An A-Z Guide To The Search For Plato's Atlantis

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    September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we move to Sicily and Malta. The trip is purely vacational. Unfortunately, I am writing this in a dreadful apartment, sitting on a bed, with access to just one useable socket and a small Notebook. Consequently, I possibly will not […]Read More »
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    Joining The Dots

    I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
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Donald Ingram

Bell Beaker People

The Bell Beaker People identified by their distinctive pottery existed from around 2800 BC until 1800 BC. They occupied large areas of Iberia, Central Europe and the British Isles as well as some of the western Mediterranean Bell Beakerislands. Melville Nicholls claims that they originated in Portugal. Associated with them are the Wessex people divided into Wessex I and Wessex II, who are found in western Europe and southern Britain, the latter, dated to 1650-1400, were involved with the construction of the later stages of Stonehenge.

Uwe Topper associates the beginning of metallurgy with the Bell-Beaker People(e).

Nicholls and others(b) have linked Atlantis with the Bell Beaker culture, identifying a location near Gibraltar as the site of Atlantis. He published his views in Children of the Sea God[944], a 2013 Kindle ebook(a) and a second ebook, The Real and Imaginary Atlantis[945] generally reprising the first, later the same year! Further comment from Nicholls can be found on an internet forum(f).

David D. Miner, is an American Doctor of Medicine, who published a paper linking the Beaker People, Atlantis and Salisbury Plain. He makes a serious and imaginative effort to explain details in Plato’s narrative in the context of this proposed association.

Donald Ingram was more specific equating the Atlanteans with the Wessex II culture in The Unlost Island[665].

The Beaker People are also claimed to have crossed the Atlantic, where they have been linked to the Adena culture of North America. A leading exponent of this theory is undoubtedly Jay S. Wakefield, co-author of How the SunGod reached America [0751]. He has reprised his views in a 2018 paper on the Diffusion & Migration website(c)(g) . Others have expanded on his concepts(d).

(a) https://www.amazon.com/Children-Sea-God-ebook/dp/B00CNCD9GA

(b) https://widespreadblyss.blogspot.ie/2013/02/platos-atlantis-and-bell-beaker-culture.html (link broken Sept. 2018)

(c) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2018&id=558

(d) https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/adena-people-and-prehistoric-colonization-north-america-003342

(e) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=545

(f) https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/29303-A-New-Atlantis-Theory

>(g) https://migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2020&id=699<

 

Nicholls, Melville

Mel NichollsMelville Nicholls is a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado where he studies atmospheric science, mainly relating to hurricanes. In May 2013, he published Children of the Sea God[944] as a Kindle ebook. One of his main contentions is that Atlantis existed  during the early Bronze Age at the time of the Bell Beaker culture, >which he claims originated in Portugal around 2800 BC.<

He also contends that Britain was the large island of Atlantis described by Plato. However he also proposes that the main port city of Atlantis, with the concentric rings of land and water was situated in southwest Spain near Gibraltar. He proposes that this port was destroyed by an event such as a tsunami.

While all these features have been proposed individually as characteristics of Atlantis, Nicholls brings them together in a comprehensive theory, but not without indulging in a liberal amount of speculation.

He devotes a considerable amount of space attempting to link Stonehenge with the Atlanteans. While I was not won over by Nicholl’s book, it is worth a read and might best be studied along with Donald Ingram’s book, The Unlost Island[665].

The idea of  ‘two’ Atlantises was probably first promoted by Lewis Spence and more recently by Karl Jürgen Hepke. In fact, were there not ten Atlantises?

In November 2013, Nicholls published a second ebook, The Real and Imaginary Atlantis[945], in which he revisits his theory of a British/Spanish Atlantis and its relationship to the Bell Beaker People. In conclusion, he seems to reluctantly write that “I still come down in favor of the theory that Plato invented the story as the one most likely to be correct.”

 

Portugal

Portugal, in the 12th century, began as a county, that is, governed by a count. Wikipedia notes that it “refers to two successive medieval counties in the region around Braga and Porto, today corresponding to littoral northern Portugal, within which the identity of the Portuguese people formed. The first county existed from the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries as a vassalage of the Kingdom of Asturias and later the Kingdoms of Galicia and León, before being abolished as a result of rebellion. A larger entity under the same name was then re-established in the late 11th century and subsequently elevated by its count in the mid-12th century into an independent Kingdom of Portugal.”

Impressive megalithic sites are to be found in Portugal, among which is the large Almendres Cromlech (Cromeleque dos Almendres) near Evora. It still has 93 huge stones that form two concentric rings. They were erected there around 4000-5000 BC making them about 2000 years older than Stonehenge(a).

>A recent article(e) on Graham Hancock’s website by Leonard Wolf describes a number of megalithic sites in Portugal that he personally explored including some in the Evora district in 2022. In 2015, the same Mr. Wolf published a lengthy paper(f) advocating a site off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as the location of Atlantis.<

According to Mel Nicholls [0944], the Bell Beaker culture originated in Portugal around 2800 BC and has nominated the Beaker people in Britain as Atlantean, whereas Donald Ingram argues that their successors in Britain, the Wessex II culture were Atlantean.

Portugal entered the Atlantis Stakes with a claim by a Basque researcher, Luis Aldamiz, that a little-known ancient civilisation, known as the Villa Nova VNSP2de São Pedro (VNSP) culture matched much of Plato’s description of Atlantis(b). Its capital was Zambujal, which was located on a mountain in the centre of the Estramadura peninsula, near modern Lisbon. Originally it was described as a ‘perriruthos’, which indicates something surrounded by water. Aldamiz notes that ten tombs were found there; reminiscent of the ten kings of Atlantis. Zambujal had large complex fortifications. Aldamiz claims that this civilisation fought against the Greeks during the Middle Bronze Age. He further believes that the destruction of his Atlantis was caused by an event that was similar to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that caused such death and destruction.

