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

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  • NEWS September 2023

    NEWS September 2023

    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 »
  • Joining The Dots

    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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Dardanelles

Bosporus, The

?The Bosporus or Bosphorus is described by Wikipedia as “a narrow, natural strait and an internationally significant waterway located in northwestern Turkey. It forms part of the continental boundary between Asia and Europe, and divides Turkey by separating Anatolia from Thrace. It is the world’s narrowest strait used for international navigation. The Bosporus connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, and, by extension via the Dardanelles, the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, and by the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov.”

A number of modern commentators have promoted the Bosporus as the location of the Pillars of Herakles; Eberhard Zangger, Christian and Siegfried Schoppe and Werner E. Friedrich.

Arysio dos Santos in his book Atlantis [320.186] noted that “The Bosphorus was considered to be the site of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ even before the name of these famous features was transplanted to the region of Gibraltar, where it remains stuck down to the present time. In reality, bosporus or bosphorus (or bosporos or bosphoros, rather, the Greek words from which the Latin name derives) means ‘cattle passage, oxford’ precisely because Hercules was said to have crossed there with the cattle he rustled from Geryon, in Erytheia.”

Ballaster, Xaverio

Xaverio Ballester is a Spanish linguist and a professor at the University of Valencia. He is a leading proponent of Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm or PCP), which suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, several millennia earlier than the Chalcolithic or at the most Neolithic estimates in other scenarios of Proto-Indo-European origins.(a)

He has written on the subject of Atlantis in a paper on the Academia.edu website(b). He discusses the Pillars of Heracles at some length noting that “it is also hardly credible that for the distant Greek world the expression arose precisely from the reference to a strait, that of Gibraltar, which the Greeks must not have known more or less directly, at the earliest, until the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a time that must also be well after the emergence of traditions about Heracles. The corollary of all this is the inevitable suspicion that other older Heracles columns, perhaps the original ones, must have stood much closer to Athens, much closer to Greece.”

He suggests the Dardanelles as the possible location of the Pillars, with Atlantis in Anatolia along with the perimeter of the Black Sea.

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

(b) https://www.academia.edu/5921500/Las_Atl%C3%A1ntidas_de_Plat%C3%B3n (Span)

Atlantrope

Atlantrope in spite of its name has no connection with Atlantis. It was in Herman Sorgelfact the name of an enormous dam building project first proposed in 1928 by the German architect Herman Sörgel (1885-1952). Ironically, he was hoping to create artificially what some think had existed in reality and within the memory of man and whose destruction may have led to the destruction of Atlantis.

His idea was to create dams at Gibraltar, the Dardanelles and the Strait of Sicily and gradually reclaim land by lowering the level of the Mediterranean and incorporate hydro-electric plants into the scheme(a)(b). He went further and  suggested flooding large sections of the Sahara Desert. For a few years after Sörgel’s death, efforts were still being made to gain support for the idea.

>In 1997, Robert G. Johnson, a retired professor, also proposed the damming of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar(c).<

Sörgel’s proposal was briefly referred to in SKY TV’s second series of The Man in the High Castle.

(a) https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/04/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-691-blog-bookstore-simply-the-thing-i-am-shall-make-me-live-from-jorge-luis-borges-sha.html

(b) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

>(c) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/97EO00180<

Zangger, Eberhard

Eberhard Zangger was born in Switzerland in 1958. He is a geoarchaeologist who has written a number of books and articles on ancient civilisation. He is the leading proponent of the controversial idea that Troy and Atlantis are the same. In 1989, he initially Zanggeradvanced the idea while working at Cambridge University.

The late Steven Sora also proposed that Atlantis and Troy were one and the same and that the reports of their wars were confused accounts of the same event. However, Sora located his Atlantis/Troy around 4,000 km from Zangger’s in Iberia.

His views were published in English as The Flood From Heaven[483], however, It seems rather odd to me that Zangger ended this book with eight counter-arguments and shortcomings relating to his thesis. He repeats some of this in a separate paper(l) where he notes that this theory has some obvious weaknesses: Troy is not an island, it does not lie in the Atlantic Ocean, is nowhere near the size of a subcontinent, did not flower 11,000 years ago and was not washed into the sea by a natural catastrophe. All those things are characteristics of Atlantis.” Whether all this is an expression of open-mindedness or doubt, I shall leave others to decide.

