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Atlantis

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Myths

   Atlantis ( Greek: Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος, "Island of Atlas") is the name of an
   island first mentioned and described by the classical Greek philosopher
   Plato. According to him this island, lying "beyond the pillars of
   Hercules", was a naval power, having conquered many parts of western
   Europe and Africa. Soon after a failed invasion of Athens, Atlantis
   sank in the waves "in a single day and night of misfortune" due to a
   natural catastrophe which happened 9,000 years before Plato's time.

   As a story embedded in Plato's dialogues, Atlantis is mostly seen as a
   myth created by Plato to back up a previously invented theory with real
   facts. Some scholars express the opinion that Plato intended to tell
   real history. Although the function of the story of Atlantis seems to
   be clear to most scholars, they dispute whether and how much Plato's
   account was inspired by older traditions. Some scholars argue Plato
   drew upon memories of past events such as the Thera eruption or the
   Trojan War, while others insist that he took inspiration of
   contemporary events like the destruction of Helike in 373 BC or the
   failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415–413 BC.

   The possible existence of Atlantis was actively discussed throughout
   the classical antiquity, but it was usually rejected and occasionally
   parodied. While basically unknown during the Middle Ages, the story of
   Atlantis was rediscovered by Humanists at the very beginning of modern
   times. Plato's description inspired the utopian works of several
   Renaissance writers, like Francis Bacon's " New Atlantis". More than
   ever, Atlantis inspires today's literature, from science fiction to
   comic books and movies.
   Athanasius Kircher's map of Atlantis, in the middle of the Atlantic
   Ocean. From Mundus Subterraneus 1669. The map is oriented with south at
   the top.
   Enlarge
   Athanasius Kircher's map of Atlantis, in the middle of the Atlantic
   Ocean. From Mundus Subterraneus 1669. The map is oriented with south at
   the top.

Plato's account


   Atlantis

    Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly
    true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven
                                   sages.


   Atlantis

   —Critias to Socrates, according to Plato, Timaeus 20d. Translated by B
                                   Jowett.

   Plato's account of Atlantis is written in the dialogues Timaeus and
   Critias, dated circa 360 BC. These works contain the earliest known
   references to Atlantis. The dialogue Critias was never completed by
   Plato for an unknown reason, however scholar Benjamin Jowett among
   others, argues that Plato originally planned a third dialogue titled
   Hermocrates. John V. Luce assumes that Plato — after describing the
   origin of the world and mankind in Timaeus as well as the allegorical
   perfect society of ancient Athens and its successful defense against an
   antagonistic Atlantis in Critias — would have made the strategy of the
   Hellenic civilisation during their conflict with the barbarians a
   subject of discussion in the phantom dialog.

   The four persons appearing in those two dialogues are the politicians
   Critias and Hermocrates as well as the philosophers Socrates and
   Timaeus, although only Critias speaks of Atlantis. While most likely
   all of these people actually lived, these dialogues as recorded may
   have been the invention of Plato. In his written works, Plato makes
   extensive use of the Socratic dialogues in order to discuss contrary
   positions within the context of a supposition.

   The Timaeus begins with an introduction, followed by an account of the
   creations and structure of the universe and ancient civilizations. In
   the introduction, Socrates muses about the perfect society, described
   in Plato's Republic, and wonders if he and his guests might recollect a
   story which exemplifies such a society. Critias mentions an allegedly
   historical tale that would make the perfect example, and follows by
   describing Atlantis as is recorded in the Critias. In his account,
   ancient Athens seems to represent the "perfect society" and Atlantis
   its opponent, representing the very antithesis of the "perfect" traits
   described in the Republic. Critias claims that his accounts of ancient
   Athens and Atlantis stem from a visit to Egypt by the Athenian lawgiver
   Solon in the 6th century BC. In Egypt, Solon met a priest of Sais, who
   translated the history of ancient Athens and Atlantis, recorded on
   papyri in Egyptian hieroglyphs, into Greek. According to Plutarch the
   priest was named Sonchis, but because of the temporal distance between
   Plutarch and the alleged event, this identification is unverified.

   According to Critias, the Hellenic gods of old divided the land so that
   each god might own a lot; Poseidon was appropriately, and to his
   liking, bequeathed the island of Atlantis. The island was larger than
   Libya and Asia Minor combined, but has since been sunk by an earthquake
   and became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel between the
   Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Egyptians described
   Atlantis as an island approximately 700 kilometres (435  mi) across,
   comprising mostly mountains in the northern portions and along the
   shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south
   "extending in one direction three thousand stadia [about 600 km;
   375 mi], but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia [about
   400 km; 250 mi]."

