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 »
  • 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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Ulf Erlingsson

Woods, Anthony

 Anthony Woods is the author of Atlantis Ireland, published under the auspices of the unaccredited Keystone University(a) in Dublin, with Woods listed as CEO(b). To be blunt, for me as an Irishman, in spite of such an interesting title, I was greatly disappointed. In fact, I was by turn uncertain whether I should laugh or cry.

Woods engages in a generous level of speculation, which was certainly attention seeking. He selectively uses some mythological stories as if history whenever it suits his purpose [p.71]. The content is irritatingly repetitious throughout, references should have been numbered, which along with a few typos, all cry out for an editor.

His core contention is that Stone Age Ireland was a cultural hyperdiffusionist centre. He claims that megalith building, language and religion, all spread globally from Ireland, also known as Atlantis!

Among his many outlandish claims are that:

1.The ancient Irish language is the oldest in the world and is the most extensive with almost a million words [p.142], which is completely wrong by about a factor of six!

2.Irish megaliths are the most spectacular – obviously Woods has never heard of Brittany!

3.Megalith construction spread from Ireland to the world. However respected archaeologists such Aubrey Burl, Mike Parker Pearson and Robert Hensey [1766.6] burst that particular bubble with the their shared view that megalith building originated in France.

According to Woods, “the high concentration of megaliths on the west cost of Britain and France proves that Ireland was the fountainhead, the source of the megalithic mother culture.” The ‘logic’ here eludes me!

4.For some reason Woods thinks islands are ideal for evolution(p139), and that Cro-Magnon Man evolved in Ireland[p.103]!

5.Although Ireland was the island of Atlantis, the city of Atlantis (Cerne) was in Mauritania and is known today as the Richat Structure!

6.The Celts didn’t come to Ireland, they came from Ireland![p.99]

7.Woods makes the modest claim that the Irish visited America thousands of years before Columbus. Which may or may not be true, but what has that to do with Atlantis? [p.93]

In all, this book is not just an Hibernocentric rant. Woods also offers a lengthy diatribe against British imperialism and Vatican political interference, which, although probably justifiable, has also nothing to do with Atlantis

He introduces a range of subjects such as giants, Machu Picchu, Gobekli Tepe and the Garden of Eden, all with Woods’ imagined connection with ancient Ireland!

Apart all the nonsense about ancient Ireland, he barely touches on Plato’s dialogues, except to rubbish his narrative with “It’s clear that Plato’s legend is useful but unreliable, that it combined two separate related places, a lot of exaggeration and several historical errors.”[p.13] and twice patronisingly refers to Plato’s account as “useful but unreliable.”[p.50]

Woods did quote from Ulf  Erlingsson, who made a more valliant attempt to link Ireland with Atlantis some years. Erlingsson matched the dimensions of 2000 x 3000 stadia (340 x 227 miles) given by Plato with the diagonal dimensions of Ireland [319.16]. Unfortunately, Erlingsson got it very wrong and Woods copied his error. Plato’s figures were the dimensions of the Plain of Atlantis, while the Central Plain of Ireland is just a fraction of its size(c), being very roughly 150 x 100 miles in extent. Now, who’s unreliable?

At which point, I could take no more and gave up.

(a) https://www.keystone.ie     

(b) https://ie.linkedin.com/in/anthonymwoods

(c) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Ireland

Megalithic Yard, The

The Megalithic Yard is a controversial unit of measurement originally proposed by Alexander Thom following a study of hundreds of megalithic sites in Britain and Brittany. Very many attempts have been made to verify his conclusions but to no avail. Wikipedia(d) offers an interesting overview of the wide-ranging theories that the controversy has thrown up.

Humans have used their body parts as measuring tools right up to the present day, e.g. foot, finger or hand, so it was not surprising that the human pace provided a unit of measurement that has been suggested by many as the original megalithic ‘yard’.

Paul Screeton in his Quicksilver Heritage [1882.48] noted  that “the first person to write on prehistoric standard distances was Edward Milles Nelson (1851-1938).” He concluded that the megalith builders used a unit of measurement of 12.96 inches.

Not unexpectedly, some researchers, such as Ulf Erlingsson(a), Sylvain Tristan(b) and Jim Allen(c) have endeavoured to link the megalithic yard with their interpretation of Plato’s Atlantis, sometimes using convoluted associations with ancient Egyptian and/or Sumerian metrics!

