The Lost Empire of Atlantis

by Gavin Menzies

  PLATO’S DESCRIPTION OF MINOAN CIVILISATION

  Plato writes that the civilisation of Atlantis employed highly organised methods of agriculture. To cite Critias :

  . . . It produced and brought to perfection all those sweet-scented stuffs which the earth produces now, whether made of roots or herbs or trees or of liquid gums derived from flowers or fruits . . .

  GM : Here Plato is referring to Crete’s perfume industry in the Bronze Age, based on olive oil with terebinth resin as a fixative and perfumes of fruit and flowers (see chapters 8 and 10). Plato continues his description:

  . . . The cultivated fruit also [vines] and the dry [corn] which serves us for our meals – the various species of which are comprehended under the name of ‘vegetables’ – and all the produce of trees which contains liquid and solid food and unguents and the fruit of the orchard tree so hard to store, which is grown for the sake of amusement and pleasure, and all the after-dinner fruits which we serve up as welcome remedies for the sufferer from repletion – all these that hallowed island [of Atlantis] as it lay beneath the sun produced in marvellous beauty and endless abundance . . .1

  GM : The ‘hallowed island’ of Crete provides everything Plato describes. Moreover Plato writes that the island is rectangular and that the island has heavy rainfall in winter, both true of Crete. Plato’s island has mountains and plains in the same position as Crete’s.

  Plato states in Critias that the civilisation of Atlantis was a place of conscious amenity, leisure and public service:

  . . . The springs they made use of, one kind being of cold, another of warm water were of abundant volume, and each kind was wonderfully well adapted for use because of its natural taste and these they surrounded with buildings and with plantations of trees such as suited the waters; and moreover they set reservoirs round about some under the open sky; and others under cover to supply hot baths in the winter; they put separate baths for the king, and for the private citizens, besides other women . . .

  GM : Phaestos and other Cretan palaces had all of these amenities (as described in chapter 1). By contrast, other great civilisations of the time in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia had the amenities but were not islands.

  Plato describes Atlantis as a literate state.

  . . . The relations between her ten kings were governed by the precepts of Poseidon as handed down to them by the law and the records inscribed [my italics] by the first prince on a pillar of orichalcum which was placed within the temple of Poseidon in the centre of the island . . .

  GM : The Minoans had the Linear A and later the Linear B scripts and a numbering system. No other island at that time had writing. Plato says Atlantis was a metalworking state based on copper. Orichalcum, described above, is a copper alloy. Two further passages in the Critias :

  . . . And they covered with brass, as though with a plaster, all the circumference of the wall which surrounded the outermost circle; and all that of the inner one they covered with tin; and that which encompassing the acropolis itself with orichalcum which sparkled like fire . . .2

  Diagram 1 – Plato’s island.

  Diagram 4 – Santorini before first eruption c. 15,000 BC.

  Diagram 5 – ‘Minoan’ island before 1450 BC eruption showing canal.

  Diagram 6 – Island today – after 1450 BC eruption.

  and a little later:

  . . . All the exterior of the temple they covered with silver, save only the pinnacles and these they covered with gold. As to the exterior,

  they made the roof all of ivory in appearance variegated with gold and silver and orichalcum and all the rest of the walls and pillars and flowers they covered with orichalcum . . .

  GM : Minoans traded and worked copper, tin, bronze, gold, silver and ivory. Some Minoan buildings had roofs of translucent alabaster to let in the light – as Plato describes it, ‘ivory in appearance’.

  Only Crete fits the description and the only island people who had the metalworking skills in the period described by Plato were the Minoans.

  Plato expands on the metal-making and trading capacity of the Atlantis civilisation:

  . . . For because of their headship they had a large supply of imports from abroad, and the island itself furnished most of the requirements of daily life – metals to begin with, both of the hard kind and the fusible kind which is now known only by name [orichalcum] but was more than a name then, there being mines of it in many places of the island. It brought forth also in abundance all the timbers that a forest provides for the labours of carpenters and of animals it produced a sufficiency, both of tame and wild [elephants] . . .3

  Plato’s claim that Atlanteans ‘produced a sufficiency, both of tame and wild elephants’ seemed to demolish my claim that Atlanteans were Minoans – because obviously, there are no tame elephants to be found on the Mediterranean islands which were part of the Minoan trading empire.

  However, I found to my amazement that pygmy elephants were found on Cyprus, Rhodes, the Dodecanese islands, the Cyclades islands, and on Crete, Malta, Sicily and Sardinia in the late Bronze Age (Masseti; Johnson.) their bones have been dated to 2900 BC– 1700 BC. Elephants could not swim to Cyprus. They must have been taken by ship and thus must have been tame.

  THE VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS.

  Looking towards the sea, but in the centre of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains and very fertile.

