Atlantis

[Eldo]

Does anyone believe in the ancient lost city of Atlantis, an underwater civilsation of people of higher intellect? Scientists have recently claimed it can be found near the island of Cyprus. What are your views on this?

 

[Princess Ivy]

To the best of my knowledge, its become pretty much accepted nowadays that the cretian civilistation (called minoan by some) was around long before the Greeks came to prominance, as such it is believed that the greeks would have seen these people with their advanced civilisation as demi gods, and that this was the basis of the myths of atlantis. Crete was situaited on or near a caldera volcano, the resulting erruption burried parts of the city in volcanic ash and drowned other parts in the ocean. see the link for forther details
http://www.laketech.com/AD_LC.HTML

 

[Eldo]

Hello Princess

So it was the Minoans. But I recently heard and read that it was more likely to be nearer to Cyprus than Crete.

 

[polymorphikos]

I heard it was Helike or something. But then again, there are probably many sunken or smothered cities in such a tectonic hot spot.

 

[Alexa]

As per my knowledge, Atlantis was not an underwater civilization, located on a continent and sunkken by the explosion of a volcano four times powerful than Krakatoa.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

As Princess Ivy said, the best evidence seems to show that there was no real Atlantis, and that the legend may spring from garbled reports or tales of the Cretan culture and the catastrophe that destroyed it. It may also be based on the people of the island of Santorini, which suffered a smilar fate.

Why do people still seach for Atlantis? I think it's a classic case of energy expended in the wrong direction. Most Atlantis buffs seem to imagine the Atlanteans posessed a highly advanced pre-historical civilization that holds arcane secrets and insights that can help us solve the problems we face as individuals and as a species. In reality, it's up to us to find our own answers.

Where does this legend come from? Basically, from a passage in Plato's Timaeus, that speaks of a mighty nation from the Atlantic Ocean that attempted to conquer Athens and was defeated, reversing the Atlantean's territorial expansion. These events are supposed to have occured some 8,000 years BC - at which point Athens would have been either uninhabited or host to a very primitive proto-civilization. Hardly a force capable of thwarting 'a great and wonderful empire' which had already 'subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia'.

More importantly, Plato's account was never meant to be historical, even in the sense in which a legend like the Iliad may be presumed to be the echo of some real event. Like the Parables of many spiritual teachers, his dialogues are stories that convey messages, not factual data about real-world events. To look for a real-world corollary of Atlantis as depicted by Plato is a category error. One may as well search for the Cave that forms the setting for one of Plato's most famous allegories.

Most tellingly, there are no historical or legendary citations of Atlantis prior to Plato. Subsequent to Plato, the story was repeated in several works of philosophy, spirituality and mysticism. Somewhere along the line, people (mostly dubious 19th century spiritualists) began assuming that there really was an Atlantis.

Many claims have attempted to place Atlantis in some region other than that explicitly stated by Plato ('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, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.').

None of these claims can be taken as revealing Plato's lost empire; quite to the contrary. As L Sprague de Camp wrote on the subject: "You cannot change all the details of Plato's story and still claim to have Plato's story. That is like saying the legendary King Arthur is 'really' Cleopatra; all you have to do is to change Cleopatra's sex, nationality, period, temperament, moral character, and other details, and the resemblance becomes obvious."

Plato was pretty precise about the location of Atlantis. If it hasn't been found around the area he described, its reasonable to assume that it never existed, or at least that it hasn't yet been re-discovered. Claims that place Atlantis anywhere else can be safely ignored. And, as I hope I've shown, the whole legend springs from a single source, and one that neither has, nor claimed to have, any historical authority.

Aight.

 

[Neon]

I read a story on this new "finding" of Atlantis. I recall reading that it holds many features concurrent with that of Plato's writings, such as building structures (I think). But, "Atlantis" has been "found" many times before ... all of which proved false.