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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 »
Aryans
Thule Society
The Thule Society emerged just over a century ago, as an extreme nationalistic German secret society called Germanenorden was founded and after a few years, a schism in its ranks led to the Munich branch adopting the cover name of Thule-Gesellschaft. Some of its members sought to link Thule with Atlantis and the Aryans with the Atlanteans using some of the ideas of Helena Blavatsky and Jean-Silvain Bailly(a).
The Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum (“Study Group for Germanic Antiquity”), was a German occultist and völkisch group founded by Felix Niedner in 1910(c). Other sources name Rudolf von Sebottendorff as the founder(d).
Karl Harrer, a member of the Thule Society along with the far-right politician Anton Drexler were founders of the German Workers Party (DAP) in 1919, two years later it changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, better known as the Nazi Party(b). The Thule Society faded with the establishment of the DAP, although there was a failed attempt to revive it in 1933.
Claims that most leading Nazis had been members of the Thule Society seem to be a gross exaggeration, having only had Rudolf Hess as a member for a brief period, although it is claimed that other high-ranking Nazis such as Göring and Himmler were also members, there is no evidence to support this claim.
History Professor Peter Staudenmeier offers a more sober view of the Thule Society than that portrayed in many popular books today. He points out that “the short-lived Thule Society, which gained brief notoriety in the aftermath of the First World War, is frequently portrayed as a paradigmatic example of the ‘secret societies’ that supposedly gave birth to the Nazi party. While the organisation was indeed secretive, and its modest membership did include several figures who went on to become leading Nazis, it was not an occult order……………the Thule Society was in reality a political organisation committed to Right-wing radicalism, not esoteric machinations. Aside from spreading antisemitic propaganda, its chief activities consisted of militant confrontations with the Left in the Munich area. Hitler had nothing to do with the group.”(d)
(a) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_vril08.htm
(b) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society
(c) https://occultthirdreich.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/the-thule-gesellschaft/
(d) The Nazis as occult masters? It’s a good story but not history | Aeon Ideas
Aryans
Aryan is a term used to denote “peoples speaking Indo-European (or specifically Indo-Iranian) languages, or ancient peoples thought to have spoken Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical language from which Indo-European languages are believed to derive.”
An Aryan Atlantis was proposed by Ignatius Donnelly in his famous 1882 book(a), selectively employing biblical texts and a variety of mythologies to support his view.>However, he did not use the term in the racist manner it came to be employed just four decades later.<
Donnelly also promoted the popular 19th-century idea that India was subjected to an invasion by Aryans from the northwest. This idea is still debated today with opponents of the idea, such as the American-born Vedic scholar, David Frawley, who see the Aryans, not as invaders but indigenous Indians[0817]. Graham Hancock quotes Frawley extensively in support of his ancient civilisation views.
The term ‘Aryan’ was also used to describe one of Blavatsky’s imaginary ‘root races’, however, some argue that it was used in a ‘spiritual’ sense, but this is debated.
>The World History Encyclopedia offers an excellent overview of the origins of the Aryans(b) as well as the etymology of the name itself. It explains how “it was first applied as a self-identifying term by a migratory group of people from Central Asia (Kazakhstan) later known as Indo-Iranians (who settled on the Iranian Plateau) and, later, applied to Indo-Aryans (who traveled south to settle northern India).” It seems that this group integrated with the people of the Indus Valley. When, in the 2nd millennium BC, the Indus Valley civilisation declined, supposedly due to climate change, its people moved south. This may also have been exacerbated by a decline in trade, due to internal strife in two of their principal trading partners, Mesopotamia and Egypt.<
Today the term is primarily used to describe the family of languages known as Indo-European. Unfortunately, the word has also a dark side to its history, with its arrogation by the Nazis to describe their ‘master race’.
