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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 »
Exodus
Amalekites
The Amalekites are usually described in encyclopedias as “a biblical people and enemy of the Israelites. They were reportedly wiped out almost entirely as the result of Israelite victories against them in wars beginning shortly after the Exodus and continuing into the period of the early Israelite monarchy(a).”
According to the Old Testament “God ordered Saul (1079-1007 BCE), King of Israel (1049-1007 BCE) to “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1 Samuel 15.2-10)
The Amalekites were responsible for attacking the Israelites after the Exodus from Egypt. There is no mention of the Amalakites ever being in Egypt.
However, I therefore find it strange that many scholars, including Velikovsky, identify the Amalekites with the Hyksos who invaded Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC and ruled it for over a hundred years until defeated by the Egyptian Pharaoh Amasis I.
>Donald Keith Mills considers Velkovsky’s identification of the Hyksos as Amalekites to be deeply flawed and outlines his reasons in his paper Velikovsky and the Amalekites(e).<
Damien Mackey has noted(b) that “Dr. I. Velikovsky’s identification of the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt with the biblical Amalekites has been widely accepted by revisionists – even those who have since rejected his Ages in Chaos.
David Rohl, whose own biblico-historical revision is some centuries apart from Velikovsky’s, had nonetheless accepted the latter’s identification of the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt with the Amalekites of the Book of Exodus (Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest, 1997).
Debbie Hurn, in 2003, wrote a solid article(c) in support of this Velikovskian thesis. I thoroughly recommend that one reads her insightful article written for Testimony Magazine.”
Mackey continued with his own support for the Hyksos Amalakite identification, adding a further twist with his suggestion that the Amalakites were also known as the Amu, following the opinion of the 19th-century German Orientalist Johann Christian Friedrich Tuch and quoted by Velikovsky, endorsing it in Ages in Chaos [0039].
In March 2021, Diego Ratti published Atletenu [1821], in which he places Atlantis in Egypt, with its capital located at Avaris, better known as the capital of the Hyksos(d). He identifies Atlas as “Shamshi-Shu I: the Amorite Prince of Ugarit who in 1646 BC led a coalition of Foreign Kings to conquer Egypt starting the XV Dynasty of the ‘Hyksos’.”
So we now have the following mixture – Amalekites = Hyksos = Amu = Amorites = Atlanteans! Unfortunately, it is beyond my competence to unravel this tangle.
(a) https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Amalekite
(b) https://mosesegyptianised.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/the-hyksos-as-amalekites/
(c) http://www.testimony-magazine.org/back/dec2003/hurn.pdf
(d) About | Atletenu (archive.org)
(e) https://www.academia.edu/97365447/VELIKOVSKY_AND_THE_AMALEKITES *
Gertoux, Gérard
Gérard Gertoux (1955- ) is a French academic who is best known for his book The Name of God YeHoWaH(a)(b). However, most of his prodigious output is concerned with ancient chronology. Many of the subjects he discusses
(c) are touched on in Atlantipedia – The Deluge, Exodus, The Trojan War, Carthage, The Hyksos, all of which are available, in English, on the Academia.edu website
(b) THE NAME OF GOD YeHoWaH. ITS STORY, by Gérard Gertoux (lifes-purpose.info)
Typhon *
Typhon in Greek mythology is described as a winged serpentine monster who fought Zeus for control of the cosmos and lost. He first appeared in Greek literature in the writings of Homer and Hesiod(b). Many castastrophists have identified the story of Typhon as a description of a close encounter and/or possible impact by a comet. Some atlantologists have endeavoured to link Typhon with Plato’s Atlantis.
Emilio Spedicato has described the Typhon explosion as ‘a Tunguska type event’, which led to the collapse of great civilisations such as Egypt and Indus at the end of the third millennium BC(c).
Jürgen Spanuth [15.178] and Walter Baucum [183.36], among others, identified Typhon with Phaëton, while decades later Axel Famiglini proposed that Typhon had destroyed Atlantis located in the Atlantic.
Others have identified Typhon as the comet of Exodus(a), just one of the many speculative suggestions that the myth has generated. However, it is hard not to think that there may have been some real historical event behind the evolution of the story.
Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs, a cosmologist, has gathered together all the principal classical references to Typhon in ‘a Typhon Reader’(d). However, he offers a lengthy discussion regarding the comet Typhon in two parts on the academia.edu(e) and researchgate(f) websites.
