Atlantis: the island of Plato

By Marco Goti

Why did the mythical island of Atlantis disappear so suddenly "Submerged by water and sunk in a day and a terrible night "? Is it still possible to find it? And if so, where is it now?
Based on the Platonic Dialogues and a study on the unique geological conformation, the author traces it Atlantis to an existent island: a wide and almost rectangular plain, surrounded by large mountains. Not only that: he individuates the catastrophic event which lead to its suddenness destruction, even coming to designate with absolute precision the exact geographic coordinates of the site in which the capital was located, with its very special concentric ring structure that alternates earth and sea.
Atlantis: the island of Plato is a "journey by sea" along the route indicated by the great Greek philosopher 2400 years ago, that offers the possibility to finally shed light on one of the most fascinating mysteries in human history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marco Goti
• Release date: Mar 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9788826036267

Book preview

Atlantis: The Island of Plato

Translated by Elena Castorina

Index

Foreword

Introduction

The origins of the Myth and the previous researches of Atlantis

The city, the plain and the whole island

The Region of Gades and its Pillars of Heracles

About the Hyperboreans and the garden of the Hesperides

The expedition of the Argonauts

The Island of Atlantis

The city of Atlantis

Greenland ice cap

Valediction

Appendices

Bibliography

Image Credits

Foreword

Is it true what Plato tells? This is what all the readers of the tale of Atlantis wonder. [¹] This is how the famous Greek scholar Enrico Turolla (1896-1985) introduces the myth of the island disappeared, which Plato summoned first in his Timaeus and Critias, and which, since then on, has never ended to let rivers of ink flow.

The answer provided by the scholar himself is clear and firm: in his opinion, Plato "is the carrier of a tale coming from much farther. He has received, has organized, but has not invented anything. In fact, he has accurately kept, like the reference to the continent beyond the sea ( Timaeus , 25a1) shows undoubtedly". [²] This refers to the part where Plato states that in the Atlantic, beyond the missing island, there are other isles, beyond which the immense sea is surrounded by "a land that, absolutely, clearly and for sure ( pantelôs alethôs orthótata ), can be called a continent". Now, the fact that a wonderful thinker like Plato, with his ever-elegant prose, has put his credibility on the line, by betting on the existence of a continent beyond the sea that was completely unknown in his days – with three adverbs after each other – shows the reliability of his tale (and of his sources, which he clearly had utmost confidence in), for we know nowadays, that continent beyond the ocean truly exists!

I believe that another point making Plato’s tale likely is the fact that, in both dialogues, he describes an extremely ancient Athens, in parallel with Atlantis, founded and led by Athena and Hephaestus, included in a Region of Attica that’s morphologically completely different from the present region: But in the primitive state of the country, its mountains were high hills covered with soil, and the plains, as they are termed by us, of Phelleus were full of rich earth; and there was abundance of wood in the mountains (...) It let off into the hollows the streams which it absorbed from the heights, providing everywhere abundant fountains and rivers. The town territory was itself different: In the first place the Acropolis was not as now (...) But in primitive times the hill of the Acropolis extended to the Eridanus and Ilissus, and included the Pnyx on one side, and the Lycabettus as a boundary. In short, the prehistoric Athens described in Critias is quite different from the Greek Athens. Now, according to the theory expounded in my book, Omero nel Baltico. Le origini nordiche dell’Odissea e dell’Iliade , the Greek Athens actually should have had its prototype in another Athens, i.e. the one mentioned by Homer and flourished in the 2 nd millennium BC in the Baltic area, where the events celebrated in the Homeric poems should have taken place, and which only later on should have been transposed into the Mediterranean area by people coming from the North, who rebuilt there their Baltic-Scandinavian lost homeland, by using the names of the places they had to leave (just like many other migrant people were going to do, after them: just think of New York, New Orleans and so on). Moreover, the width given by the Critias to the territory of that remote, prehistoric town, has a precise reflection in the Greek adjective " euryaguia (spacious), used by Homer to depict" his Nordic Athens.