Lereno Barradas was a Portuguese writer who speculated in the early 1970s that Tartessos could be identified with Atlantis and that it had been located in the Tagus estuary near the site of modern Lisbon. He also suggested that these ancient Atlanteans had travelled to America.

In 1989 another Portuguese researcher, José Antunes, proposed that Atlantis had been situated in what is now northwest of Lisbon between Sintra and Mafra.

A more radical theory has been put forward by Roger Coghill, the British bioelectromagnetic investigator, who suggests on his website that Atlantis was located in the vicinity of Faro in the Algarve. Coghill expanded on his theory in his book, The Message of Atlantis[494]. He has also drawn attention to a book [1562] by Antonio Jose Lopes Navarro, published in 1983, in which he has brought together a number of classical references to the prehistory of the Algarve.

Portugal got further attention in 2013 when another British researcher, Peter Daughtrey, who then lived in Portugal, published Atlantis and the Silver City [893] in which he designates not just the Algarve and the submerged area in front of it as Atlantis, but the whole of that south-west Iberian region.

Daughtrey’s book has been updated and contains what he calls “dramatic new evidence”. His book is supported by a website(d), where you will find additional articles, interviews and reviews.

The late Steven Sora suggested [0395] that the Etruscans were refugees from their original homeland in Iberia, where he also located Troy/Atlantis. He specified Lisbon, Setubal and Troia, all in modern Portugal, as Trojan/Atlantean territory, conflating the Trojan and Atlantean wars, although placing those conflicts 4,000  km away from the battleground at Hissarlik, where Eberhard Zangger claims his Troy, which he also deemed to be identical with Atlantis was located!

Apart from the mainland claims the Portuguese Atlantic archipelagos of Azores and Madeiras have also been identified by several commentators as probable Atlantis locations.

Manuel J.Gandra has produced a valuable bibliography(c) of Portuguese sources dealing with Atlantis.

(a) https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/almendres-cromlech 

(b) https://www.geocities.ws/luis_aldamiz/Atlantis/Atlantis.html

(c) Wayback Machine (archive.org)

(d) https://www.atlantisandthesilvercity.com

(e) https://grahamhancock.com/wolfl3/ *

(f) The Quest – Graham Hancock Official Website *

Britain * .

Britain. For as long as  I can remember, received wisdom told us that the ancestors of the British (and Irish) had Celtic origins. Then in 2007, Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, professor of genetics at Oxford University ‘threw a cat among the pigeons’ when he bluntly wrote “Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celtsin Origins of the British [1950].R.Cedric Leonard reviews Oppenheimer’s claims in the book and two earlier papers(d)(e)(f).

Britain as the home of Atlantis has been claimed by many writers and not without undertones of nationalism by some of the British authors. Nevertheless, support for the idea has been offered by a number of more disinterested researchers. Probably the first to advance this idea was John Wallis (1660-1703), who, in 1700, proposed that the Atlantis story had been corrupted over time and was a reference to the destruction of the landbridge that had existed between France and England, leaving a British Atlantis more isolated (The original Brexit!)(c).  It was nearly a century before the idea was taken up by Thomas Pennant and then more than another century passed before Cooper, Spence, Beaumont and Calestani produced related theories. Fast forward to the 21st century, when Donald Ingram identifies the Wessex II culture as Atlantean and Melville Nicholls considers Britain to be one of the Atlantean islands referred to by Plato.

The precise location, the exact date and the probable cause of the destruction of Atlantis are the basis for a range of theories. There is general acceptance that following the deglaciation at the end of the last Ice Age vast regions of low-lying land that had linked Ireland and Britain to mainland Europe were gradually flooded.

One school of thought is that these flooded regions contained Atlantis, of which the most extensive was in the North Sea and is now known as Doggerland. Other offshore locations proposed for Atlantis are the Celtic Shelf (Gidon, Steuerwald & Koudroiavtsev) and the Irish Sea (Dunbavin). These lands had been settled and following the inundations, its inhabitants were forced to retreat to the higher ground of what is modern Europe and the British Isles.

David L. Hildebrandt in Atlantis-The Reawakening [1602] proposes a reworking of the ‘Atlantis in Britain’ theory with some new perspectives. For me, his date, location and identity of the Atlanteans do not ring true, particularly why Stone Age people in Southern Britain would want to launch an attack on Athens, over 2,000 miles away, a city-state that did not even exist at the time. Those early Britons did not have the wheel, yet Plato tells us that the Atlanteans had chariots!

Another view is that Atlantis was destroyed by the impact of a comet or asteroid, an idea espoused by Dunbavin and Spence.

E. J. de Meester on his now-defunct website postulated a link between Stonehenge and Atlantis(b). After arbitrarily dividing Plato’s dimensions by ten, he suggested that the plain described by Plato lay in a rectangle between Salisbury and Chichester.

A recent suggestion by a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, places the biblical Tarshish in Britain(h) an idea also supported by a Christadelphian website(g).

