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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 »
Tibet
Ophir
Ophir is referred to in the Bible as a source of gold, silver, precious stones and exotic animals. King Solomon was reputed to have received a cargo of such goodies every three years, a detail which seemingly points to Ophir having been a considerable distance from Israel.
>>The location of Ophir has been the subject speculation from at least the beginning of the 16th century, when Peter Martyr, In a letter written in May 1500, claimed that Christopher Columbus identified Hispaniola with Ophir(k).
Later in the same century, Benito Arias Montano proposed Peru as the location of Ophir, an idea popular with others at that time according to José de Acosta. The suggestion has not been abandoned as the American explorer, Gene Savoy (1927-2007), was still promoting it in the 21st century(l).<<
The exact location of Ophir is the subject of continuing controversy. In broad terms the most popular regions suggested are, or have been, India(g), Africa(f) and the Americas(a), but they were not the only proposed locations, even Australia and the Solomon Islands were considered. Emilio Spedicato has opted for Tibet, where an ancient goldmine fits the bill, which he outlines in his paper entitled Ophir, It’s Location Unveiled(h).
>>The Jewish Encyclopedia offers the suggestion that “The most probable view is that Ophir was situated in Arabia. This is indicated, as mentioned above, by the Biblical reference in Gen. x. 29. An old tradition recorded by Eupolemus (c. 150 B.C.) also assigns Ophir to this region, identifying it with the island of Uphre in the Red Sea.”(j)<<
There is also a claim that the Batanes Islands off the Northern Philippines held the site of Ophir(b). Further west, Dhani Irwanto has claimed that Punt was also known as Ophir(d) and was situated on Sumatera (Sumatra) in Indonesia(c). However, he went further and also located Atlantis in Indonesia in his book, Atlantis: The lost city is in the Java Sea [1093]. His chosen site is just north of Bawean Island in the Java Sea.
However, Irwanto was not the first to link Atlantis with Ophir, Theodore L. Urban was the author of a paper delivered to the Lancaster County Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1897. In it, he denied that Atlantis had been completely destroyed and argued that the biblical Ophir was in fact Atlantis, suggesting that it had been located in the Americas, which explained the three years that the round trip took(e).
Jason Colavito has published articles written by Thomas Crawford Johnston in 1892(i) that he later developed into his 1913 book Did the Phoenicians Discover America [1902+] in which he places Ophir in America!
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophir#Americas
(b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZqYQpmRCx0
(c) https://atlantisjavasea.com/2015/11/14/land-of-punt-is-sumatera/
(d) https://atlantisjavasea.com/2019/06/16/land-of-ophir/
(e) https://openlibrary.org/works/OL10326701W/American_Indians (p.91)
(f) https://www.historicmysteries.com/lost-mine-ophir/
(g) https://www.britannica.com/place/Ophir
(h) Ophir, its location revealed (2010-q-conference.com) *
OPHIR 27-10-09 (2010-q-conference.com)
(i) Phoenicians in America – JASON COLAVITO
(j) OPHIR – JewishEncyclopedia.com *
(k) Ophir – Wikipedia *
Denisovans
Denisovan is the name given to an extinct sub-species of hominid(a). Their name is derived from the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia. Only fragments of four individuals have been identified so far. While the first Denisovan remains were found in Siberia, there is now evidence that they were the earliest hominins on the Tibetan Plateau (b).
It has also been determined that they interbred with Neanderthals, while a recent DNA study(d) indicates that the Denisovans and modern humans were possibly ‘makin whoopee’ as recently as 15,000 years ago!
It did not take long for the speculative history brigade to jump on this new bandwagon. Andrew Collins has now prepared for publication The Cygnus Key[1509] in which he claims to present “compelling evidence showing that the earliest origins of human culture, religion, and technology derive from the Denisovans, the true creators of the lost civilization long known to exist but never before proved.”
In 2019, Collins co-authored a new book together with Greg Little in which they combine their speculative abilities to produced a full book on the physical and intellectual attributes of the Denisovans, based on a few bone fragments! >The full title of the book is rather revealing – Denisovan Origins : Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America [1672]. Collins discusses the book in an interview in New Dawn magazine(e).<
The book received the imprimatur of Graham Hancock, so the collective name recognition value of Collins, Hancock and Little should boost sales. Jason Colavito has critiqued this volume(c), highlighting the amount of dubious material that the authors have previously published is included in this offering.
This comment is nearly identical to that expressed by the late Colin Wilson relating to the Neanderthals whom he claimed had 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[0336].
