An Aspie's Life

Where do I sign up for the job? For someone to pay me to go tramping around the globe looking for lost cities? The idea has captured the imagination of many, but I believe there is no evidence that it actually existed.
In Plato’s account, Atlantis was a naval power lying “in front of the Pillars of Hercules” that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa subjecting its people to slavery 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean “in a single day and night of misfortune”.

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.

The island was larger than Ancient Libya and Asia Minor combined, but it afterwards was sunk by an earthquake and became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel to any part of the ocean.”
One TV show I saw said that the story described Atlantis as being larger than Europe Asia and Africa combined. This would be way too big to fit in the Atlantic Ocean. They suggested that it was a mistranslation, and that the text really read “in the middle of.” This supports the idea that the island of Crete was the inspiration for Atlantis.

The eruption on the island of Thera around the 17th or 16th century BC, caused a large tsunami which is believed to have devastated the Minoan civilization that existed on nearby Crete. And some historians believe that the time scale has been distorted by an error in translation, probably from Egyptian into Greek, which produced “thousands” instead of “hundreds”, this error would rescale the time to 900 years before Solon, a much more realistic date than 9600 BC.

The Island being larger than Ancient Libya and Asia Minor combined, as says in Wikipedia is also much more realistic.

People who go off in search of Atlantis overlook some very important elements of the story. Critias in the dialogue sees ancient Athens as the “perfect society” and Atlantis, its opponent, is the opposite. It is not described as a Utopian society but as a ruthless war making society that invades Europe and attacks Athens.
If such a devastating war really happened, there would be more of a record of it.
Also notice that the tsunami also killed the soldiers of Athens, not just Atlantis.
Also there is this little detail that after it sank it became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel to any part of the ocean.

People get so caught up in the idea that they just don’t see that Plato is clearly using what has become a standard device of fiction — stressing the historicity of an event (and the discovery of hitherto unknown authorities) as an indication that what follows is fiction. Edgar Allen Poe used this device, as did Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park. The idea is to illustrate a point through parable.
Science lends no support. Continental drift, and plate tectonics demonstrate the impossibility of a lost continent. And satellites have mapped the ocean floor. You can get an Atlas or a globe that shows the mid ocean mountain ranges which curve in an exact mach to the edges of the continents, and there is no hidden land mass there.

Some scholars have pointed out that there is another Pillars of Hercules in the Mediterranean, and reckoning from that Pillars Crete again becomes a candidate. Perhaps a distant point in the Atlantic Ocean could refer to what to the Greeks at the time may have seemed the vast expanse of the Mediterranean.

I think that Plato probably did mean the Atlantic Ocean. If you create an imaginary place, you need to put it somewhere that is not well known. If he had placed it in the Aegean Sea then people would have said, “I’ve sailed all over that sea and I never saw any Continent.” The Atlantic, past the Straight of Gibraltar, was unknown; therefore anything could be there. Jonathon Swift placed one of his lands in Japan, then little known. Eldorado, the city of gold, was supposed to be in the New World somewhere. H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe put fictitious places in the then little explored Antarctica.

Technology, which allowed further exploration, erased those places from possible existence. Yet still people cling to the ideal of an Atlantis. The idea that a perfect world once existed, but is now gone, and maybe we could find it again. If only we look hard enough.

One of the most foolhardy things, I believe, is the search for Atlantis. Atlantis comes from Plato’s Dialogues “Timaeus and Critias” and there is no other primary account. The name has become a byword for any and all supposed advanced prehistoric lost civilizations.

Thanks to Wikipedia I can relate the basic story,

“For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the pillars of Heracles,’ there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.

But at a later time there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down.

Perhaps the stupidest Atlantis search I ever heard about was on a TV show where some guy reasoned that there was no large land mass beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Hercules in Latin) then Atlantis had to be in South America. He found a Toltec or Mayan ruin and then using the kind of convoluted logic that these kind of obsessed people have, he calculated that a cubit was a different length at that latitude, I think shorter, so when using that measure the dimensions came out as written in the legend.

Did the Atlanteans know that the earth is round? They were supposed to be advanced, but would they have known that they were supposed to change the length of their measuring sticks when they founded the city? “Hey, bubbastotle. You need to cut your cubit stick shorter.”

“What are you talking about?”

“BillyBobatsophanes says that at this latitude cubits are shorter.”

“What’s latitude?”

“Just cut off 10 decicubes.”

“But this cubit stick has been passed down in my family for generations”

“Well now you can pass down a shorter cubit stick.”

The guy only paid attention to the parts of the story that suited him. He didn’t notice, “an island 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 555 km; 345 mi], but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia [about 370 km; 230 mi].’ Fifty stadia [9 km; 6 mi] from the coast was a mountain that was low on all sides…broke it off all round about… the central island itself was five stades in diameter [about 0.92 km; 0.57 mi].”

I don’t know what stadia are, but I’m sure that that description is of a land mass much shorter smaller than South America. And could a city on the other side of the Atlantic attack the European mainland and threaten Athens? There were no ships at that time capable of making a transatlantic voyage. How do I know? Archeologists have found ships from that era. Many of which are shipwrecked in the middle of the Mediterranean. People had a hard enough time sailing around in the Mediterranean sea, much less the Atlantic. Odysseus spent ten years wondering around a small area, and the Argonauts that it was a big deal going to the Black Sea. Nor do they find any evidence of ocean going craft in South America.

Then what about “wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down.” One key part of the Atlantean story is that the continent sank. This guy found a ruin on dry land.