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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 »
Ramesses III
James, Peter
Peter James (?- ) graduated in ancient history and archaeology at Birmingham Univer sity and engaged in postgraduate research at University College, London.
James came to public attention when, in collaboration with Nick Thorpe, Nikos Kokkinos, Robert Morkot and John Frankish, he authored Centuries of Darkness [346] in which he explored the problems of the chronology of the Mediterranean and Near East in the second millennium BC. It generated much controversy, which continues as the authors’ website(c)(d) demonstrates.
The following years saw the production of an impressive three-volume work by David Rohl[229][230][232] offering similar ideas on a New Chronology for the region. Initially, James and Rohl had jointly researched the flaws in Velikovskian chronology for a number of years, which resulted in a paper(e) written for the SIS in 1982. Rohl has published this document on his website as he “felt it would be useful to republish the ‘first outing’ of the New Chronology theory here since the original paper is difficult to find. It also serves to put the record straight about when and how the revision of the Third Intermediate Period took shape.”
Unfortunately the collaboration ended over divergent views regarding the identification of the biblical Shishak, Rohl favouring Ramesses II, while James opted for Ramesses III.
James has also been studying the Atlantis question since the early 1970s. Paul Dunbavin recounts that James had originally favoured Megalithic Britain as Atlantis. Francis Hitching in The World Atlas of Mysteries[307] notes how James calculated the date of the demise of Atlantis as 3600 BC. He arrives at this by accepting the commonly agreed date for the beginning of Egyptian civilisation of 3100 BC. He then adds the 1,000 years, which Solon was told by the Egyptian priests, was the time that had elapsed between the Atlantean Athenian war and then arbitrarily subtracts 500 years to compensate for an assumed nationalistic exaggeration of Egypt’s antiquity; a habit common to many ancient kingdoms.
However, when he finally published his work on the subject, The Sunken Kingdom [047], he controversially offered a site in Anatolia in western Turkey as his preferred location for Atlantis. Unfortunately, he has been unable to obtain permission from the authorities to dig at the site and hopefully substantiate his theory. The book is supported by a website(a).
A few years earlier, Eberhard Zangger published The Flood From Heaven, in which he also placed Atlantis in western Anatolia, specifically in Troy. James offers a few critical comments including what he considers a major weakness in Zangger’s theory, namely that Troy did not ‘sink beneath the waves in a single day and a night’. [p.201]
James was highly vocal in disputing the dendrochronological dating of the Uluburun shipwreck discovered in 1982 off southwestern Turkey. The initial date given was 1315 BC, later revised to 1305 BC but due to a lack of bark on the piece of wood tested a definitive date was impossible. Even if the bark had been attached it would still only have provided the date that the tree had been felled not the date of the shipwreck(b). Subsequently, the more imprecise radiocarbon dating gave a date of ‘around’ 1300 BC.
James is also co-author, again with Nick Thorpe, of Ancient Inventions [757], which is a 672-page tome that offers a fascinating account of the inventive capabilities of ancient civilisations. In this 1994 book, he comments that “Plato’s yarn is largely a work of fiction” [p.455], which makes you wonder why, just a year later, he published The Sunken Kingdom!
Seven years later James and Thorpe teamed up again to compile Ancient Mysteries [1922], which covers familiar subjects, such as Nazca, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Vinland Map and the Maya.
More recently in correspondence with another researcher, James ‘clarified’ his views further with the following statement “Please note that I do not think that Atlantis was in Turkiye!!! People have been mislead by something the publishers added to the book jacket. My method was literary criticism and to investigate the sources that Plato used for his philosophical construct. I identified the core story, the legend behind his story, as Tantalis near Manisa. If you cite my book in your writing I would appreciate it if you could make this clear.”
(a) https://www.knowledge.co.uk/the-sunken-kingdom/
(b) https://www.centuries.co.uk/uluburun.pdf
(c) https://www.centuries.co.uk/replies.htm
(d) https://www.centuries.co.uk/faq.htm
Chott el Jerid
Chott el Jerid is one of a series of ancient salt lakes (sometimes spelt shott or shat) in Tunisia that stretches from the Gulf of Gabés westward into Algeria, south of the Atlas Mountains. It is the second-largest salt lake in the world after Salt Lake in Utah. It is maintained that ancient Lake Tritonis was located in this region and possibly incorporated Chott el Jerid and at some point may even have extended as far as an enlarged Lake Chad.
These chotts are not, strictly speaking, lakes at all today. They are flat depressed areas, which for most of the year are areas of dried mud covered with a thick skin of salt, suggesting an earlier connection with the Mediterranean.
