Freund, Richard

Published March 10, 2011

Professor Richard Freund is the latest academic to enter the Atlantis debate. Freund is a rabbi and the director of the Greenberg Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford. He is the author of Digging Through the Bible in which he recounts his experiences excavating in the Middle East.

Freund ‘led’ (see below) an expedition of Spanish, American and Canadian scientists in 2009 and 2010 to investigate satellite images of the Doñana Marshes, showing circular and rectangular features, discovered by Werner Wickboldt in 2003. National Geographic has included the findings of the expedition in a 2011 documentary entitled Finding Atlantis^(a).

Another documentary, along with a transcript, which also ‘stars’ Freund, entitled “Atlantis – The Lost City” is available^(e). Freund has also inveigled his way into the 2017 National Geographic documentary, Atlantis Rising.

Frank Joseph, the former leader of the American Nazi Party, probably jealous of the media coverage that Rabbi Freund got, following the 2011 documentary, disputed Freund’s conclusions in an article in the Atlantis Rising magazine Number 88.

Freund believes that these structures discovered at Doñana are related to Atlantis/Tarshish. Freund has pointed out that the large amounts of methane emanating from the site suggests that only a tsunami could have suddenly trapped the large quantities of organic matter required to generate that quantity of methane!

However, a more sober view is presented by Juan Villarias-Robles, a Spanish anthropologist working with the Spanish team investigating the Doñana site. He recounts^(b)how Professor Freund spent less than a week on the site and was not the leader of the Hinojos Project.

“Richard Freund was a newcomer to our project and appeared to be involved in his own very controversial issue concerning King Solomon’s search for ivory and gold in Tartessos, the well-documented settlement in the Donaña area established in the first millennium BC.

He became involved in what we were doing and provided funding for probes through his connections with National Geographic and Associated Producers.

He left and the film company told us the documentary would be finished in April or May. But we did not hear from him and are very surprised it has appeared so soon and makes such fanciful claims.”^(b)

Concerning the features identified by Wickboldt, Villarias-Robles explains that so far anything found has been smaller than anticipated or dated to the Muslim period. He declares that no remains of Tartessos or Atlantis have been found.

>Jason Colavito has published a free ebook entitled Golden Fleeced ^(f) in which, among other matters, he discussed Freund’s 2011 claim of Atlantis in Spain. He notes that “apparently Freund dropped in to an active Spanish archaeological investigation into an actual ancient city, ongoing since 2005, and has hijacked it to generate publicity for his research into the connection between Solomon and Atlantis to prove the Bible true.”<

Equally moderate are the comments of archaeologist Philip Reeder from the University of South Florida, who is also unconvinced that Atlantis has been found^(c).

Furthermore, the respected Greek historian Ephorus described Tartessos in his day (4th century BC) as still being a rich source of tin, copper and gold^(d). Since he wrote this long after Solon’s visit to Egypt, and even longer since the sinking of Atlantis, it would appear to rule out identifying Atlantis with Tartessos.

Freund also believes that the Phoenicians were descendants of the Atlanteans. No doubt these contentious claims will be explored in greater detail in his book Digging Through History: From Atlantis to the Holocaust.

^(a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytVENC4td8k

^(b)https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/natgeos-shameful-atlantis-documentary-more-atlantis-bible-nonsense

^(c)https://io9.com/#!5789352/will-we-ever-really-discover-atlantis

^(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20170707131215/https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Tartessos.html

^(e) See: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Atlantis-Lost-City-OH-Krill/dp/B01MED39GY

^(f) golden_fleeced.pdf (jasoncolavito.com) *

Tagged Doñana Marshes, Ephorus, Frank Joseph, Hinojos Project, Jason Colavito, Juan Villarias-Robles, National Geographic, Philip Reeder, Phoenicians, Richard Freund, Tarshish, tsunami, Werner Wickboldt

Doñana Marshes

Published February 25, 2011

The Doñana Marshes, a National Park in the valley of the Andalusian Guadalquivir River was linked with Atlantis over 400 years ago by José Pellicer. During the 1920’s George Bonsor and Adolph Schulten searched the area for evidence of Tartessos. After that interest in the marshes waned until a few years ago when Werner Wickboldt identified circular and rectangular features in the Park from satellite images, which he claimed a possibly Atlantean.