There is also an ancient unit of measurement known as the ‘long foot’ of 12.7 inches (32.2 cm).>In 1889, a set of small carved chalk drums were discovered near the village of Folkton in Yorkshire. In early 2019, archaeologists from the University of Manchester and University College London concluded, after a study of three of the ‘drums’, that they “could be ancient replicas of measuring devices used for laying out prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge.” They found that “a string wound 10 times around the smallest of the drums would give a measure of exactly 10 long feet — a length used to lay out several ancient henge monuments(e). A similarly engraved fourth drum was discovered in 2015 in Burton Agnes, also in Yorkshire(g) and is thought to be 5,000 years old.<

Douglas C. Heggie [1837], an astronomer and mathematician as well as the late Aubrey Burl (1926-2020) [1838], arguably the leading authority on British stone circles, have both expressed the view that Thom’s evidence was at best ‘marginal’.(f)

>The Academia.edu website has a 2020 paper by Robert Carl that reexamines some key arguments concerning the validity of the Megalithic Yard’s existence and some of the specific critiques that have been aimed at it(h).<

(a) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242275382_A_geographic_comparison_of_Plato’s_Atlantis_and_Ireland_as_a_test_of_the_megalithic_culture_hypothesis

(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20200217205938/http://spcov.free.fr/site_nicoulaud/en/article.php

(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20190730190157/http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/elcastillocubits.htm

(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalithic_Yard

(e) Ancient carved ‘drums’ give exact Stonehenge measurements, say archaeologists – WSBuzz.com (archive.org)

(f) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalithic_yard#:~:text=The%20megalithic%20yard%20is%20a,the%20construction%20of%20megalithic%20structures.

(g) https://the-past.com/news/elaborately-carved-burton-agnes-chalk-drum-goes-on-display/ *

(h) https://www.academia.edu/43164917/A_Brief_Reconsideration_of_Alexander_Thoms_Megalithic_Yard *

National Geographic *

National Geographic or Nat Geo are the registered trademarks of the National Geographic Society and are now, sadly, part of the Murdoch communications empire. Its magazine and TV channel enjoy global recognition. Undoubtedly, NG has enhanced our view of the world around us. One piece of NG trivia is that the word ‘tsunami’ first appeared in an English language publication in the September 1896 edition of National Geographic Magazine.

In May 1922 NG published its first picture of Stonehenge, now a century later it returned to this remarkable monument for its cover story in its August 2022 edition. It highlights how the use of new technologies has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the site and the people who built it. Jim Leary, a lecturer in field archaeology at the University of York admits that “a lot of the things we were taught as undergraduates in the 1990s we know now simply aren’t true.”  This beautifully illustrated article is a useful update on developments at this huge UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Generally, NG has avoided controversy, but not always(a), so it will be interesting to see how its new chief James Murdoch, a climate change denier(b), will deal with the NG views on the subject up ’til now(c). However, for me, it was something of a surprise when NG tackled the subject of Atlantis.

In 2004 NG News published a short article(d) highlighting the theories of Ulf Erlingsson and Rainer Kühne, who, respectively, were advocates for Ireland and Spain as Atlantis locations. Also in 2004, Zeilitsky and Weinzweig claimed to have found submerged man-made structures near Cuba and subsequently sought US government funding for further research there. It has been suggested that NG objected and further exploration did not take place! In 2006 NG gave the Atlantis in America theory of Zapp & Erikson an airing(e).

However, in 2012, Andrew Collins offered a different account of the Zelitsky funding difficulties(m).

In a short 2011 article(l)., NG trotted out the now generally abandoned idea that Atlantis had been a continent. The idea was obviously later dumped by NG as well when James Cameron et al. went looking for Atlantis in Malta, Sardinia and Santorini in 2016.

December 2012 saw NG publish an article on Doggerland, without any reference to the suggestion that there might be an Atlantis connection. NG has also voiced the scepticism of well-known commentators, such as Robert Ballard and Charles E. Orser jnr(f).

However, I find that the NG treatment of Atlantis is inconsistent. In October 2011 an anonymous article(k) on one of their sites, entitled The Truth Behind Atlantis: Facts, declared that Atlantis was continental in size (and so must have been located in an Ocean?) This is based on a misinterpretation of the Greek word meison. Nevertheless last year NG had Simcha Jacobovici, remotely guided by James Cameron, scouring the Mediterranean, from Spain to Sardinia, Malta, and Crete for evidence of Atlantis. This attention-seeking exercise found nothing but a few stone anchors that proved nothing and inflicted on viewers an overdose of speculation!

NatGeo TV aired a documentary(g) in 2015 relating to earlier excavations in the Doñana Marshes of Southern Spain by a Spanish team and partly hijacked by Richard Freund. A new NG documentary, hyped with the involvement of James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici, was filmed in 2016, and later broadcast at the end of January 2017. Initially, it was thought by Robert Ishoy to be in support of his Atlantis location of Sardinia, but at the same time, Diaz-Montexano was convinced that his Afro-Iberian theory was to be the focus of the film. To coincide with the airing of the new documentary D-M has published a new book, NG National Geographic and the scientific search for Atlantis[1394] with both English and Spanish editions.

Jason Colavito was promised a screener but had the offer subsequently withdrawn. One wonders why.

