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

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  • NEWS September 2023

    NEWS September 2023

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

    Joining The Dots

    I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
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Peter Jakubowski

Sicily

Sicily was known in earlier times as Trinacria because of its triangular shape. The island was first inhabited by modern humans during the last Ice Age(h) when lower sea levels exposed a land bridge between it and what is now mainland Italy.

>Antoine Gigal, the French writer and explorer noted(f) that “In the Odyssey, Homer refers to Sicily as Sikania (in classical texts it is also called Sikelia) and mentions the Sicanian Mountains. This is why one of the three native peoples of Sicily was named the Sicani (Sikanoi or Sicanians). They were probably there from 3000-1600 BC, from the earlier proto-Sican period, where various Mediterranean influences reached the Neolithic population that was based more in the central and western part of the island.”

She added later “Some modern researchers think that Siculo and his people originated from even further away, from the east. Prof. Enrico Caltagirone and Prof. Alfredo Rizza have even calculated that in the modern Sicilian language there are more than 200 words that come directly from Sanskrit. Then from the Bronze Age and classical antiquity there is evidence of another Sicilian people, the Elymians, who migrated from Anatolia and may have been descended from the famous “Sea Peoples”. The west of Anatolia was then occupied by non Indo-Europeans. Thucydides said they were refugees from Troy.

Indeed a group of Trojans are supposed to have survived the defeat of Troy, having escaped by sea, and settled in Sicily and mixed with the Sicani. Virgil even writes that they were led by the hero Acestes, king of Segesta in Sicily, who gave help to Priam and Aeneas, and had Anchises buried in Erix (modern Erice).”<

Plato was quite familiar with Sicily having paid a number of visits there(i) and on one occasion was sold as a slave having offended King Dionysius with his criticism of tyrannical rulers. Many think that his time in the capital, Syracuse, inspired elements of his description of the capital of Atlantis!

The island was probably first suggested as having a link with Atlantis by Mário Saa in a 1936 book in which he has Atlantis stretching from and including Sicily and the Maltese archipelago all the way to Tunisia. It was then more than four decades before Phyllis Young Forsyth wrote her book, Atlantis: The Making of Myth [266], in which she expressed her belief that Plato wrote the Atlantis story as an anti-war allegory partly based on his own experiences with the king of Syracuse.

More recently a number of other sicilywriters have also put Sicily forward as a location for Atlantis. One of these was Francesco Costarella, who is an Italian researcher and the author of two books relating to Atlantis. The first [1636] puts forward the idea that Plato’s Atlantis and the biblical Deluge, are in the author’s words, ‘two sides of the same coin’, while in the second [1637], he identifies Sicily as the location of Atlantis.

In the main, it has been European investigators who have advocated such a Sicilian connection and some have gone further and proposed a land bridge with Tunisia within the memory of man.

Dr Peter Jakubowski also offers(a) Sicily and the Malta Plateau as the location of Atlantis. He proposes a cosmic impact in the Atlantic which closed the Strait of Gibraltar around 4800 BC. When the dam eventually broke, the Mediterranean to the west of Sicily began to fill. This was then followed by the breaching of the land bridge between Sicily and Africa and finally, the dam in the Bosporus broke, flooding what was a much smaller Black Sea than we have today. Jakubowski’s site is apparently a reworking of Axel Hausmann’s book. A few years ago he revamped his website but removed all the Atlantis material.

Patrick Archer has also adopted the concept of a Sicilian land bridge and promotes the idea that the breaching of it and its consequences were the inspiration for the biblical Deluge(e).

Zhirov noted that “the Mediterranean is fairly shallow between Sicily and Tunisia. There are vast sandbanks and shoals. It may be considered as beyond all doubt that this region subsided recently and that there was a broad isthmus between Sicily and Tunisia.”

Alberto Arecchi(b) has added his voice in support of this Sicilian land bridge linking Italy with Africa and places Atlantis off the coast of modern Tunisia.

Further support has come from Thomas J. Krupa in his 2014 book[1010], which proposes that the land bridge was composed of limestone which over time had been partially dissolved by rainwater and was under stress from the rising sea levels on its western side. He considers the land bridge the most likely location for Atlantis, which was destroyed when the isthmus was sundered by an earthquake.

Another exponent of a relatively recent collapse of the Gibraltar Dam is the previously mentioned Axel Hausmann[371] who locates Atlantis between Sicily and Malta.

