The primary source of a legendary ancient super-civilization
that existed on a mid-Atlantic island ten thousand years before the birth of
Christ originated in Plato’s book Critias
and Timaeus, written circa 255 BC, when Plato was in his seventies. Among
these works, Plato gives a detailed description of the Atlantean metropolis.
When describing the dimensions and measurements of the island and its
architecture, Plato often refers to the “stade”, which is an archaic
measurement of length, equivalent to 606 feet. According to Plato:
At the centre of the island, near the sea, was a plain –
said to be the most beautiful and fertile of all plains – and near the middle
of the plain about fifty stades inland a hill of no great size. There were two
rings of land and three of sea, like cartwheels, with the island at their
centre and equidistant from each other. In the centre was a shrine sacred to
Poseidon and Cleito, surrounded by a golden wall through which entry was
forbidden. There was a temple to Poseidon himself, a stade in length, three
hundred feet wide and proportionate in height, though somewhat outlandish in
appearance. The outside of it was covered all over with silver, except for the
figures on the pediment which were covered in gold. Round the temple were
statues of the original ten kings and their wives, and many others dedicated by
kings and private persons belonging to the city and its dominions. The two
springs, cold and hot, provided an unlimited supply of water for appropriate
purposes, remarkable for its agreeable quality and excellence; and this they
made available by surrounding it with suitable buildings and plantations,
leading some of it into basins in the open air and some of it into covered hot
baths for winter use. Here separate accommodation was provided for royalty and
commoners, and again, for women, for horses and for other beasts of burden. The
outflow they led into the grove of Poseidon, which (because of the goodness of
the soil) was full of trees of marvelous beauty and height, and also channeled
it to the outer ring islands by aqueducts at the bridges.
On each of these ring islands they had built many temples
for different Gods, and many gardens and areas for exercise, some for men and
some for horses. Finally, there were dockyards full of triremes and their
equipment all in good shape… Beyond the three outer harbours there was a wall,
beginning at the sea and running right round in a circle, at a uniform distance
of 50 stades from the largest ring and harbor and returning in on itself at the
mouth of the canal to the sea. The wall was densely built-up all round with
houses and the canal and the large harbor were crowded with vast numbers of
merchant ships from all quarters, from which rose a constant din of shouting
and noise day and night.
Where was this civilization sited? According to Plato,
Atlantis was located “Beyond the pillars of Hercules”, which means beyond the
Starits of Gibraltar (on either side of which the Herculean pillars once stood)
and out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Many think that Atlantis was merely a figment of Plato’s
imagination; a pure myth that the Greek philosopher used as a vehicle for his
theories of a utopia. Aristotle flatly rejected Plato’s tale, and right up to
the Middle Ages, a majority of the academics agreed with him, although
Aristotelian reasoning on many things, such as metaphysics and astronomy, was
faulty, and held up the advancement of empirical science for centuries.
Where did Plato get his information about Atlantic from? He says
he heard it from a young man named Critias, who says he heard it from his
grandfather who in turn heard it from his father, a friend of Solon, a famous
Greek elder statesman, who learned of the story of Atlantics from the Egyptian
priests of Sais. Solon was visiting Sais on the Nile delta around 600 BC. His
work of framing a constitution for Athens and of instituting social and
economic reforms was ended, so Solon had decided to devote the remaining years
of his life to poetry and the study of history. He was particularly interested
in the origins of the Hellenic civilization, so he asked the Egyptian scholars
what they knew of his nation’s genesis. The scholars of the college of the
Goddess Neith, the protectress of learning, confided to Solon that there were
records in their archives that were thousands of years old which referred to a
continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules which sank around 9560 BC. This
continent, was named Atlantis. The people of this continent, the Atlanteans,
prized fellowship and friendship above worldly possessions, and enjoyed an
advanced system of socialism that meant no one ever lived in poverty. Like the
Incas (who were said to be the descendants of the Atlanteans) the people of the
Atlantis also had a moneyless economy and all land was held in common. Virgil’s
Georgics and Tibullus’s Elegies state that land in ancient times was shared by
large communistic-like societies where no one had the right to own a single
acre. There is also a mention of a lost social system in which “there were no
liars, no sickness, nor old age” in the 5,000-year-old Engidu and the poem of
Uttra of Sumer.
