Atlantis
Over 11,000 years ago there existed an island nation located in the middle of the Atlantic ocean populated by a noble and powerful race. The people of this land possessed great wealth thanks to the natural resources found throughout their island. The island was a center for trade and commerce. The rulers of this land held sway over the people and land of their own island and well into Europe and Africa.
This was the island of Atlantis.
Atlantis was the domain of Poseidon, god of the sea. When Poseidon fell in love with a mortal woman, Cleito, he created a dwelling at the top of a hill near the middle of the island and surrounded the dwelling with rings of water and land to protect her.
Cleito gave birth to five sets of twin boys who became the first rulers of Atlantis. The island was divided among the brothers with the eldest, Atlas, first King of Atlantis, being given control over the central hill and surrounding areas.
At the top of the central hill, a temple was built to honor Poseidon which housed a giant gold statue of Poseidon riding a chariot pulled by winged horses. It was here that the rulers of Atlantis would come to discuss laws, pass judgments, and pay tribute to Poseidon..
To facilitate travel and trade, a water canal was cut through of the rings of land and water running south for 5.5 miles (~9 km) to the sea.
The city of Atlantis sat just outside the outer ring of water and spread across the plain covering a circle of 11 miles (1.7 km). This was a densely populated area where the majority of the population lived.
Beyond the city lay a fertile plain 330 miles (530 km) long and 110 miles (190 km) wide surrounded by another canal used to collect water from the rivers and streams of the mountains. The climate was such that two harvests were possible each year. One in the winter fed by the rains and one in the summer fed by irrigation from the canal.
Surrounding the plain to the north were mountains which soared to the skies. Villages, lakes, rivers, and meadows dotted the mountains.
Besides the harvests, the island provided all kinds of herbs, fruits, and nuts. An abundance of animals, including elephants, roamed the island.
For generations the Atlanteans lived simple, virtuous lives. But slowly they began to change. Greed and power began to corrupt them. When Zeus saw the immorality of the Atlanteans he gathered the other gods to determine a suitable punishment.
Soon, in one violent surge it was gone. The island of Atlantis, its people, and its memory were swallowed by the sea.
This is a summary of the story told by Plato around 360 BC in his dialogues
Timaeus and Critias. These writings of Plato are the only specific known references
to Atlantis. They have prompted controversy and debate for over two thousand
years.
The only evidence in writing of Atlantis was found in Plato's dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. In the Timaeus, it is said that the story of Atlantis was brought to Greece by Solon, a Greek traveler and historian, from Egypt. During Solon's stay in Egypt he communicated with Egyptian priests and took the story home. He gave his notes and recordings to his son, who in turn gave them to Critias.
Theories on the location of Atlantis...
It is likely that Atlantis was the land of the Minoan culture, namely ancient Crete and Thera. If this hypothesis is correct, Plato never realized that the land of Atlantis was already familiar to him.
Archaeological records show that the Minoan culture spread its dominion throughout the nearby islands of the Aegean, very roughly from 3000 years BC to about 1400 years BC. Crete, now part of Greece, was the capital for the Minoan people an advanced civilization with language, commercial shipping, complex architecture, ritual and games.
Plato's (Egyptian) legend also holds that Atlantis was peaceful - this is confirmed by a virtually complete absence of weapons in Minoan ruins and in Minoan artwork - unusual for peoples of that time. And Plato's maps of Atlantis have even been argued to resemble the geography of ancient Crete.
In this article published in 1996 it talks about a group of scientists who theorized that we should be looking far to the south for the lost continent of Atlantis.
Founded on a scientific theory developed by Dr. Charles Hapgood it has withstood the barrage of attacks from the scientific community. Two of the proponents of this theory are Canadian researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, authors of When the Sky Fell.
When Flem-Ath first began researching Atlantis he didn't believe Hapgood's theory but he later changed his mind after stumbling across two obscure but similar maps
A 1665 map by Jesuit scholar Athenasius Kircher, copied from much older sources, seemed to have placed Atlantis in the north Atlantic but strangely, had put north at the bottom of the page apparently forcing study upside down. The 1513 Piri Ri'is map, also copied from much more ancient sources, demonstrated that an ice age civilization had sufficient geographic knowledge to accurately map Antarctica's coast as it existed beneath an ice cap many millennia old (as pointed out by Charles Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age). What seemed obvious to Flem-Ath was that both maps depicted the same land mass.
Further study of Plato yielded even more clues. Armed with a U.S. Navy map of the world, as seen from the South Pole, he discovered a new way of understanding Plato's story and a new way of looking at Kircher's map. Viewed from this southern perspective, all of the world's oceans appear as parts of one great ocean, or, as what is described in Plato as the real ocean and the lands beyond as a whole opposite continent. Sitting in the middle of that great ocean, at the very navel of the world is Antarctica. Suddenly, it was possible to understand Kircher's map, as drawn, with north at the top, Africa and Madagascar to the left and the tip of South America on the right. Flem-Ath soon realized, to the ancients, the Atlantic Ocen included all of the world's oceans.
Platonic theories notwithstanding, the most difficult challenge, explaining how Atlantis might have become Antarctica, remained. How could land, now covered with thousands of feet of ice, have once supported any kind of human habitation, to say nothing of a great civilization on the scale described by Plato? For the Flem-Aths, the answer, it turned out, had already been worked out, thoroughly, convincingly and published in the Yale Scientific Journal in the mid 1950s.
To learn more read the full article here
If, in fact, satellite photography and seismic surveys produce the indications that Flem-Ath expects, what next? The ice in the region that we are talking about is relatively shallow, he says, less than half a kilometer and once we've pinpointed the area, it should be relatively easy to sink a shaft and find something.
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