Archive 7567

Quest for Atlantis. The search for archaeological

evidence of a legend

Kenneth L. Feder

Leidschrift, jaargang 32, nummer 1, januari 2017

Introduction

As old as Stonehenge, the megalithic site of Carnac, in France, is not a stone

circle or ‘henge’. It is, instead, four separate groupings of linear alignments

consisting of more than three thousand upright stones or ‘menhirs’. As an

archaeologist interested in the ability of ancient people to marshal the forces

of enormous groups and coordinate their labor to produce monumental

structures, I wanted to see Carnac for myself. My assistant during my 2001

visit to the site was my then fifteen-year-old son Josh. At first, we had the

place all to ourselves and, except for the rumble of traffic on a nearby

roadway, it was easy to imagine Carnac as it was when new, more than 4,000

years ago.

That is when we saw him. He appeared to be, at first, nothing more

than another visitor to the site, entranced, as we were, by its alien majesty.

Curiously, however, each time I looked up from my reverie, he appeared to

be moving surreptitiously toward us. When he finally peered out from

behind the standing stone my son and I were examining, I was startled and

more than a little concerned about this gentleman’s intent.

My French speaking abilities, already fairly limited, became even

worse in my emotional state, but I managed to blurt out: ‘Pardon? Que

voulez-vous?’ To which the stranger responded in heavily accented English:

‘Oh, I am not French, I am Dutch. I am so sorry to disturb you. Pardon me,

but aren’t you an archaeologist?’

I was stunned. How could this person have known my profession? I

responded: ‘Well, yes, but how did you know that?’ His response clarified

the situation.

I have recently seen you on a BBC documentary about the Lost

Continent of Atlantis. I recognized you immediately and thought it

such an amazing bit of luck, running into an archaeologist from the

television here at this wonderful place. I have had a long layman’s

interest in archaeology and I thought the documentary was fantastic,

so very interesting. I very much enjoyed your contribution to the

show.

Kenneth L. Feder

64

The program to which he was referring was titled Atlantis Uncovered. It was a

1999 BBC documentary, part of their Horizon science series. 1 I had, indeed,

been interviewed on the program, wherein I expressed my strong skepticism

concerning the historicity of Atlantis.

I admit, at that moment, to feeling rather full of myself as my new

Dutch friend heaped praise upon the documentary, my profession in

general, and me in particular. Of course, it did seem a bit odd when he

leaned in and whispered, almost conspiratorially: ‘Are you searching for

Atlantis here?’ I really had been unremittingly skeptical about the claim that

Atlantis was a real place or even that Plato had based the dialogues in which

the story appears on an actual location and series of events. At the

conclusion of our conversation, the two of us shook hands and off he went,

quite pleased, it appeared, to have met a ‘real’ archaeologist, one from the

television no less.

I turned to my son, perhaps a little too prideful, and said: ‘You have

to admit that was pretty impressive. Here we are, walking around an ancient

megalithic monument in France and a Dutch guy recognizes me and praises

my contribution to a television documentary produced by the BBC and

then asks if I’m searching for Atlantis. I’m internationally famous! Aren’t

you impressed?’ Josh gave me his best look of fake sincerity, put his hand

on my shoulder and said: ‘Gee dad; I guess you know you’ve really made it

when you have a fan club in Holland.’

The purpose of this story, however, is not to show how annoying

teenagers can be, but to exemplify the abiding interest people have in the

possibility that archaeological evidence proves that human history was

greatly influenced by a precociously sophisticated ancient civilization which,

despite its advanced technology, great wealth, and military power was

destroyed by an unimaginable natural cataclysm about 11,600 years ago. The

producers of the BBC documentary and my Dutch friend were certainly not

the first to wonder if there was any truth to the tale told by Critias and

passed along by Plato. That interest in Atlantis has inspired some to actually

search for the truth behind Plato’s story in the physical record provided by

archaeology. I will summarize a number of these attempts in this paper.

