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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 »
Troy
Croatia
Croatia has been mentioned several times within these pages. Apart from being the birthplace of Rudolf Steiner and Flavio Barbiero, it also offers a serious rival to Malta as the place where St. Paul was shipwrecked, namely on the island of Mljet! Coincidentally, Mljet is also claimed by some as the home of Calypso’s Ogygia(a).
Vedran Sinožic in his book Naša Troja (Our Troy) [1543]. “Sinožic provides numerous arguments that prove that the legendary Homer Troy is not located in Hisarlik in Turkey, but is located in the Republic of Croatia – today’s town of Motovun in Istria.”
Pero Metkovic recently announced that he had identified a number of pyramids in the vicinity of Dubrovnik. Not content with that revelation, he also claims to have located Atlantis nearby(b). For good measure, he supports the idea of Croatians in America in ancient times!
When the sunken ruins of a city, dated to around 1500 BC were discovered in 2015, near Croatia’s oldest city, Zadar, it generated the usual flurry of Atlantis speculation. There was a media report(c-e) in early 2017 in which treasure hunter Mark Kempf claimed to have discovered the remains of Atlantis 30 miles off the coast of Croatia.
So, with links to St. Paul, along with Ogygia, Troy, Atlantis and a collection of Egyptian-style pyramids within its territory, it has got to be the holiday destination of all time.
Nevertheless, although it cannot be directly linked to Atlantis, I feel obliged to add a May 2023 report that a “prehistoric road was discovered under layers of sea mud at the sunken Neolithic site of Soline, and helped connect the Hvar settlement to the now-isolated island of Korcula in Croatia(g). The ‘road’ has been dated to around 5000 BC.
(b) https://perometkovic.medium.com/mistery-of-dubrovnik-pyramids-3dea77cedc57
(c) http://empirenews.net/lost-city-of-atlantis-uncovered-in-mediterranean-sea/
(d) https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3u7rce/archeologists_in_croatia_announced_their/
(g) 7,000-Year-Old Ancient Road Found Buried Underneath the Mediterranean Sea! | Weather.com
Finley, Moses I.
Moses I. Finley, originally Finkelstein (1912–1986) was an American-born British academic. He moved to England in 1955, where he developed as a classical scholar and eventually became Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1979.
In common with a number of archaeologists and historians at the time, Finley maintained that none of the events in Homer’s works are historical, particularly in his book, The World of Odysseus [1139] and was highly critical of Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War [1141] when it first appeared in 1984, four years before modern archaeology was undertaken at the Hissarlik site.(a)
>Finley in chapter two of his Aspects of Antiquity [1953] listed a number of weaknesses in Schliemann’s identification of Hissarlik as Homer’s Troy. Some of his more important points are summarized here(f).
“Schliemann’s “Troy” site had been over the ages razed and rebuilt many times, and the various rebuildings are commonly referred to by numbered names such as “Troy I” or “Troy VIIa”.
Schliemann’s “Troy” site has only one stage of its history that has any resemblance to Greece. That is Troy VIIa, which contains pottery shards and other evidence that it had contact with Greece. All the other “Troy” ruins at Schliemann’s site have no remains that even suggest they ever had contact with the greeks.
Troy VIIa is actually one of the smallest constructions at Schliemann’s “Troy” site. To quote Finley: ‘a shabby, impoverished huddled in one small sector of the ridge, as unlike the Homeric picture of the large and wealthy city of Priam as one could imagine.’
Schliemann’s great treasures which are held to prove his site was a country of vast power and influence, were found at Troy II. Troy II dates to 2500-2200 bc, long predating the greeks.
In fact, Finley contends on pages 37-38 of his book that our historical concept of the greeks of the Homeric age being a continental power capable of staging such a massive expedition is based wholely upon the description of it as such in The Illiad, and not upon archaeological evidence from the greek civilizations of the Homeric era. In other words, rather than the undeniable existence of the Achaean empire serving as proof of the events depicted in Homer, instead, the existence of the Achaean Greek empire is based solely upon its being mentioned in The Illiad
There are no surviving written records of the Achaeans or Trojans from the Homeric era. Both the Egyptians and the Hittites did keep historical records, legal documents, treaties, etc, that have survived for modern archaeologists to translate. Neither the Hittites nor the Pharaohs make any reference to the Achaeans or the Trojans.”<
Finley’s sceptical views went beyond the Trojan War and extended to Plato’s Atlantis. In 1969, a number of books and papers were published giving added impetus to the Minoan Hypothesis. Finley attacked James W. Mavor‘s Voyage to Atlantis [265] in The New York Review of Books (b). This evoked a response(c) from Mavor not long afterward.
