The reason for the lack of Greek history on the topic is because it was a closely guarded Egyptian piece of knowledge, apparently.
The story of 'Atlantis' as Plato knew it, came to him from Critias (the younger) through his father, Critias (the elder, also Plato's great grandfather), who got it from his father Dropides who received it directly from Solon, who learned of the story from his time in Egypt, specifically via priests in Sais who supposedly maintained an artifact from this lost civilization.
It's clear that Plato's recanting of the story is embellished, he probably made up a great number or all of details to support his ideas and what he was trying to get across, but it's also possible that there are germs of truth in the story, such an ancient civilization being destroyed that Egyptians were aware of.
It's not a stretch to imagine that Egyptians had knowledge of ancient civilizations, or that secret knowledge was revealed to Greeks, and it's not stretch that civilizations rose and fell all over the Earth. There isn't much to hang your hat on but I think we can charitably assume there was some real basis to the story that Plato based his writing on.
Did ancient Egyptians poses knowledge of the Americas and encounter its population? Or was it a story about a local group of people? Or perhaps it was a general story of a pre-historic civilization and the associated cataclysms that ended it? Who knows, but I don't think you can say with certainty that it existed, or it didn't exist at all.
The ancient greeks (and romans) often claimed that some piece of writing was sourced from ancient knowledge -- the egyptians and the chaldeans (babylonians) being frequent purported sources -- sometimes they even sourced things to particular people/gods (Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Zarathustra). Many (probably most) of those attributions were probably false.
India and Tibet also do this; if you come up with a new work of philosophy, you have to say it's a newly found ancient work from Buddha you found under a rock or was dictated to you in your dreams from your past life. If you wrote it yourself, nobody would respect it.
I wouldn't generalize to like, the entire nations of India and Tibet, but it's an _extremely_ common phenomenon even in the US, even today. Just look at how many spurious quotes are ascribed to "great thinkers" (abe lincoln, gandhi, albert einstein). It happens even with relatively contemporary figures when we have voluminous historical evidence available to disprove it -- imagine how often it happened before the internet and printing press. I have this pet theory that the origin of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source was just someone trying to write down all the stuff that anybody anywhere said that Jesus said in one place, so that people would stop making up shit.
We also have no surviving Egyptian accounts of Atlantis. It was not uncommon, however, for Greeks to attribute fictional and fabricated information to the Egyptians due to how relatively ancient – and therefore, wise – they were believed to be.
Was greek, staffed by Greek speaking scholars and stored works written in Greek. I’m not aware that they had many Ancient Egyptian texts there
> just we can't use absence of evidence to infer evidence of absence.
Can we apply this to pretty much anything we can’t disprove beyond a shadow of doubt? So pretty much everything including loads of conspiracy theories..
> Can we apply this to pretty much anything we can’t disprove beyond a shadow of doubt? So pretty much everything including loads of conspiracy theories..
Honestly, I don't have a good answer for you. I just simply don't know. It's a problem that much smarter people than me have likely already wrestled with. I'm with you in that a blanket application of this can lead us to accepting all kinds of crackpot theories.
However there are things where it's literally true that just because we didn't have evidence of something doesn't mean it didn't exist, such as the coelocanth.
Interestingly, Plato himself was famously guarded about what he told people and he likely had esoteric teachings that he never wrote down or talked about in public (although they can be sort of derived through what aristotle and other contemporaries said about them)
> I don't think you can say with certainty that it existed, or it didn't exist at all.
Certainty is a red hearing. You cannot say anything with absolute certainty. The question is whether there is evidence to support the conjecture. For Atlantis, there isn't much and so there really isn't any rational reason to believe it existed. If more compelling evidence arises, that is the time to believe, but not before.
There is a myth of an ancient city Atlantis that was flooded, we also name the Bronze Age collapse as caused by the invasion of Sea Peoples. I drove this strange parallel lately, maybe the story is not exactly about the water?
> We might also ask where the fabled cave from The Republic is actually located.
Certainly. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is clearly a metaphor for enlightenment, with no pretense of being a literal place. However, his depiction of Atlantis in "Timaeus" and "Critias" is detailed and concrete, lacking the overt symbolism of his allegories. This detail might imply that Plato intended for Atlantis to be considered as more than just a metaphorical construct, perhaps as a tale grounded in some form of historical tradition.
I’m sure that many cultures had some sort of ancient flood myths because of what happened after the last glacial period. But beyond that…
> detailed and concrete,
Which would be the opposite of one might expect? If we’re talking about thousand year old myths we should assume that anything “ detailed and concrete” must have been invented?
I'm not arguing that Atlantis was actually a real place, I'm arguing based on how it was written, based on his other works that use allegory, based on other works that are attributed to Plato and his use of allegory; I think Plato thought it was a real place.
Plato mentions that the story was heard by Solon in Egypt, and transmitted orally over several generations through the family of Dropides, until it reached Critias( a dialogue speaker in Timaeus and Critias. )
Which is more likely, he completely made up Atlantis and all that detail in a very weird way, or he just reached for something that he thought was historically true that he came across during his life.
Oral histories extremely important in the time that lead up to the time of Plato's life (and afterwards as well.) In the absence of widespread literacy and accessible writing materials, these oral narratives served as the primary medium through which historical events, cultural norms, legal statutes, and philosophical ideas were transmitted across generations.
Socrates, Plato's teacher, famously never wrote anything down, his philosophy was preserved and passed down primarily through the oral accounts of his students. (Like Plato!)
in "Phaedrus," Plato discusses the art of rhetoric and the importance of the spoken word over the written word, which can be seen as a nod to the value of oral tradition.
So I don't think it's as binary as, fact or allegory. There are other facets, to how this description of Atlantis came to be.