Richard Freund, a professor from the University of Hartford, claims to have led a team to study the area and has had work included in a March 2011 National Geographic documentary, Finding Atlantis. However, Spanish anthropologist Juan Villarias-Robles who has worked on the site for some years has declared that Freund did not lead the investigations on the site and in fact spent less than a week there. Wickboldt’s images turned out to be either smaller than expected or were from the Muslim period. Evidence for Tartessos or Atlantis has not been found.

^(b)https://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2011/03/muddying-up-atlantis.html (offline: June 2016) see Archive 2122

Tagged Adolph Schulten, Doñana Marshes, George Bonsor, Guadalquivir, José Pellicer, Juan Villarias-Robles, Richard Freund, Tartessos, Werner Wickboldt

Tsunami

Published June 12, 2010

A Tsunami was probably first described in the 5^th century BC by Thucydides when he wrote “in my opinion, the cause of the phenomenon was this: where the earthquake was most violent, the sea receded and was then pushed back with even greater violence, thus bringing about a flood. Such a thing would not have happened without an earthquake” (Peloponnesian War, Book III.89)^(b). However, there are also conditions that can produce tsunamis inland, such as occurred around 500 AD inundating Geneva in the Alps^(k)(m).

The word ‘tsunami’ first appeared in an English language publication in the September 1896 edition of National Geographic Magazine in which the devastation caused by an earthquake wave in Japan was graphically described.

Recent studies^(g) indicate that a similar tsunami saved the Greek town of Nea Poteidaia from a Persian attack in 479 BC. Herodotus in reporting the event attributed the Persian defeat to divine intervention by Poseidon, god of the sea.

A similar event on an even greater scale has been one of the suggestions as the possible cause of the flooding of Atlantis. A 2002 paper⁽^a⁾, by Louisiana State University geologist, Gary Byerly and his team, identified an ancient asteroid impact that generated a tsunami that “swept around the earth several times, inundating everything except the mountains”. The study of ancient tsunamis is at a very early stage of development.

A 2019 report was published online in 2022 in which it was revealed that the Yucatan asteroid impact credited with wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago generated mile-high tsunamis that travelled halfway around the world. One wave was estimated to have been 1.8 miles high⁽^ae).

Ivan T. Sanderson in one of his books, Investigating the Unexplained ^[768], recounts an 1863 report of a 200-foot high tsunami that sped up the Ganges and Houghli Rivers in India killing tens of thousands of people without ‘snapping-off’ trees. He contrasts this with the tree stumps covering acres around East Creek, New Jersey that have all been broken off at the same height and where he suggested that only a tsunami could have caused such widespread and uniform destruction. In view of the fact that some of these cedar trees had six-foot diameter trunks, he speculates on the possible size of a tsunami that could bring about such extreme damage.

Perhaps even more relevant to the study of Atlantis is the evidence gathered by Jürgen Spanuth in his chapter on the ‘Natural Catastrophes of the 13^th Century’ including an interesting section on tsunamis ^[015.167].

Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, has discovered evidence of an ancient tsunami on Spartel Island, an Atlantis candidate, in the Gulf of Cadiz. Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has pointed out that Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian, seems to describe the devastation caused by its assault on the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal at the time of the Lusitanians and Cantabrians in the 1st millennium BC.

>Some years ago, Richard Freund, a professor from the University of Hartford, expressed support for the Donana Marshes of Southern Spain as the location of Atlantis, he attributed the swamping of the locality and the submergence of Atlantis to the power of a tsunami^(ah). In 2003, Werner Wickboldt claimed that following an examination of satellite photos of Doñana, he detected structures that very closely resemble those, which Plato described in Atlantis. Freund, claims to have led a team to study the area and has had work included in a March 2011 National Geographic documentary, Finding Atlantis. However, Spanish anthropologist Juan Villarias-Robles who has worked on the site for some years has declared that Freund did not lead the investigations on the site and in fact spent less than a week there. Wickboldt’s images turned out to be either smaller than expected or were from the Muslim period. Evidence for Atlantis (or Tartessos) has not been found there.<

In the late 1970s, Booth & Fitch suggested in Earthshock^[1295] that tsunamis may have been responsible for the devastation of Atlantis, an idea that has gained in popularity.

Sergio Frau has postulated that the Atlantean civilisation on Sardinia was destroyed by a tsunami.

