Talk:Atlantis

Removed material from "other ancient accounts" section

As promised, here is material removed from the "other ancient accounts" section, either because it is badly sourced, not about Atlantis, or both.

1. Claudius Aelianus cites Theopompus, knowing of the existence of the huge island out in the Atlantic as a continuing tradition among the Phoenicians or Carthaginians of Cádiz.
2. A fragmentary work of Theophrastus of Lesbos, from the 4th century BC, speaks of the colonies of Atlantis in the sea.
3. Pliny the Elder recorded that this land was 12,000 km distant (by modern measurement) from Cádiz, and Uba, a Numidian talks of an enormous island outside the Pillars of Hercules. He describes it as having a climate that is very mild; fruits and vegetables grow ripe throughout the year. There are huge mountains covered with large forests, and wide, irrigable plains with navigable rivers. The Periplus of Scylax of Caryanda, from the 4th century BC, gives a similar account.
4. The historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century AD, recorded that the Atlanteans did not know the fruits of Ceres.
5. (after the Ammianus Marcellinus paragraph currently in the article) Marcellinus further records that the intelligentsia of Alexandria considered the destruction of Atlantis a historical fact and described a class of earthquakes that suddenly, by a violent motion, opened up huge mouths and so swallowed up portions of the earth, as once in the Atlantic Ocean a large island was swallowed up.
6. Perhaps the Byzantine friar Cosmas Indicopleustes understood Plato better than the ancient and modern "Aristotelians," says Merezhkovsky. In his Topographia Christiana Cosmas included a chart of the (flat) world: it showed an inner continent, a compact mainland surrounded by sea, and this was surrounded by an outer ring-shaped continent, with the inscription, "The earth beyond the Ocean, where men lived before the Flood."

For ancient prose authors, citations will usually take the form (book.paragraph), so for instance the citation Herodotus 8.171 will direct us to Book 8, paragraph 171 of the Histories. Some of the authors named here (Theophrastus, Scylax) are fragmentary, so citation will be more complex, but we need some specific indication of where to find the information cited--otherwise it is impossible to verify what the article is saying. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:31, 4 June 2006 (UTC)