Once again NG promotes the region of the Doñana Marshes as a possible location for Atlantis(i), based on rather flimsy evidence, such as six ancient anchors found just outside the Strait of Gibraltar. They estimate the age of the anchors at 3,000-4,000 years old. unfortunately, they are not marked ‘made in Atlantis’. Rabbi Richard Freund, never afraid to blow his own shofar, makes another NG appearance. Jacobovici throws in the extraordinary claim that the Jewish menorah represents the concentric circles of the Atlantean capital cut in half, a daft idea, previously suggested by Prof. Yahya Ababni(k).

What I cannot understand is why this documentary spends time dismissing Santorini and Malta as possible locations for Plato’s Atlantis and at the same time ignoring the only unambiguous geographical clue that he left us, namely that the Atlantis alliance occupied part of North Africa and in Europe the Italian peninsula as far as Tyrrhenia (Tuscany) and presumably some of the islands between the two.

Overall, I think the NG documentaries have done little to advance the search for Atlantis as they seem to be driven by TV ratings ahead of the truth. Perhaps, more revealing is that Cameron is not fully convinced by the speculative conclusions of his own documentary.

Jason Colavito, an arch-sceptic regarding Atlantis has now published a lengthy scathing review(j) of  NG’s Atlantis Rising, which is well worth a read. While I do not agree with Colavito’s dismissal of the existence of Atlantis, I do endorse the litany of shortcomings he identified in this documentary.

For me, NG’s credibility as a TV documentary maker has diminished in recent years.  Just one reason is the “2010 National Geographic Channel programme, 2012: The Final Prophecy, enthused about an illustration in the Mayan document known as the Dresden Codex (because of where it is now kept), which was claimed to show evidence of a catastrophic flood bringing the world to an end in 2012. This illustration included a representation of a dragon-like figure in the sky spewing water from its mouth onto the Earth beneath, which has been taken by some, although by no means all, experts in Mesoamerican mythology to indicate the onset of a terminal world-flood. However, no date was given, so the link with 2012 is entirely spurious (Handwerk, 2009; Hoopes, 2011).”(n)

(a) National Geographic Shoots Itself in the Foot — Again! (archive.org) *

(b) https://gizmodo.com/national-geographic-is-now-owned-by-a-climate-denier-1729683793

(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20200717231929/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/climate-change/

(d) See: Archive 3582

(e) https://www.dcourier.com/news/2006/oct/02/atlantis-theory-by-local-anthropologist-makes-nat/

(f) http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/archaeology/atlantis/

(g) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyEY0tROZgI & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=choIyaPiMjo

(h) https://mosestablet.info/en/menorah-tablet.html

(i) https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/more-signs-mythical-city-atlantis-its-mysterious-civilisation-found-spanish-marsh-1603470

(j) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/nat-geos-atlantis-rising-a-stew-of-fake-experts-motivated-reasoning-and-weird-claims-that-judaism-contains-atlantean-theology

(k) https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/5/5/1659107/-Descendants-of-Lost-Atlantis-may-be-wait-for-it-Jews

(l) https://channel.nationalgeographic.com/the-truth-behind/articles/the-truth-behind-atlantis-facts/

(m) https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread374842/pg11

(n) Doomsday Cults and Recent Quantavolutions, by Trevor Palmer (q-mag.org)  (about 2/3rds down page)

Ward, Francis J. & Francis P.

Francis Joseph Ward

Francis J. Ward

Francis J. Ward (1922- ) & Francis P. Ward (1951- ) are an American father and son team who have taken up the idea of Ireland being Plato’s Atlantis(a). They quote from Ulf Erlingsson, Cedric R. Leonard and the eccentric Conor MacDari in support of their view, which is that Atlantis was a global, maritime empire based in Ireland”. They also modestly claim that “Among other ancient mysteries, we have solved the hidden message of the Great Pyramid(b), and the riddles of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, the Fisher King, Pahana—the Lost White Brother, the Kalki incarnation of Vishnu, and the fulfillments of the Star, Branch, and World Ruler Prophecies.”

Their first book, The Truth Against the World-Red Phoenix Rising & the Return of the Thunder Gods[1156], but their supporting website(c) is currently offline, which may not be a bad thing!

(a) https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2012/02/the-lost-civilization-of-atlantis-is-ireland-1702516.html?currentSplittedPage=0

(b) https://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2011/11/24/the-hidden-message-of-the-great-pyramid (Link broken July 2o20) See: Archive 2835

(c) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20120728100841/https://www.thetruthagainsttheworld.net/

Kerr, Lee R.

Lee R. Kerr is the author of Griffin Quest – Investigating Atlantis[807] which is a feeble attempt to breathe new life into the Minoan Hypothesis and it sadly fails. Most of the book is taken up with the author’s search Lee R Kerrfor images of griffins (gryphons) in various museums in Santorini, Crete and Athens. He found very few and so what? There is no connection whatsoever between Atlantis and griffins.

