by Bob Curran
And in America, we have only to think of the devastation wrought in the low-lying city of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to realize that such disasters can happen even now. And of course, the Louisiana shore is not the only American coastline to have been affected by such terrific and violent weather. Small communities settled in the South Carolina low country have been swallowed up by the swamps as water levels rose during the era of the rice kings in the early to mid-1800s, and there were similar disappearances all along the Florida and New England coastlines throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
Forces of Nature
But forces such as coastal erosion and massive seacoast storms are not the only reason why some settlements—towns and cities—and even whole civilizations, might have disappeared. On August 16 and 27, 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa, Indonesia, in the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra erupted, creating one of the biggest explosions ever recorded. The force of the explosion was equivalent to a number of atomic bombs, and was heard as far away as Perth in western Australia (more than 1,930 miles away). The island itself was blown to pieces, and the remnants sank to the bottom of the ocean; it is said that this was not the first mighty explosion that had occurred in the area. The Pustara Raja, or Javanese Book of Kings, a collection of writings dating from somewhere between about 1480 and 1600, detailing the histories and mythologies of the area, makes reference to another explosion (although not as violent) dating from approximately A.D. 416, which caused widespread devastation and loss of life. There are reports of other volcanic activity much later—in the 1500s and 1600s—destroying parts of some smaller islands near Krakatoa.
During the Krakatoa explosion, many parts of Java and Sumatra, as well as towns and cities further afield, were completely overwhelmed and destroyed by massive tidal waves, and some still lie under the ocean today. Thus, volcanoes and earthquakes at sea can cause rising ocean levels that can consign whole towns and cities to the deep. We have only to think of the Asian tsunami on December 26, 2004—caused by a small shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates on the ocean floor—to realize the overwhelming effect of such events.
If volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and earthquakes are relatively common even now, it is possible that they may have been more common in the ancient world. There are, for example, tales and records of powerful earthquakes in the East and Middle East, and of mighty hurricanes and wind-storms striking the coasts of Europe (and later America). This has led to legends of whole civilizations being swept away (and it is extremely possible that a number of them were), and of massive tracts of land being swamped by the sea. Such lost lands and vanished kingdoms are said to lie—still relatively intact—in the ocean’s depths, awaiting rediscovery. It is possible that some of the civilizations of the ancient world often faced natural disasters that either threatened to, or actually did, overwhelm them, and may well have consigned them to the deep.
Sunken Lands
Of course through time, fanciful legends began to build up around these vanished places. Even the small coastal towns and villages that slipped under sea level acquired an air of mystery and legend. At Ardfert in County Kerry, Ireland, for example, it was said that the bells of a submerged church rang out on certain nights of the year, tolled by undersea beings who now inhabited the sunken building. Other such places of the coast of England also held legends of sea people dwelling among the ruins of former human settlements—but these were only local tales, and often had a limited effect on the imagination.
It was the tales of lost cities and of sunken civilizations that really inspired speculation. Tales of primal cataclysms often led to stories of whole realms—the lands of prehistoric kings and princes—being submerged in some former time, usually beyond human reckoning. After all, in the mythologies of many cultures there were tales of fearful catastrophes in some historically distant period; for instance, the Biblical story of Noah’s Flood that supposedly destroyed all the “sinful” civilizations of the early world (that is, most of the planet). Was it not possible, therefore, that some vast cataclysm had destroyed primordial societies and that this momentous event had been unrecorded, except in folk memory and myth?
As time passed the idea became more and more fanciful. Perhaps inspired by the natural disaster of Krakatoa, the notion of a mighty island civilization engulfed by a powerful volcanic explosion began to gain in popularity in the early part of the 20th century. This, as we shall see when we come to look at the legend of Atlantis, may have had some basis in fact but, through time, additions were made to the basic tale that turned it into something similar to a fantasy. This, it was suggested, might have been some sort of super-civilization, maybe even far in advance of our own, and at the very least, holding secrets and understandings that the world had subsequently lost. It was even suggested that the catastrophe, which had overwhelmed it and caused it to sink below the ocean, was not natural at all, but a misuse of something man-made, created by the civilization itself—something akin to an atomic bomb. Perhaps this was nothing more than an evocation of some imagined Golden Age that had existed somewhere in the past, and a hope that these civilizations could, if discovered, provide at least some remedy for the increasing evils and complications of a modern world. Science-fiction writers were, naturally, quick to develop this notion but so were some anthropologists (albeit in a much more measured way) in order to explain the dispersal of, and similarities in, many ancient peoples.
In the 1960s, fresh impetus was given to these theories as respected geologists began to consider that Earth’s continents had been joined into a supercontinent in early prehistoric times. It experienced a number of catastrophes that pushed it apart, allowing oceans to form between them, forming the landmasses we know today. The geologists were following a theory first put forward by Alfred Wagener in 1912, and they dubbed a couple of the mighty continents Gondwanaland (which eventually went on to form some of the countries of the Northern Hemisphere) and Pangaea (which laid the foundations for the Southern Hemisphere), and locating them during the Jurassic and Triassic Periods in Earth’s history. This led some to assert that these landmasses had been home to ancient civilizations that had more or less perished by flooding as these supercontinents split up. Many have asserted that evidences of these civilizations still remain deep under the sea, and such evidences simply haven’t been found as yet.
