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The Atlantis Thread

Mythopoeika said:
It's in more or less the right location.
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This medieval map shows (Hy) Brasil as slightly South of Rockall 's location, but certainly close enough to be considered the same small island given the inaccuracies of early maritime charts. It's way too far North to be confused with the Atlantean land mass (i.e. The Azores plateau).

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Colavito vents spleen on the latest Atlantis claims.

Dissecting This Past Weekend's Faulty Claims about Ancient History
10/2/2018


This past weekend saw a number of depressingly awful stories about ancient history. The most prominent one revolved around a newspaper report about a man’s claim to have discovered Atlantis yet again. The Daily Mail published the report on Sept. 29 and was picked up by the Russian propaganda site Sputnik a few hours later and spread around the world. Heretofore largely unknown Ancient Architects blogger Matt Sibson alleges in an interview and accompanying video essay that Atlantis was actually the phantom island of Frisland seen on a number of old maps. If that name sounds familiar… well, it connects to another old fringe history chestnut.

Sibson claims that the fictitious island had to have been real, even though it does not actually exist, and he uses Irish legends associated with the homeland of the ancient Tuatha Dé Danann, the ancient gods. “It was shown in so many maps in the 16th and 17th century and then it disappeared – it can't be a mistake,” he told the Daily Mail. He claims that the island was copied from Ice Age maps drawn by a lost civilization, and that it represents a portion of the Atlantis basin off the coast of what is now Ireland that was above water during the Ice Age. His evidence for this is less than compelling: “Some people do point out that there was 2km of ice there, but there is a gap of more than a thousand years where the ice had melted between 14,700 BC and 12,900 BC. Plato also talked about elephants on Atlantis, but I think he may have been referring to woolly mammoths.”

I will give him this: If he were better-read, he might have been able to make a case for this north Atlantic island by tying it to Ogygia, the legendary island where (among other things) Kronos (Saturn) was supposed kept prisoner. As Plutarch reported (De Defectu Oraculorum 18 and De Faciae 27), this island was located in the North Atlantic and was known to the Celts. In the Odyssey, Homer said it was the home of Calypso, a daughter of Atlas, and thus could be considered an island of Atlantis, since “Atlantis” was also a title of Calypso, meaning “Daughter of Atlas.” But Sibson isn’t terribly good at his own subject, and instead he focuses on the silly argument that ancient Irish people liked circles, and Plato said Atlantis was circular in shape—i.e., looks like, therefore is. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/dissecting-this-past-weekends-faulty-claims-about-ancient-history
 
I've become quite convinced that Atlantis was located in what is now the Donaña National Park (Southern Spain).

Atlantis Rising explores this hypotheses, but finds more compelling evidence in one of the largest marshes in Europe, in Donaña National Park which archaeologists have been excavating for years. This location had already been the subject of another National Geographic documentary, 'Finding Atlantis,' in 2011.
The marsh in question used to be an open bay, adjacent to the strait of Gibraltar. "This is important because Plato says that Atlantis was located adjacent to the Pillars of Hercules, the name given in Antiquity to the promontories at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar", Freund explains. [...]

"One of the key things I learnt when making this film is that when we say 'Atlantis', we are not talking about a particular spot, but about a civilisation. I think we can find remnants of this civilisation from the eastern Mediterranean all the way to the Atlantic. Southern Spain may have been the centre of a civilisation which spread to Malta, Santorini or all the other places we have investigated," said Jacobovici.

While the film makes an interesting case, it may fail to convince the many historians who believe that Atlantis is just an allegory, a story about moral and ethics for which Plato found inspiration by looking at cities and societies around him. Most academics believe the story of Atlantis may have been the philosopher's warning to Athens and its inhabitants not to become blinded by hubris.
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https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/more-sign...ious-civilisation-found-spanish-marsh-1603470

I don't see why it can't be both - an actual civilization and a story used by Plato as a warning.
 
