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The Atlantis Thread

Re: a possible origin for the story of Atlantis

julianpenrod said:
Plato's writings, from which Atlantis was derived, is described as having sunk around 15,000 years ago.
Give or take 3500 years... :)
 
Bump! Three threads merged.

Another thread which explores post Ice Age flooding is Flooded Kingdoms.

(No doubt Atlantis is mentioned on other threads too.)
 
Havana

If I'm not mistaken parts of Havana or an Island off the coast of Havana sunk into the sea years and years ago after an earthquake. Havana was established right on a convergence of plates. Maybe a rift valley is forming.
This was fairly recent, as in 100-200 years ago. It was my understanding that this was what Fidel was interested in diving for.

Not to say that there is not other things very interesting in the area, such as the area that the former KGB member archeologist is looking at.

However -

There was a large impact crater discovered off the coast of Yucatan. The 50,000+ year-old impact is thought to have reached as far a Phoenix AZ and its dust cloud is thought to have killed off 75% of life on earth. If it did all that then leaving remnants of unexplained rock formations would not be surprising.
But, of course if it’s unknown and wet it must be Atlantis.
 
Re: Havana

Matthew said:
There was a large impact crater discovered off the coast of Yucatan. The 50,000+ year-old impact is thought to have reached as far a Phoenix AZ and its dust cloud is thought to have killed off 75% of life on earth.
A few more noughts needed, methinks!
The impact of a comet or asteroid about the size of Hephaistos or SL9 hitting the Earth was probably responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It left a 180 km crater now buried below the jungle near Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula....
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/meteorites.html
 
...Conspiracy, Urban Legends, Spies! A Humdinger of a Fortean News Story! :)

Urban myth exposed by trial
The jury in the fraud trial of Michael Slamaj and Graham Halksworth were unconvinced by a conspiracy theory involving enormous amounts of Chinese gold and American money.

Halksworth and Slamaj were found guilty of conspiracy to defraud at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Thursday.

Slamaj was also convicted of possessing fake bonds.

During the 10-week trial the jury heard the defendants try to justify their crimes saying why an "urban myth" might be plausible.

In the 1940s the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, facing a twin threat from the invading Japanese and Mao Zedong's Communist rebels, sent thousands of tonnes of gold to the US for safekeeping, the court was told.

Halksworth and Slamaj said they had been told the Chinese gold was used to "create" Fort Knox, boosting the Depression-hit US economy.

Plane crashed

The gold was supposedly exchanged for the 1934 Federal Reserve bonds but in 1948 a US B-29 plane carrying crashed shortly after taking off from the Clark air base in the Philippines.

Slamaj told the court he was taken to the crash site on Mindanao island and shown the tail - all that remained of the doomed plane.

Born in Yugoslavia and a former operative for Tito's secret service, Slamaj told the trial he had spied on people suspected of belonging to the Croatian nationalist Ustashe organisation.

He said he also put drugs into people's food under the orders of a superior officer.

But, disillusioned, he defected to Canada in 1973 and settled in Vancouver.

'My life's goal'

The Canadian said his time in Yugoslavia had shaped his thinking.

"I know what governments do. I know that governments do things that we do not know about."

In the early 1990s he went into partnership with Dr Laszlo Paszner, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who was studying how to turn refuse from logging and sugar cane plantations into ethanol to create a clean sustainable energy source.

Slamaj's role was to secure the raw materials, land and finance to build an ethanol plant and this took him to the Philippines.

Slamaj agreed to take boxes containing the "bonds" back to Canada to either redeem them or authenticate them to obtain credit to finance the factory.

Slamaj said over the next few months he was approached by numerous middle men who wanted to redeem them.

They included a Russian prince, a member of the Saudi royal family, the grandson of the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, a chief of the Blackfeet Indian tribe in the US, representatives of the Southern Cherokee "nation", and various Chinese, Japanese and German businessmen.

He was also approached by US middlemen, who claimed to have links with the CIA or the Treasury.

One of these was Daniel Todt, a lawyer from Cleveland, Ohio, who persuaded Mr Slamaj to bring a box to the US in June 2001.

Tragic ending

Mr Todt took it to a Bureau of Public Debt office in West Virginia.

