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

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  • NEWS September 2023

    NEWS September 2023

    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 »
  • Joining The Dots

    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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Richard W. Welch

Volcanoes

Volcanoes at their most explosive have played an important part in the mythologies and histories of humans.

A recent Irish Times article (10/2/22) observed Despite the small number of volcanoes here, European culture has been deeply influenced by volcanic activity. In ancient Greek mythology, volcanoes were where the Olympian gods had imprisoned their rivals, the Titans. When the Romans adopted the Greek religion, Mount Etna became the home of Vulcan, the god of fire and blacksmiths, who worked his forges underneath the mountain.”(u)

Volcanism is not part of the Atlantis story as related by Plato. His narrative clearly attributes the destruction of Atlantis and the Athenians to flooding and earthquake. Admittedly, flooding can be the result of some volcanic activity, but in the absence of any evidence to support this view in the case of Atlantis, the idea is only supposition. While most accept that Atlantis was named after its first king, Atlas, Frank Joseph’s fertile imagination suggests[104] that ‘the island of Atlantis was named after its chief mountain, a dormant volcano’. For those that place Atlantis in the Atlantic the idea of volcanic or seismic activity as the cause of the flooding of Atlantis AND Athens is hard pressed to suggest a location for this activity that would explain two catastrophes two thousand miles or more apart.

However, the red, white and black stone that Plato may be related to volcanic eruptions that produce rocks of tufa (red), pumice (white) and lava (black). Pumice has been found at various locations in Egypt(v) and identified as originating not only from Thera but also from eruptions on the Greek islands of Nisyros and Giali as well as the Italian Lipari Islands(o). Pumice has a chemical fingerprint which enables its source to be identified(t).

Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Sanders are the authors of Volcanoes in Human History[681] which supports the idea that the eruption of Thera was a factor in the development of the Atlantis story and also suggests a link with the Flood of Deucalion.

Nevertheless, a recent book by William Lauritzen, The Invention of God[745], makes a convincing case for accepting volcanic activity as the inspiration behind some of the imagery of ancient mythologies and most major religions. A recent article(i) on the BBC website expanded on this further. Lauritzen also suggests that the pyramids were meant to represent volcanoes.

Stromboli

Stromboli

The most active volcanic region of Europe is to be found in Italy, where Etna and Stromboli have been continuously erupting for thousands of years(b).  There is a report that a 6000 BC extreme eruption of Etna resulted in a tsunami 130 feet in height which swept the Mediterranean(c). However, the most devastating prehistoric volcanic eruption discovered so far seems to have been in Siberia 252 million years, which may have led to the most extensive mass extinction of life on earth(e). This is now rivalled by Tamu Massif in the Pacific mentioned below.

The cataclysmic volcanic eruption of Thera in the second millennium BC has had a strong level of support as the cause of Atlantis’ collapse, a view endorsed by recent television documentaries and an IMAX film. The Greek volcanologist, George Vougioukalakis, whose research is featured in the aforementioned film, is convinced that the eruption of Santorini offers the most rational explanation for the truth behind Plato’s story(a). However, he dissents from the recently expressed view that pumice found on the Northern Sinai Peninsula was transported there by a tsunami generated by the eruption of Thera and prefers to believe their transportation there was by normal sea currents.

Apart from Santorini, Jim Allen had initially proposed the Andean village of Quillacas, which lies on top of a volcano, as the site of Atlantis, but later found that the nearby site of Pampa Aullagas had a greater correspondence with the description of Atlantis. More recently Richard W. Welch has suggested the eruption of a supervolcano in the Atlantic as the cause of Atlantis’ demise. And so the idea of the volcanic destruction of Atlantis still has some support!

Since January 2011, Santorini has shown some signs of a volcanic reawakening(d).

