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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 »
Lucio Russo
Canada
Canada was first suggested to have had an ancient connection with the Mediterranean in a lecture(f) to the Albany Institute of Boston in 1893 by Verplanck Colvin (1847-1920), an American lawyer and topographical engineer. He based this idea primarily on his interpretation of Plutarch‘s On the Apparent Face in the Moon’s Face and specifically named the St. Lawrence River as the site of an ancient Greek colony.
Until relatively recently Canada has had little attention from Atlantis seekers. The nearest to such a claim came in 2002, when New Zealander, Ian A. Fox, published[0782] his theory that Atlantis had been situated between Greenland and Canada’s Baffin Island.
A few years later, the earliest specific suggestion of a Canadian connection with Atlantis, that I am aware of, came from Samuel Poe in a truly dreadful book[0847], in which he claimed the east coast of Canada and the United States had been Atlantean.
Then, Brian Johnston, a retailer of precious stones, created a website(a) advocating Ontario as the location of Plato’s Atlantis. He offers a stone circle and what may be other megalithic standing stones along with many photos of the same as evidence. This is all held together by a large helping of speculation. Finally, after describing in some detail a site in Ontario’s Northumberland County, he concludes that the location “might not be Atlantis!”
Nevertheless, the idea that the ancient Greeks had an awareness of America has persisted, with some claiming that they had colonies in Canada. Among these are Lucio Russo, Ioannis Liritzis(b) and Minas Tsikritsis(d). Now Manolis Koutlis has gone one further and claims[1617] that not only were there Greek colonies in Canada but that Atlantis had been situated in the Gulf of St. Lawrence(c). This raises the question of why or how Atlanteans or Greek colonists in Canada would launch an attack on Athens thousands of miles away. In my opinion, neither identification is credible.
At the 2005 Atlantis Conference, Emilio Spedicato also subscribed to the idea of early Greeks in Canada, specifically in the St. Lawrence Region [629.411]. However, he does not refer to Atlantis in this context as he has already nominated Hispaniola as Plato’s lost island.
All these advocates of an ancient Greek presence in Canada are greatly reliant on their interpretations of the writings of Plutarch(g), a matter that has been dealt with by Jason Colavito(e).
>Long after any ancient Greeks came to North America, hard evidence of Pre-Columbian visitors from Europe was confirmed with the discovery in 1978 of an 11th-century Norse settlement at L’anse aux Meadows in Canada. In 2022, the discovery in Newfoundland of a gold Henry VI quarter noble, minted in London between 1422 and 1427 generated some excitement. Unfortunately, coins can remain in circulation for many years, so, without knowing when the coin was lost in Canada, it cannot be claimed with any great certainty that it was misplaced before or after Columbus reached the Americas(h).<
Also See: Henriette Mertz
(a) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20180319084638/https://atlantisincanada.com/
(b) https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/did-ancient-greeks-sail-to-canada/
(f) Atlantis,Vol.23, No.3,May/June, 1970
(g) https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~dduke/lectures/plutarch-moonface.pdf
Russo, Lucio
Lucio Russo (1944- ) is an Italian mathematician, physicist and science historian. In his 2013 offering L’ America dimenticata[1060] (The Forgotten America) he bravely suggests that America was discovered by
* the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians. He also claims that the longitude of the Lesser Antillies (known as the Isles of the Blest) was known precisely to Hipparchus (190-120BC), but that Ptolemy (90-168AD) later identified the Isles of the Blest with the Canaries and made a catastrophic error when he reduced the circumference of the Earth to 180,000 stadia from the nearly exact figure of 252,000 stadia calculated by Eratosthenes centuries earlier.
Having unravelled Ptolemy’s error Russo was then able to locate the position of Thule on the coast of Greenland(a). Jason Colavito had a few critical words to offer regarding Russo’s theory(b).
>Nevertheless, in an interview, Russo defends the central thesis of his L’ America dimenticata regarding early transatlantic travel. In the link below(c) which offers an English translation of the interview, a number of excerpts from his book are also added.<
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Russo
(b) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/italian-mathematician-ancient-greeks-discovered-America
Thule
Thule is the name given in ancient Greek and Roman literature for the most northerly part of the world. Around 300 BC the Greek navigator Pytheas claimed to have visited Thule, six days of travel beyond Northern Britain. This may have been Iceland and in support of this idea, a paper was submitted to the 2008 Atlantis Conference in Athens by two Italian researchers, G. Giancarlo and M. Stucchi. In Germanic and Scandinavian traditions the name is applied to a long-lost continent in the North Atlantic.
