Nexilist Notebook

     The Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias around 360 BC. The story supposedly came from Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver. Solon had recorded that on a visit to Egypt, the priests told him that the Greeks of Solon’s day were the descendants of a mighty empire that perished in a single day, swallowed by the sea 10,000 years before. The location was “beyond the pillars of Hercules”. They described the landscape, city and society of Atlantis.

     Scholars agree that Plato wrote his own philosophical ideas into his story of Atlantis but argue to this day whether he based the story on actual places and events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis

     In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly published his famous work on Atlantis and launched the modern infatuation with the legend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Donnelly

     Since Donnely, various modern researchers have placed Atlantis all over the world. Some of the more interesting theories are mentioned below.

     If you take the pillars of Hercules to be the Straits of Gilbralter at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, then Atlantis would be out in the Atlantic ocean. This would be an island continent between Europe/Africa and the Americas. The problem with this idea is that the ocean floor in the Atlantic does contain a candidate sunken land mass.

     However, there was an island at entrance to Mediterranean Sea that was inhabited and sank 11,000 years ago at the end of the ice age.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0102_020103wiratlan.html

     When the water bust thru the Bosporus straits into the Black Sea about 7000 years ago, the water level rose and drown early settlements on its shores. The story of this event could have easily made it into the fertile cresent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea

      There was a round island in the Agean Sea east of Greece. It exploded in a huge blast in about 1500 BC. It destroyed the Cretean civilization and the tidal wave and ash swamped the eastern half of Crete. This is a lot closer to the origin of the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thera_eruption

     Helike was a city  on the Sea of Corinth that was a rival of Athens. An earthquake sank it in a single night about 10 years before Plato wrote the Dialog. This is very close in time and space to the origin of the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helike

     There have been claims that parts of Antarctica were ice free and habitable some ten thousand years ago and that Atlantis was located there.

http://www.apollonius.net/atlantis.html

     One group of researchers claim that Atlantis was Cuzco, Peru in the Andes Mountains of South America.

http://farshores.org/amjj0102.htm

     Cuba is the candidate of Andrew Collins. His is the best documented work on Atlantis that I have ever read. He makes a compelling case that Cuba was Atlantis.

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/news/Atlantisfile.htm

     Many different cultures have legends of great floods. The most famous being the great flood of Noah in the bible. This was borrowed from the earlier epic of Gilgamesh from Ancient Summer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh

     Most of the human race lives near sea level near the ocean and/or a major river. Flooding would be a universal experience.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/print/40
     There WAS a world wide flood at the end of the last Ice Age approximately 12,000 years ago.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0317_030317_iceshelf.html

     Sea level rose 66 feet in 200 years. This would have drowned out a lot of coastal low lands where many people lived. It is possible that there was a civilization at the level of Ancient Greeks or Egyptians. Most of the evidence would be under water now.

     I think that Atlantis resonates with the racial memory preserved in legends of the end of the last Ice Age when the ocean rose. Survivors fled to the highlands bringing fragments of their culture and laying the basis for the lost golden age legends that are also common in many ancient cultures.