  GM : This is the plain on Thera, shown in Diagram 4, before the first major eruption (Diagram 5). When (Plato says 9,000 BC) the island was egg-shaped with a central plain, and almost the same size as Plato describes. The plain was rich in phosphates and nitrates from previous volcanic eruptions and hence very fertile:

  Near the plain again, and also in the centre of the island at a distance of about 50 stadia [10,000 yards; 9,000 metres] there was a mountain not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito.

  GM : This mountain was Skaros volcano, shown on Diagram 4, which was approximately in the centre of the island and 9,000 metres from the east coast. It was not very high compared to the plain – less than 200 metres (220 yards).

  The maiden [Cleito] had already reached womanhood, when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in love with her and had intercourse with her, and breaking the ground enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all around, making alternate zones of sea and land larger and smaller, encircling one another . . . so that no man could get to the island for ships and voyages were not as yet . . .

  GM : Poseidon ‘breaking the ground’ to seal off the central island, thereby enclosing ‘the hill’ was in reality the first major volcanic explosion, which would have been passed down in folk memory and would have turned Thera from the island shaped as in Diagram 4 to that shown in Diagram 5. Skaros volcano (4) has become Vor-Kameni island (5). ‘For ships and voyages were not as yet.’ This signifies that this major explosion was before 6000 BC – when Cretans had ships (they arrived in Crete in 7000 BC).

  He himself, being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm water and the other of cold . . .

  GM : These are the hot and cold springs in which tourists visiting the central islands of Nea Kameni and Palae Kameni bathe today (Diagram 6). So Plato’s description accords with the appearance of Thera both before the central lagoon was flooded and then again, after that point. Plato describes this eruption:

  But at a later time [viz. after Poseidon had surrounded the central island of Nea Kameni with water] there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods and one grievous day, night befell them . . .

  GM : The night is the darkness caused by the explosion of Thera’s volcano – the debris would have blotted out the sun, causing crop failures.

  . . . when the whole body o
f your warriors was swallowed up by the earth and the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down . . .

  GM : Plato is here describing the last catastrophic eruption, which changed Thera from what is shown in Diagram 5 to that shown in 6 – more huge chunks of the island have been blown away. A large part of the town now buried beneath modern-day Akrotiri would have gone, as would have some of the settlements on the western part of the main island. Doubtless the shallower parts of the central caldera became a shoal of mud. The sea would have been covered with volcanic tephra, making it appear as mud.

  For beginning at the sea, they bored a channel right through the outermost circle which was three plethora in breadth, one hundred feet [30 metres] in depth and 50 stades in length, and thus they made the entrance to it from the sea like that to a harbour by opening up a mouth large enough for the greater ships to sail through.4

  GM : The route of this channel is shown on Diagrams 5 and 6 from the sea south of Aspro Island, northeast to the central island. Today there is a passage of 30 metres (100 feet) or more in depth and over 6,400 metres (7,000 yards) in length from the sea to Nea Kameni. Plato is probably using some poetic licence; this channel was created by the first major volcanic eruption (compare Diagrams 4 and 5 which let the sea into central Thera) rather than by man – just as the circle of water surrounding the central island was the result of a volcanic eruption, rather than being manmade as Plato claims.

  The docks were full of Triremes and naval stores, and all things were quite ready for use.

  GM : The busy docks are shown in the Thera fresco as are the triremes and their stores, not least cattle being driven to be loaded on to the ships.

  The entire area was densely crowded with habitations; and the canal and the largest of the harbours were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts who from their numbers, kept up a multi-tudinous sound of human voices and din and clatter of all sorts, night and day.

  GM : Merchants of different nationalities (from their clothes and the colour of their skins) are shown in the frescoes – Libyans, Africans, Minoans, and passengers in the ships with their white gowns.

  All of this [dockyard] including the zones and the bridge, they surrounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges where the sea passed in.

  GM : The towers and bridges and the surrounding stone wall encircling the dockyard are clearly shown on the Minoan fresco.

  The stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the central island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black and a third red, and as they quarried, they at the same time hollowed out double docks, having roofs carved out of the native rock. Some of these buildings were simple, but in others they put together different stones, varying the colour to please the eye, and to be a natural source of delight.

  GM : The white, black and red stones which Plato described appear in the frescoes and are still seen on the cliff faces of Thera today. The coloured stones are also shown in the buildings on the frescoes, as is the subterranean double dock with the roof hollowed out of native rock. This was carved out of the cliff at Red Beach. Just as subterranean docks (for fishing boats) are carved on Santorini today and subterranean houses and restaurants are still being used today.

  MYTH, MAGIC AND FINDING AMERICA

  Visiting Mycenae on mainland Greece made a big impression on me, not least because it was clear that Heinrich Schliemann had followed Homer to the letter in finding both Troy and Mycenae. Homer had been extraordinarily accurate. This fitted with my own experience, firstly with 1421 and then with 1434 , when it became apparent that the legends of indigenous peoples concerning their ancestors were almost always based on fact. This was especially true in the Americas, where the Indian peoples living on the thousands of miles of Pacific coast that stretch from the Arctic down to South America all maintained that their ancestors came by sea. The same story was later repeated on the North Atlantic coast.