India *
India, which at first sight to Europeans might appear an improbable candidate, has not escaped the attention of Atlantis seekers. For the sake of simplicity, I use the term ‘India’ as employed before independence so as to include Pakistan, in order to accommodate most of the Indus Valley area of influence, which straddled both those modern states. Awareness of the region was boosted by the investigations of Graham Hancock and recorded in his book Underworld, which prompted a flurry of speculation(a)(c).
More recently a wall was discovered just 3 metres below the surface of the sea off the coast of Konkan on the west coast of India. The structure stretches over many kilometres (possibly as much as 25 km) and has been dated to 8000 BC(j). At the northern end of the Konkan Coast lies the Bay of Cambay, where the discovery of a large sunken city has also generated claims of great antiquity. A paper(r) by Badrinaryan Badrinaryan proposed that this ‘great metropolis’ had lasted from 13,000 BP until 3000 BP!
It may be informative to read a more sceptical commentary on discoveries in the Bay of Cambay. In a lengthy article, Paul V. Heinrich wrote – “Given the significance of the claims being made for artefacts recovered from the Gulf of Cambay, remarkably little, if anything has been published. As of the time that this article was written, nothing has been published in any scientific literature about these artefacts. At this time, the only known source of pictures had been newspaper articles, popular books (Hancock 2002a), and web pages (Hancock 2002b). Being an experienced archaeological geologist familiar with lithic materials used to prepare artefacts and concretions created by both pedogenic and marine processes, these artefacts naturally attracted my attention. However, an examination of the artefacts illustrated by Hancock (2002b) generated considerable scepticism on my part as to whether many of these so-called “artefacts” illustrated by Hancock (2002b) are really artefacts.”(u)
Further interest was generated by suggestions that the Indus Valley civilisation could also have had an Atlantis connection.
In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India[0817] is a ground-breaking book wherein its three authors, Feuerstein, Kak & Frawley, argue that there was no “Aryan invasion” and that India, not Sumer, was the cradle of civilized humanity.
P. N. Oak (1917-2007) the Indian history revisionist has gone as far as to claim that the British Isles had once been ruled by India(l)(t)!
An Indian researcher, P. Karthigayan, had prepared a paper for the 2005 Atlantis Conference on Melos entitled ‘The Origin of the Atlantis Civilisation through Tamil literary evidence’, however, circumstances prevented his attendance. Another Indian anthropologist, Amlan Roychowdhury, an anthropologist, also proposes(b) that the Vedic culture of India is a remnant of the Atlantean civilisation. March 17th 2013 saw an article(i) published in the Sunday Observer of Sri Lanka by Neil Kiriella, in which he proposed that Plato’s Atlantis story was a reworking of the destruction of Lankapura as recorded in the Ramayana.
In an October 2015 article by blogger Abo Rashad, he outlined in some detail similarities between Vedic civilisation and that of ancient Egypt. He concluded with the following comment, “ There are evidences galore that Vedic civilization was the precursor of all major civilization in the world. Similarities between the Egyptian civilization and the Vedic civilization and the evidence of the latter being the progenitor of the earlier is but one example. There are plenty of similarities between Vedic and Celtic civilization, between Vedic and Anatolian civilization, between Vedic and Mayan civilization etc. The question is the similarities between one and many.”
Sergey Teleguin is a Russian professor of Philology and a leading advocate of the idea that the city of Tripura (Triple City) in Vedic tradition was the original inspiration behind Plato’s city of Atlantis. In support of his contention, he has outlined a number of parallels between Plato’s account and the sacred texts of India, the Puranas and Mahabharata in an extensive English excerpt(n) from his 2005 Russian book, Anatomy of a Myth[1122].
The Malagabay website published a lengthy article(l) in July 2016, offering evidence along with some conjecture, supporting the radical idea that the Sea Peoples had originated in India and having migrated westward, some of them reached the Aegean and became known as Dorians! The author of the article appears to have followed the ideas of Edward Pococke published in his India in Greece[1231].
Martin Freksa has a totally different view of where India fits into the Atlantis saga by maintaining that Atlantis while pursuing world domination, was destroyed by atomic weapons aboard missiles launched by India around 3000 BC.
