Atlantis: The Truth behind the Legend

Atlantis: The Truth behind the Legend [263] by Angelos Georgiou Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon supports Thera, modern Santorini, as the location of Atlantis. Their starting point was a re-appraisal of Plato’s date of 9,000 years from the time of the attack on Athens & Egypt to the time of Solon. They proposed that there had been a mistranslation from the Egyptian records and that this should in fact have read nine hundred years (see Date of Atlantis Collapse). This would place the demise of Atlantis around 1500 BC. They then linked the cataclysmic eruption of Thera with this date and proceeded to build a case for identifying this event with the destruction of Atlantis. A number of inconsistencies between their theory and the details of Plato’s narrative have been pointed out; Thera was never large enough to accommodate the extensive plain of Atlantis, the location of the Pillars of Heracles, the original island was too small to support a viable population of elephants, the size of the Atlantean army and navy at around one million men, not to mention an even greater civilian population could not have been housed on tiny Thera, etc, etc. When these difficulties are added to the authors’ arbitrary re-dating of the sinking of Atlantis, a Theran solution is untenable, unless the detailed descriptions given by Plato can be set aside as just a fictional overlay. However, the idea of Atlantis being connected with the 2^nd millennium BC eruption of Thera is widely accepted and has done no harm to the tourist industry of Santorini.

The authors also introduce the idea of two islands, each with its own adjacent plain, one of which is quite small and the other quite extensive, supposedly Thera and Crete. However, if Plato was speaking of Thera and Crete, why did he not say so? Any serious reading of Plato’s text shows that he was not exactly sure where Atlantis had been.