We well realize that the above claims might seem far-fetched and even erroneous to most people, particularly the experts. We all have been so indoctrinated into believing that Atlantis never existed at all that it is hard to pay any unbiased attention to contrary arguments.
But lend me your ears for a moment, as I hope I will be able to convince you, dear reader. The very fact that this tradition on the reality of the Terrestrial Paradise was able to diffuse to all places on earth so early in time is proof sufficient that a nation capable of carrying out this worldwide diffusion once necessarily existed. Otherwise, who carried out this universal diffusion? Angels? Devils? Heroes? Saviors?
Three Proofs of the Above Conclusions
In what follows, we provide three arguments derived from the ancient traditions which we believe to prove our case beyond reasonable doubt that Atlantis-Eden lay – if it was at all a geographical reality – in Indonesia, in the East Indies, and nowhere else in the world.
My first proof concerns the true nature of what the ancients understood by the word “Ocean”, which has nothing to do with what we currently understand by this word. The second argument concerns the oriental location of Paradise in the traditions of all peoples, the Jews and Christians and the Mesopotamians in particular. Both these arguments are commented upon in more detail further below.
They are presented here as a preview, in order to whet the appetite of my dear readers. Most experts have now come to realize that Atlantis was Paradise itself. Moreover, the ancients – Plato included, perhaps, and Diodorus Siculus for sure – also placed Atlantis on the opposite shore of the Ocean, at the outer fringes of the world, in the East Indies themselves.
These arguments should be closely read and pondered, as they shed a lot of light on the murky issue of Atlantis’ whereabouts and on its undeniable identity with the site of Paradise Lost.
Since it is already difficult to have to believe in the reality of one Paradise Lost, imagine having to believe in two, one in the east the other one in the west. This is one of the main factors which led us to serendipitously conclude that Atlantis and Eden are one and the same location, in the East Indies.
We will now present an actual historical document – one of the several confusing ones we have amassed in the course of our researches – proving that the “Ocean” of the ancients was in fact the Pacific Ocean, and that both the Atlantic and the Indian oceans were deemed its “arms” or “branches”, that is, their extensions respectively to the east and the west.
Thus, whenever the ancients mentioned the “Ocean” they were normally referring to the Pacific Ocean, unless they named a specific body. Since they were ignorant of the existence of America, the ancient Mediterraneans believed that the Atlantic Ocean extended all the way to the East Indies, just as Columbus and other conquistadors also did.
They also knew the Pacific Ocean from the east, and believed it to extend all the way to western Europe and Africa. In the east, the Ocean was named “Eastern Ocean” (Eoos Okeanos) and in the west it was known as “Western Ocean” (Hesperios Okeanos). But it was also known as “Atlantic Ocean” (Atlantikos Okeanos), a name meaning the same as “Ocean of the Atlanteans” since sunken Atlantis and the “Atlantic Islands”, its remains, were known to be located there.
As is now clear, the ancients of Plato’s time and later believed that the Outer Ocean extended from the Far East all the way to the European and the African west coasts and, conversely, all the way from there to the Far East. This belief prevailed down to the times of Marco Polo (1254–1324 AD), who speaks of the Mar Ozeano (“Ocean Sea”) as doing so.
This belief is quite reasonable. It survived down to the times of Christopher Columbus and even later, until Amerigo Vespucci discovered the fact that the interposed Americas were in fact a coterminous continent separating the two oceans.
So, when Diodorus Siculus – and probably also Plato and other mythographers place Atlantis on the far side of the “Atlantic Ocean” what they mean is that the Lost Continent was formerly located in the East Indies (India and Indonesia) and in Serica (China), the “Land of the Seres” right where we finally succeeded in locating it.
The document we have in mind here is the Libro del Conosçimiento, which dates from about 1350 AD. This book embodies the geographical knowledge to that date, more or less as do others such as Marco Polo’s
Book of Wonders and Sir John Mandeville’s Travels. ↑070
Discounting some obvious fables contained in it, the geographical knowledge this book embodies is rather reliable, and is taken directly from older authorities. It is based on the accounts of Classical authors such as Pliny, Strabo, Mela and Solinus, to mention just four.
