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

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    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 »
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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 »
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Richard Hennig

Netolitzky, Friedrich

Friedrich (Fritz) Netolitzky (1875-1945) was an entomologist and a professor of botany, which he taught at a number of universities. However, he also had a keen interest in the mystery of Atlantis.

Atlantisforschung notes(a) The fact that F. Netolitzky’s Atlantological work was not completely forgotten after his death is mainly due to the historical geographer Richard Hennig (1874-1951), who wrote about him and his work in several of his books – above all in Das Rätsel der Atlantis (The Puzzle of Atlantis) (first publication 1925). There (pp. 21-24 ) we learn, for example, that Netolitzky ‘s considerations about an Iberian Atlantis of the Bronze Age inspired Adolf Schulten‘s research into Atlantis and Tartessos, who, according to Hennig, described them in individual details”

Netolitzky also provided an independent interpretation of the oriharukon (orichalcum) from Plato’sAtlantis account, which he identified as an artificial modification of white gold (known as Asem in ancient Egypt).

(a) Friedrich Netolitzky – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)

Hanno, The Voyage of

The Voyage of Hanno, the Carthaginian navigator, was undertaken around 500 BC. The general consensus is that his journey took him through the Strait of Gibraltar and along part of the west coast of Africa. A record, or periplus, of the voyage was inscribed on tablets and displayed in the Temple of Baal at Carthage. Richard Hennig Hannospeculated that the contents of the periplus were copied by the Greek historian, Polybius, after the Romans captured Carthage. It did not surface again until the 10th century when a copy, in Greek, was discovered (Codex Heildelbergensis 398) and was not widely published until the 16th century.

The 1797 English translation of the periplus by Thomas Falconer along with the original Greek text can be downloaded or read online(h).

Edmund Marsden Goldsmid (1849-?) published a translation of A Treatise On Foreign Languages and Unknown Islands[1348] by Peter Albinus. In footnotes on page 39 he describes Hanno’s periplus as ‘apocryphal’. A number of other commentators(c)(d) have also cast doubts on the authenticity of the Hanno text.

Three years after Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis, Lord Arundell of Wardour published The Secret of Plato’s Atlantis[0648] intended as a rebuttal of Donnelly’s groundbreaking book. The ‘secret’ referred to in the title is that Plato’s Atlantis story is based on the account we have of the Voyage of Hanno.

Nicolai Zhirov speculated that Hanno may have witnessed ‘the destruction of the southern remnants of Atlantis’, based on some of his descriptions.

>Rhys Carpenter dedicated nearly twenty pages to the matter of Hanno commented that ”The modern literature about his (Hanno’s) voyage is unexpectedly large. But it is so filled with disagreement that to summarize it with any thoroughness would be to annul its effectiveness, as the variant opinions would cancel each other out”[221.86]. Carpenter included what he describes as ‘a retranslation of a translation’ of the text.<

Further discussion of the text and topography encountered by Hanno can be read in a paper[1483] by Duane W. Roller.

What I find interesting is that so much attention was given to Hanno’s voyage as if it was unique and not what you would expect if Atlantic travel was as commonplace at that time, as many ‘alternative’ history writers claim.

However, even more questionable, is the description of Hanno sailing off “with a fleet of sixty fifty-oared ships, and a large number of men and women to the number of thirty thousand, and with wheat and other provisions.” The problem with this is that the 50-oared ships would have been penteconters, which had limited room for much more than the oarsmen. If we include the crew, an additional 450 persons per ship would have been impossible, in fact, it is unlikely that even the provisions for 500 hundred people could have been accommodated!

Lionel Casson, the author of The Ancient Mariners[1193] commented that “if the whole expedition had been put aboard sixty penteconters, the ships would have quietly settled on the harbour bottom instead of leaving Carthage: a penteconter barely had room to carry a few days’ provisions for its crew, to say nothing of a load of passengers with all the equipment they needed to start a life in a colony.

The American writer, William H. Russeth, commented(f) on the various interpretations of Hanno’s route, noting that “It is hard for modern scholars to figure out exactly where Hanno travelled, because descriptions changed with each version of the original document and place names change as different cultures exert their influence over the various regions. Even Pliny the Elder, the famous Roman Historian, complained of writers committing errors and adding their own descriptions concerning Hanno’s journey, a bit ironic considering that Romans levelled the temple of Ba’al losing the famous plaque forever.”