So do remnants of strange and sunken lands from an antique time exist somewhere on the ocean floor? Quite possibly, though they may be very different from what we imagine them to be, and may contain few secrets that we don’t already know. Their names, however, live on in legend—Atlantis, Mu, Lyonesse—to enthral and intrigue many people even today; for who knows what lies out there beneath the rolling waves—perhaps more than we could possibly imagine!
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Atlantis
Arguably, no sunken realm has provoked the human imagination so readily or as frequently as the lost land of Atlantis—the island civilization that was allegedly destroyed by some form of natural cataclysm, which is said to have given its name to the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, during the early-to-mid-20th century, Atlantis was imagined as some kind of advanced culture, intellectually and perhaps even technologically superior to our own, which had dominated prehistoric times. All this, however, was destroyed in either massive volcanic upheavals or earthquakes, which not even the Atlanteans themselves could prevent or control.
Locating Atlantis
But did such a fantastic realm actually exist? Was it as advanced as the writers of the 20th century imagined it to be? And, if so, how did it meet its end?
There is little reference to Atlantis in ancient texts, but the one mention of it in early classic literature is a significant one. The scholar Plato (428/7–348/7 B.C.) makes specific allusion to an island continent of that name lying to the west of Greece, “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” (taken to mean the Strait of Gibraltar). Atlantis appears to have been a significant naval power that established
colonies both in Western Europe and in Africa, roughly 8,000 years before Plato was writing. Incredibly aggressive, its naval fleet made war on Athens, but was defeated and driven back beyond the edge of the Mediterranean. Shortly afterward, the entire continent was destroyed in what the writer calls “a single day and night of misfortune.” No further mention of it is made, but the implication is that it sank into the sea, according to Plato; all that remained of the once great civilization was a mudbank.
Plato’s reference to Atlantis appears in a set of classical literature known as the Dialogues (or more properly the Socratic Dialogues because they were named after, and sometimes featured, the classical scholar Socrates as a character within the text). These were imagined “conversations” between fictitious or historical characters, usually on philosophical topics and moral problems. The reference to Atlantis appears in what are known as Conjoined Dialogues written around 360 B.C. including the characters Timeaus and Crtias. The Dialogues consider the structure of the Universe, and how this was mirrored in (or actually determined) ancient civilizations. Parts of it are taken up with musings on the perfect society—a topic that concerned Plato greatly. However, only the character Critias speaks directly of Atlantis, comparing it to Plato’s own theories. The structure of Plato’s Republic, Critias muses, was possibly as close to a perfect society as men can achieve, whereas that of Atlantis was the very antithesis of that. He claims that his information about the continent comes from a trip to Egypt by the Greek poet and lawmaker Solon (638–558 B.C.) in the sixth century B.C. In the city of Sais in southern Egypt, Solon met a priest who told him a remarkable story. He, the priest, had translated some ancient papyri from early Egyptian hieroglyphics into Greek, which detailed the early histories of Athens and another civilization known as Atlantis.
The gods, according to the priest, had divided up the world between them, and a large portion of land, bigger than Libya and part of Asia Minor combined, had been given to Poseidon, god of the sea, as his own. This was Atlantis. One of Poseidon’s sons was the Titan Atlas (who was later envisaged as bearing the world on his shoulders), and it was to him that the god granted this land, making him the first king (the name Atlantis actually translates as “the island of Atlas”). To Atlas’s twin brother Gadeius, Poseidon gave the outer limits of the island lying nearest the Pillars of Hercules, as well as some other sections to several other children; for example, Mestor and Azaes ruled there for many years, developing naval strengths with their father.
Land Features
Atlantis was a seafaring nation. Even the interior of the island was intercut by a system of waterways and water-dependent defenses. A series of internal defensive moats reputedly encircled the Atlantean heartlands, connected to the coast by a system of locks and carved tunnels. Coastal settlements all boasted complicated docks, all defensively laid out. The Atlanteans were both traders and slavers—indeed it has been suggested that slavery was the backbone of their civilization—as well as maintaining a powerful ocean-going war fleet. To obtain slaves, it has been suggested that they raided along the coasts of Africa and into Asia, even attacking as far away as Tyrrheania or Eturia in northern Italy. There they attacked cities that had been built by the forerunners of the Etruscan peoples—a civilized society—carrying away booty and scores of slaves.
Past Wars
About 9,000 yeas before the time of Critias (and therefore before the time of Plato) a war broke out between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Hercules (that is beyond the Mediterranean Sea) and those who dwelt within it. The Atlanteans reputedly used this conflict for their own advantage, sending their fleets to pillage and conquer various shores. They conquered Libya and parts of Egypt, which they occupied, carrying away thousands of people into slavery. Alarmed, a number of Mediterranean countries, under the leadership of Athens, formed an alliance to stand against them and drive them out. The alliance finally crumbled, but Athens now took on the Atlantean navy and defeated it in a series of sea battles. Around this time, Atlantis was destroyed by a mighty internal cataclysm—“the day and night of misfortune”—and sank beneath the waves.