Alfred E. Schmeck has written[542], in German, a detailed look at Sicily as the inspiration for Plato’s narrative.

Thorwald C. Franke has a well-balanced website(c), in German and English, supporting the idea of a Bronze Age Sicilian Atlantis. For topographical reasons, he places the city on the Plains of Catania on the east coast of the island. He sees that the importance of Atlantis within his hypothesis “is the transfer of culture from the eastern to the Western Mediterranean, e.g. there can be found parallels between the culture of the Etruscans, whose role in bringing eastern culture to the west is widely acknowledged.”

Sicily is also home to a number of step pyramids similar to the Canarian examples(d). Antoine Gigal  offers(f) an extensively illustrated article about 23 previously unrecorded Sicilian pyramids as well as seven pyramids on Mauritius(g).

A 2020 article on the Ancient Origins website by Daniela Giordano reviews the subject of Italian pyramids and more particularly the Sicilian pyramids and their possible connection with the Shekelesh one of the Sea Peoples, an idea also advocated by Nancy K. Sanders, the British archaeologist. The article goes on to suggest some linkage with the more than controversial Bosnian pyramids, which I find overly speculative(k).

Quite recently a bronze object with a 13th century BC Sicilian connection was found off the coast of Devon in the UK, suggesting ancient trade between the Central Mediterranean and Britain(j).

(a) https://naturics.info/

(b) http://www.antikitera.net/news.asp?ID=9728

(c) http://www.thorwalds-internetseiten.de

(d) Archive 2006

(e) https://patrickofatlantis.com/

(f)  https://www.gigalresearch.com/uk/pyramides-sicile.php

(g) https://www.gigalresearch.com/uk/pyramides-maurice.php

(h) http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/article00749.html

(i) https://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art407.htm

(j) https://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php?topic=5703.0;wap2

(k) https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/sicily-pyramids-0013233

Also See: Pantelleria

Neanderthals *

The Neanderthals were claimed by the late Colin Wilson to have possessed highly sophisticated mathematical and astronomical knowledge and were precursors of the Atlantis civilisation. This extremely speculative assertion is made in Wilson’s Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals [336], a book that wanders all over the place with references to an extensive range of ancient mysteries from the Maya to Mary Magdalene without offering anything tangible to substantiate his central thesis.

Stelios Pavlou has noted that in 2001, Peter Jakubowski published Atlantis of the Neanderthals, in which he argues that Atlantis was a Neanderthal civilization that was destroyed in 4804 BC’.”(ah) In 2014, Jakubowski revised and expanded the paper into an ebook [1970] with the subtitle Colin Wilson Corrected. Pavlou also noted that “Jakubowski formerly supported the notion of Atlantis in Sicily and Malta. It is unclear if this is still the case as all mentions of Sicily and Malta were removed in the book’s recent revision.”

The idea of a Neanderthal connection with Atlantis is totally at variance with Plato’s description of a literate Bronze Age civilisation. While many atlantologists have chosen to reinterpret, modify or ignore aspects of Plato’s narrative, they have usually made some effort to justify their stance. Wilson, however, simply disregards the consistent Bronze Age references by Plato without any attempt at an explanation for this omission. Although it is generally accepted that the Neanderthals had died out by 20,000 BC and Wilson seems to believe that the cataclysmic flooding of Atlantis took place around 9500 BC, it leaves an insurmountable gap of over 10,000 years unexplained by him.

neanderthal

Model by Alfons and Adrie Kennis

Neanderthals are accepted to have been indigenous to Europe, although the are sites in Israel attributed to them. As far as I’m aware, the most southerly evidence in Europe of Neanderthal activity has been in Malta(l), which is outlined in Dr. Anton Mifsud’s beautifully illustrated book, Dossier Malta – Neanderthal [1587]+, which can now be read online.

In a 2008 article, NatGeo reported on a study of skulls that suggested that the Human-Neanderthal divergence took place around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago.

A January 2010 report(a) dated the demise of the last Neanderthal at around 35,000 BC, which conflicts with the last paragraph. An even more eyebrow-raising claim was made two years later in February 2012, when New Scientist magazine published an article(b) that suggested that the Neanderthals had a maritime history in the Aegean 130,000 years ago! However, to make such a claim does not seem to take adequate account of the fact that at the time sea levels were much lower and as a consequence, some islands were considerably larger and in many cases, individual islands that we know today were joined to each other or generally required shorter sea journeys between them.