Alas, Plato says that the Atlanteans became decadent and
bellicose. They waged a war against the neighbouring areas of Europe and Asia.
Not long afterwards, Atlantis disappeared beneath the ocean after being
devastated by either a catastrophic earthquake or a meteor. Some skeptical
historians believe the dramatic end of Atlantics is a very convenient epilogue
that gets around the problem of obtaining proof of the continent’s existence.
However, throughout history, there have been many instances of land masses
sinking and emerging from the seas of the world. In 1780, Falcon Island in the
Pacific was discovered by the Spanish. In 1892, the government of Tonga planted
2,000 coconut palms on the island.
Two years afterwards, the island dramatically sank beneath
the ocean waves. In November 1963, the volcanic island of Surtsey emerged from the coastal waters of Iceland and grew
rapidly. After three weeks, the island, which was half a mile across, had risen
to 390 feet above sea level. Its lava rapidly solidified and the island now has
vegetation. In 1819, the delta of the Indus was shaken by a mighty earthquake
which caused most of the local territory to sink. One of the worst cases of a
drowned city occurred on November 1, 1755, when a tremendous earthquake struck
Lisbon. Every dwelling in the lower part of the city was demolished by the
quake, then a gigantic tidal wave swept in from the ocean. Over sixty thousand
people perished in the catastrophe. The shock from the quake was felt over an
area of one and a half million miles, and people all over Europe who were
attending masses in their cathedrals that All Soul’s day actually saw the
chandeliers dance and sway.
If Atlantics did disappear under the waves, surely there
must be some traces of the island on the bed of the Atlantic. Deep-sea
soundings of the Atlantic seabed have been made over the years with sonar and
submarine investigation, and there have been some very curious finds. In 1898,
500 miles north of the Azores, an American telegraph company lowered grappling
irons onto the seabed and tried to retrieve the broken ends of the snapped
transatlantic cable. Instead, they brought up samples of basaltic lava. A
French geologist named Pierre Termier who analysed the dreged up lava was
flummoxed, as the sample was vitreous instead of crystalline. This meant that
the lava had been submerged under water after cooling. As lava disintegrates
after 15,000 years, this told Termier that there had been some volcanic
activity above sea level near the Azores in the fairly recent past, perhaps
around the time of the Atlantis cataclysm.
In other areas on the sea bottom in the vicinity of the
Azores, beach sand has been found. It was first discovered by Professor M.
Ewing of Columbia University in 1949, at a depth of 3 miles. The find was just
as perplexing as the lava discovery. Beach sand is a product of sea erosion,
and nonexistent on the bed of the ocean, so its presence indicates that coastal
land must have sank into the Atlantic at some period in the recent past.
Some think that those underwater findings suggest that the
Azores are the vestiges of Atlantis, but there is another site in the Atlantic
where the legendary continent may have been located – the West Indies. The West
Indies is an archipelago that extends in a curved chain for over 1500 miles
from the peninsula of Florida to the Venezuelan coast. The islands are mostly
volcanic origin, but the Bahamas and Antigua are composed largely of coral. In
September, 1968, a local Bahamian fishing guide known as ‘Bonefish’ Sam brought
Dr. J. Manson Valentine, an archaeologist and honourary curator of the Museum
of Science in Miami, to see an intriguing geometrical structure lying in 23
feet of water off North Bimini. Dr. Valentine, who had been searching for
traces of lost civilizations in the Bahamas for 15 years, was naturally
excited. After investigating the underwater structure, Dr. Valentine described
hi s findings in his museum magazine as:
An extensive pavement of regular and polygonal flat stones,
obviously shaped and accurately aligned to form a convincingly artefactual
pattern. These stones had evidently lain sub-merged over a long period of time,
for the edges of the biggest ones had become rounded off, giving the blocks the
domed appearance of giant loaves of bread or pillows of stone. Some were
absolutely rectangular and some approaching perfect squares.
