Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  “Plato mentions an island before the Pillars,” Tony said. The Greek word Plato used was pro. “Was that inside or outside? I have to depend on the English translation, so I’d be wary of that. We only have Plato’s works. Anything else isn’t evidence. People get an idea and they just find a theory to match. They’ve drawn up these checklists and conveniently leave out anything that might work against their theories. It doesn’t work to get nine out of ten things to match up but the tenth is no good.”

  Kontaratos, the NASA scientist, had listed helpful criteria for finding what he termed “a potential resting site for Atlantis,” the basic elements of which were

  Atlantis must have been located someplace where an island exists or once existed.

  The island must have once sunk, entirely or partially.

  The island must agree with Plato’s description of Atlantis’s “distinct geomorphology.” It should have concentric rings of water, mountains, and a large plain.

  The island must have been home to “a literate population with metallurgical skills.”

  The island must have suffered a cataclysmic natural disaster.

  The island must have been “routinely reachable from Athens.”

  The island must have been at war with Athens when the cataclysm occurred.

  The island must have been situated “just outside” of the Pillars of Heracles.

  The island must have been destroyed around 9600 BC.

  The island must have been as large as a continent or connected to a body of land of that size.

  It’s a very sensible-sounding checklist, but as I was slowly learning, every single one of these criteria was open to interpretation. Kontaratos, for example, argued that the rings of Atlantis were inspired by a semicircular earthworks in Poverty Point, Louisiana, a landlocked spot in the northeast corner of that state. How would news of this structure, which wasn’t exactly “routinely reachable from Athens,” or even New Orleans, have traveled to the Mediterranean? Kontaratos believed it had been brought back by European seafarers who had traveled up the Mississippi River to mine a deposit of high-grade copper found near Lake Superior.

  “The name Cyprus means ‘copper,’” Tony said, referring to the mineral-rich island off the coast of Turkey, well-known to Athenians of Plato’s time. “Why bother going all the way up the Mississippi?”

  Meizon and pro weren’t the only ancient Greek words up for philological debate. Some Atlantologists were arguing that the word island in the original Greek, for example, might signify something other than land surrounded on all sides by water. A surprising number of theories were based on the notion that the Greeks applied the name Pillars of Heracles to any number of narrow channels around the Mediterranean, and therefore Plato wasn’t necessarily referring to the Strait of Gibraltar. Tony thought that the term might not represent an actual place but rather the furthest limits of Greek exploration during Plato’s lifetime.

  • • •

  Over the days and various desserts, Tony and I discussed the pros and cons of the leading theories and how they stacked up against Plato’s story. After a week, I’d narrowed my list of candidates down to four.

  The most popular theory by far was what’s known as the Minoan Hypothesis. This was the idea that Plato had been inspired by the massive eruption of the volcano at the center of the Greek island Thera, now called Santorini. Like Atlantis, Santorini has a circular shape, almost like a bull’s-eye. In the 1960s, archaeologists had uncovered there an entire lost city buried for thirty-five hundred years beneath a thick layer of ash. This city was filled with extraordinary artworks and architecture and had evidently been home to a technologically sophisticated people with close ties to the Minoans of Crete, who had built the spectacular Palace at Knossos. But Tony wasn’t convinced. “Remember, Plato said it was an earthquake, not a volcano,” he said, his raised eyebrows punctuating his doubts. The Thera eruption had almost certainly caused a tsunami, though, a logical explanation for the floods that sank Atlantis. A few scholars had even connected the Thera eruption with the biblical plagues recorded in the book of Exodus. Some theorists had made a big deal about the similarities between Minoan artworks with a bull motif and Plato’s description of the bull-killing ceremony practiced by the kings of Atlantis. Tony was dubious. “Stories about bulls are all over the place,” he said. “We have them here in Ireland.”

  Another location that had recently gained in prominence was the coast near the city of Cádiz in southern Spain. Geographically, it seemed a better match than Santorini, since it was located just outside the Pillars of Heracles at Gibraltar and in the Atlantic Ocean. Plato had even mentioned it by name. The area was rich in copper, which could account for the orichalcum mentioned in the Critias. Historians generally agreed that another famous lost city, Tartessos, had once existed in the vicinity. Tartessos might have served as the model for what Plato called Atlantis. The region had a well-established history of earthquakes and massive tsunamis. Satellite photos seemed to show large shapes, including concentric circles, buried beneath what was now a swampy nature reserve. “But it doesn’t exactly have a sign saying WELCOME TO ATLANTIS, with the population and elevation numbers, does it?” Tony said, crossing his arms. There also was no large island in southern Spain, and Plato had been clear about Atlantis being an island.

  Malta was a perfect candidate for Atlantis. It’s an island, located due south of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Italy, one of the many possible locations for the Pillars of Heracles that Tony identified. Malta is an ancient maritime culture, home to some of the oldest and least understood ruins on Earth, including some extraordinary stone temples older even than those of Egypt and Athens. Many of these were now submerged due to centuries of rising sea levels. Archaeological evidence has shown that Malta’s entire population vanished without explanation long before Plato was born. It’s a generally mysterious place. Malta even has intriguing grids of trenches etched into its rocky surface, which might have inspired Plato’s ancient irrigation canals. But Malta has no mountains and is nowhere near large enough to have contained the enormous plain that Plato described, nor to have launched a million-strong navy.