A few days later Mr Todt apparently shot dead his wife Rebecca and their children, Nathaniel, 13, and Dominique, 16, at their home in Strongsville, Ohio, before turning the gun on himself.

Prosecution witness
Unbeknown to Slamaj, Mr Todt was heavily indebted and faced losing his licence to practise law. He also believed in a story right out of TV's The X Files.

'Delusions'

Ari Jaffe, from the Cuyanoga County Bar Association in Cleveland, told BBC News Online: "He (Mr Todt) was suffering from delusions.

"He believed that some time in the 1940s an alien from the planet Atlantis, called Dr Thor De Allah Kahn, met Earth officials at a rest stop in Virginia and handed over some bonds which were supposed to be distributed to improve Third World countries."

Mr Jaffe, an attorney who recommended Mr Todt be disbarred, said: "He had some fake Japanese bank bonds and he was going around trying to redeem them.

Chiang Kai-Shek expert
Slamaj had trawled various conspiracy theory websites - such as http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk - and had read about Project Hammer, a banking conspiracy theory involving covert funding of "deniable government operations".

'Well documented'

Espionage expert Professor Richard Aldrich told the court covert operations involving bonds and counterfeit bank notes were well documented.

Prof Aldrich, from Nottingham University, said: "We know that aircraft flew from the Philippines.

"We know the CIA carried out covert operations to China between 1949 and 1951 and some were shot down in China."

But Richard Hwang, a specialist in Chiang Kai-Shek at the Academica Sinica in Taiwan, told the BBC's Tim Culpan the tale of Chiang's gold did not sound "reasonable".
 
An astonishing story. I guess if you're going to risk going down, you may as well aim high. :)
 
Yes, totally bonkers - now up on the breaking news (independently I might add ;)).

I prefer my headline (v similar to ryns): "Chinese gold, atlantean aliens and Tito's spy" - those BBC writers need to sharpen their quills I reckon :p
 
Fortis said:
An astonishing story. I guess if you're going to risk going down, you may as well aim high. :)

Like when Howard Marks was going to be sent down for an early drug smugling offence. He decided to claim he'd been working for MI5 - with a few contacts, judicious silences, and an acquaintance with a member of MI5 he managed to sew enough doubt to stop his conviction (beyond a reasoanble doubt remember) This guy may have tried a similar tactic - if he can convince the court that there may have been a 'legitimate' claim to the gold then they may opt to give him the benefit of the doubt rather than convict a potentially innocent man. You'd have to have a damned fine lawyer though!
 
Ever since I was a kid raiding my dad's occult bookshelf, I've always been fascinated by the idea of Lemuria, Atlantis, and the Victorian occult theories that came out of those ideas.

In fact, let's be honest. It's mainly the occult stuff that fascinates me.

As a nine-year-old, it was the illustration of a 15' tall bestial Lemurian leading a dinosaur by a lead that hooked me. Now, having read Rudolf Steiner, W Scott-Elliot and dear old Mme Blavatsky, I've oten found myself wondering if anyone still actually literally believes what is essentially the esoteric version of creationism.

Anybody got any ideas?
 
Yamashita Treasure

This tale is so similar I had to drop it in here (it is possible that it is they are somehow connected):

Atlanta corporation claims U.S. government helped steal gold

09:30 AM EDT Apr 04

ATLANTA (AP) - A lawsuit claims the U.S. government helped steal possibly trillions of dollars in gold from an amateur Filipino treasure hunter.

It sounds like something right out of an Indiana Jones movie, but Atlanta lawyer Bill Stone insists, "The government has done stranger things."

Court documents state that Roger Roxas, an amateur treasure hunter, began searching in 1961 for the booty of Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who plundered it from various Southeast Asian countries during the Second World War.

In 1970, Roxas found a series of tunnels on state land in the Philippines, the documents said. The following year, Roxas and his excavators allegedly found the Yamashita Treasure, which included a one-metre Buddha made of gold and several boxes full of gold bricks, the documents said.

Court documents state that between 1971 and 1974, the Philippines' then-president Ferdinand Marcos ordered his agents to torture Roxas to find the location of the gold. Stone, a lawyer for Golden Buddha, an Atlanta corporation now pursuing Roxas' claim against the government, said the U.S. government helped the Marcos regime remove the gold from the Philippines and convert it.

