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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 »
Sahara
Ahaggar Mountains
The Ahaggar Mountains, also known as the Hoggar Mountains are highlands situated in Southern Algeria.
Stephen E. Franklin also opted for an African location for the Garden of Eden, placing it south of the Ahaggar Mountains near the Wadi Tafanasseta) He also claims that Mt. Tahat, the highest peak in the Ahaggars, was the original Atlas mountain referred to by Herodotus as the home of the Atlantes (sometimes Atarantes(b)).
Sprague de Camp noted [194.191] that Paul Borchardt identified ancient Mt. Atlas with the Ahaggar Mountains rather than the Atlas range in the Maghreb!
Lucile Taylor Hansen in The Ancient Atlantic [572], has included a speculative map taken from the Reader’s Digest showing Lake Tritonis, around 11.000 BC, as a megalake covering much of today’s Sahara, with the Ahaggar Mountains turned into an island. Atlantis is shown to the west in the Atlantic.
George Sarantitis, who identifies west Africa as Atlantis has also proposed(c) a vast network of huge inland lakes and waterways in what is now the Sahara, before its desertification. If true, this would probably left the Ahaggars as an island.
Count Khun de Prorock became convinced that Atlantis had a North African origin, specifically on the Hoggar Plateau.He also claimed to have identified the tomb of the legendary Tuareg queen, Tin Hinan, at the oasis of Abalessa in the Hoggar region(d) .
To the east and adjacent to the Ahaggar Mts.is Tassili National Park, where archaeologist Henri Lhote studied the remarkable neolithic cave paintings in Tassili-n’Ajjer [442]. Some of these depicted masked humanoid figures that led Lhote to suggest that they were evidence of prehistoric extraterrestrial visitors. One of these was dubbed the ‘Great Martian God’ and a decade later it was exploited by Erich von Däniken in the promotion of his ‘ancient astronauts’ ideas.
(a) Eight: Adam and Atlas–Eden and the Fall of Atlantis (lordbalto.com)
(b) W. W. How, J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus, BOOK IV, chapter 184 (tufts.edu)
(c) The Peninsula of Libya and the Journey of Herodotus – Plato Project (archive.org)
(d) Tin Hinan – Wikipedia *
Gilligan, Gary*
Gary Gilligan (1957- ) is a British author who has “studied Egyptology, Astronomy and Geology with an almost obsessive passion. When he first came across the theory of catastrophism, he was intrigued by the possibility that the Solar System had undergone recent upheavals due to cosmic chaos.”
Gilligan is arguably the most radical of the catastrophists and ancient chronology revisionists publishing today. Some of his ideas make those of Velikovsky as well as James and Rohl seem somewhat tame.
Among his many extreme claims are (1) Our Moon was only captured in the first millennium BC(a), (2) The Saharan sands, he claims are extraterrestrial in origin [1365], (3) The ancient year had only 360 days [1385.61] and (4) The ancient Egyptian climate was milder than today as indicated by a red sun, rather than today’s yellow disk!(c)
In a short 2012 paper now republished in October 2022 on the Thunderbolts website Gilligan proposes that the Amazon rainforest is only a few thousand years old. He argues that the Amazon region is today dependent on the 54,000 tons of fine dust received daily from the Sahara and since the Sahara did not exist 6,000 years ago neither did the Amazon rainforest which he says is claimed to be 55 million years old!(d) However, an article from Scientific American (July 7, 2014) also offers an even more recent date for the development of the rainforest, suggesting that “the people of the Amazon from2,500 to 500 years ago were farmers.”(e)
(a) http://www.gks.uk.com/moon-origin-egyptian/
(b) http://www.everythingselectric.com/forum/index.php?topic=347.0 (link broken) *
(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest
(e) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amazon-rainforest-is-much-younger-than-commonly-believed/
Bisceglia, Carlos Alberto
Carlos Alberto Bisceglia is the author of Atlantis 2021 – Lost Continent Discovered [1895]. He has several other books currently being translated from their original Italian.
Bisceglia’s central claim is that Atlantis was situated on an ‘island’ in northwest Africa. He claims “that the ‘geographical coordinates’ left by Plato indicate that the empire of Atlantis included the regions enclosed by Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the adjacent islands, and possibly southern Spain.” He further claims that this territory was known to the Egyptians as ‘Ma’, being an abbreviation of Meshwash!
The African Humid Period which ended between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, saw North Africa as home to some very extensive river systems and huge lakes. In what is now Western Sahara, the Tamanrasset River flowed from the Atlas Mountains southward and then west to the Atlantic. This creates a virtual ‘island’ enclosing the Atlantean territory delineated above, leaving a relatively small ‘isthmus’ in the Atlas mountains between the Mediterranean and the source of the river.
