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Atlantis:

A Theoretical Perspective in Search of Truth

The year was 380 B.C. The great philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) sat with his pupils during one of his lectures, and he told them a great story. In his eighty years on this planet, he would be known more for that tale than anything else. (Donkin 1) . He told this story, the legend of Atlantis, to his students through two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias (Lewis 7) .

In Timaeus, Plato retells a conversation that happened between the philosopher and his friend, Critias. Plato explains that Critias knew of an early scholar, Solon, who journeyed to Egypt to learn of a forgotten civilization. Solon traveled to the Egyptian Delta, and it was here that he met a group of priests in the small town of Saïs. Not far into their conversation did the priests tell Solon the story of an island nation, a powerful empire that had once lain beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Solon returned home after this discussion, and later he told the legend to Dropides, a friend of his. Dropides subsequently passed the knowledge along further to Critias’s grandfather, also known as Critias. It was this elder that then shared the tale with Critias (Lewis 7) .

Critias, the dialogue written after Timaeus, tells the story slightly differently. In Critias, Critias claims that his father had a manuscript from Atlantis, and he studied it often as a child (Lewis 8) .

Even though the two dialogues have a minor dispute over how Critias learned of Atlantis, they still agree on the details of the lost civilization. The legend begins by stating that Atlantis had lain beyond the Pillars of Hercules, known as the Strait of Gibraltar today, in the Atlantic Ocean (Donkin 2) . Atlantis was the size of Asia Minor and Libya combined (Lewis 15) . It was rich, with fertile lands and a successful trading industry. The most technologically advance nation in the world, Atlantis had tools seen nowhere else at the time, and the Atlanteans had ships that had allowed sailor to map all the oceans and seas of Earth (Donkin 3-6) .

The legend then peers into the history of Atlantis, explaining how the land came to be. When the Gods created the world and divided it amongst themselves, Poseidon was given his fair share with Atlantis. He took a mortal wife and fathered ten sons with her, and these ten sons divided their father’s estate into ten equal kingdoms. Atlas, the eldest, was granted the right of kingship over all others (Donkin 3-5) .

The capital city, never given a true name by Plato, was on the southern coast of the island, protected from harsh northern winds by large mountains and distance itself. This capital, famous for its beauty, was a citadel formed of three rings of land, with deep canals between them. Stone bridges connected the rings and tunnels dug through the rings connected the canals. The royal family lived in a magnificent palace on the center ring, and the ring around that was filled with temples and gardens of unparalleled extravagance. The outermost ring contained army barracks, public recreational facilities, and a horse track. All three rings maintained numerous ports for shipping (Donkin 3-5) .

However, as Critias says, “Human nature got he upper hand” (qtd. in Constable 19) . The Atlanteans succumbed to their weaknesses when they saw how wealthy they were becoming, and this motivated them to become wealthier. Their greed caused them to amass armies and send them through the Pillars of Hercules in an attempt to invade the countries of the Mediterranean Sea. Although an easy victory was expected, the Greeks fought hard and virtuously, sending the Atlanteans home massacred. From Mount Olympus, Zeus saw what happened and grew angry with the people of Atlantis. For their insatiable greed, he sent a lightning bold to destroy the island. The entire island flooded, nine thousand years before Plato, and sank in a single day. As the generations passed, Atlantis was forgotten. As few of the brave fighting men of Athens survived, and their descendents were never taught to read or write, the story was lost from history (Donkin 8-13) . Long forgotten, eventually revived, Atlantis has been a legend for the ages. One must remember, though, that Atlantis was more than a legend. Plato’s Atlantis has been fantasized about and searched for globally for centuries, yet it remains where Plato said it was: Atlantis lies in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, most likely the sunken victim of an asteroid.

The modern hunt for Atlantis began with a strange discovery that seemed as though it could not be explained away. When archeologists began closely examining the Egyptian mummies they had uncovered, they found some over seven thousand years old with cocaine in the wrappings. This was hard to believe, as the coca plant, from which cocaine is made, grew only in South America then as well as in the current day. Somehow, the drug made an enormous voyage from one continent, across an ocean, to another continent (Collins 7) .

