Spain and Portugal
The Ancient Mediterranean Research Association held an important Congress in Cadiz, Spain in 1973. Maxine Asher, an archaeologist and explorer of underwater cities off the coast of Spain, organized the event as described in the March 1973 issue of Atlantis in Sykes’ article, The Cadiz Congress Of 1973.
In 1979, two Soviet professors Dr. A.A. Aksyenov of the Oceanographic Institute and Dr. Marcello Vasconelos of the Fishery Research Institute announced a remarkable discovery made by a recent expedition on the Ampere Seamount between Madeira and the Portuguese-Spanish coast. The event was described in the May and November 1979 issues of New World Antiquity in Russian Discoveries On The Ampere Seamount by Egerton Sykes and Russian Under Sea Discoveries On Atlantis by Mr. Barinov. The research vessel Kurtachov took eight undersea photographs showing lines of brick or stone walls plus fragments of a wide flight of steps. The pictures were taken from the Horseshoe archipelago that is linked with the islands of Madeira, Porto Santo, and Dezerta, and with the Gettysburg bank. Sykes stated that the ruins could not be part of Atlantis but may be contemporary. An Atlantean site would more likely be found a mile or so south of the triangle formed by Santa Maria, St. Miguel, and the Formigas Rocks, at the eastern extremity of the Azores. He believed the finds to be part of the European African continental shelf and probably submerged about 6000 BC.
ZHIROV
Dr. N. Th. Zhirov was a personal friend of Sykes for over twenty years.
Unfortunately, Zhirov suffered from injuries received in World War II and never got out of Russia actually to see the Atlantic Ocean about which he wrote so much. Zhirov quoted early Russian classical sources; thus, he was an outstanding contributor to the study of Atlantis. He was very scientific and absolutely objective, and set a standard for Russian Atlantology. Zhirov died in December 1970 in Moscow. His obituary was published in the January 1971 issue of Atlantis.
Russians and Atlantis
The earliest original work on Atlantis was written by A.S. Norov and published in 1854 in Russian and German. In 1917, appeared one of the most serious works by V. Bryusov, the famous Russian poet, who was engaged in the scientific study of the problem until his death. He gave all of the data available as evidence that Atlantis was the cradle of the majority of subsequent civilizations. In the 1930’s, there was considerable interest in the problem with articles in small popular science brochures and the publication of B.L. Bogaevsky, a prominent Soviet historian, who dismissed the lost continent. Almost twenty-five years followed, in which not a single work on the subject appeared in the USSR. Impetus was given in 1954 by E. Andreeva’s most popular science book about Atlantis, Easter Island, and Sannikov’s land, in which she used scientific geological and oceanographic data to demonstrate the undoubted reality of Atlantis.
In 1963, Sykes received a Christmas card from Zhirov which had postage stamps issued in Russia commemorating two well known scientists who were also famous Atlantologists — Vladimir Obzuchev, Member of the Academy 1863-1956, and Valery Brussov, the famous poet and Atlantologist.
Some Of Zhirov’s Writings
In 1957, Zhirov published Atlantis in Moscow, a most informative book on Atlantis with a bibliography that included no fewer than eighty references in Russian, plus sixty references in other languages. The book was only available in Russian. Zhirov was an active contributor to Atlantis journal. In the November 1957 issue of Atlantis, Sykes published A Letter From Dr. Zhirov & A Short Contents Of The Book Atlantis, and in the September 1958 issue of Atlantis, An Open Letter From Dr. Zhirov To All Atlantologists was published.
In January 1962 in Atlantis, Zhirov, who was always looking for evidence that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was once above sea level, reported in An Indisputable Demonstration Of The Great Subsidence Of The Mid-Atlantic Ridge,that N.N. Gorskiy’s book
The Secrets of the Ocean, Moscow, 1960, showed two photographs of shallow water corals grown on rock, dredged up from the Mid Atlantic ridge from a depth of twenty-five-hundred meters by the Soviet oceanographic expedition ship Mikhail Lomonossov. No Carbon-14 dates available. In January 1962 in Atlantis, Zhirov wrote A Critical Analysis Of The Material Culture Of Plato’s Atlantis in which Plato mentions iron, gold, silver, copper, tin, orichalcum (a copper alloy?), and the antiseismic architecture of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
On April 22, 1964, Dr. Zhirov’s The Existence and Destruction of Atlantis was read to the Leningrad House of the Scientists Geological-Geographical Section. The report gathered more than one-hundred-and-fifty scientists and students for two-and-a-half hours. The event was reported in the October 1964 issue of Atlantis in an article titled Atlantological News From The USSR.
Zhirov’s Atlantida was published in 1964 by the State Publishing House of Moscow. The preface was written by the editor, Professor Demetrius G. Panow, Doctor of Geological Sciences. The book was published in Romanian in 1967, while Sykes ranted impatiently that no copies were available in French and English. In the book, Zhirov painstakingly reviewed the latest knowledge of the formation of continents, structure of mountains and submarine ridges, seismic processes, cosmological influences, tectonic origins, and the effects of glaciations on the distribution of flora and fauna, and changes produced by the Gulf Stream. The accumulated evidence indicated that a land mass could have existed in the Atlantic. If this view could be proved, it would lead to a complete reversal of the views generally held concerning the migration and development of man.
Atlantis, Atlantology: Basic Problems was published in Moscow in 1970. At the time, this book was the most extensive attempt to produce geological and geographical proof that Atlantis really existed. The great complexity of the geology of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is discussed. There was a thirty-five page bibliography of eight-hundred references. Sykes owned this book in three languages. The book was reviewed in the November 1971 issue of New World Antiquity.
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