Atlantis: Discovered at Last? 478
Henry G. writes "The BBC is reporting that recent satellite pictures may show the location of the fabled city of Atlantis, as described by Plato. It is in Southern Spain, though, and not on an island as is commonly believed. Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area." This story has gotten a lot of submissions; it's worth noting that it's also shown up off Cyprus, or near Cuba, or is Crete, or... It is worth noting that that Ubar was found this way.
This is not off-topic (Score:3, Informative)
Atlantis: Discovered Again? (Score:4, Informative)
Atlantis: Discovered Again?
It makes the story more consistent with facts.
--
virve
FFS! Atlantis again (Score:5, Informative)
It has as much objective reality as More's Utopia and Butler's Erehwon. It even had the same purpose, to illustrate a philosophical point and "demonstrate" Plato's idea of an ideal society.
It just happened that Atlantis was a handy cultural peg to hang it off, somewhat like Avalon and Lyonesse is today for some people.
There have been numerous candidates for Atlantis, but the outstanding one, IMO, is Santorini.
That island, part of the of the Minoan civilisation, blew its top somewhat spectacularly, and was probably a contributory factor to the collapse of the Minoan, Mycenaean and Hittite empires, who just happened to be trading partners with the Egyptians at the time.
The Egyptians, being anal-retentive record keepers kept some records of this, and these, in garbled form, are probably what inspired Plato to use the island as the home for his ideal civilisation.
Given the effects of this massive explosion on the weather (shitty crops practically guaranteed throughout the region), which would have negatively effected the economies of the Mycenaeans and Hitties.
The loss of contact with the Minoans (who were in a decline at the time anyway, so this probably played a large part in finishing them off) would likely have pushed them over the edge as well. Both of those regions (the Anatolian Plateau and southern Greece) being somewhat marginal environments to start with, having low annual rainfall, poor and shallow soil, and high summer temperatures).
This probably would have made it into the Egyptian annals as something along the lines of "those Greek and Turkish bastards haven't turned up so far this year to hawk their tat, no great loss, but a bit of a pain in the arse. Also we have been having some really shitty weather this last year, on the plus side, the surf was wicked last summer. Wonder if they are related? - Amememhat"
This also would quite likely have been mythologised to a certain extent from the tales of survivors.
No need for the tortured logic and papering over the cracks here, it all depends on fairly well understood factors, a big fuck off explosion, the fragility of civilisations based on gift-giving economies and ties of obligation, especially in somewhat marginal environments, and a bit of garbling and mythologisation over the years.
Mix an ambitious philosopher looking for a name to hang an idea off, and Viola! a ready made myth for people to chase incessantly, and for con-men in the mould of Von Daniken and Hancock to make a good living off.
Re:maybe i'm stpid, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Q: how do they confirm it is atlantis?
A: When they find some artifacts in the vicinity and can carbon date them back from 9000 years ago. When they can find proof of the animals and/or technology that existed there according to the one-and-only document [sacred-texts.com] that even mentions the city.
Q: why can't their find of this ancient city stand on its own as exciting and important?
A: Because the human-race has this drive to solve puzzles and find proofs and explanations of any and everything. The city of Atlantis is no different from Noah's Ark, Solomon's Temple, Eden, or even the laws of physics; people will continually search for them until they find inexplicable proof (whether it exists or not) that they exist.
Q: why link it to a dubious unprovable myth
A: Short answer: in hopes of acquiring more research dollars.
And finally...
Q: maybe i'm stpid, but...
A: You are correct, because you can't spell "stupid".
Re:Troy. (Score:3, Informative)
Thus the story of Troy was a myth in the sense that the ride of Paul Revere is a myth. False, invented by a poet, but historical.
The story of Atlantis is a story heard from a friend who heard it from a wise man at the edge of the world who said it happened 10,000 years before beyond the edge of the world.
In the modern idiom that translates into:
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. .
