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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 »
Helgoland
Pudor, Heinrich
Heinrich Pudor (1865-1943) was the German author of Voelker aus altes Athen, Atlantis, Helgoland [1693] and Völker aus Gottes Athem: Atlantis-Helgoland das arisch-germanische Rassenhochzucht- und Kolonisations-Mutterland [1694] .
Pudor was an ardent anti-Semite, who identified an enlarged Helgoland as Atlantis and the German motherland, a la National Socialism, presaging the work of Jürgen Spanuth published after war.
Kalweit, Holger
Holger Kalweit is a German psychotherapist and ethnologist and something of a conspiracy theorist. In his Irrstern über Atlantis[1024] (Inferno over Atlantis) he follows Spanuth in identifying Heligoland as a remnant of Atlantis, which he claims was destroyed in 1222 BC by the comet Phaëton.
He sees Atlantis as the home of the white Nordic people. After the catastrophe he believes that the survivors fled en masse south to the Mediterranean, where they settled in what was later known as the Levant and Greece. According to Kalweit they were responsible for the Hellenic culture, whose influence is still felt today.
At this point most people would think that his ideas were questionable enough, but unfortunately there was worse to come. He goes on to claim that the Nordic gods were also brought to Greece, “but, unfortunately, their gods were not human beings, but reptiloid aliens.” Anyone for therapy?
Horned Helmets *
Horned Helmets have been worn by various warrior groups from ancient times but, despite popular belief, not by the Vikings. Jürgen Spanuth, the leading proponent of a North Sea Atlantis, has identified the Sea Peoples who attacked the Egyptians as North Sea Peoples. The attack was recorded by the Egyptians on the walls of Medinet Habu and where they depicted some of the invaders with horned helmets. Spanuth claimed that “The only known Bronze Age horned helmets come from north Europe”[0015.55]. The illustrations from the Viscø helmets in the Danish National Museum used by Spanuth[0015.31] were more likely to have been for ceremonial use and show no signs of having been used in battle.
An early 2022 report confirmed that recent radiocarbon dating pushed these helmets back to long before the Vikings – “For many years in popular culture, people associated the Viksø helmets with the Vikings,” said Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “But actually, it’s nonsense. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East.”(g)
A January 2018 article highlights a horned figure on the so-called Oseberg Tapestry, who appears to be leading a religious procession, contributing to the theory that the few horned helmets found so far were probably used for ceremonial purposes(e). Another textile fragment found at the same site also depicts a horned person, which to my mind is more reminiscent of a nordic shaman than a warrior.
Baruch Halpern in a footnote in his paper(f) on the Sea Peoples informed us that “Sherden-like horned helmets have also been found along the northern shore of the Black Sea and on statuettes in Sardinia, but that these lack the central disks, and may reflect coincidence, appropriation, trade or migration rather than indicate a place of origin. The iconographic connections of the horns and disk would suggest devotion to a lunar god; see Bernett and Keel (1998).”
It is noteworthy that the ‘Gjermundbu Helmet’, discovered in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Norway, is the only helmet documented to have existed during the Viking period and is hornless(d).
Furthermore, he was incorrect in claiming that horned helmets were only used in northern Europe during the Bronze Age. Archaeologist Roger Grosjean (1920-1975) has demonstrated(a) that the Torreans of Corsica did use such helmets during that period. The Sherden/Shardana, considered to be one of the Sea Peoples depicted at Medinet Habu are shown as wearing horned helmets and in every instance, except three, they include a round additional piece on the crest. The Shardana are generally accepted to be from Sardinia and are possibly related to the Torreans on neighbouring Corsica. However, the Sardinian examples do not appear to have the accoutrement at the helmets’ crest depicted at Medinet Habu.
Andrea Salimbeti’s website(b) devoted to the Greek Bronze Age has a section on the helmets used in the Aegean during that period, which depicts some horned helmets used by the Mycenaeans(c).