A comparable claim was made by Michael Hübner in 2008, when he described the Souss-Massa plain of Morocco as an island, surrounded as it is by mountains and called ‘island’ by the native Amazigh people!
I did not find Bisceglia’s claim convincing. His insistence that the Atlantis war took place 9,000 years before Solon, millennia before Athens even existed and certainly well past the African Humid Period is, for me, untenable. His book lacks focus and could have been fruitfully edited to half its size. Having described his Atlantis, he wanders off all over the world to Göbekli Tepe, Gunung Padang, Nan Madol along with many other places, all interesting, but without any real connection to Atlantis in NW Africa. He names the Richat Structure along with the 50km distant Semsiyat Dome as the capital(s) of Atlantis! According to Bisceglia, the larger structure (Richat) was reserved for the deity, the smaller one (Semsiyat) for his ‘people’!
Nevertheless, Bisceglia offers a pathetic explanation as to why his chosen Atlantis location is not submerged by suggesting that his Land of Ma was confused with the Land of Mu (Sundaland) in the Pacific and that the two separate accounts ‘were merged into one’. He adds “how the Egyptian priests knew this is a mystery. Evidently, some survivors from Sundaland arrived in some way in Egypt”
However, Bisceglia made one simple but highly pertinent comment – “If Plato had thought that Atlantis was an island located in what we today call the Atlantic Ocean, he would have written that his Atlantis was ‘in the Middle of Okeanos’.” For the Greeks of Plato’s time, Okeanos referred specifically to the great river that encircled the known world. Instead. he placed Atlantis in the Atlantic Sea, which in my opinion brings us back to the Mediterranean.
In 2022, Bisceglia’s entire book was plagiarised under the name of Annabel Caras and is still>>(8th August, 2023)<<on sale at Amazon.
Sarkar, Pabhat Rainjan (L)
Pabhat Rainjan Sarkar (1921-1990) was an Indian philosopher and spiritual leader with followers in over 130 countries. I am reliably informed that he expressed a number of beliefs regarding Atlantis, the core of which was that it was a huge continent that existed in the Atlantic. He also believed that Atlantis joined Africa and Iberia with a landbridge at Gibraltar. The destruction of Atlantis by an extensive earthquake separated Europe from Africa and also led to the creation of the Sahara.
In the book, Travels with the Mystic Master(a) by Dada Dharmavedananda, Sarkar is quoted as saying that ” The old Atlantis is now underwater except for parts of Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland.”[1209.208]
(a) https://www.scribd.com/doc/11386818/Travels-With-the-Mystic-Master
Karam, Christian C.
Christian C. Karam is a Brazilian archaeology student who has written a paper with the controversial, if not provocative title of Phoenicians in Brazil(a). In it he proposes that an encounter with an extraterrestrial body caused a global catastrophe, which caused a large part of the Andes to be uplifted, the Sahara to be dried out and Atlantis in the Atlantic to be submerged. He dates this event to around 9500 BC and believes that the Atlantean survivors fled to Africa.
Perhaps the first to suggest that the Phoenicians visited Brazil was Georgius Hornius in the 17th century. The matter was dealt with in greater detail(d) by the Austrian professor of history, Ludwig Schwennhagen, who flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. A Hungarian website(c) offers more on the development of this claim.
Karam names the Phoenicians as the thalassocratic successors to the Atlanteans. The main portion of his paper concerns the possibility or as he sees it, the probability, of Phoenician visits to and even colonisation of Brazil.
Ross T. Christensen (1918–1990) an American archaeologist supported the idea of Phoenicians in America(e). However, in my view, his early work as a Mormon missionary must bring into question his objectivity. Further evidence in support of Phoenicians in Brazil is presented elsewhere(b).
(a) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_phoenicians01.htm
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20190108071141/https://www.cristobalcolondeibiza.com/2eng/2eng16.htm
(c) https://tist-fla.blogspot.com/2013/12/foniciaiak-kozep-es-del-amerikaban.html (Hungarian)
(d) https://www.academia.edu/7848641/Fen%C3%ADcios_no_Brasil_parte_1_Ludwig_Schwennhagen (Portuguese) (offline Feb. 2016)
(e) https://www.ancientamerica.org/library/media/HTML/1ofnf5kk/15.%20THE%20PHOENICIANS%20AND%20THE%20ANCIENT%20CIVILIZATIONS%20OF%20AMERICA.htm?n=0 (Link Broken) See: Archive 2534
Frank, Karl Anton
Karl Anton Frank (1909-1986) was a German philologist and the author of a 1975 book, Sturm aus Atlantis [1009], in which he argues for Atlantis in the Sahara.
