- This article is about the mythical island. For other uses, see Atlantis (disambiguation).
Atlantis was a mythical ancient island, whose existence and location have never been confirmed. 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. Plato claimed it was somewhere west of the Pillars of Hercules, now known as the Strait of Gibraltar. While there are many theories about Atlantis, nearly all serious research shows that Atlantis never existed as Plato described it, although elements of his story may have been drawn from real events.
Source writings and accounts
Plato
Plato's accounts of Atlantis are in his works "Timaeus" and "Critias"; these are the earliest known references to the mythological civilization of the Atlanteans. In his story, Critias (360 BCE) describes the origins and form of Atlantis to Socrates and his guests. The dialog of Timaeus is a continuation of Critias's tale, and delivers a more thorough history of ancient civilizations and mentions the state of Atlantis and its foreign relations, albeit briefly.
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, and after being sunk by an earthquake 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 centre 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 bore 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 three walls surrounded the city and its 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, 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."
Critias's tale of Atlantis is possibly a work of fiction, an extended parable intended to illustrate Plato's philosophy of the ideal government, much as did Plato's allegory of the cave. Plato's account purports to be based on a visit to Egypt by the Athenian lawgiver Solon. Sonchis, priest of Thebes, is purported to have translated it into Greek for Solon.
Aristotle
Aristotle wrote of a large island in the Atlantic Ocean that the Carthaginians knew as Antilia. Proclus, the commentator of "Timaeus" mentions that Marcellus, relying on ancient historians, stated in his Aethiopiaka that in the Outer Ocean (which meant all oceans, not just the Atlantic) there were seven small islands dedicated to Persephone, and three large ones; one of these, comprising 1,000 stadia in length, was dedicated to Poseidon. Proclus tells us that Crantor reported that he, too, had seen the columns on which the story of Atlantis was preserved as reported by Plato: the Saite priest showed him its history in hieroglyphic characters. Some other writers called it Poseidonis after Poseidon. Plutarch mentions Saturnia or Ogygia about five days' sail to the west of what is called nowadays Britain. He added that westwards from that island, there were the three islands of Cronus, to where proud and warlike men used to come from the continent beyond the islands, in order to offer sacrifice to the gods of the ocean.
Other Greek accounts
An important Greek festival of Pallas Athene, the Panathenaea was dated from the days of king Theseus. It consisted of a solemn procession to the Acropolis in which a peplos was carried to the goddess, for she had once saved the city, gaining victory over the nation of Poseidon, that is, the Atlanteans. As Lewis Spence comments, this cult was in existence already 125 years before Plato, which means that the story could not have been invented by him. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote 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. Diodorus Siculus recorded that the Atlanteans did not know the fruits of Ceres. Pausanias called this island "Satyrides," referring to the Atlantes and those who profess to know the measurements of the earth. He states that far west of the Ocean there lies a group of islands whose inhabitants are red-skinned and whose hair is like that of the horse. (Christopher Columbus described the Indians similarly.) A fragmentary work of Theophrastus of Lesbos tells about the colonies of Atlantis in the sea. Hesiod wrote that the garden of the Hesperides was on an island in the sea where the sun sets. Pliny the Elder recorded that this land was 12,000 km distant from Cádiz, and Uba, a Numidian talks of an enormous island outside the Pillars of Hercules. 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. Scylax of Caryanda gives similar account.
Marcellus claims that the survivors of the sinking Atlantis migrated to Western Europe. Timagenes tells almost the same, citing the Druids of Gaul as his sources. He tries to classify the Gallic tribes according to their origins and tells of one of these claiming that they were colonists who came there from a remote island. Theopompus of Chios, a Greek historian called this land beyond the ocean as "Meropis". The dialogue between King Midas and the wise Silenus mentions the Meropids, the first men with huge cities of gold and silver. Silenus knows that besides the well-known portions of the world there is another, unknown, of incredible immensity, where immeasurably vast blooming meadows and pastures feed herds of various, huge and mighty beasts. 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. Perhaps the Byzantine friar Cosmas Indicopleustes understood Plato better than the ancient and modern "Aristotelians", says Merezhkovsky. In his Topographia Christiana he 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." The Garden of Eden is placed in the eastern end of this continent. Emanuel Velikovsky discovered many records of lands that had become submerged in middle east areas around the mediterranean and also new islands that had risen out of the sea in historic times, the myths of Atlantis may in part be true or they may be the figment of a wild imagination but of the fact that these changes in land and sea did happen is certain from the records of witnesses to the facts. Even if Atlantis is ever found will we ever know which sunken mass of land it was?
Modern interest
Ninteenth century
With rare exceptions, such as Francis Bacon's book The New Atlantis, 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 rejected those claims.
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 exact geographical location 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.
Nazism and Atlantis
The concept of Atlantis also entered Nazi Mysticism 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 proven conclusively false. In response, some recent theories propose that elements of Plato's story was derived from earlier myths including that of the (now mostly sunken) Sunda Plain, which is sometimes called Sundaland in Southeast Asia. Proponents of this idea include Bill Lauritzen, Steven Oppenheimer and Arysio Nunes dos Santos. There is stronger evidence, however that some of Plato's story elements were drawn from the natural disasters that have taken place in the Mediterranean, such as the volcanic eruptions around Santorini which may have destroyed the Minoan civilization. As yet there have been no conclusive results.
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 have been proven conclusively to be the historical Atlantis. Most of the historical proposed locations are in or nearby the Mediterranean, either islands such as Sardinia, Crete and Santorini, Malta, and Ponza or as land based cities or states such as Troy, Andalucia or Tantalus (in province of Manisa, Turkey) as possible locations. Part of these hypotheses assume that the Ancient Egyptian symbol for "hundred" was mistakenly read as "thousand" (unlikely because there would be little confusion in the visual appearance of hieroglyphic symbols of Egyptian numeric values). The submerged island of Spartel near the Strait of Gibraltar is another proposed location which would coincide with some elements of Plato's account. The island of Santorini, according to geologists, experienced a massive volcanic eruption about 1640 BC, further leading some to believe that may have been the catastrophe that inspired the story.
Outside of the Mediterranean, locations as far as Antarctica, Indonesia and the Caribbean have been proposed as Atlantis' site. In the area of the Black Sea, three locations, 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 off Portugal and several Carribbean islands. In the North Atlantic, Finland (by Finnish pseudohistorian Ior Bock) and Ireland have been proposed. Areas in the Pacific and Indian Ocean have also been proposed including Indonesia, Malaysia and stories of a lost continent off India named "Kumari Kandam" have drawn parallels to Atlantis. The Canary Islands have also been identified as a possible location, as they are west of the Pillars of Hercules, as is told in Plato's account.
In fiction
- Main article: Atlantis in fiction
As a popular myth, Atlantis is frequently featured in many books, movies and other creative works.
See also
References
Accounts
- "Timaeus" translated by Benjamin Jowett; alternative version with commentary.
- "Critias" translated by Benjamin Jowett; alternative version with commentary.
- Project Gutenberg Presents: "Atlantis: the Antediluvian World" by Ignatius Donnelly
Location theories
For detailed links about possible locations see Location hypotheses of Atlantis