  The final candidate was a dark horse, Morocco. I probably wouldn’t have considered it at all if Tony hadn’t called it the most convincing hypothesis he’d seen to date. Michael Hübner, a computer programmer in Bonn, had made a list of geographical details in the Timaeus and Critias—fifty-one in all—and had used sophisticated statistical analysis to plug them into a mapping program. The result he came up with was indisputable, by the numbers anyway. Virtually every clue that Plato noted—the rings, the earthquakes, the elephants, the location outside the Pillars of Heracles—coincided with the relatively obscure Souss-Massa plain on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, about one hundred miles southwest of Marrakesh. But virtually no archaeology had been done in the area.

  “I haven’t been able to satisfy myself about two things,” Tony told me. “You start with Plato’s description for these mountains.” (From the Critias: “The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist.”) “It was almost as if Plato was writing a travel ad,” Tony said. “The only ones that would count are the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Atlas. You look at those and look at the prevailing winds from the north. You should be able to limit the possibilities to a manageable few, but I keep going in circles on that.”

  Tony’s other sticking point, one that I’d noticed most theories glossed over, were the impassable shoals left behind after Atlantis sank. “Let’s take the word impassable. It would have to take into account the tides. The draft of triremes I gather was only about a meter. That would make it impassable for part of the day but not all day. It would have to be a place with very little tidal effect—like the Mediterranean.” Tony likened such dangerous shallows to the banks of Syrtis (now Sirte in Libya, best known today a
s the hometown of Muammar Gaddafi). “The shoals to me sound like liquefaction,” Tony said. Liquefaction is the process by which an earthquake converts wet soil into something like quicksand. Anything built on this suddenly unstable ground is likely to collapse or sink.

  Tony believed that clues to the location of Atlantis might even be found outside of the Timaeus and Critias, a possibility I hadn’t considered. “Plato was talking about serious matters—when the earth was washed away from Greece,” he said. “You should study the deluge stories and look for the common elements.” Most ancient cultures seemed to have a Great Flood myth. The Deucalion flood, which the Saïs priest says came after the greater cataclysm that sank Atlantis, is strikingly similar to the Noah’s ark story and the Mesopotamian flood epic of Gilgamesh; in all three versions pious men are instructed by gods to build floating vessels in order to survive an inundation. Where exactly all of that water might have come from remained one of the great mysteries of antiquity. “One scenario that does make sense is an asteroid or comet in the ocean—that could’ve sent a giant tsunami around the world,” Tony said, adding quickly, “Obviously strange things have happened.” I sensed that linking the Atlantis story to ancient myths, gigantic flying projectiles from space, and possibly the book of Genesis would not make mainstream academics any more likely to respond to my e-mails, but Tony had been at this game a lot longer than I had. I made a note to look into it.

  “In the end, you have to go back and read Plato again,” Tony said. “Be happy that what he’s written has some degree of credibility. From that you can form a theory. The mountains, the plains, and the shoals—those are the challenges.”

  “The beginning is the most important part of any work,” Plato wrote in the Republic. Spain. Malta. Greece. Morocco. It was a start.

  • • •

  One night Tony and I broke our routine and drove to the village, stopping at both pubs for a pint and a little craic, a term that as far as I could tell referred to the unique Irish gift for free-flowing conversation. (During the span of a single pint with Paul and Dai, a friendly neighbor from down the road, the topics swerved from a famous snooker match in which the champion had worn his spectacles upside down, to the problem of Polish handymen emptying local rivers of fish, to the time Paul dressed up as Cruella De Vil for Halloween, to the debate over whether it was sacrilegious to grill sausages during a pilgrimage up a mountain associated with Saint Patrick.) I had, admittedly, been a little curious what Tony’s neighbors—residents of an overwhelmingly Catholic country that hadn’t legalized divorce until 1995—might think about living near a gay couple whose elder member was a storehouse of information about Atlantis. They had very strong feelings indeed about both topics. Several people told me that we were standing in the very pub where the publishing party for the hardcover Atlantipedia had been held, evidently a legendary blowout rivaling Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Everyone was eager to talk about Tony and Paul’s upcoming civil ceremony. “Tony O’Connell, gettin’ married at your age, are ye?” teased one local matron, who boasted that she owned two signed copies of the Atlantipedia. “Paul’s finally making an honest man of ye?” asked another. “A real May-December romance ’tis, just like in the movies.”