In October 2021 the Malagabay website published an extensive and fully-illustrated article on the ancient association of griffins and gold(b).

I think it disappointing that the author, who practices as an attorney in Texas, can produce such a flimsy offering. It may explain why used copies have been available from Amazon.com for as little as one cent.

In case anyone is interested, the griffin is part of a related group of mythological creatures which includes sphinxes(a).>An article on the Ancient Origins website offers further information on the history of the griffin(c).<

In 2015, Kerr launched a sequel, Atlantis of the Minoans and Celts[1104]. This simply rehashes claims in his first book, padded unnecessarily with too many pointless images. Unable, to reconcile Plato’s description of the Plain of Atlantis with his version of the Minoan Hypothesis, he concludes that there was a second island larger than Thera and then based on the theory of Ulf Erlingsson he decided that Ireland was it. As an Irishman, I would be delighted to find a connection between my homeland and Atlantis. However, again I found this new claim even less convincing than his Theran ideas. Furthermore, Kerr is either unaware or has ignored the fact that Erlingsson places the flooded Atlantis on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, not the Central Plain of Ireland, which, to the relief of its inhabitants, is still above water.

Not content with that, Kerr, returned to Ireland in another volume, Atlantis Aftermath [1675]in which he seeks to link my homeland and its ancient monuments with the eruption of Thera. His ‘quest’ also takes him to Spain, Portugal and Switzerland, when to my utter relief he finally announced that for me, I feel satisfied that I had completed my Griffin Quest.” Let’s hope so.

(a) http://www.gryphonpages.com/relatives/  (link broken) 

(b) sardis-10-follow-the-griffin.pdf (wordpress.com)

(c) The ancient origins of the legendary griffin | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net) *

 

 

Doggerland

Doggerland is a term applied to a shallow region (Fig.1) of the North Sea between Denmark and the North of England that covers an area of around 10,000 sq. miles. The existence of Doggerland was first suggested in a late 19th-century novel by H.G. Wells entitled A Story of the Stone Age. The appellation was coined by Professor Bryony Coles in 1998. However, the name has been applied recently(f) to nearly the totality of the Celtic Shelf (Fig.2). Ulf Erlingsson who had promoted his theory(b) that Atlantis hDoggerland2ad been located in Ireland (with 98.9% confidence!) has explained that the Egyptian story of Atlantis is the result of an account of megalithic Ireland conflated with a report of the inundation of Doggerland in 6200 BC resulting from a Norwegian storegga(ad).

According to some, this flooding may have been the inspiration behind the ‘impassable shoals’ described by Plato following the submergence of Atlantis.

However, it was Rachael Carson who was probably the first to suggest the Dogger Bank as the home of Atlantis in her 1951 book, The Sea Around Us[1267].  Later a Scandinavian writer, Nils Olof Bergquist, in his 1971 book, Ymdogat-Atlantis[785]. who appeared next to support this idea.   

Other writers such as Jean Deruelle(a), Sylvain Tristan(c) and Guy Gervis(d) have also linked the Dogger Bank with Atlantis. Gervis has written two related papers(k)(l) on the subject. The earliest suggestion of such a  connection was briefly supported by Robert Graves[342.39-3]. Rob Waugh, a British journalist, has offered an illustrated article(g) with the provocative title of Britain’s Atlantis found at the Bottom of the North Sea, in which he touches on some of the discoveries made on Doggerland.

In 2003, Georg Lohle put forward the idea that Atlantis had been situated in the North Sea between Denmark and Britain and destroyed around 2200 BC. He based this speculation on the content of the controversial Oera Linda Book(ac).

Some have combined Doggerland with exposed land further north, now known as the Viking-Bergen Banks, as having constituted the territory of Atlantis(x).

National Geographic

In 2009 a book[662] was published with the subtitle of The Rediscovery of Doggerland, based on the research of a team led by Professor Vincent Gaffney of the University of Birmingham. In July 2012 the UK’s Daily Mail published(h) an extensive article on Doggerland.

The flooding of the Dogger Bank has been attributed to a 6200 BC event apparently caused by either an outpouring of meltwater from Lake Agassiz in North America or a huge tsunami generated by a Norwegian storegga(e). This event was covered in an extensive article in the November 2012 edition of the BBC Focus magazine. The same article has a sidebar on Atlantis which suggests that there is “perhaps just one archaeological theory that has any serious claim on the myth.” Then, not for the first time, the BBC offered tacit support for the Minoan Hypothesis in spite of the fact that, at least ostensibly, it does not match Plato’s description of Atlantis in terms of either time, size or location and offers no rationale for its stance.

