So in the recent past some channel had a special on Atlantis. I don't recall if it was the History Channel or Discovery (my guess is the History channel coughalienscough) and my mother is damn well convinced now that Atlantis was a real place.
Did anyone watch this? I don't have the time to actually sit through the damn thing with my work schedule and she seems dead-set on telling me that Plato based his stories off an actual city that was destroyed by some volcano. And, despite me telling her he literally created the city as allegory for his views on why the republic was the best government and that saying he 'based' it off of an island city that was destroyed by a natural disaster is like saying Nostradomus predicted that the sun would rise a few more times, she seems to be 100% convinced in this stuff.
Call me a skeptic but the stuff she was saying about it made literally no sense. According to her, the piece showed that people who lived there were taller, had more advanced technology than Greece (Plato set his Atlantis 9000 years before his time IIRC so that'd be pretty damn revolutionary for a city to have better construction than a society that existed in the same place 9000 years later) and that the whole island was destroyed when the volcano underneath of it erupted (also convenient since we seem to have a lot of proof Pompei existed, where's this evidence?)
Yes, I'm starting off on the side of logic and I am sticking to the fact that a whole city cannot evade human detection in this day and age. BUT, if there is in fact some credibility to this, what is it? Also is any of this science peer-reviewed?
I haven't seen that special, so I can't rebut anything particular in it. I also really don't have time to look it up and watch it. If anyone can find a summary, I'd be happy to provide rebuttals point-by-point.
A long time ago, someone asked a similar question about Atlantis, and I did a little extra research to respond to their questions. Here is the link to that thread. You may find some useful info there.
Some high points:
Plato is not a historian in this instance. It was universally acknowledged by the ancients that he was creating a hypothetical situation.
the scholars that write about this stuff almost never provide sources for their claims, or take things wildly out of context. Particular names I've run across that are panned for this are Frank Joseph and Rand Flem-Ath.
Pretty much any argument for some ancient uber-civilization has an already accepted explanation.
As I said, if someone can find a summary of claims made by the special, I can do a rebuttal. I'd especially like to see what they are using as evidence for taller people (which I've never heard of, and definitely doesn't exist) and more advanced technology. Do they have anything besides Plato's description of the city?
I have read a book on Atlantis a few years ago that tried not to find the city but if the transmission of the story from the Egyptians to Solon to Plato could have been possible.
Jacques Collina-Girard, L’Atlantide retrouvée ? Enquête scientifique autour d’un mythe (Recovered Atlantis? Scientific inquiry around a myth)
The story was supposed to have happened 9000 thousand years before the time of Solon, in the 6th century BC. At that time the egyptian monarchy was almost 2500 years old. The main point of the book is to show that people without writing can pass important informations orally for thousands of years, quoting tradition of african tribes with list of more than a hundred kings and so on. The addition of the reign creating a continuous tradition of kingship for more than a thousand year. The other is the localisation of the spartel bank, emerged around 10.000 BC before being submerged at the end of the last ice age. His theory is that the event was so cataclysmic, even if the rise of water was slow enough to let the population flee, that it became like a founding myth for the survivors. Some fled south, south-west in what is today the Saharan desert, wich was a Savana until the progressive desertification thousands of years later. Some element of the fauna of the ancient egyptian kingdom suggest that the process was finishing only at that time. In between groups could migrate in the saharan region and finally join Egypt. There those traditions would have been noted at some point until it reached the ears of Solon.
The author, is quite convincing, even if a mixed hypothesis, combining those element with the catastrophic destruction of the minoan is much more probable in my opinion.
Indeed the minoan are the perfect subject for the "advanced civilization". At the time of the minoan civilization, Athens barely existed (or at all) and had contact all over the mediterranean. Until the Island/volcano of Santorin exploded around 1600BC and the coast of Crete was obliterated by a (in fact multiple) Tsunami(s). The sad thing is that the minoan civilization was very maritime and a great part of the population and the activity took place by the sea. So there you have it, a civilization dominating the seas, (almost) wiped out of the earth in one day while an entire island dissapeared around 10.000 BC.