An A-Z Guide To The Search For Plato's Atlantis

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    September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we move to Sicily and Malta. The trip is purely vacational. Unfortunately, I am writing this in a dreadful apartment, sitting on a bed, with access to just one useable socket and a small Notebook. Consequently, I possibly will not […]Read More »
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    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 »
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Andes

Invasion

Invasion today, as in the past, is usually the consequence of a shortage of resources (food, metals, oil, water), climate change (affecting food supply), overpopulation (also affecting food supply) or political upheaval. Although I do not speak as a military strategist, it would seem obvious that if for any of these reasons, a state is forced into expansionism, it will first look at its nearest neighbours and assess the chances of military success. It is obvious that before the introduction of airborne attacks, propinquity in the form of contiguous territory or short sea journeys has always been critical for a successful invasion(a) and the continued control of occupied territories. This is borne out by the simple historical fact that all the earliest empires, which were located in what we now call the Middle East, expanded through the invasion of its neighbours.

>Even today (27.02.22) Vladimir Putin has expanded his empire into more of the contiguous state of Ukraine, having already annexed Crimea. Some military imperatives never change.<

However, over-expansion can be costly and potentially dangerous. With particular reference to the fall of the Roman Empire, Rachel Nuwer noted in a recent BBC article(c) that. “By the end of the 100 BC, the Romans had spread across the Mediterranean, to the places most easily accessed by sea. They should have stopped there, but things were going well and they felt empowered to expand to new frontiers by land. While transportation by sea was economical, however, transportation across the land was slow and expensive. All the while, they were overextending themselves and running up costs.

Many people think that military intelligence gathering is a relatively modern development. However, ancient documents, including the Bible, have accounts of spying thousands of years ago. Mary Rose Sheldon has produced an invaluable sourcebook[1445] on the subject, as well as a volume on Spies in the Bible[1446], while Peter Dubovsky, in his Hezekiah and the Assyrian Spies[1568], focuses on espionage described in 2 Kgs 18-19. It is reasonable therefore to assume that Atlantis also exercised due diligence and endeavoured to assess their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses before invading.

Boris Rankov has noted(b) in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History that military intelligence in ancient times had its value limited by the “slowness of communications, which meant that it was often out of date before any response could be brought to bear.” This, of course, ties in with the then established practice of invading those within your immediate proximity; supply lines are shorter and information more up-to-date. In turn, it implies that Atlantis was within relatively easy striking distance of Athens!

Even in modern times, the same constraints determined the actions of invaders. Hitler could not have invaded Russia without first controlling Poland and Romania. Even expansionist Japan, although an island nation, expanded into Korea and Manchuria (China) and following the attack on Pearl Harbour spread even further within the same region.

The ancient land-based empires were dependent on military might, whereas others, such as the Phoenicians, expanded their influence through trade, supported by extensive merchant fleets. However, over time, Phoenician or more correctly Carthaginian rivalry with Rome led to disastrous wars.

One of the primary military concerns today, as in ancient times, will be to ensure that its men are fed and watered and consequently there will be a need to keep its supply lines as short as possible.

The nearest possible belligerent to the west of Athens was across the Adriatic in Italy. I argue elsewhere that according to Plato, southern Italy constituted part of the Atlantean domain (see Etruscans). I suggest that the Atlantean invasion of Greece was probably launched from there. The motivation is unclear, but we can speculate that success in Greece would have been followed by the control of the entire Aegean, including Crete, offering a huge expansion in trade.

The alternative is that the nearest part of Atlantis was elsewhere, necessitating the bypassing of other territories on the way and stretching supply and communication lines more than desirable. Italy looks the best bet, with forces added from the Atlantean HQ in Sicily or Sardinia, possibly travelling through the Strait of Messina, sometimes identified as the location of the Pillars of Heracles.

In the south, the Atlantean forces in North Africa (Ancient Libya), if not augmenting the attack on Greece, were probably planning their invasion of Egypt (Timaeus 25b & Critias 114c). Success there would have been followed by a two-pronged attack by both northern and southern Atlantean forces on the eastern Mediterranean coast, later known as the Levant, giving them total control of the eastern Mediterranean Basin.

Invasion requirements are the strongest argument against any of the fanciful Atlantis theories that place Plato’s Atlantis in Antarctica, the Andes, or North America. It is ludicrous to claim that any invasion force came across the Atlantic to attack Greeks and Egyptians. That there were remarkable early cultures in both North and South America is absolutely undeniable, however, it is foolishness to claim that they had any connection with Plato’s story.

(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasions

(b) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah26323/abstract

(c)http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse

Karam, Christian C.

Christian C. Karam is a Brazilian archaeology student who has written a paper with the controversial, if not provocative title of Phoenicians in Brazil(a). In it he proposes that an encounter with an extraterrestrial body caused a global catastrophe, which caused a large part of the Andes to be uplifted, the Sahara to be dried out and Atlantis in the Atlantic to be submerged. He dates this event to around 9500 BC and believes that the Atlantean survivors fled to Africa.