Nevertheless, ongoing excavations at a site on the coast of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands off the coast of France are indicating that Jersey may have been one of the last outposts of the Neanderthals in north-west Europe.”(u)

Now the suggestion has been made that the Neanderthals were possibly the first cave artists. This claim was put forward in the journal Nature (15/6/12). The El Castillo cave in northern Spain has some of this art dated to at least 40,800 years ago.

A 2021 study has suggested that a reversal of the magnetic poles around 42,000 years may have been a cause of the demise of the Neanderthals!(ac)

It was also proposed by Peter Fotis Kapnistos, who worked with Spyridon Marinatos, that Neanderthal Man may also have mastered sea travel and possibly played a part in the development of the Atlantis story(c). The idea of Neanderthal sailors has gained further support in a paper(s) by Professor George Ferentinos of the University of Patras.

Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado’s Museum of Natural History has recently (April 2004) expressed the view that the intellectual abilities of the Neanderthals have been seriously underestimated(d). Similar views are expressed in an article(e) which traces the early characterisation of Neanderthals as ‘primitive’ and contrasts that with the current revised opinions that attribute much greater intellectual capabilities to them.

In 2018, an article by Joanna Gillen on the Ancient Origins website offers more evidence that the Neanderthals had a more sophisticated lifestyle than previously thought(n). This is based on the finds from the cave at Abric Romani in Spain’s Catalonia. For obvious reasons, the technological capabilities of Neanderthals are only hinted at from the scanty evidence available so far. One such clue was the discovery(r) that they seemed to have used birch tar to haft projectile points.

A December 2022 article offers evidence for possible technology transfer from Neanderthals to modern humans(aj).

Neanderthal cave discoveries continue to surprise. In 2016, Nature published(t) details of investigations carried out in the Bruniquel Cave in southwest France. The occupation was dated to around 175,000 years ago. Furthermore, apart from evidence of the use of fire, broken stalagmites are carefully arranged in circles.

An extensive two-part article describing the Neanderthals as ‘human’ is available online(g). This view is currently championed by Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão, whose views are featured in an interesting article(m) in the May 2019 edition of the Smithsonian Magazine.

There appears to be an acceptance that many of us have some Neanderthal DNA within us. While this is usually in the form of small snippets, an article in New Scientist magazine has reported that longer strings have been identified in Melanesian populations(o) in the Pacific!

In 2015 the results of the mapping of the entire genome of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal were published, which concluded that “There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens.”(f)

Further support has come in an article by Ashley Cowie with the eye-catching title of “Neanderthal Interbreeding with Humans Rampant on Jersey?” He relates that “Now, re-analysis of thirteen ‘48,000-year-old Neanderthal teeth’ originally discovered in Jersey between 1910 and 1911 has revealed that while they have always been assumed to have come from a single Neanderthal, they actually came from at least two individuals. Furthermore, the thirteen Neanderthal teeth from both individuals ‘share traits that are distinctive of modern humans.’ In short, this means Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had a “shared ancestry.”(ab)

Also in 2015, genetic studies pushed back the origins of Neanderthals to a startling 765,000 years ago(i), twice as old as previously thought.

A 2020 report(v) claims that African populations have been revealed to share Neanderthal ancestry for the first time, in findings that add a new twist to the tale of ancient humans and our closest known relatives.” and that “The latest findings suggest human and Neanderthal lineages are more closely intertwined than once thought and point to far earlier interbreeding events, about 200,000 years ago.”

Geneticist David Reich had been sceptical of the idea that humans and Neanderthals had interbred, until he engaged in a study of the DNA extracted from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in a Croatian cave. The result was that he was forced to conclude “that humans and Neanderthals did interbreed in their time together in Europe. Possibly even more than once” (p)

“Until now (October 2023), Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) were believed to have first interbred earlier t according to a 2016 genetic analysis in the journal Nature. However, a new analysis, published Oct. 13, in the journal Current Biology, has revealed that one group of Homo sapiens from Africa interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia around 250,000 years ago.”(ak)

By way of contrast, another 2020 report highlighted the conflict between anderthals and humans, suggesting that The best evidence that Neanderthals not only fought but excelled at war, is that they met us and weren’t immediately overrun. Instead, for around 100,000 years, Neanderthals resisted modern human expansion.” (z)

In April 2016, the results of a study(j) of their ‘Y’ chromosome suggested that Neanderthals had diverged “almost 590,000 years ago from humans.”

