meters lower than today. As a result, the land area was much greater: England was connected to continental Europe and the area of the present North Sea was occupied by a large portion of land, now known as Doggerland. A reconstruction of prehistoric Europe is shown in the map below.
The extent of the ice caps was also much greater than now: a recent study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379115301141) reconstructs in great detail the progressive melting of the Fennoscandian ice cap, which covered much of the Scandinavian peninsula and today's Finland. In the figure below, taken from the cited study, it can be seen that during the Recent Dryas southern Sweden was free from ice, and that during that entire period the deglaciation underwent a drastic slowdown: only with the end of the Recent Dryas did the ice cap start to melt again.
Hence, also the "numerous and terrible cataclysms" that would have occurred since the disappearance of Atlantis (Critias, 111 a) finally find a logical explanation: very probably, in fact, they were caused by the progressive melting of the ice cap, which caused those massive floods known as "floods" (traces of one have recently been discovered).
Around 7700 BC, the Fennoscandian ice cap had almost completely disappeared, but even later there were natural catastrophes: for example, in about 6200 BC a gigantic tsunami submerged the last remnants of Doggerland, which had already shrunk somewhat in the previous millennia; its effects were also felt in neighboring British and Scandinavian regions. Therefore, it is very probable that the peoples of northern Europe really found themselves more than once having to start from scratch… just like Plato says.
Where was Atlantis?
Having completed our excursus in the geography of prehistoric Europe, let us now try to determine the exact position of Atlantis. The text gives us five elements to locate the island:
- Atlantis stood before the Pillars of Hercules (Timaeus, 24 e);
- From Atlantis one could pass to the "other islands", and from these to the "continent" which surrounded the "true sea" where the island was located, distinct from the sea within the Strait of the Pillars of Hercules, similar to a "port of narrow mouth” (ibid., 24 and -25 a);
- Atlantis had extended its dominion over the neighboring islands, over parts of the continent and over the territories "on this side" of the Pillars of Hercules, "in Libya as far as Egypt and in Europe as far as Tyrrhenia" (ibid., 25 a; Critias, 114c);
- The part of the island facing the Pillars of Hercules was close to the region known as "Gadirica" (Critias, 114 b);
- The sea where Atlantis was found is "difficult to navigate" due to the slums formed following the sinking of the island (Timaeus, 25 AD; Critias, 108 e -109 BC).
So let's go through these points one by one.
1) Atlantis was in front of the Pillars of Hercules.
The term "before" is the translation of the Greek pro, which indicates a condition of proximity. Atlantis was therefore located just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. But… where were (and what were) these “Columns”?
The Pillars of Hercules are defined as a "strait": do you mean the Strait of Gibraltar? Or should we look further north? A passage from Tacitus could help us in this regard: "Fame has disclosed that there [in today's North Sea] there are still some Pillars of Hercules..." (Germany , 34). There are no "straits" in the North Sea today, but 12,000 years ago… yes! If we look at the map, we can see how today's Orkney and Shetland formed a strait, opposite Rockall Island (unlike the Strait of Gibraltar, much further away). So the Pillars of Hercules mentioned in the Platonic text could be just these.
2) From Atlantis one could pass to the "other islands", and from these to the "continent" which surrounded the "true sea" where the island was located, distinct from the sea within the Strait of the Pillars of Hercules, similar to a "port of narrow mouth".
If we look at Rockall's position in the Atlantic Ocean, we realize the plausibility of these statements. From there, in fact, it would have been easy to reach the "mainland" by stopping at the "other islands" (Iceland and Greenland), without the need for a long navigation in the open sea. It is almost obvious to point out that the "continent" we are talking about can only be America, which surrounds the "real sea", i.e. the Atlantic Ocean.
So, if the "true sea" was the Atlantic Ocean, what was the sea "like a narrow-mouth harbor"? To find out, just take a look at the map above: it was the North Sea! In fact the presence of Doggerland made it much less wide than now, especially near Norway, where it almost resembled a channel. We can then add another detail to our map.
3) Atlantis had extended its dominion over the nearby islands, over parts of the continent and over the territories "on this side" of the Pillars of Hercules, "in Libya as far as Egypt and in Europe as far as Tyrrhenia".
Atlantis therefore dominated the nearby islands and some territories of North America: so far, nothing exceptional. But the mention of African regions (Libya, Egypt) and European regions (Tyrrenia, more or less today's Tuscany) among those subject to the dominion of Atlantis could give rise to some doubts about the reconstruction proposed here: it is possible that the dominion of this island had pushed so far, as far as the Mediterranean?
Obviously, nothing can be excluded. But if we keep in mind the northern location of the Pillars of Hercules that we hypothesized a little while ago, also the aforementioned regions (as indeed Athens itself) must inevitably be placed in the same context. From the map of prehistoric Northern Europe shown above, it can be seen that Atlantis and Athens represented two opposing "poles" between the European regions facing the North Atlantic: from this it can be hypothesized that Atlantis had conquered almost all the regions "in the middle", but not Athens which was precisely the furthest away. So the terms “Libya”, “Tirrenia”, “Egypt” could perhaps indicate the regions into which it was divided… Doggerland!