Perhaps the first to suggest that the Phoenicians visited Brazil was Georgius Hornius in the 17th century. The matter was dealt with in greater detail(d) by the Austrian professor of history, Ludwig Schwennhagen, who flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. A Hungarian website(c) offers more on the development of this claim.

Karam names the Phoenicians as the thalassocratic successors to the Atlanteans. The main portion of his paper concerns the possibility or as he sees it, the probability, of Phoenician visits to and even colonisation of Brazil.

Ross T. Christensen (1918–1990) an American archaeologist supported the idea of Phoenicians in America(e). However, in my view, his early work as a Mormon missionary must bring into question his objectivity. Further evidence in support of Phoenicians in Brazil is presented elsewhere(b).

(a) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_phoenicians01.htm

(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20190108071141/https://www.cristobalcolondeibiza.com/2eng/2eng16.htm

(c) https://tist-fla.blogspot.com/2013/12/foniciaiak-kozep-es-del-amerikaban.html (Hungarian)

(d) https://www.academia.edu/7848641/Fen%C3%ADcios_no_Brasil_parte_1_Ludwig_Schwennhagen (Portuguese) (offline Feb. 2016)

(e) https://www.ancientamerica.org/library/media/HTML/1ofnf5kk/15.%20THE%20PHOENICIANS%20AND%20THE%20ANCIENT%20CIVILIZATIONS%20OF%20AMERICA.htm?n=0 (Link Broken) See: Archive 2534 *

 

Bambrough, Sean

Sean Bambrough is a New Zealand researcher of ancient mysteries. Since 1999 he has been developing a theory that places Plato’s Atlantis in the Andes and identifies its city as Tiwanaku. He has published 37 pages of notes in support of this contention(a)(c). A reader will find them tough going and at times repetitious, but it is clear that he has put a lot of study into the subject even if he has, in my opinion, produced a very flawed theory.

Several researchers have assumed that when Plato referred to an ‘opposite continent’ he was referring to the Americas, however, Herodotus, who flourished after Solon and before Plato, was quite clear that there were only three continents known to the Greeks, Europe, Asia and Libya [4.42].

Bambrough’s first major error is to equate the sinking of Atlantis with the uplifting of the Andes! The Andes are rising at a rate of some millimetres per year. and the geological evidence is that in the past the uplift rate was somewhat more rapid, which “in geologic terms, rapid means rising one kilometer or more over several millions of years.”(b)(e)

There is no evidence that the cataclysmic upheaval described by him could have occurred around 1400BC. He does not explain how these newly elevated mountains created muddy shoals that made the Atlantic impassable.

As I have already argued in respect of Jim Allen’s Andean theory, the idea of an invasion of the eastern Mediterranean by an army from the west side of South America is untenable. That they would try it in reed boats like those of Titicaca is equally daft. Then, this mighty army from ten regions of South America was defeated by the small city-state of Athens is equally laughable.

I could go on, but just a final couple of points; Plato never described Atlantis as a continent and Kircher’s speculative map depicts Atlantis quite clearly in our Atlantic Ocean between Spain and America.

Bambrough has recently updated his website(d), however, his writing style is as irritating as ever, in particular his excessive use of retronyms (forward slashes).

In 2017, he published(f) an extended ‘check-list’ which he feels supports his location theory. This offering is far too long and repetitious. It is clearly a triumph of quantity over quality

>In 2021, Bambrough has now published his paper/ebook on the academia.edu website(g). This migration has done nothing to improve the quality of its content. It is just a huge collection of lists, most of which could be discarded.<

(a) https://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,33901.0.html

(b) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140421135926.htm

(c) https://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,33831.15.html

(d)  https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-2674/

(e) https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/taking-the-pulse-of-mountain-formation-in-the-andes/

(f) https://www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=36133 (link broken Dec. 2019)

 

(g)  https://www.academia.edu/61088843/Atlantis_Found_in_the_Andes_by_V_Sean_Bambrough *

Foerster, Brien *

Brien Foerster is an American writer who now lives in Cuzco, the former Inca capital in Peru. He has studied the ancient cultures of the Andes and believes that many predated the Incas and had advanced technologies that permitted the precise drilling of stone(a). His fully illustrated Kindle book, Lost Ancient Technology of Peru and Bolivia[0923]provides many examples. The book is worth purchasing for the images alone. There is now a video(d) that complements Foerster’s book.

Foerster has now studied the stonework of the ancient Egyptians and like Chris Dunn concluded that their level of accuracy could not have been achieved without possession of a high technology, now lost(i). He has expanded on this in his 2014 book, Lost Ancient Technology of Egypt[1487].