(a) https://sabidius.blogspot.com/2010/06/atlantis-was-it-britain.html

(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20090614050055/https://home-3.tiscali.nl/~meester7/engatlantis.html

(c) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1700.010

(d) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/ 

(e) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestryrevisited/ 

(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20170113172907/http://www.atlantisquest.com/Bretons.html 

(g) Incredible Archaeological Find Proves Tarshish Is Britain! (archive.org) *

(h) https://roodgoudvanparvaim.nl/8-tarshish-as-great-britain-and-the-paradox-with-atlantis/ 

Identity of the Atlanteans *

The Identity of the Atlanteans has produced a range of speculative suggestions nearly as extensive as that of the proposed locations for Plato’s lost island. However, it is highly probable that we already know who the Atlanteans were, but under a different name.

The list below includes some of the more popular suggestions and as such is not necessarily exhaustive. While researchers have proposed particular locations for Atlantis, not all have identified an archaeologically identified culture to go with their chosen location. The problem is that most of the places suggested have endured successive invasions over the millennia by different peoples.

It would seem therefore that the most fruitful approach to solving the problem of identifying the Atlanteans would be to first focus on trying to determine the date of the demise of Atlantis. This should reduce the number of possible candidates, making it easier to identify the Atlanteans.

A final point to consider is that the historical Atlanteans were a military alliance, and as such may have included more than one or none of those listed here. The mythological Atlanteans, who included the five sets of male twins and their successors would be expected to share a common culture, whereas military coalitions are frequently more disparate.

 

Basques: William Lewy d’Abartiague, Edward Taylor Fletcher

Berbers: Alberto Arecchi, Alf Bajocco, Ulrich Hofmann, Jacques Gossart, Ibn Khaldun

British: William Comyns Beaumont, E. J. de Meester, Donald Ingram, George H. Cooper, Anthony Roberts, Paul Dunbavin.

Cro-Magnons: R. Cedric Leonard, Theosophists, Georges Poisson, Robert B. Stacy-Judd,  Kurt Bilau, Louis Charpentier

Etruscans: Richard W. Welch, Frank Joseph  *

Guanches: B. L. Bogaevsky, Bory de Saint Vincent, Boris F. Dobrynin, Eugène Pégot-Ogier

Irish: Ulf Erlingsson, George H. Cooper, John Whitehurst, Thomas Dietrich, Padraig A. Ó Síocháin, Lewis Spence,

Maltese: Anton Mifsud, Francis Xavier Aloisio, Kevin Falzon, Bibischok, Joseph Bosco, David Calvert-Orange, Giorgio Grongnet de Vasse, Albert Nikas, Joseph S. Ellul, Francis Galea, Tammam Kisrawi, Charles Savona-Ventura, Hubert Zeitlmair. 

Maya: Robert B. Stacy-Judd, Charles Gates Dawes, Colin Wilson, Adrian Gilbert, L. M. Hosea, Augustus le Plongeon, Teobert Maler, Joachim Rittstieg, Lewis Spence, Edward Herbert Thompson, Jean-Frédérick de Waldeck,

Megalith Builders: Lucien Gerardin, Paolo Marini, Sylvain Tristan, Jean Deruelle, Alan Butler, Alfred deGrazia, Helmut Tributsch, Hank Harrison, Walter Schilling, Robert Temple, Manuel Vega

Minoans: K.T. Frost, James Baikie, Walter Leaf, Edwin Balch, Donald A. Mackenzie, Ralph Magoffin, Spyridon Marinatos, Georges Poisson, Wilhelm Brandenstein, A. Galanopoulos, J. G. Bennett, Rhys Carpenter, P.B.S. Andrews, Edward Bacon, Willy Ley, J.V. Luce, James W. Mavor, Henry M. Eichner, Prince Michael of Greece, Nicholas Platon, N.W. Tschoegl, Richard Mooney, Rupert Furneaux, Martin Ebon, Francis Hitching, Charles Pellegrino, Rodney Castleden, Graham Phillips, Jacques Lebeau, Luana Monte, Fredrik Bruins, Gavin Menzies, Lee R. Kerr, Daniel P. Buckley.

Persians: August Hunt, Pierre-André Latreille, William Henry Babcock, Hans Diller.

Phoenicians: Jonas Bergman, Robert Prutz,

Sardinians: Paolo Valente Poddighe, Robert Paul Ishoy, Sergio Frau, Mario Tozzi, Diego Silvio Novo, Antonio Usai, Giuseppe Mura.

Sicilians: Phyllis Young Forsyth, Thorwald C. Franke, Axel Hausmann,  Peter Jakubowski, Alfred E. Schmeck, M. Rapisarda,

Swedes: Johannes Bureus, Olaf Rudbeck

Sea Peoples: Wilhelm Christ, Jürgen Spanuth, Spyridon Marinatos, Rainer W. Kühne, John V. Luce, Theodor Gomperz, Herwig Görgemanns , Tony O’ConnellSean Welsh, Thorwald C. Franke, Werner Wickboldt.

Trojans: Eberhard Zangger, Erich von Däniken?

Dating Atlantis

Dating Atlantis is one of the most contentious difficulties faced by Atlantology. The critical problem is to identify the time of the Atlantean War and that of the later destruction of Atlantis itself; two events possibly separated by a period not recorded by Plato. This entry is primarily concerned with the date of the war. However, it should be pointed out that Plato also reveals that the Atlantis story has a very long history before the war, back to a time when ships and sailing did not yet exist (Crit.113e), so it is understandable when Plato filled that historical gap with mythological characters, namely five sets of twins sired by Poseidon. Of course, Poseidon being a sea god did not require a boat to get to the island of Atlantis! Plato also informs us that the twins and their descendants lived on the island for ‘many generations’ and extended their rule over many other islands in the sea (Crit.114c).