Colavito reviews:

The Search for Atlantis: A History of Plato’s Ideal State
Steve P. Kershaw | 428 pages | Pegasus | October 2018 | ISBN: 978-1681778594 | $27.95
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The greatest compliment I can bestow on Classical scholar Steve P. Kershaw’s The Search for Atlantis (Pegasus, 2018), released last week, is that I have very little to say about it. Kershaw’s book, whose title is somewhat misleading, offers a history of scholarly and pseudo-scholarly reception of Plato’s myth of Atlantis from Classical Antiquity to today. It is decidedly not a book about hunting for Atlantis, and the author makes plain his conclusion that Plato invented the story of Atlantis as a philosophical allegory and that there is not and never was either a real Atlantis or an Egyptian myth of Atlantis for Plato to have drawn upon. I am in almost complete agreement with Kershaw, who teaches at the continuing education branch of Oxford University, and have almost nothing to add.

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Kershaw is deeply read in the field of Atlantis, and as a Classicist, he is familiar not just with the ancient testimonia about Atlantis but also with ancient literature beyond the scattered references to Atlantis in the decades and centuries that followed Plato. Therefore, he does what few in Atlantis studies have done half so well, carefully laying out Plato’s own use of made-up myths and legends elsewhere in his body of work, as well as parallel accounts of fabulous cities and fictitious realms elsewhere in Greek literature prior to Plato in order to demonstrate how the story Plato tells in the Timaeus and the Critiasfits within the context of ancient Greek literature, reinforcing the fictitious nature of the tale.

Two lengthy chapters translate the relevant sections of the Timaeus and the Critias, and then each subsequent chapter of the book examines successive time periods and their efforts to reinterpret and (mis-) understand Plato’s allegory. The material he covers was familiar to me and will be familiar to many of you who read this blog, but for the general reader it will be a welcome repository of information, organized chronologically to demonstrate the development of the modern conception of Atlantis from an accumulation of accretions and errors in the millennia since Plato wrote. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-the-search-for-atlantis-by-steve-p-kershaw
 
Once again Colavito casts a caustic eye on a new Atlantis theory.

Did the Minoans Record the Name of Atlantis in Cretan Hieroglyphs?
10/27/2018

Fred C. Woudhuizen is an independent Dutch scholar who has produced a number of obscure publications making a series of controversial claims to have deciphered hitherto unreadable texts to reveal surprising confirmation of Greek mythological traditions. He argued, for example, that the Phaistos Disc was in fact a letter written by the Luwians to Nestor, the king of Pylos in the Odyssey. In another, he argued that the otherwise indecipherable Etruscan language is in fact a patois of colonial Luwian. The Luwians, for what it’s worth, are his major interest, and his arguments, as one published review of his scholarship put it, are “alas, not very convincing.”

A regular reader called my attention to a bizarre passage in his otherwise quite dull effort at the decipherment of Cretan hieroglyphics, another unreadable ancient tongue which preceded the more famous Linear A by a century and coexisted with that script throughout the Minoan period. In 2016, Woudhuizen not only claimed to read Cretan hieroglyphics but also to have found Atlantis in them!

His argument is complex, and originates with his identification—different from other scholars’ views—of 85 Cretan hieroglyphs with Luwian counterparts, 22 with Egyptian ones, and 23 with Linear A characters. Having made these connections, he then proposes to read the Cretan hieroglyphs in light of their alleged linguistic cousins, producing a series of syllables that he interprets and translates as an Indo-European tongue, likely closely related to Luwian. To the best of my knowledge, his view of the subject is shared only by some others who hold the Luwians in an exalted position not generally found in mainstream scholarship. The argument, however, is not convincing since anyone who speaks more than one language can attest to the vast differences that even closely related words can take on in different cultures, contexts, and languages. ..

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/did-the-minoans-record-the-name-of-atlantis-in-cretan-hieroglyphs
 
Take a peek at this if you have the time:

This guy's first video was merely stupid, and many of the things he says elsewhere are pretty flakey, and I completely discounted his theory as being ridiculous, but then he came up with the following one which did quite a bit better. His theory is that Atlantis is actually the Richat Structure in Mauretania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure

Yeah, yeah, I know, how did it sink beneath the waves in the middle of a desert? Fair question, and the answer may surprise you. In 2016, Scientific American ran an article on how a huge and enormously wide river system was in what is now Mauretania, and would have been close to the Richat Structure.

Sci Am article:
https://www.google.ch/search?q=Scientific American Tamanrasset River&rlz=1C1CHFX_enAU785AU785&oq=Scientific American Tamanrasset River&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.8298j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Guardian Article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science...r-network-discoverd-buried-under-saharan-sand

Anyhow, it is sufficiently interesting that I am having a bit of a look at it atm.
 