David Hatcher Childress has written Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis[1252] in which he discusses the vimanas, the ancient Indian flying machines(s) and for good measure includes the vailxi aircraft of the Atlanteans, the latter being first mentioned in 1894 by the author of A Dweller on Two Planets[1014].
James Hartman, quoting from the Agastya Samhita offers(m) intriguing evidence that the ancient Indians had the ability to make batteries, the design of which is rather reminiscent of the Baghdad Battery!
Cedric R. Leonard in an article on pre-Platonic references to Atlantis(e) identified what he believed are relevant in the ancient writings of India(v).
Ashok Malhotra has proposed that the ancient submerged Indian city of Dwarka provided the inspiration for Plato’s Atlantis story(d).
Qusai Ayman Naser writing in 2013 from Syria also suggested India as holding the location of Atlantis, specifically in the Bay of Bengal(h).
The French historian Philippe Potel-Belner also identifies Bab-el-Mandeb as the location of the Pillars of Heracles(g) beyond which lay Atlantis on a long plain on the west coast of India(f). He has recently drawn attention to the Farasan Islands, near Bab-el-Mandeb, where a Latin inscription could be interpreted as supporting the locality as the site of the ‘Pillars’ (n).
In March 2019, Eugenio B. Ralbadisole offered the highly speculative theory that Atlantis had been situated in India, in an article(o) on the Ancient Origins website. He specifies its location as the Girinagar Mountains of the Junagadh District of Gujarat in western India as its location. His ideas are more fully outlined in a paper on the Academia.edu website.(p)
Apart from any association with Atlantis, Gene Matlock has made the unexpected claim that there is “100% Non-Contestable Proof!” that ancient India had conquered the Americas(q)!
Also See: Yashwant Koak, Dholavira and Kumari Kandam
(a) See: Archive 2051
(b) IS VEDIC CIVILIZATION THE REMNANTS OF THE LEGENDARY ATLANTIS | Vedic Vidyalay ????? ???????? (archive.org) (26 pages)
(c) Indian Atlantis? (archive.org) *
(d) In Search of Atlantis — Getting Closer (archive.org)
(e) See: Archive 2055
(f) See: Archive 2056
(g) See: Archive 2057
(h) See: Archive 5135
(i) See: Archive 2058
(j) See: Archive 2059
(k) See: Archive 2723.
(l) Catastrophic English: India In Greece | MalagaBay (archive.org)
(m) https://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/ourpast.htm
(n) langue et histoire – ACTUALITES (archive.org)
(o) https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/atlantis-india-0011657
(q) http://www.viewzone.com/gene.india.html
(r) Gulf of Cambay: Cradle of Ancient Civilization | Archaeology Online (archive.org)
(s) Ancient Indian Aircraft Technology (bibliotecapleyades.net)
(t) P N Oak: World Vedic Heritage | MalagaBay (wordpress.com)
(v) The Vimana Epics (Expanded Knowledge-base) | Ancient Astronaut Archive (one third way down page) *
Wingate, Richard
Richard Wingate (1933-2011) was described by Andrew Collins as a ‘maverick mineral 
prospector and explorer’(a). His search for Atlantis brought him to Ecuador where he was enchanted by the so-called Crespi Collection leading him to speculate on a possible link between it and lost Atlantis. He subsequently shifted his attention to the Bahamas where he claimed to have discovered Atlantean structures in shallow waters. He detailed his discoveries in his first book[059].
Wingate published his second book, Atlantis in the Amazon[771] in June 2011. In it he returned to a further consideration of the Crespi Collection and its place in the theory of a South American/Caribbean Atlantis. In support of his view of Atlantis he invoked the controversial Oera Linda Book, Annie Besant, the English theosophist and of course Edgar Cayce.