What interests us here is the view it expresses on the Pacific Ocean, the Mar Oceano of Christopher Columbus. In fact, this book, along with several others, was the source which inspired Christopher Columbus to attempt to reach the East Indies by sailing westwards, into the Atlantic Ocean, which he, like most other ancients, believed to extend all the way to the East Indies. This text, in quaint Old Spanish, reads as follows:
E sabet que este mar de Jndia es vn braço que entra del grant mar oriental. E dizen algunos que atrauiesa toda la tierra fasta el mar occidental. E los sabios dizen le el mar meridional. E deste mar fasta el polo antartico es vna grand tierra que es la deçima parte de la faz de la tierra. E quando el sol es en el tropico de capricornio pasa el sol sobre las cabeças de los pobladores a los quales llaman los sabios antipodas. [“Know that the Indian Ocean is an arm of the Great Oriental Ocean [Pacific] penetrating into that region. Some say that it crosses the whole earth up to the Occidental Ocean. And the sages call it the South Sea. And from this sea down to the Antarctic Pole there is a great land which forms the tenth part of the face of the earth. And when the sun is in the Tropic of Capricorn, it passes overhead above the natives of this region, who are called Antipodes by the sages.”]
This passage, which should be carefully studied, deserves an explanation. The Great Oriental Sea is the Pacific Ocean, alias the Mar Oceano of which Columbus, as well as several other ancient experts in geography, spoke. Here, the Indian Ocean is deemed to be merely an arm of the Pacific Ocean, which it in fact is, as can be seen in the World Map of the figure below. This map uses a peculiar curvilinear projection which is most convenient for our present purposes.
The Occidental Ocean (Mar Occidental) is the Atlantic Ocean of today. And it is here made the eastern extension of the Pacific Ocean itself, which the author calls the Great Oriental Ocean (Gran Mar Oriental). This curious book predates Columbus by well over a century, and there can be no doubt whatsoever that its disclosures are not due to the Age of Navigation, but are in fact owed to Antiquity itself.
Like Marco Polo, it called the Pacific Ocean by the name of Mar Oceano, since it was deemed to encircle the whole earth, with the Atlantic and the Indian being its arms or extensions. As one can observe in the map shown above, the World Ocean forms a continuous, unbroken band around the entire world globe.
This coterminous world ocean is spotted by islands and continents, but its continuity is never really broken, not even by the Americas. The dominating feature is the Pacific Ocean, the others being its mere extensions or “branches”, as they were often called. This is the reason why the ancients spoke of a Global Ocean, the “World Ocean” of today.
Contrary to popular belief, the ancients of course knew the Pacific Ocean very well, mostly via the east, the region they sailed the most then. And the ancients also well knew that the “Atlantic Islands” or “Islands of the Blest” lay in that eastern (or western) ocean, a fact that has now been utterly forgotten by most if not all researchers of such matters.
These islands were the remains of sunken Atlantis, the great southern, equatorial land of which the book just quoted is actually speaking. This land is also called Antichthon (“counter-earth”) in Pythagorean traditions and is the same as the Antilia (idem) of the corresponding Latin ones.
; This name refers to the land inhabited by the Antipodes, placed antipodally from us, as the Indonesians really are. Note that this land is located in the Tropic of Capricorn, that is, in the southern hemisphere of the earth. Excluding Africa and the Americas, we are left with Indonesia and Australia, the very site where we have located Atlantis-Eden.
The True Location of Paradise
With this, we pass to our second proof of the Indonesian location of Atlantis and hence of Eden which we also find most compelling. This proof again concerns the equatorial location of the site of Paradise. And it is taken from a very reliable Jewish source, the Jewish Encyclopedia.
The Jewish Encyclopedia is a mine of information on obscure passages of the Bible and other such Jewish sources. This encyclopedia has the advantage of having been written by orthodox Jews, whose faith and accuracy cannot be seriously doubted by anyone.
So, the words of this encyclopedia can be trusted by both Jews and Christians alike. In their description of the Garden of Eden, these illustrious authorities affirm: ↑071
Saadia Gaon, in his Arabic translation, renders “Phison” as the Nile, which Ibn Ezra ridicules, as: “it is positively known that Eden is farther south, on the equator.”... Obadiah of Bertinoro, the commentator of the Mishnah, in a letter describing his travels from Italy to Jerusalem in 1489, relates the story of Jews arriving at Jerusalem from “Aden, the land where the well-known and famous Gan Eden is situated, which is southeast of Assyria”…
This opinion of rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro that “the well-known and famous Gan Eden is situated… southeast of Assyria” is also in accordance with the ancient traditions. For instance, it is supported by the Tale of Sindbad the Sailor which we comment in more detail in our specialized work on this charming initiatic tale.
And it is also supported by the ancient Mesopotamian traditions which placed Dilmun, their version of the Garden of Eden, in the South Seas, to the southeast of Mesopotamia. We note that the Aden in question here is really Eden, rather than the Gulf of Aden, which the Jews never inhabited.
When one consults a world map, for instance, the one shown in the figure below, it is easy to see that the site of Indonesia in fact lies directly to the southeast of Mesopotamia, just as rabbi Obadiah affirmed. In fact, Obadiah did not say how far to southeast the Garden of Eden in fact lay. A whole lot, we note. All the way around the Indian and then across the Eastern Indian Ocean, to Indonesia, that is. But this distance could be sailed rather easily, and in fact was from deepest antiquity, as is now fast becoming obvious to all specialists ever since we pointed it out.
When the above information is plotted in a world map, we obtain the results shown in the above figure. The line drawn from Mesopotamia (Assyria) downwards is due southeast, just as rabbi Bertinoro recommended. And the line along the Line of the Equator again corresponds to the information supplied by rabbi Ibn Ezra, himself supported in this view by the exploits of rabbi Nahamanides, the supreme Jewish authority on such matters.
As shown, the two lines intersect in the region of Indonesia, and in no other. This region also corresponds to Taprobane, which was precisely the site where both the Hindu and the Greco-Roman traditions converged in placing the site of Paradise and the Islands of the Blest ever since remotest antiquity. It is clear that the ships went around the obstacles, rather than over them, as illustrated, for reasons of simplicity.
These paradisial islands, known as Elysium to the Greeks, Eden to the Jews, Dilmun to the Mesopotamians, Taprobane (Tamraparna or Seylam) to the Hindus, and as Punt to the Egyptians are all the same as sunken Atlantis. And Atlantis was truly the site of Paradise Lost, as we have long been arguing and have demonstrated in detail for the first time ever.
Moreover, the geographical charts such as the one just presented leave no room for doubting the Indonesian location of Atlantis as the site of Paradise. This is precisely the location we have now established at long last, after three decades of very dedicated research.
The third proof we want to present here is from the Suda Lexicon, this marvelous encyclopedia which summarizes Classical Greco-Roman thinking in such a remarkable way. The Suda is now available online, in both the ancient Greek original and English, so that the interested readers can conveniently consult it by themselves. ↑072
The Suda (or Suidas) is the only such encyclopedia to reach us from Classical antiquity. Though somewhat late, the Suda obtained its information from far older Greco-Roman sources now utterly lost. It is hence an invaluable document on what the ancient Greeks such as Plato actually thought when they used words such as “Atlantic Ocean”, “island”, “continent”, “Flood”, “sea”, “ocean”, “Pillars of Hercules”, “Asia”, “Libya”, and so forth. ↑073
Unsurprisingly, these concepts changed a lot since the two and a half thousand years that have elapsed since Plato wrote his piece on Atlantis. And if we really want to understand the words of the great master, we have to learn the meaning of the technical vocabulary he used.
The Suda is perhaps the sole ancient document that really glosses these concepts in a reliable way. All the rest – particularly the hasty translations and the interpretations made by those who have an axe to grind – should be distrusted and subjected to verification from the original sources themselves.
