Authors: J. Douglas Kenyon
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Gnostic Dementia, #Fringe Science, #Alternative History, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Archaeology, #Ancient Aliens, #History
Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (21 page)
A LABYRINTH OF MISINFORMATION
As for the flood legend common to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and early myth, it cannot have resulted from the destruction of Thera, because the deluge myth prominent in Middle Eastern civilization traces back to Sumerian origins, predating the downfall of Minoan Crete by more than a thousand years. The Greek tradition of Theras, the mythic founder of Thera, has no elements in common with Plato’s story, nor does it hint of anything remotely Atlantean.
The Minoan Hypothesis was so much in vogue among archeologists during the 1970s that the famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau spent the better part of his time, energies, and nearly two million dollars provided by the government of Monaco searching the depths around Santorini. Lured to the Aegean by a fashionable theory designed to dismiss Plato, not explain him, Cousteau turned up nothing resembling Atlantis.
A CONFUSION OF DATES
While at first glance and from a distance the Minoan Hypothesis may appear tenable, it begins to disintegrate the closer one approaches it. Practically point for point, an Aegean Atlantis does not match Plato’s straightforward account and is uniformly contradicted by the evidence of geology, history, and comparative mythology. As a last-ditch effort to save something of their excuse for a Cretan interpretation, its advocates claim that Plato merely used the general outline of events at Thera as a vague, historical framework on which to present his notion of a consummate culture in the fictionalized guise of Atlantis.
But here too they err because the dialogues define Atlantis as the enemy of Plato’s idealized state. So often has it been repeated that he invented Atlantis to exemplify his “ideal society.” In any case, the ideal city Plato does describe, Megaera, is square, not circular.
But only one piece of evidence is required to invalidate the Minoan Hypothesis in a single stroke. The cornerstone its supporters depended upon was the date for the collapse of Thera’s volcano into the sea, because it was
this
disaster, they argued, that brought down Minoan civilization in 1485
B.C.E.
The attendant tsunamis that crashed along the shores of ancient Crete, and the earthquakes that toppled her cities, were compounded by Greek armies who took advantage of the natural catastrophe to wage war on the disorganized Minoans, plunging them into a dark age from which they never reemerged.
The pivotal date was arrived at by a process of ice-core drilling. Caroli explains: “Ice cores reveal ‘acidity peaks’ at the times of major eruptions, because ash falls on the ice caps and affects their chemistry. Long cores by hollow pipes used as drills (some hundreds of feet in length) taken from both Greenland and Antarctica have been examined to determine the past climate of the Earth.
“By analyzing the chemistry of these cores, ‘acidity peaks’ can be found,” he says, “many of them visible to the naked eye as dark streaks in the ice made by the ash that fell long ago. Some of these cores, mainly those from Greenland, have annual layers, like tree rings, or sedimentary glacial deposits at lake bottoms. These can and have been counted back for thousands of years. The oldest of these ‘long cores’ was drilled in 1963 at Camp Century in north-central Greenland. For years, it was the only core that went back far enough and had been studied in sufficient detail to potentially reveal the timing of Thera’s eruption.”
It is now understood that Thera erupted between 1623 and 1628
B.C.E.
, almost 150 earlier than the Minoan theorists believed. The significance of this discrepancy renders their entire interpretation invalid, because Minoan civilization did not disappear in the wake of a natural disaster. “By all indications,” Caroli points out, “the Minoans not only survived the eruption, but reached their peak
after
it.”
Proponents of an Aegean Atlantis call upon Egyptian history for corroboration, but here too they find contradiction to their assertion that Minoan civilization was shattered by Thera’s eruption. Pharaoh Amenhotep III dispatched an embassy to the cities of Crete and found them still occupied nearly a century after their supposed destruction. The Egyptian records were confirmed in the late 1970s when excavators around Knossos discovered evidence for the final occupation by the Minoans in 1380
B.C.E.
This was one hundred years later than even the original, incorrect date for the eruption of Thera and its assumed destruction of Aegean civilization, the alleged source for Plato’s story of Atlantis.
Caroli’s assessment seems conclusive: “And so the Minoan hypothesis is left with no war, no maritime civilization destroyed by catastrophe, the wrong kind of disaster, the wrong date, and no comparable dark age as a result. What does that leave us? To my mind, not much.”