>The Thule-in-Iceland theory has the support of the renowned Professor of European Archaeology, Barry Cunliffe, author of The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek [2081].<
The archaeologist, Rhys Carpenter, in a study of Pytheas‘ travels in the North Sea, concluded that the Shetland Islands should be identified as Thule shown on Ptolemy’s map just north of the Orkneys, He argues that “it is an unchallengeable inference that Ptolemy’s data for the location of Thule must go back to Pytheas since no one else in late antiquity ever claimed to have visited that remote region.” [221.183]
Another candidate is the Estonian island of Saaremaa(d), which is also home to the Kaali meteor craters. This meteorite “was a coarse octahedrite, with surviving fragments being only a few grams in weight. Despite the intensity of investigation both inside the craters and outside in nearby peat bogs, the actual date of the impact has been estimated at four widely spaced times: 6400 BC based on microspherules in peat (Raukas 2000); 5000 BC on similar evidence (Tiirmaa and Czegka 1996); 1740–1620 BC based on bulk sediment samples from the near the bottom of the crater lake, or a similar 1690–1510 BC date based on associated terrestrial macrofossils from the deepest part of the lake (Veskiet al. 2004); and 800–400 BC based on peat associated with impact ejecta and iridium in nearby bogs (Veski et al. 2004). Veski and his colleagues argue for the calibrated date range of around 800–400 BC, speculating that the microspherules possibly relate to a separate earlier impact event.”
Felice Vinci is a co-author (with Syusy Blady & Karl Kello) of Il meteorite iperboreo [1906]. in which the Kaali meteor is discussed along with its possible association with the ancient story of Phaeton.
In 2013 Lucio Russo located Thule on the coast of Greenland, having identified errors in Ptolemy’s geographical calculations[1060].
Marin, Minella & Schievenin in The Three Ages of Atlantis [972.375] propose that the island of Thule described by Pytheas was the legendary Hi-Brasil, which in turn they claim was part of the Porcupine Bank that they argue was only ‘recently submerged’.
A 2014 paper(b) by Cameron McPhail addressed the problem of Thule’s location. He “offers a new approach, using information supplied in the fragments of Eratosthenes’ Geography, supports assertions that Pytheas exited the Mediterranean sailing via the Strait of Gibraltar, and that Thule, the most distant locale reached, should be identified with Norway.” and concluded that “The problems of Pytheas’ route of travel cannot all be solved. The two discussed here, on account of the scant primary source information, will remain open to interpretation.“
>Support for a Norwegian Thule received a recent boost when two German investigators from the Technical University of Berlin proposed that the island of Smøla was the Thule of Pytheas. In September 2020, Smithsonian Magazine reprinted an article by F. Salazar from Hakai Magazine(f) outlining this new theory(e).<
A recent article(c) on the National Geographic website noted that “Today, historians aren’t sure if Pytheas’s remote land was based on a real location or whether it is simply a stand-in for any place. Whatever the case, it shows up in the phrase “Ultima Thule”—any extremely remote place on Earth. And the name Thule lives on in Greenland with the Thule Air Force Base; in the Sandwich Islands, one of which is South Thule; and in the name of the 69th element, thulium, discovered by a Swedish chemist.”
(b) (99+) (PDF) Pytheas of Massalia’s Route of Travel | Cameron McPhail – Academia.edu
(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule
(e) This Norwegian Island Claims to Be the Fabled Land of Thule | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine*
(f) Hakai Magazine *
America *
America as the home of Atlantis took off as an idea shortly after its discovery (or perhaps more correctly, rediscovery) by Columbus. Initially, reports sent back to Europe designated America as ‘Paradise’ 
until its identification as Atlantis quickly took hold. John Dee in the time of Elizabeth I was convinced that the newly discovered Americas were in fact, Atlantis, an idea endorsed by Francis Bacon. The first time that America was so named on a map was on the 1507(c) Waldseemüller map, sometimes referred to as “America’s birth certificate.” A rare copy of this map was recently found in Germany(e).
Nevertheless, from the early 1600’s dissenting voices were raised, such as those of José de Acosta, and Michel de Montaigne.
As late as 1700, a map of the world by Edward Wells was published in Oxford that highlights the paucity of information regarding the Americas at that time. However, in this instance the accompanying text notes that “this continent with the adjoining islands is generally supposed to have been anciently unknown though there are not wanting some, who will have even the continent itself to be no other than the Insula Atlantis of the ancients.”
For over five centuries a variety of commentators have associated Atlantis with America and many of its ancient cultures together with a range of location theories that stretch from Maine through the Caribbean and Central America to Argentina.
Although most proponents of an American Atlantis, particularly following the continent’s discovery, did not specify a location but were happy to consider the Americas in their entirety as Plato’s lost land. In 2019, Reinoud de Jonge published a paper declaring that from 2500-1200 BC America had been an Egyptian colony. He expanded on this in 2912(l), when he claimed that the American colonies, North and South had supplied the copper and tin for the Bronze Age of the Mediterranean. For good measure, he threw in a wildly speculative translation of the Phaistos Disk to support these contentions.
Over time attention was more focused on Mesoamerica and the northern region of South America, where the impressive remains of the Maya and Incas led many to consider them to be Atlantean.