In September 2013 studies revealed(f) what may be the location of the largest volcano ever to have erupted on our planet. It would have been the size of the British Isles and situated underwater in the northwest Pacific and known as Tamu Massif. It would have rivalled the Olympus Mons on Mars, but fortunately, has been dormant for 140 million years.

March 2014 saw a post on Dale Drinnon’s website(g) take the linkage between Atlantis and a volcano rather further with the suggestion that “the capital city of Atlantis in Plato’s description was built in the caldera of an extinct volcano and that many of the features of the description are volcanic in origin. The “Poseidon’ temple is the pyramidal volcanic neck, an erosional feature that stood out like a conical mound some hundreds of feet in diameter and possibly some hundreds of feet high on the outside. there was a tunnel bored through this aligned East and West, to allow the sunlight in at the beginning and the end of the day for certain rituals.”

In December 2014 a report from Princeton University revealed that a massive series of volcanic eruptions 66 million years ago can be aligned with the extinction of the dinosaurs and should be included as part of the cause of that extinction along with the Yucatan meteorite impact(h). However, in February 2021, a report from Harvard proposed that the Yucatan impactor was a comet rather than an asteroid or meteor(s).

In 2009, it was reported(q) that another example of contemporaneous meteorite impact and flood volcanism was identified in Belarus.

The Laki volcano in Iceland erupted in 1783, killing 9,000 local people but more dramatically causing the Nile Valley population to be cut by a sixth, according to a study published by scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. “The study is the first to conclusively establish the linkage between high-latitude eruptions and the water supply in North Africa”(j).

A 2015 report(k) suggests that a series of North American volcanic eruptions in 536 AD had such a detrimental effect on the climate of Europe that contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire.

Furthermore, there is now evidence(m) that the eruption of El Chicon volcano in Southern Mexico around 540 AD led to the disruption of the Maya civilisation. Can there be a connection between these two events? In 2020, it was reported that the massive Tierra Blanca Joven eruption of the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador had been accurately dated to within a year or two of 431 AD, which also devastated Maya communities within an eighty-kilometre radius(r). 

However, David Keys in his book, Catastrophe[1130], has proposed that a massive eruption of Krakatoa around 535 AD caused disruption on a global scale. Matthew Toohey from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, has suggested the possibility of a double event involving both El Chicon and Krakatoa!

Recently the longest (1,200 miles) continental volcano chain was identified in Australia(l).

The BBC reported(n) in 2016 that Deep-sea volcanoes are so remote until recently we did not even know they existed” and although “We do not see them erupt, yet more than half of the Earth’s crust can be attributed to their dramatic explosions” and “In fact, the mid-ocean ridges form the largest volcanic systems on Earth. But as they are largely hidden from sight, they have long remained elusive.” 

In July 2017, the BBC offered an interesting article on the potential ongoing threat from supervolcanoes around our globe(p)  and the inevitability of a future eruption.

(a)  https://web.archive.org/web/20190515084403/https://www.santorini.com/santorinivolcano/atlantisaffect-egypt.htm

(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanology_of_Italy

(c) https://www.livescience.com/1170-towering-ancient-tsunami-devastated-mediterranean.html

(d) https://www.livescience.com/19864-santorini-volcano-awakening.html?utm_content=LiveScience&utm_campaign=seo%2Bblitz&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social%2Bmedia

(e) https://www.seeker.com/the-deadliest-volcano-ever-1767374752.html

(f)https://www.nature.com/news/underwater-volcano-is-earth-s-biggest-1.13680

(g) https://web.archive.org/web/20170402010945/http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com/2014/03/reconstruction-of-platos-temple-of.html

(h) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141218154544.htm

(i) https://web.archive.org/web/20191202184228/https://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150318-why-volcano-myths-are-true

(j) https://news.rutgers.edu/news-releases/2006/11/icelandic-volcano-ca-20061120#.Vd2BIMtRFwE

(k) https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/283466/volcanoes-hastened-fall-of-the-roman-empire