George Sarantitis has a more radical interpretation of the Voyage of Hanno, proposing that instead of taking a route along the North African coast and then out into the Atlantic, he proposes that Hanno travelled inland along waterways that no longer exist(e).> A 2013 report in New Scientist magazine(n) revealed that 100,000 years ago the Sahara had been home to three large rivers that flowed northward, which probably provided migration routes for our ancestors. Furthermore, if these rivers lasted into the African Humid Period they may be interpreted as support for Sarantitis’ contention regarding Hanno!<

He insists that the location of the Pillars of Heracles, as referred to in the narrative, matches the Gulf of Gabes [1470].

The most recent commentary on Hanno’s voyage is on offer by Antonio Usai in his 2014 book, The Pillars of Hercules in Aristotle’s Ecumene[980]. He also has a controversial view of Hanno’s account, claiming that in the “second part, Hanno makes up everything because he does not want to continue that voyage.” (p.24) However, the main objective of Usai’s essays is to demonstrate that the Pillars of Hercules were originally situated in the Central Mediterranean between eastern Tunisia and its Kerkennah Islands.

A 1912 English translation of the text can be read online(a), as well as a modern English translation by Jason Colavito(k).

Another Carthaginian voyager, Himilco, is also thought to have travelled northward in the Atlantic and possibly reached Ireland, referred to as ‘isola sacra’. Unfortunately, his account is no longer available(g).

The controversial epigrapher Barry Fell went so far as to propose that Hanno visited America, citing the Bourne Stone as evidence!(m)*

The livius.org website offers three articles(i) on the text, history and credibility of the surviving periplus together with a commentary.

Another excellent overview of the document is available on the World History Encyclopedia website.(l) 

(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20040615213109/https://www.jate.u-szeged.hu/~gnovak/f99htHanno.htm

(c) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator

(d) https://annoyzview.wordpress.com/2012/04/

(e) https://platoproject.gr/voyage-hanno-Carthaginian/

(f) https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/5295414-ancient-navigator-finds-gorilla-of-his-dreams

(g) https://gatesofnineveh.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/high-north-carthaginian-exploration-of-ireland/

(h) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qbMBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR3&lpg=PR3&dq=Hanno+THomas+Falconer&source=bl&ots=jNnOy0QPyI&sig=xWps907X_R-1Q4kHMGaHI55Ckgs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiSysGPsLvMAhXpF5oKHRFvDCEQ6AEIMjAE#v=onepage&q=Hanno%20THomas%20Falconer&f=false

(i) https://web.archive.org/web/20180323080221/https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-navigator/

(j) BSMQgoYSQYFJ90bRJIhQ&hl=mt&ei=–tuSfNEIaqnAOo_NjHBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=&ved=CBgQ https://archive.org/details/cu31924031441847 

(k) http://www.jasoncolavito.com/periplus-of-hanno.html#:~:text=The%20Periplus%20of%20Hanno%20the%20Carthaginian%20is%20an,to%20the%20sixth%20century%20before%20the%20Christian%20era.

(l) Hanno: Carthaginian Explorer – World History Encyclopedia 

(m) Bourne stone – Wikipedia *

(n) NewScientist.com, 16 September 2013, https://tinyurl.com/mg9vcoz *

& https://zeenews.india.com/news/science/lost-river-helped-lead-early-ancestors-out-of-africa_877125.html *

Jessen, Professor Otto

 

Professor Otto Jessen (1891-1951) of Tubingen in Germany was another of a number of German academics, such as Schulten & Hennig, who, in the early part of the 20th century, were convinced that the answer to the Atlantis mystery lay in Southern Spain. Jessen excavated at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in Spain in a quest for Tartessos, which he believed to be Atlantis[413].

*In the early 1920’s he carried studies of the Strait of Gibraltar, the results of which were published in 1927[1564].

Atlantisforschung.de gives a good overview of his life and work(a).

(a) https://atlantisforschung.de/index.php?title=Otto_Jessen*

Hennig, Richard

Richard Hennig (1874-1951) was a German student of ancient geography. He drew on the work of Adolf Schulten and Otto Jessen to support his conviction that the Scheria referred to by Homer was in fact Atlantis. Hennig drew up a list of similarities between the two[613] but as N. Zhirov remarked, an equally long list of discrepancies could be compiled leaving the question still open.

In 1925, Hennig argued forcefully that Atlantis had controlled Cádiz in Spain where Tartessos was located. He claimed to have demonstrated that the Atlantean kingdom of Gadeirus controlled Atlantic Spain during pre-Classical times.

