Atlantis
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[edit] Definition
A mythical island kingdom which flourished in the 9th millennium BC, destroyed by sinking into the Atlantic Ocean.
[edit] Provenance
The only ancient source for the story of Atlantis are two dialogues by Plato, the Timaeus and the Critias.
In the prologue to Timaeus, Socrates meets with Critias. Socrates reminds him that the day before they had been discussing the constitution of the ideal city (indicating that the dialogue is set the day after the action of Plato's masterpiece, The Republic). Socrates asks Critias if he can imagine how the citizens of his ideal city would behave in times of war, and Critias replies by offering to tell Socrates about a war between the ancient Athenians and the Atlanteans: "the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us," as a historical example of exemplary military virtue. This war he dates to nine thousand years before his own time (the fourth century BC). He sketches the outline of the Atlantis myth:
- There was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands...
- Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent...
- But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
Before he embarks on his history, though, Critias says that they should listen to Timaeus's account of the creation and early history of the universe, and the rest of the Timaeus is devoted to Timaeus's lecture on cosmology and natural history.
The Critias, which follows on directly from the Timaeus, contains the promised account of Atlantis, with many curious details: we learn that the Atlanteans mined an unidentifiable substance "which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum"
- The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum.
There are a number of other details of their engineering prowess: we also learn about their religious customs, their social organization, and that their island was highly fertile and contained "a great number of elephants". The account which Critias gives is highly idealized: just as he is beginning his account of how the Atlantean society became corrupt and imperialist, the dialogue as we have it today breaks off abruptly, so the main point of the dialogue, which is to display the Athenians in conflict with the Atlanteans, is lost.
In the Timaeus, Critias gives his account of the provenance of the legend. According to him, he heard it from his grandfather, also called Critias, who heard it from Solon, the semi-mythical lawgiver of the Athenians, who heard it during a trip to Egypt, where it was contained in Egyptian historical records.
[edit] Discussion
There are various problems with the story of Atlantis as it appears in Plato's dialogues.
[edit] Doubtful provenance
Unlike most myths, the crucial question about Atlantis is not whether there is some grain of truth in the myth, but whether there ever was any such myth: it seems more likely that the whole thing came out of Plato's imagination, and no more represents history or even a distortion of history than does, for example, Gulliver's Travels.
While the characters in Plato's dialogues are real Athenians, there is no reason to suppose that he gives an accurate account of real conversations, and every reason to think that he put his own words and ideas into his characters' mouths, and that this would have been recognised by his audience.
From the prologue to the Timaeus, it is clear that the story of the struggle of the Athenians with the Atlanteans is to be presented as a moral fable, in which the ancient Athenians were to be idealized as behaving like the inhabitants of Plato's ideal Republic.
- The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke [to Solon]; they will perfectly harmonise, and there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians... Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead.
The story, then, is not there to instruct people in history or geography, but in morality, and there is no reason why Plato shouldn't have used a fictional story to illustrate his ideas if it was superior in this respect to a factual one. Nor would it be astonishing if he were to frame this story with the circumstantial account he gives of how the story is known: on the contrary, if we look at works of fiction with similar aims, such as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or More's Utopia, or Butler's Erewhon, these writers all do exactly the same thing, although these works are definitely fiction.
As noted, there is no corroborating evidence of Plato's account in any of the other texts of classical antiquity, either before or after Plato wrote his dialogues; Plutarch's life of Solon credits him as the source of the legend of Atlantis, but cites Plato as his authority for saying so:
- His first voyage was for Egypt, and he lived, as he himself says "Near Nilus' mouth, by fair Canopus' shore," and spent some time in study with Psenophis of Heliopolis, and Sonchis the Saite, the most learned of all the priests; from whom, as Plato says, getting knowledge of the Atlantic story, he put it into a poem, and proposed to bring it to the knowledge of the Greeks.
As for the supposed origin of the story in Egyptian historical records, we may note that there are no eleven thousand year old historical records in Egypt and that the records the ancient Egyptians did have pay Greece no attention.
The Greek historian Herodotus (of the 5th century BC) travelled extensively in Egypt in researching his Histories, and was a great admirer of Egyptian culture. His method of writing history, if it can be called a method, was to include everything interesting he heard and submit it to the judgement of his readership. Yet his work includes no mention of any Egyptian records either of Atlantis or of any relevance to Greek history. Nor did any such records come to light when Egypt came to be ruled by the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies.
By far the most likely view is that there was no Atlantis myth, recounted by Critias, Solon, nor anyone else, and that the creation of Atlantis was entirely a literary device of Plato, an author who knew well the art of writing with his tongue in his cheek.
