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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
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Arcadia
Ellefsen, Johan S.
Johan S. Ellefsen is Bolivian by birth and now lives in the United States, where he works as an aviation attorney.
His first book, The Sacred Landscape, deals with the subject of prehistoric art with a focus on the paintings in the Chauvet Cave.
Ellefsen’s earliest contribution to the Atlantis debate, was a paper titled La Atlántida, in Spanish(a}{b). In it, he suggests that “it is very probable that the myth collected information about islands in the Atlantic and combined them into one, which Plato called Atlantis. This compilation It was made, on the one hand, from mythology Greek regarding the Hesperides and Cassiterides islands, and on the other, an important compilation of the Memorie that lasted from Minoan Voyages to these islands, from which Crete was supplied with tin.” He seems to identify a range of influences in Plato’s story ranging from Britain and Ireland to Minoan Crete and Troy.
In Ellefsen’s second book Solon’s Atlantis [1968] he takes a very different approach, offering an array of evidence to “show the provenance of the Atlantis story. Plato did not fabricate it.” The core of his argument concerns “a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian papyrus recounting a story brought from Syria during the reign of Amenhotep II, as well as well as some obscure Greek traditions preserved in the midst of the Arcadian mountains.” Thorwald C. Franke has published a review of Ellefsen’s second book that includes qualified support for its research and presentation although he disagrees with the author’s overall thesis(c).
Many have suggested a source for the Atlantis story beyond Egypt such as Peter James, who, some years ago in The Sunken Kingdom [047.280] expressed certainty that “Solon got the story not from Egypt but from Lydia.”
(a) https://www.estudiosclasicosbolivia.org/IMG/pdf/6_ellefsen-la_atlantida.pdf
(b) Archive 7380 | (atlantipedia.ie) (machine translation to English of (a))
(c)Review of: Johan S. Ellefsen and Ugarit-Atlantis – Atlantis-Scout *
Arcadia
Arcadia is a central region of the Peloponnese in Greece. It is one of a number of locations that have been proposed as inspiring elements of Plato’s Atlantis
story. One proponent is Oliver D. Smith who argues that “Plato based his king Atlas on a mythical Arcadian king of the same name and his main inspiration for Atlantis was the town Methydrium and nearby city Megalopolis, both in Arcadia.”
This, together with some other details, such as similarities between the ten kings of Atlantis and the ten kings of Arcadia led Smith to his conclusion(a).