From Myth to History: Atlantis
How a Philosopher Created History’s Greatest Conspiracy
Appalling earthquakes and floods
occurred, and in the course of a single, terrible day and night
the whole fighting-force of your city sank all at once beneath
the earth, and the island of Atlantis likewise sank beneath the
sea and vanished. Plato, Timaeus, 13
This single quote of Plato is enough to send shivers down our spines, almost 2400 years after it was written down on his work known as “Timaeus”. These 42 words alone have inspired countless stories. They were turned into movies, books, and video games, and became part of a living legend.
The “Lost City of Atlantis”.
No other myth in history ever reached the global fame that Atlantis has gained, as the symbol of a long-lost Utopia, still waiting to be discovered. Its mere name has become synonymous with advanced knowledge, hidden paradises, colossal natural disasters, and the concept of a unique adventure beyond our wildest dreams! Unfortunately, our desire for adventure and exploration of the unknown, combined with our passion for great stories have elevated Atlantis from its initial status as a made-up land, whose existence served allegoric purposes, to an actual location, which existed somewhere in the mists of time.
There is no point in writing another conspiracy theory claiming that secret societies, the Vatican, or even aliens, are trying to hide an entire submerged continent under our noses, in order to hold for themselves the treasures that are hidden in the debts of the ocean. Instead of spicing up an old story with some “alien powder” we will examine Plato’s words about Atlantis in a new historical light. After all, there are times when real history is much more fascinating than fantasy…
Debunking the Myth 0.1: Why Atlantis Never Existed
For the sake of proving that Atlantis never existed, let’s start by believing the opposite and accepting that the lost island was real. We are talking about an advanced human civilization. We need to discover the implications that its existence would have on the historical world. Plato — the only written source about this civilization — mentions Atlantis in two of his Dialogues, “Timaeus” and “Critias”. On the first, he briefly mentions the sunken continent, its location, and its war with Athens, which ended in the latter’s victory. In his second work, he provides us with extra lore regarding the nation’s history, culture, geography, daily life, and wars.
Atlantis is described as “an island larger than Libya and Asia combined, located in front of the Pillars of Hercules” (Plato, Timaeus, 13). In ancient Greece “Libya” was the name for the lands of North Africa between the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean, which in modern-day terms would have included the countries of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. The word “Asia” describes not the continent, but instead Asia Minor, while “the Pillars of Hercules” are the Greek name for the Gibraltar strait. Plato also mentions that “travelers in those days used it (Atlantis) to get to the further islands, from where they had access to the whole mainland over on the other side, the mainland which surrounds that genuine sea” (Timaeus, 13).
If such a land truly existed, it would have covered the majority of the North Atlantic Ocean, stretching from Portugal to the islands of Nova Scotia on the north or the Caribbean on the south, since these are the only major groups of islands matching these geographical coordinates. Unfortunately, if a landmass of such extreme proportions was submerged, it would have been evident by the raised levels of the ocean floor. This was the case with the submerged Doggerland — a landmass which, before its disappearance at around 6500–6000 BCE, covered the majority of the Southern North Sea, connecting Britain with Europe. In the case of Doggerland, not only do we have geological proof of its existence, but also flora and fauna remains, and primitive human tools were all founded on the ocean floor. In the case of Atlantis, although there have been numerous searches in the Atlantic ocean, there is still no proof of a submerged continent, hiding in its depths.
Besides the complete lack of geological evidence, time is also another serious problem in Plato’s story. The philosopher places Atlantis foundation around 8000 years before the times of Solon (Timaeus, 11) — the Athenian lawgiver to whom the Egyptian priests told the story of Atlantis. Solon was born around 630 BCE and died at 559 BCE. So, if Plato is taken seriously, Atlantis was founded around 8500 BCE. Surprisingly, if we exclude the part of advanced technology, Plato is not historically inaccurate here! After all Jericho — mankind’s first city — was founded around 9600 BCE. But these early human societies were in no way resembling ancient cities, like Athens, or Rome and were not capable of sustaining an empire or even a small army. It took thousand of years for these small bastions of civilization to evolve and become the large urban centers we know today.
Plato also mentions that Atlantis, some generations after its foundation, began to enslave its neighbors, by using its supreme navy. In Timaeus (13) it is said that the oceanic empire ruled “the whole island, many of the other islands, and parts of the mainland too. They also governed some of the lands here inside the strait — Libya up to the border with Egypt, and Europe up to Etruria”. By all means, we have a large empire, the largest of its time, which ruled what appears to be Atlantis, nearby Caribbean or Nova Scotia, the coasts of the American continents (most possibly Canada’s Newfound Land or the north coast of South America along with the lands of the Gulf of Mexico), the entire coast of North Africa, Portugal, Spain, parts of southern France, and finally reaching northern Italy on modern-day Tuscany (Etruria).