Stone said his firm and a San Francisco lawyer have gathered documents, taken several depositions and have determined that the Americans involved "were working under the auspices of the CIA."

Patrick Crosby, a spokesman with the U.S. Attorney's Office, said that although he was not familiar with the case, filed Tuesday in federal court in Atlanta, the government does not comment on civil claims against it.

Under Filipino law, anyone who finds gold on state land is entitled to half of it, the court papers said. Stone estimates that the gold in today's market would be worth .3 trillion US.

No damages are named in the lawsuit.

"I don't think they're going to roll over and write a check for .3 trillion," Stone said, "although it'd be fine with me if they did."

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/040403/w040304.html

Emps
 
Hunt for Atlantis Leads Researcher to Cyprus

Mon Apr 26, 2004 10:20 AM ET



NICOSIA (Reuters) - A U.S. researcher who is convinced the fabled city of Atlantis is lurking in the watery deep off Cyprus will launch an exploratory mission this summer, he said on Monday.

"We believe our discovery will put Cyprus at the center of the world stage forever," Robert Sarmast told Reuters.

Sarmast said the east Mediterranean island is actually the pinnacle of the long-lost city and the rest of it is about one mile below sea level.

Using deep sea maps and clues found in Plato, Sarmast said he has discovered a sunken rectangular land mass stretching northeast from Cyprus toward Syria.

"We are going to sail 70 miles offshore Cyprus, directly over the spot where we believe Atlantis City lays submerged and waiting to be discovered," he said.

The mystery of Atlantis -- both whether it existed and why it disappeared -- has fired the imagination of explorers for centuries.

Many believe the ancient civilization was destroyed in the biblical flood and that it was possibly the site of the Garden of Eden.

Greek mythology says Atlantis was a powerful nation whose residents were so corrupted by greed and power that Zeus destroyed it.

Some say it is in the Aegean, others in the Azores or the Celtic Ridge of Britain, and others put it even farther a field in the South China Sea.

On Friday, he will herald the start of the expedition and Cyprus's membership to the European Union by heading out to the area where the mission will commence.

"At midnight we will deploy a sealed capsule to the seafloor containing a Cyprus flag, an EU flag and a flag bearing the symbol of Atlantis," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=4941073
 
http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=14071&cat_id=1
The holy grail of archaeology
By Alex Mita

AMERICAN researcher Robert Sarmast yesterday officially launched an expedition that he hopes will result in the discovery of the lost island of Atlantis. The launch of the expedition is expected to be marked today when the scientists submerge a copper canister with the flags of Cyprus, the EU and a specially designed Atlantis flag five hours out at sea from Limassol port.

At a news conference aboard the vessel that will take the team of experts to a submerged continental shelf – where he believes was the plain of Atlantis – Sarmast said the search for the lost island was the holy grail of archaeology.

“After years of research, and having developed the most accurate maps and models of the eastern Mediterranean seafloor, we believe that we have found Plato’s legendary island of Atlantis and we aim to prove it this summer,” he said.

“This discovery is the holy grail of all archaeological discoveries and the ramifications are due to be staggering. The world could never be the same after this discovery. We celebrate the joining of Cyprus with the EU with this flag ceremony and we are going to sail over the area where we believe the cities of Atlantis were located.”

Sarmast said he believed Atlantis was located about 1,500 metres below water, just a short distance east of Cyprus.

“Once there, we are going to lower this copper capsule which is going to contain the flags of Cyprus, the EU and a flag bearing the symbol of Atlantis,” he said.

“We are going to lower it down to the seafloor around where the cities of Atlantis are located to commemorate this event. It will remain there and we hope some day in the future the world will once again find it and remember this day long after we hopefully discovered the temples of Atlantis.”

Sarmast said the 0,000 plus expedition was set to begin in June and would take place in different phases, through the collaborative efforts of the Cyprus based company EDT, and through the American based company Phoenix, along with other marine specialists from around the world.

In her speech, Yiorgoulla Lori of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation said the CTO welcomed the project that linked Cyprus with Atlantis.