Finding Proof
This is Plato’s account of the fabulous continent, but as no other ancient scholars make any mention of the civilization, all subsequent stories concerning Atlantis must rely on it. Nor are there any other references in the literature of any other races concerning such a slave-based society that allegedly raided deep into other countries. Indeed, conversely, there is much to suggest that many other Greek philosophers and geographers actually considered Plato’s story to be entirely fictitious. The noted philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), for instance, claimed that Plato had made Atlantis disappear just as quickly as he had made it appear.
Some, however, did take Plato’s account seriously. For example, the writer Hellanicus of Lesbos wrote a work that he titled “Atlantis,” wrongly attributing the name to a daughter of the Titan Atlas, and mentioning the “Sea of Atlas” (the Atlantic Ocean), which was well known by that name long before he wrote about it. Another disciple, Crantor, allegedly tried to find proof of Atlantis in the mid-fourth century B.C., and is supposed to have set out on a journey to Egypt in order to discover any ruins that might exist. There is no real record of his journey, but another writer, Proclus, anxious to prove Plato’s theories about Atlantis and quoting an unnamed source, stated that Crantor actually found pillars in the Egyptian desert, which were covered in hieroglyphs, confirming Plato’s account. Proclus also seems to have added to the Atlantis myth by suggesting that it was not a single island at all, but a number of islands, linked by trade and commerce, in the center of which were three major landmasses, one of which was dedicated to the Roman god Pluto. The account is a confusing and contradictory one, and many scholars believe that Proclus simply made it up.
Indeed, throughout the years, Plato’s own account has been called into question: A number of subsequent scholars have suggested that, at best, the philosopher was “confused” and mistook some other ancient event for the destruction of Atlantis. Subsequent writers in the classical world have made the same mistake. They sometimes cite the destruction of the Greek city of Helike as a historical event that could be confused with the sinking of Atlantis. The city was a bustling port that was probably destroyed by a major earthquake. Helike was said to “sink beneath the earth, the fissure promptly filled with the sea,” dragging many ships docked in port (including 10 warships from the Spartan fleet) after it. Columns of fire (suggesting volcanic activity) spurted up and the sky darkened. This could correspond in many minds with the submersion of the island of Atlantis, and could have been mistaken for it in later texts. Another suggestion is that the destruction of the continent may have become confused with the attempted Athenian invasion of the island of Sicily during the Peloponnesian Wars (about 415 B.C.). During this conflict, a number of coastal cities were so heavily bombarded by the Athenian fleet that parts of them actually slid into the sea. Could this have sparked the legend of a sunken island civilization?
Some scholars have also argued that the Atlantis legend sprang from another source. Between 360 and 336 B.C., the Greek poet and writer Theopompus of Chios, a Greek island close to the Turkish coast, wrote of an imaginary island somewhere beyond the western limits of Oceanus (the Western or World Sea). This island he named Meropis, and it was inhabited by extremely civilized and erudite people—mainly poets and scholars. Meropians grew to a massive stature (around 8 feet tall) and lived for an incredibly long time (more than 200 years). Although Meropis was supposed to be a Paradise, it did comprise two very different cities: Eusebes (or “Pious Town”) in which the inhabitants dwelt in luxury and splendour, passing their days composing works of beautiful poetry; and Machimos (or “Fighting Town”) in which the inhabitants were born with weapons in their hands and continually fought with each other. The general work, which Theopompus terms the Philippica, was no more than a parody of Plato’s work on Atlantis. However, it has been argued that som
e subsequent writers have confused the two and the writings of Theopompus have been incorporated into the overall Atlantis myth.
By the third century B.C., however, some Greek writers had located Atlantis somewhere within the Mediterranean, citing the Straits of Sicily (between Sicily and Tunisia) as a possible location. They suggested that the so-called Pillars of Hercules lay on the western side of the island, and that this is the spot to which Plato had been referring. Roman writers such as Marcellinus, writing in the fourth century, however, continued to assert that the Straits of Gibraltar were in fact the Pillars. To support this, he citied that certain Gaulish (French) Druids (Celtic holy men) had claimed to come from an island from which they had fled during severe storms, and this was the island to which Plato had referred. However, this may be due to a misunderstanding; the islands mentioned may well have lain in the Rhine, and they were forced to flee when they were submerged by the flooding river. This point was debated among several classical thinkers, but no firm conclusion was reached.
Despite such interest, however, most ancient writers, geographers, and commentators remained extremely skeptical about the existence of such a place, and the myth began to slowly fade in the ancient world.
While there was great interest among scholars in Plato’s writings during the medieval period, scant attention was paid to his notions of Atlantis, except where it impinged on his ideas expressed in the Republic. Indeed, throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, Atlantis became more of a philosophical ideal than an actual historical place. During the 1600s, when it was mentioned, it referred to the hope of a perfect society, largely based on republican ideals.