I'd be very careful about assuming the legend was made up by Plato just because it's not widely attested in writings of the time.
It's likely that most of stories from oral tradition have never been put down to writing, and most of those who did were probably lost through the filter of time (along with the vast majority or ancient Greek literature).
There's is evidence for it. (Plato's account) Is it good evidence? that's up for debate clearly.
whats strange is that plato's account of Atlantis is detialed with specific measurements and descriptions of the layout of the city, ( and its temples, and the organization of the society.) This level of detail interpreted by some as an attempt to describe a real place rather than a purely symbolic or allegorical one.
Unlike other Greek myths (or allegories), the story of atlantis is not populated with gods interfering in the affairs of men, mythical creatures, or heroes of divine descent. Plato didnt have a track record of fabricating tales completely, especially since he presents atlantis in a matter-of-fact way within dialogues that are otherwise serious philosophical texts.
also, if you go and check out Homer's description of Troy, there isn't the level of detail that Plato provides for Atlantis, or at least his understanding of Atlantis. Whether or not Atlantis existed, it would seem to me that at least Plato thought of fit as a real place rather than an allegorical one.
Usually when a mythical city is described, the author highlights their mystery, utopian qualities, or moral lessons they impart, rather than providing a blueprint of their layout and structure.
The map of middle earth isn't in the middle of a philosophical treatise on understanding the nature of the physical world and the composition of the universe..... :/
It's rather in the middle of a story populated with (demi-)gods interfering in the affairs of men, mythical creatures, and heroes of elvish descent. And hobbitses. Filthy, nasty hobbitses!
And Utopia is.. it’s perfectly valid genre. Inventing a fantasy world to convey your theoretical ideas in a more approachable way seems like a very sensible approach.
For that matter Tolkien to claims that his world is actually set on our planet just thousands of years ago.
> whats strange is that plato's account of Atlantis is detialed with specific measurements and descriptions of the layout of the city
Not at all strange . The opposite, that’s exactly what I would expect from an author designing a sci-fi/fantasy/fictional world. If it was based on some old myth one would expect the complete opposite of that (vague and uncertain descriptions)
> Plato didnt have a track record of fabricating tales completel
Do you believe that’s what all people who write fiction do? Fabricate tales?
> especially since he presents atlantis in a matter-of-fact way within dialogues that are otherwise serious philosophical texts.
"Plato" absolutely does not say the story is true. "Plato" almost never spoke in his dialogues and you can't assume that anything that anyone says in one of his dialogues accords with his own beliefs, although frequently the closest speaker to Plato's beliefs is Socrates.
The story of Atlantis is told by Critias, who heard the story second hand.
Plato saying something is absolutely true actually makes me think it's more likely he's talking about an allegory, given his hierarchy of what he considered 'real'.
It’s not unlikely that he based it on some (maybe even commonly know at the time) ancient myth. Plenty of civilizations had flood related ones (and there is some historical basis for it). Of course all the government/society descriptions were invented by him
Absolutely, need we not mention when maps mention something like Terra Australis which clearly denote a continent that hasn't been discovered by historians then it must clearly be a moral fable. May we trust in the dogma of the great interpreters of history.
Example of the beautiful wash of mind (see talk page):
> Terra Australis is a legendary/theoretical continent, not based on sightings of the real Antarctica
Ah, such conviction for someone to have of a past that they never directly experienced. It's remarkable! Especially when the map is the same size of the object it represents. Lest you not think in haste, it is certainly not that which it is.
> Especially when the map is the same size of the object it represents.
Which map? Most maps that have the hypothetical landmass place it with the South Pole at its center, with land spreading outward as far as will fit with the known landmasses.
They also make it many times larger than Australia (usually to conform to the theory that the hemispheres should have equal landmass).
Well.. for centuries going back to the Ancient Greeks at the very least some people believed that earth must be balanced and that land must be more or less equally distributed across its surface otherwise because.. I guess that how they thought physics worked.
> Especially when the map is the same size of the object it represents.
A surprising number of the cultural myths that have entered western canon were born out of obvious fiction. The Holy Grail and Fountain of Youth being prime examples.
The name itself - Atlantis - was a late invention. There is more records under its older name - Lanka. And iirc, India has stories about Ravana - the last, rogue, king of that empire.
So far as I’m aware the only link between the two is that they both refer to mythical island kingdoms that have since been lost. Any and all sources that I’ve seen with regards to connecting the two lean on the same sort of terrible pseudoscience and misunderstandings that underpin most conspiratorial thinking.
As a young boy I decided to discover Atlantis. I deduced that it must be under water but not too deep. So I just searched for the shallowest place of the Mediterranean and declared it Atlantis.
Despite this early breakthrough no further discoveries have been made.
Interestingly, Plato claims that the waters beyond the Pillars of Heracles are very shallow and full of mud shoals because of the sinking of Atlantis. I’ve always thought this a puzzling detail, since a) it certainly isn’t shallow now and b) it would have been well-known at the time whether it was shallow or not, since the Greeks were well-established in that area, so Plato could have been easily refuted in his own time…unless it really was shallow, and that’s changed in the time since due to some geological process we’re unaware of.
Such very shallow waters and mud shoals do exist on the north side of Europe, following the flooding of Doggerland (around 6000 BC). Those waters are "beyond" the Pillars of Heracles if you circumnavigate the entire Iberian coastline. It's likely that tales of this region could have made it to Greece, but I don't think many Greeks had seen it themselves.
> it would have been well-known at the time whether it was shallow or not, since the Greeks were well-established in that area
I’m not sure that’s true. Or rather the Greek civilization was so widely dispersed that whatever Plato heard might have been second or third hand information. His audience probably wouldn’t be bothered that much by it either, I don’t think there is any evidence that Athen merchant ships commonly sailed there.
