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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Faroe Islands

Faroe Islands

The Faroe Islands are a small archipelago in the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland. It has been proposed that they contained the island of Ogygia, the home of Atlas’ daughter Calypso. Plutarch recorded that Ogygia was five days sailing from Britain and has been incorporated into the theories of a number of writers supporting a North Sea Atlantis, such as Felice Vinci and later John Esse Larsen.

*Larsen contends that Odysseus means ‘Isse from the island Od’, a former Danish island, which is now a peninsula. In fact he interprets Homer’s Odyssey as a description of a trip around the Baltic Sea(c). Furthermore the Pillars of Herakles have also been identified by Larsen with the village of Eide on the Faroes(a).*

In November 2018, I was directed to a German website(b) which also refers to the Faroe Islands as having an Atlantean connection, but in this case, Jan, its author, proposes that Atlantis was located between Spitsbergen and Franz Josef Land explaining that It looks like our Earth is Atlantis, and in the northern part of the Earth was hyperborea, Greenland might have been Mu, and Antarctica was Lemuria. It was a pole shift that caused Atlantis to go down. At that time Spitzbergen was probably at the height of the Canary Islands and the Antarctic must have been located at the height of today’s Philippines.”

(a) https://odisse.me.uk/odysseus-isse-from-the-island-od-in-denmark-2.html

*(b) https://ich-fand-atlantis.org/atlantis/ (link broken Sept. 2019)

(c) https://odisse.me.uk/odysseus-tour-round-the-baltic-sea.html*

Larsen, John Esse

John Esse Larsen is an independent Danish researcher who has expressed similar KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAviews to Felice Vinci regarding the Baltic origins of Homer’s epic tales, Iliad and Odyssey, in his 2012 book, Odysseus: Isse fra Od[1048]. He identifies many of the pLarsen Maplacenames recorded by Homer with Baltic and North Sea locations.

>In addition, he identified the town of Bergen, on Germany’s largest island of Rügen, as Troy(c).

Larsen has also generously given Ireland a place in the Odyssey naming the Co. Donegal hillfort Grianan an Aileach as the home of Circe! Pure speculation.<

>Larsen has an English language website(a) where many of his ideas are outlined, including an identification of the Pillars of Heracles with two huge sea stacks off the Faroe Islands and Atlantis with Watland in the Wadden Sea region of the North Sea(b), Kirsten Bang had suggested the same location for Atlantis a few years earlier[679].<

(a) https://odisse.me.uk/index.html

(b) https://odisse.me.uk/watland-in-the-north-sea-atlantis.html

(c) http://odisse.me.uk/troy-the-town-bergen-on-the-island-rugen-2.html *

Frisland *

Frisland is the name given to one of the legendary islands of the North Atlantic, ‘located’ just south of Iceland. The story goes that it was discovered around 1380 by the Venetian, Nicolo Zeno (1326-1402) and that a record of his adventures there, together with a now-famous map (see below), was published in 1558 by a descendant. A decade later the celebrated Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), published a comparable map, which also showed Frisland at much the same location and with a similar outline. Cornelius Wytfliet produced a map of the North Atlantic in 1597 depicting Frisland at the same location(c). It did not take long for doubts to be expressed about both the map and its accompanying narrative. Donald S. Johnson in his excellent Phantom Islands of the Atlantic[0652] concluded that Frisland was probably a case of ‘mistaken identity’, incorporating “the geography of the Faroe Islands and the contour of Iceland.”

The Malagabay website offers a comprehensive illustrated review of the cartographic evidence favouring the relatively recent existence of Frisland(k).

A January 2018 National Geographic article(e) also discusses the story of non-existent islands, including Frisland, which are the subject of a new book, The Un-Discovered Islands[1545], by Malachy Tallack.

Stuart L. Harris has identified Frisland as the Hyperborea of Greek mythology and Atland in the controversial Oera Linda Book (i) and in a second paper(j), he describes its demise on October 24th, 2194 BC and the catastrophic consequences “when it partially slid down the Judd Anticline toward the Icelandic Basin, 2 km deep. A remnant remained, the Faroe Plateau, topped by the Faroe Islands. The resulting tsunami, about 185m high, terminated other groups of islands, plus the Bell Beaker people in Britain and Ireland, plus most farmers in Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Germany, Poland, Finland and Estonia.”