In conclusion, I think Spanuth’s horned helmet evidence is flawed but also that the Sardinian theory is not watertight. Furthermore, his core claim of an invasion from the North Sea into the Eastern Mediterranean is equally untenable. Bronze Age territorial expansion was always into adjacent or nearby territory. A journey of over 4,000 miles from Heligoland to attack Egypt makes no sense.
(b) http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/index.htm
(c) http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/helmets1.htm (Also see helmets2 & helmets3)
(d) Why Is This the Only Existing Viking Age Helmet? (archive.org)
(e) Mary Ann Bernal: The Confusing Horned Helmets Depicted in the Oseberg Viking Age Tapestries *
(f) SCRIPTA MEDITERRANEA, Vol. XXVII-XXVIII, 2006-2007, 15-32
Joramo, Morten Alexander
Morten Alexander Joramo is a Norwegian astrologer, musician and author. In his 2011 book, The Homer Code[1075], he is heavily influenced by Felice Vinci, who situated Homer’s Odyssey in the northern European region. Joramo specifically identifies the island of Trenyken, in Norway’s Outer Lofoten Islands, with Homer‘s legendary Thrinacia. He also refers to the work of Iman Wilkens and Jürgen Spanuth. He also introduces the Bock Saga in support of his contention that “that there must have been an advanced culture in the high north thousands of years ago.”(a)
Although the author touches on the subject of Atlantis in The Homer Code he expands more fully on it the following year in Atlantis Unveiled[1076]. In it he again follows much of Vinci’s work as well as Spanuth’s identification of Helgoland as the location of Atlantis. He also uses Homer as well as copious extracts from Apollonius of Rhodes to justify his identification of Northern Europe as the backdrop to both the Odyssey and Plato’s Atlantis narrative.
Up to this point I found his work interesting, if not convincing. However, when I got to his ancient alien conspiracy theory and the use magic mushrooms, I cried halt.
In 2015, Joramo published The Lost Civilization of the North[1170], which is intended to supplant Atlantis Unveiled.
(a) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337705-the-homer-code
(b) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22156233-atlantis-unveiled
Franke, Alfred
Alfred Franke was a German researcher who published[907] a review of the four main Atlantis theories of his day, fifty years ago; southern Spain, north Africa, Minoan Hypothesis as well as Helgoland, which he favoured. Franke maintained that Plato used ‘Atlantis’ as we use ‘Rome’ to indicate (a) a city, (b) an empire or (c) an area of centre of religious influence.
Czeppan, Rudolf *
Rudolf Czeppan (1923-2003) was an ardent supporter of Jürgen Spanuth’s theory of Atlantis in the North Sea. Czeppan proposed that an impact by an extraterrestrial body south of Heligoland caused the sinking of Atlantis. He also details the unprofessional manner in which so many academics, particularly German, treated Spanuth’s Atlantis theories.
Czeppan’s paper, originally in German(a), can be read here interlined with a machine translation in English(b).
There have been suggestions that Spanuth was more than a mere nazi ‘sympathiser’ and consequently may have had access to Ahnenerbe files relating to their Atlantis research. This might partly explain why Czeppan, a convicted neo-nazi, was so enthusiastic in his endorsement of Spanuth.
(a) VffG 4/2001: Rudolf Czeppan: Zur Forschung und Ausgrenzung von Jürgen Spanuth (archive.org) (German) *
Tischner, Heinrich
Heinrich Tischner was a German Protestant minister for 32 years. He has an 
extensive website which includes a paper on the possible existence of Atlantis(a). He reviews the theories of a couple of German atlantologists, Otto Muck (Azores), and Jürgen Spanuth (Heligoland) and finds flaws in both theories. While Tischner apparently accepts the existence of Atlantis he is disinclined to offer a theory of his own. Some of his criticisms are now available in English.(b)
(a) Kreuzdenker, Atlantis (archive.org) (German) *
(b) Archive 2661 | (atlantipedia.ie) (German & English mixed)
Deer
Deer(Greek elephos) are apparently not mentioned in his Atlantis narrative, however, he does refer to elephants (elephas). Jürgen Spanuth, who advocated a North-West Europe location for Atlantis was unable to satisfactorily reconcile his Helgoland location with Plato’s elephants. Now another German researcher, Eckart Kahlhofer, has offered a simple explanation, namely that a transcription error led to the Greek word for elephant (elephas) being mistaken for their word for deer (elephos). However, as Atlantis story originated in Egypt, what may be more relevant is the fact that the Egyptian hieroglyphics for deer (seshau) and elephant (abu) are so totally different that confusion between the two is not possible.
