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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 »
Leon Elshout
Elshout, Leon *
Leon Elshout is a Dutch commentator with some ‘off the wall’ ideas expressed on his website, predominantly concerning biblical events(a). Among these, is the claim that Tarshish was located in Britain. Writing in English and Dutch he has also published a number of posts regarding Atlantis and possible related texts in the Bible, such as chapters 2 & 7 of the Book of Daniel(b). Daft speculation.
Babylonia *
Babylonia was one of the great nations of ancient Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq. Its capital, Babylon, was founded towards the end of the third millennium BC(a). For many, it is best known for its frequent mention in the Bible. The region has also produced what is arguably the earliest epic narrative in the form of The Epic of Gilgamesh, who was a semi-mythical king. In it, we have a flood myth, which is accepted by some as an earlier version of Noah’s Deluge account(b).
Babylonian astronomy can be traced back to the fourth millennium BC(c), although some argue that their interest was in astrology rather than what we would call scientific astronomy(d). The idea that the Babylonians had knowledge of precession has also been challenged by Gary David Thompson(h). A similar debate concerns the claim that the Babylonians had used trigonometry more than a thousand years before Hipparchus(e).
Another claim that has produced additional controversy relates to what has been claimed as ‘the oldest map of the world’. This relates to a clay tablet discovered in 1899 and now housed in the British Museum. The claim to be a world map stems from what appears to be a depiction of the ‘ocean’ that at the time was thought to surround the known world. This is similar to the later Greek understanding of the world. According to one interpretation of the tablet, the Babylonians saw themselves at the centre of a world that we would consider now to be regional in extent(j).
Stephen Kershaw, an Atlantis sceptic, noted that “Herodotus’ History includes a memorable description of the city of Babylon, which may have had a considerable influence on Plato’s description of Atlantis in the Critias.” (i).
Dieter Bremer has identified references to Atlantis in various ancient Mesopotamian traditions(g) that, for him, justify his claim that Atlantis was a space station! This daft idea of an Akkadian connection he supports by quotations from the Bible and Homer and also some modern writers. All his ravings are in German only, but MSEdge will translate them automatically.
Any suggested connection between the Babylonians and Atlantis is lacking any real foundation. Thorwald C. Franke summed it up as follows:
Babylon = Atlantis?
The city of Babylon has a many-fold symbolic meaning for the history of humankind: First, as the best-known Mesopotamian city, it is a symbol of the development of urban civilization in the course of the history of humankind. Secondly, from the biblical records, Babylon became a symbol of decadence and arrogance which lead to decay. Because of this symbolism, some identified Babylon with Atlantis.
But similar symbolism should not seduce to an identification. Babylon is not on an island, it is a quadratic, not a circular-shaped city, and the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel has no correspondence with Plato’s Atlantis account. Indeed, Babylon is old enough for Atlantis but the Bible especially refers to the neo-Babylonian empire 626-539 BC.
For adherents of the invention hypothesis, Babylon is considered to be one of the models after which Plato allegedly invented the Atlantis account. But even under this perspective, the similarities are much too vague in order to make reliable statements on the question.”
More recently (2018), an ‘off-the-wall’ Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, has also written extensively, in Dutch and English, linking Atlantis and Babylon(k) with details in the Book of Revelation.
(a) Babylon – World History Encyclopedia (archive.org)
(b) https://www.gotquestions.org/Gilgamesh-flood.html
(c) https://www.livius.org/articles/person/kidinnu-the-chaldaeans-and-babylonian-astronomy/
(d) https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/babylonians-scientists/462150/
(e) https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/tsikritsis-minas/
(f) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis_bible.htm
(g) Mesopotamian traditions | Atlantis Mythology (archive.org)
(h) Archive 6896 | (atlantipedia.ie) *
(i) https://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/resources/images/babylon-and-atlantis
Britain .
Britain. For as long as I can remember, received wisdom told us that the ancestors of the British (and Irish) had ‘Celtic’ origins. Then in 2007, Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, professor of genetics at Oxford University ‘threw a cat among the pigeons’ when he bluntly wrote “Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts” in Origins of the British [1950]. The late R.Cedric Leonard reviewed Oppenheimer’s claims in his book and two earlier papers(d)(e)(f).
Britain as the home of Atlantis has been claimed by many writers and not without undertones of nationalism by some of the British authors. Nevertheless, support for the idea has been offered by a number of more disinterested researchers. Probably the first to advance this idea was John Wallis (1660-1703), who, in 1700, proposed that the Atlantis story had been corrupted over time and was a reference to the destruction of the landbridge that had existed between France and England, leaving a British Atlantis more isolated (The original Brexit!)(c). It was nearly a century before the idea was taken up by Thomas Pennant and then more than another century passed before Cooper, Spence, Beaumont and Calestani produced related theories. Fast forward to the 21st century, when Donald Ingram identifies the Wessex II culture as Atlantean and Melville Nicholls considers Britain to be one of the Atlantean islands referred to by Plato.
The precise location, the exact date and the probable cause of the destruction of Atlantis are the basis for a range of theories. There is general acceptance that following the deglaciation at the end of the last Ice Age vast regions of low-lying land that had linked Ireland and Britain to mainland Europe were gradually flooded.
One school of thought is that these flooded regions contained Atlantis, of which the most extensive was in the North Sea and is now known as Doggerland. Other offshore locations proposed for Atlantis are the Celtic Shelf (Gidon, Steuerwald & Koudroiavtsev) and the Irish Sea (Dunbavin). These lands had been settled and following the inundations, its inhabitants were forced to retreat to the higher ground of what is modern Europe and the British Isles.
David L. Hildebrandt in Atlantis-The Reawakening [1602] proposes a reworking of the ‘Atlantis in Britain’ theory with some new perspectives. For me, his date, location and identity of the Atlanteans do not ring true, particularly why Stone Age people in Southern Britain would want to launch an attack on Athens, over 2,000 miles away, a city-state that did not even exist at the time. Those early Britons did not have the wheel, yet Plato tells us that the Atlanteans had chariots!
Another view is that Atlantis was destroyed by the impact of a comet or asteroid, an idea espoused by Dunbavin and Spence.
E. J. de Meester on his now-defunct website postulated a link between Stonehenge and Atlantis(b). After arbitrarily dividing Plato’s dimensions by ten, he suggested that the plain described by Plato lay in a rectangle between Salisbury and Chichester.
A recent suggestion by a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, places the biblical Tarshish in Britain(h) an idea also supported by a Christadelphian website(g).
(a) https://sabidius.blogspot.com/2010/06/atlantis-was-it-britain.html
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20090614050055/https://home-3.tiscali.nl/~meester7/engatlantis.html
(c) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1700.010
(d) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/
(e) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestryrevisited/
(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20170113172907/http://www.atlantisquest.com/Bretons.html
(g) Incredible Archaeological Find Proves Tarshish Is Britain! (archive.org)
(h) https://roodgoudvanparvaim.nl/8-tarshish-as-great-britain-and-the-paradox-with-atlantis/
Iraq
Iraq was been given little attention by early Atlantis hunters until the 16th-century Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernandez Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557) suggested Iraq as the location of Atlantis, whose inhabitants fled to the Americas when their country was inundated. However, it took another four hundred years before the discovery of the advanced civilisation of Sumeria situated in central Iraq began to generate interest in the possibility of Sumeria being Atlantean and the ‘cradle of civilisation’.
Mario Pincherle considers the Mandaeans of southern Iraq to be descendants of the original Atlanteans.
Leon Elshout associates the story of Atlantis with Iraq in a brief blog(a).
Tarshish
Tarshish is a city referred to about a dozen times in the Bible and has been widely accepted as another version of Tartessos. Josephus, the Jewish historian who wrote during the 1st century AD, was confident that it referred to Tarsus in Cilicia, Turkey, the birthplace of St. Paul. The Septuagint Bible uses Karkendonos where it refers to Tarshish in Isaiah 23:1, which was the Greek form of the name for North African Carthage. This could imply that the founders of Carthage and Tarsus were the same. We know that Carthage was founded by Tyrians and we also know that Cilix, a Tyrian, gave his name to Cilicia when he settled it. Andis Kaulins has claimed that Carthage was possibly built on the remains of Tartessos (i)!
Immanuel Velikovsky was of the opinion that “Tarshish was the name employed by the writers of the Old Testament to designate Crete as a whole, or its chief city Knossos.” as explained in a paper by his former associate Jan Sammer(m).
In 2008, Rainer Kühne published a paper titled Tartessos-Tarshish was the model for Plato’s Atlantis in which he identifies Tartessos as Tharshish, locates it in the Donana Marshes of southern Spain and suggests that it lasted from the tenth to the sixth centuries BC(p).
Utica was a Phoenician port city on the northern coast of what is now Tunisia. It no longer exists and its site is now some miles inland because of silting. It is also one of a number of suggested locations for Tarshish(f).
Tarshish/Tartessos is thought by many others to be alternative names for Atlantis. There is a consensus that it was a coastal city in Southern Spain, near modern Cadiz. Despite the efforts of many, its location is still unknown, which can probably be explained by the fact that the coastline has altered considerably over time. Adolf Schulten, who was convinced that Tartessos was Atlantis, spent many years searching, unsuccessfully, for Tarshish in Andalusia. Louis Millette is a modern writer who supports this identification but has offered little by way of evidence.
>>On March 20, 2011, The Jerusalem Post reported(s) that according to filmmaker Simcha Jacobvici, “it is generally acknowledged that the Biblical Tarshish is what the historians call Tartessos, which was in southern Spain. In the Tanach, Tarshish is a great city with a huge navy, with silver and gold. Jonah sails towards Tarshish. Solomon has naval expeditions with Tarshish. Tarshish disappears from the Biblical record. Tartessos disappears from the historical record.” Says Jacobovici, “Tarshish is Atlantis itself.”<<
In 1927, Edwin Björkman devoted a third of his book, Search for Atlantis [181] to a discussion of Tarshish and its possible connection with Atlantis.
Other locations have been suggested, such as Tharros in Sardinia, Troy and even Malta where Tarxien may be considered an echo of Tarshish. Tharros sometimes referred to as a ‘second Carthage’ had its port located as recently as 2008(d). The suggestion that Tharros was Tarshish was based on their similar-sounding names and the reference to Tarshish in the Phoenician inscription on the ‘Nora Stone’ discovered at Nora on the south coast of Sardinia in 1773.
The Brit-Am organisation, which seeks to identify the ten lost tribes of Israel has published an extensive series of papers about Tarshish(n). Responding to a question about Atlantis and Tarshish they wrote – “Atlantis does seem to have existed and does appear to have been somewhere in the Atlantic coastal area. Tarshish is a good candidate or at the least would have had some contact with Atlantis.”(o)
Quite a variety of locations have been offered as the site of Tarshish(f)(k).
Aaron Arrowsmith (1750-1832), a British cartographer and geographer was of the view that “Tartessus was a territory established by adventurous traders who settled in the Iberian peninsula after moving from the ancient city of Tarsus in Asia Minor (modern Turkey).” [1761]
It is accepted that biblical silver was sourced from ‘Tarshish’, initially assumed to be Tartessos in Spain. Recent studies employing lead isotope tests, when applied to Phoenician silver hoards(g) revealed that both Spain and Sardinia were possible sources. However, it might be argued that the Nora Stone may give Sardinia a somewhat stronger claim.
A contribution to a historum.com forum offers additional support for the idea of a Sardinian Tarshish(r).
A more radical idea was put forward in 2012 by the Spanish researcher, José Angel Hernández, who proposed that the Tarshish of the Bible was to be found in the coastal region of the Indus Valley and that Tartessos was a colony of the Indus city of Lhotal and had been situated on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar!(a)(b) This view is apparently supported by biblical references (1 Kings 9:26, 22:48; 2 Chr. 9:21) that note that the ‘ships of Tarshish’ sailed from Ezion-Geber on the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba!
Jim Allen, who has been the leading supporter for decades of the idea of Atlantis being situated in the northern Andes, has also proposed that Tarshish had been a South American city. “The more probable site of Tarshish however lies on an island at the entrance to the Pilcomayo River opposite Asuncion, since satellite photos show that at this point the Pilcomayo forks into two arms exactly as per the ancient text, creating an island between the arms of the river. Moreover also in accordance with the ancient text, the river discharges into a broad bay – the Bay of Asuncion and this part of the Paraguay River also comprises shallows and sandbanks.”(l) This demonstrates that Allen saw Atlantis and Tarshish as separate entities.
However, if Tarshish was another name for Atlantis and according to the bible it existed at the time of Solomon, circa 1000 BC, we are confronted with a contradiction of Plato’s 9,000 years elapsing since the destruction of Atlantis and the visit of Solon to Sais. King Jehoshaphat reigned around 860 BC and planned to send a fleet to Tarshish, just 200 years before Solon, so the likelihood of Tarshish being Atlantis is a rather remote possibility.
A recent suggestion by a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, places the biblical Tarshish in Britain(h) an idea supported by a Christadelphian website(j).
