Atlantis the Lost World

The story of Atlantis comes down to us through a description offered in Timaeus by Plato. Kukal (1984) notes that season the inaugurational description by Plato ran only about 30 pages, several(prenominal) 130,000 pages have been write on the subject since. correspond to what Plato wrote, Atlantis was a large island or group of islands that existed 9,000 years forwards his time, or about 11,500 years ago. Atlantis was the location of an advanced subtlety that was destroyed by a huge natural catastrophe, and Plato indeed gives the location of Atlantis, describes it, tells of its age, and its destruction. The details offered by Plato, however, are not clear, though m any(prenominal) assumed that Plato was placing Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, with otherwises finding severalise that it was located in some portion of the Mediterranean sea (p. 2).

In the Timaeus, the story of Atlantis is presented through a dialogue among Timaeus and Critias (Plato's cousin) and their instruct Socrates. Critias introduces the story of Atlantis and says it was related to him by his grandfather, also named Critias, who had heard it from statesman, the Athenian statesman who had blabed Egypt in 590 B.C. and who then had access to the "House of Books." The visit of Solon to Egypt is a historical fact as Solon went exploring at about 590 B.C. thither is considerable eviden

Though Plato is the first author to mention Atlantis, other ancient prolongations can also be found. Herodotus seems to have written about Atlantis before Plato, scarcely the Atlantians to whom Herodotus refers were a people of northwest Africa who have nothing in common with Plato's Atlantis except the name. There were many mentions of Atlantis in writings after Plato. Elianus in the arcsecond century after Christ described in his Historia Naturalis how the rulers of Atlantis were dressed, indicating their origin from Poseidon, and in his Historia Varia he quotes the Greek geographer Theopompos on a colloquy between the Phrygian king Midas and the demigod Silenos about a enormous continent now lost. The writer Proklos from the fifth century A.D.

makes reference to an earlier writer concerning seven islands consecrated to Persephone, described in terms very like those Plato uses for Atlantis. Marcellus remains unknown foreign of this reference. Proklos also claims that some 300 years after Solon, a certain Krantor saw in the temple of the goddess Neit at Sais some columns with hieroglyphics describing the destruction of Atlantis in precisely the way Plato described it, but this reference is questionable. The name "Atlantis" appears often in Roman literature, invariably with reference to the Atlantians of Herodotus. Kukal recounts these various ancient references and then notes: "Everything we have report from the ancient literature testified how labyrinthine the Atlantis problem is. The ancient authors . . . imitate one another without reference to the source; they borrow names and titles; and if they ever add something of their own, it is seldom based on any serious information" (p. 8).

Berlitz notes legends of a sunken civilization in the Pacific Ocean, the civilization of Lemuria or Mu, and he states that some " animadvert that the existence of these lands could have been the basis for the Atlantis legend or that they were coexisting in time with the Atlantis continent" (p.
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