1 ‘Atlantis Uncovered’, BBC Horizon (1999).

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65

Finding Atlantis?

Louis Figuier was a well-respected naturalist and scientist in the second half

of the nineteenth century. The author of several books, the one most

relevant to our discussion here is La Terre et Les Mers ou Description Physique

du Globe – The Earth and the Seas or Description of the World. 2 In this work,

Figuier appears to be the first author to assert that: 1) Plato’s Atlantis was a

veritable place; 2) it was located, not in the Atlantic, but in the

Mediterranean and; 3) its demise as described in the Timaeus and Critias

dialogues was precipitated by an actual event, specifically the volcanic

eruption of Thera on the island historically called Santorini. 3 In La Terre et

Les Mers, Figuier proposes that:

In other words, we hope to establish that Plato’s Atlantis, accepted

by some, denied by others, interpreted a hundred ways at various

times, has really existed, and disappeared beneath the waves, because

of earthquakes similar to those seen today in the vicinity of Santorini.

Plato’s Atlantis was, in our view, an island in the archipelago of

Greece. A volcanic upheaval swallowed it beneath the waters of the

Mediterranean in prehistoric times.4

Disputing the claims made by others that Atlantis was located in Palestine,

Sweden, or America, Figuier maintains that Atlantis existed ‘not beyond the

Pillars of Hercules, as in the text of Timaeus, but we believe, in the Greek

archipelago.’ 5 Like many authors who followed him, Figuier ignores many

of the particulars of Critias’s rather precise details concerning the location

of Atlantis (in the Atlantic Ocean) as well as its size (‘greater in extent than

Libya and Asia’ 6 ).

At one time associated with Queen’s College in Belfast, K.T. Frost

followed Figuier in a correspondence titled ‘The Lost Continent’, published

anonymously in The Times (London) on February 19, 1909. 7 There he asserts

2 L. Figuier, La Terre et Les Mers ou Description Physique du Globe (Paris, 1872).

3 Plato, Timaeus. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html, accessed 16 October

2016; Plato, Critias. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html, accessed 16 October

2016.

4 Figuier, La Terre et Les Mers, 415; my translation.

5 Ibidem, 420-421.

6 Plato, Critias. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html, accessed 16 October 2016.

7 K.T. Frost, ‘The Lost Continent’, The Times, 19 February 1909, 10.

Kenneth L. Feder

66

that the essence of Plato’s Atlantis story was based on fact. He specifies that:

‘The whole description of Atlantis which is given in the Timaeus and Critias

has features so thoroughly Minoan that even Plato could not have invented

so many unsuspecting facts.’8 Sir Arthur Evans had, in 1903, excavated the

great, labyrinthine structure at Knossos on Crete and, in so doing, had

discovered what he believed to be an ancient, lost civilization, that of the

Minoans. Frost believed that this Minoan civilization had been the

inspiration for Plato’s Atlantis.

Four years later, Frost abandoned his anonymity and expanded his

thesis in an article published in The Journal of Hellenic Studies (1913). 9 Frost

makes clear the thrust of his argument in the title of that article: ‘The Critias

and Minoan Crete’. Frost reiterated in this article that much of Plato’s

description of the geography and culture of Atlantis was a remarkably close

match to what was historically known and what had been archaeologically

revealed about Minoan Crete, but his enumeration of similarities is quite

generic. He notes, for example, that Plato’s Atlantis was a ‘great and

wonderful empire’ which held dominion over the sea in which it was

located. 10 Beyond this Frost points out that the Atlanteans had expansionist

ambitions, hoping to economically and politically dominate their neighbors.

Frost then asks rhetorically: ‘Could the political position of Cnossus (today

spelled Knossos) be expressed more accurately?’ 11 Well, though such a

summary of Atlantis as provided in Timaeus and Critias may seem to be an

accurate match for Minoan Crete, it applies to virtually all civilizations, both

ancient and modern. The very general nature of so many of the proposed

identities between Atlantis and an archaeological source, especially Minoan

Crete, is a fundamental problem that afflicts Frost’s and, in truth, every

attempt to link the literary creation of Plato to a real place.

