Olof (Olaus) Rudbeck, (1630-1702), was a 17th century nationalistic writer from Uppsala, Sweden (a very powerful nation at that time). He was a professor of botany and anatomy, and was one of two discoverers of the lymphatic vessels. He also had an interest in astronomy, taught mining and fortification theory and was Sweden’s first field archaeologist.

Olaf published, Atlantica (1679), in Latin, which placed Atlantis, not altogether surprisingly, in Sweden. This was a massive 2500 page work, published with the financial help of the Swedish king, in which he offered 102 ‘proofs’ to support his thesis.

Rudbeck built his Atlantis on a number of details.

• He assumed that the mythical Swedish king Atle was the original Atlas,
• He linked the Swedish Atlefjell (Atle’s Mountain) with the Atlas Mountains and an old name for Sweden was Atland, which crops up in the Oera Linda Book,
• He cited Sweden’s large copper deposits as one of his proofs of his country’s identity with Plato’s Atlantis.

It is also of interest that Rudbeck was an early proponent of the idea that the ‘years’ referred to by Plato were in fact originally Egyptian ‘lunar years’ and concluded that Atlantis was destroyed circa 1500 BC.

Rudbeck also noted that the Greek word ‘nesos’ could mean ‘island’ OR ‘peninsula’, the latter being applicable to Sweden. He argued that the ‘Pillars of Heracles’ was a designation formerly used to refer to a number of locations. Rudbeck claimed that the Oresund strait between Sweden and Denmark was the site of the Atlantis Pillars.

It should be noted that Rudbeck’s theory was a development of the earlier ideas of another Swede, Johannes Bureus (1568-1652), a runic scholar, also born near Uppsala.

In recent years, Gunnar Eriksson, professor emeritus of the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, published the first Swedish biography of Rudbeck. He also compiled a shorter version, in English^[529], that looked at Rudbeck’s 17th century ‘proofs’ that Sweden was Plato’s Atlantis. David King of the University of Kentucky has published ^[530] a further look at this remarkable, if eccentric, individual.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and after whom the annual Nobel Prizes are named was a direct descendant of Rudbeck.