Atlantis is an island whose historical existence and ___location are uncertain. The first references to Atlantis are from the classical Greek philosopher Plato, who said it was engulfed by the ocean as the result of an earthquake 9,000 years before his own time. While there are many hypotheses about Atlantis, the vast majority of scientists conclude that Atlantis never existed, and that Plato made up the story using elements that may have been drawn from real events.
- This article is about the hypothetical ancient island of Atlantis. For other uses, see Atlantis (disambiguation).
Ancient accounts of Atlantis
Plato's story
Plato's accounts of Atlantis are in his works Timaeus and Critias. These philosophical dialogues, usually dated to the 360s BC, are the earliest known references to Atlantis. The Timaeus begins with an introduction, followed by an account of the creations and structure of the universe and ancient civilizations. In the introductory portion, Socrates muses on the perfect society (as described in Plato's Republic) and wonders if he and his guests could come up with a story which puts this society into action. Critias mentions an allegedly historical tale that he would make the perfect example, and follows up by describing Atlantis in the Critias dialogue, mainly its origins and form (Ancient Athens represented the "perfect society," and Atlantis the opponent, representing the opposite of the "perfect" traits described in the Republic.) Critias' account is purported to have originated from a visit to Egypt by the Athenian lawgiver Solon, where Sonchis, priest of Thebes, translated it into Greek for him.
According to Critias, the Hellenic gods of old divided the land so that each god might own a lot; Poseidon was appropriately, and to his liking, bequeathed the island of Atlantis. The island was larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined, but has since been sunk by an earthquake and became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Egyptians described Atlantis as an island approximately 700 km across, comprising mostly mountains in the northern portions and along the shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south "extending in one direction three thousand stadia [about 600 km], but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia [about 400 km]."
Fifty stadia inland from the middle of the southern coast was a "mountain not very high on any side." Here lived a native woman with whom Poseidon fell in love and who bore him five pairs of male twins. The eldest of these, Atlas, was made rightful king of the entire island and the ocean (now the Atlantic Ocean), and was given the mountain of his birth and the surrounding area as his fiefdom. Atlas's twin Gadeirus or Eumelus in Greek, was given the easternmost portion of the island which also lay at its northern extreme facing Gades, a town in southern Spain. The other four pairs of twins — Ampheres and Evaemon, Mneseus and Autochthon, Elasippus and Mestor, and Azaes (the Azores?) and Diaprepes — "were the inhabitants and rulers of divers islands in the open sea."
Poseidon carved the inland mountain where his love dwelt into a palace and enclosed it with three circular moats of increasing width, varying from one to three stadia and separated by rings of land proportional in size. The Atlanteans then built bridges northward from the mountain, making a route to the rest of the island. They dug a great canal to the sea, and alongside the bridges carved tunnels into the rings of rock so that ships could pass into the city around the mountain; they carved docks from the rock walls of the moats. Every passage to the city was guarded by gates and towers, and a wall surrounded each of the city's rings. The walls were constructed of red, white and black rock quarried from the moats, and were covered with brass, tin and orichalcum, respectively.
According to Critias, 9,000 years before his lifetime, a war took place between those outside the Pillars of Heracles and those who dwelt within them. The Atlanteans had conquered the Mediterranean as far east as Egypt and the continent into Tyrrhenia, and subjected its people to slavery. The Athenians led an alliance of resistors against the Atlantean empire and as the alliance disintegrated, prevailed alone against the empire, liberating the occupied lands. “But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea." Plato claimed it was somewhere outside the Pillars of Hercules, now known as the Strait of Gibraltar.
