{"id":54564,"date":"2022-05-30T07:16:20","date_gmt":"2022-05-30T06:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/?p=54564"},"modified":"2025-11-01T07:52:46","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T07:52:46","slug":"archive-3062","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/archive-3062\/","title":{"rendered":"Archive 3062 *"},"content":{"rendered":"

Atlantis as Sesklo Part 1: Euhemerism <\/strong><\/p>\n

In May 2013, I submitted Atlantis as Sesklo<\/em> as my dissertation for a B.A. (Hons) in Classics at the University of Roehampton. Arguing Atlantis is history and not fiction is a fringe view held by a very small number of classicists and archaeologists [1] therefore my grade (2: 2) did not surprise me since my research was unorthodox. In the introduction of my dissertation I outlined four interpretations of Atlantis (1a, 1b, 2a, 1b) under two labels, ‘fiction’ and ‘history’, and argued for 2b (‘euhemerism’):<\/p>\n

1. Fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n

1a. Imaginary<\/em>: Plato invented\u00a0Atlantis\u00a0from scratch.<\/p>\n

1b. Pastiche of history<\/em>: Plato invented Atlantis using diverse historical sources.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 History<\/strong><\/p>\n

2a. Donnellianism<\/em>: Atlantis is straightforward history.<\/p>\n

2b. Euhemerism<\/em>: Atlantis is\u00a0exaggerated and distorted history.<\/p>\n

The most popular\u00a0interpretation among classicists is 1b given the improbability of Plato inventing Atlantis from scratch, but the historical\u00a0sites that supposedly inspired Plato and sources of history he used are disputed, e.g.\u00a0Ecbatana, Carthage, Athens, Persia, Syracuse and Minoan Crete have been proposed; if this “pastiche of history” reading is correct (Gill, 1980<\/a>: xx-xxi; Vidal-Naquet, 2007<\/a>: 23), it is\u00a0almost certain Plato\u00a0modelled Atlantis on\u00a0more than one\u00a0historical place. Atlantis as a pastiche of history\u00a0(from pasticcio<\/em> “a medley of ingredients”) should not be confused with\u00a0real history because Plato was mixing diverse sources together into a fiction. However, in the 1960s, a minority of scholars began to popularize the view Atlantis is real history in the form of euhemerism. The latter usually identifies Atlantis with Minoan Crete<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“I follow the view that a genuine tradition of the sudden destruction of Minoan power was preserved in Egypt, and that this tradition was brought back to Greece by Solon about 590 BC, but in a garbled and misunderstood form<\/em>.” (Luce, 1969<\/a>: 10)<\/p>\n

This “Minoan hypothesis” should not be confused with the (1b) view\u00a0\u00a0Plato invented Atlantis but incorporated aspects of the Minoan civilization into his abstract design:<\/p>\n

“Minoan Crete was one of the models Plato used to create his fictional Atlantis. But, if so, he was drawing on well-known Greek traditions, not on a garbled version of (alleged) Egyptian records<\/em>.” (Gill, 1980<\/a>: xii)<\/p>\n

Euhemerism (2b)\u00a0in contrast takes Plato at face value when he says the Atlantis story derived from Egypt as an (alleged recorded) oral tradition Solon\u00a0heard and took back home with him to Greece; it was retold\u00a0or sung via word of mouth in the form of bardic poetry (since Solon poeticized the oral tradition), until it was heard by Plato. This means euhemerism\u00a0can\u00a0explain discrepancies between Minoan Crete and\u00a0Plato’s description of Atlantis (see Critias – The Internet Classics Archive | Critias by Plato<\/a><\/em>)*<\/span><\/strong> as having accumulated when the Atlantis story was retold over generations. For John V. Luce<\/a> (1969) who popularized this view in The End of Atlantis\u00a0<\/em>\u2013<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>by the time the oral tradition had reached Plato it was garbled history, e.g.\u00a0the size of Atlantis had been magnified, the age pushed back from 900 to 9000 years, and so on; similar to how information is altered or lost during a game of Chinese whispers<\/a>. Euhemerism\u00a0thus argues Plato was a recipient of the Atlantis story, not its\u00a0creator\u00a0and this sharply contrasts\u00a0to the\u00a0view Plato\u00a0made it\u00a0up as fiction.<\/p>\n