“If this is proved, this is going to be a great event and a great discovery for Cyprus,” she said.

“Today we celebrate the link of Atlantis and Cyprus but also the island’s accession to the EU.”

Sarmast said the cities of Atlantis were numerous, with a group of them located on a rectangular plain that currently stretches from the south-eastern side of Cyprus to the shores of Syria.

“The main city we are going to be looking for is just about half way between Cyprus and Syria,” he said.

“We are going to cover about 150 to 200 square kilometres and we are going to have specialists from America that will operate a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV), a robot equipped with cameras and arms.

“The ROV is capable of going all the way down to 6,000 metres and it’s one of the best in the world. (When submerged), the ROV will send back video footage and will take snapshots and we will use its arms to bring back any finds,” he added.

Sarmast said the search for Atlantis would be based on a series of clues left by Plato, including a very detailed description of the island as it was told by an ancient Egyptian priest to Solon, who in turn brought the story to Greece.

“We know exactly what this island looked like,” he said.

“There was a long rectangular plain that was at the foothills of this island, that stretched in an east west direction, and we know that the main cities were located near the middle of the plain.

“Not only do we have a match with the island but we also found a rectangular plain, and to our surprise we also found a pyramidal hill in the middle of this plain that matches the description of the Acropolis hill.

“The level of matches is beyond a scale where you can say it’s just coincidental. We have the exact co-ordinates of the Acropolis hill, which is where the main temples and structures where located.”

Sarmast said the structures would be preserved at that depth due to the lack of oxygen and sunlight, something that would increase the odds of finding them and filming them to prove the island existed.

“We are not just looking for a ship or a small item but an entire city,” he said.

“All we really have to do is to film a cut-stone block or a megalithic structure that’s laid out in some geometrical shape of a building on the sea floor.

“We are not looking to retrieve anything although maybe we can bring a little piece of rock or something of a wall, but our aim is to film it.

“If all goes well we’ll be bringing you good news about the greatest archaeological discovery in human history in the near future and we will inaugurate the dawn of a new era of knowledge for human kind.”
 
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Why does the phrase `publicity stunt` spring to mind??

My moneys on crete
 
Mines on Atlantis~Antartica. It all seems so obvious:rolleyes:
 
A scientist says he may have found remains of the lost city of Atlantis.
Satellite photos of southern Spain reveal features on the ground appearing to match descriptions made by Greek scholar Plato of the fabled utopia.

Dr Rainer Kuehne thinks the "island" of Atlantis simply referred to a region of the southern Spanish coast destroyed by a flood between 800 BC and 500 BC.

The research has been reported as an ongoing project in the online edition of the journal Antiquity.

We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described

Dr Rainer Kuehne, University of Wuppertal
Satellite photos of a salt marsh region known as Marisma de Hinojos near the city of Cadiz show two rectangular structures in the mud and parts of concentric rings that may once have surrounded them.

"Plato wrote of an island of five stades (925m) diameter that was surrounded by several circular structures - concentric rings - some consisting of Earth and the others of water. We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described," Dr Kuehne told BBC News Online.

Dr Kuehne, of the University of Wuppertal in Germany, believes the rectangular features could be the remains of a "silver" temple devoted to the sea god Poseidon and a "golden" temple devoted to Cleito and Poseidon - all described in Plato's dialogue Critias.

Temples of the sea god

The sizes of the "island" and its rings in the satellite image are slightly larger than those described by Plato. There are two possible explanations for this, says Dr Kuehne.

First, Plato may have underplayed the size of Atlantis. Secondly, the ancient unit of measurement used by Plato - the stade - may have been 20% larger than traditionally assumed.


If the latter is true, one of the rectangular features on the "island" matches almost exactly the dimensions given by Plato for the temple of Poseidon.

The features were originally spotted by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who studied photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato.

"This is the only place that seems to fit [Plato's] description," he told BBC News Online.

Mr Wickboldt added that the Greeks might have confused an Egyptian word referring to a coastline with one meaning "island" during transmission of the Atlantis story.

Commenting on the satellite image showing the two "temples", Tony Wilkinson, an expert in the use of remote sensing in archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, told BBC News Online: "A lot of the problems come with interpretations. I can see something there and I could imagine that one could interpret it in various ways. But you've got several leaps of faith here.