KFG
Plato. Sigh. It's about Athens and Sparta, Folks. (Score:4, Informative)
Plato's references to Atlantis, specifically, are basically a sequel to his Republic, which is in turn an idealized version of the Spartan state. The Republic is mostly about an anti-democratic reaction to the direction Athens chose to go. The Atlantis myth is essentially a way of describing early Athens as virtuously fighting against an outside invader. Plato was using his created myth, to quote a skeptic's article on this, as a "noble lie." [csicop.org]
The specific physical characteristics being cited in this article are so ludicrously overgeneral that I'm amazed they don't have more than one match to go on. All you have to know is what the article says: "The features were originally spotted by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who studied photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato." This is another Heinrich Schliemann. They'll be planting golden masks next.
(Hey, I've found another ancient city of Troy! It's an Anasazi settlement. Go ahead... prove it ain't. Or maybe Atlantis was on Santorini. Or was that Troy? Or Tyre. Yeah... Tyre.)
Re:C-14 dating ... (Score:5, Informative)
It was originally thought that the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere was constant over time. It's been later found out that this is incorrect. In addition there is the 'hard water error' which affects results quite badly. However by correlating dendrochronology dates (very, very precise and accurate) with C-14 dates we have quite a refined system. C-14 dates are represented as a date with an error margin and percentage probability eg 10,000BP +/- 200years at 2 standard deviations.
C-14 isn't a fundemental principle of Archaeology. It's one of many tools that are used.
supposed sites for Atlantis (Score:5, Informative)
Mythology being quite entertaining to me, I've read of most of the supposed sites. There is an island called Thera, located off the coast of Crete. It seems to me that if anything found so far is the fabled Atlantis, this is it. [atlantia.de] Archological digs show that they had both hot and cold running water, as well as a very advanced trade. Prior to the erruption, there was a circular cove around the island. There are significant enough similarities between Plato's Atlantis and Thera for there to be a very convincing arguement for this site. The disaster of the volcanic erruption would fit the timeframe of the other legends surrounding the survivors of Atlantis - for instance, the Spanish conquistadors that slayed the white-skinned men on the northwestern coast of Africa that claimed to be from such a society (I think? my memory is sketchy.)
I suspect people aren't making conclusive claims about Thera being Atlantis yet because there simply aren't enough interesting historical mysteries to get funding for. Atlantis is a pearl in almost everyone's eyes, thus people keep searching - finding various other interesting things - in the name of searching for Atlantis.
After all, once you've found all the easter eggs that they said there were, you're not going to want to keep looking, as it's not likely you'll find anything - or so you think.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
The only easy access I know is through the beach, from a tourist town, and it could take you some time as it is a very big park.
Here you can have a look to a satellite photo [209.15.138.224] of that area. The park, is on the right of the river, in which the photo, by the way, is heading south. Here you can see one which is not upside down [209.15.138.224].
Why Santorini may be Atlantis. (Score:5, Informative)
Let's consider the following:
1. Thera in its heyday had a very advanced civilization by ancient standards with things like surprisingly modern plumbing systems!
2. The island of Crete--90 miles south of Thera--had more or less the same type of civilization on Thera.
3. When Thera's volcano did that catastrophic eruption, not only did most of the island sink into the sea from the eruption but it also created a massive tsunami wave that wiped out most of the smaller and larger human settlements on the north coast of Crete 90 miles south. That explains why there was considerable water and mud damage to Knossos.
4. If Solon had properly translated what he heard from the Egyptians in the 7th Century BC, he would have placed the destruction of Atlantis at 900 years, not 9,000 years before his time. 900 years would almost match perfectly the time Thera did its final eruption from Solon's contemporary perspective.
Re:That would be Andalusia, infidel swine! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The neatest thing about this, IMHO... (Score:5, Informative)
Quite a way down in the section entitled 'Radioactive Ash in Rajasthan, India'. As they point out it fits with peoples preconceptions and a willingness to believe that there is some esoteric layer to history.
The various other pieces of 'evidence' are interesting but inconclusive. There's quite a good description of them in 'Fingerprints of the Gods' by Graham Hancock who goes in for that sort of thing.
