Message #121189

[dhill757]

Fact or Fiction? Viewpoints

Without claiming to present an exhaustive survey of the existing viewpoints on the issue, I would like to list only the ones I believe to be the most widespread.

* Some believe that Atlantis is Plato's invention from beginning to end, which he needed to expound his ideas of an ideal state.

* Others, who do not consider Plato's narration to be an invention, persevere in trying to interpret it in a way which would make it possible to link it with the already explored archaeological sites. Thus, some of them contend that none other than the island of Crete is Plato's Atlantis, claiming also that Greeks used the name of the Pillars of Hercules, mentioned by Plato, not for what is now called the Strait of Gibraltar, but for some rocks which were situated on the way from Athens to Crete. Given such an interpretation, it becomes imperative for them to bring the date of the vanishing of Atlantis given by Plato, in line with the time of the decline of the Minoan civilization, established by archaeologists, and link it to the explosion of Thera/Santorin.

Hence, rise is given to the hypothesis that the span of time between the vanishing of Atlantis and the conversation between Solon and the priest is actually 10 times shorter, and that the mistake was made either when Egyptian priests were copying the sacred records (it is suggested that the characters denoting 100 and 1000 in the Egyptian system of writing are alike) or because Plato himself, like all his contemporaries, had little sense of time and dating. The same thesis of a mistake of multiplication by ten is used by the proponents of the Cretan Atlantis as regards the dimensions of the island, for the numbers Plato gives in "Critias" do not quite fit in with their theory, to put it mildly. Similar arguments are used to substantiate a variety of hypotheses, including some according to which Atlantis was situated not even in the Mediterranean Sea, but in the Sea of Marmaraor the Black Sea.

* Yet others, fervently believing in the truthfulness of the information provided by Plato, rush to search for Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean. They have already announced, at different times, that the Azore, Canary and Bahama Islands, as well as some other more or less suitable ones, are the remains of Plato's sunken island. They also like to juggle with suggestions of mistakes in the numerals as regards the dimensions of Atlantis.

Let us endeavor to analyze once again Plato's narration, comparing its basic elements and their interpretations with some fairly credible facts, and try to formulate one more hypothesis, which, in my opinion, hardly has more weak points, vulnerable to criticism, than the already existing ones.