 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
Plato's Atlantis  Full transcripts of Plato's "Critias" and "Timaeus" mentioning Atlantis are available in several places on the web, but no matter how I read it, I cannot forget a crucial truth of Plato's time: The entire world, as far as they were concerned, was wrapped around the Mediterranean Sea. Few, if any, had the remotest clue of how large the world really is. They didn't understand that the Earth is actually a sphere covered in more land and water than they could possibly imagine. So, while they attempted to describe Atlantis from where they were, they didn't really have a full grasp of the neighborhood.
The woodcut map to the right shows the whole world according to Ancient Greece. Naturally, Greece itself is near the center of everything. The Mediterranean Sea is the main thoroughfare. There is mention of a continent surrounding the ocean, but no understanding of what that meant. They had an idea that perhaps there was ocean (Oceanus) beyond their known world because the water which came through the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) had to come from somewhere. All of this is indicative of their narrow frame of reference which we must consider when trying to interpret their writings. The 'opposite continent' mentioned by Critias might have referred to Africa across the Med more easily than the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean, which they didn't know existed. Of course, the Americas did not sink, nor did Africa sink, and neither is lost. The often associated Kircher map (c.1665) is further muddlement. First, you have to flip it vertically and horizontally to put America in the west and Africa/Europe in the east.  A notation upon it says it is to represent Atlantis from Plato's description. Well, there's an island, but no zones 'as turned on a lathe', ie, concentric circles, which are clearly described by Critias. He tells how Poseidon arranged the land and water then later allocated it to his sons. None of Poseidon's godly terraforming is indicated on Kircher's map.
If the scale is remotely intended to be accurate and representative of distances given in Plato's writing, then Kircher's map indicates the Atlantic Ocean is about 700 miles wide from the Strait of Gibraltar to North America. This is of course inaccurate, it's off by more than three thousand miles. Kircher's map doesn't represent the world as we know it, nor Atlantis as Plato described it. He seems to have been rather confused and so is everyone showing this map around as an indication of Plato's Atlantis. There are a few other maps claiming the location of Atlantis but they're as fanciful as Kircher's. A major disadvantage is that these cartographers and Atlantis researchers have been looking at what's been said of Atlantis without knowledge of the Earth. In their defense, we have only recently been able to look at the Earth as clearly as we can now to see the imprint of Atlantis. Because of this, now seems the time to straighten out the myth and literally ground the truth of it with physical evidence.  Another often shown map, by Piri Reis (c.1513), is a terrific artifact and does indeed give some very interesting notes about the Americas and Atlantic Ocean discoveries as seen through the ink of a 16th Century fellow. However, there is no reason to connect it with Atlantis. What is described is very obviously the Americas, including some of the inhabitants and fauna.
If proponents of this map were trying to show that Atlantis was located in the Americas, perhaps there would be some validity to be found in that. However, they generally use this map to draw correlations between Atlantis and Antarctica, by some leap of logic which is never explained convincingly. There is no reasonable connection, and even the suggestion that Piri Reis drew Antarctica's de-iced coastline is quite a stretch of imagination when this map is compared to the actual lay of the land upon the Earth. Piri Reis put together this map from the partial maps and logs of other explorers, like Columbus. The shape of South America is quite well done. The shape of everything north appears rather inaccurate, but could be seen as a problem of scale, even though Reis claims to have adjusted for that. Still, there is no indication of anything remotely Atlantean going on in this map, and it wouldn't be. By 1500AD, before this map was compiled, Plato's Atlantis had been missing for at least 10,000 years. Actually, even Plato's direct accounts of Atlantis have a few glaring inconsistencies. Critias gives terrific detail of a place, but some of that detail belies further detail given in other passages. For instance, he alludes to Atlantis being outside the Pillars but alternately says it was within. The Pillars are called by Hercules in one place, Heracles in another, and presumed now to mean the Strait of Gibraltar. The island of Atlantis is in one instance described as rather small (50 stadia or 5.5 miles from middle to coast), and then bigger at possibly 3000 stadia long which is still only about 330 miles across (2000 stadia or 220 miles wide). Elsewhere, Plato relays that Atlantis is as large as Libya and Asia combined. A place this large would have taken up the entire Mediterranean and then some, if inside the Strait (and not Africa itself). If outside, there would surely be some small shred of evidence on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. It is said that the island could be seen from the Pillars, that would have to place it very close, thousands of miles closer than the Americas, but there's nothing as big as Libya or Asia in the Atlantic at all and no evidence that there ever was. Outside the Strait of Gibraltar, the nearest candidates are perhaps the Azores or Canary Islands, for the small version of Atlantis. Either might have been one whole island if the sea level were much lower. How the population there could have defeated the 'whole world' and been so thoroughly routed by the power of Athens alone, just doesn't really add up. And, if Athens had defeated 'Atlantis' then why was it necessary for Zeus or other to sink it with catastrophe? Hadn't they been rendered harmless by defeat? Inside the Strait, ie, within the Mediterranean, the islands of Crete and Santorini (formerly Thera) seem like viable candidates. They do look as though they could have been part of a circular arrangement. There was indeed a mountain in the middle of Thera and then a ring of mountains around the perimeter, as described, and so on. Taken as part of the whole group of Greek islands, it could well be that Plato's descriptions refer to this area close at hand. Perhaps Ancient Crete and/or the Minoan Civilization were related to Atlantis. However, this area obviously does not lie beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar). In any case, the shifting story, even by the same story teller (Critias) and the same reporter (Plato), does not really offer much verifiable information about Atlantis, only that it was something to do with a utopian civilization and it had been destroyed thousands of years before Plato's time. This much I can believe and in fact feel is true, but the details found in the writings of Plato are lacking. It is possible that the island to which Plato's writings refer, if real, was indeed an Atlantean settlement, but it was not THE island of Atlantis nor had he pinpointed a lost continent. I believe this tale is one of the countless examples of how information carried along the grapevine often gets quite mangled. After all, this story is told by Plato who is recounting what was told to Socrates by Critias who heard the tale from his grandfather and read from his great grandfather's writings when he was a boy. The great grandfather reportedly heard it from Solon who heard it from an old priest of the temple of Neith (Athena). It was reportedly a 9,000 year old tale even then and had been passed through many until it was interesting but not something one might consider strictly factual. And yet, at least the archetype persists, even now, over 2000 yrs after Plato first mentioned it. Therefore, Plato has at least served the cause of Atlantis by bringing it forward from the mists of time. The only way I can reconcile the inconsistencies of Plato's descriptions of Atlantis is to assume that he spoke of a portion of Atlantis, the portion routed by the Athenians, and only alluded to the greater part of Atlantis, that which was the 'opposite continent' and probably the Americas. At this time, I believe the smaller portion is likely to have been the Azores which are more likely to be visible from the Strait of Gibraltar than any part of the Americas. Next in Sequence Select From Menu |
 |
|
|
|||
 uicksilver
|
|