  Applying that principle to the history of the Mediterranean, it gradually seemed to me that Plato could have been telling the truth. I also thought that Greek or Roman historians must have recorded histories of the great Minoan trading empire.

  In 1954, at the Naval Training College, Dartmouth, we had been taught Greek and Roman history. So I was in a position to investigate whether Herodotus, Homer or Plato had in fact described Minoan voyages to the Americas. I quickly discovered that authors much more learned than I considered that Homer’s Odyssey did indeed describe a European Bronze Age fleet circumnavigating the world. I studied some of these histories, notably those of the American ancient history expert Henriette Mertz and several French historians. The problem was that their accounts, which could well be true, were not specific enough – the descriptions could be of America, but they could equally be of the Mediterranean. So reluctantly I discarded them. Then, Marcella found Atlantis: the Truth Behind the Legend , by A.G. Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon, the landmark book which opened my eyes.

  Over the past forty years, since Professor Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon’s book was published, there has been an avalanche of new evidence about the Minoans and their fabulous civilisation. Galanopoulos and Bacon did not have an analysis of the Uluburun wreck and its cargo to go by nor, most important, knowledge of the copper ingots in its hold and their chemical analysis. Nor did they know of the millions of pounds of high-quality copper which disappeared from the mines of Lake Superior in the 3rd millennium BC, apparently into thin air. And they did not have the opportunity to compare the hull of the Uluburun wreck with the Thera frescoes, so as to be in a position to appreciate the magnificent seagoing qualities of Minoan ships. The results of the excavations of Iberian rivers, notably the Bronze Age hoards and Bronze Age ports, were not available to them. The full extent of the Minoan empire, notably the base at Tell el Dab’a in Egypt, was not known to them. As to Stonehenge, the discoveries of Minoan artefacts and skeletons of people who had originally lived in the Mediterranean is very recent. The Minoan pottery in north Germany has only just come to light.

  Galanopoulos and Bacon did not know of recent discoveries of Minoan artefacts in copper mines across the world. Neither had they the benefit of the monumental works since published by the Emeritus Professors Sorenson and Johannessen, in which they described enormous levels of transcontinental trade in the Bronze Age. Thanks to new evidence provided by a great many people far more knowledgeable than I, it has been possible to build on Galanopoulos and Bacon’s ideas to advance an explanation of Plato’s Atlantis which is at once simple and all-embracing.

  With the benefits of the enormous amount of recent research we can critically examine Plato’s descriptions that concern America:

  . . . For the ocean that was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the Pillars of Heracles’ [Straits of Gibraltar] there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travellers of that time to cross from it to the other islands and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses the veritable ocean . . .5

  Here we have Plato describing the Atlantic and America; and stating that the Atlantic is navigable via islands (Canaries and Cape Verde outward bound; Hebrides and Orkneys inward bound).

  Plato describes the Minoans’ elegant civilisation and says that their empire stretched from across the Atlantic to Europe and embraced the Mediterranean. America lay to the west of the Atlantic ‘. . . encompass[ing] the veritable ocean . . .’, which was navigable in those days.

  The huge island in the western Atlantic ‘encompassing the ocean’ can only refer to America; the fleet returning from America across the Atlantic to attack Athens refers to Minoan ships returning from their voyages with Lake Superior copper.

>   Such has been the interest in the Atlantis story that a huge amount of investigation and research has been devoted to Thera by professors and experts in all sorts of disciplines – volcanologists, archaeologists, oceanographers, art historians, geographers, meteorologists. It is all fascinating stuff. A selected bibliography of their research is on our website.

  THE CONCLUSION THAT ’S HARD TO AVOID

  The simplest explanation for all these similarities is that Plato was indeed describing the Minoan civilisation. However Plato’s story is a conflation of three realities – first, that the Atlantis metropolis was really Santorini; secondly that the island in the Atlantic as big as Libya and Egypt was in fact America; thirdly that Atlantis’ manufacturing base and bread basket was Crete. Atlantis was not a single place, but an empire, now lost. Today a visitor taking a colour photograph of the frescoes with him or her can board a boat and sail past Red Beach and in doing so is viewing Plato’s Atlantis almost as it was 4,000 years ago.

  Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

  Notes to Epilogue

  1. Plato, Critias 115b

  2. Ibid. 116d

  3. Ibid. 115e

  4. Ibid. 115d

  5. Plato, Timaeus 25A

  6. Masseti and Johnson DL, JSTOR Journal of Biography, vol 7 (1980) p383–398

  7. Ibid.

  Full details of diagrams on our website are contained on our website. This includes acknowledgements to the German vulcanologists whose dplans I have copied.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  (Full bibliography on website)