He followed that a decade later with a second book[484] that in part returns to the subject. In The Future of the Past Zangger matches a range of features in the Atlantis narrative with the available description of Troy. He then describes how he applied an objective statistical analysis system known as a ‘Monte-Carlo Method’, to these matching details, as well as those of other popular theories, and found that his theory, which situates Atlantis at Troy, scored the highest probability rating as its location. While I do not doubt the neutrality of the system’s results, I would have some misgivings regarding the objectivity of the data entered, a view supported by Zangger himself. For example, if Zangger has entered the location of the Pillars of Heracles as the Dardanelles and ignores the Straits of Messina and Gibraltar, then the results must be considered biased. Consequently, I would suggest that the exercise be repeated by some disinterested mathematicians and then collate their results.

Erich Von Däniken had seldom touched on the Atlantis story until his Odyssey of the Gods published in English in 2000 [0273].  He concentrated his discussion on the work of fellow Swiss writer, Eberhard Zangger, who identifies Atlantis with Troy. Von Däniken appears ambiguous about the actual existence of Atlantis although he seems most reluctant to accept Zangger’s Trojan Atlantis theory. He notes that “Almost anything is possible where Atlantis is concerned. Only Eberhard’s assumption that Atlantis was nothing other than Troy is hard to sustain.”

Zangger claims that Plato’s Atlantis narrative is a distorted recollection of the Trojan War, including the earthquake and sudden flooding of Mycenaean Tiryns around 1200 BC morphing into the demise of Atlantis(k). However, the Tiryns inundation is just one of several other flooded Greek cities, such as Helike or Atalanta that are also claimed as the inspiration for Plato’s flooding of Atlantis.

Zangger points out that the library of books and articles relating to Atlantis all stem from two excerpts from Plato’s Dialogues that amount to no more than 6,000 words, many of which he claims to be mistranslated.

There is a scholarly critique of Zangger’s work by Edmund F. Bloedow to be found on the Internet(a).

Zangger has also entered the debates surrounding the Sea Peoples. He contends that their movements were unrelated to climate change as suggested by some. His views on the subject have been contested(d).

Zangger together with archaeologist Serdal Mutlu investigated the little-known ancient Luwian civilisation of Anatolia. They believe “that Trojans and many of the people who sided with the Trojans in the Trojan War were Luwians.” They also claim that the remains of Troy has even lower levels still unexcavated(b). A website devoted to the subject is available(c).

Zangger has now expanded further on the subject with the publication The Luwian Civilisation[1217], which bears the subtitle of The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age. In the book [p.20] he makes the interesting point that “Sea Peoples with feather crowns bear the name Tekker, which is reminiscent of ‘Teucer’, a term commonly used for the Trojans after 1200 BCE.”>This book is now available online(m).<

In May 2016, Zangger, President of Luwian Studies, introduced the results of a recent investigation of the Luwian-speaking peoples, who now appear to have been an alliance of small independent states in Turkey, west of the Hittite Empire.

Zangger also adds a video clip(e) in which he compares a history of the Trojan War by the 13th-century Italian writer, Guido de Columnis, with Homer’s account. Some aspects of Guido’s description of the city of Troy are evocative of Plato’s description of Atlantis (f).

Jason Colavito has written a highly critical article(g) on Zangger’s Luwian theory. By contrast, a more positive overview of Zangger’s work is presented by Thorwald C. Franke(h).

Zangger’s proposed ancient conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean was reported in New Scientist (i) and dubbed ‘World War Zero’, a soundbite that attracted wider media attention(j).

(a) https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1995/95.02.18.html

(b) https://www.dailysabah.com/history/2015/05/21/another-long-forgotten-anatolian-civilization-rising-from-shadows

(c) luwianstudies.org.

