Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City
Page 31
White stone. See Tricolor stone
Wickboldt, Werner
author’s visit with, 103–6
criticisms of Kühne by, 103–4
literal belief in Plato by, 104–5
on the Parian Marble, 105–6
Plato’s dates adjusted by, 105
satellite photos of, 71
Winchester, Simon, 65
Works and Days (Hesiod), 147
World Ice Theory, 87–88
Worlds in Collision (Velikovsky), 248, 257
World-Soul, 179, 180
Writing
disappearance of written Greek, 197
discredited by Socrates, 21
hieroglyphic symbols for numbers, 137–38
Linear B script, 130, 197
Xerxes, emperor, 238
MARK ADAMS is the author of the acclaimed history Mr. America and the New York Times bestseller Turn Right at Machu Picchu. He writes for many national magazines, including GQ, Men’s Journal, and New York. He lives near New York City with his family.
1 A logical question to ask here is, do we know what Plato’s students at the Academy thought of Atlantis? The answer is yes—sort of. Aristotle, in addition to his famous quip about Plato having invented the lost island, also echoed a key point from the Atlantis story in his Meteorology, a work probably written before Plato’s death, when he stated that “outside the Pillars of Heracles the sea is shallow owing to the mud, but calm, for it lies in a hollow.” A member of the next generation of Academy students, Crantor, seems to have taken the view opposite Aristotle’s. (We can’t know for certain because like the writings of so many of the ancients, his original works have been lost and live on only in citations made by later writers.) According to the fifth-century-AD writer Proclus, Crantor—whose status as the first scholar to write extensive commentaries on Plato’s works is not in dispute—may have sent envoys to Egypt in an attempt to verify Plato’s original sources.
2 Heracles, occasionally spelled Herakles, is the Greek name for the mythical hero, a son of Zeus, famous for his strength. The Romans incorporated him into their own pantheon, changing his name to Hercules. Historians and classics scholars generally agree that the Pillars of Heracles that Plato refers to are the narrow Strait of Gibraltar at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and Morocco. If you look up Pillars of Heracles/Hercules in Wikipedia, you’ll see a photo of the Rock of Gibraltar. Among Atlantologists, however, the debate over where Plato intended these pillars to be situated is far from settled. For simplicity’s sake, when I use the term Pillars of Heracles (other than to cite Plato’s use of the name), I’m referring to those at Gibraltar.
3 Though the Timaeus and Critias were evidently planned as the first two parts of a trilogy, Plato seems to have never written the dialogue for Hermocrates, who in real life was a Syracusan general famous for helping repel an Athenian invasion.
4 Tony O’Connell’s site is atlantipedia.ie. There are other unaffiliated Atlantipedias.
5 According to Kühne’s article, the smaller of the two rectangular structures can be found by entering the coordinates 36º57'25N and 6º22'58W onto a satellite map such as Google Earth. The center of the second structure, he writes, is five hundred meters southwest of the center of the first.
6 From Reuters, March 12, 2011: “A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis . . .”
7 Mu is a hypothetical lost continent invented by the nineteenth-century antiquarian Augustus Le Plongeon, who equated it with Atlantis. He also believed, among other things, that inscriptions on Mayan pyramids showed the influence of Freemasonry and told the story of Atlantis’s destruction. Lemuria was originally a continent invented by a zoologist to explain the presence of lemur fossils in both Madagascar and India. The theory has long since been discredited, but the concept of Lemuria lives on in pseudoscientific works such as Cayce’s.
8 In addition to being another geographic clue to the location of Atlantis, Cádiz was the birthplace of one of its many ironies. Professional and amateur historians agree that the Library of Alexandria in Egypt was once the world’s greatest repository of ancient knowledge and that among its many thousands of scrolls was information that today could confirm or refute the truth of Plato’s Atlantis. (Part of its original collection was probably purchased from the library of Aristotle’s school in Athens, the Lyceum.) According to one account, Rome’s ambitious quaestor in Cádiz, Julius Caesar, one day stood inside a temple gazing at a statue of Alexander the Great. Looking upon the image of the man who’d conquered half the known world, Caesar vowed to equal his achievements. A little more than a decade later, having crossed the Rubicon with his army, Caesar laid siege to Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander as a center of Hellenistic learning and culture. During Caesar’s attack he set fire to ships in Alexandria’s harbor. The flames are believed to have spread all the way to the great library, destroying a large part of its collection.
9 Perhaps the one thing that every scholar I spoke with for this book could agree on was that at some point they’d been interviewed by a documentary crew that neglected to mention they were making a film about Atlantis.
10 One Platonic ideal that Plato didn’t invent was Platonic love—that is, nonsexual friendship. The term was originally coined by the Renaissance scholar Marsilio Ficino, as a purified interpretation of a speech Socrates gives in Plato’s Symposium, in which, as Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes, the philosopher “passionately urges them to transform the erotic longing that tends to fixate on particular boys into an equally passionate longing for abstract truth.”
11 To be fair, when I asked Corby Anderson, a professor of metallurgical and materials engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, if it made any sense to transport heavy loads of copper across the ocean, he said, “There could be something to it, because high-grade copper is much easier to smelt and refine, and smelting technologies pre–500 BC were not very effective.”
12 The last VEI 6 blast was Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, in 1991. Just two hundred years ago, in 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted at VEI 7, pulverizing almost a mile of rock off its crown and spewing so much debris into the atmosphere that temperatures dropped around the world for months afterward, resulting in what historians call 1816’s “Year without a Summer.” A June 6 storm dumped half a foot of snow on New England; an estimated one hundred thousand malnourished Irish died in the years that followed. Such blasts occur every few hundred years. The picturesque geysers of Yellowstone National Park are visible evidence of an underlying supervolcano that has erupted at VEI 8 three times in the last 2.1 million years. VEI 8s occur about twice every hundred thousand years. The next Yellowstone superblast could bury most of the western United States in thick, heavy ash and blot out the sun for years.
13 The idea that humans might one day disrupt nature’s catastrophist cycles by deflecting unwelcome flying projectiles from space probably never occurred to Plato. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program calculates that it has located 95 percent of Earth-threatening asteroids one kilometer (0.6 miles) or wider, but that accuracy plummets as objects get smaller. (The 1908 Tunguska meteoroid, for example, was estimated to be only about two hundred feet in diameter.) An independent group called the B612 Foundation, which includes former astronauts, is raising funds to build a satellite to track smaller objects. Masse, who has seen multiple grant requests to study the Burckle Crater declined, isn’t optimistic.
14 On a piano, these twelve notes are represented by the seven white keys of the major scale (ABCDEFG) plus the five black keys, the sharps and flats of the chromatic scale, that fall between them.
15 At the risk of piling on, I should note that in 2003, a team of researchers that had studied microwave radiation created shortly after the Big Bang published a paper arguing persuasively, according to The Economist, “th
at the universe is, indeed, a dodecahedron.”
16 Feeling a little uncertain about this conclusion, I again e-mailed Janet Johnson, the Egyptologist at the University of Chicago who’d explained how 900 and 9,000 looked similar. This time, she was unequivocal. “The Egyptians used two different lunar calendars and a solar calendar. The lunar calendars were used for calculating religious festivals. The Egyptians knew very well how to convert from one calendar to another. If an Egyptian priest had said 9,000 years, he would not have meant 9,000 months.”
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!