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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 »
elephants
Abraham
Abraham is generally accepted as the Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, possibly living in the 2nd millennium BC. The name Abraham and its variants has been identified(a) in many cultures, although the existence of Abraham as a real historical person has been disputed.
Nevertheless, there have been a number of efforts to connect Abraham with the religion of ancient India(b) . The most publicised proponent of this view is Gene Matlock who offered his evidence in a paper titled Who was Abraham?(c)
He begins this document with three citations from ancient sources;
“In his History of the Jews, the Jewish scholar and theologian Flavius Josephus (37-100 A.D.), wrote that the Greek philosopher Aristotle had said: “…These Jews are derived from the Indian philosophers; they are named by the Indians Calani.” (Book I:22.)
Clearchus of Soli wrote, “The Jews descend from the philosophers of India. The philosophers are called in India Calanians and in Syria Jews. The name of their capital is very difficult to pronounce. It is called ‘Jerusalem.'”
“Megasthenes, who was sent to India by Seleucus Nicator, about three hundred years before Christ, and whose accounts from new inquiries are every day acquiring additional credit, says that the Jews ‘were an Indian tribe or sect called Kalani…'” (Anacalypsis, by Godfrey Higgins, Vol. I; p. 400.)”
Matlock believes that India ruled our prehistoric world including parts of America and furthermore. that Atlantis was located in South-East Mexico at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan [0472]. In an attempt to link his Mexican location with Plato’s description of Atlantis, Matlock contends that the ‘elephants’ mentioned by him were the long-snouted tapirs of Meso-America!(e) Furthermore, he claims that there was a connection between India, the Phoenicians, Atlantis and Mexico.
However, Matlock by way of clarification added “My readers should know that the ‘Atlantis’ described in this book may not be the same as Plato’s ‘Atlantis’. I’m just proving that there was once a part of the world called ‘Atlantis’ – that a part of Mexico once had the Sanskrit name Atlán, Tlan or Toltán, whose citizens were known as Atlantecas and Atlantl.” He then continues with “if my ‘Atlantis’ is not the real ‘Atlantis’ no one will ever find the one Plato mentioned.”
Matlock’s widely quoted internet article(c) begins with the identification of Abraham and his wife Sarai with the Hindu god Brahma and his wife Saraisvati.
In 2000, Matlock published Jesus and Moses Are Buried in India, Birthplace of Abraham and the Hebrews[0473], in which he develops this theme further.
A book supporting Matlock by the controversial Sri G. Ananda (Gregory Alexander) entitled Brahma: The God of Abraham [1187] was published in 2014. However, the idea is hotly debated on the internet by all interested parties, Christian, Muslim and Hindu.
Roger M. Pearlman tackled the subject of Atlantis in Plato’s Atlantis Legend Resolution: Abraham is the Real Atlas [1596]. Apart from the unexpected identification of Abraham, he also equates Hercules with the biblical Samson and places the Pillars of Hercules at Gaza. Disturbingly, he suggests that Sodom can be identified as Atlantis. Then, for good measure, he maintains that Göbekli Tepe was founded by Noah‘s family!
Jason Colavito had a critical view(d) of the recent (2017) Turkish documentary, supported by the government, which claims that Göbekli Tepe was built by Telah, Abraham’s father, and destroyed by Abraham.
(a) So Many Abrahams by Hiberia (archive.org)
(b) WELCOME TO AUM-SHALOM.COM (archive.org)
Milkovic, Veljko
Veljko Milkovic is a Serbian inventor from Novi Sad. For the past twenty years, he has been claiming that Atlantis is now at the bottom of the Danube, “more precisely, between Novi Sad, at the foot of the Petrovaradin fortress and Srem.”
To support his claim “Milkovic also collected a large amount of evidence from the bottom of the Danube. During the low water level, numerous stone artifacts with holes, various inscriptions and markings emerged, which are obviously not carved by hand, but perfectly precisely – with a laser.”