However, Foerester has recently stepped out of line when he apparently chipped fragments from stones at the Bolivian Puma Punku site with a view to having them tested for age. The laboratory refused to test the fragments as Foerester did not have the appropriate export document from Bolivia(e). It would appear that Foerster is either stupid or criminally irresponsible or both. Apparently, Foerester now claims that the details of this report are inaccurate and may be libellous(f).

This episode is reminiscent of the two German scientists who in 2013 were wrongfully accused of removing part of the ‘Vyse cartouche’ in the Great Pyramid and illegally smuggling it out of Egypt. This was subsequently shown to be a false claim by Zahi Hawass(l).

Elsewhere with regard to Atlantis, he claims “the most plausible idea is that Atlantis was not a single land mass that sank, but was a series of smaller states in the Atlantic area 12,000 years ago.”

In recent interviews, Foerster has proposed that the story of Atlantis is based on an Ice Age civilisation(g). His latest attention-seeking claim is that the Maya visited ancient Egypt, a trip that had some form of Atlantis connection(h).

He has also co-authored with David Hatcher Childress a book on South American cranial deformation and elongated skulls. These are reminiscent of similar skulls found in Malta(c) and Egypt as well as elsewhere around the world and date back many thousands of years(b).

Carl Feagans’ website(j) has a number of articles that are highly critical of Foerster’s methods and motivation. Equally critical is a posting and comments on the newagefraud.org website(k).

(a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7of1Lkef0

(b) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/head-space-artificial-cranial-deformation

(c)  https://nexusilluminati.blogspot.ie/2013/03/ancient-elongated-skulls-and-cranial.html

(d) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmK7Ng0eGV8

(e) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2014/04/purdue-refuses-to-test-stone-pieces-brian-foerster-claimed-to-have-chipped-from-puma-punku.html

(f) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2014/04/brien-foerster-accuses-me-of-libel-says-puma-punku-stones-came-from-outside-fenced-area-at-site.html

(g) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/l-a-marzulli-and-brien-foerster-discuss-megalithic-ruins-decide-native-people-couldnt-have-built-any-of-them

(h) https://verumetinventa.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/brien-foerster-good-evidence-of-maya-culture-in-egyptian-pyramids/ (offline October 2017)

(i) https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/evidence-cut-stone-compelling-argument-lost-high-technology-ancient-021545

(j) https://ahotcupofjoe.net/

(k) http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=5345.0 *

(l) URGENT URGENT! BREAKING NEWS: EGYPT – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)

 

Anstee, Margaret Joan

Margaret Joan Anstee (1926- ) was a distinguished British diplomat who served at ansteethe United Nations for over forty years. She was the UN Deputy Resident Representative for a number of years.

James Bailey referred to her 1970 offering, Gate of the Sun: A prospect of Bolivia[1420],  in which she claimed that the Andes got their name from the word ‘antis’ meaning copper. Bailey claimed that Anstee believed America to be Atlantis!

Fuente Magna Bowl

Fuente-MagnaThe Fuente Magna Bowl is a remarkable artefact sometimes called ‘the Rosetta Stone of the Americas.’ It was discovered accidentally near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The bowl’s claim to fame is that it has been inscribed with cuneiform writing, similar to Sumerian.

It is claimed that thermoluminescence dating has shown the object to be quite ancient and not a forgery. The same site(a) quotes at length a translation of the text by Clyde Winters, but a German website(b) denounces his translation as nonsense, although it accepts that the Bowl as genuine. Another site(c) offers a selection of detailed images of the Bowl.

Carl Feagans’ website(f) is equally critical of Winters’ ‘translation’ and raises a number of questions regarding the authenticity of the artefact.

>April Holloway offered an overview of the controversy relating to the Fuente Magna Bowl on the Ancient Origins website, concluding quite reasonably, that further objective linguistic research could bring the debate to a conclusion(g).<

Jim Allen and his supporters have sought to link the Bowl with the theory of Atlantis in the Andes(d).

The bad archaeology website has a reasonably balanced article(e) on the bowl which should be read.

(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20110727221012/http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_8.htm

(b) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418030709/https://www.palaeoseti.de/doku.php/suedamerika/fuente_magna

(c) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20160613101558/https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/biados/fuentmag.htm

(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20200704031245/http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/boliviaandthesumerianconnection.htm

(e) https://badarchaeology.wordpress.com/tag/fuente-magna-bowl/

(f) https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2017/11/fuente-magna-bowl-not-cuneiform-not-sumerian/

(g) Fuente Magna, the Controversial Rosetta Stone of the Americas | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net) *

Turolla, Pino (L)

Pino Turolla (1922-1984) was an Italian Count and a recognised expert in underwater exploration and photography. He also held a US patent for an improved parachute(a).

He carried out an investigation of sunken ‘pillars’ at Bimini in the late 1960’s. Turolla identified forty-four such pillars and suspected that more were still to be discovered. He was of the opinion that these pillars were not composed of stone native to the Bahamas, but had been brought from the Andes. Photos taken by Turolla were used by Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley in their book Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search[594].