I found a similar video about the Richat Structure a while back, but I can't remember which thread I'd posted it to.
 
Waylander said:
And now this, off the coast of spain. ...
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This candidate for the site of Atlantis was mentioned back in 2004 within this thread (see post #45). I always thought this location made a lot more sense than most of the more commonly cited ones. It's good to know someone's finally been able to research the area in more detail.
 
I personally found the fact that Herodotus' map placed Atlantis in Africa and in the vicinity of the Richat structure was compelling, especially given that the Richat structure has a fresh water spring in its center (despite every other well in the area being salty), and is of perfect dimensions in terms of measurement to fit with Plato's descriptions, and has the three rings he described. Better yet, the area may well have been washed by a huge river system about 10,000 years ago. The fit is unusually good, especially when you include the fact it was a volcanic dome (allowing for a collapse into the water), and there are traces of built structures in the Richat apparently. If all these things are true (and I haven't had time to check), then the fit is unusually good.
 
AlchoPwn said:
I personally found the fact that Herodotus' map placed Atlantis in Africa and in the vicinity of the Richat structure was compelling, especially given that the Richat structure has a fresh water spring in its center (despite every other well in the area being salty), and is of perfect dimensions in terms of measurement to fit with Plato's descriptions, and has the three rings he described. Better yet, the area may well have been washed by a huge river system about 10,000 years ago. The fit is unusually good, especially when you include the fact it was a volcanic dome (allowing for a collapse into the water), and there are traces of built structures in the Richat apparently. If all these things are true (and I haven't had time to check), then the fit is unusually good.
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More and more, I'm becoming persuaded that the Richat might be the best candidate for Atlantis.
 
Mythopoeika said:
More and more, I'm becoming persuaded that the Richat might be the best candidate for Atlantis.
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I guess the bottom line is whether there is any supporting archaeological evidence at the site.
If the Atlantean timeline is to be believed, we're talking about a culture roughly contemporaneous with Göbekli Tepe, so I would expect megalithic blocks and carvings as a minimum. Otherwise Richat would be simply a natural geological feature and the Azores plateau would still be the more likely site for Atlantis.
 
Mythopoeika said:
More and more, I'm becoming persuaded that the Richat might be the best candidate for Atlantis.
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I've never thought the Richat Structure was a viable candidate for Plato's Atlantis, because ...

(1) Plato described Atlantis as a seafaring nation or empire with a significant naval force.

(2) Plato's description of circular arrangements explicitly pertained to a seaport.

(3) The Richat Structure is at least 200 miles from the sea.

(4) The Richat Structure is listed as having an elevation of over 400 meters / 1300 feet above sea level.
(per: http://elevation.maplogs.com/poi/richat_structure_ouadane_mauritania.354729.html)

(5) Who in ancient times could tell the 25-mile-wide Richat Structure exhibited concentric circular features? (Think of the Nazca Lines and ancient astronaut theorists' claims about visibility only from high altitude)
 
EnolaGaia said:
(2) Plato's description of circular arrangements explicitly pertained to a seaport.

(3) The Richat Structure is at least 200 miles from the sea.
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NOW, yes. 12,000 years ago...? There is evidence that there was a wide river or delta leading to the sea. Maybe it became land-locked because of massive ancient tsunamis washing rocks and sand inland, blocking the channel. Look on a satellite view of the area, and you can see signs that a massive flood swept in from the sea.
 
EnolaGaia said:
I've never thought the Richat Structure was a viable candidate for Plato's Atlantis, because ...

(1) Plato described Atlantis as a seafaring nation or empire with a significant naval force.

(2) Plato's description of circular arrangements explicitly pertained to a seaport.

(3) The Richat Structure is at least 200 miles from the sea.