He also discussed ‘ancient technologies’, including his most startling claim, that Atlantis was destroyed by a prehistoric nuclear war between the Aryans and the Atlanteans. He speculates that the Athenian army was destroyed when a Gibraltar landbridge was shattered by earthquakes allowing the Atlantic to flow in, swamping the Hellenes! Minor details overlooked by Plato!
Wingate originally put Atlantis in the Bahamas, but now he entitled his second book as Atlantis in the Amazon and ends up with Atlanteans being involved in nuclear war in ancient India. Along the way we have metallic glue, Easter Island, Indian wooden flying machines and ancient lasers. All very confusing, to say the least.
Wingate’s ancient atomic weapons claim is just a rehash of the wild speculation from the 1940’s(e) followed by that of Pauwels and Bergier in the 1960’s and regularly regurgitated ever since(b). Contrast the last link and Wingate’s remarks with the more forensic analysis of Jason Colavito(c) together with Dale Drinnon’s account(d).>The late Philip Coppens also wrote a fairly balanced article(f) on the subject ancient nuclear weaponry.<
(a) https://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/stones.htm
(b) https://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5923291-atlantis-destroyed-from-atomic-bombing-by-rama-a-deep-study (offline July 2015)
(c) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-case-of-the-false-quotes.html
(d) See: Archive 2324
>(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20200225034114/https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/bestevidence/<
Black Sea
The Black Sea was known to the Greeks as the Euxine Sea and according to Strabo (1.2.10), in antiquity was often simply referred to as “the sea” (pontos). It has also been known as the Scythian Sea after the people who lived on its northern shore. Pindar referred to it as the ‘Inhospitable Sea’.
It received little attention in connection with the Atlantis mystery until the 19th century when two French writers, André de Paniagua and Moreau de Jonnès, independently located Atlantis in the Sea of Azov. Some years later in 1923, R.A. Fessenden, a Canadian professor of 
Mathematics and Electrical Engineering wrote about the prehistoric flooding of a civilisation in the Caucasus region, which he linked with Plato’s Atlantis. The text of this extensive work is now available on the Internet(a).
Trevor Palmer has written a useful paper (2009) on the Black Sea and the gradual development of theories relating to its dramatic connection with the Mediterranean and how it may have influenced the mythologies of the Middle East and possibly further afield.
Palmer concluded that “The various groups currently investigating the area are agreed that cataclysmic flooding took place during the Late Pleistocene, but remain divided about whether similar floods also occurred during the Holocene. Eye-witness accounts of catastrophic floods in the Black Sea basin at either time could have been passed on to future generations, eventually giving rise to the later Mesopotamian legend of Uta-napishtim and, subsequently, the Biblical story of Noah. However, in the absence of any direct evidence of cultural transmission, that can presently only be regarded as plausible speculation.”(p)
Little was heard of the region again until 1998 when Ryan & Pitman identified the flooding of the Black Sea with Noah’s Flood[025]. This was followed in 2001 by Ian Wilson‘s Before the Flood [185], which reflected a similar line of thought.
In 2004, the Bulgarian father and son oceanographers, Petko and Dimitar Dimitrov published their book, The Black Sea, the Flood and the Ancient Myths, in English, which supported much of Ryan and Pitman’s work. Unlike them, who based much of their conclusions on a study of molluscs, the Dimitrovs focused on sedimentation evidence. Their book is now available, in English, as a free pdf file(d). They also suggest that this Holocene influx into the Black Sea also triggered the Vedic Aryan migration to India(g).
>>In 2006 a short paper, with 11 authors that included Petko Dimitrov, William Ryan and Robert Ballard, noted how the Black Sea Flood was initially met with “great hostility” by Bulgarian scientists.
The paper considers “the most important scientific arguments in favor of the flood are as follows:
- The presence of the shelf periphery of an old shoreline that existed around 9,500-8,000 BP. The old shoreline is located at depths of 90-120 m.
- The existence of catastrophic-type deepwater organogenic-mineral sediments (sapropels) that are products of the catastrophe. A rapid change of macro- and microfauna from the brackish lake organisms that existed more than 8,000 years ago to typical marine organisms.