There are roughly three schools of thought regarding this important detail. The first group persists in accepting at face value Plato’s reference to a period of 9,000 solar years having elapsed since the War with  Atlantis up to the time of Solon’s visit around 550 BC. The second group is convinced that the 9,000 refers to periods other than solar years, such as lunar cycles or seasons. The third group seeks to identify the time of Atlantis by linking it to other known historical events.

While these groups offered some level of evidence, however flimsy, to support their claims, some individuals have placed Atlantis up to millions of years in the past based on nothing more than their fertile imaginations or delusions. Arguably the best-known was Edgar Cayce, but purveyors of such daft ideas are still lurking among us!(m)

>Rene Malaise writing in Egerton SykesAtlantis journal (#108, January/February 1967, Vol. 20 No. 1) challenged the idea that Plato’s 9,000 years was a reference to years of 12 months. Atlantisforschung has now republished the article in German and I have added an English translation below(s).<

Desmond Lee has commented[0435] that “the Greeks, both philosophers and others…….seem to have been curiously lacking in their sense of time-dimension.”

[1.0] 9550 BC is factually correct

This view has a slowly dwindling number of supporters among serious investigators. Massimo Rapisarda is one such promoter, who has offered his reasons for accepting this early date(p). To support this idea proponents usually cite a wide range of evidence to suggest the existence of advanced cultures in the 10th millennium BC. Matters such as an earlier than conventionally accepted date for the Sphinx, early proto-alphabets a la Glozel or the apparently anomalous structures such as the Lixus foundations or the controversial Baalbek megaliths have all been recruited to support an early date for Atlantis, many, if not all, have their dates hotly disputed. Apart from the contentious dates, there is NOTHING to definitively link any of them with Plato’s Atlantis.

In common with most nations, the Egyptians competitively promoted the great antiquity of their own origins. Herodotus reports that while in Egypt he was told of a succession of kings extending over 17,000 years. The priests of Memphis told him firmly that 341 kings and a similar number of high priests had until then, ruled their country. (Herodotus, Book II, 142). ), of course, there is not a shred of archaeological evidence to support such a claim. Even an average reign of 20 years would give a total of nearly 7000 years whereas a more improbable 26-year average would be required to span the necessary 9000 years.

It is therefore obvious that the 17,000 years related to Herodotus is not credible raising a question regarding the trustworthiness of the 9000 years told to Solon.

In The Laws Plato refers to Egyptian art going back 10,000 years, seemingly, indicating consistency in his belief in the great antiquity of civilisation and fully compatible with his date for Atlantis. However, I have discovered that in Plato’s time ‘ten thousand’ was frequently used simply to express a large but indefinite number.

A Bible study site tells us that The use of definite numerical expressions in an indefinite sense, that is, as round numbers, which is met with in many languages, seems to have been very prevalent in Western Asia from early times to the present day.”(h)

The acceptance of Plato’s 9,000 years as literally correct defies both commonsense and archaeological evidence, which demonstrates that neither Athens nor a structured Egypt existed at such an early period. The onus is on those, who accept the prima facie date of 9,600 BC, to explain how Atlantis attacked a non-existent Athens and/or Egypt.

A major difficulty in accepting Plato’s 9,000 years at face value is that it conflicts with our current knowledge of ancient seafaring. Professor Seán McGrail (1928-2021) wrote in his monumental work, Boats of the World “There is no direct evidence for water transport until the Mesolithic even in the most favoured regions, and it is not until the Bronze Age that vessels other than logboats are known” [1949.10]. Wikipedia’s list of ancient boats supports this view(r). For those that adhere to a 10th millennium BC date for the Atlantean War with Athens, this lack of naval evidence to support such an early date undermines the idea. An invasion fleet of canoes travelling from beyond the Pillars of Herakles to attack Athens or Egypt seems rather unlikely!

Even more incongruous is Plato’s description of horse baths (Crit.117b), a facility that was highly unlikely around 9600 BC, when you consider that this is probably millennia before the domestication of horses.

In a 2021 article(h) concerning 10,000 BC, Thorwald C. Franke offered the following opinion; “Many scientists seem to live quite comfortably with Graham Hancock and similar authors speculating about 10,000 BC because these hypotheses are so nonsensical that they do not interfere with real science. Sometimes you have the impression that many scientists even prefer such misleading popular errors over more informed hypotheses because they would make the audience ask more serious questions and then the questions could not be dismissed so easily anymore. But this is only an impression. In truth, scientists shy away from the effort to overcome these popular errors. It is much easier to stay silent and to ignore them.”

Alexandros Angelis wrote(q) of how he is “always suspicious of coincidence. Whenever I hear this word, an alarm sets off in my head. In my book ‘Our Unknown Ancient Past: Thoughts and Reflections on the Unexplained Mysteries of Prehistory’ I state that it cannot be a coincidence that Plato’s date of Atlantis’ destruction (9.600 BC) is spot on, coinciding with the abrupt end of the Younger Dryas (9.600 BC).”

When I first encountered this ‘coincidence’ I was also suspicious. However, as I investigated further I realised that all of Plato’s large numbers seemed to be inflated by what was arguably a common factor – another coincidence? I have devoted an entire chapter in Joining the Dots to this problem.

Angelis considers the ‘rapid’ gradual melting of the ice at the end of the Younger Dryas as the cause of Atlantis’ submergence, which might have been true except that Plato tells us that the catastrophe took place over a day and a night and that the event was triggered by an earthquake. Angelis seems unaware that isostatic rebound is a very slow process of readjustment involving centuries and sometimes thousands of years and even when glaciers melt rapidly, sea levels, because of the vastness of our oceans, rise slowly.

