aaarrrghhhhhh! does no one ever read anything I write?

Plato wrote "Pillars of Hercules" but he didn't mean the Straits of Gibraltar; he was transcribing the words of an Egyptian priest who'd said this to Plato's ancestor. In the time frame that the conversation takes place, the Pillars of Hercules referrred to the Dardanelles. So Atlantis is probably.. Troy.

How could it be Troy? Troy's in Turkey, it never sunk under the sea, and it isn't the size of Asia!

1. the correct location of the Pillars of Hercules for the time frame of Plato's story is the Dardanelles. The name got transferred to Gibraltar later. Plato's distinctive description of the seas of "Atlantis" compred to the Mediterranean is q plainly the sluggish Black Sea, not the stormy Atlantic Ocean.

2. Plato got his myths mixed up and mistakenly got the Trojan War and the Santorini explosion and the Minoan civilisation confused. He was dictating this tale several hundred years after it had happened, based upon family oral traditions and popular legends. Later writers embellished this original source with other myths, legends, sailor's stories, possibly distorted tales of sightings of the Atlantic islands and maybe America by storm blown vessels.

3. the size issue was simply a matter of incorrect transposition of measurements. Besides, Plato's story never claims that Atlantis is the size of Asia the continent, that's a subsequent and misleading assumption; in ancient times "Asia" referred to the western part of Anatolia, not the huge continent that now bears the same name. Just as "Africa" only originally meant the fertile coastal strip of the continent which now bears the same name.

4. if you scale down the measurements for Plato's Atlantis but keep the same proportions, then compare his topographical descriptions with a map of the Troy region and of Troy itself, errr they fit q well.

5. In Plato's time the Atlantic Ocean wasn't called the Atlantic, but just "The Ocean" and was believed to encircle the entire known world.

6. Plato's ancestor is being told this story by an Egyptian priest, in illustration of how much older and more learned Egyptian civilisation is compared to the Greeks. So even the source is twice distanced from the events it relates.

"..send another Musa to free his children from dis' Babylon.."


Edited by - Tawakalna on 8/20/2004 2:49:13 PM

Troy was a maritime power at it height, in the time of the Iliad .

The harbor was much closer to the City's central precincts as well.

There were/are earthquakes in tha region and various levels of Troy tend to
show damage from them as well as war and sacking.

So it isn't impossible that the reference was made of Troy. Again, from the Egyptian perspective, at least. Their worldview was a south/north one, like the Nile itself.

There was, also, a time of the Hyksos and other marauding Sea Poeples who really caused problems for the Egyptians but of whose origins, little explanation has been found. Current understanding implies that these were many different peoples including raiders from the Western Anatolian regions ... like Troy and also, likely, the Greek City States as well..

This was something in the area of 1200BC and later which is rather contemporaneous with the time of the Trojan War.

so another populist "mystery" consigned to the rubbish tip, then. the "real" histories are far more interesting anyway than super-civilisations and fookin' aliens.

Has there been any other manuscript describing Atlantis other than plato's famous one? And, obviously, not just a text in refrence to that one. Cuase if you're searching the world on the word of one man, as merrited and trustfull as he may be, that just seems a bit foolish, now doesn't it? And anyone ever consider he was just taking inspiration from myths past to write a new story of his own, much the same way we write fan fics about FL? Who knows, maybe one day people will think that some story written by on of us is true and will vainly search the heavens for any trace of humanity in the Sirrius sector. --- VH16

I am Nobody; Nobody is Perfect; Therefore, I am Perfect

No. Plato is the original and only source for the Atlantis story. Everything else is just speculation, fantasy and often downright lies (a la EvD)

You can only have a serious discussion of the Atlantis myth in the context of the Platonic references. Nothing else is acceptable, I'm afraid, fun though it might be.

I should add that the Plato we have is made up of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, themselves copies of older manuscripts, and copied time and again back to the Dark Ages, Byzantium, Rome, and finally to Greece. The long lost originals were themselves dictations taken at P's open symposia in the Agora, student's notes if you will. Plus, the texts we do have were subsequenly edited by Greek and Roman scholars to fit in with academic curricula, and were also subject to the all-too-common moralising and pious revisions by medieval clerics. So in fact we have no way of knowing for certain if the texts we have now are accurate renditions of the original story, itself an oral family tradition subject to distortion through the generations until Plato related it for posterity, and his own philosophical agaenda


Edited by - Tawakalna on 8/19/2004 4:27:57 PM

The knowledge base that was lost when the Library at Alexandria went up in flames is unimaginable.

and that mummified snake. bet that was a big crowd puller