- The occurrence of hydrogen sulfide contamination, which resulted from the catastrophe.”
The authors also briefly touch on artifacts and legends associated with the Black Sea Flood and in reference to the latter they make the following unexpected comment – “Juxtaposing the data from the Black Sea’s natural events and archaeo-mythology, as well as the legend of Noah’s ark, we can claim with a high degree of reliability that the remains of the ark are located within the Black Sea bottom.”<<
Hristo Smolenov is another Bulgarian and a recognised expert in counter-terrorism and mathematics and is another advocate of a Black Sea Atlantis, which he identifies with what he calls the Aurolithic Varna Civilisation that existed 3,000 years before the pyramids. Varna today is situated in the Bulgarian province of Stara Zagora on the Black Sea coast. He has publicised his views through a website(r), video(s) and a book [1003], Zagora – Varna: The Hidden Superculture.
Ryan and Pitman’s book unintentionally triggered the imaginations of a number of people into considering the possibility of a possible link between this inundation and the sinking of Atlantis. While Ryan and Pitman have made no such suggestion, others such as Ian Wilson[185] have seen a distorted memory of the event as a possible inspiration for Plato’s story. In 2009, Liviu Giosan, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute published a paper(e) which suggested that prior to the intrusion of the Mediterranean, the level of the Black Sea had been just 30 metres below its present level rather than the 80 metres proposed by Ryan and Pitman. This would imply a less extensive degree of flooding than previously thought. Giosan has offered a sceptical Ryan an opportunity to replicate his tests.
Although the scenario pictured by Ryan & Pitman and others is of very rapid flooding of the original smaller Black Sea, more recent studies appear to indicate a more gradual rising of the water levels. “With more data to be analysed, it supports the idea that the waters rose unnoticeably, by metres over centuries, even millennia.”(o)
Nick Thom, a British engineer, wrote The Great Flood [776] which includes a section on the Black Sea in which he suggests that the flow of water was from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara rather than the other way around.
Nearly two hundred years ago Josiah Priest in his 1835 book American Antiquities [1143] also offered evidence from Euclid of Megara that the flow of water had been from the Black Sea to the Aegean. Apparently, Euclid heard this from Anacharsis a philosopher from the northern coast of the Black Sea related how the inflow from the rivers of Europe and Asia raised the level of the ‘Sea’ until it breached the landbridge and spilled over into the Sea of Marmara.
Paul Dunbavin has entered the Black Sea flood(s) debate with a 2020 paper entitled Diodorus Siculus and the Black Sea Flood(q). This lengthy essay covers a lot of ground, in particular the comments of Diodorus Siculus who described a Samothracian flood story that appears to contradict the flood described by Ryan & Pitman as it describes a flow of water in the opposite direction. Consequently, the evidence offered by Diodorus is often discounted as ‘unreliable’. Dunbavin, however, offers a possible solution with the suggestion that “The Samothracian flood, as described by Diodorus, could only have occurred after the Black Sea Flood.”
The question of whether the Black Sea Flood was from the east or the west may be answered by consideration of Ronnie Gallagher’s claim of a vast post-glacial Eurasian sea that included the Caspian and Aral Seas. Modern proponents of Atlantis in the Sea of Azov have suggested(t) that at the end of the last Ice Age floods of meltwater poured into the Caspian Sea, which in turn escaped through the Manych-Kerch Gateway(u) into what is now the Sea of Azov, but at that time contained the Plain of Atlantis and from there to the Black Sea proper! This theory suggests that the flooding came from the Black Sea into the Aegean.
More recently, Christian & Siegfried Schoppe, two German researchers have also asserted that the Black Sea was the original ‘Atlantis Ocean and that Atlantis was located in that region [186]. They have suggested that Snake Island located east of the mouth of the Danube was the probable site of Plato’s city. Their contention is that around 5500 BC a landbridge at the Bosporus was breached causing extensive flooding that created what we now know as the Black Sea. Until that time there had only been a small freshwater lake in the region. Although their book was published in German, the Schoppes have a website(b) with a useful amount of English content.