Tracking Atlantis gets thus a new perspective: as a matter of fact, in the Nordic world, large areas were repeatedly under flooding, since the end of the Ice Age. For example, Rydbeck suggested the existence, in the megalithic age of an emerged, intermediate territory, in the North Sea, between the British Isles and the Cimbrian Peninsula [³] (that means Jutland, which the Romans called Chersonesus Cimbrica ). This corresponds to a precise geographical indication by Plato, according to which the aggressive Atlantis people were supposed to have colonized a region called Gadiric, on the European continent, whose name seems to be resembling that of the present territory of Agder, in southern Norway, located exactly in front of the North Sea. And this is where The Odyssey allows us to close the loop: in fact, just in that area in Norway, in a place not far away from Agder, the Phaeacian people can be placed and, as highlighted by many researchers, the Phaeacians have much in common with the people of Atlantis in the Critias . Just think of their seafaring tradition (Homer calles them nausiklytoí , that means famous sailors), or their origins, from the god Poseidon, or the characteristics of the palace of Alcinous, the sacrifices of bulls and the family relationship itself of the king with his wife, who was his brother’s daughter.

Now let’s focus for a while on the Nordic reallocation of the poems by Homes, that’s going to be helpful again: this reallocation is necessary, to solve all the macroscopic, geographical, morphological and climatic inconsistencies to be found in the traditional Mediterranean setting, already noted in ancient times. For example, the enigmatic, Homeric Peloponnese, described in both poems as a plain, in spite of the sharp orography of Greece, can be identified as Sjaelland, the large Danish island, where Copenaghen is presently located; the only archipelagus in the world that perfectly matches the precise indications concerning the islands surrounding Ithaca in The Odyssey is in Denmark; in the longest battle of The Iliad , the fight lasts uninterruptedly for two days and this implies the phenomenon of the so-called white nights, that’s typical of high latitudes; in Homeric poems, the climate is always cold and the weather quite bad and the thick clothing of the heroes actually corresponds to that of the Danish tombs of the Bronze Age. Moreover, in Homer we can find all the phenomena typical of high latitudes, from northern lights to white nights, from the darkness of the Winter solstice to the sun at midnight. After all, according to Bertrand Russell, the Mycenaean civilisation in Greece had originated from the fair-haired, Nordic invaders who brought with it the Greek language. [⁴]

Let’s get back to Atlantis that shares further relations with Homer and the Nordic world: for instance, a passage of The Iliad tells of a Trojan warrior, who, stabbed in the back, breathed his last, bellowing like a bull bellows when young men are dragging him to offer him in sacrifice to the King of Helice… (Il. XX, 403-405). This passage refers to the temple of Poseidon, located in the placed called Helikē by Homer (that’s where the expression King of Helice to call Poseidon comes from): this place can be identified with the present Helgoland, or Heligoland, one of the Frisian Islands, in the North Sea, west of Jutland. Now, Helgoland is also called Fositeland: a name coming from that of an ancient Frisian god – Fosite [⁵] - and strongly recalling that of Poseidon. That is not all: the Viking equivalent of Fosite, called Forseti and said to be quite an ancient god by scholars, [⁶] used to have a Glitnir , i.e. shining, dwelling, with golden walls and pillars, which is easy to match to the wonderful (…) glittering golden palace of Poseidon (Il. XIII, 21-22). In short, it’s absolutely reasonable to think that the present Helgoland (whose name means holy earth) can be identified with the Homeric Helike, the temple of Poseidon.