Professor Stefano Tinti of Bologna University visited Sardinia and explained^(r) “that until the 1980s no one was aware that tidal waves had occurred in the Mediterranean. But since 2004 scientists have identified 350 events of this type over a 2,500-year period,” and regarding the Sardinian tsunami “So what would have been required in our case?” he then asked. “We’re talking about a huge volume of water, some 500 metres high [the elevation up to which the nuraghi were affected]. Only a comet could do that if the impact occurred very close to the coast and in a very specific direction,” he asserted. An event of this sort may have occurred near Cagliari, with the resulting wave devastating the plain of Campidano.”

Tinti has also noted^(w) that generally speaking, the majority of tsunamis are generated by seismic rather than volcanic activity. Globally, volcanic tsunamis account for only 2% of the total, however, the profusion of volcanoes in Southern Italy has considerably increased this percentage. Furthermore, according to a recent article on the BBC website “The scale of the tsunami hazard from volcanoes that collapse into the sea has been underestimated.”^(x)

A 2022 report of a recent study(ac) revealed some new interesting information.

“Archaeologists have found evidence of the largest known earthquake in human history — a terrifying magnitude-9.5 megaquake that caused a 5,000-mile-long (8,000 kilometres) tsunami and prompted human populations to abandon nearby coastlines for 1,000 years.

The earthquake struck about 3,800 years ago in what is now northern Chile when a tectonic plate rupture lifted the region’s coastline. The subsequent tsunami was so powerful, it created waves as high as 66 feet (20 meters) and travelled all the way to New Zealand, where it hurled car-size boulders hundreds of miles inland, the researchers found.”

More recently, Dhani Irwanto has written about the probable effect of tsunamis on his Indonesian Atlantis^(y). Studies of the sedimentary record in a sea cave in Sumatra have revealed the frequency and strength of tsunamis in the region over a five-thousand-year span from 5900 BC until 900 BC^(u).

Tsunamis are also associated with the destruction on Crete following the eruption of Thera in the 2nd millennium BC. A TV documentary entitled Sinking Atlantis⁽ⁱ⁾, provided graphic evidence of tsunami damage on Minoan Crete^(h).

J.V.Luce cited^[120.119] a number of local legends from around the Aegean that may have originated with the tsunami that followed the eruption on Thera.

However, the extent of this damage is strongly contested by W. Sheppard Baird^(j)and he proposes instead that it was in fact more likely to have been a pyroclastic surge from the Theran eruption that caused the most damage.

A recent report^(d) concludes that a large tsunami generated by the volcanic activity of Mt. Etna around 6000 BC produced waves up to 43 feet high that struck the coasts of Greece and Libya. This event would have caused devastation on nearby Malta, where evidence of past tsunamis was published in the journal Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie. The research was carried out over three years by scientists from the University of Portsmouth, led by Dr Malcolm Bray with assistance from colleagues at the Department of Geography at the University of Malta⁽ⁿ⁾. A 1693 earthquake generated the earliest recorded tsunami on Malta and as recent as 1908 Malta was hit by a tsunami that resulted from a catastrophic earthquake in the vicinity of the Strait of Messina^(p).

On the Atlantic west coast of Ireland, we have a 250 km²region, in County Clare, known as the Burren, which consists of limestone denuded of soil cover. Recently, strong evidence was discovered suggesting a 4000 BC tsunami in the region^(o). For me, the karst landscape of the Burren is reminiscent of parts of Malta.

Plato’s description does not support the idea of a tsunami as the primary cause of Atlantis’ inundation since tsunamis will eventually subside and return to the ocean, whereas Atlantis was still underwater centuries after the event, causing a permanent navigation hazard. John Michael Greer makes a similar point ^[^345.^126] in relation to the megatsunami which struck Madagascar in 2800 BC. Evidence of other ancient megatsunamis in Hawaii was presented at the 2012 meeting of the American Geophysical Union^(l). The power of megatsunamis is highlighted in an article on the UK’s MailOnline website^(t). Atlantisforschung also offers a lengthy article about megatsunamis^(af).

Recent excavations at Olympia on the Peloponnese peninsula, the location of the original Olympic Games, have pointed to the site having been repeatedly hit by devastating tsunamis during the past 7,000 years^(c).

The Bunurong tribe in Australia has a ‘myth’ that explains the creation of Melbourne’s Port Philip Bay. A recent article^(e) has linked this to a tsunami that resulted from the impact of Comet Manhuika southwest of New Zealand in the 15^th century. A more cautious view of this event is expressed elsewhere^(f).

The excellent livescience.com website has an interesting list of ten history-making tsunamis^(q), while Wikipedia offers an extensive list of European tsunamis from prehistoric times until the present^(s).