Hennig also saw similarities between Atlantis and Tartessos and believed that the Greeks of Plato’s era thought of Tartessos as having disappeared no more than a hundred years earlier. This idea would have placed the demise of Tartessos/Atlantis around 500 BC, in other words after Solon’s visit to Egypt!

Atlantic Ocean *

The Atlantic Ocean as defined by modern geography stretches between the Poles and is bounded on the west by the Americas and on the east by Europe and Africa. The word ocean is taken from the Greek ‘Okeanos’ which in turn has been suggested to have a Phoenician origin. Okeanos or ‘ocean river’ is first mentioned in Homer’s Iliad, a term that was employed by many ancient writers to refer to an ocean that they believed encircled the then-known world.

As a slight digression, I should mention that ‘Okeanos Potamos’ is an old name for the River Danube, a fact woven into Densusianu‘s theory of a Romanian Atlantis.

It seems that ‘Atlantic sea’ was a term first used by the poet Stesichorus (630-555 BC)(h), about two hundred years before Timaeus was composed by Plato and coinciding with the time of Solon’s famous visit to Egypt, to describe the seas beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Histories I. 202). If this is correct, then we must ask what term was used prior to Herodotus? If it was Okeanos, what body of water, if any, did the term ‘Atlantic’ apply to at the earlier period?. There have been suggestions that the word referred to the western Mediterranean.

Jacques R. Pauwels in his Beneath the Dust of Time[1656] maintains that contrary to popular belief “The Atlantic Ocean does not owe its name to these mountains, as we are often told; on the contrary, they received the name Atlas because they were situated near the Ocean and, like the Okeanos, conjured up the end of the (inhabited) world, the Oikoumene, and separated the earth from the heavens.”

George Sarantitis has proposed that the term used by Plato, Atlantikos Pelagos, can be more legitimately interpreted as ‘Atlantean archipelago’!(d)

However, some researchers, such as Alberto Arecchi(f), have asserted that the name was given to a very large inland sea in what is now North Africa bound by the Atlas Mountains. Jean Gattefosse was a leading exponent of this during the first half of the 20th century.Sarantitis has expanded on this idea, proposing(c) a vast network of huge inland lakes and waterways in what is now the Sahara, which has, in his view, allows a more acceptable interpretation of Hanno’s voyage. Others such as Diodorus (3.38), as late as the 3rd century BC, used the term ‘Atlantic’ to describe the Indian Ocean. It is quite clear that ancient geographical names did not always have the same meanings that they do today.

The confusion does not end there as some ancient writers have identified the Strait of Sicily as the location of the Pillars of Heracles and the waters of the Western Mediterranean as the Atlantic, with some identifying Tyrrhenia as being in the Atlantic.

Most important of all are the comments of Plato himself who refers to the Atlantic in Timaeus (24e) when Atlantis existed noting that ‘in those days the Atlantic was navigable’, implying that in his own time it was not. Consequently, he could not have been referring to the body of water that we know today as the Atlantic. Furthermore, Aristotle seemed to echo Plato when he wrote(e) that “outside the pillars of Heracles the sea is shallow owing to the mud, but calm, for it lies in a hollow.” This is not a description of the Atlantic that we know, which is not shallow, calm or lying in a hollow and which he also refers to as a sea not an ocean. So, what sea was he referring to?

Since other seas have been called Atlantic, we are therefore forced to consider possible alternatives that are also compatible with the other known features of Atlantis. The three leading candidates are

(i) the Western Mediterranean,

(ii) the Tyrrhenian Sea (which is part of the Western Mediterranean) and

(iii) the inland sea in North Africa, sometimes referred to as Lake Tritonis, favoured by Arecchi, Sarantitis and others.

I am personally inclined towards the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Pliny the Elder writing in the first century AD mentions a number of islands in what we now accept as the Atlantic Ocean. These include the Cassiterides (Britain), the Fortunate Isles (the Canaries), the Hesperides, the Gorgades and an island ‘off Mount Atlas’ named Atlantis. Understandably, Pliny’s comments have led to extensive controversy, particularly the identification of the island off Mount Atlas.

In fact, there is even some dispute about the location of the Mount Atlas in question, as there were a number of peaks known by that name in ancient times. Richard Hennig is cited by Zhirov[458.58]  as describing the ‘utter confusion’ among ancient authors regarding the location of Mount Atlas.