(a) A Dangerous Comet. a Dangerous Sky. | Thomas Schoenberger (archive.org) *
(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhon
(c) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=498
(d) https://mythopedia.info/typhon-reader.htm (no longer available)
(e) https://www.academia.edu/43823074/Trials_on_the_Trails_of_Typhon_and_the_Exodus_Part_1
Clube & Napier *
Victor Clube (1934- ) & Bill Napier (1940- ) are two British Astronomers, who published The Cosmic Serpent [291]. in 1982, which was later revised as The Cosmic Winter [290], which was also the title of a lecture given by Clube(b).
They have promoted what became known as ‘Coherent Catastrophism’, which envisions encounters between our Earth and large comets, events that are recorded in ancient history and mythology. They claim, for example, that the biblical Exodus story contains an early reference to Halley’s Comet! Among other encounters, they date the story of Phaëton, mentioned by Plato, to 1369 BC and also discuss catastrophic close encounters with Encke’s Comet or a proto-Encke.
Although Clube & Napier do not refer to Atlantis, from time to time, some commentators have claimed some connection between the demise of Atlantis and encounters with comets named and unnamed.
Philip R. “Pib” Burns has an extensive overview(a) of Clube and Napier’s work on his excellent website. He argues that Clube & Napier should have given greater recognition to the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky(c).
However, The Velikovsky Encyclopedia is happy to quote a number of passages from Clube & Napier’s The Cosmic Serpent including “No authors can justifiably make reference to proposals of this kind without mention also of the investigations by Velikovsky. In a quite remarkable piece of historical analysis some thirty years ago, this author not only drew attention to the parallels between the events described in Exodus and the Ipuwer Chronicle, but also to their implications so far as a catastrophic extra-terrestrial missile and ancient chronology were concerned.” (d)
(a) Clube and Napier: Coherent Catastrophism (archive.org) *
(b) https://www.sott.net/article/148708-Cosmic-Winter-A-Lecture-by-Victor-Clube
(c) https://www.saturniancosmology.org/files/velikovsky/vel-pib.txt
Rogers, Charles A.
Charles A. Rogers is the author of a fully illustrated paper(a) in which he locates the city of Atlantis on the Tunisian River Triton, which led from Chott el Jerid (formerly Lake Tritonis?) to the Gulf of Gabes. He dates the demise of Atlantis to 1404 BC based on a possible connection with a close encounter with Phäeton, which in turn he identifies as what was later to be known as Halley’s Comet. He also combines all this with the eruption of Thera that generated a tsunami, which ran across the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Gabes and destroyed the city of Atlantis and in Egypt wiped out the Pharoah and his men during the biblical Exodus. There seems to be too many coincidences required here.
With regard to the location of Atlantis, the satellite imagery used by Rogers is, in my view, not very convincing and although I am sympathetic to the existence of Atlantis in that region, I think only investigation on the ground will offer real evidence.
(a) https://www.academia.edu/36855091/Atlantis_Once_Lost_Now_Found
Fitzgerald Lee, J.
J. Fitzgerald Lee was the controversial author of The Great Migration[1169], who proposed that the Israelite migration recorded in Exodus was not from Egypt to Palestine, but from Central America westward, via the frozen Bering Strait, through Asia and on to Europe and Egypt! He also speculated that Atlantis had existed in the Atlantic and that its submergence cut off Africa from Central and South America(a).
(a) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/59387233?searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=
Late Bronze Age Collapse
Late Bronze Age Collapse of civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC has been variously attributed to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and severe climate change. It is extremely unlikely that all these occurred around the same time through coincidence. Unfortunately, it is not clear to what extent these events were interrelated. As I see it, political upheavals do not lead to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or drought and so can be safely viewed as an effect rather than a cause. Similarly, climate change is just as unlikely to have caused eruptions or seismic activity and so can also be classified as an effect. Consequently, we are left with earthquakes and volcanoes as the prime suspects for the catastrophic turmoil that took place in the Middle East between the 15th and 12th centuries BC. Nevertheless, August 2013 saw further evidence published that also blamed climate change for the demise of Bronze Age civilisations in the region.
In 2022, a fourth possible cause emerged from a genetic research project -disease. The two disease carriers in question were the bacteria Salmonella enterica, which causes typhoid fever, and the infamous Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for the Black Death plague that decimated the population of medieval Europe. These are two of the deadliest microbes human beings have ever encountered, and their presence could have easily triggered significant heavy population loss and rampant social upheaval in ancient societies(d).
Robert Drews[865] dismisses any suggestion that Greece suffered a critical drought around 1200 BC, citing the absence of any supporting reference by Homer or Hesiod as evidence. He proposes that “the transition from chariot to infantry warfare as the primary cause of the Great Kingdoms’ downfall.”