There are two major problems considering the above information. First of all, from what History can teach us, one of the greatest dangers that a newly formed empire can face is overstretching its territories. This in turn leads to the problem of having more territories to control than your bureaucracy and army can handle. This fatal mistake was committed by the first true empire in History, the Akkadian under Sargon I, and Humanity just kept repeating it from that point onwards. The only solution to overexpansion is the introduction of advanced technology, which would allow for a faster response whenever needed. If the Atlanteans truly possessed such superior technology, then they simply would not have lost the war to Athens, a state which Plato informs us was far less technologically advanced. But for the sake of this theory, let’s accept that the Atlanteans managed to secure their empire by the use of advanced (but also historically accurate) seafaring technology. After all, their empire was a “Thalassocracy” and Atlantis ports were filled with warships (Plato, Critias, 116). If the Atlanteans succeeded to control their territories, then why there is not any archaeological evidence of their existence?
This is the second problem that completely sets Atlantis a fictional tale. Many empires were lost due to natural disasters, famine, or conquest. However, they always left something behind. Pottery, written scripts, broken tools, weapons, graves. Moreover, when it comes to empires, the subjugated nations tend to adopt the culture of their overlords either by choice or by force. If the Atlanteans existed, their culture, or at least some remains of it, would have survived and passed on to the conquered territories. It is in the nature of humans to adopt and copy whatever they find useful or appealing for them. So, by comparing the contemporary late neolithic and early bronze age civilizations of the Americas and the Mediterranean, we should have found fragments of a once common culture that united them, much like we find Roman cultural references across medieval Europe or Persian influences in the islamic Middle East.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an Atlantean culture. Much to our disappointment, there isn’t any archaeological evidence to none of the territories mentioned by Plato, of a once-thriving maritime empire. Neither there is proof of an “outer culture” that inspired or contributed to the cultures of the existing civilizations in those areas. But this does not mean that his story is not based on actual historical facts!
Debunking the Myth 0.2: Which Elements of Plato’s Story Are True?
To understand which elements of Plato’s story are true or at least hold some historical significance, we first need to understand how he and his contemporary Greeks used to write stories. In a world without the Internet, where written records were pretty much a rare comfort, available mostly to kings, the only way for something to be remembered and retold was by oral means through songs, myths, and stories. With such limited access to information, the world of Plato was one of endless possibilities and unlimited fantasy.
Today when we need to escape reality, we tend to tell stories about galactic empires in the far future, or zombie apocalypses just a few years apart from our times. We have searched our planet, and we are blessed to know the majority of its secrets. We gaze at the endless universe and set new goals, observing the stars and thinking “where to go next”. For an ancient Greek, the “endless universe” started the moment he sailed the Aegean. The “unreachable stars” were the snow-covered plains of Russia, the sun-scorched Sahara dessert, or the endless waters of the Atlantic. For them, the unknown was not in outter space, neither in a post-apocalyptic earth. The unknown was a few hundred kilometers away…
Considering the above, it comes as no surprise that ancient storytellers used to place mythical lands at the edge of the world. Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, everyone included monsters, mythical islands, and weird people, living on the edge of the world. For most people, these stories were “Antiquity’s travel vlogs” to places which they could see only in their dreams. Plato followed the pattern of his predecessors and placed Atlantis at the edge of the known world. Therefore, the geographical location of the famous sunken city is meant to be taken allegorically and not as accurate geographical directions.
Moreover, in order to gain the trust of his audience and establish credibility for his story, he claimed that the tale of Atlantis was guarded by Egyptian priests, who then passed it to Solon, the famous lawman. These two figures were not chosen by luck. Solon was admired by all the Athenians — to whom Plato addressed his story. Being one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, his words were unquestionable. He was the ancient equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, a man to whom the Athenians had blind faith. But, if Solon was seen as the beloved American president, then the Egyptian priests were the Einsteins of their era. Before Greece and Rome established themselves as the cradles of western civilization, Egypt held the title of the world’s top advanced civilization and its priests were the keepers of this sacred knowledge. The Greeks admired Egypt greatly and adopted great amounts of scientific knowledge, religious beliefs, and social reforms from the land of the Pharaohs. Even by the time of Plato, when Greece and especially Athens was the center of the world, a trip to Egypt was considered a great privilege, for one’s education.
