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)
(Note: when it says "1 comment" but you can't see any, that's because the mods have removed something unhelpful.)
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.
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:
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.
For some odd reason it says 1 comment, but I can't see anything...is this just me?