(4) The Richat Structure is listed as having an elevation of over 400 meters / 1300 feet above sea level.
(per: http://elevation.maplogs.com/poi/richat_structure_ouadane_mauritania.354729.html)

(5) Who in ancient times could tell the 25-mile-wide Richat Structure exhibited concentric circular features? (Think of the Nazca Lines and ancient astronaut theorists' claims about visibility only from high altitude)
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I hear you, and frankly I was of a similar opinion, then I was confronted with a series of interesting facts. The now vanished Tamanrasset River system was pretty damn immense, and there are whale bones and even remains of mummified whale carcasses lying around within miles of the Richat structure. You don't find whale bones without plenty of salt water. I am no geologist, but that turned my head. I don't claim to know what the conditions in the area were like in those ancient timeframes, but "sea + huge river system" seems to be the answer. It is simply a case of ridiculous "goodness of fit" with the facts. Please watch the video and read the attached articles, as while the video is a bit woo-hoo, the supporting articles about the Tamanrasset river just pile on the credibility.

(1) A naval empire can in fact have a number of ports that are up a river. Take London for example. Back in the day, ships sailed up the Thames and docked in London, and they still do.

(2) Sea port or river port? Given that there are multiple sets of whale bones within a mile of the Richat, that seems to suggest that where there were whales there was salt water.

(3) Is is different to was. This is about establishing the conditions of the past tense.

(4) A good point. Again... whale carcasses. Plus Herodotus places Atlantis on the map there, and the first king of the Mauri tribe of Mauritania
was called Atlas (for whom the Atlas mountains are named), and that is the same name as the first king of Atlantis according to Plato. Perhaps there was a huge salt lake that was fed by the Tamarasset river system, a bit like the Aral sea or Caspian, but smaller?

(5) Plato mentions the exact dimensions of Atlantis, and they are a damn good fit for the Richat. Also, as a volcanic dome, the Richat may have collapsed, causing the civilization built on it to "vanish into the sea". Of course Atlantis may not have been the ludicrous techno-hive of space aliens that the Von Daniken lobby in Hollywood would like us to believe.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
I guess the bottom line is whether there is any supporting archaeological evidence at the site.
If the Atlantean timeline is to be believed, we're talking about a culture roughly contemporaneous with Göbekli Tepe, so I would expect megalithic blocks and carvings as a minimum. Otherwise Richat would be simply a natural geological feature and the Azores plateau would still be the more likely site for Atlantis.
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Apparently there are the remains of a structure present in the middle of the Richat. Of course, given that it has a fresh water spring in the middle of it (just like in Plato's description of Atlantis), it could have been a caravanserai or somesuch.
 
AlchoPwn said:
Apparently there are the remains of a structure present in the middle of the Richat. Of course, given that it has a fresh water spring in the middle of it (just like in Plato's description of Atlantis), it could have been a caravanserai or somesuch.
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This site claims lots of Stone Age artefacts found nearby - stone spheres, arrowheads and a weird thing dubbed the surfboard of the gods:

https://visitingatlantis.com/archaeology/
 
EnolaGaia said:
This candidate for the site of Atlantis was mentioned back in 2004 within this thread (see post #45). I always thought this location made a lot more sense than most of the more commonly cited ones. It's good to know someone's finally been able to research the area in more detail.
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Yes, and I had earlier linked to a Documentary that outlined the case for the Doñana National Park - #248.
Anyways, that seems to be the best supported case IMHO and it is well worth watching.

As it turns out, there's a new doco coming out, and I definitely wish to see it as well:

https://www.iflscience.com/editors-...tructures-spark-claims-of-atlantis-discovery/
and
http://ingeniofilms.com/elements/atlantica/
 
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PaulHavens said:
Have you read this https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/15/bronze-age-sardinia-archaeology-atlantis? I have so many interesting aspects to be found here, that it is very interesting to follow further.
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Interesting. If you take into account that the proposed advanced culture was spread throughout the mediterranean and further, then this makes perfect sense. Also, both the site at Doñana and Sardinia were supposedly wiped out by (one or more) tsunamis.

To me, Doñana still makes more sense as "the" Atlantis, but it doesn't really matter. I think the Archaeologists are really onto something here, and that's the bit that I find fascinating, a lost culture.
 
More on the possibility of the Richat Structure in Mauritania being Atlantis. This time, somebody goes there on foot.
 
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AlchoPwn said:
It worries me that as time goes on, this theory seems more plausible.
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Why does that worry you?
I guess the only thing that makes it hard to believe is the distinct lack of architecture in the central rings. It was probably washed away in a massive deluge, but some masonry should still be there. I think it's time for archaeologists to start digging there.
 
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