[edit] Doubtful history
In order for the Atlantis story to be true, it is necessary also to move the history of Egypt and of Greece back in time by several thousand years. There are of course people such as Graham Hancock who would love to do just that: but there is nothing in the historical record which would encourage us to do that, and much in the archaeological record that would lead us to reject it. There is no evidence of anything that could be described as a city at Athens before about 1500 BC, nor evidence of habitation at all before about 3000 BC, which makes it implausible that Athenians should have been struggling with Atlanteans six thousand years before that.
[edit] Doubtful geography
On the one hand, according to the Critias:
- The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia. This part of the island looked towards the south, and was sheltered from the north ... The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty...
On the other hand, Atlantis is supposed to have sunk beneath the waves in "a single day and night of misfortune". There is simply no geological process by which this can happen to an island "larger than Libya and Asia [by which Plato means the Middle East] put together".
Moreover, we are told that the submersion of Atlantis is the reason that:
- The sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way.
No-one else in classical times mentions running aground as one of the big hazards of Atlantic navigation; nor is it so today; nor do surveys of the ocean floor reveal any mysterious lost continents.
[edit] Modern views of Atlantis
Having sunk beneath the waves 11,000 years ago, Atlantis has resurfaced in the work of pseudohistorians.
[edit] Madame Blavatsky
The Atlantis myth was reworked by the self-proclaimed medium, Madame Blavatsky. In her version of events, Atlantis sinks slowly enough for the Atlanteans to get off before it went under, and they dispersed from there to parts of the globe as far apart as Mesoamerica and Tibet, where, feeling most at home in non-existent places, they founded the fictional kingdom of Shangri-La.
The arguments for Blavatsky's view are based on commonalities between various cultures: for example, both the Egyptians and the Maya built pyramids. We might try to trace this to a common cultural influence of Atlanteans; or, like Erich von Daniken, we might attribute this to a common alien influence; or we might observe that a pyramid is the easiest shape in which to build a large edifice, and that there is no need to imagine some tribe of Atlanteans wandering the world explaining to anyone who wanted to listen that the pointy bit should go at the top. In the same way, we may attribute a worldwide interest in astronomy to the fact that astronomical knowledge was of fundamental importance to ancient civilisations in order to know when to plant crops.
Moreover, such searches for cultural affinities are an example of Cherry-picking the data: it ignores the huge cultural differences between the cultures being compared, and focuses only on the similarities. Even if we look more closely at the much-vaunted example of the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica, we find that they are completely different in the method of their construction, and that they had completely different religious functions: the Egyptian pyramids were tombs; the Aztec pyramids were temples and sites for mass human sacrifice.
What makes this view of history thoroughly implausible is the idea that a nation of people could wander about affecting human history as profoundly as Blavatsky claims and yet go unrecorded in history. As any Jewish person could tell you, it is not easy for a homeless nation to wander the Earth without attracting comment and attention.
It should also be noted that Blavatsky’s account contradicts Plato’s on a number of important points, agreeing only on the idea that there was a place called Atlantis and that it sank beneath the waves. Madame Blavatsky predicted:
- That the periodical sinking and reappearance of mighty continents, now called Atlantean and Lemurian by modern writers, is not fiction will be demonstrated. It is only in the 20th century that portions, if not the whole, of the present work will be vindicated. A world destruction as happened to Atlantis 11,000 years ago... instead of Atlantis all of England and parts of NW European coast will sink into the sea, in contrast, the sunken Azores region, the Isle of Poseidonis, will again be raised from the sea.
The twentieth century has come and gone, England is still where we left it, and Madame Blavatsky still awaits her vindication.
[edit] Graham Hancock
Graham Hancock takes the myth of Atlantis to be evidence for one of a number of submerged civilizations to be found worldwide. The most mysterious thing about these mysterious lost ancient civilizations is that they always chose to build their mysterious lost cities on mysteriously low-lying costal regions, and never inland or at an altitude, so that there's no hope of any archaeologist actually digging one up.
[edit] A real Atlantis?
The discovery of the city of Troy, of the "palace of Minos", of the "mask of Agamemnon" et cetera, have taught archaeologists that it is certainly worth looking for facts behind any myth which might have a historical component. The destruction of the Greek island of Thera in the fifteenth century BC has been suggested as a prototype for the myth of Atlantis: but apart from being an island, and having been destroyed, it hardly fits the account given by Plato. We might understand how the time between the fall of Thera and Plato might have been stretched to nine thousand years, but it would be harder to explain how the spectacular destruction of Thera by a volcano could turn into mere subsidence beneath the waves, or why an island known to the Greeks should be transported, in the myth, to the Atlantic ocean. And if we accept this hypothesis, which supposes that the story of the fall of Thera was passed down to Plato’s day in the Greek oral tradition, we are at a loss to explain why Plato should trace the provenance of the myth through Critias' family and Solon back to Egyptian historians.