His theory is developed in his 2020 book Panonska Atlantida (Pannonian Atlantis) [1932] with some brief notes on the internet(c). He places the Pillars of Herakles at the Iron Gates Gorge on the Danube as have several other commentators. Milkovic places Atlantis itself on the Pannonian Plain, a region where mammoth remains have been found explaining Plato’s reference to elephants.
The same report (a)(b) notes that a team of scientists from the Geological Institute in Bucharest, Romania, are investigating the Deliblato Sands in Serbia in connection with Atlantis.
(a) Tražite je na POGREŠNOM mestu! Veljko tvrdi da se ATLANTIDA nalazi na dnu DUNAVA, poseduje i DOKAZE (novosti.rs) (Serbian)
Mammoths
Mammoths existed as a number of species in many parts of Eurasia and the Americas and were the ancestors of today’s elephants, part of the fauna of Plato’s Atlantis. Mammoths existed for around 5 million years until their extinction over 10,000 years ago, apart, apparently, from a small population on Wrangel Island in Siberia(d), which appears to have lasted until possibly as late as 1700 BC. An intensive study of mammoth remains on Alaska’s St. Paul Island, which was once part of the Beringia landbridge has revealed that they finally died out there 5,600 years ago(e). “The St. Paul mammoth demise is now one of the best-dated prehistoric extinctions,” the researchers report today (August 1, 2016) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The remains of mammoths were probably not studied scientifically until early in the 19th century, with individual specimens such as the ‘Adams’ and the ‘Berezovka’ receiving great attention(c).
In 2022, the BBC reported(i) that “A whole baby woolly mammoth has been found frozen in the permafrost of north-western Canada – the first such discovery in North America.”
However, it was not until the 20th century that mammoths began to slowly enter the pages of the Atlantis story. Both John Cogan and Wolter Smit, among others, have used the mammoth evidence to support their belief that Atlantis was destroyed by an asteroid strike which caused a sudden Pole Shift and consequent freezing of the mammoths.
>>Jason Colavito has traced the story of the frozen mammoths back to the early catastrophist, George Cuvier in 1822(k), who was among the first to suggest that fossil elephant bones had been mistaken in ancient times for the bones of Giants!<<
Ludwik Zajdler believed that there was evidence of a collision between the Earth and Halley’s Comet in 9570 BC and that this caused a 30° alteration to the axis of the earth resulting in the sudden freezing of the Siberian mammoths.
In 2002, Michael Brass has published a paper(h) titled Tracing the Graham Hancock’s Shifting Cataclysm which is “An examination of a specific portion of Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints of the Gods, relating to Earth Crustal Displacement, the climates and fauna of Siberia and Alaska, and the deaths of the mammoths, finds it to be critically flawed.” Readers should find the section dealing with the alleged instant freezing’ of the frozen mammoths of Alaska and Siberia particularly interesting.
Then Antarctica was also nominated by the Flem-Aths as the home of Atlantis, before its destruction, caused by a Pole Shift. However, in their scenario, this was caused by the movement of the Earth’s entire crust as a result of an excessive build-up of ice at the poles!
Theosophists have seized on the sudden demise of the very many mammoth remains discovered in Siberia and Alaska as vindication of Blavatsky’s Atlantis claims.(a)
R. Cedric Leonard has also reviewed the matter of the apparently instant death of many mammoths bodies discovered and the date of their end and posed the rhetorical question “Can it be merely coincidence that this is the very date (circa 10.000 BC) indicated by Plato for the floods and seismic disturbances which led to the sinking of Atlantis and the destruction of its empire?” (b)
Beverly Jaegers (1935- ) has written on a variety of subjects for Atlantis Rising and Hera magazines among others. In AR #22 she wrote of the various theories put forward to explain the mystery of the frozen mammoths but concluded that “Finally, it must be restated that little evidence exists for any of these events as a direct cause of giant mammoths expiring on their feet as suddenly as they must have done to freeze so quickly and so perfectly as to be still fresh millennia later. Although many prehistoric animal populations may have been affected by mass kills, these are fossils, and only the largest, frozen in such an apparently lightning-like moment of time, remain to tantalize the theorist. No single piece of this fascinating scientific puzzle yet covers all the gaps. None answers all the questions.”(f)
Jaegers also wrote a paper on the possibility of cloning mammoths(g).