In addition to cocaine, cultural similarities tied ancient civilizations. In Central America, Europe, and North Africa, prominent peoples all worshipped the sun (Fleck) . Pyramids discovered both in Central America and the Middle East are remarkably similar in design and structure (Muck 131) . Many ancient texts of assorted religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and the ancient Greek beliefs, all hold stories of a global flood that ravaged the earth and destroyed species upon species of life (“Atlantis”) . 10000 B.C., the age when Atlantis is said to have slid beneath the waters of the ocean, was also a time of great change in human ways. At that point, many cultures died off while new ones rose. At that point, the first dogs were domesticated in North America and Europe. Around 9800 B.C., the Golden Age of the Azilian cultures began in the Mediterranean Sea, ushering in a new wave of progress in the arts and sciences. The first known agriculture-based societies formed in Central America about 9000 B.C (Fleck) .

However, the facts alone did not resurrect the idea of Atlantis. It took a young writer named Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to reintroduce the legend to a post-Greek world. In his fanciful book, The New Atlantis, surviving Atlanteans built and ark and traveled what he called Bensalem, or America today (Lewis 19).

While Bacon’s book inspired imaginations, esteemed politician Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) brought a slightly more scientific view to Atlantis. In his novel of 1882, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Donnelly claimed that Atlantis was in the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, and that a civilization had been there before man colonized other regions, such as the Gulf of Mexico; the Amazon; the Pacific coast of South America; the Mediterranean; the west coasts of Europe and Africa; and the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas. His book brought Atlantis back to the forefront of society and made the forgotten empire the talk of the nineteenth century. Even though he had very little scientific proof, he was immediately escalated to the rank of the foremost expert on Atlantis (Lewis 22) .

Donnelly’s beliefs came to be the standard of the age, and many of the believers in Atlantis felt that it was the birthplace of mankind and the ultimate utopia. Donnelly and others felt it was the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields, Mount Olympus, and Asgard, the home of the Norse Gods. According to Donnelly, the sinking of Atlantis inspired the tales of the Great Flood that had spread throughout religions, cultures, and nations (Lewis 22-23) .

Still, Donnelly knew much was lacking from his theories and beliefs. He summarized best the situation when he finished his book with the lines, “A single engraved tablet dredged up from Plato’s island would be worth more to science, would more strike the imagination of mankind, than all of the gold of Peru, all of the monuments of Egypt, and all of the terra-cotta fragments gathered from the great libraries of Chaldea” (qtd. in Constable 24) . These words set many a man upon a search of epic proportions.

The first of scores of explorers to claim a find of Atlantis was Felix Berlioux (1828-1910). The Frenchman investigated Morocco’s Atlas Mountains before claiming to have found the ruins near Casablanca. Following Berlioux, another Frenchman, Claude Roux, placed Atlantis on the Mediterranean coast of northwest Africa. In the same time period as Roux, Count Byron Kuhn de Porok made the announcement that Atlantis was in the Sahara Desert. He declared that he had found corroborating evidence, including the body of Tin Hinan, the lead character of a fictional novel on Atlantis. Geologist Paul Borchardt came across rubble that was once a palace in Tunisia and pronounced it the capital city of Atlantis. Not long after, the remains were proven to be those of an ancient Roman fortress (Lewis 20-21) . The famed Henry Fawcett traveled to South America to seek out Atlantis, only to disappear in 1925 in the jungles with his son and a family friend, never to be seen again (Constable 25) . Of the more recent investigators, Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos (1901-1974) began excavating on the Mediterranean Sea’s volcanic island of Santorini. Marinatos discovered that around 1620 B.C., Santorini’s volcano exploded and destroyed the powerful and successful race living there; known today as the Minoans, he believed them to be the Atlanteans (Lewis 34-36) . Never did any of these explorers unearth their dream.

In his thirty years studying the history of Atlantis, Professor Arysio Nunes dos Santos of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, has witnessed the fall of many hopeful researchers and archaeologists searching for the lost land. “Atlantis,” Professor Nunes says, “was never found because we have all been searching in the wrong places” (qtd. in “Atlantis”) . And until now, he was right.

The Gulf Stream Current is one of the most powerful and driven currents in the world. Starting in the warm tropical waters off of West Africa, it flows to the Caribbean and then into the Gulf of Mexico. The water moves very slowly here, gathering heat, before it creeps up to the east coast of North America. Building speed, it travels across the Atlantic Ocean. Made of bright blue water with very high salinity, it flows over the cold, gray Atlantic waters with easy, eventually becoming over five hundred miles wide. Gradually, the current cools and sinks. Yet, it still surpasses Ireland and Scotland to travel past the western coasts of Spain and France before finally disappearing around the North Cape. The Gulf Stream uses an enormous amount of energy to make this voyage, energy that is provided by the winds’ push and the sun’s heat. The Gulf Stream crosses the Atlantic twice, making a circle of 12,430 miles; this distance is seven times the length the Amazon River in South America, and at one hundred million tons per second, it flows more water than all of the world’s rivers combined (Muck 58-61) .