Earlier studies based on skull size and shape suggested that the split took place between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago(af). This research is ongoing as one commentator(ag) in 2013 expressed it – “Researchers have suggested a range of dates for when the last common ancestor of our lineage and Neanderthals could have lived.

The dates range from more than 800,0ars ago to less than 300,000, with many estimates in the neighborhood of 400,000 years ago. According to some studies, this time frame would seem to match that of the extinct species Homo heidelbergensis, which has been found in Africa, Europe, and possibly Asia.

But this may not be so. A new study theorizes that the last common ancestor of H. sapiens and Neanderthals lived longer ago than previously expected, with fossil evidence yet to be uncovered.”

A study(x), published on 3 June 2020 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B concluded that “Ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer than polar bears and brown bears, and so, like the bears, were able to easily produce healthy, fertile hybrids according to a study, led by the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology.”

The apparent relatively rapid extinction of the Neanderthals has, understandably, led to a great amount of speculation. One suggestion is that the massive eruption of Campi Flegrei, a supervolcano west of Naples, 39,000 years ago led to consequent cooling that may even have helped bring about the end of the Neanderthals(aa).

One of the most recent(h) suggests that the lack of control of fire by the Neanderthals, in contrast with their human neighbours, was probably a factor that led to their demise! However, the use of fire by Neanderthals in Tuscany now appears settled with the discovery of tools shaped with fire(q). 2020 saw evidence emerge which suggested that even as far back as 41,000 – 52,000 years ago the Neanderthals had mastered the making of cords(w).

Even more important is the long-running debate on whether Neanderthals had the physical equipment that enabled them to speak. For a long time, it was thought that they were missing a pharynx and a larynx and so lacked speech. A 2021 paper brings the discussion up to date with evidence that Neanderthal speech was a possibility although not of the same quality as modern humans(ai).

It has now been reliably demonstrated that Neanderthals also played music using a flutelike instrument made of bear bone around 50,000 years ago(y).

Although we see above, various claims about the various technologies employed by Neanderthals, there is still debate regarding a fundamental capability, namely whether they had the ability to communicate with speech. The evidence seems to favour that they had.

More relevant to life today is a report(k) that the average 3% that modern Europeans share with Neanderthals has left us with a greater risk of nicotine addiction and depression.

A number of interesting articles relating to Neanderthals are also available on the q-mag website(ae).

 [1587]+ https://www.academia.edu/40076100/DOSSIER_MALTA_-_NEANDERTHAL?email_work_card=view-paper 

(a) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100126220321.htm

(b) https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328544.800-neanderthals-were-ancient-mariners.html

(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20090321022014/https://ufodigest.com/news/0309/more-terrible4.php

(d) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140430133054.htm

(e)  https://nautil.us/our-neanderthal-complex-235115/ 

(f) https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/entire-neanderthal-genome-finally-mapped-amazing-results-001138

(g) https://theorbo1.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/neanderthals-they-were-human/

(h) https://www.livescience.com/50532-neanderthals-died-no-fire.html

(i) https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/scientific-breakthrough-oldest-partial-genome-sequenced-reveals-020531

(j) https://popular-archaeology.com/issue/spring-2016/article/neanderthal-y-chromosome-offers-clues-to-what-kept-us-separate-species

(k) https://www.q-mag.org/neandertals-transmitted-a-taste-for-nicotine-and-a-propensity-to-depression.html

(l) https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20160619/local/could-the-first-maltese-have-been-neanderthals.615901

(m) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-research-redefining-what-we-thought-about-neanderthals-180971918/

(n) https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/discoveries-spanish-cave-suggest-neanderthals-had-hot-water-020505

(o) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2220381-long-strand-of-dna-from-neanderthals-found-in-people-from-melanesia/#ixzz639ABebgu

(p) https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/ancient-dna-history/554798/

(q) https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/neanderthals-used-fire-to-make-tools/

(r) https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/neanderthal-glue-was-a-bigger-deal-than-we-thought/

(s) https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328544-800-neanderthals-were-ancient-mariners/

(t) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291

(u) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51299755

(v) https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/30/neanderthal-genes-found-for-first-time-in-african-populations

(w) https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=828400733

(x) https://phys.org/news/2020-06-humans-neanderthals-polar-brown.html

(y) Hear the world’s oldest instrument, the 50,000 year old neanderthal flute (archive.org) *

(z) https://www.sciencealert.com/how-neanderthals-and-humans-battled-for-supremacy-for-over-100-000-years

