I have been searching around for information about this fora very long time, and after hearing many many different opinions, I am turning to you all. Can anyone tell me evidence for or against the Atlantis theory? Or even provide reasonable sources. I am just very curious. And yes, I am new here, so feel free to comment on that too.
The strict answer is “no”. Not that there aren’t lots of theories out there. The best one I’ve seen is that it was the island of Santorini. Do a bit of googling and you’ll find lots of articles.
One good place to start around here are the columns of The Straight Dope, by Cecil Adams. Specifically, see Is the lost city of Atlantis at the bottom of a lake in North Dakota?
“Can anyone explain Atlantis?”
What do you mean by explain? If you mean…does anyone actually know the truth about whether or not Atlantis ever existed? Then I would have to say NO. No one can say they know without a doubt that Atlantis is fact or fiction.
If you mean…where can any actual Atlantis evidence be found? Well AFAIK this link is Plato’s account of Atlantis and is the cite most referred to. Read it for yourself and decide.
Personally I don’t have a problem with the idea of a city/state called Atlantis that was destroyed in a natural catastrophy. The exaggerations and myths that have been attached to Atlantis have pretty much destroyed any respect on the subject.
Here’s a link. Like John said, there are lots of 'em.
This is an opinion, not just mine, but I think many who support the possibility of an Atlantean civilization. I think many would agree that it was probably small, it was also probably local (not here) but local to the Mediterranean. Possibly as far off as the Azores but not farther. It was likely destroyed as a result of a natural catastrophy. If it did actually occur, it was more recent than the date of 9000 years before Plato…more like 900 years.
Other than that there’s not a lot of physical evidence supporting the idea. But there have been a few cities destroyed in the past, so it is possible. Of course Atlantis was decribed a large, not small.
…and the fish weighed how much? That kinda thing IMHO.
Here’s the theory I’ve heard the most of. I don’t neccesarily believe it, but I’ll tell you what it says. Not even sure how much of it is true . . . but you asked.
Minoan Crete = Atlanis
Here’s how it went down:
The Minoans were a peaceful people, isolated well-enough from other civilizations to not worry about spending all their time on military and defenses and such. They were an old-timey egalitarian society that worshipped a fertility goddess and her bull companion. In tune with nature and all that.
Now, because they didn’t have to spend so much energy on defense, they spent more time with the arts and such. Apparently, they had beautiful architecture with very open houses. Also, they were supposedly moe advanced with . . . some kind of technology (I don’t recall what, but it’s not like they had lasers or anything).
And Then . . . came the Greeks. The Minoans caught wind of their intent to conquer them, so they started to try to build a military. However, shortly after that, the island was heavily damamed by earthquakes and tidal waves, or somesuch. This left them in such a vulnerable state that they were easy pickings for the Greeks.
By the time Plato (did I get that right? He’s the one who wrote about them?) came around, all that was left of the Minoans was a vague memory of a beautiful civilization that had been destroyed by natural catastrophe. So he wrote a story about them.
Since then, ug, we’ve had folks saying that Atlantians were aliens or new-age folks saying they were highly spiritualy evolved, or other folks saying that when Atlantis sank, the Atlanteans boated to Egypt and Central America. Kinda gone about discreting the idea as a civilizaton that might have existed, and has turned into a myth.
So, there’s one theory.
PS: Sorry for all the typos that I’m sure are in this post. It’s one of Those days.
Atalantë was destroyed when Ar-Pharazon attempted to wrest the Undying Lands from the Valar. Eru sank it into the bottom of the sea…
Oh, sorry, forgive me…
I buy the theory that the Minoan civilization was the nugget of fact at the nucleus of the Atlantis story, for the reaons that silver serpentine explained. A highly advanced early civilization, destroyed by catastrophe (there were earthquakes and fires we know of archaeologically that wrecked the Palace of Knossos, the nerve center of Minoan civilization). The Greeks, starting with the Myceneans, preserved other memories of Knossos throughout the Greek dark ages by reciting them as heroic sagas in which Greek invaders were the heroes and the Minoans were the bad guys. Thus the legend of Theseus.