Other ancient accounts
Modern scholars generally regard Plato's description of Atlantis as a fantasy, though its kernel may have been formed from hazy memories of historical events such as the Thera eruption. However, in antiquity, there were a few philosophers, geographers, and historians who can justify Atlantis' existence.[1]
Some scholars criticize that the idea of Atlantis also inspired parodic imitation: Writing only a few decades after the Timaeus and Critias, the historian Theopompus of Chios wrote of a land beyond the ocean known as "Meropis." This description was included in Book 8 of his voluminous Philippica, which contains a dialogue between King Midas and Silenus, a companion of Dionysus. Silenus describes the Meropids, a race of men who grow to twice normal size, and inhabit two cities on the island of Meropis: Eusebes ("Pious-town") and "Machimos" ("Fighting-town"). Hans-Gūnther Nesselrath has argued that these and other details of Silenus' story are meant as imitation and exaggeration of the Atlantis story, for the purpose of exposing Plato's ideas to ridicule.[2] 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 Cádiz.[citation needed]
The philosopher Crantor, a student of Plato's student Xenocrates, tried to find proof of Atlantis' existance. For his opinions we are dependent on Proclus' commentary on the Timaeus, written in the 5th century AD. Proclus reports that Crantor said he had travelled to Egypt and seen the same columns on which Plato had seen the history of Atlantis, written in hieroglyphic characters.[3]
A fragmentary work of Theophrastus of Lesbos, from the 4th century BC, speaks of the colonies of Atlantis in the sea.[citation needed] Pliny the Elder recorded that this land was 12,000 km distant (by modern measurement) from Cádiz, and Uba, a Numidian talks of an enormous island outside the Pillars of Hercules.[citation needed] He describes it as having a climate that 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. The Periplus of Scylax of Caryanda, from the 4th century BC, gives a similar account.[citation needed]
The historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century AD, recorded that the Atlanteans did not know the fruits of Ceres.[citation needed]
Zoticus, a Neoplatonist philosopher of the 3rd century AD, wrote an epic poem based on Plato's account of Atlantis.[4]
The 4th century AD historian Ammianus Marcellinus, relying on a lost work by Timagenes, a historian writing in the 1st century BC, writes that the Druids of Gaul said that part of the inhabitants of Gaul had migrated there from distant islands. Ammianus' testimony has been understood by some as a claim that when Atlantis sunk into the sea, its inhabitants fled to western Europe; but Ammianus in fact says that “the Drasidae (Druids) recall that a part of the population is indigenous but others also migrated in from islands and lands beyond the Rhine" (Res Gestae 15.9), an indication that the immigrants came to Gaul from the north and east, not from the Atlantic Ocean.[5]
Marcellinus further records that the intelligentsia of Alexandria considered the destruction of Atlantis a historical fact and 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.[citation needed]
Another passage from Proclus' 5th century AD commentary on the Timaeus gives a description of the geography of Atlantis: "That an island of such nature and size once existed is evident from what is said by certain authors who investigated the things around the outer sea. For according to them, there were seven islands in that sea in their time, sacred to Persephone, and also three others of enormous size, one of which was sacred to Pluto, another to Ammon, and another one between them to Poseidon, the extent of which was a thousand stadia; and the inhabitants of it—they add—preserved the remembrance from their ancestors of the immeasurably large island of Atlantis which had really existed there and which for many ages had reigned over all islands in the Atlantic sea and which itself had like-wise been sacred to Poseidon. Now these things Marcellus has written in his Aethiopica".[6] However, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath argues that this Marcellus—who is otherwise unknown—is probably not a historian but a novelist.[7]
Perhaps the Byzantine friar Cosmas Indicopleustes understood Plato better than the ancient and modern "Aristotelians," says Merezhkovsky.[citation needed] In his Topographia Christiana Cosmas included a chart of the (flat) world: it showed an inner continent, a compact mainland surrounded by sea, and this was surrounded by an outer ring-shaped continent, with the inscription, "The earth beyond the Ocean, where men lived before the Flood."[citation needed]
Modern interest
Francis Bacon's book The New Atlantis which claims that Americas or continent of South America was the lost continent of Atlantis, and that it had been mislaid in the map (technologically inacculated at the time of Plato) and not actually lost, interest in Atlantis mostly languished, until, some 2,200 years after Plato, the 1882 publication of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by 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.
In middle and late 19th century, several serious Mesoamerican scholars, starting with Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and including Edward Herbert Thompson and Augustus Le Plongeon proposed that Atlantis was somehow related to Mayan and Aztec culture. However, several of the researchers later repudiated those claims even there has been an absence of intercalation of solar calendar to lunar calendar or vise versa. Since the Mayan used a lunar calender, the date can possiblly be adjusted to the same time, the Greco-Roman era.
Around this same time, the mythical nature of Atlantis was combined with other lost continent myths such as Mu and Lemuria by popular figures in the occult and the growing new age phenomenon. Helena Blavatsky, the "Grandmother of the New Age movement," writes in The Secret Doctrine that the Atlanteans were cultural heroes (contrary to Plato who describes them mainly as a military threat), and are the fourth "Root Race", succeeded by the "Aryan race". Rudolf Steiner based much of his writings on occult revelations of Mu or Atlantis. Famed psychic Edgar Cayce gave its geographical ___location as the Caribbean, and proposed that Atlantis was an ancient, now-submerged, highly-evolved civilization which had ships and aircraft powered by a mysterious form of energy crystal. He also predicted that parts of Atlantis would rise in 1968 or 1969. The Bimini Road, a submarine geological formation just off North Bimini Island, discovered in 1968, has been claimed by some to be evidence of the lost civilization (among many other things).
Before the time of Eratosthenes about 250 BC, ancient Greek writers located the Pillars of Hercules on the Strait of Sicily. This changed with Alexander the Great’s eastward expansion and the Pillars were moved by Eratosthenes to Gibraltar. This evidence has been cited in some Atlantis theories, notably in Sergio Frau's.[8]
Nationalist and Socialist ideas of Atlantis
Plato's Atlantis has been considered by some socialists as an early socialist utopia. British nationalists identified the British isles with Atlantis.
The concept of Atlantis also entered National Socialist (Nazi) theory through Theosophy and Anthroposophy. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler organized a search in Tibet to find a remnant of the white Atlanteans. According to Julius Evola (Revolt Against the Modern World, 1934), the Atlanteans were Hyperboreans -- Nordic supermen who originated on the North pole. Similarly, Alfred Rosenberg (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930) spoke of a "Nordic-Atlantean" or "Aryan-Nordic" master race.