(l) https://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/worlds-longest-continental-volcano-chain-discovered-in-australia/

(m) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36086096

(n) https://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160808-the-volcanoes-hiding-in-the-ocean

(o) https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_176233.pdf

(p) https://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170724-would-a-supervolcano-eruption-wipe-us-out

(q) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090107085320.htm

(r) https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/09/scientists-reveal-more-about-volcanic-eruption-that-rocked-the-ancient-maya/

(s) https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/comet-asteroid-dinosaurs-killed-harvard-theory-chicxulub-impactor/ *

(t) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080624124308.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,civilizations%20in%20the%20Eastern%20Mediterranean.

(u) https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/from-atlantis-to-frankenstein-volcanoes-have-long-shaped-european-culture-1.4791753

(v) https://www.santorini.com/santorinivolcano/atlantisaffect-egypt.htm *

Etruscans

The Etruscans were an ancient people of Etruria (now Tuscany) in Italy. They occupied an area somewhere between Rome and Florence Etruscan mapfrom the 8th century BC until incorporated in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century BC. They do not appear to have been particularly expansionist as the only Etruscan settlement on Sardinia, which was not discovered until our 21st century, on the Tavolara isle off the coast near Olbia(o).

It is thought that they originally came from Asia Minor before 800 BC, a suggestion that originated with Herodotus. This view has been given recent (2007) support by the results of DNA studies carried out at Pavia University. Another study of Etruscan mtDNA estimated “that the genetic links between Tuscany and Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan culture developed locally, and not as an immediate consequence of immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean shores.” (e).

Stefan Anitei who supports an Anatolian, or more specifically a Lydian, origin for the Etruscans, cited A recent (2007) DNA analysis showed that (the Bos Taurus) cattle in central Italy seem indeed to have originated in modern Turkey and the Middle East. As there is no link between these cattle and others from other European regions, they must have entered the peninsula by sea.” (n).

However, a study published in 2022 has challenged the idea of an Anatolian origin for the Etruscans, instead, it claims that they were “actually descended from pastoralists (sheep herders) who moved into the region from the steppes during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age from approximately 6,000 BC to 3,500 BC.”(v) 

Some decades ago Professor Licinio Glori also supported an eastern Mediterranean origin for the Etruscans(i). However, he has also claimed a common origin for the peoples of the Americas and Europe, including Etruscans, without identifying this shared ancestry(j).

It has also been suggested that the Etruscan culture has shown distinctive Indian influences.(l)

Until their written language can be translated there will remain an air of mystery about them. Even then because of the paucity of material available in their language, it is probable that little will be gleaned from it. Mark Cartwright’s excellent site has further information on the Etruscan script(k) and many articles on different aspects of Etruscan culture. A 2016 report(h) revealed the discovery of a stele that has at least 70 legible Etruscan letters and punctuation marks on it. Hopefully, this find will help to advance the translation of this language.

The site of the ancient city of Chiusi has been assumed by some to be the location of Clusium, the capital of the Etruscan king, Lars Porsena. This suggestion is based on the fact that the two names mean the same, namely ‘closed’. However, Giuseppe Centauro believes that he found the real Clusium near Florence where he identified two concentric walls about 10 miles in circumference. The extensive walls have resonance with Plato’s description of Atlantis. If he is correct, Clusium may at one time have been the biggest city in Italy(f). Centauro is currently seeking permission to excavate there.

At Orvieto, nearly 100km north of Rome, Professor Simonetta Stopponi is investigating the possible location of the Fanum Voltumnae, where the leaders of the Etruscan city-states met every year to discuss policy. This meeting has also got echoes of the regular meeting of the kings of the Atlantean federation.

It is worth highlighting that Tyrrhenia, the Greek name for Etruria, is one of the few places whose location is not disputed and is mentioned by Plato as bordering (Critias 114c & Timaeus 25b) Atlantean territory. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that south of Etruria on mainland Italy some remnants of Atlantis may yet be identified.