North America received minimal attention until the 19th century when an 1873 newspaper report(i) claimed that there was support from unnamed scientists for locating remnants of Atlantis in the Adirondacks and some of the mountains of Maine! More recently Dennis Brooks has advocated Tampa Bay, Florida, while John Saxer supports Tarpon Springs, also in Florida as Atlantean. To confuse matters further, Mary Sutherland locates Atlantis in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and for good measure suggests that King Solomon’s mines are to be found in the same region!
For example, the discovery of the remains of the remarkable cultures of Mesoamerica generated speculation on the possibility of an Atlantean connection there. This view gained further support with the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s groundbreaking work on Atlantis.
Some have seen an Atlantic location for Atlantis as a conduit between the culture of ancient Egypt and that of Meso-America(d).
Half a century ago Nicolai Zhirov claimed that Plato had knowledge of America [458.22] indicated by his statement that Atlantis was in a sea with a continent encompassing it. He thought that this was the earliest record of a continent beyond the Atlantic.
However, Plato also said that Atlantis was surrounded ‘on all sides’ by this continent, which is not compatible with the Azores, advocated by Zhirov as the location of Plato’s sunken island. In an effort to strengthen this claim Zhirov also claims that there is evidence that King Sargon of Akkad travelled to America in the middle of the third millennium BC, an idea that has gained little traction.
The idea of Sumerians in America was promoted by A.H. Verrill and his wife Ruth, who claimed [838] that King Sargon travelled to Peru, where he was known as Viracocha. The Verrills support their contention with a range of cultural, linguistic and architectural similarities between the Sumerians and the Peruvians.
More recently, Andrew Collins has promoted the idea of Atlantis in the Caribbean, specifically Cuba. Followers of Edgar Cayce are still expecting the Bahamas to yield evidence of Plato’s island. Gene Matlock supports the idea of a Mexican location with an Indian connection, while Duane McCullough opts for Guatemala. Ivar Zapp and George Erikson have also chosen Central America for investigation. Further south Jim Allen has argued strongly for Atlantis having been located on the Altiplano of Bolivia. A website entitled American Atlantis Research from Edward Alexander , now offline, was rather weak on content and irritatingly referred to the ‘Andies’.
Although much of what has been written about an American location for Atlantis is the result of serious research, it all falls far short of convincing me that the Atlantis of which Plato wrote is to be found there. No evidence has been produced to even hint that any American culture had control of the Mediterranean as far Tyrrhenia in the north and Libya in the south. No remains or carvings of triremes or chariots have been found in the Americas. How could an ancient civilisation from America launch an attack across the Atlantic and at the furthest end of the Mediterranean 9,000 or even 900 years before Solon? An even more important question is, why would they bother? There is no evidence of either motive, means or opportunity for an attack from that direction.
A number of Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis would seem to rule out America as its location.
(a) As mentioned above, the ‘opposite continent’ referred to by Plato (Timaeus 25a) is described as encompassing the sea in which Atlantis lay. America cannot be described as enclosing the Atlantic. Around 550 AD, Procopius noted that when viewed from the southern side of the Strait of Gibraltar “the whole continent opposite this was named Europe”(m) (not America)!
(b) The Greeks only knew of three continents, Europe, Asia and Libya. Armin Wolf, the German historian, when writing about Scheria relates(f) that “Even today, when people from Sicily go to Calabria (southern Italy) they say they are going to the “continente.” I suggest that Plato used the term in a similar fashion and was quite possibly referring to that same part of Italy which later became known as ‘Magna Graecia’. Robert Fox in The Inner Sea[1168.141] confirms that this long-standing usage of ‘continent’ refers to Italy.
(c) Herodotus described Sardinia as “the biggest island in the world” (Hist.6.2). In fact Sicily is marginally larger but as islands were measured in those days (Felice Vinci) [019] by the length of their coastal perimeter Herodotus was correct. Consequently, it can be argued that since Cuba and Hispaniola are much more extensive than Sardinia, the Greeks had no knowledge of the Caribbean.
(d) Plato makes frequent references to horses in Atlantis. The city itself had a track for horseracing (Critias 117c). The Atlanteans had thousands of chariots (Critias 119a). The Atlanteans even had horse baths (Critias 117b). All these references make no sense if Plato was describing an American Atlantis as there were no horses there for over 12,000 years, when they died out, until brought back by the Spaniards millennia later. Furthermore, it makes even less sense if you subscribe to the early date (9600 BC) for Atlantis as it is thousands of years before we have any evidence for the domestication of the horse, anywhere.