In December 2020, a degree of revisionism was offered in a New Scientist article, which suggested that storegga tsunami may have been less than previously thought. Furthermore, it proposes that parts of what is now the submerged Dogger Bank was not completely flooded by the tsunami, but that parts continued as dry land, perhaps for centuries!(y)

“For a long time, scientists assumed that a tsunami of this kind also caused the Dogger Bank, which was still protruding from the sea, to sink completely. According to a study by researchers at the University of Bradford, however, there was no single, all-destroying tsunami.

Rather, by examining sediments, the researchers were able to prove that only the northern part of Doggerland was submerged after the tsunami and that the destructive force of its floods was probably slowed down by hills or forests on the island.

However, after the water receded, the flooded area recovered over the years, as is demonstrated by the fact that evidence of plants and animals can be found again in the sediment layers above the disrupted tsunami layer.”  There is a suggestion that Heligoland may be the last remnant of Doggerland.(ab)

It has been estimated that over a period of a couple of hundred years, the English Channel was also created in a comparable manner(n).

The December 2012 edition of National Geographic magazine also published an informative article on Doggerland and the ongoing work by archaeologists in the region. It considers the Storegga or the Lake Agassiz meltwater to be the cause of Doggerland’s final inundation. For me, it was interesting that a map in the article showed a small area around where I live as the last glaciated region of Ireland.

Alfred de Grazia’s online Q-Mag also published an overview of the Doggerland story in 2012(j) that was originally taken from the German magazine Der Spiegel. The same site has another paper(r) by Jean Deruelle in which he also argues that Doggerland was the location of the Great Plain of Atlantis that stretched from the east of the Dogger Bank and extended as far as what is now Denmark. Plato described the plain as being surrounded by a huge ditch. Then Deruelle, with a flash of ingenuity claims that it was not a ditch but instead was a dyke, designed to hold back the slowing advancing waters of the North Sea that were being fed by deglaciation. He endeavoured to reinforce this claim with the proposal that the Greek word for a ditch, ‘taphros’ can also be used for dyke. This interpretation seems possible according to W.K. Pritchett, a distinguished historian [1622.52.5].

Robert John Langdon has proposed that megalith builders from Africa came to Doggerland as the Ice Age ended and when Doggerland submerged they migrated to what is now mainland Britain, eventually constructing Stonehenge(i). But Langdon has gone further and also claims that Doggerland was actually Atlantis(aa).

A 2014 ‘Drowned Landscapes’ exhibition(m) organised by Dr Richard Bates of the Department of Earth Sciences at St Andrew’s University, reveals in greater detail the flora and fauna, as well as the lives of its inhabitants, of this submerged world. Much of the information was gleaned from data provided by oil and gas companies, combined with artefacts recovered from the seafloor.

Comparable discoveries have been made submerged deep under the waters of Hanö Bay near the coast of Havang, Sweden and dated to about 7000 BC(v).

In 2015 it was announced that €2.5 million in funding from the European Union has enabled a number of archaeologists from Britain’s top universities to team up for what will be the most intensive study of Doggerland so far(o)(q). Joined by experts from the University of Ghent and assisted by the Belgian Navy they located the first identifiable submerged settlements on the floor of the North Sea. Until now (2019) the only evidence of human habitation in the region were occasional artefacts caught up in fishermen’s nets.

In 2016, it was revealed(p) that the ancient footprints of both adults and children had been discovered off the coast of Northumberland, formerly a part of Doggerland. Their feet had apparently been shod.

On Sunday, January 13th, 2019. the UK’s Sunday Express delighted its readers with two Atlantis stories(t)(u). First, the online edition of the paper had a story by one of its reporters, with an ‘Atlantis Discovered’ headline claiming that the remains of an ancient 8,000-year-old city, home to ‘tens of thousands’ of people, had been discovered in the North Sea, in a huge region sometimes referred to as Doggerland. The reporter cites Dr Richard Bates in support of this account. Unfortunately, the 2012 comments by Dr Bates never mentioned ‘a city’, but a vast area occupied by ‘tens of thousands’ of people, presumably early farmers(s). Then the same edition of the same paper by the same ‘reporter’ with another ‘Atlantis Found?’ headline, offered a video clip of the Maltese island of Filfla, while the commentator told us that Plato had said that a devastating earthquake had destroyed Atlantis it was finished off by an eruption. This is factually incorrect as Plato never mentioned an eruption. These two accounts are a sad reflection of the quality of media reporting today.

In 2020, David Keys, author of Catastrophe [1330] wrote an article for the UK’s Independent newspaper outlining the most recent research into the 6200 BC tsunami that destroyed Doggerland. It is estimated that multiple giant waves inundated some 2,700 square miles of land – from Scotland in the north to Norfolk in the south.

