Latest News
NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Adam
Peyrére, Isaac La
Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676) was a French philosopher, lawyer and diplomat. Although brought up a Calvinist, he was later forced to convert to Catholicism. His theological views created
quite a stir when he put forward the theory of humans existing before Adam & Eve in an attempt to explain where Cain’s wife came from. He argued that there must have been two creations; first the creation of the gentiles and later of Adam, as the father of the Hebrews.
He published his claims in 1655 in Praeadamitae[1300], upsetting Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Stephen P. Kershaw relates[1410] how Peyrère added the testimony of Solon and Plato to bolster his claim, arguing that if Atlantis in 9600 BC, then humans existed earlier than Genesis suggests.
Thorwald C. Franke noted in a paper(b) on The Dark Side of Atlantis Scepticism that Peyrère’s “work was immediately condemned by the church and the author put to prison. Shortly after that, Isaac La Peyrère had to recant his opinion. Thus, Atlantis scepticism had triumphed once more.”
Some of his ideas are widely accepted today(a).
(a) Were Adam and Eve the first humans? (archive.org)
(b) (99+) The Dark Side of Atlantis Scepticism | Thorwald C. Franke – Academia.edu *
Salverda, John R.
John R. Salverda is an apologist for many aspects of the Brit-Am movement(a), which endeavours to link the British and American people with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. He also claims that Greek legends have a Hebrew origin(c). This brings to mind that Joseph Yahuda, a linguist, has proposed that ‘Hebrew is Greek’, which is the title of his 1982 book [1705]+ on the subject(d).
In a March 2014 blog(b), part of his Biblical Roots of Classical Philosophy series, Salverda claims that Atlas can be equated with Adam and that Plato’s Atlantis is a retelling of the antediluvian world of the Bible.
>Salverda has also proposed that there is a connection between the Greek Mount Olympus and the vaguely similar sounding Hebrew word Elohim – “The contention here being that Greece was colonized largely from the northern ten tribes of Israel, let us look among the Israelites for the origin of the Olympian concept. The Greek “Olympus,” the idea of a heavenly council of the gods, who spoke with one voice from a certain sacred mountain, surely did not originate in Greece, but it is suspiciously like the religion that began at the mount Shechem of Abimelech, and culminated into that of Ahab’s at Samaria.
Not only did the Israelites have such a mountain-based heavenly council of the gods, but they even called it by a very similar name! These apostate Israelites did not call the gods the “Olympians,” however we do learn from the Scriptures that there was such a term as “Elohim,” which, once upon a time we are told by scholars who have studied the matter, used to be a plural term meaning the “gods.” The Greeks borrowed the Hebrew word, and it’s apparent that it wasn’t just the word that they borrowed, but also they had a common culture and religion as well.”(e)<
[1705]+ https://archive.org/details/Hebrew.is.Greek/page/n573/mode/2up *
(b) https://historyancientphilsophy.wordpress.com/
(c) https://www.britam.org/salverda/salverdacontents.html
(e) (99+) The Council of the Gods | John Salverda – Academia.edu *
De Roo, Peter
Peter de Roo (1839-1926) was a Catholic priest, who as an historian is probably best known for two works, a five-volume defence of the much maligned Pope 
Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and a two-volume History of America before Columbus[890]. In the latter he reviews the classical writers and quotes larges excerpts from Critias and Timaeus in support of his conclusion that the ancient Greeks had knowledge of America and that the Atlantis story was an expression of this. In fact de Roo goes further and ascribes American ‘nationality’ to both Adam and Noah[890.1.20]!
Bolivia *
The Altiplano of Bolivia has most of its western half situated in the central Andes which includes the Altiplano (High Plateau). Jim Allen, a Scot, has promoted this region[040](a) as the true home of Plato’s Atlantis. Allen claims that ‘Andes’ is a corruption of Antis, a local word that means copper and that the same language uses Atl to denote water. He has identified a site known as Pampa Aullagas as the most likely location of Atlantis. The radical nature of this idea has ensured it widespread attention and sometimes scathing criticism.