The Gulf Stream is the warm water heating system of Europe, giving it climatic advantages over other parts of the world at the same latitudes. For example, in England, the average temperature in January is 41 degrees Fahrenheit, but in Labrador on the North American continent, the average January temperature is –40 degrees Fahrenheit, even though England and Labrador are at the same latitudes. Without the Gulf Stream, this could never be (Muck 61-62) .

Some years back into the past, the Gulf Stream still makes a statement on Europe’s condition. Around 5000 B.C., Europe was covered in a green blanket of forest. This time period was the heyday of European life, where civilization advanced at an astonishing rate. However, going back further, problems arise. From approximately 10000 B.C. on into even more prehistoric times, the Gulf Stream never reached Europe. The climate was the same on both sides of the Atlantic at the same latitudes. Simply put, something block the current (Muck 67-68) .

The Gulf Stream is driven by the trade winds, and these winds have been around since before the time of the dinosaurs, when the Atlantic Ocean first formed. Around 10000 B.C., Europe was cold and raw, not the lush and beautiful place it would become. At that point, it was basically a big ice cube (Muck 67-69) . The question is raised: what was stopping the world’s most formidable current?

Just south of where the Gulf Stream currently cross the Atlantic Ridge, an underwater mountain chain in the ocean, the small Azores islands poke out of the water. At ten thousand feet below the surface of the water, the mountainous ridge under the Azores flattens out into a huge landmass, similar to the plateau the forms many of the world’s large islands. This brings to mind Plato’s firm description of Atlantis as a “vast island” (qtd. in Muck 55) or a small continental platform, nothing like the size of North America or Europe. This sunken landmass, now called the Azores Plateau, would have been the correct size and been in the correct place to have been the mystical Atlantis (Much 55-84) .

Of more interest than the plateau below the water are the eels that swim in it. For no apparent reason, the eels put themselves in danger to breed far from the territories they normally inhabit. The eels of the Atlantic mate in the seaweed paradise of the Sargasso Sea, a path of warm water the size of Central Europe near the West Indies. Soon after, tiny transparent larvae hatch and catch a ride on the warm current of the Gulf Stream. On their three-year voyage, the surviving eels will float across the ocean and reach the European coast. While the male eels remain in the sea, the females swim up European rivers. At the age of five, the eels become sexually mature. The females require a stay in fresh water to become sexually mature, but soon enough they join the males, and the couples join the cold undercurrent of the Gulf Stream to gain a ride back to the Sargasso Sea, where the mating rituals begin again. Pure instinct drives the eels, telling them to ride the Gulf Stream. While in the current day eels swim across the ocean, braving predators to keep with their primal urges, the situation was different thousands of years ago (Muck 88-93) .

When the Gulf Stream was blocked thousands of years ago, the current curved around the blockade and rotated back to South America, carrying the eels in a much smaller circle. The eels’ instinct has developed as the females found fresh water and the species itself found safety around the landmass blocking the Gulf Stream over millions and millions of years. Instincts themselves are not open to reason and instinctual animals lack the ability to think or learn from experience. These elongated fish are unware that the blockade, Atlantis, no longer exists (Muck 92-93) . In the end, their behavior does confirm the statements of a psychic, Edgar Cayce. As Cayce said during a hypnotized reading, “The position…the continent of Atlantis occupied is between the Gulf of Mexico on one hand and the Mediterranean on the other” (qtd. in Constable 31) . Atlantis is still there, far below the surface in the cold, dark waters of the deep Atlantic.

But then another question is raised: what happened to the island? The Atlantic Ridge is one of the world’s most unstable regions (Fleck) . The lightning bolt that hit Atlantis would have obviously had to be more than that; it would have had to be some kind of massive object. No mere comet or meteor would have sunk that much land. An asteroid, or mini-planet, of massive proportions would have been required. Given the name Asteroid A by various historians, this is the asteroid thought to have demolished Atlantis (Muck 159-185) .

Before the monstrous collision, one would most likely have found Asteroid A in the Adonis Group of asteroids. In this group, all of the members have roughly the same size and shape. They hall have eccentric orbits, as well, traveling past the orbit of Jupiter and Saturn at their aphelion and coming inside the orbits of Earth and Venus at their perihelion. These odd orbits often bring member of the Adonis Group close to crashing into planets. In fact, in February of 1936, Adonis itself came within 186,000 miles of Earth. This is but an astronomical stone’s throw away from being caught in Earth’s gravity. Had Adonis hit Earth, it would have been far worse than any nuclear explosion ever witnessed by mankind (Muck 165-170) .