20
Atlantology: Psychotic or Inspired?
Media Stereotypes Aside, What Kind of Person Pursues Knowledge of a Forgotten Civilization?
Frank Joseph
A
mainstream archeologist interviewed about Atlantis on a recent special for The Discovery Channel declared that the only people who believe in such garbage are cranks, fools, and charlatans. His assessment is shared by conventional scientists who insist that no one of any intellectual worth would demean him- or herself by seriously considering any sunken civilization. True, virtually no university-trained researchers today are willing to risk the wrath of conservative academics not above sabotaging the careers of independent-minded colleagues.
But contrary to the establishment’s defaming characterization of those interested in the historical possibility of Atlantis, the subject has for centuries attracted some of the best brains in the world. Solon, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, introduced social reforms and a legal code that formed the political basis of Classical civilization. He was also the first great poet of Athens. In the late sixth century
B.C.E.
, the great law-giver traveled to Sais, the Nile Delta capital of the twenty-sixth dynasty, where the Temple of Neith was located.
Here a history of Etelenty was preserved in hieroglyphs inscribed or painted on dedicated columns, which were translated for him by the high priest Sonchis. Returning to Greece, Solon worked all the details of the account into an epic poem,
Atlantikos,
but was distracted by political problems from completing the project before his death in 560
B.C.E.
. About 150 years later, the unfinished manuscript was given to Plato, who formed two dialogues
,
the
Timaeus
and the
Critias,
from it.
As one of the very greatest historical figures in Classical Greek history, Solon’s early connection with the story of Atlantis lends it formidable credibility. But neither he nor Plato was the only towering figure of Classical antiquity to embrace the reality of Atlantis. Statius Sebosus was a Greek geographer and contemporary of Plato mentioned by the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder for his detailed description of Atlantis.
All the works of Statius Sebosus were lost with the fall of Classical civilization. Dionysus of Miletus, also known as Skytobrachion, for his prosthetic leather arm, wrote
A Voyage to Atlantis
around 550
B.C.E.
, predating not only Plato, but also Solon. A copy of Dionysus’s manuscript was found among the personal papers of the historical writer Pierre Benoit. Tragically, it was lost between the restorers and borrowers who made use of this valuable piece of source material after Benoit’s death.
Another Greek historian, Dionysus of Mitylene (430 to 367
B.C.E.
), relying on pre-Classical sources, reported that “from its deep-rooted base, the Phlegyan isle which stern Poseidon shook and plunged beneath the waves with its impious inhabitants.”
The volcanic island of Atlantis is suggested in the fiery (Phlegyan) isle destroyed by the sea god. Tragically, this is all that survives from a lengthy discussion of Atlantis in the lost Argonautica, mentioned four hundred years later by the Greek geographer Diodorus Siculus as one of his major sources for information about the ancient history of North Africa. Interestingly, Dionysus was a contemporary of Plato.
A utopian novel written by Francis Bacon in 1629,
The New Atlantis,
was the first written discussion of Atlantis since the fall of Classical civilization and probably sparked Athanasius Kircher’s interest in the subject; he published his own scientific study of Atlantis in
The Subterranean World
thirty-six years later. Although a work of fiction,
The New Atlantis
came about through excited discussions in contemporary scholarly circles of reports from travelers to America. They said that the indigenous peoples had oral accounts of a land comprising numerous points in common with Plato’s sunken civilization; they even called it Aztlan, which paralleled a native version of the Greek Atlantis.
The New Atlantis
actually incorporates some Atlanto-American myths Bacon heard repeated in London.
A German polymath of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher was a pioneering mathematician, physicist, chemist, linguist, and archeologist. He was the first to study phosphorescence and he was the inventor of numerous futuristic innovations including the slide projector and a prototype of the microscope. The founding father of scientific Egyptology, he led the first serious investigation of temple hieroglyphs. Kircher was also the first scholar to seriously investigate the Atlantis legend. Initially skeptical, he cautiously began reconsidering its credibility while assembling mythic traditions about a great flood from numerous cultures in various parts of the world.