   Fifty stadia inland from the middle of the southern coast was a
   "mountain not very high on any side." Here lived a native woman with
   whom Poseidon fell in love and who bore him five pairs of male twins.
   The eldest of these, Atlas, was made rightful king of the entire island
   and the ocean (now the Atlantic Ocean), and was given the mountain of
   his birth and the surrounding area as his fiefdom. Atlas's twin
   Gadeirus or Eumelus in Greek, was given the easternmost portion of the
   island. The other four pairs of twins — Ampheres and Evaemon, Mneseus
   and Autochthon, Elasippus and Mestor, and Azaes and Diaprepes — "were
   the inhabitants and rulers of divers islands in the open sea."

   Poseidon carved the inland mountain where his love dwelt into a palace
   and enclosed it with three circular moats of increasing width, varying
   from one to three stadia and separated by rings of land proportional in
   size. The Atlanteans then built bridges northward from the mountain,
   making a route to the rest of the island. They dug a great canal to the
   sea, and alongside the bridges carved tunnels into the rings of rock so
   that ships could pass into the city around the mountain; they carved
   docks from the rock walls of the moats. Every passage to the city was
   guarded by gates and towers, and a wall surrounded each of the city's
   rings. The walls were constructed of red, white and black rock quarried
   from the moats, and were covered with brass, tin and orichalcum,
   respectively.

   According to Critias, 9,000 years before his lifetime a war took place
   between those outside the Pillars of Hercules- commonly considered to
   be the Strait of Gibraltar- and those who dwelt within them. The
   Atlanteans had conquered the Mediterranean as far east as Egypt and the
   continent into Tyrrhenia, and subjected its people to slavery. The
   Athenians led an alliance of resistors against the Atlantean empire and
   as the alliance disintegrated, prevailed alone against the empire,
   liberating the occupied lands. "But afterwards there occurred violent
   earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all
   your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of
   Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea."

Receptions

Ancient

   Detail of The School of Athens by Raphael, 1509, showing Plato (left)
   and Aristotle.
   Enlarge
   Detail of The School of Athens by Raphael, 1509, showing Plato (left)
   and Aristotle.


   Atlantis

    Its inventor caused it to disappear, just as did the Poet the wall of
                                the Achaeans.


   Atlantis

    —Alleged quote of Aristotle, according to Strabo, Geography 2,3,6.
                           Translated by HL Jones.

   Other than Plato's Timaeus and Critias there is no primary ancient
   account of Atlantis, which means every other account on Atlantis relies
   on Plato in one way or another. To this day, no proof for a
   non-Platonic tradition of Atlantis has been found. However, the Greek
   logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos wrote a work (now lost), named
   Atlantis (or Atlantias), about the daughters of the titan Atlas (not
   the Atlas mentioned by Plato). However, it is unlikely that this work
   was an inspiration to Plato, since he named Atlantis after the Atlantic
   Ocean (ancient Greek: Ἀτλαντὶς θάλασσα, "Sea of Atlas"), which already
   had this name in the time of Herodotus.

   Many ancient philosophers viewed Atlantis as fiction. The most popular
   might be Aristotle, who is allegedly quoted by Strabo with the above
   mentioned commentary on Atlantis.

   However, in antiquity, there were also philosophers, geographers, and
   historians who believed that Atlantis was real. For instance, the
   philosopher Crantor, a student of Plato's student Xenocrates, tried to
   find proof of Atlantis' existence. His work, a comment on Plato's
   Timaeus, is lost, but another ancient historian, Proclus, reports that
   Crantor traveled to Egypt and actually found columns with the history
   of Atlantis written in hieroglyphic characters. However, Plato did not
   write that Solon saw the Atlantis story on a column but on a source
   that can be "taken to hand". Proclus' proof appears implausible.

   Another passage from Proclus' 5th century AD commentary on the Timaeus
   gives a description of the geography of Atlantis: "That an island of
   such nature and size once existed is evident from what is said by
   certain authors who investigated the things around the outer sea. For
   according to them, there were seven islands in that sea in their time,
   sacred to Persephone, and also three others of enormous size, one of
   which was sacred to Pluto, another to Ammon, and another one between
   them to Poseidon, the extent of which was a thousand stadia; and the
   inhabitants of it—they add—preserved the remembrance from their
   ancestors of the immeasurably large island of Atlantis which had really
   existed there and which for many ages had reigned over all islands in
   the Atlantic sea and which itself had like-wise been sacred to
   Poseidon. Now these things Marcellus has written in his Aethiopica".
   However, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath argues that this Marcellus — who is
   otherwise unknown — is probably not a historian but a novelist.

   Other ancient historians and philosophers believing in the existence of
   Atlantis were Strabo and Posidonius (cf. Strabo 2,3,6).