In this regard, it is at least curious to note that Doggerland was crossed by the river Elba, curiously homonymous of the Tuscan island where the Etruscans (another name of the Tyrrhenian) extracted iron. Furthermore, the Elbe river is called Laba or Lobja (a name that recalls Libya) in some Slavic languages: perhaps the Tirreni and Libi lived on opposite banks of this river? For now we can only remain in the field of hypotheses.
4) The part of the island facing the Pillars of Hercules was close to the region known as "Gadirica".
Chapter 9 of Northcote's book is entirely devoted to this subject: he identifies this region with Ireland, which is actually "within a stone's throw" of Rockall. This identification is suggested by various ancient writers (Herodotus, Apollodorus, and others), who, citing a certain island of "Erizia", close to the ocean, place it near this region or identify it with it. Since various details would lead one to think that the island of Erizia corresponds precisely to Ireland (whose local name, Eire, recalls that of Erizia), we could conclude that the Gadirica region corresponds precisely to this island. However, I refer to the book for further information.
5) The sea where Atlantis was located is "difficult to navigate" due to the slums formed following the sinking of the island.
It is certainly no mystery that the small island of Rockall is actually part of a vast portion of land now submerged (for example, it is also mentioned at http://marine.gov.scot/information/rockall-bathymetry-2011-and-2012). But this sinking is not an event of the past: it seems that the island is still sinking. From measurements carried out in 1977 and subsequently in 2014, it was possible to ascertain that in that period of time the island had subsided by 85 cm (therefore approximately 2.3 cm per year). Considering a similar rhythm also in past centuries, in Plato's time the island must have been over 50 meters higher than today.
But what about the sea "difficult to every navigation"? This assertion could find confirmation in the story of Himilco, a Carthaginian navigator of the 5th century BC, reported by Avieno in his poem Ora Maritima, much later (4th century AD). According to this account, near the British Isles the sea was full of weeds and very shallow, which made navigation difficult. Even Aristotle in Meteorology states that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was shallow and muddy. But even today navigation in those waters is particularly risky, as demonstrated by the various shipwrecks that occurred near the island of Rockall.
Atlantis: “larger than Libya and Asia”
Both in the Timaeus (24 e) and in the Critias (108 e) it is asserted that the island of Atlantis was "larger than Libya and Asia combined". A statement, however, not easy to decipher: in fact we need to understand 1) what is meant by "greater" and 2) what is meant by "Libya" and "Asia". So let's try to understand it.
1) What does "bigger" mean?
The word translated as "larger" is meizon . It has been hypothesized that this term did not refer to the size of the island, but rather to its military power: an incorrect interpretation, in my opinion, since it was not justified by the context of the sentence. It is more probable that the word actually indicated the physical size of the island and, specifically, its perimeter (and not the surface). In fact, as Vinci points out, in ancient Greece the size of a territory was determined by measuring its coastal profile, as indeed was fitting for an essentially maritime civilization: Diodorus Siculus reports the size of present-day Great Britain in this way (Historical Library, V, 21). Therefore, we can meanwhile say that the perimeter of Atlantis was greater than that of Libya and Asia combined.
2) Which places indicate the terms "Libya" and "Asia"?
In this case the answer is more difficult, since we do not know exactly which territories Plato was referring to: it is believed that in that era, "Libya" meant the current North Africa west of Egypt, while "Asia" meant the current Turkey and the Middle Eastern territories. Northcote, however, addresses the question by referring to Herodotus, who in a passage of his Histories (IV, 42) states that Europe is as long as Libya and Asia combined. Considering "Europe" the territory between the Caucasus and the Atlantic Ocean, we have between the two ends a distance as the crow flies between 2900 and 4100 km (depending on the western point taken as a reference): therefore it should have been this is the order of magnitude of the perimeter of Atlantis.
But what was the perimeter of the now submerged region of Rockall? Northcote calculates approximately, via Google Earth, both this perimeter (2730 km) and that of Great Britain (2860 km); then compares the latter with the perimeter obtained from http://ports.com/ (3430 km) and obtains through a proportion the "real" Rockall, which turns out to be about 3275 km, in line with the expected interval. Theoretically, then, the identification of Atlantis with Rockall also mirrors the claim that the island was larger than Libya and Asia combined.
Miscellaneous
The Critias is generous with information on the geography and natural wealth of Atlantis. We will examine them briefly after a small digression on the units of measurement used by Plato.
ABOUT SIZE
Plato employs three different units of measurement to describe quantities: the foot (about 30 cm), the plethra (about 30 m = 100 feet), and the stadium (about 180 m = 6 plethra = 600 feet). However, if we examine the dimensions that he provides of the island of Atlantis (especially of the buildings), they are all incredibly exaggerated, to the point that even he comes to doubt them (Critias, 118 c)! An example: Plato states (Critias, 118 c-d) that all around the plain that occupied the center of the island a channel had been dug a plethra deep (therefore about 30 m) and a total of 10,000 stadia long (about 1800km). But these are enormously disproportionate measures: just think that the Panama Canal has a depth of "only" 12 m and is "only" 80 km long!