But the Atlantis disaster story came to the Greeks by way of Egyptian records. The volcanic eruption of Thera was the icing on the disaster cake. Thera is one of the Cycladic group of islands, and at the time was on the fringes of Minoan civilization. The Egyptian priests told their visitor Solon of old stories they had recorded about an Aegean civilization that perished in disaster. The Minoans had ben trading partners of Egypt, and so Egypt would have noted the disruption in commerce when the Minoan ships stopped visiting. The Egyptians would have pieced together enough of the story to realize that catastrophe had helped to wipe out the Minoan state. They told this to Solon because he came from the same neck of the woods, the Aegean, and they figured he would be interested. The story got garbled during its may retellings from the Egyptian priests to Solon to Plato, and probably Plato himself embellished it further in order to make the philosophical point he was making.
So classical Greeks had heard of the Minoans from two sources: One was the Theseus legends transmitted from Mycenean times, and the other was the Atlantis disaster story heard in Egypt. It was routing the story through Egypt that obscured the Minoan identity of “Atlantis”, so that the Greeks didn’t recognize it as the same civilization that “Theseus” had invaded.
DSYoungEsq, your theory makes the most sense to me.
My wild theory is that Plato made up the whole thing, as a fictional background he could use to make political and philosophical points. Writers do that.
I heard that many many years ago the Earth tipped over slightly by a few degrees and the land masses ended up in different places, what had previously been an ocean became the North Pole and Atlantis ended up where the South Pole now is.
And apparently it’ll happen again … so therefore in a few years time people will be asking about the lost city of America or Australia or Bognor …
Just saying …
Oh, and that’s probably what happened to Middle Earth too …
Didn’t we just go over this a couple of weeks ago?
At the time, I recommended L. Sprague deCamp’s book Lost Continents, which I think you can still get from Dover books. Excellent book, well worth the reading.
The short story: Plato probably made it up – it’s his ideal state for explaining his theories. Th idea that some of this might come from dim recollections of the explosion of Santorini/Thera via Egyptian historians is tantalizing, but way short of proven, or even of satisfaction.
The article in Wikipedia entry is pretty comprehensive and includes this gem:
For people who want to believe in Atlantis, it doesn’t if that every single location searched is barren, as they have faith.
Our good friend, the Bad Astronomer has a few things to say about the whole “earth’s poles reversing” hysteria, which usually involves scenarios including “Planet X”. There’s two things that are generally confused: magnetic pole reversal, which has happened in the past, and there is geological record of this and it probably will happen again, but that doesn’t move continents around. OTOH, Immanuel Velikovsky did publish a work wherein he “proved” that the Earth had flip-flopped physically in space multiple times. Velikovsky was, frankly, a crank, and the Planet X supporters seem to generally follow his example in that regard.
Portions of the earth’s crust, including continents, do move, through plate tectonics, but that process does not involve tipping over the Earth.
Exactly. He made it up. There was no mention of Atlantis before Plato.
Of course, since a good story often has some basis in historical truth, it is not impossible that Plato had heard some story about Thera, and used it as a basis, but …
DrDeth I’m not disagreeing that Plato might have taken some poetic license in his version. But whether or not some mention of Atlantis existing or not I can’t agree with. Because he claimed to have read it in some work of Homer’s that is no longer available, thanks to the retards who destroyed libraries in the past. What was once written and available to the ancient civilizations are gone. No one here can say what was in print then. There were millions of books destroyed at Alexandria alone. The biggest tragedy in all of humanity IMHO is lost literature.
Like this board one of these days. There’s a lot of bullshit here at the SDMB but even through all the BS there is a lot of good stuff that would be tragic if it were lost for good. I want a CD collection of all the threads in the SDMB database with updates
The ancient Greeks weren’t morons. They knew the size and shape of the earth. They knew the sun was center of the galaxy. They had a basic understanding of biology and cellular structure. The concept of the atom was from the ancient Greeks. They excelled in math, art, music, architecture, and much more.