Ignatius Donnelly was convinced that Atlantis had been situated in the Atlantic opposite the entrance to the Mediterranean. His theories predominated for over half a century and are still popular today. The late Gerry Forster, a British writer, has a 50-page paper supporting Donnelly’s contention posted on his website entitled The Lost Continent Rediscovered(a).

In order to add scientific credibility to Donnelly’s views the discovery of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was offered as confirmation of the existence of Atlantis as parts of the ‘ridge’ would have been exposed when ocean levels were hundreds of feet lower during the last Ice Age. Today, the Canaries and the Azores are just remnants of what were once larger landmasses.

When Alfred Wegener advanced the theory of Continental Drift, later replaced by that of Plate Tectonics, was first presented, some atlantologists assumed that a mechanism for the disappearance of Atlantis in the Atlantic had been found. However, when the slow rate of movement was fully realised, the theory also sank as an explanation for the demise of Atlantis.

In April 2009 the media burst into one of its occasional ‘Atlantis found’ phases, when it was reported that evidence of an underwater city had been identified 600 miles west of the Canary Islands using Google Earth. The co-ordinates were given as 31 15’15.53N and 24 15’30.53W.

Atlantic gridThe site appeared to show a grid-like street system, which was estimated to be the size of Wales – a highly improbable, if not impossible size for a Bronze Age city. Apart from which, what appeared to be ‘streets’ would have been kilometers in width. Google responded with the following explanatory statement:

“what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (sea-floor) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea-floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.” It did not take long before one commentator suggested that this statement was a cover-up.

By early February 2012, Google had corrected what they called ‘blunders’ contained in the original data, which in turn removed the anomalous image(b). No doubt conspiracy theorists will have their appetites whetted by this development.

Nine years later, on April 3, 2018(g), the UK’s Express regurgitated the same story!

As usual, people will believe what they want to believe.

(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org) *

(b) https://www.pcworld.com/article/249339/google_pulls_atlantis_from_google_earth.html

(c) The Peninsula of Libya and the Journey of Herodotus – Plato Project (archive.org) 

(d) The Importance of Accurate Translation – Plato Project (archive.org) 

(e) Meteorologica : Aristotle : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive  354a *

(f) https://www.liutprand.it/Atlantis.pdf

(g) https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/940747/Atlantis-FOUND-400-mile-undersea-land-mass-Google-Earth-Azores

(h) https://www.loebclassics.com/view/stesichorus_i-fragments/1991/pb_LCL476.89.xml

Ogygia*

Ogygia is the home of Calypso, referred to by Homer in Book V of his Odyssey. It is accepted by some as an island in the Mediterranean that was destroyed by an earthquake before the Bronze Age. The Greek writers Euhemerus in the 4th  century BC and Callimachus who flourished in the 3rd century BC,  identified the Maltese archipelago as Ogygia. Others have more specifically named the Maltese island of Gozo as Ogygia. Anton Mifsud has pointed out[209] that Herodotus, Hesiod and Diodorus Siculus have all identified the Maltese Islands with Ogygia.

John Vella has added his support to the idea of a Maltese Ogygia in a paper published in the Athens Journal of History (Vol.3 Issue 1) in which he noted that “The conclusions that have emerged from this study are that Homer’s Ogygia is not an imaginary but a reference to and a record of ancient Gozo-Malta.”

Adding to the confusion, Aeschylus, the tragedian (523-456 BC) calls the Nile, Ogygian, and Eustathius, a Byzantine grammarian (1115-1195), claimed that Ogygia was the earliest name for Egypt(j).

Isaac Newton wrote a number of important works including The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended [1101]in which he discussed a range of mythological links to Atlantis, including a possible connection with Homer’s Ogygia. There is now evidence that he concurred(c) with the idea of a Maltese Ogygia in The Original of Monarchies(d).

Strabo referred to “Eleusis and Athens on the Triton River [in Boiotia]. These cities, it is said, were founded by Kekrops (Cecrops), when he ruled over Boiotia (Boeotia), then called Ogygia, but were later wiped out by inundations.”(i) However, Strabo also declared that Ogygia was to be found in the ‘World Ocean’ or Atlantic (j). To say the least, these two conflicting statements require explanation.

Richard Hennig opted for Madeira following the opinion of von Humboldt. Spanuth argued strongly against either Madeira or the Canaries[0017.149] and gave his support to the Azores as the most likely location of Calypso’s Island.. Not unexpectedly the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic, have also been nominated as Ogygia by other 20th century researchers such as Sykes(e) and Mertz[397]. In a 2019 paper(f), Gerard Janssen also placed Ogygia in the Azores, specifically naming the island of Saõ Miguel, which both Iman Wilkens [610.239] and Spanuth [015.226] also claimed. Spanuth added that until the 18th-century Saõ Miguel was known as umbilicus maris, which is equivalent to the Greek term, omphalos thallasses, used by Homer to describe Ogygia in chapter eight of the Odyssey!