New underwater research carried out by the universities of Bradford, Warwick, St Andrews and Wales has for the first time discovered that the tsunami devastated parts of East Anglia and adjacent land which is now submerged beneath the southern part of the North Sea.” (z)

>In 2021, the UK’s Guardian reported on an “exhibition, Doggerland: Lost World in the North Sea’, at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden, southern Holland, includes more than 200 objects, ranging from a deer bone in which an arrowhead is embedded, and fossils such as petrified hyena droppings and mammoth molars, to a fragment of a skull of a young male Neanderthal. Studies of the forehead bone, dredged up in 2001 off the coast of Zeeland, suggests he was a big meat eater.”(ae)

Graham Phillips‘ latest offering is The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea [2063], published in late July 2023.<

(a) atlantide (archive.org)

(b) http://atlantisinireland.com/

(c) http://spcov.free.fr/site_nicoulaud/en/empire.php

(d) See:  https://web.archive.org/web/20180320072706/https://nwepexplore.com/

(e) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20160303180752/https://arheologija.ff.uni-lj.si/documenta/pdf35/weninger35.pdf

(f)https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-18687504?goback=.gde_157795_member_130235946

(g) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/atlantida_mu/esp_atlantida_38.htm

(h) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2167731/Britains-Atlantis-North-sea–huge-undersea-kingdom-swamped-tsunami-5-500-years-ago.html

(i) http://www.the-stonehenge-enigma.info/#!/2013/06/stonehenge-atlantis-momentous-discovery.html
Also See:https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-2071/

(j) https://www.q-mag.org/doggerland-lost.html

(k) See: Archive: 2073

(l)  See: Archive 2074

(m) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2167731/Britains-Atlantis-North-sea–huge-undersea-kingdom-swamped-tsunami-5-500-years-ago.html#ixzz374DGxUiM

(n) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

(o) https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/secrets-britains-atlantis-revealed-archaeologists-6361422

(p) https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/7000-year-old-forest-and-footprints-uncovered-atlantis-britain-005913?nopaging=1

(q) https://www.q-mag.org/doggerland-to-be-digitally-repopulated.html

(r) https://web.archive.org/web/20150706130417/https://www.q-mag.org/the-great-plain-of-atlantis-was-it-in-doggerland.html

(s) https://www.guidememalta.com/en/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-mysterious-islet-of-filfla

(t) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-18687504

(u) https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1071594/atlantis-found-malta-island-matches-plato-description-spt

(v) https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/17/the-discovery-of-the-submerged-stone-age-atlantis/

(w) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/atlantis-britain-stone-age-north-sea-archaeology-artefacts-discovery-a8952721.html?fbclid=IwAR2JPs3s5OvPxHyVHpOYeiSmTJiWoqSOu7_72ZOZzHhK2DaKIQCyiXoVURg

(x) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbenuEzWgQk 

(y) Tiny island survived tsunami that helped separate Britain and Europe | New Scientist

(z) https://news.knowledia.com/GB/en/articles/how-a-giant-tsunami-devastated-britain-s-atlantis-3d966568f069ce0cc79d391c7f4a28ee51e59cfa

(aa) http://dawn-of-the-lost-civilisation.info/dlc_atlantis

(ab) https://www.dw.com/en/doggerland-how-did-the-atlantis-of-the-north-sea-sink/a-55960379 

(ac) Atlantis is a myth or real past (archive.org) 

(ad) https://www.academia.edu/437214/The_Catastrophic_Final_Flooding_of_Doggerland_by_the_Storegga_Slide_Tsunami

(ae) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/01/doggerland-lost-atlantis-of-the-north-sea-gives-up-its-ancient-secrets *

 

 

Sweden

Sweden was claimed to be the location of Atlantis by Olaus (Olaf) Rudbeck in the 17th century. Before him another Swede, Johannes Bureus, expressed similar views. His friend Carl Lundius supported Rudbeck’s theories, but received none of the acclaim.

In the 18th century Carl Friedrich Baër was happy to follow a fashion, which placed Atlantis in the Holy Land. I am not aware of any major Swedish contribution to Atlantology in the 19th century.*However, the following century saw a number of Swedish researchers make valuable contributions to the subject.*

The discovery of the Mid Atlantic Ridge led René Malaise and Hans Pettersson to suggest the Azores as remnants of Atlantis, an idea still popular today. Around the same time Gunnar Rudberg proposed that Syracuse in Sicily had inspired some of Plato’s description of Atlantis. Arvid Högbom advocated the North Sea as the location of Atlantis in 1915, long before Jürgen Spanuth. In the same region Nils Bergquist opted for the Dogger Bank as has Ulf Erlingsson.

More recently, we seem to have come full circle as Bertil Falk has revived some of Rudbeck’s ideas(a) and a short illustrated 2007 paper (updated 2015)(b) by Robert Fritzius also added some additional modern support. However, for something quite different we have Carl Festin promoting a Mediterranean location.