[2.0] 9000 refers to units of time other than solar years

Advocates of this view, understandably point out, that the Atlantis described in such detail by Plato belongs to the Bronze Age and could not have existed at an earlier date. It is worth noting that the technology is coincidental with the most advanced known to Plato and his audience. For those who argue that mankind has been destroyed on one or more occasions and has had to start again from scratch, it is not credible that if this was the case, the culture and technology described by Plato as existing in 9500 BC is precisely what he would have experienced himself. There is nothing in the Atlantis texts to connect it with a pre-Bronze Age society, nor is there anything to suggest any technology or cultural advance beyond that of the 4th century BC. Plato’s tale tells of the existence of at least three major nations before the destruction of Atlantis: Egypt, Athens and Atlantis itself. There is no archaeological evidence to indicate anything other than Neolithic cultures existing in Egypt or Athens around 9500 BC. The currently accepted date for the beginning of Egyptian civilisation is circa 3100 BC and also for the existence of a primitive culture around Athens at about the same time. This would parallel the time of the Western European megalithic builders.

It is noteworthy that researchers who support a 9,600 BC date for the war between Atlantis and Athens cannot explain how this took place millennia before there was any structured society in Greece or Egypt.

It may be worth noting the comments of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman who have argued[280] for a 7thcentury BC date for the final draft of the Exodus narrative rather than during the 2nd millennium BC as suggested by the text“In much the same way that European illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages depicted Jerusalem as a European city with turrets and battlements to heighten its direct impact on contemporary readers” (p68). Similarly,  it is possible that Plato added architectural and technological details of his day to a more ancient tale of a lost civilisation to make a more powerful impression on his audience.

According to Bury’s translation, Plato mentions (Crit. 119e) that iron was used for utensils and weapons in Atlantis and so forcing us to look to a date later than 2000 BC for its destruction. Olaf Rudbeck drew attention to this reference around 1700.

[2.1]

Diaz-Montexano claims that the ‘9000 years’ in Critias has been mistranslated. He refers to the earliest versions of Critias that are available and insists that the texts permit a translation of either ‘9 times in a 1000 years’ or ‘1009’, the first being the more rational! Frank Joseph has also used this 1009 number, quoting private correspondence from Kenneth Caroli, in his 2015 regurgitation[1074] of Atlantis and 2012. Diaz-Montexano has also drawn attention to the commentary on Timaeus by Proclus, writing in the 5th century AD, where he treats Plato’s use of 9000 as having symbolic rather than literal meaning. It should also be kept in mind that many cultures, ancient and modern use specific numbers to indicate indefinite values(e). In a more recent paper, Diaz-Montexano concluded that we can place their military and colonizing expansion towards the end of 3.500 BC, at the earliest, and the end of their civilization (with Atlantis sinking) between 2.700 and 1.700 BC.”(o)

[2.2] In June 2017, a forum on the Historum.com website included the following possible explanation for the Atlantean dates:

The date 8000 is given as a fraction of 8 since the Greeks commonly used fractional notation. Plato wrote in 400 BC and Solon obtained the account in 570 BC.

No Egyptian Annals ever went back 9000 or even 8000 years. The furthest back the Egyptian annals went at the time of Herodotus was to 3050 BC to the reign of Menes the first Pharaoh who Herodotus knew about. Therefore it is obvious that the number of years has been given as a fraction which was extremely common in Greek numerology.

Thus the war between Atlantis and Athens occurred in 9000/8 + 570 = 1695 BC (+/-63 years) which is pretty close to the date of the war between the Titans and the Gods c.1685-1675 BC. The entire story of Atlantis runs concurrent to the time of the Thera Eruption. You even have 10 kings ruling the land equivalent to the 12 Titans.”

The Bible too denotes years as fractions, i.e. seasons, equinoxes/solstices etc. That is why you have biblical patriarchs that lived 800 and 900 years old. The ages to Noah are all counted in Lunar months.”(i)

While I’m aware that the Egyptians also had a different way of dealing with fractions, I really cannot fully understand any of the suggestions made above.

 [2.3] 900, not 9000 years

To address these apparent dating problems, some have suggested that the stated 9000 years, which allegedly elapsed since the catastrophe, are the result of incorrect transcription by someone along what is a very long chain of transmission and that hundreds have somehow been confused with thousands and that the correct figure should be 900 years. Another suggestion is that the Egyptian hieroglyphics for ‘hundred’ and ‘thousand’ are easily confused. This explanation does not hold water, as there is little room for confusion between these hieroglyphics as illustrated below. This idea has been adopted by Don Ingram and incorporated into his Atlantis hypothesis.

Immanuel Velikovsky also endorsed the idea of a tenfold discrepancy in Plato’s date for the time of Atlantis in Worlds in Collision [037.152].

However, 900 years earlier than Solon would place the conflict with the Atlanteans during the XVIIIth Dynasty and would have been well recorded. More recently Diaz-Montexano put forward the idea that the Egyptian words for ‘100’ and ‘1000’ when spoken sounded similar leading to Solon’s error. This idea has now been taken up by James Nienhuis and in greater detail by R. McQuillen(a).

Another explanation offered by James W. Mavor Jnr. is that the original Egyptian story emanated from Crete where it may have been written in either the Linear A or Linear B script where the symbols for 100 and 1000 are quite similar. In both scripts, the symbol for 100 is a circle whereas the symbol for 1000 is a circle with four equally spaced small spikes or excrescences projecting outward.