Homer in his Odyssey identifies Ogygia as the home of Calypso. The Roman poet Catullus writing in the 1st century BC linked Ogygia with Calypso in Malta(g). However, Gozo’s claim is challenged by those supporting Gavdos in Crete(k). This opinion has been expounded more fully by Katerina Kopaka in a paper published in the journal Cretica Chronica(l), where her starting point is the claim that Gavdos had been previously known as Gozo! Another Greek claimant is Lipsi(o) in the Dodecanese. We must also add Mljet in Croatia to the list of contenders claiming(p) to have been the home of Calypso. Mljet is also competing with Malta as the place where St. Paul was shipwrecked!

>Further south is the beautiful Greek island of Othoni near Corfu where local tradition claims an association with Calypso. An article on the Greek Reporter website(r) suggests that Evidence confirming this legend appears in the writings of Homer, who described a strong scent of cypress on Ogygia. Many cypress trees are grown on Othonoi.

Shortly after departing the island on a raft, Odysseus is shipwrecked on Scheria, which we know of today as Corfu. This implies that the two islands Homer described were relatively close. Likewise, the islands of Othonoi and Corfu are separated by a relatively short distance. Due to this mythological connection, during the 16th century, many naval maps described Othonoi as ‘Calypso island.‘”

Mifsud quotes another Roman of the same period, Albius Tibullus, who also identified Atlantis with Calypso. Other Maltese writers have seen all this as strong evidence for the existence of Atlantis in their region. Delisle de Sales considered Ogygia to be between Italy and Carthage, but opted for Sardinia as the remains of Calypso’s island.

Other researchers such as Geoffrey Ashe and Andrew Collins have opted for the Caribbean as the home of Ogygia. Another site supports Mesoamerica as the location of Ogygia, which the author believes can be equated with Atlantis(h).  An even more extreme suggestion by Ed Ziomek places Ogygia in the Pacific(b)!

In the Calabria region of southern Italy lies Capo Collone (Cape of Columns). 18th-century maps(m) show two or more islands off the cape with one named Ogygia offering echoes of Homer’s tale.  Respected atlases as late as 1860 continued to show a non-existent island there. It seems that these were added originally by Ortelius, inspired by Pseudo-Skylax and Pliny(n) . Additionally, there is a temple to Hera Lacinia at Capo Colonne, which is reputed to have been founded by Hercules!

By way of complete contrast, both Felice Vinci and John Esse Larsen have proposed that the Faeroe Islands included Ogygia. In the same region, Iceland was nominated by Gilbert Pillot as the location of Ogygia and Calypso’s home[742]. Ilias D. Mariolakos, a Greek professor of Geology also makes a strong case(a) for identifying Iceland with Ogygia based primarily on the writings of Plutarch. He also supports the idea of Minoans in North America.

A more recent suggestion has come from Manolis Koutlis[1617], who, after a forensic examination of various versions of Plutarch’s work, in both Latin and Greek, also placed Ogygia in North America, specifically on what is now the tiny island of St. Paul at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada, a gulf that has also been proposed as the location of Atlantis.

Jean-Silvain Bailly also used the writings of Plutarch to sustain his theory of Ogygia, which he equated with Atlantis having an Arctic location[0926.2.299],  specifically identifying Iceland as Ogygia/Atlantis with the islands of Greenland, Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen (Svalbard) as the three islands equally distant from it and each other.

The novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902) identified Pantelleria as Calypso’s Island, but the idea received little support(q).

However, Ireland has been linked with Ogygia by mainly Irish writers. In the 17th century historian, Roderick O’Flaherty(1629-1718), wrote a history of Ireland entitled Ogygia[0495], while in the 19th century, Margaret Anne Cusack (1832-1899) also wrote a history in which she claimed[1342] a more explicit connection. This was followed in 1911 by a book[1343] by Marion McMurrough Mulhall in which she also quotes Plutarch to support the linking of Ireland and Ogygia. More recently, in The Origin of Culture[0217Thomas Dietrich promotes the same view, but offers little hard evidence to support it.

>In 2023, an article on the Greek Reporter website renewed speculation regarding the possible identification of Ireland with Ogygia(s).