(a) https://www.ancient.eu/Denisovan/
(d) https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/denisovans-mated-modern-humans-0011688
>(e) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia3/historia_humanidad217.htm<
Sumerians *
Sumeria was one of the earliest civilisations emerging between the 6th and 5th millennia BC and was situated in what is now central Iraq.
It was unknown in Europe until the middle of the 19th century. With the discovery and the decipherment of the Sumerian cuneiform tablets the sophistication of their culture prompted the idea that Sumer had been ‘the cradle of civilisation.’ Subsequent discoveries, such as those in the Indus Valley and more recently Göbekli Tepe have now somewhat diluted that idea.
Nevertheless, there is an acceptance that the Sumerians were very advanced in the field of mathematics and astronomy. The late Ernest McClain, a professor of music, was convinced that music theory could be traced back to the Sumerians as early as 3000 BC.
The origin of the Sumerians is still something of a mystery as is their language which seems to be an ‘isolate’, unrelated to any known language group(q). The Flem-Aths in an Atlantis Rising article (Issue 95) and Atlantis Beneath the Ice [981.70] claimed a cultural and genetic linkage between the Sumerians and the Haida of northwest America. The Flem-Aths also noted [062.54] that some have linked the languages of the two peoples!
Ronnie Gallagher has suggested that migrants from the Caucasus had provided the impetus that led to the development of the Sumerian civilisation. Gallagher’s theory is supported by Jerald Jack Starr on his Sumerian Shakespeare website, who emphatically attributes a Caucasian origin to the Sumerians(l).
Emilio Spedicato has controversially suggested that the Sumerians came from the Tibetan region!(m) Equally provocative were the views of Catherine Acholonu-Olumba, who as the author of Eden in Sumer on the Niger [1833], claimed that her book, “provides multidisciplinary evidence of the actual geographical location in West Africa of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis and the original homeland of the Sumerian people before their migration to the “Middle East”. By translating hitherto unknown pre-cuneiform inscriptions of the Sumerians, Catherine Acholonu and Sidney Davis have uncovered thousands of years of Africa’s lost pre-history and evidences of the West African origins of the earliest Pharaohs and Kings of Egypt and Sumer such as Menes and Sargon the Great.”(p)
Sumeria has now been proposed as a possible source of the Atlantis story. Dr Ashok Malhotra, a professor of Engineering, has suggested(a) that that ‘the likelihood of the Atlantis stories being of Sumerian origin is strengthened by the fact that the submergence of ancient cities was a strong part of the Sumerian mythology. It dominates their historical tradition. The destruction of the ancient city as a result of sin was also part of their beliefs.’ Malhotra then proposes that these Sumerian stories reflected actual flooding events in the Indus Valley region that were brought first to Sumeria and then were later transferred to Egypt and from thence via Solon to Plato to us.
George Michanowsky went much further and claimed that the Sumerians had known Atlantis under the name of NI-DUK-KI, known today as Dilmun[282.66]. The renowned Henry Rawlinson interpreted this name to mean ‘blessed hill’ or ‘blessed isle’. While Michanowsky’s suggestion is highly speculative, if correct, it would be the earliest known reference to Atlantis.
The Sumerian king list(e) from Larsa records eight kings (some versions note ten) before the Deluge, which may have been reflected, in a distorted fashion, in the ten patriarchs of Genesis and/or the ten kings of Atlantis! Another suggested link is with the eight generations between Adam and Noah recorded in Genesis chapter 5.
John Sassoon would seem to support Malhotra’s thesis in his book[566], which proposes a Sumerian origin for the Jews with possible earlier links with the Indus Valley. He is not concerned with Atlantis, just the ancestry of the Jewish people of whom Abraham was born in Sumeria around 2000-1800 BC. Sassoon’s views offer a possible transmission route for Eastern traditions and myths to have reached Egypt and subsequently through Solon to Athens.
More recently, Dr Willem McLoud, a South African researcher, commented that “we have good reason to think that Atlantis was not located beyond the pillars of Heracles in the Atlantic Ocean, as is so often propagated, but that it was actually none other than the ancient land of Sumer itself.” Mcloud is primarily concerned with the Sumerians and Akkadians, which he will expand on in a forthcoming book(n).
In 2001, a book by Radek Brychta was published in the Czech Republic in which he also advocates a Sumerian connection. He identifies Atlantis with the legendary Dilmun of Sumerian legend and locates it on the Indus civilisation island of Dholavira. Excerpts from this fascinating book are available on the Internet and are worth a read.