A recent study of worldwide DNA patterns suggests that “no more than 70 people inhabited North America 14,000 years ago.”(b) But a more important claim has been offered by Professors Jennifer Raff and Deborah Bolnick who have co-authored a paper offering evidence(j) that the genetic data only supports a migration from Siberia to America. This certainly runs counter to any suggestion of transatlantic migration from Europe.In 1900,
Peter de Roo put forward the idea that the ancient Greeks had knowledge of America, despite the fact that Herodotus clearly said that only three continents were known to them [Histories 4.42]. A 2013 book, L’America dimenticata [1060], by Italian physicist and philologist Lucio Russo, also claims that the ancient Greeks had knowledge of America and it was gradually forgotten because of mistakes made by Ptolemy including a 15-degree error for the latitude of the Canaries(g).
However, the idea that the Greeks had an awareness of America persists, with some claiming that they had colonies in Canada. Among these are Lucio Russo, Ioannis Liritzis(n) and Minas Tsikritsis(p). Manolis Koutlis has gone one further and claims that not only were there Greek Colonies in Canada but that Atlantis had been situated in the Gulf of St. Lawrence(o).
The late Professor Antonis Kontaratos placed the capital of Atlantis at Poverty Point in Louisiana or it at least inspired some of Plato’s description since “there is also solid evidence that the Greeks were travelling to America in prehistoric times too and could have witnessed firsthand the impressive earthworks at Poverty Point, information which could have reached Plato independently as a fading legend [0750].” Kontaratos cited Plutarch to support his contention of Greek transatlantic travel in prehistory.
I note that there is a suspiciously disproportionate number of Greeks supporting the idea of pre-Columbian Hellenic visitors to America!
While there is extensive debate regarding the Americas being visited by ancient Greeks (Minoans), Phoenicians and even Sumerians, there seems little doubt that America had been visited by various other peoples prior to Columbus such as Welsh, Vikings or Irish. The case for the latter is strengthened by a 500-year-old report(h) of a long-established Irish colony in North America called Duhare.
America as Atlantis and the source of freemasonry knowledge was recently repackaged in a brief article on the Odyssey website(k) quoting Manly P. Hall who in turn cited Plato and Sir Francis Bacon. It then proceeds to speculate on what lessons the story of this original American Atlantis offers the America of today!
(c) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldseem%C3%BCller_map
(d) https://www.africaspeaks.com/reasoning/index.php?topic=5106.0
(f) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(g) Reconsidering History: Ancient Greeks Discovered America Thousands of Years Ago (archive.org) *
(j) https://phys.org/news/2016-01-genetic-ancient-trans-atlantic-migration-professor.html
(k) https://www.theodysseyonline.com/america-as-atlantis
(l) https://www.academia.edu/3894415/COPPER_AND_TIN_FROM_AMERICA_c.2500-1200_BC_
(m) Vandal Wars 1.1.7
(n) https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/did-ancient-greeks-sail-to-canada/
Phoenicians
The Phoenicians or Canaanites are linguistically regarded as Semitic people, who among their many achievements are credited with giving us our alphabet (without vowels). Both Strabo and Herodotus claim that they originally came from Bahrain(p), but this origin is denied by the phoenicia.org website(q). The correctness of these two ancient writers has been heavily criticised(r).
Dr. M. D. Magee in a 2001 paper(ak) wrote “The identity of the Israelites and the Canaanites is falsified in the scriptures, doubtless to justify the biblicists in painting the Israelites as worshippers of True God and the Canaanites as monstrous idolators to be suppressed. They are the same race as the Jews, Semites, but Genesis makes them sons of Ham.”
Nevertheless, Dhani Irwanto in a 2019 article(ab) on his website insists that the Phoenicians originated somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Irwanto suggests “that perhaps the most significant contribution of the Phoenicians was an alphabetic writing system that became the root of the Western alphabets.” However, Irwanto has gone further and proposed that the Phoenicians also influenced the development of at least three of the scripts of South Sumatera in Indonesia!
The widespread idea that Phoenician writing inspired the development of European alphabets, such as that of the Greeks, conflicts with the discovery of the Dispilo Tablet(ad) in Greece which has pushed back the use of writing in Greece to around 5200 BC, which is long before the people recognised as Phoenician emerged in the 2nd millennium BC(ac)!
A recent essay explicitly claims that there was never any such entity as ‘Phoenicia’! It also charts the manner in which ‘Phoenicians’ have been arbitrarily claimed as ancestors by distant nations, having been “enlisted in support of the nationalist histories of Lebanon, Britain, and Ireland, and in some cases seriously distorted by them. Despite claims by various partisans of Lebanese, British and Irish nationalism to enlist the Phoenicians as their ancient progenitor, the Phoenicians never existed as a self-conscious community, let alone a nascent nation.” (y)
The Phoenicians flourished during the 1st and 2nd millennia BC. The late Joseph Robert Jochmans has suggested(c) that similarities between Phoenician names and those of the sons of Poseidon are more than coincidental. The descendants of the Phoenicians are still to be found in great numbers in modern Lebanon as well as elements of the Phoenician language. Contrary to popular belief the Maltese language is more related to Phoenician than Arabic(g). Similarly, in a mountainous and isolated northeast corner of Asia Minor, its people still speak Greek in a dialect known as Romeyka(l). Dr Ioanna Sitaridou of Queen’s College, Cambridge explains that ‘Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect, it preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavor to the dialect’s structure – traits that have been completely lost from other Modern Greek varieties.’
