by Phil Masters
Poseidon, God of the Sea. One of the three greatest gods in the Greek pantheon, Poseidon reshaped the island of Atlantis to provide a safe home for his lover, the local woman Cleito, and founded the ruling dynasty of the Atlantean Empire by fathering ten sons with her.
DIVISION BY TEN
Soon, Cleito did indeed bear children for Poseidon; in fact, she produced five sets of male twins. Poseidon declared them the rulers of Atlantis, dividing the island into ten principalities. The eldest was named Atlas, and the island and its surrounding ocean came to be named after him; Poseidon made him the overall king, with direct rule over the mountain where he was born and the surrounding plain. His younger twin brother, whose name can be rendered as ‘Eumelus’ in Greek or ‘Gadeirus’ in the ancient language of Spain, received the part of the Atlantis directly facing the Pillars of Hercules and that part of Spain that thus came to be called ‘Gades’ in ancient times – or ‘Cadiz’ in the modern age. The names of the other sons, in the Greek forms given by Plato, were, in birth order, Ampheres, Evaemon, Mneseus, Autochthon, Elasippus, Mestor, Azaes, and lastly Diaprepes.
The descendants of Poseidon and Cleito proved to be a wise and noble family, at least for a good few centuries, and Atlantis prospered under their rule, which passed from fathers to eldest sons for many generations. Indeed, Atlantis grew uniquely wealthy, from trade, from tribute from client states, and from its own natural resources. Its mineral wealth included the metal orichalcum – valuable in that time, just a name to later ages.
ORICHALCUM
The legendary metal of Atlantis is also mentioned in other ancient sources, but quite what it actually was is unclear. It’s likely that different sources mean different things by the name; it doesn’t help that Plato said that the metal was only known by this name in his time, although some later sources talk about it as currently in use.
‘Orichalcum’ literally means ‘mountain copper’. Assuming that it wasn’t some magical substance lying off the periodic table, it may (sometimes) have been some kind of alloy of copper with gold, tin, or zinc (perhaps a bronze variant of striking attractiveness), chalcopyrite (a copper iron sulphide mineral), or even a gold–silver alloy. However, Plato talks about it as a naturally occurring mineral, second in value only to gold, and describes the walls of Atlantis as flashing with the ‘red light of orichalcum’. Its use seems to have been mostly or entirely decorative, but given its association with Atlantis, it was doubtless used to embellish the weapons and armour of high-ranking Atlantean warriors.
THE ISLAND REALM
Atlantis was geographically varied as well as rich in natural resources, but the area around the capital was the heart of the kingdom, and the centre of the Empire’s power.
The World in the Age of Atlantis. This map appears to show the world as perceived by the Atlanteans, although the style and some of the names attached to outlying features suggest that it was created in the post-Columbian Renaissance period, with reference to classical Greek and Roman sources as well as surviving Atlantean data. It may anticipate or be contemporary with the work of 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher.
THE GREAT PLAIN
Much of Atlantis was somewhat mountainous, with highlands often running right up to the coast; many of the small coastal towns had good harbours but poor roads. The great south-eastern plain was one exception to this rule – although it was in fact bordered on three sides by mountain ranges (and hence was sheltered from cold north winds). Those mountains were considered especially imposing and beautiful, with numerous small villages and extensive upland meadows supporting a lively pastoral society.
The plain was roughly rectangular in shape, about 370 miles by 250 miles. In the early days of Atlantean glory, once the great Empire was established and organized, one emperor launched a vast engineering project; an irrigation system that transformed the wide, hot plains into a lush and highly productive agricultural region. The key element of this was a gigantic canal, around 650ft wide and 100ft deep, which ran around the entire outer edge of the plain, even running parallel and close to the coast, giving it a total length of some 1,200 miles. This collected all the water running off the surrounding mountains, balancing and regularizing the flow; it was also connected to the great ship canal which ran from the capital city to the sea.
Water from the great perimeter canal was distributed to farmlands on the plain by a system of smaller channels, about 100ft wide, which ran inwards roughly every 12 miles. Further, even smaller channels ran between these, bringing water wherever it was needed. As well as forming a huge, reliable irrigation system, these canals facilitated extensive movement of produce and raw materials from the plains and the surrounding mountains to the capital city and the coast. Timber was brought down from the mountains as great rafts of logs, providing the city and its shipyards with all the wood they needed; meanwhile, the plains produced two good harvests a year, being watered by the rains in winter and the canal system in summer, and the surplus produce was also taken to the city by boat.
ATLANTEAN WILDLIFE
For the most part, Atlantis appears to have shared the typical ecology of the Mediterranean region, and particularly North Africa, at the time. Plato noted that there were multiple types of wilderness environment, each supporting its own set of species, including lakes, marshes, rivers, mountains, and plains. There were also certainly extensive forests, as the Atlantean Empire was never short of wood for construction work.
