In the fourth century BC, Plato described in his Timaeus and Critias dialogues a conversation between Egyptian priests and ancient Athenian lawgiver Solon about the vanished civilization of Atlantis. It had existed beyond the Pillars of Hercules – the Strait of Gibraltar – about 9,000 years before Solon’s day. It was based in a prosperous and powerful island that had conquered many lands, until the inhabitants’ wickedness and impiety angered the gods. So they wrecked the island with earthquakes, then sent the sea to swallow it up. Thus was born a legend.
A Plot Device to Advance Philosophical Points
Atlantis has been presented in the modern era as a peaceful and wise country – an idealized model of what the world could and should be. The Atlantis described by Plato was powerful and advanced compared to other countries, but was definitely not peaceful or wise. His Atlantis was rich, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful, and the prosperity and power corrupted it into trying to conquer the world. Atlantis and its people were the baddies in Plato’s narrative. If Plato’s Atlantis existed today, it would try to conquer and enslave us all.
Plato’s Atlantis narrative about an island destroyed then sunk by the gods as punishment for its inhabitants’ hubris and moral decline was entirely fictional. It was just a plot device in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues to make some philosophical points. However, long after Plato’s day, some took what he wrote out of context, treated it as a description of real events, and tried to prove that Atlantis had actually existed. The legend’s modern revival began in the nineteenth century, thanks to an amateur historian and congressman named Ignatius Donnelly.
The Historicity of Atlantis
In 1882, Donnelly wrote the Antedeluvian World, in which he took Atlantis out of Plato’s philosophizing, transformed it into pop pseudoscience, and added new “facts” that became part of the modern Atlantis legend. One of the big ones was his assertion that Atlantis was the originator of all major human advances. Serious scholars dismissed Donnelly, but some writers took his version of Atlantis, and ran with it. Most prominent among them were a famous psychic, Edgar Cayce, and a mystic named Madame Blavatsky.
Cayce gave psychic readings in which he thrilled clients by describing their past lives in Atlantis. He predicted that Plato’s island would be discovered in 1969 – it was not – and introduced a Christian spin to the legend. No evidence of Atlantis was ever discovered, even though Plato was quite specific about its location. He described an island bigger than Asia – what the ancient Greeks called Asia Minor – and Libya put together, in the Atlantic Ocean just past the Straits of Gibraltar. It should have been relatively easy to find.
The twentieth and twenty first centuries saw great advances in submarine, deep sea probe, oceanography, and ocean floor mapping technologies. Despite that, no evidence has emerged of Atlantis’ existence. The ocean deep is still full of mysteries, but it is difficult to miss a submerged landmass bigger than Asia Minor and Libya. So advocates of a “real” Atlantis pivoted their arguments to claim that Plato was either mistaken about Atlantis’ location, or deliberately sought to mislead for reasons of his own. The idea of a lost advanced civilization is too fascinating for the myth to vanish anytime soon.
_________________
Some Sources & Further Reading
Adams, Mark – Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (2015)
Federer, Kenneth L. – Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walum Olum (2010)
History Halls – Folklore and Mythology: The Origin of Dragons