The elk was the largest species of deer in Northern Europe and is still found in Scandinavia. The Great Irish Deer which died out around 5500 BC was 10 feet (3 metres) tall and had an antler span of 11 feet.
Tartessos *
Tartessos or Tartessus is generally accepted to have existed along the valley of the Guadalquivir River where the rich deposits of copper and silver led to the development of a powerful native civilisation, which traded with the Phoenicians, who had colonies along the south coast of Spain(k).
A continuing debate is whether Tartessos was developed by a pre-Phoenician indigenous society or was a joint venture by locals along with the Phoenicians.(o) One of the few modern English-language books about Tartessos was written by Sebastian Celestino & Carolina López-Ruiz and entitled Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia [1900].
A 2022 BBC article offers some additional up-to-date developments in the studies of Tartessos(v).
It is assumed by most commentators that Tartessos was identical to the wealthy city of Tarshish that is mentioned in the Bible. There have been persistent attempts over the past century to link Tartessos with Atlantis. The last king of Tartessia, in what is now Southern Spain, is noted by Herodotus to have been Arganthonios, who is claimed to have ruled from 630 BC until 550 BC. Similarly, Ephorus a 4th century BC historian describes Tartessos as ‘a very prosperous market.’ However, if these dates are only approximately true, then Atlantis cannot be identified with Tartessos as they nearly coincide with the lifetime of Solon, who received the story of Atlantis as being very ancient.
However, the suggested linkage of Tartessos with Atlantis is disputed by some Spanish researchers, such as Mario Mas Fenollar [1802] and Ester Rodríguez González(n). Mas Fennolar has claimed that at least a thousand years separated the two. Arysio dos Santos frequently claimed that Atlantis was Tartessos throughout his Atlantis and the Pillars of Hercules [1378].
Rodrigo Caro
The existence of a ‘Tartessian’ empire is receiving gradual acceptance. Strabo writes of their system of canals running from the Guadalquivir River and a culture that had written records dating back 6,000 years. Their alphabet was slightly different to the ‘Iberian’. The Carthaginians were said to have been captured by Tartessos after the reign of Arganthonios and after that, contact with Tartessos seems to have ended abruptly!
The exact location of this city is not known apart from being near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River in Andalusia. The Guadalquivir was known as Baetis by the Romans and Tartessos to the Greeks. The present-day Gulf of Cadiz was known as Tartessius Sinus (Gulf of Tartessus) in Roman times. Cadiz is accepted to be a corruption of Gades that in turn is believed to have been named after Gaderius. This idea was proposed as early as 1634 by Rodrigo Caro (image left), the Spanish historian and poet, in his Antigüedades y principado de la Ilustrísima ciudad de Sevilla, now available as a free ebook(i).
In 1849, the German researcher Gustav Moritz Redslob (1804-1882) carried out a study of everything available relating to Tartessos and concluded that the lost city had been the town of Tortosa on the River Ebro situated near Tarragona in Catalonia. The idea seems to have received little support until recently, when Carles Camp published a paper supporting this contention(w). It was written in Valenciano, which is related to Catalan and can be translated with Google Translate using the latter option.
