Keftiu and biblical Caphtor, which means ‘pillar’ in Hebrew, are usually considered to refer to the same place and are accepted by a sizeable number of commentators to be another name for Minoan Crete and equate it with Atlantis. It is implied in Jeremiah 47.4 that Caphtor was an island.

Others have argued in favour of identifying Keftiu with Cyprus among whom Immanuel Velikovsky argued that if Cyprus was not Keftiu, then it is the only island of any importance in the eastern Mediterranean not mentioned by the Egyptians.

Although Plato was the first to use the term “Atlantis”, there are antecedents to his legend of a drowned civilisation. There is an Egyptian legend, which Solon probably heard while travelling in Egypt, and was passed down to Plato years later. It concerns the island nation of Keftiu, home to one of the four pillars that held up the sky. It was said to be a glorious advanced civilization, which was destroyed and sank beneath the ocean. It has been suggested that Plato embellished Solon’s story from “the land of the four pillars that held up the sky” into “the land of the Titan, Atlas, who held up the sky”. The Egyptian legend refers to an island west of Egypt, but not necessarily west of the Mediterranean. It may be relevant to point here that Crete is more northerly of Egypt whereas some suggested Atlantis locations such as the Maltese Islands or Sardinia are in fact located westward.