A question arises spontaneously: are these measures reliable? Or did Plato blunder? In an excellent article (http://www.thorwalds-internetseiten.de/atlantis/RichterU_2005_PlatosAtlantisWasInARiverDelta.pdf) the German researcher Ulf Richter suggests that the Greek stadium should be replaced with the Egyptian khet, corresponding to 52.4 m (100 real cubits): indeed, Solon may have reported the sizes in this unit of measurement, but the his heirs, through whom the story reached Plato, may have confused it with the stage. With this expedient, the quantities we obtain are much more realistic: for example, the canal is only slightly less than 9 m deep and 524 km long; the hippodrome (Critias, 117 c), one stadium wide and 57 long (over 10 km!), measures 52 m in width and just under 3 km in length, like the largest current racecourses; the temple of Poseidon (Critias, 116 AD) measures not 90 x 180 m, i.e. 3 plethra (1/2 stadium) x 1 stadium, but only 26 x 52 m (1/2 khet x 1 khet), roughly the same as the temple of Neptune in Paestum, which measures 24 x 60 m. In my opinion, therefore, the replacement of the stadium with the khet is more than reasonable and therefore we will take this into account later.
THE TOPOGRAPHY
According to the Critias, the central part of the island was occupied by an oblong-shaped plain, facing south and sheltered from the north winds (113c, 118a -b); this plain was surrounded by mountains of great height and beauty, extending as far as the sea (118a -b). The sides of the plain, already quite regular in themselves, had been made artificially straight, so that the whole plain had the shape of a quadrilateral (118c); since the sides measured 3000 and 2000 stadia, its perimeter was 10,000 stadia (118 a , d). The whole area was crossed by several straight canals, 100 stades apart from each other, which connected to the ditch dug all around the plain (118 AD).
So let's see if these particulars can fit Rockall. The vast submerged area actually has a flat central part (the Hatton-Rockall Basin), facing south and surrounded by hills (the Hatton and Rockall Banks). Had this area been subaerial, these mountains could have actually protected the plain from the north winds, which makes perfect sense for an island that grazes the 60th parallel.
But what about the measures of the central plain? Referring to what we said earlier, let's replace the Greek stadium with the Egyptian khet (52.4 m): we thus have a plain of 157 x 105 km and canals 5.2 km away from each other, measurements compatible with the size of the Rockall Basin. Moreover, through Google Earth we can observe the presence in the Rockall Basin of numerous parallel channels distant from each other about ... 5 km. Just a coincidence?
THE CLIMATE
From some passages of the Critias (for example 115 a-b) we can guess that Atlantis enjoyed a rather mild climate. We also know that the inhabitants of the island harvested the products of the earth twice a year, "using rainwater in winter, and in summer irrigating the products of the soil with the waters of the canals" (Critias , 118e). Rockall's current climate does not reflect that described in the Critias; however, if the entire Hatton Rockall area had been sub-aerial, it would have been "embraced" on all sides by the Gulf Stream: this would probably have favored a milder climate. The climate of Atlantis, therefore, could have been similar to that of Ireland: it too, like Platonic Atlantis, receives most of the rains in winter and is lapped by the Gulf Stream, which allows the growth of palm trees and other plants typical of warmer climates.
THE ELEPHANTS
Atlantis was home to animals of all kinds, among which the elephant stood out (Critias, 114 and -115a). The presence of this animal in a Nordic island might sound strange, but let's remember that we are talking about a time very distant from ours, in which mammoths still existed in Europe, the last specimens of which became extinct only 4000 years ago. Northcote points out that another species of elephant was also present in the British Isles, the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), more adapted to temperate climates than the mammoth. The straight-tusked elephant would have died out in Europe before 30,000 years ago, but according to this study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618211006264) some specimens belonging to the same genus were still present 3000 years ago in northern China. Although it cannot be proven that elephants were actually found in a subaerial Rockall, the presence of at least one of these two species would have been theoretically possible.
Conclusions
We have thus come to the end of this research. In my opinion, on the basis of what has been stated here, Rockall represents the "ideal" location of the mythical island of Atlantis: an island of considerable size, located in a "strategic" position between Europe and America, lapped on all sides by the Current of the Gulf, which benefited from a happy climate, and finally sank due to terrible cataclysms: "simple" natural disasters, or really a "divine punishment" for the arrogance of its inhabitants? Whatever happened, even today a tiny part of the ancient island emerges from the ocean waves, almost as a warning to us men of the third millennium. And perhaps it will disappear completely only when its mystery is finally revealed.
Note
This article is an english translation of the italian article "Rockall: la Vera Atlantide" by Merlo Bianco. You can find the original article here: https://merlobianco.altervista.org/rockall-la-vera-atlantide/
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