Metal trading

"We use the imagery to recognise certain types of imprint on the ground and then do [in the field] verification on them. Based on what we see on the ground we make an interpretation.

"What we need here is a date range. Otherwise, you're just dealing with morphology. But the [features] are interesting."

The fabled utopia of Atlantis has captured the imagination of scholars for centuries. The earliest known records of this mythical land appear in Plato's dialogues Critias and Timaios.


His depiction of a land of fabulous wealth, advanced civilisation and natural beauty has spurred many adventurers to seek out its location.

One recent theory equates Atlantis with Spartel Island, a mud shoal in the straits of Gibraltar that sank into the sea 11,000 years ago.

Plato described Atlantis as having a "plain". Dr Kuehne said this might be the plain that extends today from Spain's southern coast up to the city of Seville. The high mountains described by the Greek scholar could be the Sierra Morena and Sierra Nevada.

"Plato also wrote that Atlantis is rich in copper and other metals. Copper is found in abundance in the mines of the Sierra Morena," Dr Kuehne explained.


Dr Kuehne noticed that the war between Atlantis and the eastern Mediterranean described in Plato's writings closely resembled attacks on Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant during the 12th Century BC by mysterious raiders known as the Sea People.

As a result, he proposes that the Atlanteans and the Sea People were in fact one and the same.

This dating would equate the city and society of Atlantis with either the Iron Age Tartessos culture of southern Spain or another, unknown, Bronze Age culture. A link between Atlantis and Tartessos was first proposed in the early 20th Century.

Dr Kuehne said he hoped to attract interest from archaeologists to excavate the site. But this may be tricky. The features in the satellite photo are located within Spain's Donana national park.

link
 
Well, I've squinted as hard as I can and I still can't see the concentric rings that he's talking about. Can anyone give me any tips? (I hope it's not going to be like one of those Magic Eye images. ;) )
 
Even the 'rectangular' structures don't look particularly rectangular, and like Fortis, I cannot see the circles.
 
I can see the outer circle, I think. Rectangles and inncer circles are... well... not there.
 
You have to be careful, as some of the features I was initially keying on by eye, upon closer examination turned out to be clouds. :eek: (I can't believe that I've just admitted to that. ;) )
 
I can almost believe it but i'm far from convinced - especially with the circles 'finish' in the final quadrant (north-west) between 9 and 12 o' clock. The lines just aren't there.

Also, the photography being from directly overhead, i certainly want some idea of the contours and the lie of the land - there could be any number of height differences not visible from the angle which would totally disprupt the consistency of the proposed (Platonic) 'Stades'.
 
this is like the twentieth time Atlantis has been "found" in the past 10 years alone. Go dig, find some interesting artifacts to prove your case THEN go alert the press. This is likely just an attempt to drum up some funding for future expeditions, but like everyone else here, I just don't see a whole lot in the pictures.
 
Who moved Atlantis? Now it's in Spain

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News

Wednesday, 9 June 2004




The fabled lost city of Atlantis may lie in a salt marsh region off Spain's southern coast, according to a German researcher.

His study, which is reported online by the archaeology journal Antiquity and has not yet been peer-reviewed by archaeologists, is based on the analysis of satellite images.

They show ancient ruins that the author says appear to match descriptions by the Greek scholar Plato.

The structures resemble two rectangular buildings and are hidden in a muddy region known as Marisma de Hinojos, near the port of Cadiz.

The study's author Rainer Kühne, of the University of Wuppertal in Germany, said descriptions of Atlantis as an island simply referred to this part of Spain, destroyed by a flood between 800 and 500 BC.

Kühne's theory is supported by the presence of the two rectangular features that match temple depictions in Plato's dialogues Critias and Timaios.

Associate Professor Tony Wilkinson, a U.K. expert in applications of remote sensing in archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, described the structures visible in the satellite pictures as "interesting".

One feature, 230 meters long and 140 meters wide, could be a "silver" temple dedicated to the sea god Poseidon; the other, somewhat "quadratic" structure, measuring 280 meters by 240 meters, could be a "golden" temple devoted to Cleito and Poseidon.