Although I cannot subscribe to Jim Allen’s Bolivian location for Atlantis, there is little doubt that Bolivia has yet to reveal all its secrets. For example, there are the little known Sajama lines in western Bolivia near the border with Chile and Peru. These straight Sajama Lines ”average between one and three meters wide, and run from a few meters to several kilometers. The longest of them are about twenty kilometers in length.”(m) Unlike the Nazca lines those at Sajama do not represent any creatures.
Very little research has been carried out on these lines, but I note that Evan Hadingham touched on the subject in Lines to the Mountain Gods[1309] noting that Tony Morrison, who had previously filmed the lines at Nazca[1036], stumbled on those at Sajama, and was told by locals that the lines joined sacred shrines. This was similar to what was told to the noted French anthropologist, Alfred Métraux in the 1930’s.
Returning to the subject of Atlantis, I continue to ask both why or how a mountainous kingdom on the west of South America would attack Athens on the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean is not clear! Allen’s theory concentrates on comparing the topography on the Altiplano with Plato’s description. He compared the physical features described by Plato with the site on the Altiplano and found that there was a very close match except that all the dimensions were out by a factor of two. This he explains by pointing out that unlike the Greeks, the pre-Columbian South Americans used a base 20 for counting. Allen also points to a naturally occurring alloy of copper and gold that is to be found in the Andes as the origin of the Orichalcum mentioned by Plato.
In an effort to strengthen his theory Allen suggests that the bull sacrifice on Atlantis, recorded by Plato, was in fact a reference to llama sacrifices(b)practiced in the Andes for thousands of years right up to the present! He argues that since the Egyptians would have had no word for llama they substituted ‘bull’ for it instead. Although llamas are camelids, I would have thought that they were closer in appearance to goats than bulls. Goat sacrifice is commonplace in the Southern Mediterranean and across much of Asia and has been for millennia. I consider Allen’s suggestion overly speculative and highly improbable.
Atlantisrevealed.com is a website(d), in English and Italian, which supports Jim Allens’s theory of Atlantis on the Altiplano of Bolivia. Unfortunately, it adds little new to the debate. Contrasting that is a lengthy and balanced critique of Allen’s ideas on Timothy Stephany’s website(e). He concludes that there is currently insufficient evidence to justify Allen’s claims.
Advocates of a South American Atlantis have pointed to the discovery of cocaine traces, derived exclusively from the South American coca plant, found in Egyptian mummies as evidence of ancient trans-Atlantic links and a possible channel for the spread of story of the destruction of Atlantis.
David Antelo, a Bolivian engineer, has also proposed a plain, in the Beni region just north of Allen’s site, as the location of Atlantis. In January 2011, Allen’s website included an extensive selection of aerial photos(c) of topographical features in Beni which suggest the pre-existence of an advanced civilisation in the region.
The oldest settlements so far found in Bolivia’s Amazon region are dated at 10,400 years old(f). A recent report(g) has shown numerous large circular earthworks throughout the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon region. It also reported that the same territory, until recently forest, was savannah as recently as 2,000 or 3,000 thousand years ago.
Near the end of the 19th century, Emeterio Villamil de Rada (1804-1880) created quite a stir when he was the first to suggest that the Garden of Eden had been situated in the Andes and for good measure that the Aymara language was the language of Adam. Comparable ideas were expressed by Ramiro Gonzales Yaksic (1966- ) is the Bolivian author of Earthly Paradise: The Garden of the Andes[1055] in which he claims to have identified the biblical Garden of Eden in his native Bolivia(h). Dieter Groban has written in support of Yaksic(n).
In 2003 Jay Weidner & Vincent Bridges published a book[608] supporting an Andean location for Atlantis(o) in neighbouring Peru. Weidner & Bridges subsequently fell out(i) and Bridges has been accused of organising a scam by Laura Knight-Jadczyk(j).
