is there any evidence Atlantis existed or is it just a myth?

by JediKnight1

I know there are many myths about Atlantis ranging from the plausible(slightly advanced for there time, destroyed by a tsunami, possibly part of what is now Santorini) To the absolutely absurd(they were destroyed because somehow they were way to hedonistic and techonolgically advanced) But I was wondering if there was any historical evidence that such an island existed? On the history channel I have seen reports that that Archelogists thought they found "parts of Atlantis" but I take it with a grain of salt. Do you think Atlantis was real or just an invention of Plato(another theory I heard)

rosemary85

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Why don't we start by keeping the myth separate from the historical realities we'd like to identify it with. If we started by conflating cherry-picked historical exemplars with the Atlantis described by our primary source, things would only get confused.

So let's first focus first on the primary source. There is only one, Plato, whose dialogues the Timaeus and Critias have Critias tell the story of Atlantis.

  • Critias describes Atlantis as extremely wealthy, with a vast range of natural resources including many minerals including a purely legendary one called "mountain bronze" (oreichalkon); forests and crops; animals both wild and domesticated, including a large population of elephants; a 9 kilometre canal connecting the capital to the sea, and a complex system of canals and bridges in the capital; and the city's chief god was Poseidon. It was located in a plain on the south side of the island, and the plain had a circumference of 10,000 stadia (i.e. ca. 460 by 460 km, if it were square).
  • He also tells us that the entire island was the size of "Libya (=Africa) and Asia combined". He presumably doesn't mean the full extent of those continents as we know them, but let's say "Libya" means super-Saharan Africa from Egypt westward to Tunisia, and "Asia" means Anatolia. So that's roughly the size of Turkey, Egypt, modern Libya, and Tunisia combined, or ca. 4,300,000 km^(2); that's about twice the size of Greenland, or half the size of Brazil. (Maybe subtract half of Libya and Egypt because they're desert: that still leaves a little under 3,000,000 km^(2), considerably bigger than India.)
  • He also tells us that there was a war between Atlantis and Athens, which was eventually won by Athens, a city-state less than 4000 km^(2) in area and which in Plato's time had at most 40,000 male citizens.
  • This war took place in ca. 9400 BCE, that is to say shortly after the earliest archaeological evidence of permanent human settlements anywhere in the world, and about 8000 years before Athens existed.
  • Critias was a historical sophist, but was also a notorious tyrant and mass murderer. He was one of the chief oligarchs responsible for killing between 5% and 15% of the citizen population of Athens in 404/3 BCE in order to seize their property for themselves. Critias in turn claims that he heard the story from his grandfather, that his grandfather heard the story from Solon (a famous reformer, poet, and traveller from early 6th-century BCE Athens), and that Solon heard the story when he was in Egypt. For an Athenian, this is pretty much the equivalent of a story where Hitler reveals hidden knowledge that was passed down secretly through his family after it was imparted to them by Goethe.
  • Atlantis not only had Greek gods, but also a Greek name. It comes from Mt Atlas, the Greek name for a mountain range in Morocco and Algeria that was associated with travel past Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean; that's also the origin of the ocean's name. In Greek it means "unenduring". (The implication is that either the Atlanteans or Egyptians spoke 1st millennium Greek in 9400 BCE.)

So that's the purely textual side. Turning to purely historical places that were subject to one marine disaster or another, there are many examples:

  • Akrotiri, a Minoan settlement on Thera/Santorini, destroyed by volcano in the mid-2nd millennium BCE; Minoan culture was pre-Greek, and no records survived to Plato's time even from the later Mycenaean (Greek) civilisation, let alone from before.
  • Pavlopetri, off Cape Malea in the Peloponnese, a Bronze Age settlement that was inhabited from ca. 2800 to 1000 BCE.
  • Tartessos, in southern Spain; except that this site was still inhabited and in use in Plato's time.
  • Helike and Boura, in the northern Peloponnese, destroyed by earthquake/tsunami in 373 BCE.

And with a bit of imagination it's not hard to come up with more.

Whether you want to associate any of these sites, or any others, with Plato's story or not depends on how exactly you envisage the train of intermediate sources between the historical event and the 4th century philosopher. I can see a case for Helike. I can't see a case for anything prior to 700 BCE, because there are only the most fragmentary indications that anything from before that date survived in Greek memory. It's possible to use special pleading to morph some elements of this into something vaguely less ridiculous, e.g. by claiming that distances, areas, and time periods somehow got multiplied by 10 or 100 in Critias' account (a thing without parallel), or that the name "Atlantis" is somehow a Greek rendering of an unattested Egyptian name, or that "hidden knowledge" is a thing that could in principle happen. But that's all speculation. It might be true. But there's no particular evidence to point that way.

Even if Helike provided inspiration for the story at some level, we still need to read the story through the lens of its immediate significance for Athens. In the 370s Athens worked hard at rebuilding the empire that it lost in the Peloponnesian War 40 years earlier, but in the 350s (when it is usually thought the Timaeus was written) Athens suffered setbacks and was forced to claw its way back to maritime power yet again. In Plato, Critias uses the story to paint a picture of the ideal state, as per Socrates' requirements laid out at the start of the Timaeus and following the ideas laid out in the Republic; in doing so, Critias argues that a militaristic Athenian empire with naval supremacy would be an ideal realisation of the Republic. The Atlantis story is a great vehicle for portraying Critias as an extremist hawk.

Beyond that contemporary historical context, the best way of thinking about Atlantis is as a myth whose meaning developed and shifted over time. Pierre Vidal-Naquet's The Atlantis story: a short history of Plato's myth (Exeter, 2006; orig. in French, 2005) is the best study of that subject out there: Vidal-Naquet was one of the world's greatest critics and theorists on Greek mythology and its reception. The book covers the full history of the legend's reception, placing it in its own cultural context and the contexts of subsequent periods. You can find a review here. He argues that though some ancient writers took Plato's Atlantis as real, it only really took on significance as a supposed historical reality in the Renaissance, when it was treated as a kind of independent witness for the biblical Flood in Genesis. In later transformations it has become an archetype of the "hidden knowledge" motif that is so attractive to 20th/21st century mystics and conspiracy theorists.

In those versions of the myth, there's not much room for objective evidence; it's all driven by confirmation bias. Making excuses for all the lunacies in Critias' story, regardless of whether there's any basis for those excuses or not, only amounts to subscribing to that confirmation bias.

JediKnight1

For some odd reason it says 1 comment, but I can't see anything...is this just me?