Atlantis and the Silver City

by Peter Daughtrey

  72. And around the temple on the outside were placed statues of gold of all the descendants of the ten kings and of private persons, coming both from the city itself and from the foreign cities over which they held sway.

  73. In the next place, they had fountains, one of cold and another of hot water, in gracious plenty flowing.

  74. They constructed buildings about them and planted suitable trees.…

  75. Also they made cisterns, some open to the heavens, others roofed over to be used in winter as warm baths.

  76. Of the water which ran off, they carried some to the Grove of Poseidon, where were growing all manner of trees of wonderful height and beauty, owing to the excellence of the soil.

  77. … while the remainder was conveyed by aqueduct bridges to the outer circles.

  78. … gardens and places of exercise, some for men, and others for horses in both of the two islands formed by the zones.

  79. … guardhouses at intervals for the guards, the more trusted of whom were appointed to keep watch in the lesser zone, which was nearer the Acropolis, while the most trusted of all had houses within the citadel.

  80. The docks were full of triremes and naval stores.

  81. … a wall which began at the sea and went all around: this was everywhere distant fifty stadia from the largest zone or harbor, and enclosed the whole, the ends meeting at the mouth of the channel which led to the sea.

  82. The entire area was densely crowded with habitations: and the canal and the largest of the harbors were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts.…

  83. I have described the city and the environs of the ancient palace NEARLY (author’s capitals) in the words of Solon.

  84. The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea.…

  85. But the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain.

  86. … itself surrounded by mountains which descended toward the sea.

  87. It was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia.

  88. This part of the island looked toward the south, and was sheltered from the north.

  89. The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist.…

  90. Having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts.

  91. I will now describe the plain as it was fashioned by nature and the labors of many generations of kings through the ages.

  92. … for the most part rectangular and oblong and where falling out of a straight line followed the circular ditch.

  93. The depth, and width and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told.

  94. It was excavated to a depth of a hundred feet and its breadth was a stadium everywhere. It was carried around the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length.

  95. It received the streams which came down from the mountains and winding round the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea.

  96. Farther inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea. The canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal to another, and to the city.

  97. Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth, in winter having the benefit of the rains from heaven, and in summer the water which the land supplied by introducing streams from the canals.

  98. Each of the lots in the plain had to find a leader for the men who were fit for military service … four sailors to make up the complement of twelve hundred ships … such was the military order of the royal city—the order of the other nine governments varied.

  (IMAGE 1) Timeline covering the period from the date given by Plato for the sinking of Atlantis up to the present day.

  99. There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon … the ten kings … hunted the bulls without weapons but with staves and nooses.

  100. These [laws] were inscribed by the first king on a pillar of orichalcum at the temple of Poseidon.

  101. There follows an amazingly detailed discourse on how the kings sacrificed the bull, and the ceremonies and contemplations to arrive at decisions and judgments, even down to the putting on “most beautiful azure robes.”

  102. Plato then discourses on the people’s debasement.

  It’s a long, complicated list. I’ve read and reread it countless times. I will return to each section of it as I lay out further evidence in this book. I’ll admit that from the first time I fully examined the clues, I could immediately see parallels between them and southwest Iberia. But, containing my excitement, I decided to reexamine the other major Atlantis theories first to ascertain whether any of them are relevant or, more importantly, whether any of the reasoning behind them would be useful for my own analysis.

  Hopefully, this will also help readers who are not very familiar with the Atlantis phenomenon to understand the background and, particularly, the confusion that surrounds it. It’s time to think about location, location, location.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Location, Location, Location

  The story of Atlantis has intrigued, entertained, and puzzled millions of people for more than two millennia, and at least two thousand books have been devoted to the subject. All over the world, people have a subliminal hankering for a lost golden age, when life and its pleasures were simpler, everyone was provided for, and there were no wars or major confrontation. There is an inexorable fascination for civilizations whose knowledge has been buried for thousands of years. Knowledge that is time-worn, mysterious, and coded.

  Many authors have stimulated interest and awareness by pulling together the myriad of evidential strands from various continents and legends indicating the one-time existence of a worldwide maritime civilization, but none have been able to pinpoint it. Some of the books on Atlantis have enjoyed huge success, the first being Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882 by Ignatius Donnelly3 and, more recently, three books on the subject written by Charles Berlitz between 1969 and 1984.4 Some of the plethora of titles presented theories that were just plain wacky, but most of them are by intelligent researchers or academics who believe that they have finally located the site of Atlantis. But that is precisely what continues to fuel the debate: not one of the books or any of the clutch of television documentaries has convincingly nailed that location. None of them has produced a theory, let alone evidence, that can be accepted as plausible in the light of what Plato wrote. So the debate rumbles on and the books keep rolling off the presses.