A few years ago, Richard Cassaro endeavoured to link the megalithic walls of old Tarragona with the mythical one-eyed Cyclops and for good measure suggest a link with Atlantis(l). Concerning the giants, the images of doorways posted by Cassaro are too low to comfortably accommodate giants! Cassaro has previously made the same claim about megalithic structures in Italy(m)
The German archaeologist Adolf Schulten spent many years searching unsuccessfully for Tartessos, in the region of the Guadalquivir. He believed that Tartessos had been founded by Lydians in 1150 BC, which became the centre of an ancient culture that was Atlantis or at least one of its colonies. Schulten also noted that Tartessos disappeared from historical records around 500 BC, which is after Solon’s visit to Egypt and so could not have been Atlantis.
Richard Hennig in the 1920s also supported the idea of Tartessos being Atlantis and situated in southern Spain. However, according to Atlantisforschung he later changed his opinion opting to adopt Spanuth’s Helgoland location instead(x).
Otto Jessen, a German geographer, also believed that there had been a connection between Atlantis and Tartessos. Jean Gattefosse was convinced that the Pillars of Heracles were at Tartessos, which he identifies as modern Seville. However, Mrs E. M. Whishaw, who studied in the area for 25 years at the beginning of the 20th century, believed that Tartessos was just a colony of Atlantis. The discovery of a ‘sun temple’ 8 meters under the streets of Seville led Mrs Whishaw to surmise[053] that Tartessos may be buried under that city. Edwin Björkman wrote a short
book, The Search for Atlantis[181] in which he identified Atlantis with Tartessos and also Homer’s Scheria.
Steven A. Arts, the author of Mystery Airships in the Sky, also penned an article for Atlantis Rising in which he suggests that the Tarshish of the Old Testament is a reference to Tartessos and by extension to Atlantis(r)!
More recently Karl Jürgen Hepke has written at length, on his website(a), about Tartessos. Dr Rainer W. Kühne, following the work of another German, Werner Wickboldt, had an article[429] published in Antiquity that highlighted satellite images of the Guadalquivir valley that he has identified as a possible location for Atlantis. Kühne published an article(b) outlining his reasons for identifying Tartessos as the model for Plato’s Atlantis.
Although there is a consensus that Tartessos was located in Iberia, there have been some refinements of the idea. One of these is the opinion of Peter Daughtrey, expressed in his book, Atlantis and the Silver City[0893] in which he proposes that Tartessos was a state which extended from Gibraltar around the coast to include what is today Cadiz and on into Portugal’s Algarve having Silves as its ancient capital.
It was reported(c) in January 2010 that researchers were investigating the site in the Doñana National Park, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, identified by Dr Rainer Kühne as Atlantis in a 2011 paper(s). In the same year, Professor Richard Freund of the University of Hartford garnered a lot of publicity when he visited the site and expressed the view that it was the location of Tartessos which he equates with Atlantis. The Jerusalem Post in seeking to give more balance to the discussion quoted archaeology professor Aren Maeir who commented that “Richard Freund is known as someone who makes ‘sensational’ finds. I would say that I am exceptionally skeptical about the thing, but I wouldn’t discount it 100% until I see the details, which haven’t been published as far as I know.”(u)
A minority view is that Tarshish is related to Tarxien (Tarshin) in Malta, which, however, is located some miles inland with no connection to the sea. Another unusual theory is offered by Luana Monte, who has opted for Thera as Tartessos. She bases this view on a rather convoluted etymology(e) which morphed its original name of Therasia into Therasios, which in Semitic languages having no vowels would read as ‘t.r.s.s’ and can be equated with Tarshish in the Bible, which in turn is generally accepted to refer to Tartessos.
Giorgio Valdés favours a Sardinian location for Tartessos(f), an idea endorsed later by Giuseppe Mura in his 2018 book, published in Italian, Tartesso in Sardegna [2068], the full title of which translates as Tartessos in Sardinia: Reasons, circumstances and methods used by ancient historians and geographers to remove Tartessos (the Tarshish of the Bible) from Caralis and place it in Spanish Andalusia. Caralis is an old name for Cagliari, the Sardinian capital.