   Plato's account of Atlantis may have also inspired parodic imitation:
   writing only a few decades after the Timaeus and Critias, the historian
   Theopompus of Chios wrote of a land beyond the ocean known as Meropis.
   This description was included in Book 8 of his voluminous Philippica,
   which contains a dialogue between King Midas and Silenus, a companion
   of Dionysus. Silenus describes the Meropids, a race of men who grow to
   twice normal size, and inhabit two cities on the island of Meropis:
   Eusebes (Εὐσεβής, "Pious-town") and Machimos (Μάχιμος,
   "Fighting-town"). He also reports that an army of ten million soldiers
   crossed the ocean to conquer Hyperborea, but abandoned this proposal
   when they realized that the Hyperboreans were the luckiest people on
   earth. Heinz-Günther Nesselrath has argued that these and other details
   of Silenus' story are meant as imitation and exaggeration of the
   Atlantis story, for the purpose of exposing Plato's ideas to ridicule.

   Somewhat similar is the story of Panchaea, written by philosopher
   Euhemerus. It mentions a perfect society on an island in the Indian
   Ocean. Zoticus, a Neoplatonist philosopher of the 3rd century AD, wrote
   an epic poem based on Plato's account of Atlantis.

   The 4th century AD historian Ammianus Marcellinus, relying on a lost
   work by Timagenes, a historian writing in the 1st century BC, writes
   that the Druids of Gaul said that part of the inhabitants of Gaul had
   migrated there from distant islands. Ammianus' testimony has been
   understood by some as a claim that when Atlantis sunk into the sea, its
   inhabitants fled to western Europe; but Ammianus in fact 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"
   (Res Gestae 15.9), an indication that the immigrants came to Gaul from
   the north and east, not from the Atlantic Ocean.

Modern

   A map showing a supposed location of Atlantis. From Ignatius Donnelly's
   Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, 1882.
   Enlarge
   A map showing a supposed location of Atlantis. From Ignatius Donnelly's
   Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, 1882.

   Francis Bacon's 1627 novel The New Atlantis describes a utopian
   society, called Bensalem, located off the western coast of America. A
   character in the novel gives a history of Atlantis that is similar to
   Plato's, and places Atlantis in America. It is not clear whether Bacon
   means North or South America.

   In middle and late 19^th century, several renowned Mesoamerican
   scholars, starting with Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and
   including Edward Herbert Thompson and Augustus Le Plongeon proposed
   that Atlantis was somehow related to Mayan and Aztec culture.
   Ignatius Donnelly, American congressman, and writer on Atlantis.
   Enlarge
   Ignatius Donnelly, American congressman, and writer on Atlantis.

   The 1882 publication of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by Ignatius
   Donnelly stimulated much popular interest in Atlantis. Donnelly took
   Plato's account of Atlantis seriously and attempted to establish that
   all known ancient civilizations were descended from its high neolithic
   culture.
   American psychic Edgar Cayce, 1910
   Enlarge
   American psychic Edgar Cayce, 1910

   During the late 19^th century, ideas about the legendary nature of
   Atlantis were combined with stories of other lost continents such as Mu
   and Lemuria by popular figures in the occult and the growing new age
   phenomenon. Helena Blavatsky, the "Grandmother of the New Age
   movement," writes in The Secret Doctrine that the Atlanteans were
   cultural heroes (contrary to Plato who describes them mainly as a
   military threat), and are the fourth " Root Race", succeeded by the "
   Aryan race". Rudolf Steiner wrote of the cultural evolution of Mu or
   Atlantis. Famed psychic Edgar Cayce first mentioned Atlantis in a life
   reading given in 1923, and later gave its geographical location as the
   Caribbean, and proposed that Atlantis was an ancient, now-submerged,
   highly-evolved civilization which had ships and aircraft powered by a
   mysterious form of energy crystal. He also predicted that parts of
   Atlantis would rise in 1968 or 1969. The Bimini Road, a submarine
   geological formation just off North Bimini Island, discovered in 1968,
   has been claimed by some to be evidence of the lost civilization (among
   many other things) and is still being explored today.

   Before the time of Eratosthenes about 250 BC, Greek writers located the
   Pillars of Hercules on the Strait of Sicily. This changed with
   Alexander the Great’s eastward expansion and the Pillars were moved by
   Eratosthenes to Gibraltar. This evidence has been cited in some
   Atlantis theories, notably in Sergio Frau's work. His theory, supported
   by scholars and archaeologists, is still studied by the UNESCO

Nationalist and Socialist ideas of Atlantis

   Plato's Atlantis has been considered by some socialists as an early
   socialist utopia. British nationalists identified the British isles
   with Atlantis.