A more radical view of the Phoenicians has been expressed by Professor Josephine Quinn(o) who declared “the Phoenicians never existed as a self-conscious community, let alone a nascent nation.” In a lengthy article, she suggests that “‘‘Phoenician’ was just a generic label invented by ancient Greek authors for the Levantine sailors they encountered in their own maritime explorations. Although some of these Greek writers entertain a mild stereotype of these Phoenicians as rather cunning or tricksy, they never use the term as a description of a distinct ethnocultural community.”
The Phoenicians have been frequently identified as the Atlanteans of Plato’s narrative. Peter Dawkins’ Zoence Academy website has the following logic-stretching gem – “Atlas also is known by other names, such as Enoch or The Phoenix, (hence Atlantis is Phoenicia, the land of the Phoenix)(v).
Keith Hunt noted on his website that “Prof. George Rawlinson (1812-1902), in his “Story of Phoenicia,” tells us that Phoenicia derived its name from the forests of date or Phoenix palms which grew there in great luxuriance. So far so good; but whence did the Phoenix palm derive its name? Horapollo says: “A palm branch was the symbol of the Phoenix.” Yes, but what or who was the Phoenix? Sanchomathon, the Phoenician writer, states that “Phoenix was the first Phoenician.” Phoenix, then, was a man. Now, the word Phoenix is the Greek form of the Egyptian term “Pa-Hanok,” the house of Enoch. In Hebrew Enoch also is Hanok. Thus the mystery of that ancient race is solved: they were the sons and descendants of Enoch and of Noah and his three sons, who after the Flood started their westward march. Their descendants have kept it up since, settled, first north of the Persian Gulf in the bushlands of Mesopotamia, where they found a dusky race in occupation of the land, the ancient Sumerians, and from thence towards the Mediterranean.” (w)
James Nienhuis, a young-earth creationist, has identified the Canaanites as Atlanteans(m)! The supporters of a Bronze Age date for the invasion of the Atlanteans see in the Phoenicians the powerful far-flung maritime civilisation described by Plato. In 2022, Matthew P. Courville devoted his Ancient Navigators [1960] to demonstrating that Atlantis was a Phoenician colony, located on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.
However, this identification is in conflict with Plato’s statement that Atlantis or its influence extended as far as Tyrrhenia and Libya, whereas the Phoenicians had their 
original base further east in the region of modern Lebanon and Israel. In the western Mediterranean, Carthage did not develop into a military power until the first millennium BC.
It also runs counter to Plato’s clear account of the Atlanteans attacking from their bases in the Central Mediterranean (Tim.25b & Crit.114c).
The Phoenicians were never unilaterally at war with Greece and/or Egypt, but their successors, the Carthaginians, whose main military campaigns were directed against the Roman Empire, did clash with the Greeks in Sicily.
It is accepted that the Phoenician commercial empire began with the three cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. They expanded with the establishment of trading settlements along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa usually separated by a day’s rowing – somewhere between 30 to 60 miles.
It is claimed that the Phoenicians together with the Egyptians had an influence on the development of the Minoan culture(e).
Jonas Bergman recently presented a paper to the 2005 Melos Atlantis Conference on the subject of a Phoenician association with the Atlantis story. He outlined how Plato’s description of Atlantis was similar to the western colonies of the Phoenicians.
“Roderic O’Flaherty (Ruaidrhí Ó Flaithbheartaigh) was the first Irish scholar to suggest in his influential work Ogygia (1685) that the Phoenicians formed part of Irish ancestry. In the 18th century, O’Flaherty’s theory of the Phoenicians as progenitors of the Irish became very popular among the Protestant Ascendancy as well as Gaelic intellectuals.”(y)
Also in the 18th century, Charles Vallencey was convinced that “the Phoenicians had colonised Ireland in archaic prehistory: When their explorers had searched for Thule, Vallancey affirmed, they had come to Ireland; the word Thule was identical to the Irish word thua, which meant simply ‘north’.”(al)
Joaquín Lorenz Villanueva (1757-1837) was a Spanish historian, who moved to Dublin in later life, where he wrote Ibernia Phœnicea [1664], which was an attempt to prove that Ireland had been colonised by the Phoenicians. This was translated into English and published by Henry O’Brien in 1833 as Phoenician Ireland [1663].
Phoenicians in America
Stephen P. Kershaw notes [1410.227] that Oviedo y Valdéz was a Spanish historian, who in 1519 was the author of what was probably the first literary work produced in the New World, Libro del muy esforzado e invencible caballero Don Claribalte(am) and attributed the peopling of the Americas to Phoenicians and/or Carthaginians.