The principal chotts are Chott el Djerid, Chott ech Chergui, Chott Melrhir, Chott el Fejej and Chott el Hodna.
The largest, the Chott el Jerid, is just a few feet below the level of the ![chott_el_jerid[1]](https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/chott_el_jerid11.jpg)
Mediterranean, according to Wikipedia. However, François Roudaire, a 19th-century French geographer, surveyed the chott and reported that the entire salt lake was 15 metres above the level of the Mediterranean. This fact was confirmed by Edward Dumergue in his 1883 booklet, The Chotts of Tunis[659]. In the same publication [p.5] he mentions Roudaire “showing how these chotts could be formed into one great inland sea, extending from near Biskra and Chegga in Algeria, through Tunis, to the Gulf of Gabes, about 300 miles in length and about 60 in breadth, forming a new gulf into the Mediterranean, with an area somewhat greater than the Irish Sea.”
It is worth noting that Diodorus Siculus records that around 1250 BC catastrophic seismic activity across North-West Africa from the Gulf of Gabés to the Atlantic radically changed the topography of the region. Some investigators see this event as being responsible for the cutting-off of these inland seas from the Mediterranean creating today’s salt lakes. This idea is not as fanciful as it might seem at first sight when you consider the geological instability of the Central Mediterranean region. A well-known example is to be found at the Macellum of Pozzuoli near Naples which has been rising and falling over the past two millennia, due to movements in the volcanic caldera on which it sits.
Wintertime can produce up to a metre of water in these chotts, which by liquefying the mud makes them perfectly impassable. There is a clear suggestion that these chotts represent an inland sea that was once connected to the Mediterranean. It is believed that seismic activity in the area cut this connection. All around these salt lakes there are numerous springs, rushing from the sandy hillocks. Virtually all these springs are very near boiling point. The town of Gabés is close to a grand oasis, which is maintained by water from a stream emptying itself into the sea at Gabés after a short run.
More than one writer has placed Atlantis in this region. Paul Borchardt and Albert Hermann in the early 1920s and more recently Alberto Arecchi have advocated this idea. Borchardt reported that the local name of Chott el Jerid was Bahr Atala or Sea of Atlas.
Arecchi concurs with this explanation and is convinced that the inland sea was the original ‘Atlantic Ocean’. He quotes the Book of Jubilees to support this contention(a).
In 2020, David Winder published Mysterien der Bronzezeit (Mysteries of the Bronze Age) [1936] in which he firmly locates Atlantis in the region of Chott- el-Jerid. In an article on the Atlantisforschung website, he expands on his theory and includes a chronology of key events in the 2nd millennium BC(f).
A year late, Hong-Quan Zhang also placed Atlantis firmly within what is now the northwest region of Africa, specifically identifying the capital’s location at the eastern end of Chott el Jerid in modern Tunisia(e).
>>In 2021, Aleksa Vuckovic reviewed the history of the suggestion of Atlantis being located in the region of the chotts, but does not appear convinced that such is the case(g).<<
A contributor to a June 2012 forum(b) provided a link(c) to an interesting satellite image, as well as the following list of fifteen points favouring the chotts as a location for Atlantis:
1) Atlantis did not sink to “the bottom of the ocean” instead it became a “muddy shoal only several feet below the water surface”
2) It’s to the West of both Egypt and Greece
3) The Chotts used to be a large “mega-lake” and you can use a sea-level map to simulate how large this lake used-to be
4) That mega-lake is very likely to be the mythical “Lake Tritonis” that the Greeks ascribed to this area
5) Herodotus spoke of Tritonis in relation to peoples near mount Atlas who referred to themselves as Atlanteans
6) There are Carthaginian coins from this area with Elephants (and older petroglyphs with Elephants and diverse fauna)
7) One phase of the local art was highly similar to the Minoan\Sea Peoples influence
8) The local Deity is syncretically equal to Neith (who was deemed syncretically equal to Athena by Egypt in the tale)
9) Another local Deity is syncretically equal to Poseidon
10) The tale of the Amazons is corroborated genetically from Tuscany to Corfu to this Region (the Amazons fought the Atlanteans)
11) The Berbers often claim to have a heritage from Atlantis (not a big deal, so does half the Mediterranean and South America… etc)
12) Several ancient sources claim that this “mega-lake” emptied via a geological cataclysm. The event precedes the Sea Peoples epoch.
13) The name ‘Gabes’ is arguably linguistically closer to ‘Gades’ than Cadiz (Spain).