This matter would appear to be far from a resolution.

[0495]+ http://archive.org/stream/ogygiaorchronolo02oflaiala/ogygiaorchronolo02oflaiala_djvu.txt

(a) https://greeceandworld.blogspot.ie/2013_08_01_archive.html

(b) https://www.flickr.com/photos/10749411@N03/5284413003/

(c) See: Archive 3439

(d) http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00040

(e) ‘Where Calypso may have Lived’ (Atlantis, 5, 1953, pp 136-137)

(f)https://www.academia.edu/38535990/AT LANTIC_OGUGIA_AND_KALUPSO (Eng)

https://www.homerusodyssee.nl/id26.htm (Dutch)

(g) Lib. iv, Eleg. 1

(h) See: Archive 3439

(i) Strabo, Geography 9. 2. 18

(j) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogygia

(k) https://gavdosgreece.page.tl

(l) https://www.academia.edu/24851908/Kopaka_K._2011_Gozo_of_Malta_Gozo_of_Crete_Gavdos_._Thoughts_on_a_twinned_Mediterranean_micro-insular_toponymy_and_epic_tradition_???????_???????_??_13-32

(m) https://nl.pinterest.com/pin/734438651719489108/

(n) See: Note 5 in Armin Wolf’s Wayback Machine (archive.org)

(o) http://www.wiw.gr/english/lipsi_niriedes/

(p) National Park The island of Mljet Croatia | Adriagate (archive.org) *

(q) https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/snap-shots-samuel-butler-esq-1893-94 

(r) https://greekreporter.com/2022/10/17/othonoi-island-westernmost-point-greece/ 

(s) https://greekreporter.com/2023/01/21/odysseus-travel-ireland/ 

 

 

Madeira

Madeira, an autonomous region of Portugal, is a small group of islands in the Atlantic, just north of the Canaries. The archipelago includes the tiny independent Principality of Pontinha(a), which today has bitcoin as its official currency.

The French philosopher, Voltaire, seems to have been somewhat sceptical about the existence of Atlantis, remarking in his Essai sur le moeurs [1504] that“ if it were true that such a part of the world ever existed. Most likely it was none other than the island of Madeira.”

Ignatius Donnelly proposed it as one possible location for Atlantis. This followed soundings taken in the area at the end of the 19th century, which suggested that there existed a submerged map-madeiraridge linking the islands with the European mainland. Madeira is frequently linked with the Azores and the Canaries as visible remains of Atlantis.

In the 1920s Edwin Bjorkman noted [0181.68] that many of his peers, including Richard Hennig(d), considered Madeira to have been Homer’s Ogygia, itself frequently associated with Atlantis.

>By way of balance, I must include reasons offered by Stelios Pavlou for not identifying the Madeiras as one the remnants of Atlantis

1.) There is no evidence that this archipelago was once a larger island.

2.) There is no evidence that it was ever connected to the Canary Islands or the Azores.

3.) There are no traces of a megalithic civilization there(f).<

Atlantisforschung has published a short list of other commentators who have considered the Madeiras as possible remnants of Atlantis,

Andrew Collins in Gateway to Atlantis [072.80] refers to a work by Pseudo-Aristotle, On Marvellous Things Heard, in which the author describes a prosperous island with navigable rivers, outside the Pillars of Heracles. There are no rivers on Madeira, a fact that has not gone unnoticed. Cyrus H. Gordon wrote that ‘west of Africa there are no navigable rivers until Haiti, Cuba and the American mainland’. Cuba being Collins’ preferred Atlantis location, such comments tenuously supported his claim and also ruled out Madeira.

Some commentators such as Gilbert Pillot[742.46] have remarked on the similarity of Madeira to the island of Aeolia described in Homer’s Odyssey.

There are a couple of YouTube clips(a)(b) that purport to show the remains of Atlantis on Madeira. In fact, all they show are ruins, subjectively identified as Atlantis. Apart from this, unlike Atlantis, Madeira is obviously not submerged.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid the closest you’ll come to Plato’s famous island of Madeira is in a bottle of Blandy’s Atlantis rosé wine.

(a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Rkg1T2dl4

(b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGswJuo0cE8

(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20170905084632/https://principality-pontinha.com/index.html

(d) Neue Erkenntnisse zur Geographie Homers”, Rheinischen Museum für Altphilologie (N. F) Band 75, 1926, S. 266, 282

(e) Madeira (Archipel) – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) 

(f) Maria Lamas – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) *