  By the end of the week, my head was stuffed with Atlantis information and the rest of me with pie, cake, soda bread, full Irish breakfasts, and Guinness. Before dropping me back in Dublin, Tony took me to see Newgrange, one of the world’s great megalithic monuments. Someone had managed to incorporate it, like almost all impressive pre-Hellenic structures, into an Atlantis location theory. “Your man Ulf Erlingsson”—a Swedish geographer who argued that Newgrange and its nearby structures were the temples that inspired Plato’s story—“estimated that it was 99.98 percent likely that Atlantis was in Ireland,” Tony told me. Tony was as proud an Irishman as one could hope to meet, but he wasn’t in the least convinced by Erlingsson’s argument. “He goes on and on about the concentric circles on a stone basin found near here,” Tony told me as we walked through the exhibits at the Newgrange museum. “Ah, there it is.” He pointed at a carved bowl with an image of circles, perhaps the size of an LP record, carved onto its side.

  “There’s your 99.98 percent proof of Atlantis,” Tony said. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Amateur Hour

  Nininger City, Minnesota (ca. AD 1882)

  For someone who professed such deep respect for numbers, Plato certainly used some head-scratching ones in his Atlantis story. The dates don’t match up even remotely with ancient history. Solon likely visited Egypt not long after 600 BC, which means that by the priest’s reckoning, Atlantis and Athens were destroyed around 9600 BC. Historians believe that Athens was first settled sometime in the fourth millennium BC and did not grow to a size anything like that of a city—let alone a city with twenty thousand soldiers—for another two thousand years. The founding of the first Egyptian dynasty has been dated to approximately 3150 BC. Were these exaggerations invented by Plato on purpose, or were they the work of some sleepy Byzantine transcriber?

  Plato wrote that the Atlanteans had twelve hundred triremes, or oared warships. Triremes don’t turn up in historical records until the seventh century BC. It’s possible that either Plato or Solon was using a modern term to describe older boats. The Atlantean army’s ten thousand chariots are harder to explain. Chariots seem to have emerged in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC; domesticated horses date to the fifth millennium BC. Plato estimates the combined forces of Atlantis to include about 1.2 million men, who are improbably defeated by those twenty thousand guardians of Athens. By comparison, Herodotus estimated that the massive army and navy that Xerxes of Persia brought to Greece in 480 BC was more than a million men strong, a number now believed to be greatly inflated. During the D-day sea invasion of Normandy, 156,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel.

  As Tony O’Connell had explained, perhaps the most fantastic figures in the Atlantis story are the dimensions Critias somewhat sheepishly gives for the enormous channel surrounding the plain:

  The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stade [approximately six hundred feet] everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stades [more than eleven hundred miles] in length.

  Some have argued that the Atlanteans were technologically sophisticated—an argument that has sparked some outlandish theories about their prehistoric airships, radios, and microwave ovens. But no one, to my knowledge, has suggested that the Atlanteans had access to backhoes and bulldozers. The canal described by Plato would require the removal of ten billion cubic meters of earth. The Panama Canal project involved excavating 120 million cubic meters of earth.

  In part because these numbers seemed so incredible, speculation about the location of Atlantis remained a pretty low-interest field for almost two thousand years. Then in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west and found a sizable land mass roughly where Plato had said (according to a popular interpretation) one would be. As fleets of European explorers followed, theories soon abounded that the largest and most sophisticated New World cultures, such as the Mayas and Aztecs of Mesoamerica, were descendants of an Atlantean diaspora. Brilliant naturalists such as France’s Comte de Buffon and Prussia’s Alexander von Humboldt seriously considered possible links between Native Americans and the peoples of Atlantis.

  These hypotheses were essentially intellectual parlor games, though. No one looked very hard for Atlantis until the late nineteenth century, when an unusually dedicated amateur archaeologist decided to search for Homer’s mythical city of Troy, using the evidence of the original story. And then he found it.

  • • •

  Skepticism from experts
about using ancient stories to find lost civilizations isn’t exactly new. As I dug in to the canon of Atlantology, I repeatedly came across instances of historians and classicists condescendingly referring to the idea of a real Atlantis as “euhemerism.” The term comes from the Greek philosopher Euhemerus, who hypothesized that some myths—in particular those of the Greek gods—had been based on historical events. (The residents of Mount Olympus, he believed, had been inspired by ancient Greek kings.) The third-century-BC geographer Eratosthenes—who served as chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria—may have been the first scholar to throw cold water on euhemerism when he quipped that “you will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds.”

  More than two thousand years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the relatively new field of archaeological excavation was not yet the sole province of academic professionals when the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann took an interest in it. Schliemann was a self-made millionaire and self-taught historian who read Homer’s epic myths the Iliad and the Odyssey as history and thus believed that the Greek hero Achilles truly had battled the Trojan Hector and that the beautiful Helen—later famous as “the face that launched a thousand ships”—actually had been kidnapped from Sparta and taken to Troy. When Schliemann read that Achilles had dragged the dead body of Hector around the walls of Troy in revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus, the German was convinced not only that those walls had once existed, but also that they might be found and excavated. As Plato had with Atlantis, Homer had described Troy in enough detail to identify it if located: a prosperous city of temples and fine homes, located near a river and the Hellespont between Greece and Turkey, surrounded by an imposing high wall with a gate that was located near two springs, one warm and one cold.