If the story of Solon and the Egyptian priests was true, then it would have passed on to the rest of the Athenians, who studied with religious zeal the life of the famous Sage and possibly would have been integrated as part of the Greek mythos. Myths and legends are an important clue to discover long-lost historical events that passed on as oral traditions and became immortalized as tales. The Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Mycenaean civilization were captured at the events of the Trojan War, while the once-mighty Minoan civilization was immortalized with king Minos, the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur. If an enormous maritime empire once existed, enslaved the western Mediterranean, and then collapsed because of a colossal natural disaster, then for sure there would have been a lot of myths throughout the area retelling the story.
So, let’s take the original tale of Atlantis. For all the reasons stated above, we take off the geographical location, the tale of a once-mighty evil empire, the exotic lands, and the story of Egyptian priests and Solon.
Then what is left?
The answer is a maritime nation, which was once powerful or at least known to the world, until it was suddenly lost, along with its home place, beneath the waters due to a natural disaster. With this concept in mind, an idea without fictional elements and allegorical meanings, based only on historical evidence, let’s now discover the real Atlantis.
Debunking the Myth 0.3: Helike, the Real-life Atlantis
We are looking for a maritime nation, a great seafaring power, once known to the world, then lost suddenly. The question is: how far back in time shall we search and which people we will include in our research?
To no surprise, there were lots of seafaring people in the Mediterranean, whose cities were destroyed by floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis. The answer to this riddle is evident only if we take into account the possible limitations of knowledge in Plato’s time. Remember, Plato wrote the story, not us. In a world, where History was born just 100 years prior with Herodotus, there was no way for a disaster, war, or generally any event to be widely spread. Plato himself was a philosopher, not a historian. He had traveled much more than the average man of his time, but his travels were narrowed around Greece, Sicily, and perhaps Libya or Egypt. So, we must narrow our research to these parts of the world.
The most evident candidate for being the real Atlantis is at first glance the famous Minoan civilization. They were a mighty maritime empire, with archaeological evidence of their existence found in Greece, the Levant, and Egypt, until the Santorini volcano erupted between 1642 and 1540 BCE, creating huge tsunamis that stroke the island of Crete, and destroying their civilization. All the clues are right! Even mythology seems to support this theory by stating that the first king of Crete, Minos, was a son of Poseidon just like the first king of Atlantis, Atlas. Moreover, there are historical records in Egypt that report the disasters that the volcano’s eruption brought to Egypt, giving at least some basis to the story of the Egyptian priests and Solon. All seem perfect, except one thing:
This theory is false!
First of all, there is no way that Plato — and neither of his contemporaries — knew that the Thera eruption really happened! In a world where no written records (the first Greek alphabets were created sometime during the early Archaic age) existed before the 9th century BCE, myths and legends, passed down orally, were the only source of information regarding the past. We find no presence of the eruption in Greek mythology, no tale of its huge impact. This is because during the Bronze Age Collapse and the fall of the Myceneans any knowledge of how to read and write was lost. If the Myceneans, who lived during the days of the eruption, wrote down the events, their documents (writen in Linear B) would have been impossible for their descendants to decode. Neither Hesiod nor Homer, who lived closer to the event compared to Plato, were aware of the eruption and its impact. Without any oral or written evidence, the catastrophe was simply forgotten. As for the Egyptian records, they are mentioning only the impact that the eruption had on Egypt, without giving any account for the Minoans. If you wonder how such a disaster was forgotten, be aware that 400 years after the Vesuvius eruption at 79 AD, no one remembered the city of Pompeii, and its name along with its terrible fate were lost!
With the Minoans being excluded as potential candidates, we need to search for a destruction near the Greek world and around the times of Plato, so that the memory of its impact would be still alive.
Imagine the surprise of modern historians when they found out that a huge natural disaster took place in Greece during a winter night of 373 BCE when one entire city was sunken to the sea! The story goes like this:
There was once the city-state of Helike (Ελίκη), a rich city in the shores of northern Peloponnese. During the Archaic Age, Helike evolved into a major maritime force of the region. Its mighty fleet sailed the known seas and its harbor became a place where people from all over the Mediterranean met to exchange goods. Its sailors traveled to the edge of the then known world, establishing colonies in Asia Minor and Sicily, among whom the most famous were Priene and Sybaris. Helike’s patron god was Poseidon, who was carved on the city’s coins and to whom the Helikians built a large temple. Ancient sources mention that this temple, dedicated to “Helikonian Poseidon” was a marvelous work of art, which attracted visitors from all over the Greek world and was second in religious importance only to the famous Delphi Oracle! It also had a massive bronze statue of Poseidon, located either inside the sanctuary, near it, or at the city’s harbor.