Diodorus Siculus describes a great seismic upheaval in 1250 BC which caused radical topographical changes from the Gulf of Gabes to the Atlantic. (181.16)
This extended period of chaos began around 1450 BC when the eruptions on Thera took place. These caused the well-documented devastation in the region including the ending of the Minoan civilisation and probably the Exodus of the Bible and the Plagues of Egypt as well. According to the Parian Marble, the Flood of Deucalion probably took place around the same time.
Professor Stavros Papamarinopoulos has written of the ‘seismic storm’ that beset the Eastern Mediterranean between 1225 and 1175 BC(a). Similar ideas have been expressed by Amos Nur & Eric H.Cline(b)(c). The invasion of the Sea Peoples recorded by the Egyptians, and parts of Plato’s Atlantis story all appear to have taken place around this same period. Plato refers to a spring on the Athenian acropolis (Crit.112d) that was destroyed during an earthquake. Rainer Kühne notes that this spring only existed for about 25 years but was rediscovered by the Swedish archaeologist, Oscar Broneer, who excavated there from 1959 to 1967. The destruction of the spring and barracks, by an earthquake, was confirmed as having occurring at the end of the 12th century BC. Tony Petrangelo published two interesting, if overlapping, articles in 2020 in which he discussed Broneer’s work on the Acropolis(e)(f).
>A recent review of two books on subject in the journal Antiquity begins with the following preamble;
“The collapse c.1200 BC’ in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean—which saw the end of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite state and its empire and the kingdom of Ugarit—has intrigued archaeologists for decades. As Jesse Millek points out in (his book) Destruction and its impact, the idea of a swathe of near-synchronous destructions across the eastern Mediterranean is central to the narrative of the Late Bronze Age collapse: “destruction stands as the physical manifestation of the end of the Bronze Age” (p.6). Yet whether there was a single collapse marked by a widespread destruction horizon is up for debate.” (g)<
(b) https://academia.edu/355163/2001_Nur_and_Cline_Archaeology_Odyssey_Earthquake_Storms_article (this is a shorter version of (c) below)
(e) https://atlantis.fyi/blog/platos-fountain-on-the-athens-acropolis
(f) A General Program of Defense | Atlantis FYI
(g) Getting closer to the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, c. 1200 BC | Antiquity | Cambridge Core*
Nibiru
Nibiru was a Sumerian astronomical term used to describe a planetary body that periodically approached Earth. This account was hijacked by the late Zechariah Sitchin to construct his Planet X theory in which he claimed that this planet had an orbit that took it to the outer limits of the solar system returning every 3600 years to the vicinity of Earth. Sitchin claimed that during one of these visits some of its inhabitants came to earth and become the ‘gods’ of the Sumerians. However, Sitchin failed to explain how the inhabitants of this Planet X survived the lack of heat and light that it would have had to endure as it moved away from the proximity of the Sun. For us inhabitants of Earth, a drop of just a few degrees is fatal.
However, Emilio Spedicato has a radically different and certainly more rational view of this Sumerian planet. He ascribes a much shorter orbital period of 20 years to Nibiru and claims that close encounters with this planet (and its satellites) had a dramatic physical effect on the prehistory of our planet including the capturing of our Moon, the destruction of Atlantis and later the biblical Exodus! His scenario has elements that can be traced to Velikovsky, Ackerman and Hörbiger.
Robert Solarion was a keen follower of Immanuel Velikovsky and like him was convinced that in the first and second millennia BC the Earth had suffered a catastrophic Pole Shift as a result of a close flyby of a large extraterrestrial body or bodies. Velikovsky identified these as Venus and Mars, but Solarion differed, suggesting that it was the putative Nibiru!(h)
Professor Spedicato’s November 2012 paper, From Nibiru to Tiamat, an Astronomic Scenario for Earliest Sumerian Cosmology, can be read or downloaded from the excellent Diffusion and Migration website(a). A number of his other papers can be found on the same website and are certainly worth studying.
In sharp contrast to the serious work of Spedicato, for the past couple of years, we have been subjected to a barrage of silly articles(b) linking Nibiru with the promised 2012 global catastrophes ‘predicted’ by the Mayan calendar.
A debunking of both Sitchin’s scholarship and the existence of Nibiru has been offered by a number of sites(c).
Nevertheless, in 2018, Stuart L. Harris published three papers(e-g) proposing Rockall as the location of Atlantis, which was destroyed by an encounter with Nibiru in 9577 BC.