In 2021, it was reported that this idea may not be as far-fetched as some think, when the project received encouragement “in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.” (j)
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20170603012148/https://www.atlantisquest.com/Paleontology.html
(c) https://mammothtales.blogspot.com/2010/04/zombies-of-mammoth-steppes.html
(d) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-mammoths-idUSKBN20200I or Chapter summary – WhisperingTales (archive.org) *
(f) Atlantis Rising magazine #22 At – PDF Archive
(g) Cloning Of Frozen Mammoths Remains Elusive (rense.com)
(h) p45.pdf (centerforinquiry.org)
(i) Frozen baby mammoth discovered in Yukon excites Canada (bbc.com)
(j) Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction | Extinct wildlife | The Guardian
(k) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-claim-of-flash-frozen-mammoths-is-older-than-i-thought *
Central Mediterranean
The Central Mediterranean is a very geologically unstable region containing as it does all of Europe’s land-based active volcanoes(a), regular seismic(b) activity with the attendant risk of tsunamis. It is now estimated that a devastating tsunami will hit the Mediterranean every 100 years(c). While the Aegean region experiences the greatest number of earthquakes, the Central Mediterranean, particularly around Sicily is also prone to regular tremors.
The idea that Atlantis was situated in this region is advocated by a number of researchers, including Alberto Arecchi, Férréol Butavand, Anton Mifsud, Axel Hausmann, as well as this compiler. Plato unambiguously referred to only two places as Atlantean territory (Crit.114c & Tim 25b) North Africa and Southern Italy as far as Tyrrhenia (Tuscany) plus a number of unspecified islands.
The area between Southern Italy and Tunisia has had a great number of sites proposed for the Pillars of Herakles, while possible locations for Gades are on offer with a number places still known today by cognates of that name.
Plato clearly includes continental territory as part of the Atlantean domain as well as a number of important islands. Within a relatively small geographical area, you have two continents, Africa and Europe represented by Tunisia and Italy respectively, as well as the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Malta together with a number of smaller archipelagos, matching Plato’s description exactly. The later Carthaginian Empire also occupied much of the same territory apart from eastern Sicily and southern Italy which by then was controlled by the Greeks and known as Magna Graecia.
For me, the clincher is that within that region we have the only place in the entire Mediterranean to have been home to elephants up to Roman times – Northwest Africa.
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanology_of_Italy
(b) The Europeam Mediterranean Seismic Centre – EMSC, records all activity in the region.
(c) Tsunami Alarm System – A3M Tsunami Alarm System (tsunami-alarm-system.com) (German & English)
Goti, Marco
Marco Goti is the Italian author of The Island of Plato[1430] in which he attempts to demonstrate 
that Atlantis was situated in Greenland. I say attempts because, in my opinion, he fails dismally. He starts by locating the Pillars of Heracles in the Atlantic, with one side being the basaltic columns at the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland and their counterparts across the sea in Scotland’s Isle of Staffa. This idea was touted by W. C. Beaumont over sixty years earlier(a).
The Cyclopean Islands off the east coast of Sicily near Mt. Etna referred to by Homer in his Odyssey are also known for their basaltic columns.>>At Gunung Padang and Nan Madol there are also numerous columns with comparable volcanic origins.<<
Goti then moves on to Iceland, which he identifies as Thule and spends too much time describing a variety of unpronounceable locations there. He eventually heads for Greenland, which he contends must be Atlantis as it is greater than Libya and Asia combined, ignoring that Plato was referring to might rather than size. Goti posits the huge plain described by Plato to have been situated in the centre of Greenland, ignoring the fact that ice cores dated to over 100,000 years have been identified there, and apart from which the huge island is not submerged. He offers two papers with extracts from his book(b)(c) as well as some evidence of neolithic activity in Greenland(d).
