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

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    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 »
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    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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John R.Salverda

Ten Lost Tribes of Israel

The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a reference to the ten of the twelve tribes deported from the Kingdom of Israel after its conquest by Assyria in 722 BC. It has been pointed out that the Hebrew Bible has relatively little to say on the matter.

 

In 1865, Brasseur de Bourbourg discovered some of Bishop Diego de Landa‘s lost documents. He studied the thoroughly flawed interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphics by de Landa, produced in the 16th century and proceeded to develop his own faulty translation.

 

Nigel Davies has revealed [1635]  that Brasseur, as well as Lord Kingsborough (1795-1829), concluded that the native Americans were the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Kingsborough spent a £40,000 fortune publishing The Antiquities of Mexico in nine huge volumes, an extravagance that landed him in a Dublin debtors’ prison for non-payment of bills relating to publication costs and sadly, he died there.

 

The variety of identifications put forward for some or all of these groups is quite remarkable, ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous. At one end of that spectrum, the view “is that the “lost tribes of Israel” were never really lost. Many of the Jews who remained in the land after the Assyrian conquest re-united with Judah in the south (2 Chronicles 34:6–9). Assyria was later conquered by Babylon, who went on to invade the Southern Kingdom of Israel, deporting the two remaining tribes: Judah and Benjamin (2 Kings 25:21). Remnants of the northern tribes would have thus been part of the Babylonian deportations. Seventy years later, when King Cyrus allowed the Israelites to return to Israel (Ezra 1), many (from all twelve tribes) returned to Israel to rebuild their homeland.” (a)

 

>>At  this point I must mention Leo Frobenius, who, over a century ago, nominated the Yoruba territory of Nigeria as the home of  Atlantis!<<

 

At the other end is the entertaining idea that the Lost Tribes inhabit the interior of a Hollow Earth, which is defended by flying saucers!(b)

 

Another unexpected claim, with a tenuous Atlantis connection, comes from “Dierk Lange(a)(h)*, Prof. Dr Emeritus, of Bayreuth University in Germany, who has performed extensive research concerning many West African groups and their origins in the Near East. In the abstract to one of his many essays, “Dierk Lange: Origin of the Yoruba and “The Lost Tribes of Israel”,” Dierk confirms the traditions of a Levantine (Israelite) origin of the Yoruba Nigerians.”(d)(e)

 

Nearly as extreme is the attempt to link the Lost Tribes with Atlantis, a combination that would not normally leap to mind. However, some have attempted to justify such a linkage in spite of the contradictions between Plato’s story and the details of this minority opinion.

 

This alleged relationship between Atlantis and Israel points out that the Biblical patriarch Jacob who had twelve sons, excluded two of them, Levi and Simeon. Jacob is then presented as having been Poseidon with the ten remaining sons ruling Atlantis. One of Jacob’s sons, Gad, is assumed to have been Gadeiros, one of the ten sons of Poseidon. After that, no further parallels are offered to connect Jacob’s other sons with the remainder of Poseidon’s offspring.

 

In Britain, Richard Brothers (1757–1823), a retired naval officer and a radical Calvinist, revealed himself as a prophet of the lost tribes in 1794 in London. The fact that he was writing from the confinement of Fisher Mad-House, Islington, did not deter many from following him and producing the doctrine of Anglo-Israelism: a fiercely nationalist theology based on the idea that the British Isles were the home of the lost tribes.” (c)

 

A 2016 paper by Prof. W.A Liebenberg begins the Introduction(g)  with Dolmens and Megalithic Monuments originated in Ancient Israel. The prophet Jeremiah (31:21) is instructed to make it clear that the Ten Tribes will construct a trail of Megalithic Monuments from their homeland Israel to their places of deportation and further migration into the nations, and evidence of this path will be a vivid reminder of their forefathers and will also enable them to return. Such a trail undoubtedly exists and is embedded in the earth’s crust! It is the Trail of the Dolmens from the Middle East to the various nations.”

 

To suggest that the megaliths mark the tribal dispersal routes is to my mind utter nonsense. Judging by the number of megaliths spread throughout the world there should be thousands of ‘lost tribes’, not to mention that the biblical lost tribes disappeared in the 8th century BC, even though the megaliths are scientifically dated to the 5th millennium BC!

 

Also See: Agartha, Baer, Baucum, Bible, Davidiy, Eurenius, Olivier, Salverda and Wauchope.

 

(a) https://www.gotquestions.org/lost-tribes-Israel.html

(b) https://www.ourhollowearth.com/ourhollo/index.html

(c) The Lost Tribes of Israel (archive.org)

(d) https://blackhistory938.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/the-bantu-branch-of-africans-are-hebrew-israelites-part-i-of-ii/ *

(e) https://blackhistory938.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/the-bantu-branch-of-africans-are-hebrew-israelites-part-ii-of-ii/  *

(f)  http://www.dierklange.com 

(g) https://www.academia.edu/30702086/A_Historical_Research_of_the_Ten_Tribes_Scattered_Into_the_Nations_Part_10  

(h) http://dierklange.com/pdf/LOST_TRIBES_OF_ISRAEL.pdf  *

Salverda, John R.

John R. Salverda is an apologist for many aspects of the Brit-Am movement(a), which endeavours to link the British and American people with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. He also claims that Greek legends have a Hebrew origin(c). This brings to mind that Joseph Yahuda, a linguist, has proposed that ‘Hebrew is Greek’, which is the title of his 1982 book [1705]+ on the subject(d).