“Well-established” may be too strong wording, but Greek sailors and traders were certainly familiar, and people generally were familiar with Gades and other settlements. I am not sure if there really was a Greek colony as well at the time of Plato in the Portus Menestheus, although the Greeks believed they had founded one there after the Trojan War.
There’s also Greek stories and lesser familiarity as well at some point with Tartessos (another possible Atlantis.)
I'm not sure of the chronology of ancient Greek writers, but Greek geography was largely aware of the Atlantic coast from roughly the English Channel to around Guinea.
Pytheas, born about 2 years before Plato’s death did sail to Northern Europe and possibly even reached the arctic circle. It’s not at all inconceivable that other Greeks might have reached Britain before him.
There is tiny problem with this theory. Namely Santorini is (and by all accounts always was) a tiny island. Contrast with:
> "for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together" [1]
Whatever the definition of "Libya and Asia" implied here, its kinda hard to reconcile. Like by a factor between 100x - 1000x :-)
Who knows what kind of convolution of themes, imaginary and real, spanning time and space may have been folded together in these enigmatic passages.
Which leads to the broader question, what fraction of puzzles we inherited from these very early patchy historical artifacts we'll we ever be able to resolve?
This a reference to Africa west of Egypt. It was all "Libu" in Herodotus.
Asia, from the Greek name for the city of Assuwa. This was to reference all of Anatolia/Asia Minor.
Hmm. Didn't 6000-4000BC Northwest Africa was part of Green Sahara? The Sahara drying up was part of the Civilization building in the Nile. Maybe Egypt had some myths about the earliest eras and remember a large, very large area of fertile savanna and forest of pre-Egyptians and pre-Berbers, and Plato got Atlantis from that?
He could have been conflating Santorini and Crete, which is a much larger island which was also home to the Minoans. Not larger than modern-day Libya, but perhaps larger than the populated area of Libya at the time.
When the Greeks of Plato's time talked about Libya they aren't talking about the modern country, they mean Africa west of the Nile which is considerably larger, though they didn't realize the full extent of Africa's size.
I think it's pretty obvious that Plato's literal description is complete nonsense. What makes these historical fables interesting is when you ask whether they could be based on real events. Because sometimes there are real historical events that match them in some central details, despite being completely off in others.
This is a field of speculation of course; there's never any hard proof that the author was influenced by those events, but the similarities are intriguing nonetheless.
Other, similar examples:
* King Arthur and Riothamus
* Noah's flood and the flooding of the Black Sea (or more likely a massive flood of the Tigris and Eufrates)
You can never prove that these events did influence the author, but it's intriguing to speculate that they might be.
There's no need to go searching for the "real" Noah and an "actual" flood in the distant past. It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains come up with flood myths that explain the destruction and rebirth of civilizations because they saw floods and rebuilding on a fairly regular basis. Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth. Sometimes even building a boat to save the animals because the gods told him. IMO, it's almost certain that the ancient Hebrews picked up on one (or more) of these myths and incorporated it into their own culture.
> Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth.
Not sure about the others, but at least the Chinese "flood myth", the legend of Yu the Great, is qualitatively different from the Noah myth. It involves non-cataclysmic, recurring floods that the "government" wanted to control. There was no saving animals on a big boat and restarting civilization. It basically involved a big engineering project of directing water flow to where it's needed.
The Noah flood myths seem to describe floods of a much scarier kind, the kinds that have the potential to wipe out civilizations, as opposed to ones happening on a "fairly regular basis". Given that sea water levels rose tens of meters during the Younger Dryas (that's what google tells me at least), it seems conceivable that the movement of such massive amounts of water during these periods would have given rise to such stories.
Civilization to early man was not global, it was local. And yes, the Chinese myth you mention doesn't include a guy saving animals on a boat. But the indian Manu and Matsya myth does. As does the Ziusudra myth and the Gilgamesh flood myth of the Sumerian. And the And the Videvdad of ancient Iran, and the Pu Sangkasa-Ya Sangkasi of ancient Thailand (though here it's a giant magical gourd rather that a ship), and many many more.
What is common is that "everything" gets destroyed, a few survive to rebuild.
> It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains...
I'd go even further: there is no human habitat at all where floods are not dangerous catastrophes. The coast and alluvial plains trivially so, but mountains and deserts, too.
I might be misunderstanding your point, but Egyptian civilisation was entirely based on the flooding of the Nile bringing fertility to the farmlands. It wasn't a dangerous catastrophe, it was a benevolent event that was celebrated with religious feasts etc dedicated to Isis iirc (long time since I read my Egyptian mythology).
My point wasn't that each flood has always been detrimental, but that there has never been a collection of people living in a place where there aren't also dangerous floods that kill people, so wild stories of floods destroying the world aren't really far out for the lived experience (perhaps across a few generations) of any human ever.
Got it. Yes indeed. That makes total sense and I agree.
Also at some point in prehistory the rock formation that is now the strait of Gibraltar fractured and the Atlantic ocean rushed in and drowned the entire basin of the Mediterranean,[1] so that type of cataclysm has actually occurred, although before human experience
>Exploration of the Black Sea shelf reveals two major shelf-crossing unconformities. The older unconformity separates mostly-barren deposits of late glacial age from overlying Neoeunxiain sediment containing fresh to brackish fauna. This unconformity can be traced over the shelf edge to depths beyond –140 m. The substrate below is dry, firm, and contains unchallenged evidence of subaerial exposure at least to depths of –110 m. The Neoeuxinian cover is present on the outer shelf and is preserved, though incompletely, in depressions on the middle and inner shelf. It is even found as subsurface valley fill in the coastal limans and Sea of Azov. The Neoeuxinian on the shelf represents a transgression leading to a highstand at ~ –20 m below today’s sea surface, which was reached by 10,000 BP (uncorrected). Sediments with marine fauna lie above the Neoeuxinian and are separated from it by a sand to gravel layer that represents a younger unconformity. In the limans, the hiatus between the Neoeuxinian and overlying Bugazian is called “peririf” and on the shelf a “washout.” Dune fields between –65 and –80 m and wave-truncated terraces with beach-like berms at –90 to –100 m contain shell material dated between 9500 and 8500 BP, suggesting that the younger unconformity represents a post-Younger Dryas regression that took the surface of the Black Sea’s lake below the level of the global ocean.
I find it so wholly unconvincing that it annoys me whenever it is presented as anything more than quite idle speculation, even if by academics (not here in this particular comment chain, mind you).
It fails to convince me because it rests on two basic claims that I just cannot make myself believe: that humans are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories, and that word of mouth, so inferior to writing for conveying information through the ages, somehow suddenly becomes a gold standard that can hold the kernel of a story true for a multiple of the time span of history.
Occam's Razor just screams that actually, every civilization across the world having their version of flood myths means that humans live in places where floods are important, life-defining catastrophes. this is true of every single habitat I'm aware of, up to and including deserts. It's "7000 (or whatever exactly) years of oral tradition before some Sumerian writes it down that captures anything useful" vs "Listen 'ere, grandchildren, did I tell you tykes the story of when I was your age, and my grandpappy put us all in boat with the sheep because of the flood? I couldn't see no land no more, so much water it was. Sigh, even the floods where better in my time, you don't know how good yer got it (repeat and aggrandize for three more generations)", and knowing humans, only one is instantly believable.
It also solves the annoying conundrum of Native Americans also having flood myths, despite the Black Sea flood happening definitely well after they lost contact with the Old World.
It may be unlikely, and perhaps "unconvincing", but honestly curious - why does it annoy you?
The idea that the flood myths came from an oral tradition ten thousand years ago doesn't even require the first assumption you mentioned (i.e. "that humans are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories"). It may be that among the myths, most of them are grand exaggerated stories, but this one is real.
As for how long oral traditions can survive without writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?
I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely in your framework, a framework that's not indisputably valid at that?
We have so thoroughly lost the art of oral information transmission it is hard to even have a gut feeling as to how it may have worked over generations.
For example did people distinguish "fact from fiction" as they were passing along stories (in some way we would recognize today)?
I somehow doubt that "fact checking" had to wait for Thucydides (in the Hellenic world) [1] as it seems like an important survival attribute, but how did they signal that the story coming up should be taken at face value or with a grain of salt?
[1] Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
That is a good question, and one where I had to do some self examination. I think it is because of the closeness of these claims to just-so stories, despite their posing as science ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story ). That is, stories that fit empirical data to an explanation of it, without ever considering at any point if there is any reason to discard it, or if your hypothesis can even be disproved -- like the famous "not even wrong" quip by Wolfgang Pauli.
> I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely...
I'd like to point out that I'm not at all annoyed at people talking about the possibility in potentia. I disagree that it's a good possibility, but I am only annoyed when this is presented by professionals, most probably scientific journalists*, as something we should expect to be probable. This also extends (a bit unfairly, I guess) to amateurs repeating that claim as truth -- this is just bad pop science.
I do think, however, that the two quoted sentences above do at least imply a logical fallacy: of course we don't know the truth in this case. This does not make any kind of speculation an equally valid hypothesis to any other, there are distinctions, as per Russel's Teapot. And a claim as maximalist as "all the worlds flooding myths come from the Black Sea" better have some actual evidence to back it up, or be preceded with "In further publications, it might be interesting to look for evidence that ..." in the paper.
> As for how long oral traditions can survive without writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?
Similarly, the logical conclusion of that is not "there are stories that have been passed down from our common time in Africa 200k years ago, because who knows how far oral history can go" but rather "until there is actual evidence to the contrary, oral tradition remains suspect as a carrier of stories". We do know that correct details, at least, can be transported over centuries: the Iliad contains descriptions of soldiering that are, in part, clearly Late Bronze Age Mycenaean, though by the time it was written down the authors were unable to disentangle these tidbits from descriptions more fitting to the Archaic Age. That is the upper bound that I'm aware of: a few hundred years, information strongly mangled, but still recognizable if you know what to look for. How do you propose to go from there to an order of magnitude more? Of course, you might reply "you can't disprove it", to which my reply stays the same: then there is absolutely no reason to believe it true.
* I checked the original paper about the deluge, the authors didn't mention all of the worlds flooding myths at all in there. The wild speculation wisely appears in a book they published, which I do not have and which seems to propose a connection of all Indo-European and Egyptian myths. This is a far cry from "the Chinese are unable to think of a flooding myth themselves".
Update: a bit of searching around has mainly offered up thinly-disguised young earth creationist sites or sites clearly pointing out the problems as well as the allure of the "all flood myths are from the Black Sea Deluge" speculation. Maybe I should go softer on science journalism here...
That's very vague. Oral tradition was replaced by writing because writing is better, and the information content decays far slower. Do you have evidence of information transmitted orally across thousands of years? Best I know of is a few measly centuries, from the Iliad, where some passages obviously show knowledge of Late Bronze Age Mycenaean gear, but mixed up with later Archaic stuff.
>and it's not just the Black Sea that flooded, it's coastlines everywhere.
Which wasn't the specific claim here, which is "all flood myths go back to the Black Sea Deluge".
> Do you have evidence of information transmitted orally across thousands of years?
Australian Aboriginal oral tradition describes flooding to create islands or bays (modern science can date the corresponding event back 7000+ years). But in certain cases the level of detail is even better [see link]:
> The story describes several named landmarks with remembered historical-cultural associations that are now underwater.
My theory about the Noah's Ark story is that Noah was a real person, who was a bit more skilled at reading the weather than his neighbors, and predicted a bad rainy season in time to build a boat large enough to save his family and some of his livestock. The rest is just the tale growing in the telling.
It could be literal survivorship bias too, one guy builds a boat in a flight of fancy, turns out to be correct and is the only survivor of a cataclysmic flood, literally lives to tell the tale.
It’s indeed very tiny if we assume that Plato’s story is almost entirely fictional (I don’t think there are any reasons not to) and partially based on some ancient myth or his interpretation of it (just like many modern works of fiction).
That's a lot more reasonable, but that still doesn't exactly fit into the Mediterranean without making a continental bridge to Africa. Maybe as the Azores or Canary islands if they used to be higher.
One fanciful chain of hypothetical events is the Younger Dryas Impact leading to both higher sea levels and the subsidence of the Azores. That series of events is, a comet impacted the North American glacial ice sheet and melted immense amounts of ice. Simultaneously this removed immense amounts of weight from the continent. The removal of weight causes the land to rise where the weight was removed. This rise must be compensated by some other part of the globe. This would be areas that were being pushed out by the weight on North America. There is a rift below the Azores, a weak spot in the crust, that would be squeezed out. As the weight is near instantly removed from North America the rift areas sink rapidly to compensate.
A maritime civilization on the level of the Phoenicians, on an island the size of Turkey, in the middle of the Atlantic would be in an ideal position for trans-Atlantic trade that is even easier than trans-Atlantic trade in our age of sail. If such a civilization existed it would be fantastically wealthy facilitating trade between the Amazon and the Nile. This civilization built in an ideal position during the 2.5 million year Pleistocene would have a very long time to develop a high level of technology.
Like I said, it is fanciful. But, the physics of it are known. Cosmic impacts have reshaped the planet multiple times. Something changed the planet drastically in a very short amount of time that ended the Pleistocene. I like to entertain the idea that a previous global civilization existed that had conquered the long running ice age environment. A cosmic impact rapidly changed the environment and the civilization couldn't survive the upheaval. It doesn't matter one bit to me if it is true other than to remind me, like every other ancient civilization, that nothing, no matter how great, is forever.
Not unless you go really far beyond the "pillars of Heracles" and end up in America, but I'm sure that's been posited as an explanation plenty of times. If it is though, that's really impressive given that ships weren't made for the big oceans / months long trips like that. (I don't know if they had the navigation tools either)
This eruption happened in the 16th century BCE, so Plato was writing about it over 1000 years after it happened. I’m skeptical a story can be passed down that long through oral tradition without changes, so no surprise all the details don’t match up. I would even venture to say that since the focus of this discussion is “something someone once wrote down” and keeping in mind that “people can write down anything they want to” I would say it was completely invented as a thought experiment.
But I’ll also take that Plato could have used an existing folk tale describing that very event as the basis for a point he was trying to make. Especially if his audience was already familiar with said folk tale.
Nb. Plato claims Solon found written records of 'Atlantis' on a visit to Egypt, around 600 BC. That seems consistent with the Santorini hypothesis and Egyptian historians.
We know that Minoans were actively trading to Egypt by around 1600-1400BCE before they get suddenly replaced by Mycenaean Greeks, so there seems to be some support for that hypothesis...
> But I’ll also take that Plato could have used an existing folk tale describing that very event as the basis for a point he was trying to make.
Seems reasonable as well. What comes to mind for me is a (Western?) tradition of writing fiction as if it were reality that takes place in a foreign land. Isn't that kind of a thing? Maybe my brain is extrapolating an untrue connection, if someone here with more literary experience needs to shoot this down that's ok.
This would be a reasonable thing to believe if plato didn't frequently make up tales like this as allegory out of whole cloth, including more than one example _in the same dialogue_
There are multiple examples of 'myth-like' stories whose only attestation is a platonic dialogue.
I can't say much about Atlantis, but my favorite Greek geography tale is from Herodotus, who says the Egyptians sent an expedition around Africa, traveling down the Red Sea then back through the Pillars of Hercules. But he says he's skeptical because how can anyone believe their claim that the sun rose & set in the north ("on their right")?
This is a good counterexample for when you should believe a story like this -- the author is a historian who made an effort to "tell the truth" as best as he could, it doesn't describe anything implausible, he was rightfully skeptical about his own sources, and information that he used to say that the story was probably false is now evidence that it might be true. Herodotus wasn't immune from spreading bullshit(to say the least: https://listverse.com/2015/04/08/10-historical-facts-that-he...), but he at least gives you a good idea of where he was getting the bullshit from and gives you all the information you need to figure out if it was bullshit.
I thought it had been pretty well established for a very long time that, to the degree there was some historical basis for the legend of Atlantis, it is probably tied in with the Minoan civilization and Santorini.
While an interesting enough piece, it certainly isn't a novel theory.
To the degree that there's a consensus view, it's probably that Atlantis didn't exist in reality. (Or, at best, is based on very weak echoes of something that existed.) To the degree that it is based, however loosely on historical reality, Santorini is one of the better candidates.
A few interesting things to mention about the Minoans. Their artwork largely depicts leisure activities. Compare this to the Mycenaeans whose artwork mostly depicted war. It's hard to say for certain without being able to read their writing, but there's a high chance that Minoan woman were equal members of their society. The Minoans also are noteworthy for not having any major defensive structures unlike the Mycenaeans, although around the time of their collapse there is evidence of burn marks from war. They were a very mercantile people trading all around the Mediterranean, but with especially close ties to Egypt. Specifically they imported advanced goods from there. Again, a huge stumbling block is that we can't read their writing, but by all accounts the Minoans seem to have been super wealthy, educated, and civilized people. The Mycenaeans who took over most likely adopted some of their customs, along with their vast trade networks. Probably not unlike how the Romans reacted to the Greeks when they conquered them.
Also, one other interesting tidbit to me, is that Zeus is from Crete. I think it's interesting because Zeus is strong and intelligent, like the Titan Cronos, but more importantly is he is the God that brought justice. Maybe in ancient history there was a time period that was marked by constant war and rule of the strong over the weak, until a Minoan King named Zeus ended the cycle? Who knows, but the list of things that point to Minoan pedigree is really interesting. It's a shame we don't know more about them. I think even if Atlantis per se wasn't mentioned much in surviving writing, that nonetheless the Minoans must have left a huge impact on proto-greeks and that carried onward to archaic and classical Greece.
The name ‘Zeus’ is derived from ancient Indo-European god of the sky ‘Dyḗus ph₂tḗr’ from the days when they were still living in the steppe (Jupyter has the same etymology). While the Minoans weren’t Indo-European (of course it’s very likely that the Greek Zeus just like most of their gods were an amalgamation of local pre Indo European, Middle eastern etc. deities)
I'd CTRL+F for 'Atlantis' to get the relevant part, as the rest of the text isn't too relevant to the Atlantis myth. It's a very short passage, relatively.
That's all that time has left us from Plato's accounts, just the two stories. It;s really not all that much, considering the ink split since then.
Reading it like this is the source of the confusion that so many people have about the nature of the story -- people walk away with the impression that the dialogue is in some sense "about" atlantis, and if you read the entire dialogue it's clear that Plato is interested in far more abstract concerns -- it's about the nature of things, the creation of the universe and the nature of divinity and consciousness. Given that context the idea that Plato just randomly included a random story about an island blowing up as factual reporting is ridiculous. He rolls directly from atlantis to talking about the Demiurge -- which, btw, is another myth that seems to have been entirely the invention of Plato.
There is no mention that Plato placed Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which are usually identified with the Strait of Gibraltar, i.e. in the Atlantic Ocean.
Atlantis is probably mythical, but it isn't the only mythical Atlantic island to go missing. There's also Brasil (or Hy Brasil), an island once regularly shown on maps off the coast of Ireland:
I mean Brasil is fairly recent, go back far enough and there's a land bridge between Europe mainland and the modern day British isles (Doggerland, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland)
perhaps also related to the “Sea Peoples” during the bronze age collapse ~3,0000 years ago?
Could see how the people of the Aegean could produce myths like Atlantis when they themselves were invading Egypt and most likely became the Philistines of the Old Testament, aka Goliath’s people (local greek pottery discovered there, as well as descriptions of helmets etc lend credence to Philistines being the invading Greeks)
You actually see the story about an elite sea peoples warrior being killed by a shepherd throwing a stone in the Argonautica.
The thing is, it's shortly after their prophet Mopsus died in the desert as they wandered by foot back from a conflict in North Africa, remarkably similar to a prophet Moses dying in the desert as different tribes wander by foot back from a conflict in North Africa.
Which ends up very interesting given the Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan, the mention of Dan staying on their ships in Judges 5, the descendent of Moses going with Dan in Judges 18, and then the Denyen sea peoples in Adana recording their rulers as belonging to the House of Mopsus. Particularly in light of Ezekiel 27:19 where Dan and the Greeks are trading together with Tyre in goods that seem likely to come from the Ahhiyawa and Denyen geographies.
There's an important missing piece to understanding the context of the sea peoples that's unfortunately overlooked given the version of the story that was claimed by Hecataeus of Adbera to have recently been changed by subsequent conquests is the only version seriously looked at while the Greek and Egyptian accounts are broadly ignored.
If you're interested in the topic, I recommend looking over the details of the battle of Kadesh inscriptions, particularly noting how Ramses II captured twelve groups of tribes, one for each son with him. At least one of those tribes (the Lukka) are among the first mention of "sea peoples" when they are allied with Libya in a single day battle against Merneptah - which bears striking resemblance to Odysseus's single day battle in Egypt right after Troy falls. He hangs out in Egypt for 7 years until "a certain Phrygian" shows up and tries to ransom him to Libya. Interestingly, exactly seven years after the sea peoples battle is when the usurper Pharoh Amenmesse (going by 'Msy' in Papyrus Salt 124) conquered Egypt.
The picture is a bit more complex than any one ethnocentric story centuries later retells it, and the scholars in antiquity that had Moses as one of the Argonauts or had Greek ancestors as part of the Exodus may have been more relevant than we give tend to regard them.
I'm becoming interested in comparative mythology and religious historiography, it seems you have some pointers in this area. Do you have any books to recommend? I'm very interested in a materialistic explanation of religion, the relation of myths to events at the time is intriguing to me.
Kind of. Homer is combining two separate events into one.
You have the LBA Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia establishing a foothold which correlates to the catalogue of ships (~1400-1350 BCE).
And then you have the sea peoples conquest of Troy taking it back from the Hittites in the early Iron Age (~1200-1180 BCE).
In between that time you have letters from the Hittites pursuing a refugee asking the Ahhiyawa to hand him over from Troy (so presumably the pre-Greeks already had influence over Troy), then later referring to their own vassal in charge of the city.
The sea peoples are primarily Anatolian and from the Aegean isles. They don't seem to be from the Greek mainland, whereas the Mycenaeans were.
So you have a predominantly Greek story of the initial LBA conquest, and then a quite mixed group conquering their own homelands which happens in the early Iron Age.
Homer rolls them up into one story of a predominantly Greek conquest of Troy, and as a result the Greeks had an entirely broken picture of the LBA/EIA period, from Perseus being his own grandfather based on the sources to thinking the Argonauts (a sea people story) happened before the Mycenaean catalogue of ships when it was the other way around.
You can even match details in both parts of the story to independent events recorded in Egypt during each of the respective periods.
Yes, it's well established that Philistines were Greek sailors that were invading Egypt.
After Revolt of Maccabees against Greek Seleucid empire (Jewish holiday of Hannukah), a Philistine Gaza that was a Greek stronghold, was conquered by one of the revolt leaders (Jonathan the Hasmonean).
> Philistines were Greek sailors that were invading Egypt
There is a thousand year gap between that and:
> a Philistine Gaza that was a Greek stronghold, was conquered by one of the revolt leaders (Jonathan the Hasmonean).
In reality they were almost certainly entirely unconnected. There is no way that by the time the Greeks conquered the region during Alexander’s time they would considered Philistines to be “Greek” in any discernible way.
The sea people are probably what we consider now barbarians. They can be powerful when an empire is going through a weak period but they do not have an established civilization (they are nomads and survive from plunder)
> In the 16th century BC ... this volcanic island erupted.
> the eruption emptied the magma chamber beneath the island. This caused large sections of the island to literally collapse ‘into the depths of the sea’.
I wonder if any exploration has been done in the (now submersed) portions of outer ring. Was this land fully above the surface and previously inhabited? If so can divers find any kind of artifacts in that submersed outer rim.
I suspect any explosion of the caldera volcano that would blow the island out of existence would thrown artifacts far out to sea instead of burying them.
Nobody would survive an explosion that destroyed the inner most island, the middle ring island, and half the outer island. All bronze age people would know was that there was a great noise, some smoke, and then they whole island was gone into the sea. Of course they would assume it sank rather than got blown up.
Finding artifacts from 3,700 years ago that were thrown out to sea would be difficult. Differentiating them from other artifacts of similar age in that area would sadly be beyond belief.
> any explosion of the caldera volcano that would blow the island out of existence would thrown artifacts far out to sea instead of burying them.
Modern Santorini has a crescent shape because of the "missing middle" part.
But there is also a site called Akrotiri, which is still on land, and was buried in volcanic ash. It is a bit like Pompei, only about twice as old:
> The settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the remains of fine frescoes and many objects and artworks. Akrotiri has been excavated since 1967 after earlier excavations on Santorini.
Not having listened to it, I'd guess he's referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure, a very large circular rock structure in Africa. And also one where the archaeological evidence shows nothing more than periodic visitation by nomadic peoples, nothing like the supposed state society Atlantis would have been.
A rich civilisation (possibly in the millions), leaving absolutely no trace in any shape or form? Maybe time to apply Occam's Razor.
On the other hand, a green north Africa is well established. And it turns out that the Ancient Egyptians might have descended from hunter-gatherers who were driven towards the nile as the grasslands gave way to desert. For all of which there is archaeological evidence.
I can imagine a green Sahara, as I could imagine a civilization. What I can't imagine is a civilization that exists without leaving any archaeological trace of itself.
What about catastrophic tsunami induced by asteroid impact? That's one of the theories in the context of that structure as Atlantis. There are people who think some of the geologic features surrounding that place lead to that conclusion. Comparable to the things found in North-America, where there is no doubt at all that these are traces of catastrophic flooding at laaarge scale.
Anyways, theory is that giant masses of water rushed from somewhere of what is now the southern or southwestern cost of the mediterran sea(Lybia, Algeria), downwards and westwards, until reaching the Atlantic. Not gently at all.
What do you expect to find there, especially after so much time passed?
The hardened pyramid defence bunkers of the Kinks of Koulou?
> What about catastrophic tsunami induced by asteroid impact? That's one of the theories in the context of that structure as Atlantis. There are people who think some of the geologic features surrounding that place lead to that conclusion. Comparable to the things found in North-America, where there is no doubt at all that these are traces of catastrophic flooding at laaarge scale.
It's ~400m in altitude, approximately 500-600km inland, and not along a major watercourse like the Mississippi river that might funnel tsunamis inland. So... no, it's not plausible for this structure.
Yes, I'm aware of their other activities, that it could be considered clickbait, scamming naive people into subscribing to their premium content elsewhere, or whatever.
While I don't believe in much other stuff they are propagating, this seems to be at least usable as 'work(ing) hypothesis' in the sense and meaning that it isn't more absurd, than so much else we subscribed to by 'tradition'.
I won't go further into that now, because I had my fun/enlightening/scam/brain wash/whatever with that a few years ago, and won't budge an inch into my acceptance of the possibilty that it could have been.
At 10:45: Somebody who jumps from “A city that was busy all day, all night” to “it must be millions of people like New York” can only be described as daft.
There is scholarly work on Atlantis. And this clown mentions none of it.
They say 12,500 years ago the Sahara once had rivers everywhere and it was green and verdant. That there once was a massive river flowing along the Atlas mountains on the southern side to what we know as Mauretania. Was that where Atlantis located? Because with that massive river on the southern side of the mountains and the Atlantic and Mediterranean on the northern side it would have been a big fucking island.
no, Atlantis was a rhetorical device used to denounce the profligacy of democratic rule, and how it will cause the collapse of society (by nature overthrowing a corrupt and unnatural, as they saw it, way of life.)
Just like someone had very convincing evidence that Delphi was actually Delft, in The Netherlands. I can't find any reference to it anymore, but he published a book. Odysseus apparently traveled the North Sea, or something silly like that.
“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."
I sometime wonder if in the 25th century people will be searching for the exact location of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
To be fair, Troy was also mostly thought to be mystical before Heinrich Schliemann went on a quest to find it (and subsequently destroyed most of it as he used explosives to perform archeological digs).
The funny thing is this has already happened. They erected a platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross. The only problem being that a) it doesn’t even vaguely correspond to the description in the book and b) in fact, from the description it’s likely they were actually talking about old St Pancras station.
There's no reason to believe that what Evans found was the mythological Troy (note the "mythological"). Maybe it was the city called Wilusa by the Hittites, or maybe it wasn't, and maybe Wilusa was Troy ("Ilion") or maybe it wasn't. There's no way to know for sure.
Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient as the Iliad, after all.
The one i like is imagining some poor schnook of a grad student in 500 years writing a dissertation on “american pie” and the complex interrelationship of food culture and religion, and if the Jester in the song is the same as the joker that batman killed (or didn’t), and if so was he talking to the thief in the watchtower — and what really does that have to do with band camp?!
"We know that they generally had good diplomatic relationships and there was a great deal of cross-border trade, but the historical record is still unclear about the exact relationship between the United States of America and the Magic Kingdom."
Over drinks one night, Cardozo shared with Brosnan a short, somewhat cheeky passage in DeMille's 1959 autobiography in which the director cryptically confirmed the burial. The book's section reads: "If, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilisation... extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America… The sphinxes they will find were buried there when we had finished with them."
[NB This is based on me recognising the landscape in some of the movies, apparently the books say it is near Dufftown - which is on the other side of Scotland].
I had also assumed it was the school on Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, but apparently that's definitely not true...
Apparently Rowling thought of Hogwarts before moving to Edinburgh - but it seems a bit of a coincidence that Heriots school is right next to the graveyard with Tom Riddle's grave:
Mind you - I'm not really that big a Harry Potter fan but I did live in that part of Edinburgh for many years and my son went to Heriots after adventures at other schools...
The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic. But when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality - people don't seem to notice - this is a virtual reality. These are all ideas - ideas that have been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to be human. - Terence McKenna
And yet in Plato's Timaeus, you find statements like this:
> On the side toward the sea, and in the center of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the center of the island, at a distance of about fifty stadia (one stadia=606 feet), there was a mountain, not very high on any side.
> And, beginning from the sea, they dug a canal three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth, and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this,
> Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two, as well the zone of water as of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia.
> It was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill.
> And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below.
> The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.
This is also a geographical account, by Tolkien of Minas Tirith.
There are actually striking similarities in style, which is unsurprising given that Tolkien was a scholar who patterned his works on ancient epics. The main difference is that the ancient text has more numbers, which, given the timescales a historical Atlantis would have to have occurred on, were certainly not literal measurements recorded by Plato or a contemporary.
There is one—"a thousand feet"—but also you can't use the existence of measurements as evidence of authenticity.
For one, those measurements can't possibly have been recorded by Plato or a contemporary, because if there were a historical Atlantis all claims point to it being centuries older than Plato. Any numbers he's using are either completely fictitious or passed down and distorted through generations. Either way, Plato clearly didn't care that they were accurate.
Second, ancient literature is kind of obsessed with giving precise measurements for things that can't possibly be accurate. The numbers are inserted to give a sense of grandeur, and are just a part of the style of this kind of work. Where they seem odd and out of place to us, they were common at the time. See the Bible, Herodotus, and many others.
Tolkien's writing is accurate and descriptive enough to not only produce an atlas [5], and a legendarium of plants [24356] but for said atlas to not only describe the routes, but the types of land/mountains traversed, and how they would have come to be.
Plato frequently gave detailed descriptions of utterly fanciful situations. He wasn't a historian and wasn't particularly interested in details of the physical world. He wrote dialogues about philosophy and was interested in the world of forms, and any story he told that was seemingly grounded reality was in service of making a larger point. In fact, even the dialogues themselves purported to be actual conversations between real people and almost certainly were not in most cases, no matter how much detail he provided about the event.
The “physical details” of the new jerusalem are given in exhausting detail in Revelations, but this is well understood by scholars to be rife with symbolic and numerological intent and was not likely to have been intended by john of patmos to be understood as representing any material place.
Plato, fond of such rhetorical devices himself, is more than likely to be following a similar game.
Yeah, a fictional geographical account. What about that description suggests it's real to you? If it's the specific measurements used, then I don't think you've read very much ancient literature, because that's not at all an uncommon way of describing fictional things.
"Ancient people where to stupid to imagine measurements in a fictional account, therefore the presence of measurements is evidence of the story being factional" is a quite arrogant take, don't you think?
Crossan’s work as a scholar and pop-history author involved a particular sceptical interpretation of very early Christianity that is not shared by most of the sceptical historians of early Christianity. So, his scepticism is particularly extreme.
There are plenty of Mediterranean historical fiction-like tales where an original grain of truth does seem promising. Besides popular cases like Atlantis, and Troy as a site, there’s e.g. Aeneas coming from Troy to Rome as a possible reflection of an Bronze Age-collapse era migration from western Anatolia to Italy bringing the Etruscan language.
Crossan always seems to be well respected whenever I’ve heard him mentioned by other academics that study historical Christianity. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have some heterodox views, but they at least seem to exist within the broader academic consensus.
In Atlantis's case, Plato's story is based on quoting someone who lived 150 years before him, also includes Poseidon as a historical figure, and Aristotle called it symbolical in his own writing[0].
[0] not sure where, have only seen other people mention this
No Greek historian mention Atlantis. No Greek myth or epic mention Atlantis.
We might also ask where the fabled cave from The Republic is actually located.