(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20200811094111/http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/atlantisboliviapart1.htm
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20190120200652/http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/bullsatlantis.htm
(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20200703083909/http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/beni.htm
(e) See: Archive 2237
(g) https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/07/03/1321770111.abstract
(h) See: Archive 2331
(i) https://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/clarification.htm
(j) https://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/vincent-bridges-scam.htm
(l) https://cffbolivia.blogspot.ie/2010/06/ramiro-gonzales-yaksic.html see (h)
(m) https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/09/the-mysterious-sajama-lines-of-bolivia.html
(n) https://www.facebook.com/Groben.Turismo/posts/926029544094509
(o) Atlantis in the Andes (archive.org) *
Atlas
Atlas was the first king of Atlantis and was the son of Poseidon according to the story of Atlantis from Plato. However, in traditional
, Atlas was the son of the Titan, Iapetus, often identified with the biblical Japheth, and the nymph Clymene. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the fact that the name Atlas is applied to more than one figure in Greek legends.
Atlas is usually portrayed kneeling with the world on his shoulders. However, the earliest known statue of Atlas, the 2nd century Farnese Atlas(c), which is a Roman copy of an older Greek statue, has the sky is represented as a sphere with a map of the stars and constellations known to the Ancient Greeks, which they represented as objects, animals and mythological creatures and characters. 16th century cartographers assumed that the globe represented the Earth, not the sky and since then it has been depicted accordingly.
Edwin Björkman noted the opinion that the name Atlas does not have a Greek root but is generally thought to have a Semitic origin. He also suggested the possibility that the name may have been derived from one of the Greek words for sea, thalassa.
However, Peter James points out[047.190] the name has a clear etymology in the Greek root ‘tlaô’ which can mean ‘to bear’, ‘to endure’ or ‘to dare’.>Tantalis, the capital of ancient Lydia, was apparently named after the legendary King Tantalus, its first king, who shared remarkable similarities with Atlas, the first king of Atlantis; they were both Titans, supported the heavens and had mountains named after them(f).<
Atlas has also been identified with both the Egyptian god Shu and the biblical Enoch, the latter being a more controversial concept. Lewis Spence went further and identified the Meso-American deity, Quetzalcoatl, with Atlas!
A somewhat more conventional view was offered by Thorwald Franke who has written a convincing paper(a) identifying Atlas with king Italos of the Sicels, who gave their name to Sicily and were one of the earliest groups to inhabit the island.
A more radical view has been put forward by Brit-Am writer John R.Salverda, who claims that the biblical Adam is the Atlas of Plato’s Atlantis narrative. A similar theory was proposed by Roger M. Pearlman in a 2018 booklet [1596]. In this small, difficult to read, book the author suggests, a linkage between the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah and Atlantis, places Atlantis in the Jordan Valley and equates Abraham with Atlas – “ If Atlas as described in Plato’s work was based on a historic figure, Abraham alone meets key criteria.”In a more recent paper(d), Pearlman also suggested that Göbekli Tepe was founded by Noah (Noach) and his sons!
Moving further east, the Hittites had an equivalent if not an original version of Atlas in the form of Tantalus. The Hittites in turn may have developed the identity from the Hurrian god Ubelleris. It was this Anatolian figure that led Peter James to his conclusion that Atlantis had been located in Turkey. Tantalus had a son Pelops, whom some consider Phrygian and according to Herodotus the Phrygians were the oldest race on earth.
Diego Ratti claims “that Atlantis was Avaris, capital of the Hyksos Kingdom and that king Atlas was Shamshi-Shu I: the Amorite Prince of Ugarit who in 1646 BC led a coalition of Foreign Kings to conquer Egypt starting the XV Dynasty of the ‘Hyksos’.”(e)
An even more extreme idea has been proposed by Sean Griffin that the yogic concept of ‘Kundalini’ is contained within part of Plato’s Atlantis story(b). Griffin begins his explanation by pointing out that Atlas is the medical term for the 33rd vertebra of the human spine!
(a) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis_italos.htm
(b) https://www.scribd.com/doc/211332861/Atlantis-and-Kundalini
(c) https://www.dioi.org/ggg.htm
(d) https://www.academia.edu/38664571/Gobekli_Tepe_founded_by_Noah_and_sons
(e) Atletenu | Atletenu (archive.org)
(f) https://www.jstor.org/stable/262536?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents *