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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 »
Lisbon
Barradas, Lereno
Lereno Barradas was a Portuguese writer who speculated in the early 1970’s that Tartessos could be identified with Atlantis and had been located in the Tagus estuary near the site of modern Lisbon. He also suggested that these
ancient Atlanteans had travelled to America.
Corrêa, António Augusto Mendes
António Augusto Mendes Corrêa (1888-1960) was a Portuguese anthropologist who has written about the prehistory of his country. Included in his output were at least two 1934 papers about Atlantis, the titles of which translate as(1) Atlantis and the Origins of Lisbon and(2) The New Ideas about Atlantis.
(1) A Atlântida e as origens de Lisboa in Da Biologia à História (Porto, 1934) p.93-157
(2) As Novas Ideias sobre a Atlântida (A Terra No.12 Jan.1934 p.1-14 & No.13 Mar 1934 p.1-12)
Pereira de Sousa, Francisco Luís
Francisco Luís Pereira de Sousa (1870-1931) was born in Funchal, the capital of the mid-Atlantic Portuguese archipelago of Madeira. He was a geologist by profession and is well known for his 1914 study of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He speculated(a) that this tragic event might have been the last ‘gasp’ of a sunken Atlantis. He also suggested that Atlantis had originally occupied most of the Atlantic, linking Africa, Europe and America. He considered the Canaries and his native Madeira to be present-day remnants of Plato’s island.
(a) https://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/artigo5081.doc
Topper, Uwe
Uwe Topper (1940-) was born in Wroclaw, Poland (formerly Breslau, Germany) and currently living in Berlin where he earns a living as an artist. However, he is better known as a researcher and author in the fields of history, ethnography and anthropology. 
Towards the end of the last century, he turned his attention to chronology and developed his own version of New Chronology which incorporates some of the views of Anatoly Fomenko [1823] and Heribert Illig.
‘New Chronology’ is also a term applied to the realignment of the chronologies of the Middle East as expounded by David Rohl and others. An interesting review of the New Chronology and its revisionist antecedents is available online(h).
A paper(b) by Topper on the subject is worth a read as is a critical review(g) of Topper’s work by Jason Colavito.
An English translation of some of Topper’s work relating to his revisionist view of ancient chronology is available(i). In it he explores what he describes as “jolts and gaps in historical chronology”, noting that “dates that were detem1ined centuries ago and documented in classical and prehistoric monuments collide with those re-calculated by modem techniques for those same objects. They diverge quite noticeably, and the more the dates go back in time the bigger the difference between the two, i.e. between real observation of that time and re-calculation based on present observations.” Topper is convinced that chronological misalignments are the consequences of cataclysms(b).
Topper seems to thrive on controversy, because not content to deconstruct our chronology, he has denounced, Beowulf, the cave paintings of Chauvet, and the Lady of Elche as all fakes(a). He has also written an extensive paper(f) on the cart ruts, usually associated with just Malta, but which are found around the Mediterranean and further afield.
Topper has also written about Atlantis, placing its capital on the site of modern Cadiz surrounded by nine other cities between Lisbon and Tarragona(j) (see Richard Cassaro) and has identified possible references to Atlantis in the Qur’an(k) and also speculated that by 11,000 BC Atlantean culture had spread as far as the Americas and Asia! He dealt with these matters in his 1977 book[916], Das Erbe der Giganten. Untergang und Rückkehr der Atlanter (The legacy of the giants, fall and return of the Atlantean)
He has also attempted to revive interest in Hanns Hörbiger’s ‘world-ice theory’(d).
My instincts tell me that Topper’s views should be treated with great caution.
Topper’s son, Ilya, is following in his father’s footsteps with articles on New Chronology as well as papers with provocative titles such as; The Christian Koran and The Sumerians did not exist(c).
(a) http://www.ilya.it/chrono/pages/topperen.htm
(b) http://www.ilya.it/chrono/pages/kataursacheen.htm
(c) http://www.ilya.it/chrono/pages/ilyaen.htm
(d) http://www.ilya.it/chrono/pages/glacialen.htm
(f) http://www.ilya.it/chrono/pages/gleisedt.htm (german)
(g) https://web.archive.org/web/20200227140310/http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizations/id13.html
(i) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=544
(j) Die Chronik von Atlantis – Atlantisforschung.de (German) *
(k) Der Koran als Quelle der Atlantisforschung – Atlantisforschung.de (German) *
Portugal
Portugal, in the 12th century, began as a county, that is, governed by a count. Wikipedia notes that it “refers to two successive medieval counties in the region around Braga and Porto, today corresponding to littoral northern Portugal, within which the identity of the Portuguese people formed. The first county existed from the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries as a vassalage of the Kingdom of Asturias and later the Kingdoms of Galicia and León, before being abolished as a result of rebellion. A larger entity under the same name was then re-established in the late 11th century and subsequently elevated by its count in the mid-12th century into an independent Kingdom of Portugal.”
Impressive megalithic sites are to be found in Portugal, among which is the large Almendres Cromlech (Cromeleque dos Almendres) near Evora. It still has 93 huge stones that form two concentric rings. They were erected there around 4000-5000 BC making them about 2000 years older than Stonehenge(a).
>A recent article(e) on Graham Hancock’s website by Leonard Wolf describes a number of megalithic sites in Portugal that he personally explored including some in the Evora district in 2022. In 2015, the same Mr. Wolf published a lengthy paper(f) advocating a site off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as the location of Atlantis.<
According to Mel Nicholls [0944], the Bell Beaker culture originated in Portugal around 2800 BC and has nominated the Beaker people in Britain as Atlantean, whereas Donald Ingram argues that their successors in Britain, the Wessex II culture were Atlantean.
Portugal entered the Atlantis Stakes with a claim by a Basque researcher, Luis Aldamiz, that a little-known ancient civilisation, known as the Villa Nova 
de São Pedro (VNSP) culture matched much of Plato’s description of Atlantis(b). Its capital was Zambujal, which was located on a mountain in the centre of the Estramadura peninsula, near modern Lisbon. Originally it was described as a ‘perriruthos’, which indicates something surrounded by water. Aldamiz notes that ten tombs were found there; reminiscent of the ten kings of Atlantis. Zambujal had large complex fortifications. Aldamiz claims that this civilisation fought against the Greeks during the Middle Bronze Age. He further believes that the destruction of his Atlantis was caused by an event that was similar to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that caused such death and destruction.
Lereno Barradas was a Portuguese writer who speculated in the early 1970s that Tartessos could be identified with Atlantis and that it had been located in the Tagus estuary near the site of modern Lisbon. He also suggested that these ancient Atlanteans had travelled to America.
In 1989 another Portuguese researcher, José Antunes, proposed that Atlantis had been situated in what is now northwest of Lisbon between Sintra and Mafra.
A more radical theory has been put forward by Roger Coghill, the British bioelectromagnetic investigator, who suggests on his website that Atlantis was located in the vicinity of Faro in the Algarve. Coghill expanded on his theory in his book, The Message of Atlantis[494]. He has also drawn attention to a book [1562] by Antonio Jose Lopes Navarro, published in 1983, in which he has brought together a number of classical references to the prehistory of the Algarve.
Portugal got further attention in 2013 when another British researcher, Peter Daughtrey, who then lived in Portugal, published Atlantis and the Silver City [893] in which he designates not just the Algarve and the submerged area in front of it as Atlantis, but the whole of that south-west Iberian region.
Daughtrey’s book has been updated and contains what he calls “dramatic new evidence”. His book is supported by a website(d), where you will find additional articles, interviews and reviews.
The late Steven Sora suggested [0395] that the Etruscans were refugees from their original homeland in Iberia, where he also located Troy/Atlantis. He specified Lisbon, Setubal and Troia, all in modern Portugal, as Trojan/Atlantean territory, conflating the Trojan and Atlantean wars, although placing those conflicts 4,000 km away from the battleground at Hissarlik, where Eberhard Zangger claims his Troy, which he also deemed to be identical with Atlantis was located!
Apart from the mainland claims the Portuguese Atlantic archipelagos of Azores and Madeiras have also been identified by several commentators as probable Atlantis locations.
Manuel J.Gandra has produced a valuable bibliography(c) of Portuguese sources dealing with Atlantis.
(a) https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/almendres-cromlech
(b) https://www.geocities.ws/luis_aldamiz/Atlantis/Atlantis.html
(c) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(d) https://www.atlantisandthesilvercity.com
Lisbon (L)
Lisbon, capital of modern Portugal was previously called Olissipo, which is a modification of its Phoenician name ‘Alis Ubbo’ that some writers, such as Steven Sora, suggest that it means ‘the port of 
Ulysses’. Later, under the Romans, it was known as ‘Felicita Julia Olisipo’ and renamed by the Moors ‘Aschbouna’.
Lisbon has been identified by some with one of the first ten kings of Atlantis. One of whom was called Elasippos and it is claimed that he gave his name to that part of the Atlantean empire over which he ruled. The assumption is that over time Elasippos was corrupted to Lisbon. However, Plato pointed out that the names given by Solon had been Hellenised and consequently Elasippos would probably have been originally known by a totally dissimilar name and so any suggested connection with Lisbon would appear to have no real foundation.
Steven Sora, in The Triumph of the Sea Gods[0395.219] , maintains that the Lisbon area held the true location of both Troy AND Atlantis. He repeats this in his essay in Douglas Kenyon’s Forgotten Origins[1191].
Elasippos
Elasippos is the name of the elder of the fourth pair of twins who became kings of the Atlantean empire. This name is claimed to have been modified by time and usage to what we know as Lisbon today, where his kingdom is assumed to have existed. However, Plato tells us that the names of the original ten kings of Atlantis recorded by him have been Hellenised so that the putative connection between Elasippos and Lisbon is somewhat suspect.
The Greeks knew Lisbon as Olissipo and believed that this was derived from Ulysses whom is supposed to have founded the city, although it is more conventionally accepted as having been established by the Phoenicians and known by them as Alis-Ubbo.
However, Frank Joseph claims that they knew it as Elasippos (b) and in Douglas Kenyon’s Forgotten Origins [1191.67] he translates the name as ‘Kingly horse-rider’. However, in The Lost Civilisation of Lemuria [0107] Joseph suggested that Elasippos was possibly a reference to Olisihpa a king of Nan Madol in the Pacific! (d)
It is interesting that this suggested Ulysses connection supports the view that the adventures of Homer’s hero took place outside the Mediterranean.
C.&S.Schoppe translate ‘Elasippos’ as ‘horse of war’ referring to its domestication and also claim that he gave his name to a region around the River Don(a) that flows into the Black Sea, their preferred location for Atlantis.
Other translations of the different variants of the name are ‘calm roadstead’ or ‘walled town’ (c).
>(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20190830053312/https://www.black-sea-atlantis.com/black-sea-atlantis/<
(b) See: Archive 3646
(d) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/daily-mail-suggest-that-nan-madol-offers-evidence-for-atlantis
Sora, Steven
>Steven Sora (1952-2021) has been investigating and writing about historical mysteries for over a quarter of a century. In The Triumph of the Sea Gods [0395], he addressed the geographical problems presented by Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and linked his conclusions to Plato’s tale of Atlantis. He contended, as several others have, that the ‘years’ referred to in Solon’s report were in fact lunar months, which would place the destruction of Atlantis around 1200 BC, coinciding with the time of the Trojan War. He further asserted that the Atlantean war recorded by Plato is a 
distortion of the Trojan War, but he contentiously claimed that Troy was located on the Iberian Peninsula rather than the more generally accepted Turkey. He specified Lisbon, Setubal and Troia, all in modern Portugal as Trojan/Atlantean territory! This is a daring effort aimed at solving two persistent mysteries with one radical theory. For good measure, Sora also suggested that the Etruscans were refugees from his Iberian Troy (Troia).<
There is one interesting comment by Sora [p.6] that may have a bearing on the location of the Pillars of Heracles, where he claimed that at the time when Homer wrote, around 755 BC, the Greeks had barely ventured as far as Italy. This would appear to suggest that at the time of the Trojan/Atlantean War/s it is improbable that the ‘Pillars’ were identified by the Greeks with Gibraltar, but more likely to have been somewhere in the Central Mediterranean. Nevertheless, Sora opted for the Gibraltar location!
Some more of his views can be read online in an Atlantis Rising article(a) .
*(a) https://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/article/echoes-of-atlantis-from-homer/ (offline) See: Archive 3329
Divine Retribution *
Divine Retribution is the explanation offered by Plato (Crit. 121c) for the destruction of Atlantis in a manner that for us is reminiscent of the biblical tale of Noah and many other flood stories. Some modern writers such as Maxine Asher have promoted this concept of godly reprisal. However, there is one important element missing from Plato’s narrative, namely, the salvation of a chosen few. The idea that the entire story of Atlantis was concocted by Plato as some form of parable is incompatible with the elimination of both (bad) Atlanteans AND (good) Athenians (Tim.25d). Consequently, if Plato was not relating some form of invented morality tale, we are entitled to reconsider the probability that he was transmitting a story with a core of historical truth.
The earthquake and tsunami of 1755 that destroyed Lisbon and which killed up to 100,000 people is just another example of how divine retribution has been invoked as the cause of the catastrophe. For those that accepted this explanation, all it did was consolidate the power of the church and its clergy. For me, the event was just an example of twisted divine humour, when people were killed in churches and synagogues while the red-light district was left virtually intact(f).
The idea of a god on a punishment spree arose more recently when both Christian(e) and Muslim(d) survivors attributed the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean on December 2004 to divine retribution for the wickedness of man. Similar comments were expressed following the 2015 earthquake in Nepal(g). This modern knee-jerk reaction may explain the inclusion of similar sentiments in so many ancient flood stories.
William Lauritzen is a leading advocate of Atlantis having been situated on the Sunda Shelf where Indonesia is located today. He provides a more rational explanation for the tsunami tragedy in a new eBook(a) where he explains that the unstable geology of the area which caused the recent tragedy also destroyed Atlantis.
The following year the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was once again credited to the whims of a bad-tempered divinity.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti produced a further stream of ‘divine retribution’ claims, among which were those from American evangelist Pat Robertson, who attributed the cause to the ‘satanic’ voodoo beliefs of many Haitians and somewhat surprisingly from the well-known movie actor Danny Glover who claimed that the earthquake was god’s response to the failure of the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen!!!
Charles Pellegrino expressed it well, when he wrote in Return to Sodom and Gomorrah[821.120], “when an explanation is sought for evil events in a presumably just universe, history brands the people villains because they became victims, victims because they became villains.”
All these nonsensical claims demonstrate that god has either an appalling sense of justice, executing good and bad with equal vigour or, as is my personal belief, that he/she/it does not exist at all. Tectonic fault lines and their attendant hazards exist irrespective of the moral behaviour of people living in their vicinity. Similarly, hurricanes sweep into the Caribbean and the southern United States every year bringing death and destruction, not because the people in the area are inherently evil, but because particular meteorological conditions exist in the region that cyclically generate hurricanes.
It is fairly clear then that a fault line existed in the vicinity of Atlantis, a fact which should help to identify or at least eliminate some suggested locations. Coincidentally, a BBC documentary How the Earth Made Us, aired today, highlighted the fact that many of the most important ancient cities were sited near fault lines in order to exploit the mineral resources that are frequently to be found associated with them.
Another ‘prophecy of doom’, from the late V.M.Rabolú (1926-2000), is that a planet five or six times the size of Jupiter, is approaching earth to destroy it, because of mankind’s wickedness. Rabolú claims to have travelled in his Astral Body to Venus and Mars and witnessed the inhabitants of those planets. He also points to the destruction of Atlantis being the result of the greed of its inhabitants. All this and more drivel is available in a free booklet, written by Rabolú, from the Alcione Association(b).
The concept of divine retribution was given a further twist in January 2014 when a British politician and member of UKIP, David Silvester, claimed(c) that the recent severe flooding in his country was a consequence of the same-sex marriage policy of the British government. Rain in Ireland seems a little heavier lately, following the referendum vote here in favour of same-sex marriage!
My final comment is a reflection on the fact that many western legal systems incorporate the concept of divine intervention with the use of the term ‘Act of God’ to describe catastrophic natural events leading to loss of life or property. Is it not time that such happenings be more accurately redefined as ‘natural but unanticipated’.
In February 2016 a paper was published(h) in Nature magazine with the interesting title of “ Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality”.
(a) www.earth360.com.
(b) https://www.hercolubus.tv#mantras
(d) https://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/13-01-2005/7593-0/
(e) Wayback Machine (archive.org) *
(g) https://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/ken-ham-nepal-earthquake-caused-by-sin/
(h) https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rise-human-civilization-tied-belief-punitive-gods