Riaan Booysen who controversially locates Atlantis on a large landmass of which Australia is a ‘remnant’(a) has also written about Frisland(b). He concluded that Frisland along with many other ‘mythical’ North Atlantic islands shown on Mercator’s map can be matched with present-day underwater features in the ‘relatively’ shallow waters suggesting that they were dry land during the last Ice Age when sea levels were considerably lower. He believes that their inclusion on extant maps is the result of copying much earlier charts that recorded those exposed landmasses.

D.S. Allan & J.B. Delair in their acclaimed book Cataclysm [0014] discuss the Zeno map at some length and conclude that its depiction of Greenland is based on earlier maps, “which apparently antedate Greenland’s present glacial regime” and “there are, apparently no genuine arguments for regarding the Zeno map – curious though it may seem to modern eyes – as portraying anything but that which actually once existed on Greenland in the not so very remote past.” [p.249]

Dr. Gunnar  Thompson, the author of Early New World Maps(m), has offered a staunch defence of the reliability of the Zeno Map, including the following interesting comment  “I suspected that maps of Frisland were made in the 13th or 14th century using the magnetic compass – thus, all Frisland Maps were disoriented with respect to true geographical coordinates as seen on modern maps. I further suspected that the error of declination could be resolved by tipping the maps upside down to account for the fact that in the 14th century, the Magnetic North Pole was situated someplace between Labrador and Foxe Basin near Baffin Island. The magnetic error was about 180°.”(l)

Jason Colavito has also highlighted the controversy surrounding the Zeno Map (see below)(d).

At the end of September 2018, the UK’s Daily Star, a well-known comic for adults, tried to revive the idea of Atlantis in Frisland(f). They based their brief article on the speculations of Matt Sibson, presented as an ‘expert’, who admits that “there are still some questions that need clearing up.” I would like to know why Frislanders in the middle of the last Ice Age would want to attack a non-existent Athens 4,000 km away? If Sibson is considered to be an expert historian, my cat is a brain surgeon. Colavito had a few words to add regarding Sibson’s pathetic claims(g).

Incredibly, a week later the same ‘newspaper’ cited Sibson again, this time claiming that Rockall was the remains of Atlantis(h), an equally silly idea that is not new.

Zeno-map

Zeno-map

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(a) http://www.riaanbooysen.com/ *

(b) https://www.riaanbooysen.com/terra-aus/87-terraproof1?start=7 (link broken)

(c) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20191013063349/https://lib-dbserver.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/northwest-passage/wytfliet.htm

(d) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/apps/search?q=Zeno+Map

(e) Ancient Maps Show Islands That Don’t Really Exist (archive.org) 

(f) https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/732388/Atlantis-found-Brit-historian-sunken-lost-city-coast-Ireland-conspiracy-video

(g) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/dissecting-this-past-weekends-faulty-claims-about-ancient-history

(h) https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/734235/Atlantis-pictured-tip-lost-city-discovered-Ireland-British-historian-video

(i) https://www.academia.edu/36044603/Identification_of_Hyperborea_with_Atland_and_Frisland

(j) https://www.academia.edu/36044703/Catastrophic_demise_of_Hyperborea_Atland_Frisland_on_October_24_2194_BC?email_work_card=view-paper

(k) Finding Frisland | MalagaBay (wordpress.com) 

(l) The Isle of Frisland on Zeno Map (1380) is Real! – Ancient America 

(m) Early New World Maps – Ancient America 

 

Hyperboreans *

The Hyperboreans in Greek mythology lived to the far north of Greece in a land called Hyperborea, which means beyond the North Wind or Boreas, which has been linked by a number of writers with the Atlanteans. Even more exotic is the claim on one loony website that the Hyperboreans were an ancient extraterrestrial race! (j)

Researchers have variously identified this land of Hyperborea with Iceland, the British Isles, and the North Sea. Like many classical references and later commentators, there is no clear consensus on a precise location. Hecataeus of Abdera, a 4th century BC Greek historian, noted that the Hyperboreans were located “in the lands of the Celts, in the ocean, (where) there is an island no smaller than Sicily.”

Diodorus Siculus described Hyperborea as a northern island with a temple to which the god returns every nineteen years. This was initially thought by many to be a reference to England’s Stonehenge, but the renowned Aubrey Burl considered Stonehenge to be 500 miles too far south and instead proposed the Hebridean island of Lewis home to the famous Callanish megalithic site, which includes the ability to record the return of the stars to the same position every nineteen years(c).