Kühne said the structures agreed with Plato's description of the temples.

"These rectangular structures are surrounded by concentric circles. This agrees with Plato's description that the temples were surrounded by concentric circles of water and earth. Even the sizes are correct. According to Plato, the diameter of the largest circle was 27 stades, ie 5 kilometers. In the satellite photos, the diameter of the largest circle is between five and six kilometres," Kühne said.

Atlantis has piqued the imagination of scholars ever since Plato first mentioned it in about 360 BC.

In his account, the Greek scholar told of a city placed in front of the Pillars of Hercules, now the Strait of Gibraltar, which flourished for more than 9000 years. It was destroyed by the gods when its people became prone to sin and corruption.

Legend has it the entire city was swallowed by the sea within a day and a night under the onslaught of an earthquake and subsequent tidal wave.

For centuries scholars and explorers have searched for it. The lost city of concentric rings of water and lands has been "found" in Sweden, Palestine, Central Asia, Crete, Carthage, Mexico and Antarctica.

One recent theory equates Atlantis with Spartel Island, which sank to the bottom of the sea 11,000 years ago. The island, just to the west of the Strait of Gibraltar, lies only 120 kilometres from the rectangular structures that Kühne spotted.

According to Plato, the Atlantean capital was placed about nine kilometres from the sea on the edge of a rectangular, smooth and even plain surrounded by mountains that reached to the sea. Apart from this, the country was very high and had a steep coastline.

"Near Cadiz there is a rectangular, smooth and even plain which lies at a south coast. It is the plain south-west of Seville through which the Guadalquivir [river] flows," Kühne said.

The mountains described by Plato would then be the Sierra Morena and Sierra Nevada.

Kühne noticed that the war between Atlantis and the eastern Mediterranean countries described in Plato's writings strongly resembled that of mysterious raiders known as the Sea People around 1200 BC.

The Atlanteans and the Sea People would then be the same, according to the German scientist.

"If the capital of Atlantis indeed existed near the mouth of the Guadalquivir, then we suggest that Plato's Atlantis tale is based upon an Egyptian report on the Sea Peoples and some Greek tradition on the Athens of that time."

The report on the Atlantean city and state may refer to a Spanish city, possibly identical with Tartessos, which was probably destroyed by Carthaginians during the 6th century BC," Kühne said.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1127929.htm

The Antquity paper with a piture and (crappy) diagram:

http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/kuhne/

Emps
 
Goldstein said:
The Aztecs believed that their ancestors had travelled to Mexico from the island of "Aztlan" - a name very similar to "Atlantis", and I believe placed in the Caribbean/Atlantic Ocean.

And people are out there looking for it:

Search for Aztec Homeland Clouded in Myth, Politics

Tue Jun 22, 2004 08:02 AM ET

By Alistair Bell

MEXCALTITAN, Mexico (Reuters) - The mythical homeland of Mexico's Aztecs -- an island known as Aztlan -- has eluded historians for centuries, and the quest to find it has become shrouded in political spin and scholarly speculation.

Like the lost Atlantis and Camelot, Aztlan may or may not have existed, but fervent believers have sought it from the desert of Utah to a mangrove swamp in western Mexico.

Academics agree that the Aztecs, a warlike tribe with a passion for human sacrifice, wandered the badlands of central Mexico for years before founding what is now Mexico City around 1325 and then forging the greatest empire of the ancient Americas.

But the original habitat of the people whose history and symbols are still invoked by modern Mexico remains a mystery.

Aztec legend says little about Aztlan, apart from that it was a small island on a lake inhabited by herons north of Mexico City. If it is ever found, archeologists do not expect to discover much in the way of treasure or ruins there.

The small western state of Nayarit, long neglected by the federal government, declared itself the "cradle of the Mexicans" in the early 1990s based on an old theory that the marshy island of Mexcaltitan was in fact Aztlan.

Little stirs on the mosquito-infested islet nestled in a salt water lagoon on the Pacific coast.

An expected tourism boom to the state has mostly failed to materialize and the islanders still scratch a living from fishing for shrimp and lobsters.

"No serious archeological study has ever been done in Mexcaltitan," said Jesus Jauregui, an expert in western Mexico at the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

"Aztlan is a mythical place, not a historical one," he said.