   The concept of Atlantis also attracted National Socialist (Nazi)
   theorists. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler organized a search in Tibet to
   find a remnant of the white Atlanteans. According to Julius Evola (
   Revolt Against the Modern World, 1934), the Atlanteans were
   Hyperboreans -- Nordic supermen who originated on the North pole (see
   Thule). Similarly, Alfred Rosenberg ( The Myth of the Twentieth
   Century, 1930) spoke of a "Nordic-Atlantean" or "Aryan-Nordic" master
   race.

   Aleister Crowley has also written an esoteric history of Atlantis,
   although this may be intended more as metaphor than as fact.

Recent times


 Atlantis

         Atlantis, I take it, is a creation of Plato's own imagination.


                                                                        Atlantis

                   —JA Stewart, The Myths of Plato, p. 466.

   As continental drift became more widely accepted during the 1950s, most
   "Lost Continent" theories of Atlantis began to wane in popularity. In
   response, some recent theories propose that elements of Plato's story
   were derived from earlier myths.

   Plato scholar Dr Julia Annas ( Regents Professor of Philosophy,
   University of Arizona) has had this to say on the matter:

   "The continuing industry of discovering Atlantis illustrates the
   dangers of reading Plato. For he is clearly using what has become a
   standard device of fiction - stressing the historicity of an event (and
   the discovery of hitherto unknown authorities) as an indication that
   what follows is fiction. The idea is that we should use the story to
   examine our ideas of government and power. We have missed the point if
   instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea bed.
   The continuing misunderstanding of Plato as historian here enables us
   to see why his distrust of imaginative writing is sometimes justified."

Location hypotheses

   Satellite image of the islands of Santorini. This location is one of
   many sites purported to have been the location of Atlantis.
   Enlarge
   Satellite image of the islands of Santorini. This location is one of
   many sites purported to have been the location of Atlantis.


   Atlantis

    To one degree or another, all these scenarios involve such a deal of
    reinterpretation (with violence) of Plato's actual words that the end
                            result is ridiculous.


   Atlantis

                 —P Jordan, The Atlantis Syndrome, p. 40.

Inside the Mediterranean

   Since Donnelly's day, there have been dozens—perhaps hundreds—of
   locations proposed for Atlantis. Some are scholarly or archaeological
   works whilst others have been made by psychic or other pseudoscientific
   means. Many of the proposed sites share some of the characteristics of
   the Atlantis story (water, catastrophic end, relevant time period), but
   none have been proven conclusively to be the historical Atlantis. Most
   of the historically proposed locations are in or near the Mediterranean
   Sea, either islands such as Sardinia, Crete and Santorini, Cyprus,
   Malta, and Ponza or as land based cities or states such as Troy,
   Tartessos or Tantalus (in the province of Manisa), Turkey, and the new
   theory of Israel- Sinai or Canaan as possible locations. The massive
   Thera eruption, dated either to the 17th or the 15th century BC, caused
   a massive tsunami that experts hypothesize devastated the Minoan
   civilization on the nearby island of Crete, further leading some to
   believe that this may have been the catastrophe which inspired the
   story.

Outside the Mediterranean

   Locations as wide-ranging as Andalusia, Antarctica, Indonesia,
   underneath the Bermuda Triangle, and the Caribbean have been proposed
   as the true site of Atlantis. In the area of the Black Sea at least
   three locations have been proposed: Bosporus, Sinop and Ancomah (a
   legendary place near Trabzon). The nearby Sea of Azov was proposed as
   another site in 2003. In Northern Europe, Sweden (by Olof Rudbeck in
   "Atland", 1672- 1702), Ireland, and the North Sea have been proposed
   (the Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson combines the North Sea and
   Ireland in a comprehensive hypothesis). Areas in the Pacific and Indian
   Ocean have also been proposed including Indonesia, Malaysia or both
   (i.e. Sundaland) and stories of a lost continent off India named "
   Kumari Kandam" have drawn parallels to Atlantis. Even Cuba and the
   Bahamas have been suggested. Some believe that Atlantis stretched from
   the tip of Spain to Central America. According to Ignatius Donnelly in
   his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, there is a connection
   between Atlantis and Aztlan (the ancestral home of the Aztecs). He
   claims that the Aztecs pointed east to the Caribbean as the former
   location of Aztlan.

   The Canary Islands have also been identified as a possible location,
   West of the Straits of Gibraltar but in close proximity to the
   Mediterranean Sea. Various islands or island groups in the Atlantic
   were also identified as possible locations, notably the Azores
   (Mid-Atlantic islands which are a territory of Portugal), and even
   several Caribbean islands. The submerged island of Spartel near the
   Strait of Gibraltar would coincide with some elements of Plato's
   account, matching both the location and the date of submersion given in
   the Critias. Popular culture unceasingly places Atlantis in the
   Atlantic Ocean and perpetuates the original Platonic ideal.

Atlantis in art, literature and popular culture

   The legend of Atlantis is featured in many books, movies, television
   series, games, songs, and other creative works

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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