(a) https://joseangelh.wordpress.com/category/mito-y-religion/
(b) https://joseangelh.wordpress.com/category/arqueologia-e-historia/
(c) https://www.academia.edu/5812547/Tharros_the_megalithic_city
(f) https://www.notjustanotherbook.com/tarshish.htm
(h) https://roodgoudvanparvaim.nl/8-tarshish-as-great-britain-and-the-paradox-with-atlantis/
(i) Pillars of Heracles – Alternative Location (archive.org)
(j) Incredible Archaeological Find Proves Tarshish Is Britain! (archive.org)
(k) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarshish#Sardinia
(l) http://www.geocities.ws/myessays/LocationofTarshish.htm
(m) https://www.varchive.org/nldag/tarshish.htm
(n) https://www.britam.org/Questions/QuesTarshish.html
(o) Scroll down to Question 2 in (n)
(p) https://vixra.org/pdf/1103.0040v1.pdf
(q) tarshishtarsus (bibleorigins.net)
(r) https://historum.com/t/the-nuragic-civilization-of-sardinia-was-it-tarshish.127443/
(s) https://www.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-news/the-deepest-jewish-encampment *
Bible *
The Bible offers no direct reference to Atlantis, but this is not to be seen as proof of its non-existence, when you consider that in spite of the fact that the Hebrews were in Egypt for hundreds of years, the Bible does not mention the pyramids either and they most certainly did then and still do, exist.
The Bible has been invoked as a justification for everything from war to slavery. It has been one of the most divisive books ever, having been instrumental in the creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of competing Christian sects over the last two millennia. It is assumed that any theory, religious or secular that can be shown to have a biblical foundation will automatically have enhanced credibility.
Jean De Serres, the 16th-century historian, was probably the first to link Atlantis with the Bible when he wrote that Atlantis had been located in the Holy Land. Lewis Spence[259.33] accused Huet, Borchart and Vossius, in the 16th and 17th centuries of using ‘ingenious misreading of the Pentateuch’ to claim that the Platonic story of Atlantis was, in reality, a version of patriarchal history. In a similar vein, in 1726 a French lawyer, Claude Olivier, wrote of his conviction that the ten tribes of Israel were to be equated with the ten kingdoms of Atlantis.
The Book of Genesis in particular has inspired speculation regarding a possible link between the Bible and the Atlantis narrative. Ignatius Donnelly in his seminal Atlantis: The Antidiluvian World, devoted Chapter Six to ‘demonstrating’ that Genesis held a history of Atlantis(o).
Therefore, I advise that any new scriptural interpretation must be treated with extreme caution. With that in mind, I mention that an American researcher, J. D. Brady, who claims to be a scriptural scholar and as such has identified Atlantis, drawing on chapters 26-28 of Ezekiel. He refers to the Atlanteans as Tyrrhenians and names their leader as Satan! He claims that the Tyre referred to in these chapters was an island named Tyrus that Plato knew as Atlantis. He offers a range of data to suggest that this Tyrus was not the Tyre we know today located in Lebanon. Brady claims with great certainty that the remains of Atlantis are to be found in the Bay of Troy! A 2014 book[1016] by David Hershiser, Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, has taken up this idea that the reference in Ezekiel was concerned with Atlantis.
Not content with identifying Atlantis, Brady also claims to know the location of the Ark of the Covenant, saying that “It is currently secreted in an underground treasure crypt on Lemnos Island.”(b)
H.S. Bellamy, the Austrian researcher, also produced a volume[097], The Book of Revelation is History, devoted to demonstrating that the last book of the New Testament is a coded description of the catastrophes that accompanied the capture of our Moon! He claimed that the reference to the ten horns is an allusion to the ten Atlantean kings. He also interpreted the Book of Jeremiah I & II as well as Ezekiel as containing references to aspects of the Atlantis story. Earlier, Kurt Bilau had also been seduced by the theories of Hans Hörbiger and also like Bellamy endeavoured to use the Book of Revelations to support this belief.
However, R Cedric Leonard does offer(a) an interesting comparison of a passage in the Old Testament with the classical writers:
“And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose…
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same mighty men (heroes) which were of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:1-2,4)
This passage has been frequently invoked to support the daft idea that extraterrestrial visitors had intercourse with human females, a contention that was debunked by Klaus Aschenbrenner some years ago(l).
“The mixture between gods and men, which is reported in the sixth chapter of Genesis of the Old Testament, is to be interpreted in a similar way: “Then the children of God looked after the daughters of men, how beautiful they were, and took them for wives, which they wanted … and begot them children.”
The fact that offspring resulted from this union clearly speaks for the earthly origin of those Divine beings. There is a genetic barrier that makes it difficult for similar species to mix. For example, if one tries to cross closely related animal species, such as horses and donkeys, the stallions of the resulting mixed forms of mule or hinny are sterile. We must therefore not expect any offspring from a connection between humans and higher extraterrestrial beings because of the certainly greater genetic differences.”