In December 1969, Finley wrote a combined critical review of both Atlantis [263] by Galanopoulos & Bacon as well as J. V. Luce‘s Lost Atlantis(U.S) (The End of Atlantis, U.K.) [120] for the same publication(d), to which Galanopoulos also responded(e).
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Homeric_epics
(b) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(c) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/12/04/back-to-atlantis-again/
(d) Back to Atlantis | by M.I. Finley | The New York Review of Books (archive.org)
(e) The End of Atlantis | by A.G. Galanopoulos | The New York Review of Books (archive.org)
Illyrians *
The Illyrians were an ancient people who occupied the northwestern region of the Balkans, which included a large portion of the eastern Adriatic Sea coast. As usual there is controversy regarding their origins, although there is some agreement that they came from the east, with the region of Troy (Illium) a possibility. It being noteworthy that there is one other ancient city called Illium on the Adriatic coast, today called Epirus(b).
There is a minority view that the some of the Illyrians had connections with the Sea Peoples, or more particularly the Sherden and Shekelesh.
In 1982 the Austrian historian Fritz Schachermeyr promoted this idea, noting that the similarly sounding Sardiotae and Siculotae occupied part of the later Roman province of Dalmatia(a). The same link adds additional information on other possible Balkan links with the Sherden.
(a) Origins of the “sea peoples” – The Sherden, the Shekelesh, the Peleset | COGNIARCHAE (archive.org) *
Harris, Stuart L.
Stuart L. Harris is an American researcher, self-described as an linguist, historian and archaeologist. 
He has contributed over eighty papers to the Migration & Diffusion website(a) and dozens to the Academia.edu site(b). He has touched on a wide variety of subjects; from Comet Encke to Glozel and Newgrange to Noah’s Flood. Although I am not a linguist, I think that that Harris’ penchant for ‘finding’ evidence of the Finnish language in locations as far apart as Dacia, Gaul, Teotihuacan and Hawaii is highly questionable, but I shall leave it to others, more skilled than I, to comment further.
Inspired by Felice Vinci, Harris has promoted the idea of Troy in Finland, but until lately he had not directly addressed the question of Atlantis, but in recent private correspondence with me, he has claimed that Plato’s lost island had been situated in the vicinity of Rockall and destroyed around 9577 BC. He later published these ideas in a number of papers on the Academia.edu website(c-f) in which he proposed that a close encounter with Nibiru (Marduk) that resulted in a number of its satellites impacting the Earth, causing devastation which included the demise of Atlantis. He also equated Nibiru with Marduk. The article contains a lot of wild speculations including the suggestion that Nibiru on a return to Earth in 9417 BC, lost another of its satellites, which became our Moon!
(a) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?authorid=113
(b) https://independent.academia.edu/StuartHarris3
Hershiser, David
David Hershiser is the author of Beyond the Pillars of Hercules: Atlantis and Tyrus in Plato’s Writings, Biblical Verses, and the Works of Helena Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, and Ruth Montgomery[1016]. In it he adopts the idea of J. D. Brady that Ezekiel’s Tyrus was not the Phoenician city of Tyre, but it can be identified as Atlantis. In a 2015 article in Atlantis Rising magazine(a) Hershiser discusses the core of this theory. Unlike Brady, who proposed that Tyrus/Atlantis was to be identified with Troy, Hershiser places his Tyrus/Atlantis in the Atlantic just outside the Strait of Gibraltar.
*(a) See: Archive 3395*
Luwians
The Luwians according to the excellent Luwian Studies website(a) were “the people who lived in western Asia Minor during 
the 2nd millennium BCE between the Mycenaeans in Greece and the Hittites in Central Anatolia.” The Luwian city of Troy has been controversially linked with Atlantis by Eberhard Zangger[483][484], who has gone further and proposed that some of the petty kingdoms in the Luwian territory were part of the ‘Sea Peoples’.