A 100-metre-high tsunami, caused by a landslide, one of the highest ever recorded was experienced in a remote area of Greenland in June 2017. Four lives were lost and eleven houses were destroyed in the fishing village of Nuugaatsiaq, located on an island about 20 kilometres away^(v).

The Greenland event would have been greatly overshadowed, literally, by the tsunami generated by the asteroid that struck Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula around 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs. According to a 2021 report^(z) it has been estimated that the impact produced a tsunami nearly a mile high!

In 2020, David Keys, author of Catastrophe ^[1330] wrote an article for the UK’s Independent newspaper outlining the most recent research into the 6200 BC tsunami that destroyed Doggerland. “It is estimated that multiple giant waves inundated some 2,700 square miles of land – from Scotland in the north to Norfolk in the south. New underwater research carried out by the universities of Bradford, Warwick, St Andrews and Wales has for the first time discovered that the tsunami devastated parts of East Anglia and adjacent land which is now submerged beneath the southern part of the North Sea.” ^(ab)

>However, 6200 BC would seem too early for the destruction of Plato’s Atlantis, apart from which the idea that at such an early date anyone living on Doggerland would have any knowledge of Athens or have the means or even a reason to invade a city 3,000km away (over 6,000km by sea). Even if they undertook such a venture, on arrival they would have to wait around for a couple of millennia before anything worth invading was developed there!<

Stuart L. Harris published a paper in 2020 entitled 5760 BC: tsunami at Rhine Valley caused by Planet X^(ad). This was based on a translation of a long inscription written on a cliff face in Germany. Harris explains that in 5760 BC “satellites from a mysterious Planet X struck the continental shelf of Texas “that pushed a piece of the shelf the size of Massachusets into the Gulf. Above the displaced shelf, the sea towered 1.9 km high. The resulting tsunami dispersed in all directions and obliterated coastal communities around the North Atlantic.

In Germany, it surged over the Ruur Mountains west of the Rhine Valley, flooded the middle Rhine between Mainz and Karlsruhe, and continued over the eastern escarpment toward Heilbronn. It left extensive ripple marks in the Rhine Valley and the eastern plateau.” Harris offers some interesting data to support this claim.”

On August 12, 2021, within minutes of each other, two earthquakes struck the South Sandwich Islands of the South Atlantic. National Geographic reported “These rumblings, which occurred on August 12, 2021, were not unusual on their own, since the islands sit atop a combative meeting of tectonic plates. The odd part is that they were followed by a tsunami powerful enough to show up on distant shores along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Although the swell wasn’t destructive, it was the first since the catastrophic tsunami of 2004 to be recorded in three different oceans^(aa).“

The Live Science website reported^(ag) “On Jan. 15, 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai submarine volcano — a large, cone-shaped mountain located near the islands of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific — erupted with a violent explosion. The eruption generated the highest-ever recorded volcanic plume, which reached 35 miles (57 kilometers) tall. The outburst triggered tsunamis as far away as the Caribbean, as well as atmospheric waves that traveled around the globe several times.” and “The Tonga underwater volcanic eruption rivaled the strength of the largest U.S. nuclear bomb and produced a “mega-tsunami” nearly the height of a 30-story skyscraper.”

^(a) See: Archive 2931

^(b) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War/Book_3#Sixth_Year_of_the_War_-_Campaigns_of_Demosthenes_in_Western_Greece_-_Ruin_of_Ambracia

^(c) Olympia hypothesis: Tsunamis buried the cult site on the Peloponnese (archive.org)

^(d) https://www.livescience.com/1170-towering-ancient-tsunami-devastated-mediterranean.html

^(e)https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/02/10/mega-tsunamis-chinese-junks-and-port-phillip-bay/

^(f) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240420231_Analysis_of_the_Mahuika_comet_impact_tsunami_hypothesis

^(g)https://www.livescience.com/19809-ancient-wave-real-tsunami.html

^(h) Sinking Atlantis | Full Episode | Secrets of the Dead | PBS (archive.org)

⁽ⁱ⁾ https://video.pbs.org/video/1204753806/

^(j) https://www.minoanatlantis.com/Sinking_Atlantis_Myth.php

^(k) Tsunamis in the Alps? (archive.org)

^(l)See: https://web.archive.org/web/20161209170519/https://www.livescience.com/25293-hawaii-giant-tsunami-landslides.html