14) Gafsa (Caspa) was legendarily the home of the Libyan Herakles and resided between two mountains
15) It’s closer proximity to Egypt and Greece make it more plausible as a Bronze Age power than Gibraltar where it would be essentially like living on the moon in that age. (In no order).
>>A strong case advocating the chotts as the most likely location of Atlantis has been put forward by Alan Mattingly. In his book Plato’s Atlantis and the Sea Peoples [1948], , he proposes that the Atlantis story “was actually based upon a version of the Libyo-Sea People’s attacks on the Egyptian state during the reigns of Merneptah and Ramesses III. And further, that the Libyan contingent of the said attacks ultimately derived from a base in and around the region of Tunisia and Algeria between the Isle of Djerba and the town of Biskra, a region known to us as the ‘Chotts’ or ‘Djerid’”.<<
(a) https://www.liutprand.it/articoliMondo.asp?id=430
(b) https://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/13909-what-is-your-favorite-historical-mystery/
(d) https://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/13909-what-is-your-favorite-historical-mystery/
(e) https://medcraveonline.com/IJH/is-atlantis-related-to-the-green-sahara.html
(f) Atlantis: From Myth to Reality – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(g) https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/tunisian-atlantis-0016130 *
Rohl, David *
David Rohl (1950- ) holds a degree in Ancient History and Egyptology from University College London. He is a former rock musician and is the author of three best-selling history books[229][230][232] that controversially proposed a New Chronology for the ancient 
eastern Mediterranean and has presented television documentary programmes on the same subject, which have provoked severe criticism(a).
Bryant G. Wood, an American biblical archaeologist, disputes the validity of Rohl’s revised chronology as he sees it as an attack on his belief in the veracity of the Bible(f).
Drawing some inspiration from the work[1388/9] of Reginald A. Walker (1917-1989), Rohl has also argued for the Garden of Eden being situated in what is now northwestern Iran[230]. Equally controversial is Rohl’s claim that the biblical Tower of Babel was sited at the Sumerian city of Eridu[231]. This claim was explored in detail in Yesterday Channel’s, Secrets of the Bible series (S1 E8).
Unexpectedly, he has written an introduction to Andrew Collins’ bestseller, Gateway to Atlantis, in which he expresses his regret for the lack of firm archaeological evidence to support the existence of Atlantis, but is clearly sympathetic to the idea and is somewhat supportive of an Atlantic location. He repeated and expanded on his views at a subsequent lecture(b).
Rohl also proposed that the Shardana, one of the Sea Peoples, originally came from Sardis in Lydia and later established the Nuragic Culture in Sardinia [232.449]. Recently, Angelo Paratico propounded the same idea during a lecture in Hong Kong in 2004(d). Perhaps more pertinent is a Wikipedia entry which notes that “According to Timaeus, one of Plato’s dialogues, Sardinia and its people as well, the “Sardonioi” or “Sardianoi”, might have been named after “Sardò”, a legendary woman from Sardis, capital of the ancient Kingdom of Lydia in Anatolia.”(e)
Peter James is another high profile historian who has advocated[046] a similar radical revision of the chronologies of the Mediterranean and Near East. Initially, James and Rohl had jointly researched the flaws in Velikovskian chronology for a number of years, which resulted in a paper(j) written for the SIS in 1982. Rohl has published this document on his website as he “felt it would be useful to republish the ‘first outing’ of the New Chronology theory here since the original paper is difficult to find. It also serves to put the record straight about when and how the revision of the Third Intermediate Period took shape.”
Unfortunately the collaboration ended when until they had divergent views regarding the identification of the biblical Shishak(c), Rohl favouring Ramesses II, while James opted for Ramesses III, suggested earlier by Immanuel Velikovsky [0039]. James has also written a controversial work[0047] on Atlantis, placing it in ancient Lydia (Turkey). Complicating matters further is a related dispute as to whether the biblical Shishak is to be identified as the Egyptian Pharoah Shoshenq or they should be treated as two separate people!(g) Their original collaborative paper is available on Rohl’s website(h) which contains a number of interesting blogs but appears to have been only active in 2012, with nothing posted since!
Readers might be interested in reading the transcript of a 2009 interview that Rohl gave to Andrew Gough(i).
(b) David Rohl (archive.org) *
(c) https://davidrohl.blogspot.ie/
(d) https://www.gingkoedizioni.it/is-there-an-association-between-sardis-and-sardinia/
(e) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_people
(f) RohlsChronologyDeconstructed (bibleorigins.net)
(g) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334975146_Shishak_and_Shoshenq_A_Disambiguation
(h) http://davidrohl.blogspot.com
(i) https://andrewgough.co.uk/interviews_rohl/