Turolla later published his own book, Beyond the Andes; My Search for the Origins of Pre-Inca Civilization.

(a) https://www.google.com/patents/US3141215?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false

Geodesy

Geodesy is usually defined as the measurement and mapping of the Earth. James R. Smith, the author of Introduction to Geodesy [1947] has conflated several definitions to produce “Geodesy, from the Greek, literally means dividing the earth, and as a first objective, the practice of geodesy should provide an accurate framework for the control of national topographical surveys. Thus geodesy is the science that determines the figure of the earth and the interrelation of selected points on its surface by either direct or indirect techniques. These characteristics further make it a branch of applied mathematics, one that must include observations that can be used to determine the size and shape of the earth and the definition of coordinate systems for threedimensional positioning; the variation of phenomena near to or on the surface, such as gravity, tides, earth rotation, crustal movement, and deflection of the plumb line; together with units of measurement and methods of representing the curved earth surface on a flat sheet of paper.”

Geodesy as a science can be traced back to Pythagoras (6th cent. BC), who was thought to be the first to propose the sphericity of the Earth. Aristotle & Archimedes were apparently the first the offer a figure for the diameter of the Earth, suggesting 400,000 and 300,000 stades respectively. The difference might be partly explained by the use of a different length of stade. 

Later, Eratosthenes (276 BC– 195 BC) offered another early attempt to determine the dimensions of our Earth and succeeded with remarkable accuracy.

A controversial aspect of modern geodesy is the claim that many ancient sites were deliberately established at locations that had a specific geodetic relationship to each other and/or the dimensions of the Earth. For example(a) in ancient Egypt, the distance from Giza to the Equator was calculated to be 1/12th the circumference of the Earth, Amarna to the Equator is 1/13th, Luxor 1/14th and Philae 1/15th!

Graham Hancock in his Heaven’s Mirror[855] pointed to similar relationships around the globe suggesting a possible world grid. This idea of a world grid has a number of supporters but is often classified as a ‘fringe’ interest due to the attempt by some to link gridlines with UFOs and their use of the grid as a power source(w).>Hancock’s various claims regarding the dimensions of the pyramids and their association with a suggested world grid has been challenged in great detail by a Hall of Maat article by Thomas W. Schroeder(ah), concluded  that “Graham Hancock’s assertion that the Great Pyramid’s dimensions reveal knowledge of earth’s dimensions certainly lacks proof but also fails to hold up to any scrutiny as a viable theory. Each step argued by Hancock; that the Great Pyramid was built to a specific scalar, that the value of the scalar can be definitively demonstrated, that the scalar indicates precession, that the only way ancient Egyptians could estimate precession is to leverage or borrow knowledge from earlier advanced and unrecognized civilizations, are each filled with flaws when taken individually, let alone when strung together to complete his narrative.”<

Possibly related features may be the ley lines identified by Alfred Watkins in Britain(c)(g), the Alesia alignments in France discovered by Xavier Guichard(b) and/or the Heilige Linien of Germany claimed by Wilhelm Teudt(aa). 

Heinz Kaminski claimed to have discovered a megalithic grid system that stretched from Stonehenge across Europe with an east-west and north-south orientation and referred to as the Stonehenge/Wormbach System(h).

Even more exotic is the ancient Raetiastone navigation system rediscovered by Gerhard Pirchl (1942-2013) and outlined in a book by [1831] Thomas Walli(ae).

Ashley Cowie has published a paper(ac) related to Alesia and the work of Guichard and others, as well as his own investigations.

I should also point out that Marcel Mestdagh also identified a form of a road system, laid out in giant ovals with radials in France. At the centre of these ovals was the ancient city of Sens. Philip Coppens informs us [1275.184] that a further strange discovery by Mestdagh was that this ancient road network, centred on Sens, was mirrored by a similar network of roads in England centred on Nottingham!

‘The Way of Virachoca’ in the Andes which runs through Tiwanaku and is oriented exactly 45° west of true north and runs for over 1000 miles, has been studied by Maria Scholten d’Ebneth [1236] in the 1970s and expanded on by a number of Spanish speaking commentators and is now the subject of an article by Dave Truman(x).

In 1973, three Russians, engineers Valery Makarov and Vyacheslav Morozov along with Nikolay Goncharov, an artist, published in Russian an article with the eye-catching title of Is the Earth a Giant Crystal? (y) This was probably the earliest presentation of an earth grid based on ancient historical sites. A brief history of the earth grid theories that emerged around this time is available online(z). There is now a Russian geodesy website with an English translation(ab).

David Hatcher Childress published his Anti-Gravity and the World Grid [1303] in 1993, with the modest claim that he “proves that the earth is surrounded by an intricate electronic grid network offering free energy.” Obviously, Childress’ understanding of ‘proof’ is different to mine, as the only proof required is the production of some of this free energy, which he has not done.