Some German writers in the 19th century such as Robert Prutz and later Jakob Kruger have advocated the idea that Phoenicians had discovered America, where he also placed Atlantis. Additionally, there is the early claim in 1867, by Bishop Patrick Nieson Lynch of Charleston, South Carolina that the ancient exploitation of the Michigan copper had to be carried out by the Phoenicians.
However, in spite of the fact that there is widespread support for this concept and the even more extreme claim of Phoenicians in Australia, a Lebanese website (now offline), in the original home of Phoenicia, discounted all such claims for lack of evidence. Nevertheless, attention-seeking Rex Gilroy persists in promoting the idea of Phoenicians in Australia(h).
Noteworthy is the fact that the world’s only traditionally-built 
replica of a Phoenician ship made the trans-Atlantic crossing successfully, landing in the Dominican Republic on 31st December 2019, after 39 days at sea(ai). It moved on to Fort Lauderdale in February 2020(u).
The expedition was titled ‘Phoenicians before Columbus’. The project’s leader was Philip Beale, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Scientific Exploration Society and sits on their Honorary Advisory Board(aj). The ship was subsequently bought by the Mormons.
A paper by Christian C. Karam, who believes that Atlantis had been located in the Atlantic has expanded on the idea of a Phoenician presence in Brazil three thousand years ago(n).
In 1886, the American novelist Ann Eliza Smith (1819-1905) published a fantasy novel(j), Atla, that tells the tale of the discovery of the Atlantis civilization by the Phoenicians.
In 1889, Enrique Onffroy de Thoron proposed[0901] that Atlantis had been Phoenician and situated in America. Indeed, claims still persist that the Phoenicians did reach South America(f). However, Onffroy was not the first to suggest this, as he was preceded by Robertus Comtaeus Nortmannus as early as 1644 and Georg Horn in 1652.
Paul Gallez (1920-2007) was a Belgian-born cartographer, historian and linguist. Atlantisforschung noted that “On the occasion of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the alleged discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (the ‘Columbus Day’ of the year 1992), Gallez wrote and published in 1996 a whole series of articles about much earlier voyages of discovery, e.g. by Phoenicians, Egyptians, Chinese and Vikings in the journal La Nueva Provincia , in which he also considered proto-Semitic influences in pre-Columbian America“(ah).
Arguably, the best-known exponent of the ‘Phoenicians in America’ school of thought was Bernardo Silva Ramos(i). In the 1930s he studied inscriptions at Pedra de Gavea and concluded that they were Phoenician and offered a translation that reads “Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir, Firstborn of Jethbaal”. This supposedly refers to a ruler of Phoenicia named Baal-Eser I, who ruled Tyre in the mid-9th century, c. 850 BC. Jacques de Mahieu decided that the inscriptions were not Phoenician but, in keeping with his Nazi background, they were Nordic runes!(ae)
Otto Muck also bought into the idea of Phoenicians in Brazil having accepted the translation of Bernardo Silva Ramos(af).
James Bailey, devoted Sailing to Paradise to a study of the evidence for cultural importations from across the Atlantic. Drawing on the work of Silva Ramos he highlights some of the many inscriptions found in America and allegedly written in various Old World scripts, such as Phoenician, Cretan or Hebrew. Bailey was also convinced that Phoenician influences can be found in Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula [149][150].
Paul Gaffarel wrote a number of papers between 1875 and 1890 on pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic voyagers from Europe. He presented a 38-page paper on the Phoenicians’ voyages to America to the Congrès International des Américanistes in Nancy (France) in 1875. Other essays concerned the Vikings and ancient Irish(ag).
Nevertheless, John Denison Baldwin, writing in the late 19th century, was highly critical of the Phoenicians being early colonisers in America and after reviewing the arguments in favour of the idea, he concluded that “if it were true that the civilization found in Mexico and Central America came from people of the Phoenician race, it would be true also that they built in America as they never built anywhere else, that they established a language here radically unlike their own, and that they used a style of writing totally different from that which they carried into every other region occupied by their colonies. All the forms of alphabetical writing used at present in Europe and Southwestern Asia came directly or indirectly from that anciently invented by the race to which the Phoenicians belonged, and they have traces of a common relationship that can easily be detected. Now the writing of the inscriptions at Palenque, Copan, and elsewhere in the ruins has no more relatedness to the Phoenician than to the Chinese writing. It has not a single characteristic that can be called Phoenician any more than the language of the inscriptions or the style of architecture with which it is associated; therefore we can not reasonably suppose this American civilization originated by people of the Phoenician race, whatever may be thought relative to the supposed ancient communication between the two continents and its probable influence on civilized communities already existing here.”(x)
Jason Colavito published articles written by Thomas Crawford Johnston in 1892(z). that he later developed into his 1913 book Did the Phoenicians Discover America [1902+] which is available online(aa).