Frost clearly recognizes that in order to transport an island nation

placed by Plato in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Pillars of Hercules (the

Straits of Gibraltar), to a location within the Mediterranean where Crete is

actually located, quite a bit of reworking needs to be done to Plato’s story.

Frost simply asserts that, regarding the location of Atlantis, the Egyptian

source of the tale must simply have been confused. The details about

8 Frost, ‘The Lost Continent’, 10.

9 K.T. Frost, ‘The Critias and Minoan Crete’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 33 (1913)

189-206.

10 Frost, ‘The Critias and Minoan Crete’, 197.

11 Ibidem.

Quest for Atlantis

67

Atlantis appearing in Critias, and which Frost acknowledges to be

demonstrably false (for example, the significant role of elephants on the lost

continent though they are wholly lacking in Minoan Crete), are dismissed as

minor errors or embellishments which also can be ignored. 12 In other words,

Frost picks and chooses those general details of Timaeus and Critias that

match what was then known about Minoan Crete and ignores or

rationalizes those that don’t. Tellingly, concerning the precise and

impossible dating of Atlantis and its utter destruction some 9,300 years

before Plato, Frost has nothing to say at all.

Making Crete Atlantis

Following this, not much new was added to the Atlantis equation until

Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos proposed a mechanism for the fall,

not of Atlantis, but of the Minoan civilization, in an article published in the

venerable British journal Antiquity in 1939. 13 Since Evans, archaeologists and

historians have recognized that, beginning about 5,000 years ago, Minoan

Crete had evolved into the dominant pre-Mycenaean and pre-Greek

economic and political entity in the Mediterranean, an equal to that of

Egypt to the east and south during the same time period. Centered on the

island of Crete, the iconic architectural accomplishment of Minoan

civilization is the sprawling complex at Knossos, a monumental palace/civic

center, built more than 3,800 years ago, which was home to their king, and

was also the hub of Minoan economic and social life.

Covering a vast expanse of 20,000 m 2 , the Knossos palace contains

more than one thousand separate rooms in its three and sometimes four

individual levels, including a central courtyard, a ceremonial bath, rooms for

storage, living quarters adorned with frescos of dolphins and bulls, and a

complex of elaborate rooms thought to have housed the king and his family

(see fig. 1). Archaeologists Runnels and Murray characterize the palace at

Knossos as, fundamentally, ‘a village under one roof.’ 14 Upwards of 100,000

people were citizens of the Minoan polity, living on Crete and surrounding

12 Frost, ‘The Critias and Minoan Crete’, 204-205.

13 S. Marinatos, ‘The volcanic destruction of Minoan Crete’, Antiquity 13 (1939)

425-439.

14 C. Runnels and P.M. Murray, Greece Before History: An Archaeological Companion and

Guide (Stanford, CA 2001) 80.

Kenneth L. Feder

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islands in the Mediterranean. Crete’s geographic position in the

Mediterranean allowed for its control of trade in the region and it became a

dominant maritime power with important harbors and a large fleet of

seaworthy ships.

Fig. 1: Photograph showing a small, reconstructed and refurbished

segment of the expansive palace of Knossos on Crete. Photo:

Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia. Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Knossos#/media/File:Knossos_-_North_Portico_02.jpg, accessed 1

November 2016.