Nevertheless, the most potent argument against the ‘factor ten’ solution is that if the priests did not intend to suggest that Egypt was founded 8000 years before Solon’s visit but had meant 800 years, it would place the establishment of Egypt at around 1450 BC, which is clearly at variance with undisputed archaeological evidence. However, I contend that they were referring to the establishment of Sais as a centre of importance, not the foundation of the entire nation of Egypt.

In Joining the Dots, I supported the ‘factor ten’ explanation but did so because all of Plato’s large numbers relating as they do to dimensions, manpower and time invariably appear to be exaggerations, but become far more credible when reduced by a factor of ten. Supporters of Plato’s 9,000 years as factual seem to ignore all the other numbers that also appear to be seriously inflated!

[2.4] 9000 months not years

The earliest suggestion that I have found which implied that the age of Atlantis noted by Plato referred to months rather than solar years comes from the early fourteenth century.

Thorwald C. Franke has drawn attention to Thomas Bradwardine‘s rejection of Plato’s, or more correctly the Egyptian priest’s, apparent claim of a very early date for Atlantis [1255.242]. It seems that he found such a date conflicted with biblical chronology. In the end, he proposed that Plato’s ‘years’ were lunar cycles. Similarly, Pierre d’Ailly (1350-1420), a French theologian who became cardinal, arrived at the same conclusion for similar reasons. 

Around two and a half centuries later in 1572 Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa suggested the application of lunar ‘years’ rather than solar years to Plato’s figures. Augustin Zárate expressed the same view in 1577, quoting Eudoxus in support of it. 

In the 18th century, Cornelius De Pauw also believed that Plato’s 9000 ‘years’ was a reference to lunar cycles.

Then there are others, such as Émile Mir Chaouat and Jürgen Hepke who also subscribe to the view that the 9000 ‘years’ recorded by Plato referred to months rather than solar years, as the early Egyptians extensively used a lunar calendar and continued to use it throughout their long history, particularly for determining the dates of religious festivals and since Solon received the Atlantis story from Egyptian priests it would be understandable if they used lunar ‘years’ in their conversations. Eudoxus of Cnidos (c.400 BC- c. 350 BC), a mathematician and astronomer, who spent a year in Egypt, declared, “The Egyptians reckon a month as a year”. Diodorus Siculus (1st cent. BC) echoes this statement. (see Richard A. Parker[682]) and Manetho (3rd cent.BC) (Aegyptiaca[1373.40])

Olof Rudbeck also proposed that Plato misunderstood the Greek priesthood’s use of lunar cycles rather than solar years to calculate time. This in turn led him to date the Atlantean War to 1350 BC.

Robert Argod wrote [065.254] “This story, which was supposedly related to Solon by Egyptian priests, speaks of 8,000 years, which are certainly in fact moons – for this was how the Egyptians counted. This dates the story reasonably accurately to the 13th century BC, at the memorable period of the battles between Rameses II and Rameses III against the Sea Peoples.” A coincidence?

This use of months rather than years would give us a total of just 750 years before Solon’s visit and so would place the Atlantis catastrophe around 1300 BC, nearly coinciding with the eruption of Thera and the collapse of the Minoan civilisation.

A similar explanation has been offered by J.Q. Jacobs to rationalise the incredible time spans found in ancient Indian literature, who suggested that numbers referred to days rather than years(b).

Stefan Bittner seemed to date the Atlantean War in 1644 BC using a combination of treating Plato’s years as months and reducing the same years by a factor of ten!

Even more bizarre is the suggestion from Patrick Dolciani that Plato’s 9000 ‘years’ were in fact periods of 73 days because it agrees with both the synodical revolution of Venus and our solar year!!

[2.5] 5,000 not 9,000 years

A claim was made on Graham Hancock’s website in 2008(c) that Plato did not write 9,000 but instead wrote 5,000, but that the characters for both were quite similar leading to the misunderstanding. This claim was originally made by Livezeanu Mihai. However, my reading of Greek numerals makes this improbable as 9,000 requires five characters ( one for 5,000 and one for each of the other four thousand), while 5,000 needs just one.

Adrian Bucurescu claims that Plato originally said 5,000, not 9,000 years had elapsed between the Atlantean war and Solon’s visit to Egypt. He bases this claim on the fact that the works of the Greek philosophers were preserved in Arabic translations after the fall of Constantinople and that their numbers ‘5’ and ‘9’ were sufficiently similar to have led to a transcription error!(b) This is difficult to accept as the Arabic character for nine is rather like our ‘9’, while the Arabic five is like our zero!

[3.1] Sometime after 9500 BC.

Jonas Bergman correctly points out that according to the story related by the priests of Sais to Solon, the Egyptian civilisation was founded 1000 years after Athens was first established in 9600 BC. Although this probably just refers to the founding of the city of Sais rather than the early Egyptian state.

Plato describes the original division of the earth between the gods of old, Poseidon got Atlantis and Athena got Greece. The implication is that both were founded at the same time, namely in 9600 BC. Realistically, the 9000-year time span is better treated as an introductory literary cliché such as ‘once upon a time’ or the Irish ‘fado, fado’ (long, long ago). Plato’s text describes the building of Atlantis and informs us that no man could get to the island ‘for ships and voyages were not yet’. Since Atlantis had twelve hundred warships at the time of the conflict with Athens, the war could not have taken place in 9600 BC. The development of seafaring and shipbuilding would have taken considerable time. Bergman concludes that the war with Atlantis took place long after 9600 BC.