  Russian, French, German, and Italian authors have contributed to the debate, as well as a host from the English-speaking world. Some of the books are incredibly detailed and scholarly. To this day, Ignatius Donnelly’s book is still much quoted. He examined evidence and legends from old civilizations all over the globe, as well as the coincidences of certain plants and place names, for example, that are found on both sides of the Atlantic, defying any explanation other than that they emanate from a common source. As I suspected, however, on serious analysis not a single hypothesis passes the “Plato test” by matching a good percentage of his clues.

  In many cases, deliberately or otherwise, I found that clues that don’t sit comfortably with specific theories are simply ignored. One example is to be found in a recent book, Discovery of Atlantis, proposing Cyprus and its surrounding seabed as the site.5 The author, Robert Sarmast, gives a list of Plato’s clues but omits key ones that would definitely preclude Cyp
rus, such as the one about Cádiz. To support the theory, an expedition was mounted and resulted in a claim to have discovered a hill on the seabed with a surrounding man-made wall. After the book’s initial publication, a second expedition discovered that the wall was a natural formation.

  The theory that has probably had the most academic support in recent years claims that Atlantis was the Greek island of Santorini, which used to be called Thera and supported a Minoan population. Some decades ago, an archaeological team led by Spyridon Marinatos excitedly began to unearth a whole town buried under volcanic ash there. It is called Akritori and had been covered when, in around 1620 B.C., a volcano blew its top in spectacular style. It ripped the mountain apart, leaving only the caldera as a reformed island in a completely new bay. The explosion was heard all over the eastern Mediterranean basin, and the ensuing tsunami is even attributed with having wiped out the main Minoan civilization on Crete. Significantly, Plato used the words “violent earthquakes and floods” (clue 14)—definitely not volcanic eruptions.

  Clues 16 and 17 refer to the sea being “impassable and impenetrable” after the catastrophe because a shoal of mud, caused by a subsidence of the island, was in the way. The Santorini explosion would have deposited a thick layer of volcanic ash on the sea, and it has been claimed that this complies with these clues. This is nonsense: any mariner encountering and recording it would have been able to tell the difference between the color and consistency of volcanic ash on the one hand, and mud caused by land sinking on the other. Plato was emphatic about this and twice used the word “mud.” Much of Akritori is still buried, and work still continues. In the meantime, it has become a fashionable port of call for cruise liners, helped in no small part by the Atlantis claims. Strangely, it is reported that not a single body has been unearthed in the excavation, yet Plato indicated that the disaster struck without warning.

  That the disaster occurred on Santorini is not in dispute—but, as already indicated, much else is. There are no indications or records that the Minoans were aggressive or warlike until after the eruption when they had to defend themselves against the attacking Mycenaeans. They did not conquer parts of the Mediterranean, or even invade Egypt as the Atlanteans supposedly did. Like the Phoenicians, who appeared on the scene about half a millennium after the explosion, the Minoans were traders. Archaeological finds have led some historians to believe that they traded as far away as southern England. Recently, it has been claimed that some of the cargo of copper found in a Minoan shipwreck off the coast of Anatolia indicates that they were also trading as far afield as Canada. This intriguing discovery has fueled the theory that the Minoan civilization was the great maritime one Plato referred to as Atlantis.

  More significantly for me, it is thought that Minoans also traded with southwest Iberia. This would hardly be surprising; it would have been much closer than Canada, for copper—or England, for tin. Southwest Iberia was already producing bronze, the much-prized alloy made from copper and tin. The Minoans would also have been attracted by the prolific amounts of silver, copper, and gold mined there. This trade was mostly carried out by the Minoans on the much larger island of Crete, which comprised the dominant part of the same confederation as Santorini. The Cretans also produced some bronze at Gournia, a town on the north coast, where there was a substantial port for the island’s extensive fleet of ships. As was the case later with the Phoenicians, southwest Iberia could have contributed mightily to the growth and wealth of this unique seafaring civilization, as you will see in later chapters. Archaeological records indicate, however, that despite the scale of the eventual disaster on Santorini it did not completely kill off the Minoan civilization on Crete. It differs from Plato’s account of Atlantis in that it existed, although probably badly wounded, for at least another 150 years before succumbing to an assault by the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans.

  The timing is also hopelessly wrong. The eruption occurred around 8,000 years after the date given by Plato. It has been suggested that when converting from Egyptian to Greek, either Plato or Solon got the figures wrong, inflating them by a factor of ten. But that has to be a contrived argument as it would also imply that the Egyptian civilization has only been in existence for a mere 800 years, a ludicrous notion that would certainly not have been uttered by the venerable priest. So many of the other clues don’t tie up either. Santorini was far too small and in the wrong part of the world altogether. Plato made it abundantly clear he was referring to the Atlantic, as will be explained in Chapter Seven. And where is the large lush plain, where are the heavily wooded mountains and valleys and the elephants he was so insistent about? The eruption was so cataclysmic the memory of it would have been embedded in the area’s psyche and inevitably documented. Plato would almost certainly have had knowledge of it and if he intended to imply it was Atlantis he would have been specific about the spot and the type of disaster.

