Jaime Manuschevich of the University of Chile has recently produced a book in Spanish^[468] that places Atlantis in what are now Israel and the Sinai Peninsula. The most dramatic part of his thesis is that at the time, 9500 BC, this region was in fact an island bounded on the west by a waterway roughly following the course of today’s Suez Canal and on the east by a widened Dead Sea and Jordan River with a northern outlet to the Mediterranean. Manuschevich claims that instead of thinking in terms of Atlantis sinking into the sea we should consider the possibility that the sea sank separating the Dead Sea, Mediterranean and Red Sea resulting in earlier waterways becoming impassable to voyagers. To support his theory Manuschevich cites geological and historical evidence.

He bases his views on the generally accepted fact that the earliest civilisations were to be found in the Middle East. Manuschevich wrote a paper, outlining what he perceives are geographical errors contained in Plato’s tale, for presentation to the Melos Atlantis Conference in 2005.

These papers are now available^(a) on the Internet. They appear to be English translations from the original Spanish and in places are a little difficult to understand clearly.

^{(a) http://www.laatlantida.cl/materialesi.htm}