Felice Vinci, who clearly offered some inspiration to Goti, wrote the Foreword to the book and also provided Goti with an archaic Athens in Sweden!
Goti decries other promoters of Atlantis theories for ignoring details in Plato’s account that don’t fit their particular ideas and then he moves Athens to Sweden, has Atlantis above water for hundreds of thousands of years, no elephants, no two annual crops and does not explain how Greenland Atlanteans controlled southern Italy as far as Tyrrhenia, all of which demands a thumbs down from me.
(a) https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/library/pamphlets/Is%20Britain%20the%20Lost%20Atlantis.pdf
(b) The Geometry of Atlantis according to Plato (1/2) – The Tapestry of Time (larazzodeltempo.it)
(c) The Geometry of Atlantis according to Plato (2/2) – The Tapestry of Time (larazzodeltempo.it)
Northcote, Jonathan
Jonathan Northcote is a South African legal practitioner and the author of 16.484ºW 58.521ºN Atlantis, Found?[1369] in which he applies his professional forensic skills to the question of Atlantis. Although initially brought to the subject by Otto Muck’s book[0098], he found aspects of Muck’s ideas unacceptable and began an investigation of his own that led him to conclude that the region of Rockall in the North Atlantic is the most likely candidate as the location of Atlantis,
There is no doubting the quality of Northcote’s research, particularly relating to the geology and underwater topography of the Rockall region, which is fully referenced. However I cannot agree with his treatment of a number of critical items in Plato’s text. These relate to words and phrases such as, continent, Pillars of Heracles, Atlantic, greater than Libya and Asia combined and elephants.
*In 2018, Stuart L. Harris, citing Northcote’s work, published four papers (a-d) on the academia.edu website endorsing the Rockall Plateau as the location of Atlantis. Harris adopts some of Emilio Spedicato’s theories and attributes the destruction of Atlantis to a catastrophic encounter with Nibiru in 9577 BC.*
In January 2019, Northcote revised his book with additional material and published this second edition with the title of Atlantis, Found? An investigation into ancient accounts, bathymetry and climatology [1611]. I am currently working my way through this latest offering and hope to review it in the near future.
(d)
Robertson, Morven (L)
Morven Robertson (1954- ) is a British scientist and author of About Atlantis: Finding the Lost City of Atlantis[1164] in which be proposes that Atlantis had been situated in the Po Valley of Northern Italy, specifically between Padua and Ferrara. He points out that the plain of the Po valley is surrounded on three sides by mountains. He speculates that the Atlantean confederation consisted of kingdoms both within and without the Mediterranean, which is my main bone of contention, namely too much speculation. While his theory, in common with many others, matches many of the details provided by Plato, it does not conform to enough of them. I find his idea of such a widely separated Atlantean alliance, not credible as Plato clearly describes a culturally coherent grouping, sharing language, script and religion. The Po Valley is not to the west of either Athens or Egypt and in addition Robertson glosses over the matter of the elephants, which has caused so much difficulty for other researchers.
Pepper, Martin
Martin Pepper is an American geologist who is intent on demonstrating that Santorini was the site of Atlantis, claiming to have new supportive evidence. He had his ideas revealed in a History Channel program, Atlantis Found, which first aired on October 19th, 2015(a) as part of their How the Earth Works series.
I found it interesting that the advertising blurb for the show never once mentions Plato!
Unsurprising, Jason Colavito, an Atlantis sceptic, offers a scathing critique of the two-hour show (b).
>Additionally, the German website, Atlantisforschung, criticises(c) the selective manner in which Pepper chose excerpts from Plato, carefully ignoring details that might conflict with Santorini being Atlantis.