However, the most extreme claims came from Zechariah Sitchin who proposed that the Sumerians had been ‘influenced’ by ancient astronauts from the planet Nibiru, which information is to be found in their cuneiform tablets if Sitchin’s translation is to be believed. Similar daft ideas(g) have been put forward by Hermann Burgard[1316] but so far have only been foisted on a German-reading public.
As if that was not bad enough, we now (Oct 2016) have the Iraqi Transport Minister claiming, among other matters, that the Sumerians launched spaceships 8,000 years ago(h)!
The Sumerian texts also crop up in the wild theories of Dieter Bremer[1022] and Jakob Vorberger, who claim that Atlantis was a space station(I)!
Jim Allen, the leading advocate of ‘Atlantis in the Andes’ has also claimed(b) a Sumerian connection with South America citing Ruth & Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, who include in their book[838.293] three pages of Sumerian words compared with the language of ancient Peru as well as other cultural aspects there. They also believed that Sargon (2369-2314 BC) was known in Peru as the deity Viracocha! Their fanciful idea stems from an account of Sargon sailing to the West and spending three years there! Zhirov supported this claim[458.23] describing it as ”a seemingly semi-fantastic theory”. My reason for considering this claim to be nonsensical, is simply that Sargon was continually engaged in expanding his empire and constantly dealing with rebellions in the various city-states that he ruled over. The idea that he took three years out to visit America, 14,000 km away, is in no way credible.
Nevertheless, the idea of Sargon in South America persists with James Bailey repeating it in Sailing to Paradise[0150.66] and more recently by the Afrocentrist, Clyde Winters in an article on the Ancient Origins website(f) in which he quotes Bailey and the Verrills as supporting Lake Titicaca as the Lake Manu of Sumerian tradition. A further article(j) on the same website begins with the forceful claim that “it is becoming increasingly clear that the Sumerians had established a colony in South America called Kuga-Ki.” The paper is based on a series of questionable artefacts, the Fuente Magna Bowl, the Crespi Collection and the Pokoyia monument!
The Fuente Magna Bowl is frequently offered as evidence of a pre-Columbian link with the Sumerians in America(c), although its provenance is unclear and there are the inevitable suggestions of a hoax. A sceptical view of the ‘Bowl’ by Carl Feagans(k) is available.
Michel Leygues has published two papers in which he offers evidence that the Sumerian and Akkadian languages can be identified in the languages of many of the native America peoples including the Hopi, Navajo and Incas(s)(t). Leygues also “presents the hypothesis that a kinship exists between Yamato Kotoba ideographic values, and Sumerian and Akkadian values. This despite a great geographical distance between Mesopotamia and Japan, and at different historical periods of language use. “(u)
Other commentators have suggested that the Sumerians reached Spain. Dr Paul Haupt (1858-1926}, an early Assyriologist proposed that the ‘two rivers’ in the story of Utnapishtim, a Noachian equivalent, were the Guadalquivir and Guadiana of Andalusia(r). Mario Mas Fenollar is a modern advocate for Sumerians in Spain.
The very existence of Sumerians has recently been attacked in an appendix to The Three Ages of Atlantis[972] by Marin, Minella & Schievenin. They maintain that the Sumerian ‘language’ “could be an artificial construct created by Akkadian priests” to be used for liturgical purposes. These ideas were first expressed at the end of the 19th century by the respected Orientalist, Joseph Halévy. Andi Zeneli has expressed comparable ideas(d) regarding the Sumerian language.
Uwe Topper’s son Ilya has also put forward the idea that the Sumerians did not exist(o). His paper is a critique, originally in Spanish, of Gunnar Heinsohn’s Die Sumerer gab es nicht.
(a) In Search of Atlantis — Getting Closer (archive.org) (new link)
(c) https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1551445/posts
(d) https://sumeriantestament.blogspot.ie/2012/08/what-is-sumerian.html
(i) Mesopotamische Überlieferungen | Atlantis Mythologie (archive.org)
(k) https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2015/03/sumerians-in-bolivia-probably-not/
(l) https://sumerianshakespeare.com/734501.html
(m) https://www.academia.edu/6556879/AA_MER_MERU_rel_2
(n) Chapter summary – WhisperingTales (archive.org) *
(p) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262069423_Eden_In_Sumer_On_The_Niger
(q) The origin of the Sumerians and the great flood (archive.org)
(r) https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/528616.pdf
(s) Sumer, Akkad, And The Languages Of The Navajo, The Hopi, The Zuni (calameo.com)
(t) Akkad, Sumer, and Incas, Nazcas languages (calameo.com)
(u) Sumer, Akkad and Yamato Kotoba by michel leygues – Issuu
Ahnenerbe-SS *
Ahnenerbe-SS or to give it its full title, Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft (The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society), was founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1935 but did not become part of the SS until 
1940. It was one of the more bizarre aspects of the Nazi regime, as it attempted to give legitimacy to the notion of German supremacy by claiming that they were direct descendants from an original perfect race, the Atlanteans.