In a March 2014 blog(b), part of his Biblical Roots of Classical Philosophy series, Salverda claims that Atlas can be equated with Adam and that Plato’s Atlantis is a retelling of the antediluvian world of the Bible.

>Salverda has also proposed that there is a connection between the Greek Mount Olympus and the vaguely similar sounding Hebrew word Elohim – “The contention here being that Greece was colonized largely from the northern ten tribes of Israel, let us look among the Israelites for the origin of the Olympian concept. The Greek “Olympus,” the idea of a heavenly council of the gods, who spoke with one voice from a certain sacred mountain, surely did not originate in Greece, but it is suspiciously like the religion that began at the mount Shechem of Abimelech, and culminated into that of Ahab’s at Samaria.

Not only did the Israelites have such a mountain-based heavenly council of the gods, but they even called it by a very similar name! These apostate Israelites did not call the gods the “Olympians,” however we do learn from the Scriptures that there was such a term as “Elohim,” which, once upon a time we are told by scholars who have studied the matter, used to be a plural term meaning the “gods.” The Greeks borrowed the Hebrew word, and it’s apparent that it wasn’t just the word that they borrowed, but also they had a common culture and religion as well.”(e)<

[1705]+ https://archive.org/details/Hebrew.is.Greek/page/n573/mode/2up *

(a) https://www.britam.org/  

(b) https://historyancientphilsophy.wordpress.com/

(c) https://www.britam.org/salverda/salverdacontents.html

(d) https://bristolgreeks.com/index.php/world-greeks/civilisation/history/item/369-hebrew-is-greek-the-blocked-book-of-joseph-yahuda

(e) (99+) The Council of the Gods | John Salverda – Academia.edu *

Atlas

Atlas was the first king of Atlantis and was the son of Poseidon according to the story of Atlantis from Plato. However, in traditionalatlas, Atlas was the son of the Titan, Iapetus, often identified with the biblical Japheth, and the nymph Clymene. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the fact that the name Atlas is applied to more than one figure in Greek legends.

Atlas is usually portrayed kneeling with the world on his shoulders. However, the earliest known statue of Atlas, the 2nd century Farnese Atlas(c), which is a Roman copy of an older Greek statue, has the sky is represented as a sphere with a map of the stars and constellations known to the Ancient Greeks, which they represented as objects, animals and mythological creatures and characters. 16th century cartographers assumed that the globe represented the Earth, not the sky and since then it has been depicted accordingly.

Edwin Björkman noted the opinion that the name Atlas does not have a Greek root but is generally thought to have a Semitic origin. He also suggested the possibility that the name may have been derived from one of the Greek words for sea, thalassa.

However, Peter James points out[047.190] the name has a clear etymology in the Greek root ‘tlaô’ which can mean ‘to bear’, ‘to endure’ or ‘to dare’.>Tantalis, the capital of ancient Lydia, was apparently named after the legendary King Tantalus, its first king, who shared remarkable similarities with Atlas, the first king of Atlantis; they were both Titans, supported the heavens and had mountains named after them(f).<

Atlas has also been identified with both the Egyptian god Shu and the biblical Enoch, the latter being a more controversial concept. Lewis Spence went further and identified the Meso-American deity, Quetzalcoatl, with Atlas!

A somewhat more conventional view was offered by Thorwald Franke who has written a convincing paper(a) identifying Atlas with king Italos of the Sicels, who gave their name to Sicily and were one of the earliest groups to inhabit the island.

A more radical view has been put forward by Brit-Am writer John R.Salverda, who claims that the biblical Adam is the Atlas of Plato’s Atlantis narrative. A similar theory was proposed by Roger M. Pearlman in a 2018 booklet [1596]. In this small, difficult to read, book the author suggests, a linkage between the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah and Atlantis, places Atlantis in the Jordan Valley and equates Abraham with Atlas – If Atlas as described in Plato’s work was based on a historic figure, Abraham alone meets key criteria.”In a more recent paper(d), Pearlman also suggested that Göbekli Tepe was founded by Noah (Noach) and his sons!

Moving further east, the Hittites had an equivalent if not an original version of Atlas in the form of Tantalus. The Hittites in turn may have developed the identity from the Hurrian god Ubelleris. It was this Anatolian figure that led Peter James to his conclusion that Atlantis had been located in Turkey. Tantalus had a son Pelops, whom some consider Phrygian and according to Herodotus the Phrygians were the oldest race on earth.

Diego Ratti claims “that Atlantis was Avaris, capital of the Hyksos Kingdom and that king Atlas was 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’.”(e)

An even more extreme idea has been proposed by Sean Griffin that the yogic concept of ‘Kundalini’ is contained within part of Plato’s Atlantis story(b). Griffin begins his explanation by pointing out that Atlas is the medical term for the 33rd vertebra of the human spine!

(a) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis_italos.htm

(b) https://www.scribd.com/doc/211332861/Atlantis-and-Kundalini

(c) https://www.dioi.org/ggg.htm

(d) https://www.academia.edu/38664571/Gobekli_Tepe_founded_by_Noah_and_sons

(e) Atletenu | Atletenu (archive.org) 

(f) https://www.jstor.org/stable/262536?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents *