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Atlantis
Published 20 August 2007 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

The most popular – and best known – of the lost continents is Atlantis, a land supposed to have
lain in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It even has its own FaceBook fan page! First mentioned
by Plato (428×7-347 BCE) in his dialogues Τιμαῖος (Timaeus) and Κριτίας (Critias), written
towards the end of the philosopher’s life in c 348 BCE.
What was Atlantis?
Plato as imagined by Raphael
Plato introduced the idea of a lost land to the west of Greece as part of a political fable. In the
first book, Plato’s relative Critias is made to explain how he learned the story of Atlantis: he had
heard it from his grandfather, who had learned it from his father, who had been told it by the
politician Solon (c 638-559 BCE). According to Plato, Solon had been told about Atlantis by a
priest in a temple at Saïs when he visited Egypt c 590 BCE. The priest explained that nine
thousand years earlier (i.e. c 9590 BCE), the ancient Athenians went to war with the ancient
Atlanteans, whom they defeated. The Atlanteans lived in a city on an island to the west of the
Pillars of Hercules (the ancient name for the Strait of Gibraltar) and were descended from the
god Poseidon, but had degenerated from an earlier state of perfection. Both Athens and Atlantis
were destroyed in “earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence… in a single dreadful day
and night” nine thousand years ago.
The Critias repeats the same story, but in greater detail, explaining how the goddess Athena
had established the city of Athens shortly after the creation of the world. The prehistoric
Athenian state was ruled by a military oligarchy, which by a remarkable coincidence was just
like the ideal state hypothesised by Plato in an earlier book, The Republic. Remarkable, that is,
if you read this political fable as history. While Athena was allotted Greece, Poseidon got Atlantis
and his descendants (via the mortal woman Kleito) established ten kingdoms with an over-king.
Plato describes the city of Atlantis in some detail: it lay between the coast and a large fertile
irrigated plain, was perfectly circular and contained at its centre a series of ring-shaped islands
set between canals, in the middle of which lay the citadel. They were connected to the sea and
to the plain by a further canal. The buildings of the city were magnificently ornamented with
precious metals – including the otherwise unknown ὀρειχαλκον (orichalcum – ‘mountain
copper’) – and ivory from indigenous elephants. The kings ruled well for many years, but when
their descendants became corrupt, Zeus decided to punish them. At the point where he is about
to launch into a speech to the other gods, the text breaks off, unfinished. The third book of what
was intended to be a trilogy, to which Plato may have intended to give the name Ἑρμοκράτης
(Hermocrates) (after another of the participants in the fictional discussion) was never written.
In the ancient world, Plato’s Atlantis was treated as a literary device, not as an historical city of
the remote past. For instance, the Christian writer Tertullian (c 160-after 213) used it as an
example of the world-wide flood of Noah and observed that it had been sought in vain (de
Pallio II.3); a few paragraphs earlier in the work, he had mentioned Plato and it is likely that the
two were connected in his thoughts. Ammianus Marcellinus (c 330-after 392) has been used to
justify statements that the Gauls believed that they had come originally from Atlantis. In fact,
Ammianus says no such thing. In Res Gestae XV.9, quoting the authority of an Augustan
historian, Timagenes (c 55 BCE-?), whose work is lost, he says that “the
Drasidae [Druids] recall that a part of the population is indigenous but others also migrated in
from islands and lands beyond the Rhine”; this would mean that they believed they had come
from the north (Britain, the Netherlands and Germany), not from a lost land in the Atlantic
Ocean, to the south-west.
Atlantis occasionally found its way onto maps, particularly after the discovery of the New World
at the end of the fifteenth century. This led some writers to speculate that these strange new
uncharted lands were the remnants of the island. However, it did not enter the popular
imagination until the 1880s, when a lawyer from Philadelphia and congressman for Minnesota,
Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), wrote Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. The book was so popular
that it is still in print (in a paperback edition published by Dover Books in 1985). It is a
remarkable book, showing a huge breadth of knowledge acquired through years of reading and
research in the Library of Congress. It is no exaggeration to say that this book (on its own) was
responsible for the late nineteenth-century growth of interest in the lost continent and its
subsequent popularity. Donnelly picked up on the work of the Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur
de Bourbourg (1814-1874), who had worked out a translation of the Troano Codex, half of one
of only three Maya manuscripts to survive. His attempt at translation was completely misguided
(he believed that Maya hieroglyphs were an alphabetic script), but he read the Codex as
describing a volcanic catastrophe in which a land called Mu was destroyed. Donnelly took this
translation seriously, identified the supposed Mayan Mu with the Greek Atlantis and began
researching possible links between the Maya and the rest of the world.
Ignatius Donnelly's map of Atlantis
Using the diffusionist logic of late nineteenth-century archaeology, he reasoned that if

institutions such as marriage and divorce, technology such as spears and sails, or beliefs such
as ghosts and flood legends existed on both sides of the Atlantic, it followed that there must be
a common origin for them. He found similarities between the Maya hieroglyphs published by
Brasseur de Bourbourg and those of Egypt and between the languages of the Chinese, Old
Japanese and the Otomi of Mexico. Needless to say, most of the supposed similarities are
fanciful and are based on superficial characteristics. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that
similar institutions, technologies and beliefs must be invented only once, in one place. The
evidence amassed by Donnelly for an historical Atlantis is ultimately weak and has never
commanded any serious academic support. Donnelly’s breadth of knowledge may have been
huge, but he lacked the depth of knowledge that would have allowed him to exercise his
lawyer’s critical faculties more effectively.
Most damaging for the hypothesis of a large mid-Atlantic island, there is no room for a landmass
in what we know of the geological history of the Atlantic Ocean. The mid-Atlantic Ridge that
Donnelly thought might contain the remnants of an Atlantean mountain range in the vicinity of
the present-day Azores is not the remains of a sunken continent. Rather, it is new material
forming as the North American, European, South American and African tectonic plates move
apart, something that was not understood in the nineteenth century.
"Paul Schliemann"'s imagined Atlantis
An obvious but still believed fraud

One of the most unusual treatments of the Atlantis story that some writers continue to quote as
a serious source comes from what ought to have been long since discarded as a hoax. This
was a front page story of The New York American (a morning newspaper published by William
Randolph Hearst from 1895 to 1937) in October 1912 quoting a Dr Paul Schliemann
(allegedly c 1884-1914×18), who claimed to be (and almost certainly was not) a grandson of the
discoverer of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), although whether he really gained a PhD,
as he claimed, does not seem to have been established. The story was called ‘How I
Discovered Atlantis, the Source of All Civilization’. He announced that he had been left certain
secret documents by his grandfather, including one that described the discovery at Troy of a
bronze vase inscribed ‘From the King Cronos of Atlantis’ and an owl-headed vase that he was to
break open. Among the documents was an envelope only to be opened by someone prepared
to dedicate his life to what was contained within: the family’s secret, which was the true location
of Atlantis. On breaking open the vase, Schliemann was astounded to discover a hoard of
square Atlantean coins of a platinum-aluminium-silver alloy (presumably meant to be
the orichalcum of Plato) and a metal plaque bearing a Phoenician inscription that read ‘Issued
in the Temple of Transparent Walls’.
Paul Schliemann was the first to claim that Atlantis was an advanced civilisation with
technological achievements matching those of the twentieth century (aircraft, power-driven
boats and so on), although the Theosophists had also made extravagant claims about Atlantean
accomplishments. Schliemann’s newspaper story is the sole authority for the ‘evidence’
sometimes used to support ideas of the superior technology of the Lost Continent. He quoted
the usual sources, but made serious blunders that made the hoax all too evident from the
outset. Claiming to have discovered the secret of the lost continent of Atlantis in an ancient
Mayan text, the Troano Codex, which he said that he had read in the British Museum, this was
too obvious an error to overlook: the Troano Codex was (and still is) in the National Museum in
Madrid. His story was merely a rehash of Brasseur de Bourbourg’s ‘translation’, anyway. Coins
had not yet been invented at the supposed time of the Atlantean kingdom, either: they were first
used c 600 BCE in the kingdom of Lydia (now part of modern Turkey). When asked for the
further evidence he had promised in the original newspaper story and to produce objects such
as the owl-headed vase, Schliemann did not respond and disappeared from history. Nothing
further appears to be known about him, although it is rumoured that he died in action during the
First World War; what is certain, though, is that his fabrication has – undeservedly – long
outlived him. Indeed, it is more than possible that he was the invention of a newspaper
copywriter, as The New York American was known for its lurid and sensationalist stories, as well
as pseudoscience, a style known pejoratively as yellow journalism.
Finding Atlantis
Renaissance scholars who rediscovered Plato’s account of Atlantis were in no doubt where it
has been located: beyond the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar. How far out into the
Atlantic Ocean it might have lain was a matter of speculation, some writers placing it close to
Africa, others identifying it with the Americas.
https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis
https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkas:Athanasius_Kircher%27s_Atlantis.gif

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Atlantis

Published 20 August 2007 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

What was Atlantis?

Plato as imagined by Raphael

Ignatius Donnelly's map of Atlantis

Using the diffusionist logic of late nineteenth-century archaeology, he reasoned that if

"Paul Schliemann"'s imagined Atlantis

An obvious but still believed fraud

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