Sarantitis, George
George Sarantitis (1954- ) was born in Athens and is by profession an electronics 
engineer. He is also a serious student of Ancient Greek history and literature whose research(a) enabled him to present three papers to the 2008 Atlantis Conference. These included a revised translation of many of the keywords and phrases in Plato’s Atlantis texts. He quotes Strabo’s Geographica (3.5.5.20) to demonstrate the multiplicity of locations on offer for the Pillars of Heracles. He places Atlantis in North Africa at the Richat Structure, with the Pillars of Heracles situated in the Gulf of Gabes which formerly led to an inland sea where the chotts of Tunisia and Algeria are today, as well as a number of other lakes and rivers in what is now the Sahara.
He posits a number of large inland seas in Africa including a much larger Lake Chad(f). The 2014 May/June edition of Saudi Aramco World has an article(c) on the remnants of the ‘Green Sahara’, during what is known technically as the African Humid Period (9000-3000 BC). Sarantitis also claims that at one stage in the distant past Libya had been a peninsula. In a June 2015 report the University of Royal Holloway in London revealed that the size of Lake Chad was dramatically reduced in just a few hundred years(d). A similar map showing enormous inland North African lakes 13,000 years ago are included in Taylor Hansen’s The Ancient Atlantic [0527.36].
Sarantitis offers details of his theories on his extensively illustrated Plato Project website(a), which I wholeheartedly recommend readers to visit. He includes a rather technical forensic analysis of Plato’s use of myth. Sarantitis also suggests that the ‘unfinished’ Critias is in fact continued at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey (1.32-34).
Some of Sarantitis’ sections on the Methodology of Mythology will be difficult for non-academic readers, such as myself, to fully comprehend. For me, his proposal that there were two Atlantean Wars, which took place in 9600 BC and 8600 BC(e) is extremely difficult to accept, since those wars were with Athens and Egypt that did not even exist at those dates! I find it difficult to accept this apparent abandonment of commonsense and the science of archaeology.
In 2010, Sarantitis published his theories in The Apocalypse of a Myth in Greek. Now (2017) that work has been translated into English and is currently being prepared for publication with a new title of Plato’s Atlantis: Decoding the Most Famous Myth.
There is now an extensive video clip Q & A session available on Sarantitis’ website(b).
Sarantitis’ theories have been been given additional exposure with a new 2024 Jack Kelley documentary entitled The Atlantis Code that is now available on Amazon and YouTube. The official website for the film includes a number of interviews with Kelley and other commentators(g).
Thorwald C. Franke has highlighted in his newsletter No. 225 one of the fundamental errors in Sarantitis’ theory is his claim that Atlantis as the Richat Structure existed around 10,000 BC. Franke provides a link to an earlier paper debunking this idea(h). I fully concur with Franke and would add that no one has explained how Atlantis in West Africa could attack Athens millennia before it existed. Not only is the suggestion plain silly, but the proposal that 12,000 years ago, when little more than logboats(i) existed, an attack was launched on a non-existent Athens, nearly 4000 km away by land (3000 km by sea) from the ‘Structure’, is pure nonsense.
(a) Plato Project – Timeus & Critias: The ultimate explanation (archive.org)
(b) FAQ’s – Plato Project (archive.org)
(c) https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/201403/last.lakes.of.the.green.sahara.htm
(e) Proceedings of the 2008 Atlantis Conference[750.389](editor S.Papamarinopoulos)
(f) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150629162542.htm *
(g) https://www.empirebuilderproductions.com/the-atlantis-puzzle *
(h) https://www.atlantis-scout.de/atlantis-10000-bc-engl.htm *
(i) https://hakaimagazine.com/news/uncovering-culture-bronze-age-logboats/ *
Hamy, Ernest Theodore (L)
Dr. Ernest Theodore Hamy (1842-1908) was a French doctor of medicine, 
although he was better known as an anthropologist. Alexander Braghine[156.42] quotes Hamy as locating Atlantis in the Atlantic between Spain, Ireland and North America.
Hamy also gave his name to the famous King-Hamy Map (c.1502), which he purchased in 1885. One of the remarkable features of the map is that it shows the Sahara as a fertile region with rivers, lakes and cities!