Another date was proposed by Otto Muck [098] in 1976 when he maintained that Atlantis had been situated in the Atlantic and was destroyed by an asteroidal impact in 8498 BC and proposed that the same event also created the Carolina Bays!

Felipoff, a Russian refugee living in Algiers presented a paper to the French Academy of Sciences in which he claimed to have astronomically calculated the exact date of the destruction of Atlantis as 7256 BC! Felipoff has been described as an astronomer whose ideas received some attention around the 1930s, apart from which little else is known about him.

[3.2] Peter James as quoted in Francis Hitching’s The World Atlas of Mysteries[307.138] is reported to have accepted the orthodox date of 3100 BC as the start of Egyptian civilisation and considering the priest’s statement that the events outlined took place one thousand years before the creation of Egypt and so added only 500 years to compensate for nationalistic exaggeration and has concluded that 3600 BC is a more realistic date for the destruction of Atlantis.

[3.3] Early in the 20th century, the German scholar Adolf Schulten and the classicist H. Diller from Kiel, both advocated an even more radical date of around 500 BC, having identified the narrative of Plato as paralleling much of the Persian wars (500-449 BC) with the Greeks. This however would be after Solon’s trip to Egypt and have made little sense of Plato’s reference to him.

[3.4] 4015 BC is the precise date offered by Col. Alexander Braghine who credits the destruction of Atlantis to a close encounter with Halley’s Comet on the 7th of June in that year. This is close to the date favoured by de Grazia.

[3.5] 3590-1850 BC has been suggested by the Czech writer Radek Brychta who has developed an ingenious idea based on the fact that the Egyptians who were so dependent on the Nile, divided their year into three seasons related to their river, the flooding, the blossom and the harvest periods. Brychta points out that counting time by seasons rather than solar years was common in the Indus civilisation that occupied part of modern Pakistan. Even today Pakistan has three seasons, cool, hot and wet. Brychta contends that the 9000 ‘years’ related to Solon were in fact seasons and should be read by us as 3000 years which when added to the date of Solon’s Egyptian visit would give an outside date of 3590 BC. If Brychta is correct this 9000-year/season corruption could easily have occurred during the transmission and translation of the story during its journey from the Indus to the Nile valley.

In the 18th century, Samuel Engel also interpreted Plato’s 9,000 years as a reference to seasons of four months each. (See: Axel Hausmann)

[3.6] 3100 BC as a date for the destruction of Atlantis has been proposed by several investigators including, David Furlong, Timo Niroma, and Duncan Steel. Hossam Aboulfotouh has proposed a similar  3070 BC as the date of Atlantis’ demise(f).

[3.7] 2200 BC is the proposed date put forward by Dr Anton Mifsud for the end of Atlantis, located in the vicinity of his native Malta. He arrived at this conclusion after studying the comments of Eumelos of Cyrene who dated the catastrophe to the reign of King Ninus of Assyria. Around the same time, in Egypt, unusually low Nile floods led to the collapse of centralised government and generations of political turmoil(f). According to some commentators(g), the Los Millares culture in Iberia also ended around the same time.

[3.8] Circa 1200 BC is a date favoured by investigators such as Eberhard Zangger  [483] and Steven Sora [395] who both identify the Atlantean War with the Trojan War. Frank Joseph is more precise proposing that “it appears, then, that the destruction of Atlantis took place around the first three days of November 1198 BCE. [102.208]. It may be worth noting that this date has also been linked to the suggested close encounter with the Phaëton comet and its destructive effects globally.

[3.9] Stelios Pavlou has taken a different approach, basing his conclusion on a close analysis of the Egyptian King Lists with particular reference to that of Manetho. Pavlou’s paper is well(l) worth studying. In the end, he contends that the time of Atlantis was in or around 4532 BC.

[4.0] More than one Atlantis!

It is not unreasonable to consider Plato’s Atlantis narrative as a literary amalgam of two or more historically based stories or myths. One possibility is that the Egyptian priests related to Solon the tale of the inundation of a powerful and advanced culture in the dim and distant past. Such an event did occur, worldwide, when the Ice Age glaciers melted, resulting, for example, in the eastern Atlantic, the flooding of the North Sea, the Celtic Shelf and dramatically reducing in size of the Canaries and the Azores and creating the British Isles. The entire world was affected by this event so there were also major inundations in the West Indies and the South China Sea. However, events off the coasts of Europe and Africa would be more likely to become part of folklore on this side of the Atlantic.

Over 70 years ago, Daniel Duvillé suggested, that there had been two Atlantises, one in the Atlantic and the other in East Africa.

[5.0] My preference is to treat the use of 9000 by Solon/Plato as an expression of a large but indefinite number or an exaggeration by a factor of ten. At the beginning of my research, I strongly favoured the former, but as I proceeded to investigate other aspects of Plato’s Atlantis story, I realised that virtually all other large numbers used by him also appeared to be inflated by a comparable amount. In seeking a solution to this I found myself drawn to Occam’s Razor, which states that where there are competing theories, the simpler is to be preferred.

It is worth noting that the Egyptian hieratic numerals also stopped with the highest value, expressed by a single character, being 9000. However, having studied the matter more closely I am reluctantly drawn to the ‘factor ten’ theory. This I have written about at some length in Joining the Dots.

The 1st millennium BC saw the introduction and gradual development of new writing and numerical systems by the Greeks. Some claim that the Greeks borrowed the Egyptian numbers(k). 