In his 2009 book, Uncovering Archaeology[1612], Dennis Cassinelli outlines in some detail his Atlantis theory, which he locates in Central America(s). He suggests that the Phoenicians landed in Central America and on seeing the Mayan cities concluded that they had landed in Atlantis. Not unexpectedly, Jason Colavito had a few words to say about this idea(t).
Jean Mazel favourably discussed the idea of the Phoenicians in South America in his 1968 book Avec le Phéniciens.
Lucio Russo (1944- ) is an Italian mathematician, physicist and science historian. In his 2013 offering L’ America dimenticata [1060] (The Forgotten America) he bravely suggests that America was discovered by the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians.
Hugh Fox (1932-2011) wrote of the early peoples of the Americas in his well-received Gods of the Cataclysm[1171]. The ‘cataclysm’ referred to is the biblical Deluge, in respect of which he follows the ideas of Velikovsky and the Christian catastrophist Donald W. Patten (1929-2014), who attributed Noah’s Flood to a close encounter with a massive extraterrestrial body around 2800 BC. Fox explicitly claims that before the Flood, transoceanic travel was commonplace, with the Chinese in America, Indian theology in the Mediterranean and that after the Flood we had the Phoenicians and Odysseus in America.
More recently, Andrew Collins has drawn attention to the extraction of purple dye from shellfish in a number of Central and South American countries [072.357], commenting that “quite clearly, the presence of purple dye processes in Costa Rica, Mexico and Ecuador, as well as in Peru, could well constitute positive proof of transoceanic contact with ancient seafarers from the eastern Mediterranean.” Collins also quotes Thomas Crawford Johnston’s Did the Phoenicians Discover America [1902+] – “There is probably no stronger evidence of the presence of the Phoenician in the New World than can be drawn from the use of dyes.” Collins also notes that similar sentiments were expressed by Wolfgang Born in a 1937 paper.
Collins has also noted [p361] how cotton was widely produced in the Americas before the Spanish conquest and that genetic studies have shown “that the variety of cotton cultivated in the New World from very earliest times is a hybrid form derived from an Old World species crossed with species native only to the American continent. Crawford Johnston also claimed that the compass had been invented by the Phoenicians!
Peter de Roo, writing in 1900 [890.1.195] stated “that the Phoenicians at some time landed on American soil could not well be denied in the presence of ancient reports; but as Gravier justly observes. if any vague account of their discoveries was kept, it reached us disfigured by Hellenic fanciful imagination.”
The late Sabatino Moscati, a renowned linguist and archaeologist, wrote a highly regarded work[505] on the subject of the Phoenicians. Additionally, there is an invaluable website(a) on offer from Salim George Khalaf, a modern Phoenician from Lebanon. This huge site with its 2,000 pages covers all aspects of Phoenician culture. This same site(b), drawing on the work of Ignatius Donnelly, identifies the kings of Atlantis with the Phoenician pantheon and claims that the gods of the Greeks were also the deified Atlantean kings.
Jacques Hébert, who places Atlantis in the Indian Ocean on the island of Socotra, suggests that the Atlanteans had a colony in the Eastern Mediterranean whose inhabitants developed into the Phoenicians!
(a) https://phoenicia.org/index.shtml
(b) https://phoenicia.org/atlantisplato.html
(e) https://www.phoenician.org/minoans_phoenicians_paper.htm
(f) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery_of_the_Americas
(g) See: Archive 2852
(h) https://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/pyramid-sequel/chapter16.html
(i) https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_de_Azevedo_da_Silva_Ramos (Portuguese)
(j) https://archive.org/details/atlastoryoflosti00smitrich
(m) https://dancingfromgenesis.com/?p=49635 (link broken) See: Archive 2985
(n) https://phoenicia.org/brazil.html
(o) https://aeon.co/essays/phoenicia-an-imaginary-friend-to-nations-in-need-of-ancestors
(p) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia
(q) https://phoenicia.org/index.shtml
(r) https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Phoenicians-Arabs
(s) Lost continent of Atlantis rediscovered | Mesquite Local News (archive.org)
(t) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/nevada-author-claims-phoenicians-mistook-maya-cities-for-atlantis
(u) https://lyme-online.co.uk/news/phoenician-ship-completes-atlantic-voyage/
(v) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(w) https://web.archive.org/web/20190410091609/https://www.keithhunt.com/Isra5.html
(x) https://www.djmcadam.com/phoenician-theory.html
(y) Phoenicia: an imaginary friend to nations in need of ancestors | Aeon Essays
(z) Phoenicians in America – JASON COLAVITO
(ab) The Phoenicians | Atlantis in the Java Sea (atlantisjavasea.com)
(ad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet
(ae) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological_interest_of_Pedra_da_Gávea
(af) Otto Muck on Phoenicians in America – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(ag) Paul Gaffarel – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(ah) Paul Gallez – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(ai) https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/who-reached-america-first-columbus-or-phoenicians
(aj) https://www.phoeniciansbeforecolumbus.com/the-expedition
(ak) The Hebrews: People of Abarnahara (askwhy.co.uk)
Greenland
Greenland was first proposed as the location of Atlantis in the 17th century by François de la Mothe le Vayer. More recently some of the more imaginative writers have tried, unsuccessfully, to revive interest in 
this idea. One of these is the American, Dale Huffman, who claims that the outline of Greenland is comparable with Kircher‘s famous map of Atlantis. He has also proposed that while Atlantis primarily consisted of Greenland it also included “the islands of the United Kingdom and Iceland”(h). Huffman ignores the fact that Kircher’s map clearly places Atlantis between the Strait of Gibraltar and America, not between Canada and Scandinavia. Apart from this, Kircher favoured the Azores and Canaries as the remnants of Atlantis.