Lake Tritonis *
Lake Tritonis is frequently referred to by the classical writers. Ian Wilson refers to Scylax of Caryanda as having “specifically described Lake Tritonis extending in his time over an area of 2,300 km2.“ He also cites Herodotus as confirming it as still partly extant in his time, a century later, describing it as a ‘great lagoon’, with a ‘large river’ (the Triton) flowing into it.[185.185]
Lake Tritonis was considered the birthplace of Athene, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom, after whom Athens is named. The exact location of the lake is disputed but there is some consensus that the salty marshes or chotts of central Tunisia and North-East Algeria are the most likely candidates. It appears that these marshes originally formed a large inland sea connected to the Mediterranean but due to seismic activity in the area were cut off from the sea. Diodorus Siculus records this event in his third book.
I should also mention that Lake Tritonis along with the Greek island of Lemnos and the river Thermodon in northern Turkey, now known as Terme Çay, have all been associated with the Amazons(d).
Edward Herbert Bunbury, a former British MP, included a chapter(a) on Lake Tritonis in his 1879 book on the history of ancient
geography [1531.v1.316]+.
In 1883, Edward Dumergue published[659]+ a brief study of the Tunisian chotts, which he concluded were the remnants of an ancient inland sea that had been connected to the Mediterranean Sea at the Gulf of Gabes.
Lucile Taylor Hansen in The Ancient Atlantic[572], has included a speculative map taken from Reader’s Digest showing Lake Tritonis, around 11.000 BC, as a megalake covering much of today’s Sahara, with the Ahaggar Mountains turned into an island. Atlantis is shown to the west in the Atlantic.
In 1967 Egerton Sykes published a paper entitled The Sahara Inland Sea in which he describes a vast inland sea of ‘remarkable proportions’ and “is attested not only by classical references but also by the fact that beneath most of it lies a layer of brackish water ranging from 200 to 500 feet below the ground. The various oases are believed to be located on patches where the depth is only about 50 feet, conducive to plant survival. The climatic change seems to have happened quite recently, around 5000 BC. B.C., since the classics contain numerous references to its [the inland sea] existence.”(e)
I should mention here that the Atlantis theory of George Sarantitis is entirely dependent on extensive inland waterways including the chotts of Tunisia and Algeria as well as a number of other large lakes and rivers in what is now the Sahara.
In modern times, Alberto Arecchi has taken the idea further[079] and suggested that the inland sea, where the chotts are now, was the original ‘Atlantic Sea’ and that the city of Atlantis was situated on an extended landmass to the east of Tunisia and connected to Sicily due to a lower sea level. Arecchi’s identification of the chotts with Lake Tritonis has now been adopted by Lu Paradise in a May 2015 blog(c). The Qattara Depression of Northern Egypt also contains a series of salt lakes and marshes and is believed by others to have been Lake Tritonis.
Cindy Clendenon is the author of a book [801.397] on hydromythology in which she concludes that “the now-extinct Lake Tritonis once was a Cyrenaican lagoon-sabkha complex near today’s Sabkha Ghuzayyil and Marsa Brega, Libya”(b), not in Tunisia! Clyde Winters also placed Lake Tritonis in Libya(f).
[659]+ https://archive.org/details/chottstunisorgr01dumegoog
[1531.v1.316]+ https://archive.org/stream/historyofancient01bunb#page/n6/mode/1up/search/Tritonis Vol.1
(a) Lake Tritonis – Jason and the Argonauts (archive.org) *
(b) https://www.abebooks.com/9780981842103/Hydromythology-Ancient-Greek-World-Earth-0981842100/plp
(d) https://www.myrine.at/Amazons/mobilIndex.html
(e) The Saharan Inland Sea – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(f) https://africanbloodsiblings.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/fertile-african-crescent-by-clyde-winters/
Stecchini, Livio Catullo
Livio Catullo Stecchini (1913-1979) was an Italian science historian with a special interest in ancient metrology and cartography. In an unpublished work called Sahara, he advocated São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea, as the location of Atlantis. He further claims that the myth of the Argonauts concerns their travels along the vast river systems that once existed across the Sahara, now represented by dried-up watercourses such as Wadi Igharghar and Wadi Tafanasset.
Stecchini was of the opinion that the metric system introduced in the 18th century by the French was almost identical to that used in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC.
Stecchini also wrote an extensive appendix for Peter Tompkins’ Secrets of the Great Pyramid[783] on the relationship of ancient measures to the Great Pyramid.
His radical views eventually led this respected academic to be shunned by his peers.
A site dedicated to his work is available on the Internet(a).
>Stecchini was an important contributor to a special edition of American Behavioral Scientist dedicated to the work of Immanuel Velikovsky in September 1963. This was later expanded into The Velikovsky Affair [1172] by Alfred De Grazia.(b)<
(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20191231054446/http://www.metrum.org/index.htm