Olof Rudbeck‘s over-enthusiastic nationalism not only brought him to associate Atlantis with Sweden but also linked the writings of Homer and other classical writers with the prehistory of his homeland. This inevitably led him to declare ancient Sweden as Hyperborea. David King outlines how Rudbeck came to this conclusion [530.71].

However, Homer reportedly(h) placed Boreas in Thrace, and therefore Hyperborea, according to him, would be located north of Thrace, in Dacia, modern Romania!

Jürgen Spanuth based his Atlantis theory[0015] on an unambiguous identification of the Atlanteans with the Hyperboreans of the Baltic region, specifically nominating Jutland, part of today’s Denmark, as the land of the Hyperboreans [p.88].

MercatorThe renowned Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), showed a large archipelago near the North Pole on one of his charts. This inclusion by him and other cartographers of the period stemmed from a now-lost book by an English Franciscan friar entitled Inventio Fortunatae (The Discovery of the Fortunate Isle).

Based on ancient maps and the work of other researchers such as Emilio Spedicato, Stuart L. Harris has proposed(e) that Hyperborea was also known as Atland to the Frisians. He further suggests that this land disappeared in 2194 BC as noted in the controversial Oera Linda Book, and that today’s Faroe Plateau topped by the Faroe Islands are its remnants.

It also appears that in the 18th century, the Russian Empress Catherine II organised an expedition in an attempt to find Hyperborea in the vicinity of the North Pole, in a pathetic attempt to discover ‘the elixir of eternal youth” allegedly invented by the Hyperboreans. She was apparently captivated by the descriptions of the classical writers who related that the Hyperboreans lived in total happiness for a thousand years.

It was reported in 2006(a) that a Russian scientist, Valery Dyemin, inspired by the work of Jean-Sylvain Bailly and William Fairfield Warren was attempting to prove the reality of Hyperborea in the Arctic region. Another Russian, Sergey Teleguin has also attributed a North Pole origin to both the Maya and the Indo-Europeans(b).

J.G. Bennett, a British philosopher, has opted for a Hyperborean origin for the Indo-European culture, a claim that has resonances with the Nazi claim that Hyperborea has been the ancestral home of the ‘master race’. He also supported the idea of an Arctic Hyperborea(i), inspired by the ideas of  Bal Gangadar Tilak, although at the same time, he was critical of Warren’s reasoning.

Luciano Chiereghin, who promotes the idea of Atlantis being situated in Italy’s Po Valley, also claims that the same river valley and its plain were also previously known as Hyperborea! The authors of The Three Ages of Atlantis, Marin, Minella and Schievenin, also refer to “the Hyperboreans of the Po Valley” [972.181].

An extensive internet article outlines the mythology associated with Hyperborea and recent efforts to determine its location(d). The Theoi.com website(g) offers a list of all classical references to Hyperborea.

(a) http://english.pravda.r science/mysteries/29-11-2006/85697-paradise u/science/mysteries/29-11-2006/85697-paradise-0/ 

(b) https://mayanarchaeology.tripod.com/id23.html

(c) https://humansarefree.com/2014/12/a-hyperborean-temple-stone-circles-of.html

(d) https://earth-chronicles.com/histori/mysterious-hyperborea.html

(e) https://www.academia.edu/36044603/Identification_of_Hyperborea_with_Atland_and_Frisland

(f) History, 3a.264. F.7.5.

(g) https://www.theoi.com/Phylos/Hyperborea.html

(h) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperborea

(i) THE HYPERBOREAN ORIGIN OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE by J. G. Bennett from SYSTEMATICS I/3

(j) Hyperboreans: An ancient alien race that lived on Earth – Infinity Explorers *

Bang, Kirsten

Kirsten Bang Kirsten Bang (1908-2003)<is a Danish writer(a)  who has placed Atlantis in the Wadden Sea, which is part of the North Sea, off the coast of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

In 2012, John Esse Larsen, another Dane, also located Atlantis in the Wadden Sea>and identified two huge sea stacks off the Faroe Islands as the Pillars of Herakles.<

Bang dates the destruction of Atlantis to around 1300 BC. This idea follows the theory of Jürgen Spanuth who advocated the island of Helgoland, which is in the Wadden Sea, as the location of Atlantis. The author’s book[679] which was published in Danish only, is a slim 98 pages.