With this we pass to the definition of the Atlantic Ocean in the Suda, one which the interested readers can check for themselves via the link to it just given. Knowing what Plato actually meant by his use of the name is essential for the search of Atlantis.
As we already said, it is obvious that “if it is Atlantis it’s gotta be located in the Atlantic Ocean”. After all, it was Atlantis that gave the name to the Atlantic Ocean, the “ocean of Atlantis”, rather than the other way around. Otherwise, we could find a different sunken civilization – for instance Lemuria – and mistake it for Atlantis. So, an Atlantic location is crucial for the localization of Atlantis.
But this location must be consentaneous with Plato’s vocabulary, rather than the modern usage of the term, which, as we just said, changed a whole lot in the course of the almost three millennia since Plato wrote his piece on the Lost Continent. This ancient world conception survived down to the times of Christopher Columbus as we explain next, as a clarifying preamble to the Suda’s definition.
Columbus and the Interposed Americas
As we will now undertake to show, the name of the Atlantic Ocean – which really means “Ocean of Atlantis” in Greek (Atlantis Okeanos) – originally applied to the Pacific Ocean, known (from the east) since remotest antiquity, rather than to the Ocean now so named.
When the Greeks moved from wherever they originally came from to the Mediterranean region, they thought – just as did most of the ancient European peoples with perhaps a few exceptions – that what we know as the Atlantic Ocean stretched all the way to the East Indies, more or less as did Christopher Columbus and the other conquistadors, geographers and experts of all kinds.
The existence of the Americas separating the three Old World continents (Europe, Asia and Africa) was of course generally ignored in antiquity. So, this supposition was rather logical, as adduced by Strabo and a host of other ancient geographers and experts since the times of Homer. In fact, Homer, in his Iliad (18:478), describes the Ocean as encircling the whole earth.
Accordingly, Columbus’ attempt to find a western route to the Indies was rather logical, even though it failed in a more or less serendipitous way. As the result of his logical reasoning, the former name of the Pacific Ocean – the one of “true Ocean” or “Ocean of Atlantis” – was also extended to its eastern extension, the European ocean now so named. And the name stuck.
With the advent of the dark Middle Ages, the naval contact of the Europeans with the East Indies became lost, and the very existence of Atlantis and its enormous ocean became utterly forgotten in the course of time. The only contact then was by land, via the Silk Road.
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So, when Balboa rediscovered the
Pacific Ocean (from the west) during the Age of Discovery, it was named anew. All memory of its former importance had become utterly effaced and forgotten, except perhaps in the minds of a very few initiates who of course never told their secret to anyone who might improperly divulge it to profane ears.
In this way, the name of the “Atlantic Ocean” of the ancient geographical traditions became finally transferred from the right to the wrong ocean. And this transference ultimately led to the desperate but vain search of the Renaissance explorers for the “Atlantic Islands”, the remains of sunken Atlantis itself, in the wrong area instead of where they truly lay, in the myriad islands of Indonesia, in the “veritable ocean” (alethinos pontos) of which Plato speaks as the site of Lost Atlantis in his dialogues.
Back to the Suda
After this necessary preamble we return to the Suda and its glosses on the ancient Greek concept of “Atlantic Ocean”. As we already said, this famous dictionary derives from the Classical sources themselves, and cannot hence be doubted in any valid way.
These glosses are representative of Plato’s sources, and are validated by a host of other Classical authorities whose lessons we discuss in more detail in this book and in other works of ours. The Suda glosses are copied verbatim from this useful source, which we link again here for the readers’ convenience. Our comments to these two glosses (headwords) are made within the square brackets, and speak for themselves. We also give the original Greek entry in LSJ for those skilled in this tongue. ↑074
“Headword: Atlantika pelagê – Translated headword:
“Atlantic seas”
Greek Original: Atlantika pelagê: hesperios ôkeanos kai heôios kai panta ta aplôta pelagê. kai Atlantis thalatta, ho ôkeanos. Translation: “The western ocean and the eastern one and all the innavigable seas.” Also Atlantis thalatta [“Atlantis sea”], “the ocean”.
Atlantis the Lost Continent Finally Found Page 21