  A further strand of the argument for Santorini is that yet another piece of information from the Egyptian priest was misunderstood by Solon. It is suggested that the priest could really have been referring to straits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, but that Solon thought he was indicating those at Gibraltar. There is as much evidence to support this theory of Solon’s misunderstanding as for the moon being made of cheese and inhabited by white mice. If Solon knew of several straits by the same name, surely he was intelligent enough to have queried it at the time. Also, the clue about “coming out of the Atlantic” to invade Egypt came out of the same priest’s mouth. In fact, the Atlantic is mentioned more than once, so Solon would have had to fudge the information several times.

  One BBC documentary, shown on television in May 2011 and repeated in January 2012, stated that Plato claimed that Atlantis was surrounded by concentric rings of water and land. This was sloppy and simply not true, as it was only the capital—a very small part of a substantial country—that was ringed in this way. Sadly, such errors are typical of many books and television documentaries proposing Santorini or other sites as Atlantis—all following the same well-worn path. They treat Plato’s clues like a “pick and mix” sweet display: very selective about the Plato clues with which they agree, but completely ignoring the many that would preclude Santorini. They imply that poor old Solon or Plato got completely the wrong idea about where Atlantis was, when it sank, what the topography was like, how old it was, and much else. About the only thing they got right was that Atlantis, or somewhere like it, once existed. The authors’ and documentary makers’ own “correct” information is presumably a result of divine intervention. The reality is that it is fiction, nothing but a fanciful theory. It is incredible that so many historians and academics have embraced it while turning a blind eye to more than ninety percent of what Plato actually wrote. I suspect that they feel the need to adopt a theory that fits in with their accepted model of civilized human history and that also offers them an excuse to dissociate from something that suggests much earlier significant events. The thought of having to rewrite history simply terrifies them.

  So, where else should we look for Atlantis? Over the years, the most suggested location has been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, with the Azores Islands often cited as the remaining mountaintops of the unfortunate sunken island. It will become obvious from analyses later in Chapter Seven that these islands are, again, in the wrong geographical position for the main part of Atlantis. In geological terms, the Azores are currently rising, not sinking. There is, however, evidence that land in this region has consistently been heaved upward by as much as a thousand meters and subsequently sunk by six thousand meters.6 The Azores were once much larger and there were more of them, but that itself is not an argument for their being the Atlantis homeland.

  Some other more extreme examples about Atlantis put it in the North Sea between Britain and Scandinavia, or southwest of Britain or Ireland. The mythical lost St. Brendan’s Isle is frequently trundled out as a possible location. The fact that the climate around Britain is and was far removed
from that indicated by Plato is conveniently overlooked.

  In 1996, a scholarly book by Peter James was published.7 His hypothesis was that a city in Anatolia was swallowed by a lake and that this was the Atlantis capital. A submerged city may well be there; but for much the same reasons as I have already marshaled about Santorini, it could not possibly be the ancient Atlantis capital.

  Another more recent and intriguing theory revolves around crustal plate science. Rand Flem-Ath has carried out meticulous research on the subject over a long period and claims that startling, substantial movements of individual earth surface plates have occurred. His theory had many members of the academic community foaming at the mouth, but he does make some telling points. He cites precise evidence proving, for example, that the magnetic North Pole has moved dramatically and substantially several times. To learn more on this subject, consult The Atlantis Blueprint by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson.8

  The link with our quest is their theory that Antarctica was Atlantis and was once much farther north in a more temperate zone, before suddenly and dramatically moving south to its current position. However, even allowing for the possibility that Antarctica did suddenly move enormous distances in a very short time span (rather than the few millimeters per year that continents now move), it would still originally have been a long way from where Plato indicated Atlantis was.

  More recent claims by Dr. Sunil Prasannan and others propose large submerged areas in Southeast Asia as the Atlantis location. They make a strong case for a lost civilization in that area, and I have little doubt that there are many of these submerged around the globe.9 This doesn’t say, however, that any of them are Plato’s Atlantis. One, a large city recently discovered off the west coast of India in the Gulf of Cambay, must be at least seven to eight thousand years old, due to its depth under the water and rising sea levels since the last Ice Age.10 Initial carbon dating from artifacts of wood, beads, teeth, pottery, et cetera, confirms a date of around 9500 B.C. This discovery has caused a very public spat between archaeologists who were not involved in the discovery and the Indian authorities. The archaeologists, mostly Americans, pointed out that the finds had not been confirmed with the usual rigorous, painstaking research required. The Indians had discovered the site using side scanners when examining the area in a pollution survey. Subsequently, the authorities instigated a dredging operation to see what they could trawl up. Unfortunately, this method can also destroy a lot of the surrounding evidence. They excused themselves by pointing out that the quality of water there is so bad that conventional, careful examination by divers was just not possible.