Tom Brooks entered the fray with a study of 1500 prehistoric sites and his conclusion that the inhabitants of ancient Britain had designed a navigation system based on a grid of isosceles triangles(i). Brooks has gone a step further and speculatively claimed that the accuracy of this geometry-based system could only have been designed through “extraterrestrial intervention(r).  This concept is explored more fully in his latest book, Seeing Around Corners: Geometry in Stone Age Britain [863]  and in a series of video clips(s).   A more critical view of Brooks’ ideas is also available on the Internet(j).

Some years ago a former employee of a NASA sub-contractor, Maurice Chatelain claimed that within a 450-mile radius of the Aegean island of Delos that 13 mystical sites, when connected by straight lines formed a perfect Maltese Cross(u)!

Others such as Livio Stecchini(d) and Jim Alison(e) using geodetic calculations have identified São Tomé and Cape Verde respectively as the location of Atlantis. I must also include Hugo Kennes, a Belgian researcher with a passionate interest in global grids and sacred geometry(l). Kennes has also informed me of a new Facebook group(q) dealing with all aspects of the subject, as well as another(v) that includes submerged cities and other features.

Anyone interested in pursuing a study of this subject might like to look over James Q. Jacobs’ archaeogeodesy website(f) as well as the BioGeometry website (m).

If you have pursued all the links so far, you can pamper yourself further with a paper(k) by William Becker and Beth Hagens(n).  Another researcher in this field is Dan Shaw whose website(o) gives a good overview of the subject.

Jean-Pierre Lacroix added his weight to the debate with his 1998 paper entitled The Mapmakers from the Ice Age(t).

A global network of sacred sites was also put forward by Rand Flem-Ath & Colin Wilson in The Atlantis Blueprint [063]. This book was intended as a sequel to When the Sky Fell [062], but generally wandered off into other areas after the first couple of chapters.

I am somewhat sceptical about certain aspects of geodesy, particularly some of the claims of a world grid. However, it does raise many questions that require further study and explanation. In this connection, I would recommend John Sase’s Curious Alignments [1589]  as a good starting point. He confirms the work of Guichard and also offers a range of his own discoveries in the Great Lakes region.

In February 2020, Frank Maglione Nicholson, Ken Phungrasamee & David Grimason, collectively known as The Nazca Group(ad), published The Nazca Great Circle Map Hypothesis. Their claim is that “The lines and geoglyphs carved into the Nazca plateau represent a map of the Earth. The map is a Great Circle Map: a gnomonic projection with the center of the Earth as its cartographic viewpoint. Each line on the Nazca Plateau represents a great circle of navigation centred at the centre of the Earth and encircling the entire planet. The majority of the lines on the Nazca Plateau radiate from five loci of origin called radial centres.” I found this rather esoteric proposition difficult to absorb.

Arturo Villamarin has published many books [1864] and papers(af)(ag) in which the geometry and astronomy of archaeological monuments; Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge, Teotihuacán and Mohenjo Daro, among others, are discussed.

(a) http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/geodesy.htm

(b) http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/xavierguichard.htm

(c) http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/leylines.htm

(d) http://www.metrum.org/mapping/atlantis.htm (link broken Dec. 2020)

(e) http://home.hiwaay.net/~jalison/concl.html

(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20200917015056/http://www.jqjacobs.net/index.html

(g)https://liminalthresholds.blogspot.ie/2008/04/earth-energy-ley-lines.html

(h) https://atlantisforschung.de/index.php?title=Die_%22ganzheitliche_Atlantisforschung%22_des_Prof._Heinz_Kaminski

(i) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20160628154229/https://www.prehistoric-geometry.co.uk/

(j) https://www.badscience.net/2010/01/voices-of-the-ancients/

(k) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/antigravityworldgrid/ciencia_antigravityworldgrid02.htm

(l) https://web.archive.org/web/20210518205346/http://users.telenet.be/kenneshugo/alternative history sciences.htm

(m) https://web.archive.org/web/20170328094319/https://www.biogeometry.org/page34.html

(n) Bethe Hagens – Geometry, Anthropology anf the Arts of Consciousness (archive.org)

(o) https://www.vortexmaps.com/grid-history.php

(q) https://www.facebook.com/groups/175027289350368/

(r) https://www.prehistoric-geometry.co.uk/ [See (i)]

(s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R35A80kV0AU&feature=relmfu 

(t) https://ancientcartography.net/geoAN.html

(u) https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg28306.html

(v) https://www.facebook.com/groups/493298404177687/

(w) https://predictionsmargiekay.blogspot.ie/2014/08/lines-of-latitude-and-ufoparanormal-hot.html

(x) https://grahamhancock.com/trumand1/

(y) https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-3193/

(z) https://www.vortexmaps.com/grid-history.php

(aa) https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/teudt_hl/pages/index.html

(ab) http://geolines.ru/eng/

(ac) Solstice Axis Of The Ancient Gauls — ASHLEY COWIE (archive.org)

