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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 »
William Ryan
Ryan & Pitman
William Ryan & Walter Pitman published evidence, in 1997, that extensive flooding of the Black Sea occurred through the Bosphorus around 5600 BC. Controversy still surrounds various aspects of their
Pitman (l) & Ryan (r)
theory, some even claiming that the Black Sea broke into the Aegean, an idea that may be partially true(d)(e).
Nevertheless, their conclusions were challenged in a paper(c) by Yanko-hombach, Gilbert and Dolukhanov, who offered evidence that the flooding of the Black Sea was not the rapid event claimed, but was spread over millennia, initially in the form of freshwater from the Caspian Sea via the Manych Spillway(d) as the glaciers retreated and later with seawater from the Mediterranean. The same paper concludes with the following; “The public perception that ‘Noah’s Flood’ happened there is not supported by any scientific evidence.”
Ryan & Pitman later published their theories in book form as Noah’s Flood[0025] and was understandably seized upon by many as proof of the veracity of the Bible. In fact a year before Ryan & Pitman launched their book, René & Denise Capart published l homme et les déluges[1062], in which they linked the Black Sea with the Deluge of Noah. A Bulgarian father and son team, Petko & Dimitar Dimitrov, refer to the pre-flood Varna civilisation existing on the Black Sea plain[0998], but not calling it Atlantis by name. Their book is available online(a).
Inevitably, I suppose, Atlantis has been more firmly linked with this event by some commentators, particularly, Christian & Siegfried Schoppe(b). However, Hristo Smolenov also claimed that swathes of the Varna civilisation were inundated by the rising waters of the Black Sea but had no hesitation identifying it with Atlantis.
>The gold found at Varna amounted to 7kg, a record for a site 7,000 years old. Further background information about the site is available on an Italian website(f).<
>The work of Ryan & Pitman has also inspired the Black Sea Atlantis theories of George K.Weller.<
So, 25 years after Ryan & Pitman’s book the matter is still unresolved. Did the Black Sea flow into the Aegean or was it the other way round? Was it a fast (R&P) or slow (Y-h) process? Did the event lead to the story of Noah’s Flood?
>Professor Maria Kuman has published a paper that throws further light on the flooding of the Black Sea and any link with the biblical Flood of Noah. She concluded with “This article claims that the Black Sea experienced two sets of two floods – each consisting of one fresh-water flood and one salty-water flood. This can be seen on the Dr. Ballard’s side-scan sonar image of the ancient shoreline of the Black Sea (Fig 2). The first two floods were Big Floods, and they took place when the huge Ice caps of the Big Ice Age were melting. Based on a study of the glaciers we dated the Big Floods as 9,500 years ago, which agrees with Prof. Petko Dimitrov’s dating published in 1982 and Dr. Ballard’s dating of the first layer of shells in Fig 2.
The second pair of floods were local floods, which took place when the ice caps were melting of the First Mini Ice Age after the Big Ice Age. Based on a study of the glaciers we dated them as 7,000 years ago (5000 B.C.), which is in perfect agreement with Dr. Ballard’s dating with C14 of a piece of wood retrieved from a flooded house on the bottom of the Black Sea. This second pair of floods displaced many of the descendants of Noah mixed with Aryans, who lived around the Black Sea at that time.(g)<
(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20190819053842/https://www.black-sea-atlantis.com/schoppe.pdf
(d) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618206001984
(f) Varna: the mystery of the oldest treasure in the world – The Tapestry of Time (larazzodeltempo.it) *
(g) The Mystery of the Black Sea Floods Solved (omicsonline.org) *