In his recent book[630] Richard W. Welch is quite happy to designate the Etruscans as “the last Atlanteans of which we have much knowledge”. Frank Joseph echoed the same idea, writing that “the Etruscans were themselves nothing more than the late Atlanteans who colonised western Italy, so their surviving material culture offers us a glimpse of Atlantis at its cultural height.”[636.21]

In 1962, the French linguist, Maurice Guignard, claimed[1109] to have deciphered the Etruscan language and also suggested that the Etruscans might have come from Atlantis. Such comments conflict with Plato’s account, which locates the territory of the Atlanteans separate from and further south than that of the Etruscans. 

Confusing matters is a 2006 report from researchers at Stanford University, using “novel statistical computer modelling to simulate demographic processes affecting the population of Tuscany over a 2,500-year time span. Rigorous tests used by the researchers have ruled out a genetic link between ancient Etruscans, the early inhabitants of central Italy, and the region’s modern-day residents.(s)

Recently, a study(t) by a team of scholars from Germany, Italy, the USA, Denmark and the UK, published in 2021 shows that the Etruscans, “were closely related to their italic neighbors, and reveal major genetic transformations associated with historical events.”   However, they also note that “the persistence of a non-Indo-European Etruscan language is an intriguing and still unexplained phenomenon that will require further archaeological, historical, linguistic and genetic investigation.”

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!

The internet offers a valuable site(a) giving a good overview of the Etruscans including a valuable bibliography and collection of related web links.

Another mystery relating to the Etruscans concerns an Egyptian mummy, which was bought in Alexandria and brought to Europe in the mid-19th century. When it was eventually unwrapped Etruscan writing was discovered on the linen!(q)(r)

Professor Natalia Rosi de Tariffi (1907-?), Italian by birth, but lived in Venezuela, has highlighted the many similarities between the Etruscan language and that of Quechua and Aymara spoken in the Andes of South America. In her well-regarded 1969 book, America cuarta dimension [1927] she proposed the migration of the Etruscans FROM America TO Europe.

The controversial Italian researcher, Dr Mario Gattoni Celli, writing in the 1960s proposed that the Etruscans had voyaged to South America, basing his opinion on linguistic and other cultural similarities. This view is apparently supported by Diodorus Siculus (History, Book V, 19+) who refers to the ‘Tyrrhenians’ setting up a colony on an island, with navigable rivers, at a great distance from the inhabited world(c). Adding some confusion to this is the claim that Old World languages had migrated FROM the Americas!!(d) Alf Bajocco wrote a piece in Sykes’ Atlantis magazine on Celli’s ideas(c).

The most exotic suggestion regarding the Etruscans comes from Xavier Séguin who has claimed that they share a common ancestry with the Yoruba of West Africa, as both originated in Atlantis(m)! Séguin quotes the work of Leo Frobenius in support of this contention, highlighting the significance of the number sixteen in both cultures.

>Caleb Howells has written an interesting paper on the gradual fall of the Etruscan civilisation that ended with attacks from the Romans in the south and the Celts in the north(w).<

(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20190831235749/https://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/

(c) Atlantis, Vol 19. No.1, Feb/Mar 1966

(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20181218003239/http://www.ancient-mysteries-explained.com/language-mysteries.htmlOr See Archive 2607

(e) Origins and Evolution of the Etruscans’ mtDNA (archive.org)

(f) http://archives.dailynews.lk/2004/11/23/fea05.html

(g) https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11174-on-the-origin-of-the-etruscan-civilisation/

(h) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160329112847.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ffossils_ruins%2Fancient_civilizations+%28Ancient+Civilizations+News+–+ScienceDaily%29

(i) St. Petersburg Times. Nov. 25 1957

(j) https://www.inmysteriam.fr/anciennes-civilisations-du-nord/similitudes-entre-les-peuples-precolombiens-et-le-peuple-etrusque.html  (French)