Andis Kaulins has claimed that further south, in the same region, Carthage was possibly built on the remains of Tartessos, near the Pillars of Heracles(j).
A more radical idea was put forward in 2012 by the Spanish researcher, José Angel Hernández, who proposed(g)(h) that the Tarshish of the Bible was to be found in the coastal region of the Indus Valley, but that Tartessos was a colony of the Indus city of Lhotal and had been situated on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar!
A recent novel by C.E. Albertson[130] uses the idea of an Atlantean Tartessos as a backdrop to the plot.
A relatively recent claim associating Tartessos with Atlantis came from Simcha Jacobovici in a promotional interview(p) for the 2017 National Geographic documentary, Atlantis Rising. In it, Jacobovici was joined by James Cameron as producer, but unfortunately, the documentary did not produce anything of any real substance despite a lot of pre-broadcast hype.
There is an extensive website(d) dealing with all aspects of Tartessos, including the full text of Schulten’s book on the city. Although this site is in Spanish, it is worthwhile using your Google translator to read an English version.
“Today, researchers consider Tartessos to be the Western Mediterranean’s first historical civilization. Now, at an excavation in Extremadura—a region of Spain that borders Portugal, just north of Seville—a new understanding of how that civilization may have ended is emerging from the orange and yellow soil. But the site, Casas del Turuñuelo, is also uncovering new questions.”(q) First surveyed in 2014 it was in late 2021, a report emerged of exciting excavations there that may have a bearing on the demise of Tartessos. Work is currently on hold because of a dispute with landowners, with only a quarter of the site uncovered. The project director is Sebastian Celestino Perez. The Atlas Obscura website offers further background and details of discoveries at the site(t).
(a) http://web.archive.org/web/20170716221143/http://www.tolos.de/History%20E.htm
(b) Meine Homepage (archive.org)
(d) TARTESSOS.INFO: LA IBERIA BEREBER (archive.org)
(e) http://xmx.forumcommunity.net/?t=948627&st=105
(f) http://gianfrancopintore.blogspot.ie/2010/09/atlantide-e-tartesso-tra-mito-e-realta.html
(g) http://joseangelh.wordpress.com/category/mito-y-religion/
(h) http://joseangelh.wordpress.com/category/arqueologia-e-historia/
(j) Pillars of Heracles – Alternative Location (archive.org)
(k) Archive 3283 | (atlantipedia.ie)
(n) (PDF) Tarteso vs la Atlántida: un debate que trasciende al mito (researchgate.net)
(o) (PDF) Definiendo Tarteso: indígenas y fenicios (researchgate.net)
(p) Lost City of Atlantis And Its Incredible Connection to Jewish Temple (israel365news.com)
(q) The Ancient People Who Burned Their Culture to the Ground – Atlas Obscura
(r) Atlantis Rising magazine #36 http://pdfarchive.info/index.php?pages/At
(t) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tartessos-casas-del-turunuelo
(u) https://www.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-news/the-deepest-jewish-encampment
(v) https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220727-the-iberian-civilisation-that-vanished
(w) https://www.inh.cat/articles/La-localitzacio-de-Tartessos-es-desconeguda.-Pot-ser-Tartessos-Tortosa-
(x) Richard Hennig – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
Herm, Gerhard (L)
Gerhard Herm was born in Germany in 1931 and studied in Munich and the 
United States, after which he took up journalism and filmmaking. He produced a number of television documentaries on ancient Mediterranean civilisations and has written a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction. He has had two popular books published in English, on the Celts[382] and the Phoenicians[383]. His volume on the Celts includes a chapter on Atlantis in which he endorses the theories of his fellow countryman, 
Jürgen Spanuth, who had published his views shortly beforehand supporting a North Sea location for Atlantis, although his preferred site was Denmark rather than Helgoland. Herm offers a map (p.96) suggesting that the Atlantean Empire extended beyond what is today Denmark to include part of southern Sweden and a number of Baltic islands.