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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Gadeiros

Ten Lost Tribes of Israel

The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a reference to the ten of the twelve tribes deported from the Kingdom of Israel after its conquest by Assyria in 722 BC. It has been pointed out that the Hebrew Bible has relatively little to say on the matter.

In 1865, Brasseur de Bourbourg discovered some of Bishop Diego de Landa‘s lost documents. He studied the thoroughly flawed interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphics by de Landa, produced in the 16th century and proceeded to develop his own faulty translation.

Nigel Davies has revealed [1635]  that Brasseur, as well as Lord Kingsborough (1795-1829), concluded that the native Americans were the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Kingsborough spent a £40,000 fortune publishing The Antiquities of Mexico in nine huge volumes, an extravagance that landed him in a Dublin debtors’ prison for non-payment of bills relating to publication costs and sadly, he died there.

The variety of identifications put forward for some or all of these groups is quite remarkable, ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous. At one end of that spectrum, the view “is that the “lost tribes of Israel” were never really lost. Many of the Jews who remained in the land after the Assyrian conquest re-united with Judah in the south (2 Chronicles 34:6–9). Assyria was later conquered by Babylon, who went on to invade the Southern Kingdom of Israel, deporting the two remaining tribes: Judah and Benjamin (2 Kings 25:21). Remnants of the northern tribes would have thus been part of the Babylonian deportations. Seventy years later, when King Cyrus allowed the Israelites to return to Israel (Ezra 1), many (from all twelve tribes) returned to Israel to rebuild their homeland.” (a)

At the other end is the entertaining idea that the Lost Tribes inhabit the interior of a Hollow Earth, which is defended by flying saucers!(b)

Another unexpected claim, with a tenuous Atlantis connection, comes from “Dierk Lange(a), Prof. Dr Emeritus, of Bayreuth University in Germany, who has performed extensive research concerning many West African groups and their origins in the Near East. In the abstract to one of his many essays, “Dierk Lange: Origin of the Yoruba and “The Lost Tribes of Israel”,” Dierk confirms the traditions of a Levantine (Israelite) origin of the Yoruba Nigerians.”(d)(e)

Nearly as extreme is the attempt to link the Lost Tribes and Atlantis, a combination that would not normally leap to mind. However, some have attempted to justify such a linkage in spite of the contradictions between Plato’s story and the details of this minority opinion.

This alleged relationship between Atlantis and Israel points out that the Biblical patriarch Jacob who had twelve sons, excluded two of them, Levi and Simeon. Jacob is then presented as having been Poseidon with the ten remaining sons ruling Atlantis. One of Jacob’s sons, Gad, is assumed to have been Gadeiros, one of the ten sons of Poseidon. After that, no further parallels are offered to connect Jacob’s other sons with the remainder of Poseidon’s offspring.

In Britain, Richard Brothers (1757–1823), a retired naval officer and a radical Calvinist, revealed himself as a prophet of the lost tribes in 1794 in London. The fact that he was writing from the confinement of Fisher Mad-House, Islington, did not deter many from following him and producing the doctrine of Anglo-Israelism: a fiercely nationalist theology based on the idea that the British Isles were the home of the lost tribes.” (c)

>A 2016 paper by Prof. W.A Liebenberg begins the Introduction(g)  with Dolmens and Megalithic Monuments originated in Ancient Israel. The prophet Jeremiah (31:21) is instructed to make it clear that the Ten Tribes will construct a trail of Megalithic Monuments from their homeland Israel to their places of deportation and further migration into the nations, and evidence of this path will be a vivid reminder of their forefathers and will also enable them to return. Such a trail undoubtedly exists and is embedded in the earth’s crust! It is the Trail of the Dolmens from the Middle East to the various nations.”

To suggest that the megaliths mark the tribal dispersal routes is to my mind utter nonsense. Judging by the number of megaliths spread throughout the world there should be thousands of ‘lost tribes’, not to mention that the lost tribes disappeared in the 8th century BC, even though the megaliths are scientifically dated to the 5th millennium BC!<

Also See: Agartha, Baer, Baucum, Bible, Davidiy, Eurenius, Olivier, Salverda and Wauchope.