In my dissertation I adopted Luce’s euhemerist approach: Atlantis is an oral tradition which contains a\u00a0core of history, muddled with distortions and exaggerations. Many ancient oral traditions (muthos<\/em>) preserve\u00a0recollections of\u00a0historical places, persons and happenings; it was Luce’s\u00a0theory\u00a0the Atlantis story\u00a0crystallizes a folk memory<\/a> of Minoan Crete and its destruction. Luce’s euhemerist approach is more credible\u00a0than donnellianism (named after Ignatius Donnelly<\/a>, 1882) which classicists have called “crazy” (Lee, 1971<\/a>: 156). Donnellianism argues Atlantis is\u00a0straightforward history i.e.\u00a0there was once a\u00a0large island\u00a0in the Atlantic Ocean submerged by a catastrophe. Needless to say, this view is incorrect; geology has falsified Donnelly’s theory and there is no archaeological evidence (using Plato’s dating)\u00a0for an Atlantic\u00a0civilization:<\/p>\n

“…to hang on to anything of Atlantis, you have to interpret\u00a0Plato in some other light<\/em><\/strong>. One eminently rational attempt to do that (the most rational ever proposed) involved a location in the Mediterranean at a quite different date from the time-scale confidently asserted by Plato, fixing on the eruption of Thera and the decline of the Minoan civilization as sources <\/em>\u2013 <\/strong>somehow a little garbled in transmission\u00a0\u2013 <\/strong>for the alleged Egyptian records shown to Solon<\/em>.” (Jordan, 2001<\/a>: 80, emphasis added)<\/p>\n

Euhemerism\u00a0however remains on the fringe of classical\u00a0scholarship\u00a0because Plato is the only prime literary source for the Atlantis story (all other writings are secondary sources). The alleged Egyptian records of Atlantis mentioned by Plato (although if Timaeus<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is read closely, Solon is not said to have seen them)\u00a0have never been found (Renfrew, 1992<\/a>) and\u00a0its rather odd Atlantis doesn’t\u00a0even appear in\u00a0Greek mythology:<\/p>\n

“Atlantis is much less securely rooted in ancient Greek tradition <\/em>
\nthan the Trojan War saga<\/em>.” (Luce, 1969<\/a>: 16)<\/p>\n

My dissertation\u00a0failed to provide\u00a0an explanation for this anomaly, nor could Luce. On the other hand, according to Plato the oral or bardic transmission of the Atlantis tale in Greece was confined to a single Athenian family, i.e. Plato descended from Dropides (a relative of Solon), so the Atlantis tradition (if Plato is\u00a0taken again at face value)\u00a0has a unique\u00a0oral pedigree: the story passed from Solon, to Dropides, down several generations, until it reached Plato. This might explain why Plato is the sole Greek literary source \u2013 <\/em><\/strong>Atlantis reflects a family\u00a0legend (Kopff, 1980<\/a>) not\u00a0a common tradition like Troy.\u00a0 I now though realize this\u00a0argument is\u00a0invalid because there are problems with the oral transmission (these I discuss in a forthcoming journal\u00a0article).<\/p>\n

Recently, my euhemerist view on Atlantis\u00a0has changed to pastiche of history. I no longer maintain Atlantis is an oral tradition with a historical core, but that Atlantis is fiction; Plato\u00a0invented Atlantis, not from scratch,\u00a0but\u00a0amalgamated together\u00a0diverse historical ingredients and in his mind built a mental picture of Atlantis out of these. As improbable the\u00a0euhemerist interpretation is (Forsyth, 1980<\/a>:\u00a0 77\u00a0calculates Atlantis is at least\u00a0twice as likely to be fictional than an authentic oral tradition), it has not been wholly discredited, but\u00a0the odds of it being\u00a0correct are extremely small.\u00a0For this reason,\u00a0my\u00a0dissertation’s identification of Atlantis with Sesklo,\u00a0is examined in Part 2.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

[1] These include: Kingdon T. Frost (1913),\u00a0\u00a0Robert L. Scranton (1949), Spyridon Marinatos<\/a> (1950), Rhys Carpenter<\/a> (1966), John V. Luce (1969), Nikolaos Platon<\/a> (1971), Mary Settegast<\/a> (1987) and Peter James<\/a> (1995); a survey\u00a0has revealed\u00a0only 1.3% of teaching archaeologists (US)\u00a0support the existence of Atlantis (Feder, 1984).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Atlantis as Sesklo Part 1: Euhemerism In May 2013, I submitted Atlantis as Sesklo as my dissertation for a B.A. (Hons) in Classics at the University of Roehampton. Arguing Atlantis is history and not fiction is a fringe view held by a very small number of classicists and archaeologists [1] therefore my grade (2: 2) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5322],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54564"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65069,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54564\/revisions\/65069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}