(a)  https://odisse.me.uk/watland-in-the-north-sea-atlantis.html

Rockall *

Rockall is an uninhabited islet in the North Atlantic, northwest of Donegal in Ireland. It appears to have been first marked on a map in 1640(c). It is first mentioned in literature in 1716 and referred to by locals as Rocabarraigh, which is also the name of “a mythical rock which is supposed to appear three times, the last being at the end of the world.”(m).

This ostensibly insignificant piece of stone is around 80ft by 100ft at the base and approximately

70ft in height. Nevertheless, its ownership is disputed by Ireland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the United Kingdom.

Rocabarraidh which was a mythic island referred to in the folklore of the Lordship of the Isles, a Scottish title, is generally accepted to be an early allusion to Rockall. The Atlantic rock is considered as part of the Hebridean parish of South Harris.

In June 1997, Greenpeace declared Rockall to be the independent state of Waveland(f).

Jean Deruelle credits Robert Graves with being the earliest, although only briefly, to consider the Rockall Bank as the location of Atlantis(e).

Recently, a new claim has been made in connection with Rockall, namely, that it is a remnant of the Atlantis highlands, with the plain so vividly described by Plato, now situated under the sea to the southwest of the rock. Two extensively illustrated French websites(a)(b) expound this theory. Which, however, are somewhat less than convincing. However, a 1938 newspaper report(d) suggests that a proposed linkage with Atlantis goes back much further!

In December 2016, Jonathan Northcote published 16.484ºW 58.521ºN, Atlantis, Found?[1369], in which he offers spirited support for this location using a mass of geological data and underwater topography. He also suggests that Gades may have been Ireland. In January 2019, Northcote revised his book with additional material and published this second edition with the title of Atlantis, Found? An investigation into ancient accounts, bathymetry and climatology [1611].

Stuart L. Harris, the prolific American researcher, has, in recent private correspondence with me, supported the vicinity of Rockall as the location of Atlantis, dating its demise to around 9577 BC. He later expanded on this in a highly speculative paper published on the Academia.edu website.

At the end of September 2018, the UK’s Daily Star, a well-known comic for adults, tried to revive the idea of Atlantis in Frisland(g). They based their brief article on the speculations of Matt Sibson, presented as an ‘expert’, who admits that “there are still some questions that need clearing up.” I would like to know why Frislanders in the middle of the last Ice Age would want to attack a non-existent Athens 4,000 km away. If Sibson is considered to be an expert historian, my cat is a brain surgeon. Jason Colavito had a few words to add regarding Sibson’s pathetic claims(h).

Incredibly, a week later the same ‘newspaper’ cited Sibson again, this time claiming that Rockall was the remains of Atlantis(i), an equally silly idea that is not new. The UK’s online Express recycled this nonsense in January 2020(k).

Kevin A. & Patrick J. Casey have published a series of papers on the Academia.edu website outlining a globally catastrophic event that occurred thirteen thousand years ago, which they refer to as the ’13K Event’, but is more popularly known as the onset of the Younger Dryas period. In February 2019, they published Atlantis Revisited (j), in which they claim that Rockall was the location of Atlantis. 

Less extreme is a claim by John Esse Larsen that in support of the theory that Homer’s Odyssey refers to adventures in the North Atlantic he suggests that Rockall is referenced in Odyssey 10.513(l).

(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20191013063335/http://rockallatlantis.com/francais/cerclespiraleos.html

(b) L’Atlantide a été retrouvée : le plateau du Rockall et son mystère dévoilé – Wikistrike (archive.org)  *

(c) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1955IrAJ….3..202L

(d) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/35603341?searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=sortby=dateAsc

(e) https://www.q-mag.org/the-great-plain-of-atlantis-was-it-in-doggerland.html

(f) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20180420165734/https://www.waveland.org/history.html

(g) https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/732388/Atlantis-found-Brit-historian-sunken-lost-city-coast-Ireland-conspiracy-video

(h) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/dissecting-this-past-weekends-faulty-claims-about-ancient-history

(i) https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/734235/Atlantis-pictured-tip-lost-city-discovered-Ireland-British-historian-video

(j) https://www.academia.edu/38380799/13k_Theory_Atlantis_Revisited.pdf

(k) https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1228892/atlantis-found-evidence-plato-lost-city-rockall-britain-atlantic-ocean-spt

(l) http://odisse.me.uk/rockall-the-monster-boulder-in-the-north-atlantic-2.html 

(m) https://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Rockall