However, Plato also made special note of the presence of one particular species, commenting that Atlantis had a great number of elephants. These were most common in the southern parts of the island, on a similar latitude to the parts of Africa where elephants are usually found – although in fact, there were also wild elephants in North Africa until Roman times. Atlantean elephants may have been related to or the same species as the African forest elephant, as found in the Congo Basin, which is nowadays regarded as a species in its own right (Loxodonta cyclotis), distinct from the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana). On the other hand, native North African elephants may have been another distinct species again, and the Atlantean animals may have been related to those – or they may have been yet another species, unique to the island.
African elephants are notoriously harder to tame than the Asian species, but the feat isn’t actually impossible, as the Carthaginians would prove when they used North African elephants in their wars with Rome. Hence, the Atlanteans may have managed the same thing – why else would Plato have singled out the species for special mention, after all?
Atlantean Elephant. This animal is clearly a close relative of the African Forest Elephant – probably the same species, in fact. Given the geographical proximity of Atlantis to the African creature’s habitat, this is not particularly surprising.
THE REST OF THE ISLAND
With direct control over this vast and productive agricultural region, the Emperor of Atlantis commanded massive resources, but his nine fellow rulers could draw on more than barren mountains for their own wealth. Even the uplands were often highly productive, and there were also smaller plains, along with great forests in the south where the famous elephant herds grazed.
Still, it required a tradition of great diplomatic skill, strong family loyalty, and some carefully calculated distracting imperial expansion, to keep the others from casting avaricious eyes on the capital region. The descendants of Eumelus had the most frequent and closest contacts with other lands, thanks to the fact that their own principality faced the mouth of the Mediterranean, which was already a centre of civilization, and hence they tended to be drawn to ideas of expansion; most of the emperors went along with this, if only in case the ‘Eumelians’ were otherwise tempted to turn their ambitions landwards, using wealth from trade and foreign mercenaries to challenge the power of the capital.
Other regions included the smaller fertile plain in the north of the island (ruled by the descendants of Mneseus) and the semi-desert parts of the south (ruled by t
he family of Azaes) that provided most of the Atlantean army’s elephant corps. However, the division of responsibilities around the family was not solely a matter of geography; for example, the descendants of Diaprepes were said to run a formidable spy network, supposedly on behalf of the Empire as a whole.
The Island of Atlantis. A somewhat stylized map, bearing a close and interesting resemblance to one drawn in the 17th century by Renaissance thinker Athanasius Kircher. If this map is as old as the style implies and draws on authentic Atlanteanera data, it suggests that Kircher too had access to such information (perhaps simply to this map), although his surviving writings do not mention the fact.
THE CAPITAL
The most spectacular place in all the Empire, though, was the capital city which grew up on and around the mountain where the ten ancestral princes were born. As the Atlantean Empire grew, the Atlanteans constructed more and greater buildings in the city, and added decoration to existing structures, to demonstrate their power; as they grew in confidence, they converted the wide defensive moats which Poseidon had created into bustling circular harbours, linked to the sea, as well as using them as clear markers for the city’s social divisions.
The mountain itself thus became a moated citadel, somewhat over half a mile in diameter. This was surrounded by a circular channel 600ft wide, which was surrounded by a ring of land 1,200ft wide. Then came another circular waterchannel, also 1,200ft wide, then a band of land and another band of water each 1,800ft wide; beyond that were sprawling suburbs. A ship canal, 300ft wide and 100ft deep, ran from the outermost circular channel the six miles to the sea; in addition, the Atlanteans constructed tunnels, wide and high enough for the largest ships of the time, between each of the circular channels, using cut-and-cover construction, so that even the innermost could serve as a harbour. Lastly, they built bridges across each of the circular channels; each bridge was 100ft wide, and they were all aligned, so that a grand, dead straight avenue ran from the outskirts of the city to the central citadel. Furthermore, the bridges had aqueducts built into them to convey water from the springs in the heart of the city to the outer zones.
Rather curiously, the tunnels were placed hard by the bridges and the grand avenue; in fact, they may have run directly under the road in some places. This seems like an entirely gratuitous piece of added engineering complexity, but from the Atlantean point of view, it served two good purposes. Firstly, anyone approaching the citadel, by road or by ship, more or less had to come along the same straight, formal line of approach, which had great ceremonial and psychological effects. And secondly, they could focus the city’s defences at a few key points. Great fortified towers controlled the ends of the bridges and the adjacent entrances to the ship tunnels, both of which could be closed off with huge gates in the event of the city being attacked.
Of course, the Atlanteans never expected their city to be attacked, at least once their power was established. However, the early generations of the dynasty reckoned that they were building for the benefit of future ages, and did not wish to leave anything to chance. This also explains why the city had a good scattering of guardhouses throughout its area. The guard forces were carefully assessed by leaders drawn from the highest levels of society; the more they trusted a guardsman, the closer to the centre of the city he would be posted. The most trusted men of all were assigned to the central citadel, and even given quarters there so that they could guard the royal family full time.
