McQuillen, R(ich)

R(ich) McQuillen is an American investigator who has cogently argued for an Egyptian location for Atlantis. He has diligently gathered an impressive array of evidence from classical writers including Hellanicus, Solinus and Aeschylus to support his view and arranged the morass that is Greek mythology to construct a credible timeframe for the Atlantis narrative.

However, McQuillen is not the first to locate Atlantis in or near Egypt, in fact, the earliest I have found is in the late 19th century by A.N. Karnozhitsky, while the most recent was published by Diego Ratti in 2021.

McQuillen places the Pillars of Heracles at Canopus, which was formerly in the Western Nile delta but is now submerged about 6.5 km from the coast in the Bay of Aboukir. He is also of the opinion that the Egyptians used lunar ‘years’ rather than solar years bringing the backdrop to the Atlantis story into the 2^nd millennium BC. However, he now seems to favour the ‘factor ten’ interpretation of Plato’s date.

McQuillen locates Atlantis at Pharos, which was near modern Alexandria. His website^(a) is well worth a visit.

Extensive underwater excavations in the region have been undertaken in recent years by Franck Goddio and his team with remarkable results ^(b).

It is also worth noting that the late Ulf Richter reasoned that a river delta was the most likely topographical setting for Atlantis ^(c).

In March 2022 McQuillen added six papers^(d-i) expanding on background details employed in his interpretation of the Atlantis story. All six are available on the Academia.edu website.

In 2020, McQuillen published A Simple Chronology of Greek Mythology^(k) adding a further paper^(j) in 2022 that offered a radical reappraisal of Biblical chronology that included the following.

1 People have been questioning Standard Biblical Chronology (the literal times), for 2000 years, and yet this still persists in modern Biblical Archaeology

2 I have thrown out the early dates entirely and introduced a different paradigm to try to find some of these elusive characters. This paper talks about the Pre-Noachian Kings, like Cainan, and links him to the real-world Syrian Hyksos King Khyan, and finds archaeological evidence of the existence of other Hyksos Kings.

3 It links the flood of Noah to the flood of Ahmose and Atrahasis, and shows it to be a real flood caused by Santorini.

4 It finds Jacob at the same time as the Israel stele of Merneptah. It finds Joseph as the Semitic Pharoah Siptah, whose mother has the same name as Jacob’s second wife. It finds Moses around the time of the Smallpox plague in Egypt (ranging from Ramses 4 to 9)(1182?1136BC).

In his paper ‘Perfecting Plato’ McQuillen is critical of some available translations available to us, of passages in Plato’s Atlantis texts. In his summary of the paper

“There are a bunch of controversial passages within the Timaeus. This has led to 50k books on the topic with a bunch of different interpretations of the same passages. These stem from mistranslations, intentional mistakes, wild speculation, etc… The purpose of this paper is to identify and correct the mistakes and add additional insight. The Timaeus is long and in most parts well-translated and irrelevant, so I’m selecting only interesting passages, where I can add insight.  I’m using the Bury Translation, with a little bit of Calcidius thrown in.

Plato’s myth has been described as a fable and a description of an idealized society.  Instead, it was intended as a story about 18th dynasty Egypt, and its interactions with the Haunebu (Aegaens). The past is often romanticized and idealized in the history books; History is written by the winners.” He then proceeded to comment on a number of specific passages in Timaeus^(h).

In 2024, McQuillen published a new paper^(l) focused on the work of Manetho.  “This paper explores other Egyptan Sources to verify the veracity of Plato’s tale; specifically, intends a lot of the peculiarites in Plato’s text, that also exist in Manetho’s writngs. Plato says this tale comes from Solon in the days of Amasis; there are, in fact, Egyptan elements within this tale which were not invented by Plato, and can be confirmed to also exist in the Egyptan writngs from Manetho and others. Manetho specifically does menton 9000 years, and a war, and a flood, and a city, similar to Plato.”

In this more recent paper, he identifies Avaris as the City of Atlantis although as you can see above he previously(2007) named Pharos, near Alexandria. In the same paper he also identifies the Atlantean Gadir with Rhakotis, an ancient city near Alexandria.

In 2020, McQuillen published the first draft of A Simple Chronology of Greek Mythology, in which he was inspired by Herodotus to develop his own methodology and applied it to the histories of Athens, Crete and Egypt^(m). He concluded “I have attempted to create a mythological timeframe for a majority of the Greek Mythological Kings in Greece. These timeframes have been tied to real world events like Troy. They have been synchronized with known timeframes of Egyptian Pharaohs. I list the kings of 20 different ancient cities and attempted to synchronize their history. I have created a framework to compare likes with likes and show when and where one might expect to find these names in Archaeology.”

^(a) http://gizacalc.freehostia.com/Atlantis.html

^(b) Franck Goddio: Homepage (archive.org) 

^(c) Archive 6142 | (atlantipedia.ie) 

^(d) https://www.academia.edu/43493561/A_Simple_Chronology_of_Greek_Mythology_First_Draft 

^(e) https://www.academia.edu/69049558/Dissecting_Diodorus_The_Legend_of_Myrina_and_Orus 

^(f) https://www.academia.edu/76436465/Finding_a_God_Phaethon_King_Tut_and_the_Amarna_Period 

^(g) https://www.academia.edu/76548637/Defining_Danaus_and_Egyptus 

^(h) https://www.academia.edu/76880053/Perfecting_Plato_A_colorful_commentary_on_the_Timaeus 

⁽ⁱ⁾ https://www.academia.edu/77235625/Perfecting_Plato_A_colorful_commentary_on_the_Critias_Part_1

^(j) (99+) A Simple Chronology for Biblical Archaeology | Rich McQuillen – Academia.edu

^(k) https://www.academia.edu/43493561/A_Simple_Chronology_of_Greek_Mythology_-First_Draft 

^(l) (99+) Manifesting with Manetho: Finding commonality from Plato’s Atlantis and Egyptian Sources | Rich McQuillen – Academia.edu 

^(m) (99+) A Simple Chronology of Greek Mythology -First Draft | Rich McQuillen – Academia.edu *