“I confess for a long time I had regarded all this,” he said of various European traditions of Atlantis, “as pure fables, to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all these legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth.” His research led him to the immense collection of source materials at the Vatican Library, where, as Europe’s foremost scholar, he had at his disposal all its formidable resources. It was here that he discovered a single piece of evidence that proved to him that the legend was actually fact.
Among the relatively few surviving documents from Imperial Rome, Kircher found a well-preserved, treated-leather map purporting to show the configuration and location of Atlantis. The map was not Roman, but had been brought in the first century
C.E.
to Italy from Egypt, where it had been executed. It survived the demise of Classical times and found its way into the Vatican Library. Kircher copied it precisely (adding only a visual reference to the New World) and published it in
The Subterranean World.
His caption describes it as a map of the island of Atlantis, originally made in Egypt after Plato’s description, which suggests it was created sometime following the fourth century
C.E.
, perhaps by a Greek mapmaker attached to the Ptolemys. More probably, the map’s first home was the Great Library of Alexandria, from which numerous books and references to Atlantis were lost, along with another million-plus volumes, when the institution was burned by religious fanatics. By relocating to Rome, the map escaped that destruction.
Similar to modern conclusions forced by current understanding of geology in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Kircher’s map depicts Atlantis not as a continent but as a large island about the size of Spain and France combined. It shows a tall, centrally located volcano, most likely meant to represent Mount Atlas, together with six major rivers, something Plato does not mention (the
Critias
speaks of large rivers on the island of Atlantis, but we are not told how many). Although the map vanished after Kircher’s death in 1680, it was the only known representation of Atlantis to have survived the Ancient World. Thanks to his research and book, it survives today in what is considered to be a close copy of the original.
Kircher was the first to publish such a map, probably the most accurate of its kind to date. Curiously, it is depicted upside down, contrary to maps in both his day and ours. Yet this apparent anomaly is proof of the map’s authenticity, because Egyptian mapmakers, even as late as Ptolemaic times, designed their maps with the Upper Nile Valley (located in the south; “Upper” refers to its higher elevation) at the top, because the river’s headwaters are located in the Sudan.
Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) was Sweden’s premiere scientific genius: professor of medicine (Uppsala), discoverer of the lymph glands, inventor of the anatomical theater dome, leading pioneer of modern botany, designer of the first university gardens; initiator of Latin as the
lingua franca
of the scientific world community; historian of early Sweden. A brilliant scholar fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Rudbeck possessed a grasp of Classical literature that was nothing less than encyclopedic. Combining his vast knowledge of the ancient world with personal archeological research in his own country, he concluded during a long, intense period of investigation (1651 to 1698) that Atlantis was fact, not fiction, and the greatest civilization in prehistory.
He believed that Norse myths and some physical evidence among his country’s megalithic ruins showed how a relatively few Atlantean survivors may have had an impact on Sweden, contributing to its cultural development, and laid the foundation (particularly in ship construction) for what would much later be remembered as the Viking Age (the ninth to twelfth centuries
C.E.
).
Critics have since misrepresented Rudbeck’s work by claiming he identified Sweden with Atlantis itself, but he never made such an assertion. In their sloppy research they have confused him with another eighteenth-century scholar, the French astronomer Jean Bailey, who concluded (before being executed during the French Revolution) that Spitzbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, was all that remained of Atlantis.
Born in Kraljevic, Austria, on February 27, 1861, Rudolf Steiner was a university-trained scientist, artist, and editor who founded a Gnostic movement based on comprehension of the spiritual world through pure thought and the highest faculties of mental knowledge. This was the guiding principle of anthroposophy, knowledge produced by the higher self in man, as he defined it, a spiritual perception independent of the senses. Such instinctual awareness of the divine energies that interpenetrate the entire universe is not new; on the contrary, it was exercised by our ancestors during the deep past, when they more freely and fully participated in the spiritual processes of life. A gradual attraction to vulgar materialism through development of the high cultures in the ancient world increasingly diminished their innate sensitivities, which eventually atrophied but did not die out.
To awaken these faculties dormant in all men and women required, Steiner believed, training their consciousness to look beyond mere matter. These concepts were developed in his 1904 book,
Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man
. He maintained that before Atlantis gradually sank, in 7227
B.C.E.
, its earliest inhabitants formed one of mankind’s root races, a people who did not require speech but instead communicated telepathically in images, not words, as part of their immediate experience with God.