The J-shaped “Bimini Road” as it is now called, quickly
fired speculation that evidence of a submerged civilization had been uncovered;
perhaps the very site of Atlantis had now been found. Strangely enough, the
renowned American psychic and prophet Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) went into a
trance in 1933 and said that parts of Atlantis would be discovered in the late
1960s. His actual words were “A portion of the temples may yet be discovered
under the slime of ages and sea water near Bimini. Except it in ’68 or ‘69, not
so far away.” The stones of the Bimini Road cannot be dated, but analysis of
the fossilized mangrove roots growing over the stones in the road has given a
date of around 10,000 to 12,000 years.
In 1975, the explorer Dr. David Zink discovered an unusual
fragment of worked stone lodged in the Bimini Road; a block of
tongue-and-groove masonry. One edge of the man-made fragment is hard but was
evidently never fired, so it cannot be dated by thermoluminescence, and no
archaeologist or architect can identify its origin.
Three miles south of the Bimini Road, underwater explorers
have found fluted marble columns, which is hard to explain, as marble is not
native to the Bahamas. Beneath the waters of the Great Bahama Banks, a large
pyramidal building measuring 180 by 140 feet has been located. In the same
area, a pilot spotted a wall under 12 fathoms of unusually clear water.
Curiously, the wall had an archway going through the middle of it. There was
also a recent report of another architectural anomaly a few miles from this wall:
a large marble citadel covering five undersea acres with roads leading from it.
Unfortunately, diving on the citadel is too hazardous, as Cuban patrol boats
regularly visit the waters around it.
Surely, if Atlantis did exist in the vicinity of the West
Indies, its culture would have rubbed off on the peoples of the eastern coast
of Mexico and the North and South Americas. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan,
which was inhabited by 300,000 people, was situated on an island in a vast lake
in the middle of concentric canals. The Aztecs built the capital as a replica
of ‘Aztlan’ a land which lay in the east, from which the Aztecs claimed their
descent. Tenochtitlan’s concentric layout was a copy of the description of
Atlantis given by Plato.
The Mayan Civilization of Central America left curious
accounts of the destruction of an early civilization. Brasseur de Bourbong, an
eminent French ethnographer, deciphered a Mayan document in 1869 which told of
the annihilation millennia before, of two countries on an island that was
rocked by a massive earthquake and ‘suddenly disappeared in the night’ along
with 64 million people.
The American Indians also have stories about a drowned
civilization in their folklore. According to the anthropologists, the Indians
came across the Bering Straits from Siberia, but the Indians themselves believe
that they came from a homeland in the east which was destroyed in a flood. The
Okanogan Indians of British Columbia tell a similar story. They maintain that a
continent existed in the middle of the Atlantis long ago called
‘Samah-tumi-whoo-lah’ – which translates as ‘White man’s island’. This island,
which was destroyed in a terrible was, was said to be ruled by a tall
white-skinned ruler named Queen Scomalt.
In the year 1519, Hernan Cortes and his Conquistadors landed
in Mexico at Vera Cruz. Cortes and his men gazed in awe at Mexico City, the
capital of the New World. The Emperor Montezuma II greeted the explorers and
promptly surrendered himself and his empire of five million people to Cortes
and his six hundred soldiers. Cortes was baffled. He was not aware that to the
Aztecs and Mayas, his arrival signified their Second Coming. Like the Red
Indians of North America, the races of Central America were awaiting the return
of the White God, Known as Quetzacoatl, who was expected to turn up soon. To
the Incas he was called Viracocha. The Toltecs described the god as fair and
ruddy with a beard and long hair who wore a long robe of black linen cut low at
the neck with short sleeves, a dress worn by the natives to this very day. To
the baffled Cortes, the Emperor explained (through the daughter of an Aztec
chieftain, who acted as an interpreter) that the Aztecs had not lived in Mexico
long, and that their ancestors had been led by a bearded white man from the eat
named Quetzacoatl who displayed great wisdom. Before sailing back towards the
east, the White God had promised to return to Mexico to govern the land. Cortes
could make no sense of the Emperor’s story, and gave an account of his journey
from Cuba and his mission to secure the pagan lands for King Charles V of
Spain. The Emperor replied, “You tell us that you come from where the sun
rises, the things you tell us of this great Lord or King who sent you hither to
us, we believe and take it for certain that he is our natural Lord, especially
as you tell us that he has known us for many days. And therefore you may be
certain that we shall obey you and accept you as Lord in place of this great
Lord of whom you speak.” Fourteen years later, the same tragedy unfolded in
Peru, when Atahualpa, the tyrannical Inca ruler, venerated the Spanish soldier
of fortune Don Francisco Pizarro as a descendant and 168 soldiers had been
sighted by the natives riding inland from the sea towards the Inca city of
Cajamarca.