At an early stage, 9000 was the highest number expressed by a single character in Greek, which in time came to be used to denote a large but uncertain value. As the needs of commerce and science demanded ever higher numbers a new character ‘M’ for myriad with a value of 10,000 was introduced. It also was used to indicate a large indefinite number, a practice that continues to this very day. Greek numerical notation was still being developed during Plato’s life.

Today, we use similar expressions such as ‘I have a million things to do’ with no intention of being taken literally, but simply to indicate ‘many’(e).  Unfortunately, this interpretation of 9,000 does little to pinpoint the date of the Atlantean war, but it is not unreasonable to attribute a value to it of something above 1,000 and possibly a multiple of it.

Diaz-Montexano has drawn attention to the writings of Proclus, who in his commentary on Timaeus declared the number 9,000 to have had a symbolic value (Timaeus 45b-f).

However, having said that, I am also attracted to the ’factor ten’ theory after a study of other numbers in the Atlantis narrative which all seem to be consistently exaggerated by a similar amount, which seems to be a factor of ten!

Andrew Collins in his Gateway to Atlantis[072.52] wrote “a gross inconsistency has crept into the account, for although Critias affirms that Athens’ aggressor came from ‘without’ the Pillars of Hercules, the actual war is here said to have taken place ‘nine thousand years’ before the date of the dialogue, c.421 BC. This implies a date in the region of 9421 BC, which is not what was stated in the Timaeus. Here 9000 years is the time that has elapsed between the foundation of Athens and Solon’s visit to Sais c. 570 BC. Since Egypt was said to have been founded a full thousand years later, and the ‘aggressor’ rose against both Athens and Egypt, it provides a date post 8570 BC. These widely differing dates leave us with a glaring anomaly that defies explanation. The only obvious solution is to accuse Plato of a certain amount of sloppiness when compiling the text.”

Collins’ suggestion of ‘sloppiness’ is made somewhat redundant if my suggestion that Plato was using 9,000 as a large but indefinite idiomatic value, could be substantiated.

The late Ulf Richter was quite unwilling to accept Plato’s 9,000 years as reliable after a close study of the relevant texts.

Others have produced evidence to suggest that this period in the Earth’s history saw one or more major catastrophic events that may or may not have been interconnected; (i) a collision or near-miss with an extraterrestrial body, (ii) a pole shift, (iii) the melting of the glaciers of the last Ice Age and the consequent raising of sea levels worldwide. This rise provides a credible mechanism that could account for the ’sinking’ of Atlantis.

Mary Settegast, an archaeological researcher, has defended the early date of Atlantis with a remarkable book[545] that delves extensively into Mediterranean and Middle Eastern prehistory and mythologies.

(a) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20181215223457/https://gizacalc.freehostia.com/Atlantis.html

(b) http://www.jqjacobs.net/astro/aryabhata.html

(c) https://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=249446&t=249446

(d) https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=255909

(e) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numbers

(f) Archive 2668 | (atlantipedia.ie) *

(g) https://www.minoanatlantis.com/Origin_Sea_Peoples.php

(h) https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/number/

(i) https://historum.com/speculative-history/128055-atlantis-truth-myth-3.html

(j) https://web.archive.org/web/20100708140347/www.fotouh.netfirms.com/Aboulfotouh-Atlantis.htm

(k) https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3109806.stm

(l) https://www.researchgate.net/project/Extrapolating-from-Manethos-King-List-to-Address-the-Critias-108e-Problem

(m) https://matthewpetti.com/atlantis/  

(n) Do you believe in 10,000 BC? – Atlantis-Scout  

(o) https://www.academia.edu/31339700/Atlantisng_com_Correct_chronology_of_Atlantis_When_did_Atlantis_appear_and_when_did_it_disappear 

(p) http://cab.unime.it/journals/index.php/AAPP/article/view/AAPP.932C1/AAPP932C1 

(q) https://ourunknownancientpast.blogspot.com/2021/08/plato-atlantis-probability-of.html 

(r) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_surviving_ships 

(s) Dating the Atlantis catastrophe – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)

 

Ingram, Donald

Donald Ingram (1944- ) is Australian who has worked in journalism as a newspaper artist for 34 years. He initially took a sceptical interest in the Atlantis story but as his researches continued he began to realise that there were historical realities behind Plato’s narrative, after identifying interpretive errors made by later commentators. In 2002 he took early retirement in order to develop his hypothesis, which was eventually published in 2009[665].

Ingram reviews the development of Atlantis theories over the centuries, dismissing, Donnelly, the esoteric Blavatsky, the inventive Cayce as well as today’s New Agers. He has used new technologies, such as DNA combined with a correction of mistranslations of specific Platonic texts to conclude that the “Atlanteans can almost certainly be equated with the Wessex II culture of Britain”.

In support of this contention he draws heavily on the similarities between the weaponry of western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. This is reminiscent of the work of Jürgen Spanuth over thirty years earlier, when he identified the Atlanteans as originating in northern Europe and supported his contention with a comparison of the weapons and helmets of the Sea Peoples depicted at Medinet Habu with those of Denmark and northern Germany during the 12th century BC.

Much of this book deals with ancient mythologies, their possible underlying historical realities and parallels with the story of Atlantis. In that respect, Ingram has quite clearly invested a lot of time into research. However, I found it somewhat disappointing that the author devoted just a few pages, towards the end of the book, to the actual text of Plato.

In May 2013, Melville Nicholls published his ebook, Children of the Sea God, in which he also saw Britain of the early Bronze Age as the large island of Atlantis described by Plato. Nicholls has opted for the Bell Beaker people as Atlantean rather than the Wessex II culture proposed by Ingram, which succeeded them.