Aleister Crowley has also written an esoteric history of Atlantis, although this may be intended more as metaphor than as fact.
Recent times
As continental drift became better understood and accepted during the 1950s, most "Lost Continent" theories of Atlantis were shown as false. In response, some recent theories propose that elements of Plato's story were derived from earlier myths.
Location hypotheses
- Main article: Location hypotheses of Atlantis
Since Donnelly's day, there have been dozens—perhaps hundreds—of locations proposed for Atlantis. Some are more or less serious attempts at legitimate scholarly or archaeological works; others have been made by psychic or other pseudoscientific means. Many of the proposed sites share some of the characteristics of the Atlantis story (water, catastrophic end, relevant time period), but none has been proven conclusively to be the historical Atlantis. Most of the historically proposed locations are in or near the Mediterranean Sea, either islands such as Sardinia, Crete and Santorini, Cyprus, Malta, and Ponza or as land based cities or states such as Troy, Andalucia or Tantalus (in the province of Manisa), Turkey, and the new theory of Israel-Sinai or Canaan as possible locations. The massive Thera eruption, dated either to the 17th or the 15th century BC, caused a massive tsunami that experts hypothesize devastated the Minoan civilization on the nearby island of Crete, further leading some to believe that this may have been the catastrophe which inspired the story.
Outside the Mediterranean
Locations as far-flung as Antarctica, Indonesia and the Caribbean have been proposed as the true site of Atlantis. The submerged island of Spartel near the Strait of Gibraltar would coincide with some elements of Plato's account, matching both the ___location and the date of submersion given in the Critias. In the area of the Black Sea at least three locations have been proposed: Bosporus, Sinop and Ancomah (a legendary place near Trabzon). The nearby Sea of Azov was proposed as another site in 2003. Various islands or island groups in the Atlantic were also identified as possible locations, notably the Azores (Mid-Atlantic islands which are a territory of Portugal), and several Caribbean islands. In Northern Europe, Finland (by Finnish pseudohistorian Ior Bock), Sweden (by Olof Rudbeck in "Atland", 1672-1702), Ireland, and the North Sea have been proposed (Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson combines the North Sea and Ireland in a comprehensive hypothesis). Areas in the Pacific and Indian Ocean have also been proposed including Indonesia, Malaysia or both (i.e. Sundaland) and stories of a lost continent off India named "Kumari Kandam" have drawn parallels to Atlantis. Even Cuba has been suggested. The Canary Islands have also been identified as a possible ___location, west of the Straits of Gibraltar but in close proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. Some believe that Atlantis stretched from the tip of Spain to Central America.
Atlantis in Fiction
- Main article: Atlantis in fiction
The legend of Atlantis is frequently featured in many books, movies, television series, and other creative works. A current example is Stargate Atlantis, in which Atlantis is depicted as a city in the fictional Pegasus Galaxy.
Notes
- ^ Nesselrath 2005, pp. 161-171.
- ^ Nesselrath 1998, pp. 1-8.
- ^ Nesselrath 2001, pp. 34-38.
- ^ Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 7=35.
- ^ Fitzpatrick-Matthews, Keith. Lost Continents: Atlantis. Accessed May 8, 2006.
- ^ Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, p. 117.10-30 (=FGrHist 671 F 1), trans. Taylor, Nesselrath).
- ^ Nesselrath 2005, p. 169-170.
- ^ Frau 2002
Ancient sources
- Plato, Timaeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett; alternative version with commentary.
- Plato, Critias, translated by Benjamin Jowett; alternative version with commentary.
Modern sources
- Donnelly, Ignatius. Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. From Project Gutenberg.
- Frau, Sergio, 2002. Le Colonne d'Ercole - Un'inchiesta.
- Nesselrath, Heinz-Gūnther, 1998. "Theopomps Meropis und Platon: Nachahmung und Parodie." Gōttinger Forum fūr Altertumswissenschaft 1:1-8.
- Nesselrath, Heinz-Gūnther, 2001. "Atlantes und Atlantioi: Von Platon zu Dionysios Skytobrachion." Philologus 145:34-38.
- Nesselrath, Heinz-Günther, 2005. "'Where the Lord of the Sea Grants Passge to Sailors through the Deep-blue Mere no More': The Greeks and the Western Seas." Greece & Rome 52:153-171.
- Ramage, J., 1978. Atlantis - Fact or Fiction?
- Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 1986. "Athens and Atlantis: Structure and Meaning of a Platonic Myth," pp. 263-284 in The Black Hunter (Johns Hopkins University Press).
- Zangger, Eberhard, 1993. The Flood from Heaven - Deciphering the Atlantis Legend.
See also
External links
- Atlantis: the Myth from Encyclopedia Mythica
- Atlantis Myth or Reality
- Real Expedition Nov. 2006 Newest hypothesis seems to be confirmed by astonishing findings.