The awestruck Incas greeted the strange visitors, and at
Cajamarca, Atahualpa hailed Pizarro as the divine son of Viracocha. When
Pizarro gave a demonstration of his power by firing a cannon, the Incas
shuddered, as they recalled the legends which told of Viracocha’s control over
thunder. In no time, Pizarro’s men were plundering their way across the
country. Atahualpa saw that the visitors were not Gods, but gangsters, and he
demanded that the thieves from the west return the goods they had stolen.
Instead, Pizarro sent a Bible-carrying priest to the Inca ruler to convert him
and his people from sun-worship to Christianity, but the catechism lesson ended
abruptly when Atahualpa threw the holy book to the ground. The outraged
Spaniards immediately went on the rampage and slaughtered the unarmed natives.
Atahualpa was taken captive and held for ransom for nine months, and during
this time, a huge room was filled with silver and gold and offered to Pizarro
for the Inca ruler’s release. Pizarro had already planned to kill Atahualpa in
order to disrupt and conquer the Inca society. The Spaniard mercenary arranged
a mock trial and found Atahualpa guilty of trumped-up charges. Pizarro gave him
a choice; he could be burned alive as a heathen, or he could be strangled as a
Christian. Atahualpa chose to be strangled. He was baptized Juan de Atahualpa
“in honour of St. John the Baptist” then tied to a stake and garroted. Pizarro
and his soldiers then laid on a full-scale Catholic funeral for the ‘converted’
ruler. It was then only a matter of time before the “men from the rising sun”
sacked the rest of the country.
The strange aspect of these dark episodes in the exploration
of the Americas is the way the explorers were assumed to be long awaited white
Gods from an eastern land.
If Atlantics really was situated near the West Indies, there
is evidence that an earthquake may not have been the demise of the legendary
landmass. On the ocean floor of the south-west Atlantic, there are twin
depressions 23,000 feet deep, near Puerto Rico, which look remarkably like
craters. There are similar craters of meteoric origin on the North American
mainland at Arizona and Charleston, South Carolina, where an elliptical area
extends out into the Atlantic. It has been estimated that the craters near the
hypothetical site of Atlantics in the West Indies were created with an
explosive force equivalent to the detonation of 30,000 million tons of nitroglycerine
around 10 to 15,000 BC. An explosion of this magnitude could also be produce by
3000 medium-sized hydrogen bombs. Such an apocalyptic explosion would punch a
hole in the planet’s crust and some theorists think this was how the Gulf of
Mexico was formed millions of years before. The celestial object that inflicted
such a devastating hammer blow to the Earth is estimated to have been around 6
miles in diameter, which rates it as an asteroid. An earlier asteroid fall is
thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and in modern
times, our world has had a number of close shaves with so-called
‘Earth-grazers’, asteroids that come dangerously close to the planet as they
orbit the sun. The asteroid Eros, which has a diameter of 10 miles, came within
14 million miles of the Earth in 1931. In February 1936, another asteroid named
Adonis came within 1,50,000 miles of the Earth, which is too close for comfort.
Incredibly, in 1993, an asteroid designated 1993 KA2, made the closest approach
ever made by an asteroid. It passed within 90,000 miles of the Earth,
travelling at a speed of 48,000 miles per hour. Although it was only 30 feet in
diameter, the asteroid had an estimated mass of 6,000 tons, and had it survived
a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, it would have caused the equivalent
of an atomic explosion.
Despite all the speculation, the truth about Atlantis still
eludes us, yet the legends of the submerged civilization continue to hold a
growing fascination over each generation. There are many who think Atlantics is
just a fable, but they should remember that prior to the excavations made by
the explorer Heinrich Schliemann in the late 19th century, Troy was
also regarded as fiction.
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