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the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (Original)

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Carolyn Silver
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« Reply #120 on: August 11, 2008, 02:12:33 am »

INVENTION ?

First of all, it is highly doubtful that Plato would have had to invent Atlantis to expound his ideas of an ideal state system, - indeed, he had previously expounded them more than once in his other works, without any geographical hoaxes.

Secondly, in Timaeus itself there already exists - and is actively used by Plato - an object only too suitable for setting forth utopian concepts - the pre-historic Athens, so the supposition that Plato needed to invent specifically for the purpose a second, let alone such an exotic one as Atlantis, seems rather far-fetched.

Thirdly, the explanation of how the information of Atlantis came to Plato's notice, does not seem to contain logical contradictions, which in itself enhances its credibility. It also sounds convincing that events of such ancient history are narrated to Solon by none other than an Egyptian priest, and the way he explains why Greeks had lost their historical memory.

"You are all [Greeks] young in mind," came the reply: "you have no belief rooted in old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means...

But in our temples we have preserved from earliest times a written record of any great or splendid achievement or notable event which has come to our ears whether it occurred in your part of the world or here or anywhere else; whereas with you and others, writing and the other necessities of civilisation have only just been developed when the periodic scourge of the deluge descends, and spares none but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you have to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in our part of the world or in yours in early times...

You remember only one deluge, though there have been many, and you do not know that the finest and best race of men that ever existed lived in your country; you and your fellow citizens are descended from the few survivors that remained, but you know nothing about it because so many succeeding generations left no record in writing". (Tim. 22d-23c)

Of course, the archaeological data on which modern ideas of the past of humanity are based, is vast. But the history of Earth has seen a lot of natural cataclysms of enormous proportions, and we cannot completely discard the possibility that the historical memory of humanity has indeed been curtailed, due to the destruction of material evidence by a catastrophe more violent than the ones we know of in the so-called "historical time". (Just imagine what the picture of life on Earth in the 19th century would have looked like a thousand years later, if both Europe and North America had been erased from the face of Earth by some catastrophe.)

WHEN ?

Assertions that Plato had a vague idea of time and chronology do not seem well-substantiated. Besides, there is such a natural approximate measure for assessing large spans of time as a generation, and it does not seem likely that Plato did not perceive the distinction between a period covering the lifespans of several tens of generations and that encompassing several hundreds of generations. (Hardly anyone would assert that Plato had a vague idea of the distinction between tens and hundreds.)

Any assumption that Solon made a mistake in reading the Egyptian hieroglyphs he did not know sufficiently well, should be discarded as Plato explicitly says that he did not read the sacred records himself, but was told of their contents by the priest.

Another reason for the mistake of multiplication by 10 might have been the misunderstanding by Solon of the numerals in the Egyptian priest's story, which is highly improbable, since, firstly, there are several numerals in the story, and, secondly, the spans of time which these numerals describe are interrelated in the priest's story.

"Solon was astonished at what he heard and eagerly begged the priests to describe to him in detail the doings of these citizens of the past. "I will gladly do so, Solon," replied the priest, "both for your sake and your city's, but chiefly in gratitude to the Goddess to whom it has fallen to bring up and educate both your country and ours - yours first, when she took over your seed from Earth and Hephaestus, ours a thousand years later. The age of our institutions is given in our sacred records as eight thousand years, and the citizens whose laws and whose finest achievement I will now briefly describe to you therefore lived nine thousand years ago; we will go through their history in detail later on at leisure, when we can consult the records." (Tim. 23d-24a)

However, if we do assume that Solon misunderstood the priest, it would be difficult to imagine an Egyptian priest who, around the year 600 B.C. gives the age of civilisation in the Nile Valley as 800 years. And it would be an outright impossibility to assume that sacred records could have contained such nonsense, and that "nine thousand years" only appeared in the story in the process of copying, as a result of an accidental substitution of the character denoting thousands for another one, denoting hundreds.

Yet another argument against the alleged mistake of multiplication by ten is the fact that none of the sources dealing with the second millennium B.C., contains any reference to what is described by Plato in his narrative about Atlantis, and consequently, either his narrative, after all, is a hoax, or it is really a case of information lost and accidentally retrieved - information going back to a much earlier period.
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