(a) https://www.gotquestions.org/lost-tribes-Israel.html

(b) https://www.ourhollowearth.com/ourhollo/index.html

(c) The Lost Tribes of Israel (archive.org)

(d) The Bantu Branch of ‘Africans’ are Hebrew Israelites PART I of II – Aria Nasi Research 

(e) The Bantu Branch of ‘Africans’ are Hebrew Israelites PART II of II – Aria Nasi Research 

(f) http://www.dierklange.com 

(g) https://www.academia.edu/30702086/A_Historical_Research_of_the_Ten_Tribes_Scattered_Into_the_Nations_Part_10   *

Bulgaria

Bulgaria has not been totally excluded from the search for Atlantis. In 2012 it was announced that the oldest European town had been discovered in Bulgaria(a), near the town of Provadia and dated to about 4500 BC. Recently there were metal beads discovered in Bulgaria tentatively dated to 6000 BC. Along with recent discoveries of hoards of Thracian gold it is obvious that Bulgaria was no backwater, although identifying it with Atlantis is not a runner. Nevertheless, some have attempted(e) to link Atlantis with the ancient region of Thrace, which today would occupy a section of Bulgaria along with parts of Greece and Turkey.

In the mid-20th century the noted Bulgarian astronomer Nikola Bonev placed Atlantis in the Atlantic. However, the flooding of the Black Sea as revealed by Ryan & Pitman triggered the imagination of a number of people. The Schoppe father and son team who favour a Black Sea location for Atlantis have broken with the generally held view that Gadeiros, the twin brother of Atlas, gave his name to the city of Gades, now Cadiz in southwest Spain and proposed the more radical view that he gave his name to the Getae who occupied parts of today’s Bulgaria and Romania(b).

In 2012, Hristo Smolenov went further and suggested a closer connection between Bulgaria and Atlantis on his website(c), a video(c) and a book[1003], Zagora – Varna: The Hidden Superculture.

(a) https://www.nbcnews.com/id/49645182/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/bulgaria-claims-find-europes-oldest-town/#.VLgVH4tFBy0

>(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20190830053312/https://www.black-sea-atlantis.com/black-sea-atlantis/<

(c) https://atlantisblacksea.wordpress.com/tag/hristo-smolenov/

(d) https://atlantisblacksea.wordpress.com/atlantis-in-the-black-sea-videos/

(e) https://www.home2b.nl/home2b-secret-history/secret-history-atlantis1.html

Gadeiros

Gadeiros was the twin brother of Atlas snd was known in Greek as Eumelos. It is generally accepted that he gave his name to the city of Gades, now Cadiz in southwest Spain. A more radical view is expressed by C. & S. Schoppe, who think that he gave his name to the Getae who occupied parts of today’s Bulgaria and Romania(a).

Others have sought to identify Gadeiros with Jacob’s son, Gad!

>(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20190930162447/https://www.black-sea-atlantis.com/black-sea-atlantis/<

Agadir

Agadir is a city in the South-West of Morocco. It is situated at the Atlantic end of the Sous-Massa-Draa valley which was considered by Michael Hübner to have been the location of Atlantis(a). The name ‘Agadir’ was identified by him as a variation of Gades, a region of Atlantis, ruled by Gadeiros, the twin brother of Atlas.>As you will see below, another of Atlas’ siblings has also been linked with this region.

