Atlantis?

[NiGHTMARE]

I'm pretty sure that Plato didn't say that Atlantis was an entire continent. IIRC the continent thing was started up many hundred years later, by Jules Verne and his novel "20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea".

[Ryback]

Plato only ever called it an island, but he did say it was bigger than Libya and Asia put together - eg, pretty big. It was located in the middle of the Atlantic and sunk below the waves around nine thousand years ago. That, and plenty of other examples from the Timaeus and Critias dialogues indicate fairly safely that Plato was telling a work of fiction.

[Foofoo]

Maybe what Plato was describing was the American continent or some place. Since America wasn't known in Plato's time. Maybe??

[Murdoch]

Ryback is right. Plato supposedly heard it from Solon(sp?) who heard it from Egyptians.

While it's probable he was bullshitting, most legends have, at their core, some measure of truth. Troy is a good example. Atlantis is probably the product of poorly recalled stories that have been mixed together. The size given calls to mind America, but the nature of the civilsation and what took it out suggests something closer to the volcanically active Mediterranean.

There are lots of ruins underwater, notably Bimini in the Bahamas. The Bimini ruins have yet to be accredited to any know civilisation or successfully explained as a bizarre fluke of nature. They're straight parallel lines of stones that look far too well aligned. It's an interesting coincidence that they were found in 1962, the year American "prophet" Edgar Cayce said Atlantis would "rise again".

Also the channel carved by the Hudson River in New York runs down underwater for several hundred feet, as though the level of water in the Atlantic was much lower than it used to be.

EDIT: This guy Graham Hancock is a bit of a nutter, but he's got some nice photos of what may or may not be underwater "ruins".

http://www.grahamhancock.com/gallery/underwater/default.htm

[Kristian Ronge]

kristus said:
Er. you realise that MIDDLE Earth is very much real as that's the place where you and all of us live.

Hm, it was a bit clumsily put. Sorry. I meant to refer to the fictional works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

[kristus]

Ah. Yes, that's fiction ;)

[david_a]

NiGHTMARE said:

IIRC the continent thing was started up many hundred years later, by Jules Verne and his novel "20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea".

I actually just got done reading that book yesterday. He threw a lot of facts in there that I was totally oblivious to (like that the first transatlantic cable was made in 1857!!) so it's actually kind of hard to easily separate the facts from the fantasy in that book. I could see how people might have gotten a bit hazy in their memory and confused the Atlantis-continent theory as coming from a more reputable source.