Moreover Glitnir, the glittering, golden palace of the Nordic god Forseti, doesn’t simply correspond to the glittering, golden palace of the Homeric Poseidon, but even to the wonderful temple built right in the centre of the capital city of Atlantis, described in detail in the Critias and dedicated to Poseidon himself: All the outside of the temple, with the exceptio of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum (…) In the temple they placed statues of gold; there was the god himselfstanding in a chariot – the charioteer of six winged horses – and of such a size that he touched the roof of the buolding with his head (…) There was an altar too, which in size and workmanship corresponded to this magnificence… ( Critias , 116d-117a). [⁷]

Another contact point between the myth of Atlantis and the Homeric world is to be found in the passage of The Iliad mentioned a little earlier: in fact, the bull given in sacrifice to Poseidon, the King of Helice, in the temple of Helike-Helgoland is reflected in a religious ritual taking place in the island disappeared. As a matter of fact, here in the heart of the capital city of Atlantis, in the grandiose temple of Poseidon, whose description we have just read, the ten kings of the island periodically gathered to then go ahead with a sort of ritual hunting of a group of bulls, followed by the immolation of the bull caught. This sacrifice was actually the introduction to the most solemn ritual of all: after a sacred oath with the blood of the bull immolated, the kings of Atlantis became a judging court and passed sentences, always inside the temple of Poseidon, which was thus turned into a courthouse (or, better said, into a sort of Supreme Court). It is amazing that a remarkable trace of this courthouse is left in the Nordic mythology, referring to Forseti himself and to his Glitnir palace tha is supported by golden pillars and covered with silver: Forseti lives there for many days and moderates all arguments ( Gr ímnismál verse 15) . Always on Glitnir, there’s the best court for gods and men ( s á er domstadhr beztr medh godhum ok mönnum ; Gylfaginning 32). [8] We have reported this passage in original language, too, for it represents an extraordinary contact point between Atlantis and Nordic mythology.

At this point, we can highlight that the German researcher Jürgen Spanuth, in his Die Atlanter , places Atlantis in the zone of Helgoland (with argumentations different from those exposed here and this gives such meeting point even more value): he thinks the so-called sea people, who came down from the North-European coasts in his opinion, were the ones taking the myth of the lost island to Egypt, where, according to the Timaues , a minister is supposed to have told it to the Athenian Solon later.

It is also observed that no land features all the characteristics, which Plato attributes to his mythical island. To overcome such difficulty, it seems reasonable to suppose that the myth of Atlantis may hide a very old substrate, that means the memory of a primordial, even more ancient location, previous to Helgoland (that, as we have seen, matches some of Plato’s indications, though not all of them). For instance, in Plato’s tale, it seems baffling that there are elephants: now, in the Siberian island of Wrangel, some remains of pygmy mammoths were found, dating back to around 2000 BC. So, the puzzling elephants mentioned in the Critias might be the last trace of the mammoths, which, in a very remote past, the people from Atlantis should have lived with, probably in an Arctic or Sub-Arctic land. After that, when the end of the so-called post-glacial climatic optimum (that for some millenniums had guaranteed quite a mild climate even at very high latitudes) made it uninhabitable, they went don to the North Sea and, later on, to the Mediterranean.

In short, the hypothesis of two substrates, the original Acrtic one and then the Nordic one, could be the key to many riddles in the tale of the Greek philosopher. It would even match perfectly both the suggested Arctic origin of the Celts (coming from the islands North in the world, according to an ancient tradition), and with the possible relationships studied by Vittorio Castellani in his " Quando il mare sommerse l'Europa " ( When the sea submerged Europe , translator’s note) between their civilization, that of Atlantis and the megalithic cultures, whose evidences can be found worldwide and, therefore, who had to refer to an advanced, seafaring civilization.

However, there had to be close relationships also with the primitive, Indo-European world, which the Homeric universe has kept the last memory of in the house of Hades, that’s placed by The Odyssey in a barren, Arctic context [⁹] (this is reflected in the Wastelands of the Celtic legends and probably even in the Bible memory of the wasteland of Isaiah). In fact, with the end of the merry age of Kronos – the lord of the golden age, corresponding to the flourishing of the climatic optimum – the primordial, Indo-European heaven located at the north end, had turned into the ice-cold land of the dead, even though its idealized memento was going to remain etched in the memory of the descendants who migrated to more comfortable places: just think of the Homeric Elysian plain, which is at the ends of the world (...) there the faired-hair Rhadamanthus reigns, and men lead an easier life than any where else in the world (Odyssey IV, 563-565).

According to Homer. Kronos was then dethroned by