(ad) The Nazca Solution – The final solution to what the Nazca Lines represent (archive.org)

(ae) https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413597

(af) (99+) (PDF) THE GEOMETRY AND ASTRONOMY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL MONUMENTS | Arturo Villamarin – Academia.edu

(ag) (99+) (PDF) THE GEOMETRY AND ASTRONOMY OF GOBEKLI TEPE | Arturo Villamarin – Academia.edu

(ah) https://www.hallofmaat.com/numerology/a-critique-of-graham-hancocks-forced-numerical-relationship-between-the-great-pyramid-of-giza-and-earths-dimensions-1/ *

Elephants *

Elephants are specifically mentioned by Plato as being indigenous to Atlantis. This must have significance for anyone trying to arrive at a credible location for Atlantis. For example, supporters of the Theran Atlantis School cannot show where such large animals could have lived on the small volcanic island. There are no physical remains, no frescos and no historical references. Rodney Castleden who supports the Minoan Hypothesis admits that “no raw elephant ivory has been found (on Thera) and very little in the way of worked ivory”[225.70]. He later speaks of the importation of ivory into Crete[p.172] having bravely denounced Plato’s description (Critias 115a) of herds of elephants on Atlantis as “false”[p.136].

Similarly, Spanuth’s Heligoland location would have been climatically unsuited to elephants. Spanuth himself admits that the elephant reference “is hard to explain“. Nevertheless, Felice Vinci who champions a Northern European origin for Greek mythology believes that Plato’s elephant reference may be a lingering memory of the woolly mammoths that inhabited Arctic regions as recently as 2500-2000 BC(t)(u).  In the late 17th century Olof Rudbeck, recognising the problem that Plato’s reference to elephants presented for his Swedish Atlantis, argued that Plato had been speaking figuratively when describing the large voracious animals and had actually been referring to wolves, the Swedish word for wolf being ‘ulf’, which sounds like the beginning of ‘elephant’!!

Elephants in Western Europe were undoubtedly represented by mammoths, remains of which have been recovered from the North Sea – Doggerland and dated to around 40,000 years ago. Coincidentally, a tool made of mammoth bone, used for making rope, has also been dated to 40,000 years ago(i)(n). This discovery(s) by Nicholas Conard from the University of Tubingen was made shortly before Ashley Cowie published his interesting book[1454] on the history of rope-making. Further information on string, ropes and knots was published in March 2017(o). This ingenuity of our very distant ancestors, so often underestimated, is slowly being revealed by modern archaeology. In 2000, in the Czech Republic, it was discovered that woven cloth was being produced on looms 27,000 years ago(v). A few years later a team from Harvard’s Peabody Museum reported the discovery of fibres that ‘were spun, twisted or knotted’ and dated to at least 34,000 years ago(x). 2020 saw evidence emerge which suggested that even as far back as 41,000 – 52,000 years ago the Neanderthals had mastered the making of cords(w). Later the same year, further evidence was offered that string-making may have begun even earlier(y).

Allied to the demise of the Siberian mammoths is the often-repeated fib that when the remains were first discovered, their flesh was still fresh enough to eat, which has recently been debunked by Jason Colavito(j). He has also unearthed the truth behind that other canard relating to a Siberian mammoth, namely that fresh buttercups were found in its mouth(j). He has now(q) traced back the earliest reference to the frozen mammoths to George Cuvier in 1822 [1586.11].

Eckart Kahlhofer, in a forthcoming book[715] advocates a North-West European location for Atlantis, and suggests that where Plato referred to elephants he actually meant deer! Kahlhofer offers, as a simple explanation for this seemingly daft contention, the fact that the Greek for elephant, elephas, is very similar to the Greek elaphos which means deer. He claims that a simple transcription error by a scribe could have caused the mix-up.

The elk was the largest species of deer to be found in the northern hemisphere and is still to be found in Scandinavia. The Great Irish Deer which died out around 5500 BC had an antler span of 11ft and a maximum height of 10ft, though usually less. The tallest African elephant ever recorded was 13 feet at the shoulder, which would appear to give the elephant the edge over the deer heightwise. Furthermore, It is worth pointing out, again, that Plato described his elephants as the ‘largest and most voracious’ animal, so when we realise that an adult elephant eats 250-300 lbs a day, while a moose manages on 40-60 lbs, there seems to be no contest.

Gene Matlock in an attempt to bolster his Mexican location for Atlantis has suggested that Plato’s elephants were in reality the long-snouted tapirs of Meso-America!(c), an idea ‘borrowed’ from Hyde Clarke 

While the elephant issue should not be dealt with in isolation it does serve to illustrate the difficulties involved in analysing Plato’s text. Consider the possibility that the early date of 9600 BC for Atlantis is accepted, then the islands that are too small today to accommodate elephants may have been considerably larger and sometimes connected to each other or a mainland during the Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, and consequently capable of supporting pachyderms. In this regard, Sundaland would have been the most suitable candidate. Not only would today’s South China Sea archipelagos have been a single landmass, but there would have been access to the region from the Asian mainland, home today to large numbers of elephants.