Zangger’s claimed that a Luwian linkage with the Sea Peoples had been strongly supported by the work of British archaeologist, James Mellaart (1925-2012). However, after Mellaart’s death, it was found that he had supported much of what he wrote with forged documents. Zangger has offered the sequence of events that led to this discovery and points out that his Sea Peoples theory predates his involvement with Mellaart(b).
In 2016, Zangger published The Luwian Civilisation; The Missing Link in the Agean Bronze Age [1217]. This illustrated book is available on the Academia website(d).
2023 began with an illustrated paper by Zangger, also on the Academia website, offering further insights into the Luwian culture during the Middle and Late Bronze Age(c).
(a) https://luwianstudies.org/the-luwians/who-are-the-luwians/
(b) https://luwianstudies.org/theory-luwians-sea-peoples-invasions-sequence-events/
(c) (99+) Putting the Luwian Culture on the Map | Eberhard Zangger – Academia.edu
Thrace *
Thrace was an ancient kingdom, which according to Greek mythology was named after Thrax, the son of Ares, the 
Greek god of war. Some push back the origins of the Thracians to 3000 BC(b)(c). Homer described the Thracians as allies of Troy. Today Thrace would occupy southeast Bulgaria along with adjacent parts of Greece and Turkey. Some have attempted to link Thrace with Atlantis(a). Abraham Akkerman suggests in Phenomenology of the Winter City[1179.98] that the inspiration for “Plato’s layout of his Ideal City on the island of Atlantis” may be found in Thrace. Keep in mind that situated just north of Thrace was Dacia, part of Romania, another Atlantis candidate.
Also See: Nicolae Densusianu, Romania
(a) atlantis history (archive.org) *
(b) The Enigma of the Thracians and the Orpheus Myth | Ancient Origins (archive.org) *
(c) The Enigma of the Thracians and the Orpheus Myth – Part 2 | Ancient Origins (archive.org) *
Gruhn, Albert
Dr. Albert Gruhn was reported to have placed Atlantis in the Western Mediterranean Basin, according to a report in New Zealand’s North Otago Times of August 8th 1911(a). Apparently it was quoting from the ‘North German Gazette’ where he stated his belief that the Western Basin had once been dry land and that Atlantis had been situated between the Balearic Islands and Sardinia or in what is now the Tyrrhenian Sea.
>Atlantisforschung has further information on the details of Gruhn’s theory(c).<
A couple of years earlier he had disputed(b) that Homer’s Troy had been located at Hissarlik, instead he opted for Duden.
(a) https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NOT19110819.2.22.16
(b) https://www.jstor.org/stable/496830?seq=14#page_scan_tab_contents
(c) Addendum zu Albert Gruhn (Februar 2017) – Atlantisforschung.de *
Ferla, Mario La
Mario la Ferla is the author of L’uomo di Atlantide[1081] in which he investigates the ‘suspicious’ death 
and its aftermath of Spyridon Marinatos on Santorini(a). In fact, he bluntly referred to the death as an assassination (assassinio).He has also written a sympathetic paper on Zangger’s theory that identifies Atlantis as Troy(b). I was disappointed that Ferla appeared to accept the claims of Paul Schliemann as factual rather than the crude hoax that they were.?
(a) Mario La Ferla nel Mondo greco (archive.org) (Italian) *
(b) Troia – Atlantide (archive.org) (Italian)
Socratous, Costas
Costas Socratous is a Cypriot author and no stranger to controversy as some years ago he claimed that Umberto Eco’s celebrated book, The Name of the Rose, had been based on a work of his, O Aforismenos. He lost his legal challenge.
In 2010, when Enrico Mattievich published his Journey to the Mythological Inferno in which he claimed that the ancient Greeks had discovered America, Socratous alleged that he had made the same claim in a 1995 book(a), apparently unaware that Mattievich had originally published his book in Portuguese in 1992 and in 1986 had delivered his preliminary findings in a lecture(b). Apart from which Henriette Mertz had published the same idea in the early 1960s. Oops!
Socratous’ book places Atlantis in the Atlantic with Troy as its capital!
(a) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.culture.greek/DXkU4JRrVeA See Archive 2433