Solon (c.630- c.560 BC) was an Athenian archon (chief magistrate). Although the story of Atlantis is normally attributed to Plato, the core of the narrative, namely the destruction of a powerful civilisation many thousands of years earlier, through flood, should in fact be credited to Solon, whose ‘notes’ provided the basis for Plato’s work, allegedly based on the content of conversations with Egyptian priests at Sais and Heliopolis. The very detailed descriptions of matters such as the history, topography and fauna of Atlantis are probably later additions by Plato. It is highly unlikely that the Egyptians would have been concerned with the recording of such minutiae relating to their former enemies.

Many commentators doubt that an actual note of Solon’s conversations with the Egyptian priests ever existed, even though in Plato’s Dialogues Critias claims that these were handed down to his relatives. However, here again we encounter a difficulty, in one place Critias [113b] states that he is still in possession of Solon’s notes, in another Timaeus [26a] he declares that he relies on his memory for details of the Atlantis story that his grandfather had told him. Why didn’t he simply refresh his memory from Solon’s notes? And why didn’t he show the notes to his three companions as incontrovertible proof of the truth of his rather unusual story of a destroyed civilisation?
The Life of Solon by Plutarch is available on the Internet^(a).
^(a) http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Aabo%3Atlg%2C0007%2C007&query=1%3A1