However, some people, such as David Meade (a pen-name) who describes himself as a ‘Christian numerologist’ predicted that Nibiru would collide with Earth on September 23, 2017! When this did not happen he moved the event to October, but again nothing happened. But he persisted and subsequently moved our demise to March 2018, then April, with a final suggestion for that year of between May and December(d).
In early 2021, an article on the BBC offered a potted history of the search for Planet X from the time of Percival Lowell until now(i). Although, Planet X has proved elusive, “either way, the search for the legendary ninth planet has already helped to transform our understanding of the solar system. Who knows what else we’ll find before the hunt comes to an end.”
(a) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2012&id=351
>(b) Search Results Nibiru : Your Own World USA (yowusa.com)<
(c) See: https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-2994/
(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Meade_(author)
(h) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cosmic_tree/nightsun.htm
>(i) If Planet Nine exists, why has no one seen it? – BBC Future (archive.org)<
Spedicato, Emilio *
Emilio Spedicato (1945- ) was born in Milan. He graduated in physics and is now working in numerical analysis and applied mathematics. He has held a full professorship at Bergamo University since 1984. In addition to his more conventional academic 
pursuits, he also researches ‘non-standard models of planetary evolution and non-standard interpretation of myth and ancient religions.’
Spedicato has developed a list(a) of ‘54 theses for reconstructing Earth and human history during the catastrophic period 9500 to 700 BC’(l). This list is partly based on the work of Velikovsky, DeGrazia and Ackerman and is intended to be the basis of a larger work in book form. Some of his ideas will be seen as highly controversial such as the genetic manipulation of humans by extraterrestrial visitors. He locates the Garden of Eden and the ‘creation’ of Adam and Eve in the Hunza valley of modern Pakistan(e).
He ventured into further controversial territory with his support for an updated version of Hörbiger’s moon capture theory(f) and endorsement for pole shifts(g)(0) after long periods of stability following encounters with large extraterrestrial bodies. He considers the last of these to have taken place in the 10th millennium BC.
Spedicato, in a series of papers delivered to the Atlantis Conference on Melos in 2005, linked the biblical Exodus with the Flood of Deucalion, which he dates as 1447 BC(d). He contended that these events were connected with the explosion of a large extraterrestrial body over Southern Denmark remembered in Greek tradition as Phaëton. He also claims that a large object impacted or exploded over the Great Lakes ice cover around 10.900 BC(k).
Atlantis has not escaped Spedicato’s attention and he has put forward the Caribbean island of Hispaniola as the home of Atlantis(b), specifically suggesting that Lake Enriquillo in the Cul-de-Sac Depression, which runs from Haiti across the border into the Dominican Republic. Spedicato accepts the possibility of the destruction of Atlantis around 9600 BC and has written an interesting paper(c) that links the demise of Atlantis with a direct asteroidal impact or a close encounter with a planet-sized body. Not without significance is the fact that Hispaniola is not submerged, in spite of the sea level rising hundreds of feet since the very early date proposed by Spedicato for the destruction of Atlantis, which should have sent it even deeper beneath the waves of the Caribbean.
In his paper entitled Was Atlantis in Hispaniola? Arguments in Favour(n) he outlines his belief that “the Atlantis civilisation developed during the terminal phase of the last great glaciation. It was terminated by a catastrophe, of extraterrestrial origin, which led to the now confirmed fast melting of most ices covering North America (north of a line from Seattle to Washington) and northern Europe; this event is now rather precisely dated at circa 9500 BC. He also considers Plato’s ‘muddy shoals’ to be a reference to the Sargasso Sea.
Furthermore, leaving aside the question of submergence altogether, Spedicato does not explain how an Atlantis in the Caribbean could, in 9600 BC, have attacked Greece or Egypt, which did not exist as structured societies at that time.
Even more intriguing is why they would plan such a venture, considering a distance of 10,000 kilometres lay between them.
Spedicato has contributed at least a dozen papers to the Migration and Diffusion website including one on a possible Indian inspiration behind the Giza pyramid complex(h) as well as a paper(i) on the planet known to the Sumerians as Nibiru and today sometimes referred to as Planet X. He controversially claims that a close encounter with Nibiru around 9500 BC ended the last Ice Age and brought about the demise of Atlantis! A difficulty with that idea, is that if the encounter with Nibiru destroyed Atlantis AND ended the Ice Age how could the location where Atlantis was submerged still be marked by mud shoals 9,000 years later when sea levels had risen by 300-400 feet, as confirmed by Plato in Timeaus 25d?
