Many people say that Plato’s dating of the war between Atlantis and those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of Gibraltar) and the ancient Athenians and Egyptians among others who dwelt within the Pillars as having occurred 9,000 years before the time of Solon (9,000 years before 590 BC being around 9,600 BC) was off by a factor of 10, and what was really meant was 900 years ago.
This, I argue, cannot have been the case, unless other details mentioned by Plato were either mistaken or made up altogether.
(Critias)
This excerpt of Critias, one of the two dialogues of Plato that mentions Atlantis, states that the people of Atlantis had horses. These horses that were used by the military forces of Atlantis were obviously domesticated horses. If Atlantis was an island in the Atlantic Ocean that was swallowed up by the sea, as Plato said, then the horses in Atlantis, prior to their domestication, could not have been endemic to that island, as horses instinctively fear water and could not have swum across long stretches of the Atlantic Ocean, but rather must have been brought from a place where horses were native species to the island of Atlantis.
The following excerpt is from Timaeus, the other dialogue of Plato that mentions Atlantis:
The continent of which Timaeus speaks of is clearly the New World. After 7,600 years BP, horses had become extinct in North America. So the people of Atlantis must have domesticated the horse before 7,600 BP (5,600 BC), as one cannot domesticate an animal that is already extinct. 7,600 years before our time would be at least 5,000 years before the time when Solon was told by the Egyptian priests. Therefore, if it is to be maintained that Plato’s dialogue exaggerates the date of the war between Atlantis and Athens and their destruction shortly thereafter, it cannot have been by a factor of 10.
The works of Plato were largely forgotten by the West following the destruction of the library of Alexandria and the fall of the Roman Empire, and were rediscovered during the Renaissance. On the subject of the existence of a large continent on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, Plato was right about everything except on his claim that the Atlantic was not navigable. But not only was Plato’s account of the existence of the Americas presciently correct, so was his knowledge that there were once horses on the American continent (as well as elephants).
If Plato was just making up a good story, then his stories are stranger than fiction, so to speak. But perhaps, the reason they are so is because they are true.
My humble opinion: The reason why:
-Horses, elephants, and many large mammals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene
-the sudden decline of the Clovis culture in North America
-the sudden ending of the Younger Dryas climatic period with a period of abrupt warming on a scale that has never been seen since, and the “end of the Ice Age”
-the existence of the Americas passed out of knowledge of the Old World for so long
-America before 1492 remained at a relatively primitive level technologically
was because there was a period of extreme climate change and global warming that happened 11,600 years ago, and that the focal point of this climate change was centered somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and that the destruction of Atlantis also destroyed much of the Americas, erasing its existence from Old World consciousness, and also wiping out the fauna and human civilization on the New World, forcing it to start back from square one.
**But the above was just a rhetorical argument (positing Atlantis as an island). In my humble opinion, Plato’s only significant mistake was saying that Atlantis was an island. It is my personal opinion that the destruction of Atlantis was in actuality the flooding of the Caribbean Basin and Gulf of Mexico basins. I’d bet my (left) arm that this is what happened. **
If you think you can win a debate with me on this, let’s have at it.
Seriously? You’re claiming Plato had accurate knowledge of events in the Americas (a pair of continents no one not living there even knew existed in his time), from a time thousands of years before the invention of writing? And with a straight face you’re claiming that’s more likely than it being an invented story to make a point? And that an actual, ***intercontinental ***war occurred in 6000+ BC, between two cultures that so far as we know weren’t even seafaring, and that left no, say, archeological evidence?
Sorry, you’ll need a LOT more evidence than that. There’s no way that sort of specific knowledge could have been passed by word of mouth for millenia.
Unless it refers to land which was (A) known to Plato and Timaeus and (B) actually includes the Pillars of Hercules, to wit, Eurasia + Africa, specifically Europe and Africa’s Atlantic coasts, whose boundaries were unknown.
And all of that, of course, is based on the assumption that Plato wasn’t repeating a legend he mistakenly believed was factual and there is any reason to accept his authority on places he did not know firsthand. Oh, and also assuming his numbers aren’t either round figures or wild guesses.
In short, even assuming Plato is completely different from every other Ancient Greek writer in access to information and conventions for conveying it, your theory is still nonsense.