An ancient and magnificent palace on Crete was an unexpected discovery

and it comes as no surprise that it inspired speculation concerning a

possible connection to Plato’s tale of an advanced civilization. At the time

of Marinatos’s writing, radiocarbon dating had not yet been developed and

chronologies were proposed based largely on the analysis of stratigraphy, by

sequencing ceramics, and, where possible, through the analysis of historical

documents. This uncertainty in dating the fall of the Minoan civilization

resides at the core of the hypothesis he proposed in his 1939 Antiquity

article. In that piece, Marinatos suggests a direct correspondence between

the cataclysmic eruption of Thera – that Figuier had already associated with

the fall of fabled Atlantis – and the destruction of the historical Minoan

Quest for Atlantis

69

civilization. Marinatos proposed that this eruption, located just one hundred

kilometers north of Crete, was the proximate cause of the fall of the

Minoans.

Using the paroxysmal 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the East Indies

as a model for the destructive force of a pyroclastic volcanic eruption,

Marinatos proposed that the Minoan civilization was virtually destroyed,

nearly overnight, by a combination of the deposition of volcanic ejecta from

Thera onto Crete, attendant powerful earthquake aftershocks of the

eruption, and the devastating impact of gigantic sea waves, citing eyewitness

accounts from Java and Sumatra of walls of water of ninety feet high

crashing onto those coasts with disastrous effect. In Marinatos’s view, a

geographically small maritime civilization like that of Minoan Crete with a

dense, urban population could not have survived the devastating impacts of

such a natural catastrophe.

In the 1939 article, Marinatos never suggests, even tangentially, that

the historical destruction of a powerful maritime civilization in the

Mediterranean located just a shade more than three hundred kilometers

from Plato’s Athens and a bit more than three thousand years before Plato

wrote the Timaeus and Critias dialogues, might have in some measure

inspired the tale of Atlantis. Nevertheless, the Marinatos Antiquity article

was another key piece of the puzzle and it led to none other than Marinatos

himself taking the next step and making overt the connection between

Minoan Crete and Atlantis in an article he wrote in 1950 for the Greek

journal Cretica Chronica (titled ‘On the Legend of Atlantis’15 ), and which was

later published as a 46-page booklet in English titled: Some Words About the

Legend of Atlantis.16

In that article, Marinatos takes Figuier’s hypothesis that the eruption

of Thera caused the destruction of Atlantis, combines it with Frost’s

hypothesis that Minoan Crete and Atlantis were one and the same, then

overlays his hypothesis that the Minoan civilization was destroyed about

3,500 years ago by the cataclysmic eruption of Thera, ties it up in a neat

little package, and presents what has become the core of the modern claim

that Atlantis was, essentially, Minoan Crete and that Crete/Atlantis was

destroyed by the eruption of Thera (see Table 1).

15 S. Marinatos, ‘On the legend of Atlantis’, Cretica Chronica 4 (1950) 195-213.

16 S. Marinatos, Some words about the legend of Atlantis (Athens 1971).

Kenneth L. Feder

70

Table 1: Chronology of the development of Figuier’s hypothesis

Marinatos asserts that surely the Egyptians experienced impacts from the

cataclysmic eruption of Thera. At about the same time, the Minoans, about

whom they were aware and with whom they traded, disappeared. This ‘gave

rise’ among the Egyptians, ‘to the myth of an island, beyond all measure

powerful and rich, being submerged.’ 17 In his view, the Egyptian priests

wrote down that bit of history, told it to the Greek sage Solon during his

visit to Egypt, Solon recorded it, passed it down, and three hundred years

later it was told by Critias. Finally, Plato recorded the story in the form of a

dialogue that bears Critias’s name.

Marinatos’s synthesis of Figuier’s, Frost’s, and his own work was

seductive, compelling, and convincing to many. Atlantis, as described by

Plato through the testimony of Critias, was a vast and powerful ancient

civilization until its destruction was wrought by a cataclysmic natural

disaster. Minoan Crete was a vast and powerful ancient maritime civilization

until its destruction was wrought by a cataclysmic natural disaster. Ergo,

Atlantis and Minoan Crete were one and the same.

17 Matintos, Some words about the legend of Atlantis, 46.

Author Year Claim

Louis Figuire 1872 Atlantis was destroyed by the

eruption of Thera.

