Two Atlantises have been proposed by some commentators in order to explain some of the difficulties in Plato’s text. While the concept has been adopted in principle, the locations chosen vary.

Lewis Spence was probably the first to suggest the idea, followed by D. Duvillé, while more recently Jürgen Hepke has followed suit. The Russian Atlantologist Vladimir Scherbakov has promoted the idea of one Atlantis in the Atlantic and a second one incorporating major cities in the Eastern Mediterranean. He believed that migrants from the Atlantic original had peopled the second one.

It is clear that Plato describes two Atlantises separated by both time and geography. One was the Stone Age culture, briefly referred to by Plato and the other was the Bronze Age society that he describes in much greater detail. This apparent contradiction is easily explained if we accept that the original Atlantis was preliterate and in common with all very ancient peoples their achievements would have been clouded by the mists of time before committed to writing. Not unreasonably, to make up for a lack of detail, Plato would have overlaid the oral tradition with the attributes of an advanced civilisation of his own era, something that his audience could identify with. Such a literary device would have been within the bounds of artistic licence at that period.