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

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  • NEWS September 2023

    NEWS September 2023

    September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we move to Sicily and Malta. The trip is purely vacational. Unfortunately, I am writing this in a dreadful apartment, sitting on a bed, with access to just one useable socket and a small Notebook. Consequently, I possibly will not […]Read More »
  • Joining The Dots

    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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Kenneth Humphreys

Mljet

Mljet is a Croatian island in the Adriatic nearly opposite Dubrovnik. It is one of the many locations claimed as Homer’s Ogygia, mljetwhich in turn has been identified by some as Atlantis. This is not the only controversial matter associated with the island, Mljet in Greek is Melite a name it shares with Malta. For centuries there has been a strong tradition on Mljet that St. Paul was in fact shipwrecked on their island. The evidence(a)(b) is quite strong and worthy of investigation.

The claim was expounded in a 1730 monograph by Ignjat Durdevic (Ignazio Giorgi)(1675-1737) who hailed from Dubrovnik. A refutation[1462] by the Maltese poet Giovanni Antonio Ciantar (1696-1778) followed a few years later. 

Recently, new information in The Geography of Ananias of Širak, written between 592-636 AD, confirms that Saint Paul stayed in Dalmatia following a shipwreck that happened on the Adriatic island of Melita (Mljet)(a).

A 2012 paper, from archaeologist Marija Buzov, adds further support to the claim of Mljet as the site of St. Paul’s shipwreck(g). Interestingly she recounts that there is also the legend of Paul being bitten by a snake according to the traditions of Mljet. However, the idea that he banished snakes from either Mljet or Malta is belied by the existence of snakes on both islands today. It brings to mind the ancient story that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, which, for different reasons, is also untrue as there were never snakes in Ireland.

An extensive and more recent contribution from Fr. Noel Muscat brings the debate up to date (2018). As a native of Malta it was no surprise that he concluded that Malta rather than Mljet was the location of St. Paul’s shipwreck. His essay can now be read online(f).

According to Heinz Warnecke, another serious contender for the location of Paul’s shipwreck is Argostoli near the island of Cephalonia(c). At the other end of the spectrum, Kenneth Humphreys offers evidence, which demonstrates that the entire Pauline story is a concoction(e).

Further rivalry concerns the origin of the name of the toy dog breed, the Maltese. Callimachus around 350 BC attributing the honour to Mljet, while John Caius, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, maintained that he was referring to Melita in the Sicilian Strait.

(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20180319155027/https://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/st_paul.html

>(b) Miho Demovic: Two millenia of St Paul’s shipwreck near the Croatian island of Mljet (archive.org)<

(c) https://www.ionion.com/english/kefalonia/culture/monasteries/enstpaul.htm

(e) https://www.jesusneverexisted.com/shipwreck.html

(f) https://www.academia.edu/41576469/Melita_Illyrica_and_Melita_Africana_The_Islands_of_Saint_Paul?email_work_card=view-paper

(g) https://www.academia.edu/32375947/Is_Mljet_Melita_in_Dalmatia_the_Island_of_St._Paul_s_Shipwreck?iid=de13b9cd-9b75-495d-ba8c-0d6e4c753d4b&swp=rr-rw-wc-41576469

 

Shoals of Mud

A Shoal of mud is stated by Plato (Tim.25d) to mark the location of where Atlantis ‘settled’. He described these shallows in the present tense, clearly implying that they were still a maritime hindrance in Plato’s day.

Three of the most popular translations clearly indicate this:

Jowett

….the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Bury

…..the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal of mud which the island created as it settled down.”

Lee

…..the sea in that area is to this day impassible to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the sunken island.

>Wikipedia has noted(h)  that “during the early first century, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo wrote about the destruction of Atlantis in his On the Eternity of the World, xxvi. 141, in a longer passage allegedly citing Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus.

‘ And the island of Atalantes [translator’s spelling; original: “????????”] which was greater than Africa and Asia, as Plato says in the Timaeus, in one day and night was overwhelmed beneath the sea in consequence of an extraordinary earthquake and inundation and suddenly disappeared, becoming sea, not indeed navigable, but full of gulfs and eddies’.”<

Since it is probable that Atlantis was destroyed around a thousand years or more before Solon’s Egyptian sojourn, to have continued as a hazard for such a period suggests a location that was little affected by currents or tides. The latter would seem to offer support for a Mediterranean Atlantis as that sea enjoys negligible tidal changes, as can be seen from the chart below. The darkest shade of blue indicates the areas of minimal tidal effect.

med_tidesIf Plato was correct in stating that Atlantis was submerged in a single day and that it was still close to the water’s surface in his own day, its destruction must have taken place a relatively short time before since the slowly rising sea levels would eventually have deepened the waters covering the remains of Atlantis to the point where they would not pose any danger to shipping. The triremes of Plato’s time had an estimated draught of about a metre so the shallows must have had a depth that was less than that.

The reference to mud shoals resulting from an earthquake brings to mind the possibility of liquefaction. This is perhaps what happened to the two submerged ancient cities close to modern Alexandria. Their remains lie nine metres under the surface of the Mediterranean.

