Archive 5099

In H. Menge, Enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch der griechischen Sprache: Menge-Guethling, 16. Aufl. Berlin 1961, S. 118, I found an onomastic and linguistic trace of Atlantis with respect to the Black Sea = Pontos and the Danube = Istros. “Atlantis” was the ancient Greek name of the river Olt (Romanian) or Alt from the North to the “Istros” = Danube. This affluent river was named Atlantis in the very early times, when the Hellenistic world was “Pontocentric”, after the “Atlas”-Mountains in the West of the Black Sea, today the Carpatiens. In this very early times all the myths of Ilias, the Argonautes, Herakles and the Hesperides (“in the West”), of Philemon and Baukis etc. played around the Black and the Aegean Sea. Later on about 700 b. Chr. Greece turned to the West, founded settlements until Gibraltar and became the leading Mediterranean Power; and the Greek transferred the Pillars of Herakles from the Dardanelles (the mouth of the Pontos to the Mediterranean Sea) to Gibraltar (the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea to the Ocean). Moving the Atlas, the Pillars of the Earth, from the West of the Pontos to the West of the Mediterranean Sea (Africa: Marocco), being about 1.000 m higher than the former Atlas, they named the Ocean Atlantic after the High Atlas. They didn’t care about how to rename the old Atlas and the old river Atlantis. The Romans put the name Carpati on the mountains in the 3rd Centennium a. Chr., when they forced the Carpi to settle there. And these abbreviated the name of the river Atlantis to Alt. The Hellenes never used the name Carpati (or Carpathes or Karpathes) for the older Atlas, because they had and have the Karpathes Islands in the Aegean Sea between Rhodos and Crete. The Atlantides, living in the sunken Danube-Delta, surely used the waterway from the Atlas: “Atlantis-Istros potamos” to raft all natural goods they could out of the mountains right down to the “Pontos okeanos” – on wooden floats, built just there from wood cut in the forests. And so they had an inexhaustible supply for their blockhouses and log cabins in the Delta lake dwellings. This should be another good argument for “Atlantis in the Black Sea”. Best wishes Siegfried Mit freundlichen Grüßen Prof. Dr. S. G. Schoppe