Another proponent is Mario Dantas who is equally determined to link Plato’s description with the enormous island of Greenland(a) and has submitted a paper on the subject to the 2008 Atlantis Conference in Athens.
More recently Johan Nygren drew attention to the similarities between a map of Greenland and the 17th-century map of Atlantis produced by Athanasius Kircher(m).
>Before that, Riaan Booysen commented on Mercator’s treatment of the Arctic region on his 1569 world map as developed by his son “Virtually all the medieval maps of the Arctic region depict Greenland as free of ice. In order to see if there might be a correlation between Mercator’s transposed map of Greenland and an ice free Greenland, the latter has to be compared to a bedrock elevation map of Greenland. This is done in Figure 30 (see link), which shows an arguably marked correlation between the two maps. If true, it would prove, like the ice free maps of Terra Australis, not only that an ancient, prehistoric map-making civilization once existed, but also that the ice core dating technique is fundamentally flawed, or at least, the interpretation of the ice core data.”. (n)<
Another website(b) advocates the Baffin Basin just west of Greenland, as the Great Plain of Atlantis. This idea developed by a New Zealander, Ian Fox, is based on a reinterpretation of Plato’s text combined with the studies of Charles Hapgood.
In 2014, Antonio Usai published an English translation of his 2011 booklet on the Pillars of Hercules[980] in which he places the original ‘Pillars’ on the Tunisian island of Kerkennah and then unexpectedly proposed that Atlantis was situated in Greenland.
Another proponent of the Greenland location is Stefan Grossmann in his book, Atlantlantean(sic) Philosophy(d), a commentary on the non-existent ‘Emerald Tablets of Thoth’(e), concocted by Maurice Doreal (Claude Doggins).
In October 2011 a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Geology in Lyon may have elevated the importance of Greenland to an even higher level with their claim(c) that life on earth may have originated there 3.8 billion years ago.
In 2013, Lucio Russo, an Italian mathematician and science historian, located Thule on the coast of Greenland, having identified errors in Ptolemy’s geographical calculations[1060].
In 2014 Antonio Moreno Checa published La Atlántida. El mito hecho realidad (Atlantis. The myth comes true) [1063] in which he also locates Atlantis in Greenland. Gennaro Anziano, an Italian writer, has also located Atlantis in Greenland(g) in his 2001 book, Atlantis – Discover the land of the gods[1072].
David Chase Taylor, journalist and conspiracy theorist, published, Greenland Theory: Apocalypse Now, which placed Atlantis in Greenland. However, he is more concerned with the location of the CIA, which he continually repeats has its headquarters under CERN in Switzerland(j)!!! An April 2020 review gives a flavour of the wide-ranging nonsense to be found within this book(k), with little to advance our knowledge of Atlantis.
Marco Goti published The Island of Plato[1430] in 2017 and offered another failed attempt at identifying Greenland as Atlantis.
Leaving aside any suggested connection with Atlantis, there are other features of the vast island that deserve attention. There are a number of raised beaches that clearly indicate that “the whole of this large island has been raised, or the sea has sunk, in post-glacial times” and that “the upheaval has been greater in the north”. Their height above sea level varies from 325 and 480 feet!
In 2018 a huge impact crater was discovered under Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier. It was initially thought that this impact had been the cause of the Younger Dryas cooling 12,000 years ago, but this idea has now been discounted as the crater is now thought to be 58 million years old.
(a) https://www.a7lan7is.blogspot.com/
(b) https://www.angelfire.com/film/atlantis_1/Page001.html
(e) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-emerald-tablets-of-thoth-a-lovecraftian-plagiarism
(g) Svelato il mistero delle Piramidi (archive.org)
(i) Greenland – Raised Beaches – I | MalagaBay (archive.org)
(j) https://archive.org/details/GreenlandTheory/mode/2up
(k) https://americanloons.blogspot.com/2020/04/2324-david-chase-taylor.html