Atlantis Found!

If I had a dime....

Atlantis is surely one of the most sought after ancient cities of lore, holding the fascination of young and old alike in the centuries since Plato first wrote of its existence in his dialogues. I'm no different. I love this kind of stuff. Enough to devote a significant amount of time to postulating about its whereabouts in a modern, Google Earth powered kind of way.

A real city? Perhaps. But it may be one that defies discovery.

Now, I'm familiar with all the usual suspects... Crete, Santorini, Cayce's Bahamas, the Canaries and the Azores, etc.... And while reasonable cases can be made in evidence for each of them, ultimately, they all fall short of the mark. At least when you try to factor in the words of Plato in a literal fashion.

Beyond the Pillars of Hercules

For me this is one point that we ought to pay attention to. The Pillars of Hercules would seem to be a pretty a hard-to-miss landmark that have presumably been known and referred to since folks first started sailing about the worlds oceans. Not only do they guard the waterway to the Atlantic, they are comprised by the Rock of Gibraltar on one side and either one (or both) of a couple of not-insignificant hill tops on the other. Perfect stuff for ancient lore.

If Atlantis ever did exist, and if Plato was in possession of any handed-down knowledge of this mythical place, surely he didn't mix up this vital point! To place Atlantis in the Mediterranean, then, is surely wrong. Despite the evidence to the contrary.

As for the rest of his account? Well, it gets pretty weak, in my opinion. For starters, it mixes the Atlanteans and the Athenians in the same context as if they had been contemporaries and sounds more and more like allegory than a recounting of fact. And as for any measurements he mentions, including time.... well, I wouldn't be so bold as to presume. It's 2007 and we still can't agree worldwide on a system of measurement (ok, so the rest of the world is metric, but the US has never jumped fully aboard. ) Indeed, if this was all there was to his account I would be inclined to dismiss it as such and call it good. But that's not all the stuff this myth is made of.

Plato is said to have heard of the ancient civilization from some Egyptian priests. Now we're talking. Not to put down the Greeks, but did they build any pyramids? I think not. So coming from the Egyptians makes the possibility of Atlantis seem more real. At least to me. Plato may have simply bent the myth to match his audience... as any good storyteller might do. Can't blame him for that.

Ok, enough flap. Working on the presumption that Atlantis lies reasonably close to the Pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic ocean, I took a look at the prevailing currents. They flow south. Then I took a look at what is possibly a stronger factor, the prevailing winds... they flow north. Given that ancient mariners probably relied heavily on wind power (just a guess) I decided to look northward for any underwater features that would be: a) large in size, and b) shallow enough to have been exposed in the past.

I quickly noted the large, relatively shallow features between Iceland and Ireland that are known as the Rockall and the Hatton banks. Directly northward from these lie the Faeroe Isles and some other rather prominent underwater banks.

Obviously I'm not the first to notice these features, but there has been little written about them (at least that I could find) and how they may fit into the Atlantis myth. I'll be looking at them more closely later.