K.T. Frost 1909, 1913 The Minoan civilization was

Atlantis.

Spyrindon Marinatos 1939 The Minoan civilization was

destroyed by the eruption of

Thera.

Spyrindon Marinatos 1950 The Minoan civilization was

Atlantis and was destroyed by the

eruption of Thera.

Angelos

Galanopoulos and

Edward Bacon

1969 The Minoan civilization was

Atlantis and major discrepancies

between Plato’s story and the

archaeological record result from a

math error.

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71

One significant problem with this neat equation is that we now know

that the dating simply doesn’t work. Certainly we cannot blame Marinatos

for not having access to modern dating methods which, essentially, negate

the underpinning of his argument. Though he was largely correct

concerning the timing of the waning and eventual collapse of the Minoan

Crete civilization, the dating he applied to the major eruption of Thera,

which he believed to have occurred nearly simultaneously with the fall of

Minoan Crete, turns out to have been off by more than a hundred years. A

radiocarbon date derived from a twig recovered from a volcanic deposit on

the flanks of the island (Santorini) left behind by the eruption of Thera

produced an age of between 1627 and 1600 B.C. (or about 3,643 and 3,616

years ago). 18 As the twig was growing on a tree that was killed in the

eruption, that date places the eruption relatively precisely in the late

seventeenth century B.C. (more than 3,600 years ago).

Similar confirmatory dates have been derived in a research project

directed by Sturt Manning. 19 In that work, 28 samples of seeds and twigs

were recovered on the island of Santorini from volcanic deposits dating to

the eruption of Thera. Those samples produced dates which ranged from

1639 to 1616 B.C., confirming that the eruption of Thera occurred more

than one hundred years before the documented collapse of Minoan Crete

and, therefore, cannot have been the direct cause of its demise. This is

fundamentally contradictory to a major element of Plato’s tale for those

who assert that Minoan Crete was Atlantis.

Certainly, Marinatos was correct that the powerful eruption of Thera

had a significant impact on the Minoan civilization. The sprawling palace at

Knossos was severely damaged at about the time of the eruption and almost

certainly Minoan harbors were destroyed by the ensuing tsunamis. However,

in the overall trajectory of Minoan civilization, the destructive impact of the

eruption of Thera registers only as a deflection not a destruction. The ability

to withstand a powerful natural catastrophe, to persevere and rebuild its

infrastructure, is the hallmark of a great civilization and Minoan Crete was

just such a civilization. Surely it suffered an economic blow, but it

rebounded, and quickly. The palace at Knossos was rebuilt, and Minoan

dominance rose again.

18 W.L. Friedrich et al., ‘Santorini eruption dated to 1627-1600 B.C.’, Science 312

(2006) 548.

19 S. Manning, ‘Chronology for the Aegean Late Bronze Age 1700-1400 B.C.’,

Science 312 (2006) 565-569.

Kenneth L. Feder

72

So, ultimately, if Plato’s purpose was to exemplify the destruction of

a great power by a natural catastrophe visited upon them by the gods, then

Minoan Crete was an imperfect bit of source material. The correspondences

between history and philosophy are simply far too weak to make any sort of

definitive or non-generic connection.

A mathematical fix?

Seismologist Angelos G. Galanopoulos, in a work co-authored by Edward

Bacon titled Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend, proposes what he believes

to be a simple mathematical fix to the problem of the metrical discrepancies

between Plato and the archaeology of Minoan Crete. 20

To begin, Galanopoulos and Bacon freely acknowledge that: ‘The

date of 9600 BC for Atlantis is both incredible and impossible.’ 21 Rather

than reject the hypothesis that Atlantis was Minoan Crete because of this

discrepancy, Galanopoulos and Bacon instead offer a workaround, asserting

the following: ‘This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the mistakes in

the date of the Atlantis catastrophe are systematic and not accidental; and

arise in the same way.’ 22

It would seem, however, that such a conclusion is ‘inevitable’ only if

one is committed to confirming the hypothesis rather than testing it. The

mathematical solution provided by Galanopoulos and Bacon is that some

measurements provided by Plato regarding Atlantis – those that happen to

conform to the archaeological record of the Minoans – are quite accurate,

while others – those that contradict the archaeological record of the

Minoans – are off by a factor of ten.