(z) Campanian Ignimbrite volcanism, climate, and the final decline of the Neanderthals | Geology | GeoScienceWorld

(aa) Campanian Ignimbrite volcanism, climate, and the final decline of the Neanderthals | Geology | GeoScienceWorld

(ab) Neanderthal Interbreeding with Humans Rampant on Jersey? | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net)

(ac) Reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles may have triggered Neanderthal extinction — and it could happen again – CNN

(ad) Did Neanderthals Have the Capacity for Verbal Language? gizmodo.com)

(ae) https://www.q-mag.org/_search.html?req=Neanderthals

(af) Archive 6625 | (atlantipedia.ie)

(ag) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/131021-neanderthal-human-evolution-teeth 

(ah) Peter Jakubowski – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) 

(ai) https://www.sapiens.org/biology/did-neanderthals-speak/

(aj) https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/toolmaking-teachers-surprising-skills-shared-between-neanderthals-and-021532 

(ak) Humans and Neanderthals mated 250,000 years ago, much earlier than thought | Live Science 

 

 

Identity of the Atlanteans *

The Identity of the Atlanteans has produced a range of speculative suggestions nearly as extensive as that of the proposed locations for Plato’s lost island. However, it is highly probable that we already know who the Atlanteans were, but under a different name.

The list below includes some of the more popular suggestions and as such is not necessarily exhaustive. While researchers have proposed particular locations for Atlantis, not all have identified an archaeologically identified culture to go with their chosen location. The problem is that most of the places suggested have endured successive invasions over the millennia by different peoples.

It would seem therefore that the most fruitful approach to solving the problem of identifying the Atlanteans would be to first focus on trying to determine the date of the demise of Atlantis. This should reduce the number of possible candidates, making it easier to identify the Atlanteans.

A final point to consider is that the historical Atlanteans were a military alliance, and as such may have included more than one or none of those listed here. The mythological Atlanteans, who included the five sets of male twins and their successors would be expected to share a common culture, whereas military coalitions are frequently more disparate.

 

Basques: William Lewy d’Abartiague, Edward Taylor Fletcher

Berbers: Alberto Arecchi, Alf Bajocco, Ulrich Hofmann, Jacques Gossart, Ibn Khaldun

British: William Comyns Beaumont, E. J. de Meester, Donald Ingram, George H. Cooper, Anthony Roberts, Paul Dunbavin.

Cro-Magnons: R. Cedric Leonard, Theosophists, Georges Poisson, Robert B. Stacy-Judd,  Kurt Bilau, Louis Charpentier

Etruscans: Richard W. Welch, Frank Joseph  *

Guanches: B. L. Bogaevsky, Bory de Saint Vincent, Boris F. Dobrynin, Eugène Pégot-Ogier

Irish: Ulf Erlingsson, George H. Cooper, John Whitehurst, Thomas Dietrich, Padraig A. Ó Síocháin, Lewis Spence,

Maltese: Anton Mifsud, Francis Xavier Aloisio, Kevin Falzon, Bibischok, Joseph Bosco, David Calvert-Orange, Giorgio Grongnet de Vasse, Albert Nikas, Joseph S. Ellul, Francis Galea, Tammam Kisrawi, Charles Savona-Ventura, Hubert Zeitlmair. 

Maya: Robert B. Stacy-Judd, Charles Gates Dawes, Colin Wilson, Adrian Gilbert, L. M. Hosea, Augustus le Plongeon, Teobert Maler, Joachim Rittstieg, Lewis Spence, Edward Herbert Thompson, Jean-Frédérick de Waldeck,

Megalith Builders: Lucien Gerardin, Paolo Marini, Sylvain Tristan, Jean Deruelle, Alan Butler, Alfred deGrazia, Helmut Tributsch, Hank Harrison, Walter Schilling, Robert Temple, Manuel Vega

Minoans: K.T. Frost, James Baikie, Walter Leaf, Edwin Balch, Donald A. Mackenzie, Ralph Magoffin, Spyridon Marinatos, Georges Poisson, Wilhelm Brandenstein, A. Galanopoulos, J. G. Bennett, Rhys Carpenter, P.B.S. Andrews, Edward Bacon, Willy Ley, J.V. Luce, James W. Mavor, Henry M. Eichner, Prince Michael of Greece, Nicholas Platon, N.W. Tschoegl, Richard Mooney, Rupert Furneaux, Martin Ebon, Francis Hitching, Charles Pellegrino, Rodney Castleden, Graham Phillips, Jacques Lebeau, Luana Monte, Fredrik Bruins, Gavin Menzies, Lee R. Kerr, Daniel P. Buckley.

