Christian & Siegfried Schoppe are a father and son team of German researchers who firmly assert that Atlantis was located in the Black Sea. Their contention is that before 5500 BC there was a great plain in the north-west of the area, now occupied by the Black Sea, which was then a much smaller freshwater-lake. Atlantis in their view was situated on what was formerly the shore of this lake. The Schoppe’s echo the view of Ryan and Pitman who were probably the first in 1998, to advance the idea that around 5500 BC the barrier at today’s Bosporus broke open due to the rising world sea levels and raised the level of the Black Sea, flooding a huge area of cultivated land, an event that lay behind the story of Noah’s Flood.

The Schoppes, on the other hand, identify this flooding of the Black Sea with the flooding of Atlantis and maintain that the Pillars of Heracles are located at the Strait of Bosporus. They further suggest that the Orichalcum mentioned by Plato was in fact obsidian that used to be a cash-equivalent at that time and was replaced by the spondylus shell around 5500 BC. This geocatastrophic event, according to the Schoppes, led to the Neolithic diaspora in Europe that also began around 5500 BC.

They also claim to have identified the location of the ten kingdoms of the Atlantean empire through an investigation of placenames for both meaning and sound. The theories of the Schoppe’s are contained in their book^[186] and outlined on their website^(a).

^(a) http://www.atlantis-schoppe.de/