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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Thomas Pennant

Kirwan, Richard

Richard Kirwan (1733-1812). Irish scientist a supporter of the theory of phlogiston.

Richard Kirwan (1733-1812) was an Irish scientist, who had a brief (no pun intended) career as a barrister, which he abandoned in favour of his scientific interests, ending up as president of the Royal Irish Academy from 1799 until his death.

Kirwan is usually linked with Buffon, Whitehurst and Pennant regarding the reality of Atlantis (Atalantis) and its location in the Atlantic.

Pennant Thomas

Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) was a British naturalist and antiquary who ThomasPennantreferred to Atlantis in his Introduction to the Arctic Zoology[1244], describing England as>being in ancient times ‘peinsulated’, before being completely separated from Europe by some unspecified catastrophe and is now the remains of Plato’s island or as he calls it ‘Atlantica insula’.<

His book can be read online.

 

McCulloh, Dr. James Haines (L)

Dr. James Haines McCulloh (1793-1870) was an officer in the U.S. Army, who wrote(a) a number of books on the origins of the native Americans. In the course of his work he touched on the subject of Atlantis, or as he called it Atalantis, supporting the idea of it being located in the Atlantic in the following words;

“The speculations of Ray, Whitehurst, Buffon, Kirwan, and Pennant, upon the subject of the island Atlantis, are all in favour of its former existence, and the arguments they produce from the present appearance of the Azores, Canaries, etc., are as plausible as can be expected when the great antiquity of the subject is considered. If to their considerations our few proofs be added, it may not be presumptuous to think the tradition almost well established.” [0876].

(a)  https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5hQOAAAAQAAJ&q=atlantis#v=snippet&q=atlantis&f=false

 

Britain * .

Britain. For as long as  I can remember, received wisdom told us that the ancestors of the British (and Irish) had Celtic origins. Then in 2007, Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, professor of genetics at Oxford University ‘threw a cat among the pigeons’ when he bluntly wrote “Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celtsin Origins of the British [1950].R.Cedric Leonard reviews Oppenheimer’s claims in the book and two earlier papers(d)(e)(f).

Britain as the home of Atlantis has been claimed by many writers and not without undertones of nationalism by some of the British authors. Nevertheless, support for the idea has been offered by a number of more disinterested researchers. Probably the first to advance this idea was John Wallis (1660-1703), who, in 1700, proposed that the Atlantis story had been corrupted over time and was a reference to the destruction of the landbridge that had existed between France and England, leaving a British Atlantis more isolated (The original Brexit!)(c).  It was nearly a century before the idea was taken up by Thomas Pennant and then more than another century passed before Cooper, Spence, Beaumont and Calestani produced related theories. Fast forward to the 21st century, when Donald Ingram identifies the Wessex II culture as Atlantean and Melville Nicholls considers Britain to be one of the Atlantean islands referred to by Plato.

The precise location, the exact date and the probable cause of the destruction of Atlantis are the basis for a range of theories. There is general acceptance that following the deglaciation at the end of the last Ice Age vast regions of low-lying land that had linked Ireland and Britain to mainland Europe were gradually flooded.

One school of thought is that these flooded regions contained Atlantis, of which the most extensive was in the North Sea and is now known as Doggerland. Other offshore locations proposed for Atlantis are the Celtic Shelf (Gidon, Steuerwald & Koudroiavtsev) and the Irish Sea (Dunbavin). These lands had been settled and following the inundations, its inhabitants were forced to retreat to the higher ground of what is modern Europe and the British Isles.

David L. Hildebrandt in Atlantis-The Reawakening [1602] proposes a reworking of the ‘Atlantis in Britain’ theory with some new perspectives. For me, his date, location and identity of the Atlanteans do not ring true, particularly why Stone Age people in Southern Britain would want to launch an attack on Athens, over 2,000 miles away, a city-state that did not even exist at the time. Those early Britons did not have the wheel, yet Plato tells us that the Atlanteans had chariots!

Another view is that Atlantis was destroyed by the impact of a comet or asteroid, an idea espoused by Dunbavin and Spence.

E. J. de Meester on his now-defunct website postulated a link between Stonehenge and Atlantis(b). After arbitrarily dividing Plato’s dimensions by ten, he suggested that the plain described by Plato lay in a rectangle between Salisbury and Chichester.

A recent suggestion by a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, places the biblical Tarshish in Britain(h) an idea also supported by a Christadelphian website(g).

(a) https://sabidius.blogspot.com/2010/06/atlantis-was-it-britain.html

(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20090614050055/https://home-3.tiscali.nl/~meester7/engatlantis.html

(c) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1700.010

(d) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/ 

(e) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestryrevisited/ 

(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20170113172907/http://www.atlantisquest.com/Bretons.html 

(g) Incredible Archaeological Find Proves Tarshish Is Britain! (archive.org) *

(h) https://roodgoudvanparvaim.nl/8-tarshish-as-great-britain-and-the-paradox-with-atlantis/