The Capital of Atlantis This picture shows the distinctive layout of the city, with its alternating rings of land and water, the ‘moats’ doubling as sheltered harbours. Note the horse-racing track running around the entire circumference of the outermost land ring. The artist has somewhat foreshortened the length of the canal running out to the sea, which was actually several miles from the city.
Although this scene comes from early in the history of the city, before urban development begins to sprawl far beyond the outer ring-harbour, a number of secondary bridges have already been constructed across the ring-harbours, in addition to those that help make up the great processional way.
THE CITADEL
The heart of the capital city of Atlantis was a place of political and religious power, and was decorated and maintained accordingly. The whole innermost island was surrounded by a wall which was plated with orichalcum, which made it flash a metallic red in sunlight. Within that wall, at the very centre of the island, on the site where the first ten princes were born, was a temple dedicated to Cleito and Poseidon. This was surrounded by a wall which was heavily embellished with gold, and was barred to all but the royal family and a few high priests, although the people of the whole island made pilgrimages to the outer gates, usually to present offerings from the annual harvest to the royal family in their aspect as demigods.
The temple itself was about 600ft long and half that in width. Those who glimpsed it over the wall or through the gates considered that it looked quite strange, as it dated to the very early days of the tenfold kingdom, and the basic architecture was barbaric by later standards; then, in later periods, the exterior had been heavily embellished, mostly with silver, with gold on the building’s soaring pinnacles. The result was, perhaps, more dramatic than elegant. Likewise, the great interior ceiling was plated with intricately carved ivory, also embellished with gold, silver, and orichalcum, while the walls, pillars, and floor were all heavily decorated with orichalcum. A grandiose decorated altar stood at one end of the interior space, and the temple was downright cluttered with gilded statues, including one of Poseidon in a chariot drawn by six winged horses, so large that the god’s head nearly touched the ivory ceiling, along with a hundred nereids (female sea spirits) riding dolphins and various other religious images contributed by assorted devout donors over the centuries.
Other gold statues stood outside the temple in the enclosed courtyard. Most of these depicted members of the royal family – descendants of the first ten princes and their wives – although others were donations from elsewhere on the island, or from conquered or client cities overseas, making for a diverse assortment. Most significantly, from the Atlantean point of view, in front of the main entrance to the temple stood a broad, low pillar made of solid orichalcum, dating back to the age of the first kings of Atlantis and inscribed with the basic laws of the Empire – most importantly, the rules governing precedence and relationships between the ten royal lineages, as laid down by Poseidon himself.
Somewhere nearby, the hot and cold springs originally drawn from the earth by Poseidon still flowed; as these had great practical value as well as sacred status, they were carefully maintained and protected. (The water was always very pure and drinkable.) The Atlanteans enclosed the springs themselves in buildings as ornate as everything else within the citadel-island, then planted gardens and groves of trees around them for show. More importantly, they made the springs the centre of an extensive system of water supplies and public baths.
The water was channelled first into a whole set of cisterns, some open and some enclosed; some of the latter were designed to double as public baths in wintertime. Other dedicated baths served the royal family, were attached to the private houses of wealthy individuals, or were open to the public. In fact, the citadel and the ring islands around it had public baths for men, for women, and for horses and cattle – and even the latter had some degree of ornamentation, as all the public buildings in the city were designed to glorify the Empire.
Equally, water drained from these baths was not wasted, but was mostly used to irrigate the city’s gardens and other green spaces. Within the citadel, this water was directed to a kind of religious park, the ‘Grove of Poseidon’, which held a whole assortment of tall, healthy trees of different species. There was also a large and heavily decorated palace complex for the regular use of the Emperor, his family, any visiting princes, and the court.
The Temple of Poseidon in Atlantis. According to Plato, this was 200m (600ft) long and 100mm (300ft) wide, ‘and of a prop
ortionate height, having a strange barbaric appearance’; this picture shows the temple as having an even more archaic, less classical form than Plato himself probably imagined. He also described the exterior as being covered with silver, with pinnacles plated with gold.
Atlantean Public Baths. Atlantis had separate public bath buildings for men, women, and horses and cattle, some enclosed for use in winter, all with stylishly adorned architecture. This illustration shows an enclosed women’s bath; the Atlanteans seem to have been less sexist than classical Greek culture, and hence to have provided comparable facilities for men and women. The Gorgones mask which is serving as a decoration is presumably a military campaign trophy – unless it indicates something more sinister.
THE CIRCLES
Developments on the rings of land between the circular harbour-channels were designed for both aesthetics and health, without the regal formality of the citadel. Most of the building work was carried out with considerable efficiency, thanks to the intelligence and dedication of early emperors; the local stone proved to be good building material, and as the Atlanteans excavated ship-tunnels and also partially underground docks, and levelled the ground, the stone they extracted would immediately be used somewhere nearby for building work. This stone was of three different types, one white, one black, and one red, and some of the more ornate buildings used these colours to great decorative effect. Each ring island was surrounded by a tall, strong stone wall, plated with metal; the outer ring’s wall was covered with brass or bronze, and the inner ring had tin (or, more likely, some kind of tin-based alloy with a high silvery sheen).