*Nils-Axel Mörner and Bob Lind, two controversial researchers, have proposed, in a number of papers, that a Bronze Age trading centre existed in southeast Sweden, which had links with the Mycenaeans, Minoans and Phoenicians in the Mediterranean. They suggest that ancient references to Hyperborea may have been generated by this trade. However, although they do not associate Hyperborea with the story of Atlantis, they delivered their theories in papers presented to the Atlantis Conferences of 2008 [750.685] and 2011(c). They also touch on a number of other peripheral subjects including Cygnus, archaeoastronomy and amber. Similar views on early Baltic trade with the Mediterranean have been expressed elsewhere(d).*

(a) https://www.vof.se/folkvett/ar-1993/nr-4/platons-atlantis-diktning-som-tagits-pa-allvar/ (Swedish)

(b) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20100807201746/https://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/atlantis.htm

(c) https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-1140054_59543.htm

*(d) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20170611180721/https://www.speroforum.com/a/ROURBRXIJL49/77965-Ancient-trade-from-Mediterranean-to-Scandinavia-revealed*

 

Storegga

Storegga submarine slides are enormous underwater movements of glacial storegga slidesedimentary deposits that were only recently identified. While many of these occurred following the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age some more recent movements have also been identified(j)*. Either earthquakes or the decomposition of gas hydrates is their most likely cause. As many as three storegga have been identified that occurred off the west coast of Norway around 6000-5000 BC(a).  The combined volume of material involved in the last two events has been calculated at 1700 cubic kilometres. As a consequence, gigantic tsunamis were generated which flooded a number of landmasses including Scotland.

Ulf Erlingsson suggests that one of these events, around 6100 BC, may have been responsible for the final submergence of the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, creating the impassable muddy shoals mentioned by Plato.>This idea, if you’ll forgive the pun, does not hold water, as Plato clearly says that the muddy shoals were still a maritime hazard nearly 6,000 years later when sea levels had risen considerably and could no longer present a navigational barrier.<

The dating of these events is discussed by Bernhard Weninger and his associates in a 2008 paper available online(b).

Knut Rydgren and Stein Bondevik of Norway’s Sogn og Fjordane University have concluded that the flooding of Doggerland as a result of the Storegga event took place at the end of autumn(g).

The evidence to date suggests that the flooding of the Black Sea coincided with a storegga event, which would require a catastrophe on a scale not previously considered. In a 2017 paper(e), John M. Jensen offers additional evidence to support this contention.

In 2014, Dr Jon Hill revealed(d) the results of a study of the impact of the 6,200 BC Storegga on the low-lying Doggerland stating that “We were the first ever group to model the Storegga tsunami with Doggerland in place. Previous studies have used modern bathymetry (ocean depth).” The study was commented on further by Axel Bojanowski in Der Spiegel with an English translation on the de Grazia website(f). The scale of the landslide is graphically described there.

Yurii Mosenkis endorses this date proposing that it lay between 6225 BC and 6170 BC(h). Further support for the 6200 BC date can be read in a 2008 paper(i).

In 2015 the UK’s Daily Mail offered further details(c) gleaned from articles in the respected journal Geology and Science Nordic.

>A paper published in 2020 by Alaister Dawson et al of Dundee University(l) refers to the studies in the Shetland Isles which indicate that the Storegga Slide tsunami run-up deposits have been identified between 8.1 and 11.8 metres above present sea levels. They add “It should be noted that the position of relative sea level ca 8 ka cited here as 20 m may have been as low as ca 30 m.”  This suggests a tsunami of between 30 and 40 metres, which must have been a terrifying spectacle. This paper should be read in conjunction with an earlier paper(k) by Dawson.<

(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

(b) https://www.academia.edu/437214/The_Catastrophic_Final_Flooding_of_Doggerland_by_the_Storegga_Slide_Tsunami 

(c) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3317451/Tsunami-devastated-Europe-8-150-years-ago-Huge-waves-swept-hundreds-miles-North-Sea-Ice-Age.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

(d) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27224243

(e) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2017&id=505

(f) https://www.q-mag.org/the-tsunami-that-obliterated-doggerland.html

(g) https://www.q-mag.org/moss-betrays-the-season-of-the-storegga-event.html

(h) (99+) HIGH PRECISION ASTRONOMICAL CHRONOLOGY OF ENEOLITHIC-BRONZE GREECE | iurii mosenkis – Academia.edu 

(i) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228667700_The_catastrophic_final_flooding_of_Doggerland_by_the_Storegga_Slide_tsunami

(j) shetland Tsunami hazards (archive.org) *

(k) (PDF) The Storegga Slides: Evidence from eastern Scotland for a possible tsunami (researchgate.net)_ *

(l) https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/38766820/Dawson_et_al_2019_Sedimentology.pdf *

Sexual Undertones

Sexual Undertones in the Atlantis narrative have been identified by J. Warren Wells, who maintains that Clieto or Kleito in Greek is the diminutive of Kleitoris, which is rendered clitoris in English. He further contends that the name of her husband, Poseidon, can have its constituent elements, Pos and Eidon, translated as ‘penis idol’(a). His ideas have been supported by Ulf Erlingsson(b).