When you add this to the Nazi support for Hans Hoerbiger’s crazy cosmology(i), strange expeditions to Tibet, and SS agents attempting to steal Crystal Skulls in South America, you cannot help wondering how such eccentric activities could have been accepted by the higher echelons of the Nazi establishment. It is contended that the Germans maintained strong links with Tibet and it is reported that when the Russians entered Berlin in 1945 they found many Tibetan corpses in SS uniforms, apparently after committing ritual suicide. This frequently quoted account is more than suspect.
The Ahnenerbe also studied the occult, a matter that has been investigated by a number of writers, including an early work[027] by Herbie Brennan, whose book is complemented by The Occult History of the Third Reich website(a). The same site reviews the place of Atlantis in Nazi thinking(g) as well as an overview of the Ahnenerbe(h).
The attitude towards occultism in Nazi Germany seems to have been ambivalent, as represented in a paper(j) by Eric Kurlander who noted that “In her groundbreaking work on German esotericsm, Corinna Treitel represents the views of much recent scholarship when she concludes, ‘Occultism ceased its highly public presence as part of Germany’s refomist milieu of cultural experimentation only after 1937, when the Nazi regime suppressed occultism as one of its many ideological enemies.’
The evidence in this chapter, while not entirely incompatible with this statement, suggests a more complex picture. First and most importantly, the Nazi regime was much more selective in its suppression of occult and other border sciences than Treitel and other revisionist accounts suggest.”
The quest for the Holy Grail was also high on the Ahnenerbe agenda, which was led by one Otto Rahn(k). He eventually fell from favour and as punishment was assigned to work in the SS-run Dachau concentration camp(a)(l).
The Ahnenerbe attracted many seeking to avoid military service, as its work was considered essential to the war effort. It had fifty different research branches known as ‘Institutes’ and also ran a large publishing operation. It had Institutes dealing with Celtic Studies, Musicology and Norse Gods, but its most abhorrent activities were the carrying out of experiments on live humans, mainly from the concentration camps.
Anton Loibl
The unbelievable ideas, including an Atlantean ancestry for the Nazis that were peddled by the Ahnenerbe are extensively covered in the recent ‘must read’ book(m), The Master Plan by Heather Pringle[032]. Her fascinating book includes an account of Himmler’s bizarre plan to exploit the mandatory use of bicycle reflectors to fund the activities of the Ahnenerbe!
Incidentally, the reflectors was invented in 1936 by one of Hitler’s chauffeurs, Anton Loibl, who formed a limited company (Anton Loibl GmbH)(e) with the SS(b) which channelled part of the royalty income to the Ahnenerbe, to fund their expeditions around the world seeking evidence for the origins of the Aryan ‘master race’.
However, Pringle also exposes the involvement of the Ahnenerbe in the plundering of museums in occupied countries and, more seriously, the painful and often fatal medical ‘experiments’ carried out on concentration camp inmates.
Film clips, in German, relating to the Anenerbe are available on the Internet(c).
Another site offers further insights into Nazi archaeology(d).
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rahn
(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Loibl_GmbH Also See Archive 2663
(c) Hitler’s Search for the Holy Grail 1 – Bing video
(d) http://alfrye04.wix.com/nazi-archaeology#! (link broken)
(e) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Loibl_GmbH
(f) http://thirdreichocculthistory.blogspot.ie/p/c0ntents.html
(g) http://thirdreichocculthistory.blogspot.ie/2013/02/atlantis-und-das-dritte-reich.html
(h) http://thirdreichocculthistory.blogspot.ie/2014/03/die-deutsche-ahnenerbe.html
(i) https://www.academia.edu/10932522/The_Nazis_and_the_Search_for_Atlantis_2011_
(j) (99+) (PDF) Hitler’s Supernatural Sciences | Eric Kurlander – Academia.edu
(k) https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/otto-rahn-the-quest-for-the-holy-grail
(m) http://www.benespen.com/journal/2019/8/11/the-long-view-the-master-plan *