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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 »
Menes
Acholonu-Olumba, Catherine
Catherine Acholonu-Olumba (1951-2014 ) was from Orlu in Nigeria and well 
known as a writer(d), researcher and former lecturer on African Cultural and Gender Studies. She was a frequent contributor to the migration-diffusion website(b). In a recent paper(a) she proposed “that ancient West Africans nurtured a high civilization that was an off-shoot of the fall of Atlantis and the migrations of its peoples in search of new lands.” She also maintained that the West African Igbo language was, in earlier times, a global lingus franca.
Some of her ideas seemed like a melange from Blavatsky/Cayce/Daniken as the following excerpt from a video clip(c) demonstrates,
“By 208,000 BC human evolution was interrupted and Adam, a hybrid, was created through the process of genetic engineering. However, our findings reveal that the creation of Adam was a downward climb on the evolutionary ladder, because he lost his divine essence, he became divided, no longer whole, or wholesome. All over Africa and in ancient Egyptian reports, oral and written traditions maintain that homo erectus people were heavenly beings, and possessed mystical powers such as telepathy, levitation, bi-location, that their words could move rocks and mountains and change the course of rivers. Adam lost all that when his right brain was shut down by those who made him.”
Another paper by Acholonu once again endeavours to link the Igbo language with that of the ancient Egyptians(e).
Even more intriguing is the claim of an association between Ogham and the Igbo language. Erich Fred Legner noted that “All the words that (Edo)Nyland and (Barry)Fell transcribed were Igbo words, which Dr Catherine Acholonu could easily read and translate. She told Edo Nyland that she had translated the words he transcribed from Ogam stones, but he didn’t believe her at first. When Hugo Kennes found Dr Acholonu’s work on the Internet and started telling all the Ogam researchers he knew including Nyland, Nyland then asked him to get an Igbo dictionary from her. It was only after her meeting with (Christine)Pellech in Belgium when she “read “all Acholonu’s books and convinced her to write for her site, that it was decided to do the “Igbo Ogam VCV Dictionary”(g)
Acholonu was one of the authors of They Lived Before Adam: Pre-Historic Origins of the Igbo[1134] which includes some rather wild Igbo-centric claims.
A few years later, she published Eden in Sumer On The Niger [1833], which continued in a similar vein. According to an abstract on ResearchGate,(f) “It provides multidisciplinary evidence of the actual geographical location in West Africa of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis and the original homeland of the Sumerian people before their migration to the “Middle East”. By translating hitherto unknown pre-cuneiform inscriptions of the Sumerians, Catherine Acholonu and Sidney Davis have uncovered thousands of years of Africa’s lost pre-history and evidences of the West African origins of the earliest Pharaohs and Kings of Egypt and Sumer such as Menes and Sargon the Great.”
>In 2017, Michelle Lopez Wellansky presented a paper in which she investigated the Igbo people, the majority of whom “today are practicing Christians. Though they identify as Christian, many consider themselves to be “cultural” or “ethnic” Jews.”(h)
John Boze has contributed a series of unconventional posts on Facebook promoting the idea of a West African Genesis including the claim that “Noah, Abraham and Moses were all born, lived and died in West Africa! Not unexpectedly, Boze also claims that Atlantis was situated in Mauritania. For good measure he further claims that the ten Hebrew nations lived in West Africa 4000BC-3000BC! I think comment is unnecessary.<
(a) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=218
(b) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?authorid=98
(c) https://igboacienthistory.weebly.com/igbo-language-a-former-global-lingua-franca.html
(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Obianuju_Acholonu
(f) (PDF) Eden In Sumer On The Niger (researchgate.net)
(g) <Ogam (Ogham) Writing System & Ogam Alphabet (ucr.edu)
(h) https://kulanu.org/wp-content/uploads/nigeria/Igbo-Jews-Senior-Project.pdf *
Pelasgians
Pelasgians or Pelasgi is the term applied to early populations of the Aegean, prior to the Flood of Deucalion and the subsequent arrival of the Hellenic peoples to the region. Pelasgian Greeks are recognised as having occupied Crete at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. It is unclear from classical sources(b) exactly what regions the Pelasgians occupied, not to mention when or where they originated.
Some writers such as Densusianu have postulated a Pelasgian Empire extending over a large stretch of central Europe.
Euripides stated that the Pelasgians were later called Danaans.
Spiro N. Konda believes that today’s Albanians are descendants of the Pelasgians and has written The Albanians and the Pelasgian Problem in support of this idea, unfortunately, it is in Albanian, but some of his arguments can be read, in English, online(a).
Oliver D. Smith in his book Atlantis in Greece identified “the Pelasgians with both the Atlanteans and prehistoric Athenians – as two regional tribes at war with each other”.
A more radical, highly speculative and quite incredible, alternative definition is offered by Marin, Minella and Schievenin[0972.471], which is that Pelasgians were refugees from their homeland in Antarctica after its catastrophic destruction. They claim that these refugees were also known as Titans, Tyrrhenians and Atlanteans, among other names! They also propose that the Pelasgians arrived in Egypt in 10,500 BCE “led by Osiris/Menes, and joined the local people, who were indigenous Negroid such as the image engraved in the Sphinx.” They further claim that anthropology calls them Cro-Magnon!
James Bailey noted in The God-Kings & the Titans [149.158] that the Pelasgians were equated with the Peoples of the Sea in the Cambridge Ancient History(c).
>Lars Karlsson is Professor in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University and in a 2023 paper(e) he offered the theory “that the Pelasgians were ‘proto-Etruscans’, since the Pelasgian island of Lemnos has inscriptions in Etruscan.”
The degree of confusion surrounding the identity of the Pelasgians is clearly demonstrated in the Wikipedia article on the subject(d).<
(a) https://at001.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/the-etymology-of-the-names-of-pelasgian-gods-2/
(b) https://stoa.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/the-pelasgians-in-the-ancient-historians-texts/
(c) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283059/page/n33/mode/2up (2nd. Edition, Vol. II, p.8)
(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelasgians *
(e) https://isvroma.org/en/2023/01/13/research-seminar-the-early-history-of-the-etruscans-2/ *