---------------------
Try telling that to the growing number of Mexican immigrants in the United States for whom the idea that Aztlan was in Utah or Colorado has become a matter of doctrine.

"Mexican Americans are very interested in it because it gives them identity as an ethnic group," said Armando Solorzano, ethnic studies professor at the University of Utah.

He said that if the Aztecs indeed came from what is now the western United States, as some linguistic studies suggest, then the millions of mostly illegal Mexican migrants there could argue that they are not just undocumented workers but descendants of the original inhabitants who have come home.

"With this massive wave of immigration from Mexico now, the immigrants are saying, 'We are returning to Aztlan,' so there is a lot of political misunderstanding and conflict," Solorzano said.

Many Mexicans still resent the United States taking much of the U.S. Southwest in the 1846-48 Mexican-American war.

Perhaps the best clue to the origins of the Aztecs is the language.

The Aztec tongue is widely recognized by linguists as being part of the Uto-Aztecan family and related to the language of the Ute Indians of Utah as well as the Hopi and Comanche.

The discovery in recent years of a cave painting in Sego Canyon, Utah that appears to be a deity also seen on a famous Aztec stone calendar boosts the theory of a former Aztec presence in the United States, Solorzano said.

Seven caves found on Antelope Island in Utah may also tie in with an Aztec story that the tribe passed through a place of seven caves, the fabled Chicomoztoc, he said.

But all this does not prove that Aztlan was in the southwest United States, only that the Aztecs may have spent time there on their wanderings before departing for Mexico City some 1,700 miles to the south.

"This is one point of departure. Nayarit might be another one. Some people say they also migrated from California," Solorzano said. "There is another belief that the Aztecs came from Florida," he said .

-----------------------
Mexcaltitan, home to 1,800 people in a mangrove swamp, is now losing ground to U.S. claims to be the Aztecs' homeland.

Even the curator of the island's tiny museum acknowledges that the local version of the Aztlan story may be fiction.

"The issue of where the mythical Aztlan is has been thrashed about a lot. They haven't located it definitively," said curator Lilia Apocada.

The island was first tapped as Aztlan by a 19th century Mexican historian and given credence by National Geographic magazine in a 1968 article.

Mexcaltitan's tiny museum houses some pre-Hispanic pottery but no evidence that it was the place from where the Aztecs took their first step into the history books.

Locals are more concerned about shrimp fishing and preparations for the annual festival when the island's population triples for a few days of dancing and heavy drinking at the end of June.

"They say the Aztecs passed through here. Well, I didn't see them," said fish gutter Abelardo Ramos, 38.

The doors of houses are often left open in Mexcaltitan, unlike in crime-ridden areas of Mexico, and families laze in hammocks, eating seafood or drinking cold beer.

"Whether it is the real Aztlan or not, people enjoy this place anyway," said museum curator Apocada.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=5481314
 
I still think that what's now Santorini was once Atlantis - seems the most likely suspect to me.
 
Me too.

Wasnt there a fastinating article on a thorough investigation of undersea remains in the carribean in the CISCOP site? cant find it.

I think it was something to do with core sample off these remains proving they were natural but oddly regular (like the giants causeway)

didnt stop the true believers though.

But Thera was in the right place, at the right time, and was advanced by the standards of the day.

Isnt that good enough for anybody, that Plato was right??
 
some comments on cultural influence and Atlantis

To all:

In any discussion of a connection between Atlantis and the cultures of at least Meso-America, particular attention should, perhaps, be given to the prevalence of the combination "atl", or "tli" or just "tl" in the language of at least the Aztecs or Mexicas. Indeed, those combinations seem to occur in a far large proportion of their language than any letter combination in any other language! The very name of their language is Nahuatl!