Another radical idea put forward by Spedicato was expressed in a paper delivered to the 2005 Atlantis Conference [629.411], in which he claimed that what he called ‘the ancestors of the Greeks’ had visited Canada. Based on his interpretation of excerpts from the writings of Plutarch, he specifies a region at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River as the point of contact. Manolis Koutlis goes further, suggesting that the Greeks had colonies there, from 1500 BC until 1500 AD. Then in his book In the Shadow [1617] he adds the even more extraordinary claim that Atlantis had been situated on an island at the entrance to the St. Lawrence!
In 2010, Spedicato published Atlantide e L’Esodo (Atlantis and Exodus) which is currently being translated into English.
In February 2015, Spedicato published another paper(j) with the radical proposal that the alignment of the three main Giza pyramids was not intended to be a reflection of the three stars in Orion’s belt according to the Orion Correlation Theory (OCT), as proposed by Gilbert & Bauval[326], but instead were more closely matched to the arrangement of three volcanoes on Mars! He claims that these volcanoes were visible from Earth during Mars periodic close encounters with our planet between 7000 BC and 700 BC, during a 54-year cycle. However, Andrew Collins has also disputed the OCT and has instead offered evidence that the alignment of the three principal Giza pyramids matches more closely the ‘wing’ stars of the Cygnus constellation than the ‘belt’ of Orion! (m).
Later in 2015, the prolific Spedicato published another paper(k) in which he linked Mayan catastrophes with those of Hesiod, Plato and the Bible.
(a) http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/ep8/ep8-spedic.htm
(b) https://www.academia.edu/10973532/ATLANTIS_IN_HISPANIOLA
(c) Wayback Machine (archive.org) *
(d) https://www.2008-paris-conference.org/mapage13/deucalione-testo-inglese-1-.pdf
(f) https://aisberg.unibg.it/bitstream/10446/316/1/WPMateRi05(2008)SpedicatoPetruzzi.pdf
(g) https://www.unibg.it/dati/bacheca/63/21825.pdf
(h) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=353
(i) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=351
(j) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2015&id=453
(m) (99+) (PDF) Orion: The Eternal Rise of the Sky Hunter | Andrew Collins – Academia.edu
Plagues of Egypt
The Plagues of Egypt have been described as supernatural(c) or an invention or can be explained rationally(e).
>>Many commentators have sought to offer a natural explanation for the ‘plagues’. One of these was Dr. John F. Marr, then chief epidemiologist for New York City department of health(h). Sceptics have pointed out that Marr’s explanations require a rare sequence of natural events, some of which were unusual on their own and which occurred over a short time period. All of which just happened to synchronise with Moses’ political plans!<<
The plagues associated with the time of the biblical Exodus have been linked to the 2nd millennium BC eruption of Thera by many writers including the renowned archaeologist Dr. Angelos Galanopoulos and more recently by Graham Philipsin Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt (originally published as Act of God) [034] and his website(b). In 1971, R.W. van Bemmelen, the Dutch geologist, suggested that the Biblical Plagues could be linked to the Theran event. Acceptance of this view clearly means that if the eruption of Thera was the inspiration behind Plato’s Atlantis story then the flooding of Atlantis cannot be connected with the biblical Deluge, which occurred much earlier than the Exodus.
>>Siro Trevisanato, a molecular biologist, published The Plagues of Egypt [2095] in 2005. In it, he associates the biblical plagues with the eruption of Santorini. He draws on various sources such as ancient Egyptian medical papyri as well as the nature and sequence of the various plagues.<<
However, if the inundation of Atlantis was one of the consequences of the Noachian Flood then the eruption of Thera had nothing to do with Plato’s narrative since it long preceded the Israelite sojourn in Egypt. In other words, it is not possible to link Noah, the Exodus and Thera: at least one of them is unconnected to the other two.
Riaan Booysen has also sought tp link the plagues with the Theran eruption(a).
Immanuel Velikovsky did not accept the Plagues of Egypt as natural phenomena. “He saw these events as the first manifestation of the early states of a cosmic catastrophe which struck the whole earth and which reached its zenith 52 years later when, as Joshua was pursuing the Canaanites, ‘the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and did not go down about a whole day’.”(d)
Frank Joseph contends[106][107] that the plagues were connected with the destruction of ‘Lemuria’.
(a) https://www.riaanbooysen.com/historical-moses-plagues-egypt
(b) http://www.grahamphillips.net/act/act.html
(c) https://bible.org/seriespage/5-finger-god-exodus-714-1029
(d) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_velikovsky03.htm
(e) The Science of the 10 Plagues | Live Science
(f) The Exodus – Wikipedia *