(k) https://www.ancient.eu/Etruscan_Language/

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

(m) https://eden-saga.com/en/survivors-from-atlantis-frobenius-sixteen-gods-oracle-of-fa.html

(n) https://news.softpedia.com/news/Where-Did-the-Etruscans-Originated-54317.shtml

(o) Etruscan settlement found in Sardinia for first time – Culture – ANSAMed.it (archive.org) *

(p) Atlantis, Vol.19, No.3, May/June 1966

(q) https://web.archive.org/web/20160329142153/http://www.dacia.org/history/gara_e.html

(r) http://www.maravot.com/Translation_Zagreb_Mummy.html

(s) https://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/may17/mountain-051706.html

(t) The origin and legacy of the Etruscans: A new study reports genome-wide data of ancient Italian individuals to trace the origins of the Etruscans and their contribution to later populations — ScienceDaily 

(u) Atlantis Rising magazine  #48  At – PDF Archive  

(v) https://greekreporter.com/2022/08/13/dna-study-finds-etruscans-originated-steppes/ 

(w) https://www.thecollector.com/fall-of-the-etruscans/ *

 

Mahieu, Jacques de

Jacques de Mahieu (1915-1990) was a French academic who spend the latter Mahieu 2part of his life teaching in Argentina. During the war, he was a member of the Division Charlemagne, a military unit comprised of French volunteers in the German Wehrmacht. When Paris was liberated he fled to Argentina, where he became a naturalised citizen and a professor of anthropology.

He continued to espouse Nazi writing on politics and scientific racism. Following a trip to Paraguay, he announced that he had uncovered evidence of a nomadic tribe of white Indians whose ancestors had been ‘Aryans of the Nordic race’. This claim seems like an echo of the story of Colonel Braghine who reported the existence of a tribe of white natives in Venezuela.  However, both the Mahieu and Braghine reports can be seen as being supported by the recent book[630] by Richard W. Welch in which he offers evidence of very early European settlers in America.

In 1985 Mahieu published Die Flucht der Trojaner[775] in which he claimed that the Trojans were originally white Libyans who had come from Scandinavia. After the Trojan War, they fled to America where they came to be known today as Olmecs!>His racist views promote the idea that all the ruling elite of the Olmecs, Incas and Maya were Trojans or Carthaginians or their descendants(b).<

He also wrote of a Templar geometric influence in America in his Les Templiers en Amérique (Templars in America) which is available as a pdf file in Italian and many other of his works in Spanish and French on the pdfarchive website(a).

(a) https://www.pdfarchive.info/index.php?pages/De

(b) Archive {4593P} (unpublished) *

Welch, Richard W. (L)

Richard W. Welch is an American journalist and talk show host, who recently (August 2009) published Roots of Cataclysm: Geopulsation and the Atlantis Supervolcano[630]. He explores the early occupation of the Americas and proposes that the first settlers came from Europe and that it was much later that Asiatic influences can be clearly identified.

He discusses the geology, geography and climatology and suggests that at the end of the last Ice Age a landbridge or chain of islands extended from the European mainland into the Atlantic, permitting easier access to America. He attributes the creation of this ancient route as a consequence of the lower Atlantic during the Ice Age.

Welch introduces the idea of rotational changes in the earth and the concept of ‘geopulsation’ and their effects on the creation of the Ice Ages and increasing the level of volcanism.

He identifies the Tore Seamount, which lies in the Atlantic between Portugal and the Azores, as the location of Atlantis. He claims that Tore is the remains of a supervolcano which exploded circa 1640 BC wiping out Atlantis. However, the Atlanteans left their influence over a wide area, including Sardinia, whose inhabitants were part of the confederation of Sea Peoples who caused such destruction in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd millennium BC.

Although I would take issue with many of Welch’s Atlantis ideas, I found that overall his book was thought-provoking in many other respects and would highly recommend his book.