Strangely enough, even the Andes, considered by some as the home of Atlantis, reveal the fact that during the last Ice Age, a species of elephant called Cuvieronius lived there but became extinct around 8000 BC. These animals are to be found carved on the great Gateway of the Sun in Tiahuanaco suggesting that they were common in the region. Supporters of an Atlantis link with Tiahuanaco have highlighted this fact.

James Bailey who supports[149][150] the idea of Atlantis in America believes that Plato’s mention of elephants could be a reference to the American mammoth, generally believed to have died out circa 10,000 BC, although Victor von Hagen, the American explorer, contentiously maintained that they survived as late 2000 BC. A similar idea was presented at the 2005 Atlantis Conference by the American researcher, Monique Petersen.

The Schoppes, in support of their theory of Atlantis in the Black Sea region, contend(l) that Indian elephants existed there until 800 BC and support this with a reference to the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmosis III who killed 120 elephants ‘there’ around 1200 BC, which is a strange claim as Thutmosis did not venture beyond Syria and he died circa 1426 BC!

Elephas Antiquus (Palaeoloxodon), is a dwarf species whose remains have been found throughout the islands of the Mediterranean from Sardinia to Cyprus. All those found were dated 200,000 BC or earlier! In sharp contrast, Simon Davis, in an article in New Scientist (3 Jan.1985), dated Mediterranean dwarf elephants to as recent as 6000 BC(p). Some writers, such as Roger Coghill, have tried to use the pygmy elephant as an explanation for Plato’s text (Crit. 114e & 115a) where we find that he describes the elephants as being ‘of its nature the largest and most voracious’. This is not a description of pygmy elephants.

Victoria Louise Herridge is a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. She has published a lengthy paper in two parts(z)(aa) offering an in-depth technical study of dwarf elephant species found on Mediterranean islands.

However, Ghar Hasan or Hasan’s Cave in southeast Malta has palaeolithic cave paintings that depict elephants, indicating more recent contact with the animals. Whether these represented full-sized or the pygmy variety is unclear. A small booklet[214] by Dr. Anton Mifsud and Dr. Charles Savona-Ventura describes this cave system.

In Dossier Malta – Neanderthal [1587] Mifsud has drawn attention to another cavern, not far away, formerly known as Ghar Dulam, now Ghar Dalam, where thousands of dwarf elephant bones were discovered. Dulam means ‘small elephant’ in Arabic. This is one of the mainstays of his ‘Atlantis in Malta’ theory. Whether these diminutive creatures justify Plato’s description that they were the “largest and most voracious” of animals (Crit.115a) is clearly debatable. For me, this is not a description of pygmy elephants and so in all probability is an indication of a North African location or, as some claim, an Asian one!

The Atlanteans had control in Europe as far as Tyrrhenia and Egypt, which would have included what is now modern Tunisia, the home of the last recorded wild elephants in that region!

The exact extent of Egyptian-controlled territory in Libya at the time of Atlantis is unclear. We do know that  “In the mid-13th century, Marmarica was dominated by an Egyptian fortress chain stretching along the coast as far west as the area around Marsa Matruh; by the early 12th century, Egypt claimed overlordship of Cyrenaican tribes as well. At one point a ruler chosen by Egypt was set up (briefly!) over the combined tribes of Meshwesh, Libu, and Soped.”(ac)

A Wikipedia(ab) map suggests that the Egyptian New Kingdom control stretched at least halfway towards Syrtis Major, which has been proposed by some as the location of Atlantis.

Readers should be aware that there is general acceptance that the North African Elephant inhabited the Atlas Mountains until they became extinct in Roman times(e)(h). The New Scientist magazine of 7th February 1985(d) outlined the evidence that Tunisia had native elephants until at least the end of the Roman Empire.

H.R. Stahel in Atlantis Illustrated [560] is the only commentator that I have encountered who suggested that elephants were used in the construction of the magnificent buildings described by Plato. This would make sense as Stahel calculated that surrounding the city of Atlantis “the aggregate length of the walls was almost 50 miles; they were 50 feet broad and twice as high. To build them, and their gates and towers, was a feat as impressive as the construction of the canals. The quantity of stone required was roughly 27 times that used in an Egyptian pyramid.” [p94]

In Elephant Destiny[1301] Martin Meredith records that one of the earliest references to the African elephant came from Hanno, the 5th century BC Carthaginian explorer, who related how he came across marshes at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, which “were haunted by elephants and multitudes of other grazing beasts.” Meredith also mentions that stables for as many as 300 elephants were to be found within the city of Carthage itself.