(d) See: Archive 2681

(e) https://popular-archaeology.com/issue/spring-2016/article/scientists-proclaim-a-new-civilization-in-the-aegean-bronze-age

(f) https://luwianstudies.org/sources/guido-de-columnis/

(g) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/swiss-geoarchaeologist-claims-lost-luwian-civilization-caused-the-bronze-age-collapse-and-the-trojan-war

(h) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis-zangger.htm

(i) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2087924-world-war-zero-brought-down-mystery-civilisation-of-sea-people/

(j) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3587701/Mysterious-civilisation-Sea-Peoples-wiped-world-war-zero-according-new-study.html

(k) https://www.academia.edu/25590584/Plato_s_Atlantis_Account_A_Distorted_Recollection_of_the_Trojan_War

(l) https://www.moneymuseum.com/pdf/yesterday/03_Antiquity/Atlantis%20en.pdf

(m) (99+) The Luwian Civilization – The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age | Eberhard Zangger – Academia.edu *

Brady, J. D.

Joseph Daniel (Dan) Brady is an American researcher with a particular interest in scripture-related non-fiction mysteries. He has now turned his attention to the question of Atlantis. In a somewhat complicated theory, he makes a distinction between the Phoenician Tyre and the Tyre (Tyrus) whose destruction is described by Ezekiel (26 & 27). He compares the demise of Ezekiel’s Tyre with Plato’s destruction of Atlantis. Brady proceeds to identify the Plain of Troy, formerly a bay, as the final resting place of Atlantis.

>In a 2023 email, Brady offered the following clarification of his view of Tyrus and Tyre – Eze 26:7 (of the KJV translation) says Nebuchadrezzar’s army attacked Tyrus on the day it was destroyed. Eze 26:21 says Tyrus will never be found again. All of the canals dug into the surface of Atlantis weakened its stability, The earthquakes imploded the surface and the floods washed the surface away. The bay at Troy was in the Illiad but is now missing. The fort at Troy needed to be dug out and my conclusion is Plato was referring to this bay when he wrote the subsidence of the island prevents sailing that way anymore. The bay at Troy was filled in by the surface of Atlantis. Tyre is in Lebanon, never lost, finding it is easy. Tyre and Tyrus were different places.

Eze 28:12-13 presents the King of Tyrus as being in Eden. This leads to Satan being the King of Tyrus. In Eze 26, God presents that he was responsible for destroying Atlantis. Eze 28:14 presents Satan as the covering cherub. The lie that Tyre was Tyrus was a cover story that all bible translations, except the King James Version, have accepted. Eze 29:18-20 confirms that Tyrus was destroyed during Nebuchadrezzar’s life. He died c562 BC, Tyre still exists after 2500 years. The story that Tyrus was Tyre does not make sense, but it has succeeded in covering the demise of Tyrus. All bible translations, except KJV, have kicked Tyrus out of the Bible.”<

In 2010 Brady published his ideas in a book with the ingenious title of Atlantis, which was available as a paperback[738] and an ebook.>Further details can be read on the imdb.com website, which also offers images and videos(e).<

He also claims to have located the Garden of Eden as well as having found evidence within the Bible of life on other planets!

Helena Blavatsky was possibly the first to link the biblical Tyrus with Atlantis in The Secret Doctrine[1495].  Brady’s idea that Ezekiel’s Tyrus was not the Phoenician city of Tyre has been taken up by David Hershiser in a 2015 article in Atlantis Rising magazine(d), reprising his book Beyond the Pillars of Hercules[1016]. However, while Brady locates his Tyrus/Atlantis at Troy, Hershiser has placed his Tyrus/Atlantis in the Atlantic just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar.

In 2014 Brady published a revised edition of his book with a new title, Atlantis: The Renamed Island[986], in which he claims that Atlantean gold treasure was hidden in a labyrinth on the Greek island of Lemnos. He further claims that Plato located Atlantis between Lemnos and Troy, in front of the Dardanelle Straits!(b)  Jason Colavito has reviewed Brady’s claim of treasure(c).

(b) https://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/Underground+Labyrinth+Gold-hoard+on+Lemnos+Isle,+Greece+Discovered%3F+J.D.+Brady,+Authorresearcher+of+True+Story,+Atlantis,+the+Renamed+Island+Comments/9481848.html

(c) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/author-uses-google-earth-to-assert-conspiracy-to-steal-treasures-of-atlantis

(d) See Archive 3395

(e) https://www.imdb.com/name/nm14658916/ *