Helike met its doom one winter night of 373 BCE when a massive earthquake sank the entire city to the deeps of the sea! In one single night Helike, one of the greatest maritime powers of Greece, along with its famous temple, disappeared from the face of the earth! So huge was the catastrophe that even after a massive rescue mission, consisting of over 2.000 men, there was no way to retrieve the bodies of the dead, nor the riches of the city. The whole area was covered by seawater and a great layer of mud. In the next centuries, famous people like Pausanias, Strabo, Ovid, and Eratosthenes visited the sunken site, where you could still see some of the monuments standing out of the mud. Eventually, they were all covered by it, and the city along with its golden days and its tragic end were lost to the sands of time.
The destruction of Helike shocked the entire Greek world. It was attributed to the vengeance of Poseidon, because its citizens refused to give his statue to some Ionian colonists in Asia, or — according to some accounts — even murdered them for daring to ask. Its tragic fate is what most likely inspired Plato to write the story of Atlantis some 10 years after, around 360 BCE. Helice and Atlantis have too much in common: both were great maritime powers, known to the whole Greek world about their seafaring abilities. Both founded colonies in remote areas. Their patron god was Poseidon, to whom both built a massive temple with a giant statue, which became a known religious landmark (Plato, Critias, 115)! Finally, both were destroyed on a single night by earthquakes and floods, which were attributed to the wrath of the Gods, because of their sins, and therefore were perished without leaving a trace!
Some additional pieces of information further prove that Atlantis was inspired by Helike. First Helike was positioned in the Corinthian Gulf and therefore acted as a bridge between its colonies in Sicily and Asia, just like Plato mentions Atlantis as a bridge from where people from the shores of Europe could cross and travel to the nearby western islands and from there to a huge landmass to the west. Helike was an Achaean city and, as natural, was an ally to Sparta and therefore both an enemy and a rival economic and maritime threat to Athens. This might explain the origins of the war between Atlantis and Athens. Finally, there is the famous “mud of Plato”, a world that puzzled the ones who searched for Atlantis for decades. Plato wrote that after the catastrophe the island of Atlantis was sunken in the ocean and that no one was able to travel outside the Gibraltar Strait because the whole area was covered with a thick layer of mud. Of course, we know that this is not scientifically possible. While Plato had never traveled to the Atlantic, he knew very well (as any Greek who had traveled to the sea) that it is not possible for a sea or ocean to be covered with mud. But Helike was indeed covered in mud! Just like Atlantis, after it sank, the whole area became a vast muddy lagoon. This must have troubled the sailors who entered the Isthmus and wished to cross the narrow Corinthian Gulf to access the Ionian Sea. It is possible that this fact — that the catastrophe was so great to close or narrow the Corinthian Gulf for a while — made such an impression on the Athenian Philosopher that he simply chose to include it in his story even if it did not make any sense!
Epilogue
There are many reasons why Atlantis remains a favorite and relevant story up to this day. The most important of them is that Atlantis manages to evoke a feeling which in our modern-day lives we tend to ignore: Our desire for the Unkown. We are attracted by mystery, whether we realize it or not. We are curious beings and each of us is a navigator eager to explore the world, a storyteller looking for new inspirations. In a world where every piece of information is easily available on the Internet and every corner of land can be seen via satellites, Atlantis offers us a chance to discover something exciting and new, a great mystery hidden in our own waters.
No matter if true differs greatly from fantasy, the tale of Atlantis will continue to amaze and inspire us. This is natural, because it is actually a very good story!
When we read the story of Atlantis it is easy to loose our minds with the famous maritime empire and not pay attention to the underdog that managed to defeat it, the actual protagonist of the story, Athens. It comes to a great surprice that Plato did not wrote Atlantis to glorify its story, but to emphathize its moral decline. The story is not about Atlantis, but about Athens. It basically tells the triumph of a small yet morally lawful Athens, whose men and women managed to destroy a foul nation, which once powerful, now has fallen into hubris. Plato writes the story in order to educate the young Athenians who views as “men of outstanding intelligence” (Timaeus, 112) and prove that a clear mind and a clean soul are more important than power, luxury, and excess.
It is wonderful to see how much the original purpose of the story has been altered. In newer adaptations Atlantis’ demise is presented as unjust or as a byproduct of their advanced technology and their desire for knowledge. The former villains became heroes, pioneers of knowledge, and a symbol of the possibilities that humanity can achieve, while the real heroes were overshadowed by the same factors, which Plato warned the Athenians to avoid (Atlantis’ unlimited power, great wealth, a life chasing endless desires etc). Perhaps we — the people of today — and the ancient Athenians are not so different afterall… Who know what stories about lost civilizations a modern-day Plato would have thought in order to direct us back to a just and moral path!
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