As transmitted by Critias, Solon reported that Atlantis was destroyed

nine thousand years ago (that’s nine thousand years before he was told the

story by the priests in 600 B.C., therefore, 9600 B.C. or about 11,600 years

before the present). However, the eruption of Thera had occurred only

(very roughly) nine hundred years before Solon recorded that fact. ‘This

seems to indicate,’ Galanopoulos and Bacon maintain, ‘that when Solon was

transcribing the Egyptian writings the word or symbol representing

20 A.G. Galanopoulos and E. Bacon, Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend (New York,

NY 1969).

21 Galanopoulos and Bacon, Atlantis, 42.

22 Ibidem, 133.

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‘hundred’ was mistaken for that representing one thousand.’23 So, though he

recorded the Thera eruption – and the simultaneous destruction of Atlantis

– as having occurred nine thousand years before his time, Solon meant to

write – or should have written – nine hundred. This argument, however,

appears to be little more than rationalization. It ignores the fact, as pointed

out by Castleden, that the hieroglyph representing ‘one hundred’ (a coiled

rope) cannot possibly be confused with the symbol representing one

thousand (a lotus flower). 24

The problems raised in identifying Atlantis as Minoan Crete are

dismissed by Galanopoulos and Bacon as the result of confusion,

embellishment, conflation, and simple error between the story first being

recorded by the Egyptian priests (at, by the way, an unspecified time, and

that record has never been found) and Plato recording it just a little before

he died in 347 B.C. Certainly, traditions about a historical event, filtered

through translation, passed down orally, and recorded hundreds of years

later are subject to all manner of transformation. The arguments presented

by Figuier, Frost, Marinatos, and Galanopoulos and Bacon aren’t inherently

unreasonable, but ultimately, in each case, much of Plato’s Atlantis has to be

ignored, altered, or rationalized.

As the author L. Sprague de Camp phrased it: ‘Now, while some of

these points may be well taken, you cannot change all the details of Plato’s

story and still claim to have Plato’s story.’25 Indeed, you cannot. Figure 2

graphically depicts the lack of correspondence between Plato’s description

of Atlantis and the archaeology of Minoan Crete. Clearly there are, indeed,

too many details to change to make Minoan Crete ancient Atlantis.

23 Galanopoulos and Bacon, Atlantis, 133.

24 R. Castleden, Atlantis Destroyed (London 1998).

25 L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and

Literature (New York, NY 1954).

Kenneth L. Feder

74

Fig. 2: Pie graph showing the lack of correspondence between Plato’s

description of Atlantis and the actual archaeological record of

Minoan Crete. Of forty-three very specific descriptions of the

physical appearance of Atlantis by Plato in Timaeus and Critias – all of

which should be reflected in the archaeological record – only 2% are

supported archaeologically, 6% can be matched, but only by special

pleading, 11% cannot be determined, and the largest slice of the ‘pie’,

fully 81%, consists of cases in which Plato’s Atlantean details are

contradicted by the archaeological record of Minoan Crete. Source:

K.L. Feder.

Atlantis as Atlantis

More than anyone else, we have Ignatius Donnelly and his monograph,

Atlantis: The Antediluvian World to credit – or blame – for bringing the

discussion of Atlantis into the broader public arena. 26 In this monograph,

first published in 1882 and still widely available more than 130 years later,

Donnelly makes no effort to reinterpret Plato, to move his Atlantis in space

26 I. Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (New York, NY 1882).

Quest for Atlantis

75

or time, or to identify it as a historically known ancient civilization.