My Two Cents (Score:2, Informative)
Atlantis is located on Antartica.
Atlantis is reputed (in ancient writings) to have a view of all three oceans and to be an island.
The Earth was not always at it's present axial tilt. Tilt the planet and Antartica will be located at the equator and have a view of all oceans. Look at a tilted globe sometime.
This has been the input of your local Free-Energy-Conspiracy nut.
Re:Oh brother, here we go again (Score:2, Informative)
I'm familiar with the vagueries of translation. I do some now and again. Typically though I'm called upon to translate translations. Make them both grammatically and idiomatically correct.
A while ago I was called upon to translate just two words in Italian as seen on a gasoline advertisment.
"Su Misura"
Transliterated that's "on measure." An Italian had already translated it into English as "Made to Measure", which would make perfect sense in English if the product involved were a man's suit, but is idiomatic nonsense when applied to gasoline (which is why it was brought to me in the first place). I translated it as "Custom Blended", which is incorrect in any literal sense, but perfectly correct in meaning.
Of course I had advantage in that, unlike the examples you provide of translating texts of a dead language, I was working with living languages. If I'd needed to I could have sat down with an Italian language scholar and dicussed that matter. It makes a big difference.
And that's just the case with Plato and the story of Atlantis. Plato wasn't trying to translate some ancient Egyptian text in some archaic version of the languge. He claims to have got it from Solon who spoke Egyptian at least converstionally and who got the story directly in coversation with an Egyptian mystic/scholar in Egypt. Plato himself went to Egypt, learned Egyptian and studied there for a goodly time with Egyptians who spoke Greek (where he could also confirm the report of Heredotus that the Egyptians claimed to have circumnavigated Africa by sea before Plato was born).
No, the "may have been a flase translation" thing won't fly.
Especially since the whole story really originated, in Greek, in the mind of Plato. There is no older text.
KFG
Re:We've "found" it dozens of times... (Score:5, Informative)
This would be meaningful, except for two things...
Re:The neatest thing about this, IMHO... (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, yet another person who misunderstands evolution. Evolution says no such thing about "evolving forward into higher life forms", that's just an asumption that a lof of people make.
Evolution is simply a method to optimize and organism for its environment. For example: down here in Australia we have these little creatures called Koalas. You may have seem photos of them. They eat eucalyptus (sp?) leaves, and nothing else. It happens that these leaves aren't very nutritious and have a lot of toxins that take a long time to break down. Because of this, koalas conserve their energy by spending most of their time sleeping. And their brains are quite tiny.
Now, are koalas a higher life form? No. But its ancestors did find a plentiful food source that was being eaten by little else. They adapted to eat the leaves and became the animal we have today.
Re:Just fudge the numbers (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of units of measurement used in ancient times were subjective like this. The best (by which I mean "Augh! Worst!")example is the stathmos, which simply meant "a day's march."
A day's march how? On foot? Horseback? Chariot? With or without a supply train? Jogging? On flat ground? Broken terrain? Roads? The correct answer is "yes," which means that this unit can vary disgustingly depending on the circumstances. A day's trudge through the Amazon and a day's travel on horseback along a plain are both a stathmos, though they're very different distances.
There's other examples of this, such as the talent, defined as the weight a man could carry on his back comfortably, and therefore something between fifty and eighty pounds. It was used both as a simple unit of weight and as a unit of currency, so you'll see people paying reparations of fifty talents or whatnot to the neighbouring state - which drives people up the wall when the authour's not specifying what the talents are of!
Units of measurement were also different from town to town. Standardized weights and measures are newfangled.
The stadia isn't quite so flexible, but the definitions of it I've seen are still based off other units the Greeks used, so yes, enough uncertainty kicks in that we could be off by some significant factor either way. He could have subscribed to a William Tarn-esque "make shit up" school of thought, it's true, but he could also be right. I'd need to take a better look at what he's written to see whether the shoe fits or whether he had to perform some unrequired surgery.
-PS