Asteroid A, however, would not have missed. It would have entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed between nine and twelve miles per second. Using simple mathematics based on the destruction caused by Asteroid it, it can be calculated that the asteroid was approximately six and a quarter miles in diameter. This would have given it a volume of one hundred and forty-four to one hundred and sixty-eight cubic miles. As with most space debris, Asteroid A would have been composed of mostly a nickel and iron ore, giving the mass an approximate weight of 2x10¹² tons. At two hundred and forty-eight miles in altitude, the space rock would have started to glow red and eventually white to create a brilliant light that would have paled the sun (Muck 163-167) . Coming from the northeast, the asteroid would have had a near-horizontal trajectory (Collins 288) . At impact, the force unleashed would have equaled that of thirty thousand tightly-packed hydrogen bombs all detonated simultaneously (Muck 179) . As Otto Muck told the world in his book, The Secret of Atlantis, “…the forces of Hell were let loose” (qtd. in Muck 185) .

Hitting the Earth’s crust’s thinnest spot, where only nine to twelve miles separated water from magma, Asteroid A did its damage. With an impact speed of one mile per second, the collision would have caused massive volcanic eruptions all across the Atlantic. The destabilized seabed would have ripped up along fault lines, exposing magma to the surface and literally boiling the ocean. All life on the island would have been immediately extinguished; the flash of light would been seen 1250 miles away and the roar of destruction would be heard 2240 miles away, as far as Central Australia. The shockwave would circle the Earth three times. The sad remains of the island would have then sunk below the water on the destroyed remains of the seabed at a rate of one and a half to two inches per second, being totally gone in twenty fours hours (Muck 167-193) . Peter Tompkins said it best in his introduction to The Secret of Atlantis when he wrote, “…Asteroid A did wildly go off its course, break into pieces, plunge into the Atlantic, and engender a holocaust…dragging with it, like some Lucifer, an entire civilisation sic and the better part of mankind on the planet” (qtd. in Collins 273) . Plato did not lie when he told his students, “Atlantis sank within a single dreadful day and a single dreadful night” (qtd. in Muck 241) .

The story of Atlantis itself ended when the island sank below the water to become the Azores Plateau of today (Muck 82) , but that was not the end of the saga. “It’s possible we may have lost from the record an entire civilization,” said Graham Hancock, the author of a multitude of books on Atlantis, “and I feel that the evidence for this lost episode in human history is mounting” (“Atlantis”) . With this thought, he begs one to ask where the records of Atlantis were. How could humans forget such a major catastrophe?

The records in the eastern hemisphere would have found their way to the Library of Alexandria, the largest library of the ancient world. Unfortunately for all of mankind, this warehouse of knowledge was burned down around the third century A.D., annihilating between 70,000 and 700,000 volumes of scientific and artistic literature. It’s estimated that this even set humans back almost one thousand years. And as for the records in the western hemisphere: the Spanish ruined all hope. In 1519, the Spanish conquistadors invaded and defeated the Aztec empire. They demolished the capital city of Tenochtitlan and, in turn, all of the records kept there. As they continued, the Spanish obliterated all of the Native American records along with most of the Central American cultures (Collins, 76, 203) . Thusly, as generations of man passed, the tale would have become unacceptable as truth and thought of, if thought of at all, as a fairy tale (Muck 193) . To best gain perspective, one would ponder Graham Hancock’s synopsis of Atlantis’s state. “What we’re looking at here,” he said, “is an accumulation of discordant evidence and information which doesn’t quite fit in with the orthodox picture. Bits and pieces of a jigsaw scattered and thrown all around the world, and yet the feeling that if we can put those pieces together slowly, methodically, painstakingly, they will show us something that we’ve forgotten about ourselves, a great civilization lost in prehistory” (qtd. in “Atlantis”) .

Works Cited

“Atlantis.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 10 April 2005. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 11 April 2005 .

Collins, Andrew. Gateway to Atlantis: The Search for the Source of a Lost Civilisation.

New York: Carroll & Giraf Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Constable, George, et al. Mystic Places. Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1987.

Donkin, Andrew. Atlantis: The Lost City?. New York: DK Publishing, Inc., 2000.

Fleck, Daniel. Atlantis Page. 11 April 2005. .de/atlantisenglish/

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Lewis, Ann. Unsolved Mysteries—the Secret Files: Atlantis. New York: Rosen Central, 2002.

Muck, Otto. The Secret of Atlantis. Times Books: New York, 1976.