Donnelly is an Atlantean literalist and Timaeus and Critias are his bibles. For

him, Atlantis was Atlantis, precisely as Plato presented it. None of Plato’s

story of a lost continent is, for Donnelly, allegory, cautionary tale, or

philosophical treatise. It is all veritable, a forgotten and hidden history

whose revelation and correct interpretation (by Donnelly, of course)

inspires a historical epiphany.

Donnelly’s support for the historicity of Plato’s Atlantis story is

based largely on the approach of ‘trait list comparisons,’ a methodology that

was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the

diffusionist school of anthropology and cultural geography. The

underpinning assumption in the diffusionist school was that most human

groups are culturally static and do not progress unless and until new

technologies are introduced into their territories by more advanced peoples

who are, for whatever reason, intrinsically more inventive and creative. For

many diffusionists there was a single source (often it was Egypt), or, at most,

a very few ‘mother cultures’ from which all or at least most of human

progress could be derived. Donnelly was a diffusionist, essentially data

mining for cultural traits across the globe that he could trace back to the

one true source of civilization: not Egypt, but Atlantis.

The archaeological record was rich with source material from which

Donnelly could compile his lists. For example, there were pyramids on

either side of the Atlantic, among Egyptians on the east, and the Maya and

Aztecs to the west. These cultures, Donnelly asserted, must have learned to

build their pyramids from an even more ancient and even more advanced

civilization: Atlantis – never mind that Egyptian and New World pyramids

bear little resemblance to one another beyond the fact that they are larger

on their bottoms than on their tops. Also, ancient people on either side of

the Atlantic practiced agriculture. For Donnelly, they could only have made

this great advance in subsistence by having been taught by an even more

ancient and more advanced civilization: again, Atlantis – never mind that

the plant and animal species domesticated and relied upon for subsistence

on either side of the Atlantic were entirely different. Further, the ancient

civilizations of the Old and New Worlds possessed writing systems.

Donnelly maintained that they must have been taught to write by an even

more advanced and ancient civilization: of course, Atlantis – never mind

that the ancient writing systems on either side of the Atlantic were entirely

different and mutually unintelligible.

Kenneth L. Feder

76

As wrong as Donnelly may have been, however, it must be said that,

as an inductive reasoner, he felt compelled to collect actual data in support

of his hypothesis of an ancient Atlantean source for all human technological

and scientific progress. For others, no such source material was necessary.

Atlantis of the imagination

America’s ‘sleeping prophet’ Edgar Lynn Cayce, for example, didn’t need to

collect and collate historical or archaeological evidence. He could merely go

to sleep and dream the details of ancient Atlantis, which he would then

recount to his followers. 27 Cayce’s evidence-free descriptions of the lost

continent (and the imaginings his testimony inspired among his followers)

included technologies that sound quite a bit like lasers, nuclear power,

submarines, television, and aircraft, none of which, of course, are even

hinted at by Plato. As author Paul Jordan points out, Cayce’s descriptions of

the sophistication and precocity of Atlantean technology include nothing

beyond that with which he would have been familiar during the time he had

his visions between the 1920s and 1940s. 28 There is no internet, smart

phones, laptops, tablet computers, or even microwave ovens in Cayce’s

ancient Atlantis. Cayce, essentially, was little more than a science fiction

author, and one with a rather limited imagination.

Cayce asserted that Atlanteans fleeing the destruction of the

continent arrived in Egypt where they built an underground ‘hall of

records.’ 29 No such hall of records has ever been found. Furthermore, it

should go without saying that his prediction that parts of Atlantis would rise

again sometime during 1968 or 1969 was not accurate.30

Cayce also claimed that the islands of Bimini in the Caribbean were

remnants of Atlantis and this, in part, inspired his followers to search for

broader evidence of the lost continent in submarine deposits in the region. 31

It was during one such search that a feature usually called ‘the Bimini Wall’

was located. Interpreted by Cayce’s followers as the remnant of an ancient

wall or road and, potentially, the remains of an Atlantean structure, it

27 E.E. Cayce, Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited (New York, NY 1997).

28 P. Jordan, The Atlantis Syndrome (Sutton Mill, 2001).

29 E.E. Cayce, Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited, 127.

30 Ibidem, 159.

31 Ibidem, 154.

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consisted of a large number of rectangular blocks of limestone, extending

across a linear distance of about six hundred meters and ending with a

curved section, giving the entire feature the appearance of a backwards

letter J.