Nevertheless,  the species of elephant used by Hannibal has been a source of debate for years(f). The Numidians of North Africa (202 BC–46 BC) also used local elephants in warfare(g). It would seem to me that the North African Elephant, rather than the Asian or African species, would have been more suited to the trek across the Alps. Needless to say, the Atlas Mountains were part of the Atlantean sphere of control (Timaeus 25a-b) and so may be the reason that Plato mentioned them. It is also reported that during the reign of the Ptolemies in Egypt (323 BC-30 BC), they imported war elephants from Eritrea in East Africa(r).

Dustin Kolb, is a German researcher, who also advocates a Mexican location for Atlantis and endeavoured, unconvincingly, to explain away Plato’s mention of elephants as a reference to bulls and bison!

The latter half of 2010 saw a new piece of nonsense hit the blogosophere when a claim that the Atlanteans had flying machines made of elephant skins suddenly appeared and before you could say “cut and paste” it was ‘adopted’ by a variety of websites(a)(b). So Dumbo was not the first flying elephant! In fact, this daft idea was just a recycling of one of Edgar Cayce’s ‘revelations’ (Reading 364-6)(m).

(a) https://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Speaking-of-Atlantis/1872335  (Offline October 2017)

(b) https://www.saching.com/Articles/Historical-Proof-of-Atlantis-2888.html

(c) https://viewzone.com/atlantis22.html

(d) New Scientist, 7 February 1985 

(e) https://interesting-africa-facts.com/Africa-Landforms/Atlas-Mountains-Facts.html

(f) https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/18/science/the-mystery-of-hannibal-s-elephants.html

(g) https://nabataea.net/elephants.html

(h) https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2014/08/137456/5-animals-that-once-roamed-morocco-but-no-longer-exist/

(i) https://www.seeker.com/how-rope-was-made-40000-years-ago-1943454415.html

(j) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/dining-on-frozen-mammoth-steaks-the-evolution-of-a-strange-rumor

(k) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/flash-frozen-mammoths-and-their-buttercups-yet-another-case-of-repetition-and-recycling-of-bad-data

(l) https://web.archive.org/web/20190830053312/https://www.black-sea-atlantis.com/black-sea-atlantis/

(m) Edgar Cayce Reading 364-6 (hpage.com) 

(n) https://www.q-mag.org/40000-years-of-rope-making.html

(o) https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-long-knotty-world-spanning-story-of-string/

(p) New Scientist (3 Jan.1985)  *

(q) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-claim-of-flash-frozen-mammoths-is-older-than-i-thought

(r) https://www.livescience.com/64407-ancient-egypt-fortress-war-elephants.html

(s) https://www.seeker.com/how-rope-was-made-40000-years-ago-1943454415.html

(t) https://www.dailygrail.com/2013/12/did-you-know-woolly-mammoths-still-walked-the-earth-when-the-pyramids-were-built/

(u) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrangel_Island#Flora_and_fauna

(v) https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/790569.stm

(w) https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=828400733

(x) https://web.archive.org/web/20090930011321/https://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529173

(y) 120,000-calendar year-outdated necklace tells of the origin of string (archive.org)

(z)  https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/133456/1/133456_Vol.1.pdf

(aa) https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/133456/2/133456_Vol.2.pdf

(ab) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Kingdom_of_Egypt 

(ac) https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/egyptians-and-libyans-in-the-new-kingdom/ 

Survivors

Survivors of the Atlantean destruction are a reasonable expectation given the extent of its influence as described by Plato. The fact that its rulers only met every few years suggests a geographical spread that must have left some, if not most, of the confederation intact, irrespective of the location of the earthquake’s epicentre. Some have proposed that survivors migrated to an extensive range of locations such as Egypt, the Middle East and the Americas, but offer little to substantiate their claims apart from the widely dispersed flood myths that are most likely to have arisen following the melting of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age.

Sanchuniathon refers to the original kings of Egypt calling them ‘Aleteans’. Albert Slosman claims[551] that survivors from Atlantis had migrated to Egypt. The archaeologist, Marcelle Weissen-Szumianska, in a 1965 book, Origines Atlantiques des Anciens Egyptiens [837], maintained that the pre-pharaonic Egyptians originated in Atlantis, which had been situated in Morocco! Others suggest that Egypt was an Atlantean colony.

Egerton Sykes proposed that the Tuatha deDanaan were refugees from Atlantis in his 1949 edition of Donnelly’s Atlantis. Sean Welsh is one of several who have labelled the Sea Peoples as Atlantean refugees.

All the suggestions put forward are either pure speculation, invention or allegedly derived from some psychic source. W. Scott-Eliot claimed [543] that refugees from an Atlantic Atlantis fled westward to Mexico and became the Toltecs and eastward and built Stonehenge ln Britain! While other European cultures have also had Atlantean roots attributed to them, the most frequently named are the great civilisations of Central and South America – Aztec, Mayan and Incan. Posnansky went as far as to suggest that Tiwanaku in the Andes was built by Nordic refugees from Atlantis! Proof, however, is lacking in all cases.