Post-Glacial_Sea_LevelOur knowledge of sea-level changes over the past two and a half millennia should enable us to roughly estimate all possible locations in the Mediterranean where the depth of water of any submerged remains would have been a metre or less in the time of Plato.

Some supporters of a Black Sea Atlantis have suggested the shallow Strait of Kerch between Crimea and Russia as the location of Plato’s ‘shoals’(e) .

The tidal map above offers two areas west of Athens and Egypt that do appear to be credible location regions, namely, (1) from the Balearic Islands, south to North Africa and (2), a more credible straddling the Strait of Sicily. This region offers additional features, making it much more compatible with Plato’s account.

By contrast, just over a hundred miles south of that Strait, lies the Gulf of Gabés, which boasts the greatest tidal range (max 8 ft) within the Mediterranean.

The Gulf of Gabes formerly known as Syrtis Minor and the larger Gulf of Sidra to the east, previously known as Syrtis Major, was greatly feared by ancient mariners and continue to be very dangerous today because of the shifting sandbanks created by tides in the area.

There are two principal ancient texts that possibly support the gulfs of Syrtis as the location of Plato’s ‘shoal’. The first is from Apollonius of Rhodes who was a 3rd-century BC librarian at Alexandria. In his Argonautica (Bk IV ii 1228-1250)(a) he unequivocally speaks of the dangerous shoals in the Gulf of Syrtis. The second source is the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 27 13-18) written three centuries later, which describes how St. Paul on his way to Rome was blown off course and feared that they would run aground on “Syrtis sands.” However, good fortune was with them and after fourteen days they landed on Malta. The Maltese claim regarding St. Paul is rivalled by that of the Croatian island of Mljet as well Argostoli on the Greek island of Cephalonia. Even more radical is the convincing evidence offered by Kenneth Humphreys to demonstrate that the Pauline story is an invention(b).

Both the Strait of Sicily and the Gulf of Gabes have been included in a number of Atlantis theories. The Strait and the Gulf were seen as part of a larger landmass that included Sicily according to Butavand, Arecchi and Sarantitis who named the Gulf of Gabes as the location of the Pillars of Heracles. Many commentators such as Frau, Rapisarda and Lilliu have designated the Strait of Sicily as the ‘Pillars’, while in the centre of the Strait we have Malta with its own Atlantis claims.

Zhirov[458.25] tried to explain away the ‘shoals’ as just pumice stone, frequently found in large quantities after volcanic eruptions. However, Plato records an earthquake, not an eruption and Zhirov did not explain how the pumice stone was still a hazard many hundreds of years after the event. Although pumice can float for years, it will eventually sink(c). It was reported that pumice rafts associated with the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa were found floating up to 20 years after that event. Zhirov’s theory does not hold water (no pun intended) apart from which, Atlantis was destroyed as a result of an earthquake. not a volcanic eruption and I think that the shoals described by Plato were more likely to have been created by liquefaction and could not have endured for centuries.

Nevertheless, a lengthy 2020 paper(d) by Ulrich Johann offers additional information about pumice and in a surprising conclusion proposes that it was pumice rafts that inspired Plato’s reference to shoals!

Andrew Collins in an effort to justify his Cuban location for Atlantis needed to find Plato’s ‘shoals of mud’ in the Atlantic and for me, in what seems to have been an act of desperation he decided that the Sargasso Sea fitted the bill [072.42]. However Collins was not the first to make this suggestion. Chedomille Mijatovich (1842-1932), a Serbian politician, economist and historian was one of the first in modern times to suggest that the Sargasso Sea may have been the maritime hazard described by Plato as a ‘shoal of mud’, which resulted from the submergence of Atlantis. However, neither explains how anyone can mistake seaweed for mud!

The late Andis Kaulins believed that Atlantis did exist and considered two possible regions for its location; the Minoan island of Thera or some part of the North Sea that was submerged at the end of the last Ice Age when the sea levels rose dramatically. Kaulins noted that part of the North Sea is known locally as ‘Wattenmeer’ or Sea of Mud’ reminiscent of Plato’s description of the region where Atlantis was submerged, after that event.

An even more absurd suggestion came from the American scholar William Arthur Heidel (1868-1941), who denied the reality of Atlantis and wrote a critical paper [0374] on the subject (republished July 2013(g)). He claimed that an expeditionary naval force sent by Darius in 515 BC under Scylax of Caryanda to explore the Indus River, eventually encountered waters too shallow for his ships, and that this was the inspiration behind Plato’s tale of unnavigable seas. Heidel further claimed that Plato’s battle between Atlantis and Athens is a distorted account of the war of invasion between the Persians and the peoples of the Indus Valley (Now Pakistan)!

 

(a)  https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/argo/argo53.htm

(b) https://www.jesusneverexisted.com/shipwreck.html

(c) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523144110.htm

(d) (99+) (PDF) Resurrection of Atlantis Minoica: A new localization of the Akrotiri (Santorini, Greece) West House room 5 frescos in view of current geological findings. Part 2 | Ulrich Johann – Academia.edu

(e) Index (atlantis-today.com) 

(f)  https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread61382/pg1 

(g) A Suggestion concerning Plato’s Atlantis on JSTOR (archive.org)

(h) Atlantis – Wikipedia_?s=books&ie=UTF&qid=1376067567&sr=-