Settegast, Mary

Mary Settegast (1934-2020)* held graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University and lives in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of a groundbreaking book^[545] on the prehistory of the Mediterranean region and its conformity with Plato’s story of Atlantis.>The first edition of her book can be borrowed from the Internet Archive^(b).<

Settegast identified the migrations of the bearers of the Magdalenian culture southward through Spain and across to Africa and eastward to Egypt and eventually north into the Levant. She believes that this movement of people and their inevitable military encounters which occurred in a pre-literate age are only available to us through the distorted prism of legend and the fragmentary artefacts discovered by archaeologists. Plato’s account can be seen as a half-remembered version of events that took place over a hundred generations earlier. This book has been critically acclaimed and is considered a ‘must’ for any serious student of the Atlantis mystery.

However, for me, her interpretation is too extreme as it removes so much of Plato’s narrative that it leaves less than a skeleton of its origlnal structure, devoid of any worthwhile historical value.>Her promotion of Plato’s apparent early date of circa 10,000 BC for Atlantis is unacceptable (see: Dating Atlantis) as neither Athens or Egypt existed at that time as organised societies!<

Her latest offering^[546] again focuses on the time of Zarathustra, or more correctly on the prehistoric period ascribed to Zarathustra by Settegast.

>Atlantisforschung has a review of Settegast’s book by Ferdinand Speidel^(a).<

^(a) Die Prähistorie von 10.000 bis 5.000 v. Chr. in Mythos und Archäologie – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) * 

^(b) https://archive.org/details/platoprehistoria0000sett/page/n5/mode/2up *