Atlantisforschung  has noted that the German Atlantis researcher Paul Borchardt, who suspected Atlantis to be in the region of Tunisia, claimed that the name Ampheres, one of the kings of Atlantis, was derived from a Berber tribe called ‘Am-Phares’: “They are undoubtedly the Pharusii of Ptolemy (IV, 6, 17) in the Wadi Draa south of the Atlas. Am means people. The name is still very common today. Borchardt thus localizes“, as Ulrich Hofmann, an expert on Borchard’s work, remarks,  the area of the Ampheres on the southwestern edge of the Maghreb, in modern-day Morocco, south of the 2500m high Atlas Mountains.”(b)<

Keep in mind that Agadir was about 3,300 km away from Athens and 3,700 km from the Nile Delta. Not what you might call ‘easy striking distances’. The relevance of this is discussed more fully in the ‘Invasion‘ entry.

(a) Plato’s Atlantis in South Morocco? (archive.org)

(b) Ampheres – Atlantisforschung.de *

Kings of Atlantis

The Kings of Atlantis were, according to Plato, originally the sons of Poseidon and Cleito. They were ten in number and consisted of five sets of male twins. The firstborn was Atlas who was given authority over the others, each of whom controlled their own territory. Some commentators reacted with such incredulity to this story, that they have either dismissed this detail or in some cases the entire Atlantis tale as pure fantasy. Of course, it is highly improbable, if not virtually impossible to accept that Clieto had five sets of all-male twins. However, we are dealing here with a myth that is an echo of the legends of many other cultures describing their antediluvian origins. Lenormant & Chevallier wrote [424] of this over a hundred years ago:

“…The ten kingdoms of Atlantis are perpetuated in all the ancient traditions. ‘In the number given by the Bible for the Antediluvian patriarchs we have the first instance of a striking agreement with the traditions of various nations. Other nations, to whatever epoch they carry back their ancestors…are constant to the sacred number of ten… In Chaldea (Babylon), Berosus, writing in the third century BC, numerates ten Antediluvian kings whose fabulous reigns extended to thousands of years. The legends of the Iranian race commence with the reign of ten Peisdadien (Poseidon?) kings…. In India we meet with the nine Brahmadikas, who, with Brahma, their founder, make ten, and who are called the Ten Petris, or Fathers. The Chinese count ten emperors, partaking of the divine nature, before the dawn of historical time. The Germans believed in the ten ancestors of Odin, and the Arabs in the ten mythical kings of the Adites”.

Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the 6th century AD, contended[1245] that Atlantis was the Garden of Eden and that Plato’s 10 kings of Atlantis were the 10 generations between Adam and Noah!

It may be just a coincidence, but Plato tells us that the domain of Atlantis extended as far as Tyrrhenia (modern Tuscany), just south of which was Rome, a city, which according to legend was also founded by twin brothers, Romulus and Remus. It has been claimed that the story of their origins is a variation of the story in the Hindu epic Ramayana concerning the twin sons of king Sri Rama, Luva and Kusha(c). 

In the same region, Sicily has the legend of the divine Palici twins (Palikoi in Greek).

>Aelian in his Natura Animalium has recorded [0619 xv.2] how the natives who live on the shores of ‘Ocean’ have a legend that tells of the Atlantean kings, who, to symbolise their authority from Poseidon, wore a crown reminiscent of the white band that ran around the forehead of the male ‘ram fish’ while their queens wore headgear made from the skins of  ’marine ewes’.

“Ram-fishes, whose name has a wide circulation, although information about them is not very definite except in so far as displayed in works of art, spend the winter near the strait between Corsica and Sardinia and actually appear above water. And round about them swim dolphins of very great size.” (15.2)(f) 

Although these animals have not been clearly identified, their size suggests a species of whale. I suggest that it was a fin whale which has a grey or white chevron marking on top of its head and is frequently found in the Strait of Bonifacio, between Corsica and Sardinia, at the southern end of the Pelagos Sanctuary.

“Fin whales, the second largest animal on the planet after blue whales, are represented in the Mediterranean by a resident population separated from the Atlantic.(e)

So, it would appear obvious from this excerpt that Aelian did not have any doubt regarding the reality of Atlantis. Perhaps even more interesting is that Aelian seems to also associate these kings of Atlantis with Corsica and Sardinia. For me, this is compatible with a Central Mediterranean location for Atlantis.<

Although Babylon is supposed to have had ten kings before the Flood, it must be noted that they reigned successively rather than concurrently, as was the case in Atlantis.