The combination, "atl", at least in some places, is meant to connote greatness. Adding it automatically makes the term it's applied to something important to the gods. Quetzalcoatl, for example, is the god of light that many feel Cortez was believed to be by the Aztec. The goddess of maize, during the Middle Culture period, was Chicomecoatl; Coactlicue was the earth goddess of life and death, and the mother of the gods; Omacatl is the god of feasts and joy; and Tonacacihuatl is the wife of the creator god Tonacatecuhlti. The importance of "tli" and "tli" can also be seen in names such as Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun, who is supposed to have ordered the Mexica south from the area, today, called the "Four Corners", in the American Southwest, to the spot in Mexico where they finally settled; Ixtliton, a god of healing and medicine, as well as feasting and games; and Opochtli, the god of fishing, hunting and bird snaring. The combination "tl" can be seen in the names of gods such as Tlaloc, the god of rain, agriculture, fire and the south; the name given their homeland, Aztlan; the original name of the capital of the Mexica nation, Tenochtitlan; and everyday words, such as ocelotl, for a large kind of cat, tecpatl, a flint knife, and tomatl, the green tomato.

Very interestingly, and suggestively, "atl", as a word, means "water"! The name of the god of water, in fact, is Atl, and Atlaua is the powerful water god called "lord of the waters". The god Atlaua is associated with the arrow, which is called "atlatl", and is also a god of fishermen! And one of the names of the Mexica mother goddess is Atlatonin!

Interestingly enough, too, the word "atl-atl" seems to have persisted in a somewhat similar form, all the way north to the area of the Inuit, where it means a kind of lever device, used to increase the distance a spear can be hurled!

To whatever extent it is considered unreasonable to suggest a connection between ancient Meso-America and the story of Atlantis, the similarity in word meanings is very unusual.

However, a good point is indicated.

It has always been assumed that peoples from the Old World were the only ones to make the trip to the Americas. Some are suggested to have brought stories back. Recountings on the significance of the word "atl", and the connections with ideas such as water, may have been altered to the forms similar to the name, Altantis. Interestingly, on the other side of the Atlantic, bracketing the ocean on the east, are the Atlas Mountains! Those returning with memories of the term "atl" meaning water might be tempted to use that as the basis for a name for mountains forming, essentially, the eastern rim of the ocean. However, there is a question, too, as to whether or not there may have been a visitation in the other direction, people from the Caribbean region, or northern South America, actually making the trip to the coasts of Africa and Europe!

The connections seem very close, and may merit further examination.



Julian Penrod
 
Ireland Is Lost Island of Atlantis, Says Scientist
Fri 6 August, 2004 16:52

By Kevin Smith

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Atlantis, the legendary island nation over whose existence controversy has raged for thousands of years, was actually Ireland, according to a new theory by a Swedish scientist.

Atlantis, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote in 360 BC, was an island in the Atlantic Ocean where an advanced civilization developed some 11,500 years ago until it was hit by a cataclysmic natural disaster and sank beneath the waves.

Geographer Ulf Erlingsson, whose book explaining his theory will be published next month, says the measurements, geography, and landscape of Atlantis as described by Plato match Ireland almost exactly.

"I am amazed no one has come up with this before, it's incredible," he told Reuters.

"Just like Atlantis, Ireland is 300 miles long, 200 miles wide, and widest across the middle. They both have a central plain surrounded by mountains.

"I've looked at geographical data from the rest of the world and of the 50 largest islands there is only one that has a plain in the middle -- Ireland."

Erlingsson believes the idea that Atlantis sank came from the fate of Dogger Bank, an isolated shoal in the North Sea, about 60 miles off the northeastern coast of England, which sank after being hit by a huge floodwave around 6,100 BC.

"I suspect that myth came from Ireland and it derives from Dogger Bank. I think the memory of Dogger Bank was probably preserved in Ireland for around 3,000 years and became mixed up with the story of Atlantis," he said.

Erlingsson links the boundaries of the Atlantic Empire, as outlined by Plato, with the geographic distribution of megalithic monuments in Europe and Northern Africa, matching Atlantis' temples with well-known burial sites at Newgrange and Knowth, north of Dublin, which pre-date the pyramids.

His book, "Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land," calculates the probability Plato would have had access to geographical data about Ireland as 99.98 percent.

Previous theories about Atlantis have suggested it may have been around the Azores islands 900 miles west of the Portuguese coast, or in the Aegean sea. Others locate it solely in the long-decayed brain of Plato.

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=5899085&section=news

there's also another report linked on here:

Lost Lands
 
Put em all in a labyrinth I say, the minotaurs getting hungry...
 
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