Persians: August Hunt, Pierre-André Latreille, William Henry Babcock, Hans Diller.

Phoenicians: Jonas Bergman, Robert Prutz,

Sardinians: Paolo Valente Poddighe, Robert Paul Ishoy, Sergio Frau, Mario Tozzi, Diego Silvio Novo, Antonio Usai, Giuseppe Mura.

Sicilians: Phyllis Young Forsyth, Thorwald C. Franke, Axel Hausmann,  Peter Jakubowski, Alfred E. Schmeck, M. Rapisarda,

Swedes: Johannes Bureus, Olaf Rudbeck

Sea Peoples: Wilhelm Christ, Jürgen Spanuth, Spyridon Marinatos, Rainer W. Kühne, John V. Luce, Theodor Gomperz, Herwig Görgemanns , Tony O’ConnellSean Welsh, Thorwald C. Franke, Werner Wickboldt.

Trojans: Eberhard Zangger, Erich von Däniken?

Wilson, Colin

Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was born in Leicester, England. He has been a most prolific author with around a hundred titles to his credit. The range of early colin_wilsonsubjects that he has covered is breathtaking; from Jack the Ripper to Sex to Atlantis. A 2004 article in The Observer described him as a self-declared genius and knicker fetishist!

Initially, he was a supporter of the Minoan Hypothesis, then in 1996 he linked the controversial redating of the Sphinx by Robert Schoch, with the influence of earlier sophisticated Atlanteans. It is revealing to note that the original title of Wilson’s book was Before the Sphinx but this was altered at the insistence of his publishers(d) in order to include ‘Atlantis’ on the cover!

A few years later he was co-author with Rand Flem-Ath, the promoter of the Atlantis in Antarctica theory, of The Atlantis Blueprint[063] again promoting the idea of the Atlantean civilisation having spread to other parts of the world that is now visible in the remains of so many megalithic cultures around our planet. Wilson revealed later, in a 2007 edition of From Atlantis to the Sphinx [335]+, that he was unhappy with the final content of The Atlantis Blueprint stating that “it did not represent his views”[p381] and wrote an account in the Fortean Times(b), of how that book evolved.

Wilson joined the Sarmast expedition in October 2004, as he had then shifted his preference(d) to the Cyprus region as the location of Atlantis. He eventuallyColin Wilson found the idea of Atlantis in the Antarctic waging war against Athens, a distance of many thousands of miles, untenable. Unfortunately, this brief display of critical thinking was short-lived as he shifted his support to Cyprus as Atlantis’ location. I believe that he might have revised his position again if he had just given some consideration to Plato’s report of how the flooded Atlantis was still a hazard to shipping centuries later. Sarmast’s Cyprus site is in water over a mile deep and could never have been a shipping hazard!

In 2006 Wilson continued[336] his support for Sarmast but added a new dimension with the claim on the cover notes that ‘the Neanderthals had been the civilising force behind Atlantis’. However, in his earlier book [335.390], he stated clearly that he was “not suggesting there was some connection between Atlantis and Neanderthal man”. Perhaps the cover notes were just a concoction of Wilson’s publisher.

At best, Wilson’s book, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals can be described as disappointing. Laura Knight-Jadczyk goes further, classifying it as ’embarrassing’(c).

>Stelios Pavlou has noted(e) that in 2001, Peter Jakubowski published a paper Atlantis of the Neanderthals, in which he argues that Atlantis was a Neanderthal civilization that was destroyed in 4804 BC’.” In 2014, Jakubowski revised and expanded the paper into an ebook titled Atlantis of the Neanderthals [1970] with the subtitle of Colin Wilson Corrected, which is offered as a review of Wilson’s book but is more of a promo for Jakubowski’s own ideas of unified physics (naturics)

Pavlou also noted that Jakubowski formerly supported the notion of Atlantis in Sicily and Malta. It is unclear if this is still the case as all mentions of Sicily and Malta were removed in the book’s  recent revision.”<

[335]+ Available online: https://archive.org/details/FromAtlantisToTheSphinx.ColinWilson 

(b) https://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/5167/a_100000yearold_civilisation.html (offline November 2015)

(c) https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RZWH2PZ425PJW

(d) See Archive 2719

(e) Peter Jakubowski – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)  *