Sex at a more blatant level was achieved by John Grant with his Sex Secrets of Ancient Atlantis delivered with all the accuracy and sincerity we could expect from tabloid journalism.

David McMillin has an extensive article on sex in Atlantis(c), unfortunately the valueof his speculations are, in my view, marred by an over reliance on the ‘readings’ of Edgar Cayce.

(a) https://greekatlantis.warpco.com/Sexcentric.html (offline 1.07.14)

(b) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190727102713/https://www.ireland-hotels.net/en/atlantisinireland.html

(c) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20180627092444/https://www.mcmillinmedia.com/atlantis-sex/

Erlingsson, Dr Ulf *

Dr Ulf Erlingsson is a Swedish geographer, geomorphologist and expert in underwater mapping. To explain several puzzles regarding the Ice Age, he developed The Captured Ice Shelf Hypothesis. He was the chairman of the Geographic Society of erlingssonUppsala, Sweden and in 1991 he received the Linnaeus Prize from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala.

Erlingsson was the American representative of AB Hydro consult(a), a spin-off from Uppsala University, Department of Physical Geography. A few years after moving to the U.S., he left AB Hydroconsult and founded Lindorm, Inc. in 2006, where he remains as CEO and President.

During the 1990s while studying the geography of the Baltic region, Erlingsson obtained a set of Soviet maps, which greatly assisted the building of the database he was engaged in. However, these maps, which had been bought openly in Riga, outlined plans for a Russian invasion of Sweden in the event of a war in Europe with NATO(b).

Since moving to Florida, Erlingsson has been very involved politically with the ‘Progressive’ wing of the Democratic Party.

Erlingsson recently identified the empire of Atlantis with the megalithic cultures of Western Europe and North Africa and suggested its capital may have been located in Ireland. His book [319] is interesting and contains a number of original ideas. However, as an Irishman, I am not convinced that our remarkable monuments in the Boyne Valley are the remains of or related to Atlantis. I will discuss this further in my review of his book. Erlingsson sees Atlantis everywhere, for example, in a carving on a stone basin found in the Knowth passage tomb close to Newgrange.

Erlingsson presented his ideas to the Atlantis Conference held on Milos in 2005(g).

Erlingsson has also suggested that the Irish authorities have deliberately made Newgrange inaccessible. This is total nonsense. As a frequent visitor to the site over many years, I have witnessed nothing but every effort being made to maximise the throughput of visitors into the very confined space within our most famous national monument. The carved basin (see image) discovered near Newgrange, is perceived by Erlingsson as a replica of Plato’s Knowth stone basincircular city of Atlantis while I can see an early version of a Babylonian winged disk. In 2005, probably as a promotional ploy, he issued a challenge for an open debate on his theory.

Frank Joseph has related speculative ideas claiming that “the early date for New Grange, its circular construction, sophisticated solar orientation and mythic tradition all point to Atlantean origins.”[0636.70]

Like all ancient monuments, the Boyne Valley cluster has generated its own collection of wild speculation, such as Freddy Silva’s claim that there is a connection between Knowth and Sacsayhuaman near Cuzco in Peru and who also hints at a possible link with Egypt’s Osirion(f)!

Erlingsson has more recently suggested that the ‘sunken’ island referred to by Plato was probably located in the vicinity of the southern end of the North Sea. He proposes that around 6100 BC a tsunami generated by a massive storegga off Norway reduced the then low-lying Dogger Bank to the impassable muddy shoals recorded by Plato! He has suggested that the original Atlantis narrative, conveyed to Solon, was a mixture of an account of megalithic Ireland and a report of the inundation of Doggerland.

Dr Patrick Wallace, the Director of the National Museum of Ireland, declared that he was unaware of any archaeological evidence to support Erlingsson’s claims.

Nevertheless, Erlingsson has produced some interesting material on the bursting of glacial lakes or what is known in Iceland as jökulhlaups and their possible effect on the ending of the last Ice Age(c).

In 2020, the unaccredited Keystone University in Dublin published two articles on the Ancient Origins website, which drew on the theories of Erlingsson and supported the idea of Atlantis in Ireland(d)(e). The Keystone theory has been developed into a book[1775] by Anthony Woods.

(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org)  

(b) USSR Planned to Invade Sweden (archive.org)  (halfway down page)*

(c) Explanation of Bølling by jökulhlaup (archive.org)

(d) https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/atlantis-ireland-0013940

(e) https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/ireland-atlantis-0013941

(f) https://www.ancient-origins.net/opinion-guest-authors/newgrange-and-saqsayhuaman-separated-birth-3050-bc-006266

(g) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242275382_A_geographic_comparison_of_Plato%27s_Atlantis_and_Ireland_as_a_test_of_the_megalithic_culture_hypothesis