Plus they lived a hell of a lot closer to the actual time and place. Maybe they had a clue what world they lived in…maybe not. There are many mysteries this world has yet to reveal. There are many ancient habitats that have been found below sea level due simply to the rise in sea level over the time. There are several cites known to have been utterly destroyed by natural disaster. I do imagine many more that are not known.
What lost civilizations (if any) are yet to be discovered. Hopefully time will tell. Then again we could get a meteor strike and be the subject of someone else’s fantastic tale.
Just as long as we don’t teach the apes too much.
er…um…well maybe I am. :rolleyes: Make that solar system if you would please.
I could’ve sworn I proofed that. Where’s that smack guy when you need him?
So that’s why so many dopers can’t supply them…
Here’s a vote for Baldwin’s theory; Atlantis is as imaginary as Utopia, and served much the same purpose; Timaeus and Critias, the two dialogues in which Plato discusses the place, are essays on political theory. By the strangest of coincidences, the ancient people of Atlantis lived exactly according to the precepts set out in Plato’s early work, The Republic. In the same way Sir Thomas More pretended to have information about a country somewhere vaguely in or near Brazil as a way to share his observations about the ideal way to live.
It is generally understood that these “dialogues” are imaginary, and that Plato set out his discussions of ideas by having great men converse about them purely as a literary convention. The two Atlantis dialogues, if real, would have taken place while Plato was a very small child and unlikely to be taking notes.
Writing around 360 B. C. E., Plato said that Atlantis was a vast continent made of concentric rings which lay “in front of” the Straits of Gibralter, and sank in one day 9000 years before his time. It seems plain that he was describing a fairy tale place, and people didn’t take it to be anything else until crank books on the subject began to be churned out in the late 19th Century.
An early and vocal proponent of the “real” Atlantis was Ignatius Donnelly, a popular novelist who once ran for vice president on the Populist ticket. Donnelly was sort of the Immanuel Velicovsky of his time; very thorough in his research, but notorious for his loopy conclusions. He was also one of the first researchers to “prove” that Shakespeare’s works contain codes which reveal he didn’t write them. Subsequent researchers, using Donnelly’s own techniques, found a coded message showing that Shakespeare really did write them, and another in which Gertrude Stein took credit.
Donnelly, like proponents of a real Atlantis generally, fudged a lot. IIRC, he thought that the Azores could be remenants of the sunken continent. In any case, he argued for a land that wasn’t perfectly round, didn’t sink in a single day, and wasn’t a continenent of enromous size.
He did, at least, place it in the Atlantic. In the 20th Century people “found” the lost continent in all sorts of places. Edgar Cayce, the so-called “sleeping prophet”, said it was in the Carribean. People have since tried to pass off lava flows on the ocean floor there as the ruins of Atlantean roads. I recall too that there was a vogue in the 70s for the idea that an extremely step pyramid lay somewhere in the Carribean, having supposedly been mapped by sonar. Actually, the “evidence” used was a map of the ocean floor made by a device where a stylus went up to a rest postion whenever a ream of paper ran out, and then shot back down to the correct position whenever tracking resumed on fresh paper. That is, the needle drew half a “pyramid” at the end and the start of every sheet of paper.
In L. Sprague DeCamp’s entertaining book Lost Continents, recommended above by **CalMeachum **, there is an observation which bears considering. DeCamp argued that all claims that some ancient place was the “real” Atlantis are fundamentally flawed. One can argue that the destruction of some real place may have helped suggest the idea to Plato, but ultimately Atlantis was a product of his imagination. Even the suggestion that Plato must have been thinking of some particular place when he got the idea to talk about an ideal country that existed in the past (and conveniently vindicated his ideas) strikes me as suspect.
That should be “an extremely steep pyramid”.