– “Furthermore, Martin Pepper commits the same mistake as almost all supporters of the Creto-Minoan Atlantis theories: He seeks out exactly those details from Plato’s Atlantis report that correspond to his own ideas and a supposedly unalterable ‘state of scientific knowledge’, while ignoring everything which doesn’t fit.” Atlantisforschung ends with a quote from Stelios Pavlou who commented – “Although Pepper relies heavily on factual science, much of the criticism of [his] theory boils down to the fact that his claim is based on ignoring much of Plato’s real text.”<
For my part, I cannot accept the Santorini/Thera theory without a convincing explanation for where, in the 2nd millennium BC, the Atlantean military of over a million men, plus an even larger civilian population actually lived, not to mention the elephants. Then there is also a small matter of the Plain of Atlantis 370x550km (230×345 miles); where was that? Finally, for good measure, we are missing “the mountains which surrounded it (that) were at that time celebrated as surpassing all that now exist in number, magnitude and beauty.” (Critias.118b). I think Pepper should try again or better still, forget Atlantis altogether!
(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20160417204840/https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3amelg
(b) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-historys-atlantis-found-documentary
(c) Martin Pepper – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) *
Hughes, Bettany (t)
Bettany Hughes (1968- ) is a well-known historian with a high media profile. She has presented one major TV documentary on the subject of Atlantis, specifically supporting aspects of the Minoan Hypothesis. This was Atlantis: The Evidence (Timewatch BBC TWO, 2010)(a) and more recently she has been trotted out to promote a new drama series Atlantis (BBC 2013).
She wrote a preview of this BBC series, for The Telegraph(b), which together with her earlier documentary still raises questions for me about her competence to deal with this subject at all. In her article she refers to the Atlantis story as a moral fable, ignoring the fact that not only were the ‘wicked’ Atlanteans destroyed, but so also were the ‘good’ Athenians.
She then alludes to Plato’s mention of the use of red, black and white stone in Atlantis. It is well known that this combination is common in volcanic regions and has been noted at a number of proposed Atlantis sites; The Canaries, Bolivia, Morocco, Azores, Sardinia and southern Spain.
Next, Hughes tries to explain away the navigation hazard described by Plato, identifying it as pumice. Plato clearly describes mud shoals as the barrier. This would be fine, except that Plato also tells us that the hazard still existed in his day, a thousand years after the eruption. It is improbable, to say the least that pumice would have lingered for a millennium!
These miserable attempts to link Thera and Atlantis are bad enough, Hughes does not explain how Plato repeatedly refers to the Atlantean invasion coming from their base in the the west (Tim.25b & Crit 114c), while Thera/Crete is north of Egypt and south of Athens. Where were the Pillars of Heracles and where were the Minoan elephants?
I would expect a professional like Hughes to offer a more comprehensive review of ALL the information provided by Plato and not dismiss whatever conflicts with her opinion as “sheer fantasy”. This picking and choosing from Plato’s text is not good enough without any justification for her selectivity.
(a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7bVIq0jNfg
(b) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10339254/Atlantis-secrets-of-the-real-lost-city.html
Kolb, Dustin
Dustin Kolb is a German researcher who has opted for a Mexican location for Atlantis(a)(b). Somehow or other he arrived at the conclusion that Plato’s description of Atlantis could only have been a reference to America. His then ‘reasoned’ that since the capital of Atlantis was in the middle of Plato’s island, this must have been a reference to Central America! Moving steadily along, he next decided that the concentric rings of the Atlantean capital could only have been an impact crater. He finally settled on the region of Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico as the original home of Atlantis.
His idea of Atlantis in Mexico is not original, having been first proposed over a century earlier by Louis de Launay and has Gene Matlock as arguably its best known modern proponent. I was not convinced by Kolb as he failed to explain either why or how an attack could be launched from Mexico across the Atlantic to the eastern Mediterranean. He also fails to explain how a Mexican Atlantis had control of the western Mediterranean without leaving any archaeological evidence to support such a contention. Finally, his explanation that the ‘elephants’ recorded by Plato were probably “bulls and bison” is, in my opinion, pathetic.
(a) https://atlantisforschung.de/index.php?title=Atlantis_lag_in_Mexiko (German)
(b) https://www.academia.edu/3385512/Atlantis_in_Mexico?email_work_card=view-paper (Ger)