Attention has been drawn to the fact that Manetho (c. 300 BC), the Egyptian historian called the first sequence of Egyptian god-kingsAuriteans’, which has been seen as suspiciously like a corruption of  ‘Atlanteans‘.

Plato gives the names of the first ten kings as; Atlas, Gadeiros (Eumelos), Ampheres, Euaimon, Mneseos, Autochthon, Elasippos, Mestor, Azaes, Diaprepres (Critias 114b).

Some writers have attempted to link these names with specific regions; such as Atlas with Morocco, Eumelos (Gadeiros) with Gades (Cadiz) and Elasippos with Lisbon. Beyond these three there is very little agreement. Lewis Spence correctly points out “Plato expressly states that these names had been Egyptianised from the Atlantean language by the priest of Sais, and subsequently Hellenised in Critias, so that there is little hope that they were transmitted in anything like their original form.” Spence also commented on the similarity of the Phoenician gods and the early kings of Atlantis, an idea suggested earlier by Ignatius Donnelly.

Reginald Fessenden claimed to have identified at least six of Plato’s Atlantean king-list with names in the Caucasus.(d)

Even more distant locations were proposed by the French cartographer Guillaume Sanson (1633-1703), who generously distributed the Americas among the ten brothers, allocating Mexico to Atlas.

R. Cedric Leonard is convinced that Manetho’s list of Egyptian god-kings is in fact a list of the first kings of Atlantis and expands on this idea on his website(a). However, in his 1979 book, Quest for Atlantis[0130], Leonard has suggested that the kings of Atlantis were human-alien hybrids and that humans are the result of alien genetic experiments!!

Another site(b) identifies the kings of Atlantis with the pantheon of Phoenician gods, an idea first mooted by Ignatius Donnelly (part IV. chap. III). But Donnelly, also suggested, unconvincingly, that the gods of the Greeks were just the deified kings of Atlantis (part IV, chap. II), while it is also possible that they were just personifications of natural phenomena.

An unusual feature of the Atlantean kings is the meeting every fifth and sixth year. Plato explains this as a way of honouring odd and even numbers. However, Bacon & Galanopoulos suggest[263.152] that in fact, this may have been the result of an awareness of the eleven-year cycles of rains.  I believe that this explanation is equally weak and the subject requires further investigation.

(a)  https://web.archive.org/web/20170608084749/http:/www.atlantisquest.com:80/Hiero.html

(b) https://phoenicia.org/godidea.html#Atlantis

(c) https://vediccafe.blogspot.ie/2014/05/the-ramayana-in-roots-of-pre-christian.html

(d) The Deluged Civilisation of the Caucasus Isthmus [1012] (chap 3.29) *

(e) https://tethys.org/activities-overview/research/fin-whales/ *

(f) http://www.attalus.org/translate/animals15.html *

Eumelos

Eumelos is the Greek name given to Gadeiros, the twin brother of Atlas. The name itself can be translated as ‘good music’. According to the text of Critias, he appears to have been given the portion of Atlantis nearest the Pillars of Heracles as his domain. This area, according to Plato, is called Gades after Eumelos’ original name in the language of the region, Gadirus. It is generally accepted that Gades is modern Cadiz.

However, a case can also be made for alternative locations such as Agadir in Southern Morocco or the Egadi Islands off the west coast of Sicily. The latter has gained in significance as support has grown for placing the ‘Pillars’in the Central Mediterranean at either the Strait of Messina or the Strait of Sicily.

Galanopoulos on the other hand believed that the Pillars of Heracles was at the south-eastern tip of the Peloponnesus and that the nearest Minoan island, Melos, may have been named after its first king Eumelos.

It is worth mentioning that a stone was discovered on Thera with the name Eumelos inscribed on it in archaic Greek, but the importance of this could be easily overplayed.