Fig. 3: Photograph of a part of the geological feature mistakenly

referred to by some as the ‘Bimini Wall’ or ‘Bimini Road’. Neither

wall nor road, the rectangular blocks are elements of a common

natural feature called beachrock. Photo: John Gifford.

Geologists who examined the feature recognized it as an entirely natural

formation called ‘beachrock’ (see fig. 3). 32 Perform an internet search under

the term ‘tessellated pavement’ and you can see multiple examples from all

over the world of far more impressive formations than the Bimini Wall. All

of them are entirely natural. No artifacts – no tools, pottery shards, carvings

– have ever been found associated with the Bimini Wall and radiocarbon

32 J.A. Gifford and M.M. Ball, ‘Investigation of submerged beachrock deposits off

Bimini’, National Geographic Society Research Reports 12 (1980) 21-38.

Kenneth L. Feder

78

dating of shells incorporated in the limestone blocks in the feature indicates

that it formed about 2,200 years ago, which certainly doesn’t conform to

any measurement of the age of Atlantis.

Still searching

The desire to find in antiquity a greatly advanced, hugely powerful and

technologically precocious civilization appears to be a quest without an end.

Historian Richard Freund suggested in 2011 that he had found Atlantis at

an archaeological site in Spain. 33 Popular author Graham Hancock, while

assiduously avoiding the ‘A’ word, posits the existence of a very Atlantis-

sounding lost civilization in his 1996 book Fingerprints of the Gods. 34 In a

more recent work, Magicians of the Gods, Hancock (2015) is now content to

actually call that ancient lost civilization ‘Atlantis.’ 35 This longing for

Atlantis has resulted in Atlantis-themed attractions at popular theme parks

in America (see fig. 4) and in Italy and even a feature-length Disney

animated movie (Atlantis, the Lost Empire).

33 E. Owen, ‘The Lost City of Atlantis buried in Spanish Wetlands’.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8381219/Lost-city-

of-Atlantis-buried-in-Spanish-wetlands.html, 16 October 2016.

34 G. Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (New

York, NY 1995).

35 G. Hancock, Magicians of the Gods (New York, NY 2015).

Quest for Atlantis

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Fig. 4: The producers of theme parks recognize the power of Atlantis.

Here is seen a part of the Atlantis attraction at the Universal Orlando

Resort, in Florida, U.S.A. Universal also has an attraction titled The

Wizarding World of Harry Potter. At least visitors realize that Harry

Potter is entirely fictional. I hope. Photo: K.L. Feder.

In his book, Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, Ignatius Donnelly ends on an

optimistic note concerning the future discovery of archaeological evidence

that will convince even hard-nosed skeptics that Atlantis was just exactly as

Critias (through Plato) described it and what he, Donnelly believed it to

have been, the source of human cultural development:

We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is advancing in great

strides. Who shall say that one hundred years from now the great

museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms,

and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall

contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all

the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which

now perplex the thinkers of our day?36

Donnelly wrote this in 1882. It is now 2016, considerably more than one

hundred years later, and we are still waiting for the realization of Donnelly’s

36 Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, 480.

Kenneth L. Feder

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hypothetical scenario. I suspect this is not because archaeologists and other

scientists haven’t looked hard enough for the lost continent but because,

after all, Atlantis was located, not in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean or

anywhere else on Earth, but instead in the mind of the great Greek

philosopher, Plato.