My vote for the source of the Atlantis myth goes to the volcanic eruption of Thera (Santorini) and the subsequent destruction of the Minoan civilization by the associated earthquakes and tsunamis, sometime around 250 BC. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me, anyway.
I very much agree that a civilization that doesn’t have written language will not be able to accurately transmit its memories over thousands of years. The Egyptian priest makes a revealing statement, when he says that the reason why Athens didn’t know about its remote past was because “for many generations, the survivors of that destruction [deluge] died, leaving no written word.” This statement pertains to the Athenians of old, and not to themselves.
The story was passed down from Egypt to Solon circa 590 BC, and then to a “dear friend” of Solon named Dropidas, who was Critias’ great-grandfather, who in turn passed it down to Critias’ grandfather (whose name was also Critias), who finally passed it down to the Critias for whom the dialogue is named.
Furthermore, it is clearly and unambiguously stated that the Egyptians had written down what had happened in Athens, their own land, and other places of which they had knowledge of. The Egyptian priest also says that it was written down by us of old.
Again, it was not passed down by word of mouth for millennia by the Egyptians. It was written down by the Egyptians! It was only passed down from the year circa 590 BC (Solon) to the time of Plato, which is at most 230 years, and by this time, the Greeks obviously had reacquired written language.
No! I’m not claiming that Plato had accurate knowledge of events in the Americas. He only had accurate a dim vague knowledge. He didn’t know about the details of the continents, nor explicitly say that there was a North and a South, he didn’t say that there was an ice age 10,000 years prior to his time and before, he didn’t say that there were Native American tribes living in North America during his time. He only said that a continent existed that encircled the entire ocean that the Mediterranean Sea is only a harbor of, which is what we call the Atlantic Ocean. And he said that the continent was on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
And what is more, I’m only claiming that Plato had this dim, vague “hunch” sort of knowledge that there was an opposite continent NOT because he himself had somehow figured that out on his own, NOR because the Greeks themselves had done so, but specifically and only because the Greeks had happened to reestablish their civilization and gain access to the Egyptian priests who had knowledge that they had lost. If the Egyptians didn’t tell Solon, and the story didn’t pass down to Critias and then Plato, it would never come to Plato that an opposite continent existed.
If it’s an invented story, then how is the knowledge that was passed from the Egyptian priests to the Greeks and ultimately Plato, and recorded in his dialogues, give such an accurate description of what lies beyond the Atlantic Ocean?
You do concede that if a sailor had trusted Plato and sailed west with sufficient provisions from Europe, simply on blind faith, EXCEPT for the comment that the Atlantic Ocean was not navigable, that he would vindicate Plato? But you have to agree that either the Egyptians just happened to make up a story about a continent encircling the Atlantic Ocean that was a “true continent,” and that they were just really lucky, and that its actual existence is just a coincidence, or that they were right about the continent because they were making an educated inference based on imperfect but relatively solid data (written records), but that they were wrong about the ocean’s nonnavigability.
Their wrongness on that latter point is understandable because the mud shoals that were supposedly there due to the sinking of the island are eventually going to go away, no matter how bad they were initially. So the Egyptians just got it wrong in thinking that the ocean was STILL not navigable. This doesn’t necessarily mean that some thousands of years before, the Atlantic Ocean was dangerous enough or “muddy” enough for travel to be risky enough so that people didn’t want to risk their lives by sailing west too far - after a couple reports of ships not returning, I think every sane person would accept that whoever sailed across had died.
Again, the so far as we know for the existence of America was once “it doesn’t exist.” And it never says that the Athenians or Egyptians were seafaring - it only says explicitly that the Atlanteans were. The Athenians didn’t have to be seafaring, as the Atlanteans came to Europe and Africa from across the Atlantic Ocean. Again, prior to the catastrophe, the ocean was supposedly navigable. And this makes perfect sense, as the oceans ARE generally navigable “normally.” Why did the Spanish Empire invade the Aztec Empire? Probably the same reason the Atlantis people invaded Europe and Asia - because of desire of glory, wealth, and power.
To the Native Americans in 1490, the coming of the Spanish had religious tones to it and their world was to truly change in ways they would probably never believe unless it actually happened before their eyes. If both the Natives and the Spanish were utterly destroyed by a catastrophe, would we believe such a story (as neutral observers)? Probably not. But the Natives and Spanish weren’t destroyed by nature.