Leonard points out that this same passage in Genesis coincides with Plato’s history of the Atlanteans and highlights that Hesiod referred to the Titans, of which Atlas was one, as the ‘sons of heaven’.
Leonard also offers a more rational translation of Job 26:5-6 that strengthens this view that the Atlanteans and Titans are identical:
“The Titans tremble beneath the waters and the inhabitants thereof. Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering”.
2011 saw the publication of Atlantis: The Eyewitnesses[749] by Walter Parks in which he also quoted extensively from the Book of Job, having claimed that it was written in 9619 BC and contained an eyewitness account of the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis!
In 2007, David Stewart Jnr., a prominent Mormon writer, offered support for Flem-Ath’s ‘Atlantis in Antarctica’ theory in an article on his scripture history website(p).
Thorwald C. Franke has reviewed a range of theories that have sought to associate various aspects of Bible history with elements of the Atlantis story. Most are rather speculative, but Franke concludes(d) that “the Bible should not be underestimated: There could indeed be indirect hints to Plato’s Atlantis in the Bible!” Furthermore, he also suggested that “A basic error is to consider the Bible as a source of information on the most ancient times of humankind. In truth, vast parts of the Bible were written only very late (since the 6th century BC). For the question of Atlantis, this is much too late!”
The biblical references to Tarshish are also used by those who equate it with Tartessos and in turn identify it as Atlantis. The location of Tarshish is a highly contentious issue with scholars unable to arrive at any clear consensus. However, there is some agreement that Tartessos had been located in Southern Spain. Some proponents of that idea not only consider Tarshish identical to Tartessos but to Atlantis as well. Richard Freund is a proponent of a Spanish Tartessos, which he also identifies with Atlantis and of course with the biblical Tarshish. This Bible connection was taken further in James Cameron’s 2017 (a) documentary, Atlantis Rising, which shows Simcha Jacobovici also linking Tarshish with Atlantis(h) and offering as ‘evidence’ for a linkage between Atlantis and the Jewish Temple, the design of the Hebrew menorah(g), which he claims is a representation of one half the concentric rings of Plato’s city of Atlantis. This foolish idea is not new, as it has already been suggested by Prof. Yahya Ababni(f). Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has also considered this as a possibility(k).
Turning the tables on the idea of the Bible supporting the story of Atlantis, Marjorie Braymer[198.30] wrote that Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th cent. AD) was the first to use Plato’s Atlantis to support the veracity of the Bible.
Another line of investigation might be the suggested parallels between Greek mythology and Genesis(c). A 2023 paper by Neil Godfrey offers some comments on Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts [2066] by Russell E. Gmirkin supporting the idea that the creation of the world and the story of the first humans in Genesis both draw directly on Plato’s famous account of the origins of the universe, mortal life and evil containing equal parts science, theology and myth(n).
A paper on the Academia.edu website(e) by M. De Rosa argues that Atlantis was the ‘Beast’ in the Book Of Revelation!
More recently, a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, has also written extensively, in Dutch and English, linking Atlantis and Babylon(i) with details in the Book of Revelation. He claims “that there is a dualistic principle behind Atlantis, expressed by the twin pillars of Hercules and the twin kings, so that Atlantis was mirrored in time and space from Babylon AND Jerusalem.” He also claims that chapters 2 & 7 of the Book of Daniel offer mirror images of the Athenian-Atlantean conflict(m).
Among a number of odd ideas expressed by him is the suggestion that Tarshish was in Britain(j).
(a) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20170607013948/https://www.atlantisquest.com:80/Myth.html
(b) The Ark of the Covenant – on the trail again! – Ritmeyer Archaeological Design (archive.org) *
(c) https://njbiblescience.org/presentations/Greek%20Mythology%20and%20Genesis.pdf
(d) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis_bible.htm
(e) https://www.academia.edu/6336088/ATLANTIS_AS_THE_BEAST_IN_REVELATIONS
(f) https://mosestablet.info/en/menorah-tablet.html
(g) https://www.wnd.com/2017/02/ocean-explorer-atlantis-found-and-linked-to-jewish-temple/
(h) Lost City of Atlantis And Its Incredible Connection to Jewish Temple (archive.org)
(j) https://roodgoudvanparvaim.nl/8-tarshish-as-great-britain-and-the-paradox-with-atlantis/
(l) They didn’t come from other stars – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(m) 1903.0463v1.pdf (vixra.org)
(o) https://sacred-texts.com/atl/ataw/ataw306.htm
(p) http://scripturehistory.com/atlantisinantarctica.php (link broken)