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'History' is not the past, it is only our best interpretation of the texts and archaeological evidence passed down to us from our ancestors. The 'Past' is what actually happened. Differing historical perspectives along with political and cultural bias, colour both our views of the evidence and perhaps the evidence itself (historical texts written by people with their own agendas). So where does that leave modern historians? Before written evidence can be trusted, the historical context must be taken into account, as well as corroboration of the facts stated by different and disconnected sources. What about missing evidence, without which history is distorted? When can we decide that we have enough evidence to draw conclusions? We can only base conclusions on the data at hand - not what might be uncovered in the future. Nonetheless, this musn't prohibit the use of a little imagination - not usually a major requirement within academia. Atlantis is one of the most debated subjects in history. Countless publications have been written, on the one hand by 'free-thinkers' whose works are usually stimulating and thought-provoking, though often unencumbered by facts, and on the other hand, by 'academics' who seize every opportunity to ridicule and condemn as charlatans anyone daring to propose any radical change to the established 'truth'. Why? Because they have reputations which can be undermined by revisionism. They are threatened by revolutionary ideas that could shatter their credibility. The image of the calm, methodical open-minded historian is more a myth than Plato's sunken island. The solution - find a middle ground. Examine and analyse all the evidence, then, as long it does not contradict any of the evidence, allow your imagination to fill in the blanks. Keeping this in mind, let us look take a closer look at the Atlantis story: What are the basic questions that need to be answered? • Did Atlantis exist? • Where might it have been located? • What type of Atlantean culture should we be looking for? • When? • How was it destroyed? There are also serious issues that have arisen in recent years relating to the Atlantis story, that cannot be answered by current orthodox history: • Conventional wisdom states that the Americas were not discovered until 1492, yet 2,000 year old Mediterranean amphorae (storage jars) have recently been found in sunken wrecks off Brazil and Honduras. • Traces of cocaine and tobacco have been detected in 3,000 year old Egyptian mummies. Narcotics that are indigenous only to South America, a continent we are assured by historians was unknown to the ancient civilizations of the 'old world'. • Roman geographers who specifically state that it is 40 days sail to reach the islands of the Hesperides beyond the western ocean from the African coast. • Plato's story stating that Atlantis lies in front of a series of other islands which act as 'stepping stones' to the 'opposite continent'. • Why Spanish and Portuguese navigators reapeatedly send out expeditions to find an island called Antilia associated with a lost continent - with which the newly discovered West Indies were so readily identified and still retain the name of the Greater and Lesser Antilles.
The Atlantis story begins with the celebrated philosopher Plato , who wrote two treaties in the Fourth Century BC - Timaeus and the Critias. In these accounts, he tells us that the story has come to him from his ancestor - the Athenian Chief Magistrate and legislator, Solon. The latter had visited Egypt when the Pharoah Amasis (570-526 BC) was on the throne. There, at Sias, Solon had learned about the sunken island of Atlantis from a temple priest named Senchis, who claimed that the destruction of this earliest of civilisations was brought about by earthquakes and floods some 8,000-9,000 years before Solon's visit. This works out to about 9570-8570 BC. This dating alone has resulted in the total dismissal of the story by historians as fiction, for they know that the earliest civilisation cannot be dated before 4000 BC. Futhermore, the story tells of a conflict between the island empire and the founders of Athens, which was not 'founded' till around 1550 BC. If there had been a civilisation (comparable to Plato's Athens) destroyed in the Ninth & Tenth Millennia BC, how did knowledge of it survive through 5000 years of 'darkness' before the re-emergence of civilisation in the ancient Near East? All these questions need to be answered. The Atlantis Legend was debated by Plato's contemporaries through to the Christian era. It was a dominating factor in the age of discovery, driving the Spanish and Portuguese ever westwards till landfall in the West Indies in 1492, where the hunt for the fabled 'Seven Cities' of Antilia and El Dorado began. The modern revival in Atlantology, however, can be directly credited to Ignatius Donnelly, whose outstanding 1882 work 'Atlantis: The Antediluvian World' captured the imagination of both the US and European public. At this time, with the newly discovered world of Ancient Egypt, among others, the search for Atlantis was still a commendable pursuit. Of course, over the years, as wilder theories were postulated outside of the constrains of academia, Atlantis became a source of certain ridicule and even ostracism. When in the 1950's, Professor Spyridon Marinatos put forward a 'respectable' theory, academia was quick to embrace it. On the Aegean Island of Santorini (ancient Thera), he unearthed a Bronze Age city buried under tens of metres of volcanic ash. It was well known that the central volcano on the island had erupted c. 1500 BC, but this was the first time the principal city had been located. The artefacts recovered showed that ancient Akrotiri was closely related to the Minoans of Crete, and so Marinatos announced that this had been the model for Plato's Atlantis. 
Superficially, many elements of the mediterranean theory fitted with Plato's story: • Thera had partially sunk • The Minoans, like the Atlanteans, were bull-worshippers • Minoan Crete had been oppressing the Greek mainland (Athens in particular), parraleling the conflict between Athens and Atlantis • It appeared Crete had been destroyed by a great tidal wave resulting from Thera's eruption, thereby freeing the Greeks By the mid 1970s however, doubts began to surface. New archaeological analysis revealed that Crete had not been destroyed along with Thera. Even more damaging were the elements of Plato's story that could in no way be attributed to the Aegean model: • Heading the counter argument was the fact that Plato's Atlantis was located unquestionably in the Atlantic, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. • His 'opposite continent' clearly alludes to the Americas • His impassable 'shallow sea' of mud and weeds, as we shall see, is indubitably a reference to the Sargasso Sea. A possible solution is to see Plato's tale as a combination of more than one historical event, deliberately blended to create a story that his Athenian audience could relate to. The original tale heavily embellished with other traditions, including the memory of the destruction of Thera and the conflict with the Minoans. The original story - A continent, islands and the sea of mud and weed beyong the Western Ocean - has no precedent in the Mediterranean. So where does the modern researcher start. Ironically, despite the age of the legend, and unlike land-based archaeology, the physical search for Atlantis is still in its infancy. Underwater research using sonar, magnetometry and water-penetrating photography is a new science. Any lost cities will undoubtedly be revealed in the next 20 years. Let us start however, with the vast textual puzzle that, pieced together, begins to reveal the story of Atlantis.... Source:
Introduction by David Rohl |
It
is appropriate that we start with Plato's treaties before moving on to
other material concerning a place variously called Atlantis, Atlantides,
Atulliae, Antilia, Aztlan and Tulan which lay out in the western ocean.