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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 »
Carlos Alberto Bisceglia
Bisceglia, Carlos Alberto
Carlos Alberto Bisceglia is the author of Atlantis 2021 – Lost Continent Discovered [1895]. He has several other books currently being translated from their original Italian.
Bisceglia’s central claim is that Atlantis was situated on an ‘island’ in northwest Africa. He claims “that the ‘geographical coordinates’ left by Plato indicate that the empire of Atlantis included the regions enclosed by Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the adjacent islands, and possibly southern Spain.” He further claims that this territory was known to the Egyptians as ‘Ma’, being an abbreviation of Meshwash!
The African Humid Period which ended between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, saw North Africa as home to some very extensive river systems and huge lakes. In what is now Western Sahara, the Tamanrasset River flowed from the Atlas Mountains southward and then west to the Atlantic. This creates a virtual ‘island’ enclosing the Atlantean territory delineated above, leaving a relatively small ‘isthmus’ in the Atlas mountains between the Mediterranean and the source of the river.
A comparable claim was made by Michael Hübner in 2008, when he described the Souss-Massa plain of Morocco as an island, surrounded as it is by mountains and called ‘island’ by the native Amazigh people!
I did not find Bisceglia’s claim convincing. His insistence that the Atlantis war took place 9,000 years before Solon, millennia before Athens even existed and certainly well past the African Humid Period is, for me, untenable. His book lacks focus and could have been fruitfully edited to half its size. Having described his Atlantis, he wanders off all over the world to Göbekli Tepe, Gunung Padang, Nan Madol along with many other places, all interesting, but without any real connection to Atlantis in NW Africa. He names the Richat Structure along with the 50km distant Semsiyat Dome as the capital(s) of Atlantis! According to Bisceglia, the larger structure (Richat) was reserved for the deity, the smaller one (Semsiyat) for his ‘people’!
Nevertheless, Bisceglia offers a pathetic explanation as to why his chosen Atlantis location is not submerged by suggesting that his Land of Ma was confused with the Land of Mu (Sundaland) in the Pacific and that the two separate accounts ‘were merged into one’. He adds “how the Egyptian priests knew this is a mystery. Evidently, some survivors from Sundaland arrived in some way in Egypt”
However, Bisceglia made one simple but highly pertinent comment – “If Plato had thought that Atlantis was an island located in what we today call the Atlantic Ocean, he would have written that his Atlantis was ‘in the Middle of Okeanos’.” For the Greeks of Plato’s time, Okeanos referred specifically to the great river that encircled the known world. Instead. he placed Atlantis in the Atlantic Sea, which in my opinion brings us back to the Mediterranean.
In 2022, Bisceglia’s entire book was plagiarised under the name of Annabel Caras and is still>>(8th August, 2023)<<on sale at Amazon.
Ocean or Sea
Ocean and Sea are words employed by classical writers in a manner different to our present usage. Originally the Greek word Oceanos referred to the ‘Great River’ that was assumed to flow around the then known world.
>That great resource Theoi.com notes(j) “In the ancient Greek cosmogony the RIVER OKEANOS (Oceanus) was a great, fresh-water stream which encircled the flat disc of the earth. It was the source of all of the earth’s fresh-water–from the rivers and springs which drew their waters from it through subterranean aquifers to the clouds which dipped below the horizon to collect their moisture from its stream.”<
Livio Stecchini wrote that “the existence of a river Oceanus as an extension of the Nile along the Equator was considered a serious reality in Greek times” (e)
Anton Mifsud has pointed out[209] that Homer used the word ocean for the sea and in fact used the same word for the Tyrrhenian ‘Sea’ (a). Both Seneca and Cicero referred to the Mediterranean Sea as the Atlantic Ocean(b)(c). Diodorus Siculus notes further that the word for ocean has even been applied to the Nile(d) by Homer. Herodotus also recorded that Homer called the Nile ‘Okeanòs’, as it was generally believed at the time that it began the Atlantic Ocean and flowed across the equator to Egypt(f)and ended in an ‘ocean’, the Mediterranean. (quoted by J.H. Agnew) [1232.123]
Georgeos Diaz-Montexano made a similar point when he offered the simplistic explanation that the classical writers had three words for bodies of saltwater; pontos (small), pelagos (medium) and okeanos (large). Plato always referred to Atlantis as being in a pelagos.
Alfred C. Moorhouse, among others, has pointed out(a) that ‘pontos’ is seemingly derived from words meaning ‘path’ or ‘bridge’, which in turn gave us the Latin ‘pons’ for bridge. Understandably, early sailors preferred shore-hugging and the use of trusted sea routes. ‘Pelagos’ refers to open seas, probably when out of sight of land. Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pospiech suggested that the words were used to distinguish “between the familiar and the foreign”.(h)
George Sarantitis suggested that ‘Pelagos’ “usually denotes a small sea in the shape of an embrace and contains islands, bays, peninsulas”, while ‘Pontos’ “denotes a sea with strong currents that require extra effort to navigate.”(i)
Carlos Bisceglia in his Atlantis 2021, made an important observation – “If Plato had thought that Atlantis was an island located in what we today call the Atlantic Ocean, he would have written that his Atlantis was ‘in the Middle of Okeanos’.” For the Greeks, Okeanos referred specifically to the great river that encircled the known world. Instead. he placed Atlantis in the Atlantic Sea, which in my opinion brings us back to the Mediterranean.
We can conclude therefore that since Plato never used the term ‘ocean’ in connection with Atlantis there is no proof that he was referring to our present-day Atlantic, while in all likelihood he was indicating the western basin of the Mediterranean or the reported large inland sea where the chotts of Tunisia and Algeria are all that remains of it today.
(a) Odysseus x. 508,
(b) Quaestiones Naturales,
(c) Somnium Scipioni
(d) Biblioteca Storica i.
(e) Ancient Cosmology (archive.org)
(g) https://www.jstor.org/stable/636658
(h) See Archive 6248
(i) The Atlantis Hypothesis (2nd Conference)(Heliotopos, Athens, 2010) p.400
(j) OCEANUS – Earth-Encircling River of Greek Mythology (theoi.com) *