The somewhat eccentric duo of the late Flying Eagle (1920-2007) and Whispering Wind, who also advocated a Black Sea location for Atlantis(a)(f), claimed a specific site on the Strait of Kerch between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Their theory was first expounded in their book [138] in 2004. They also followed the Ryan and Pitman date of 5500 BC for the inundation of the Black Sea.
The evidence to date suggests that the flooding of the Black Sea coincided with a storegga event, which would require a catastrophe on a scale not previously considered. In a 2017 paper(i), John M. Jensen offers a range of evidence to support this contention.
A rather different approach is taken by the German researcher Werner E. Friedrich[695], who pushes back the expansion and the raising of the level of the Black Sea to around 10000 BC, at the end of the last Ice Age. He believes that this led to the flooding of Atlantis, which he claims to have been situated on a plain that had lain between ancient extensions of the rivers Donau and Don. Friedrich located the Pillars of Heracles in the Sea of Marmara[p.39].
A.I. Zolotukhin places Atlantis in western Crimea on his multilingual website with the inviting title of Homer and Atlantis(j).
The legendary destroyed city of Ancomah is frequently compared to Plato’s description of the destruction of Atlantis. It was reputed to have existed in the vicinity of the ancient port city of Trabzon, which is located on the southeast coast of the Black Sea.
Michael A. Cahill in his 2012 two-volume[818][819] publication on the development of civilisation locates Atlantis near what is modern Istanbul in the pre-Diluvian Stone Age.
The concept of a Black Sea Atlantis has the support of the rather eccentric Church of Vrilology(h)!
In October 2018, an attempt was made to breathe new life into the idea of Crimea as a remnant of an Atlantis submerged under the Black Sea. Unfortunately, it offers no evidence or references in the badly translated article(k). In the same month, it was reported that the oldest intact shipwreck was discovered in the Black Sea by an Anglo-Bulgarian team. It was identified as a Greek trading vessel dated to 400 BC(l). The oxygen-free waters at the bottom of the Black Sea had preserved it and dozens of others located by the team.
In early 2019, George K. Weller, building on the theories of the Schoppes, also proposed the Black Sea as Atlantis’ home, again nominating Snake Island as the home of Mr. and Mrs. Poseidon, which, before the Black Sea was flooded, would have been the central peak of their island home, as referred to by Plato(n).
One of the most comprehensive internet papers on all aspects of the history of the Black Sea can be found on the Encyclopaedia Iranica website(m).
(a) https://www.radiocom.net/Deluge/Deluge1-6.htm
(b) See: https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-3914/
(d) http://io-bas.bg/noahproject/BOOK_PETKO.pdf
(e) Danube Delta Holds Answers To ‘Noah’s Flood’ Debate | ScienceDaily (archive.org) *
(f) https://atlantis-today.com/Great_Atlantis_Flood.htm
(h) https://web.archive.org/web/20130108091223if_/https://www.vrilology.org/Atlantis_page.htm
(i) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2017&id=505
(j) https://homerandatlantis.com/?lang=en
(k) https://ktelegram.com/scientists-crimea-may-be-a-fragment-of-the-lost-city-of-atlantis/43728/ (link broken Jan. 2019)
(m) https://www.iranicaonline.org/
(o) https://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghostly-wrecked-ships
(q) e5604c_67fd983e0b934a56ac5b31ee9dd1f41e.pdf (third-millennium.co.uk)
(r) https://atlantisblacksea.wordpress.com/tag/hristo-smolenov/
(s) https://atlantisblacksea.wordpress.com/atlantis-in-the-black-sea-videos/
(t) https://atlantis-today.com
(u) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(v) (PDF) The Flood in the Black Sea – Science and Mythology (researchgate.net) *