Let’s pull the evidence together and summarize the conclusions.
• It indicates that Plato was referring not to an island on its own but, more likely, to a peninsula, possibly with a large flat area to the south being separated—or partially separated—by a narrow strip of water, making only that area an island.
• The Iberian Peninsula, embodying the southern Costa de la Luz, part of Spanish Andalucía, and the whole of Portugal’s Algarve, starts immediately outside the Straits of Gibraltar in precisely the right position. Stretching south from its coast are large submerged plains.
• Apart from the probable mistranslation of nesos, Plato clearly stated that the country had only one side facing the sea.
• Plato’s description of “straits” in front of this coast, where navigation was difficult due to many islands, mudbanks, shallow (tidal) waters, marshy areas, and lagoons, even today perfectly matches the area from Cádiz in Spain to beyond Faro in the Algarve. More than two thousand years have passed since he wrote his Dialogues, with the inevitable geographical changes caused by momentous earthquakes and tsunamis. Today the straits between the offshore islands and the coast are navigable, aided by well-marked charts; but because of the shallowness of the water and the strong Atlantic tides, there’s a risk of running aground when venturing into the inner lagoons and the sea around Faro.
• This area could be the result of the southern part of Atlantis sinking, leaving a few remnants in the sea off the coast or the remains of the northern extremity of a long, flat offshore island that had originally only been separated—or partially separated—from the mainland by a narrow strait.
• Most of the western half of the Algarve shoreline is different from the east but exactly matches Plato’s description of the original dramatic Atlantis coast, with high cliffs.
• Plato was not referring to a huge island bigger than Libya and Asia combined, but a peninsula that was bigger than any existing at that time in what he understood as “Libya” and “Asia,” two of the largest other landmasses known to him that he could cite in comparison.
• He also indicated that the swath of mountains to the north of the Atlantis plain still existed, although they were not as impressive as they had been before the great calamity. This is contradictory if he was referring to them being on an island that had sunk. The mountains do still exist, but on the mainland peninsula, not on the remnants of an island.
There is another solution that is perhaps the simplest and most telling of all. Several experts have suggested it was the Egyptian vocabulary that was at the root of the confusion.
Jonas Bergman, for example, firmly believes that the original Egyptian word for “island” also meant “lowland” or “coastland.”48 If this was the case, then one can easily see how confusion could have crept into the information given to Solon and his translation into Greek. It must be considered doubtful whether the priest knew the precise intended meaning of the inscription on the temple columns. He had not been there when it was put there nine thousand years earlier. It is far more likely that he was only able to pass on the geographical position of the sunken civilization.
This view is supported by Eberhard Zangger. He maintains that the ancient Egyptians did not have a specific character for “island.” The hieroglyphic used was the same as for “sandy beach” or “coast,” and it was also used for “foreign countries.”49
Perhaps, therefore, Plato only knew the supposed position of Atlantis but, not being familiar with the area himself and only having a few tales from mariners to go on (which could have confused him), he was uncertain as to whether it was partly an island or islands, an island by virtue of being cut off by rivers, or simply the citadel on an island, or the whole southern flank of the Iberian peninsula—or a combination of them all. He was struggling to describe it and hedged his bets with nesos, which could ambiguously and conveniently have meant the whole lot.
Nevertheless, they all amounted to different descriptions of the same area, and I thought I had uncovered enough evidence to prove that Plato was not talking of a gigantic island, but this southern part of Iberia immediately outside the Mediterranean.
Progress was solid, ample justification to closely compare all of his other clues with southwest Iberia to see if they supported my case, starting with its fabled wealth.
CHAPTER NINE
Follow the Money
Plato was emphatic: Atlantis was the wealthiest civilization ever.
Clue 38 reads: “… and they had such an amount of wealth as was never possessed by kings and potentates, and is not likely ever to be again.”
This means it had to control a vast amount of natural resources. I already knew that my target area, from Gibraltar to the southwest tip of the Algarve, had been prized by everyone from the Phoenicians to the Romans. It had been the largest producer of precious metals in the known world for many thousands of years before Plato’s era. Mind-boggling amounts of gold, silver, and copper ore had been mined and processed there to produce millions and millions of tons of slag. Were Plato’s comments and these facts mere coincidence? Or did they compellingly lead to one conclusion: that they related to one and the same place?
In Chapter Three, I briefly discussed the work and findings of that remarkable lady Elena Wishaw. As a result of her painstaking explorations over two decades, she was convinced that Niebla had existed as a fortified inland port to facilitate this metal trade for between ten and fifteen thousand years. That puts it in the timespan given for the Atlantis Empire, which Plato stated had been destroyed nine thousand years before Solon was given the information by the priest.
Adding the last two thousand years A.D. makes it around 11,600 years ago.
The old priest’s assertion that civilization had existed that long ago is corroborated by the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484 B.C.–c. 425 B.C.), who wrote of a long, unbroken line of Egyptian kings and priests. He was shown 341 wooden statues in the great hall of a temple as proof of the immense age of the Egyptian nation.50 Each statue represented a generation’s king and high priest in continuous lineage. Calculating on the premise of three generations spanning 100 years, they represented a total of 11,366 years. Alternatively, allowing for shorter life spans of three generations every 80 years, the total would be 9,092 years.
It is a well-known fact that the Egyptians recorded that the first of their “god kings” came to Egypt after first having ruled in a western land.51
Intriguingly, the Egyptians also said that the sun had changed its usual position several times within this period, twice setting where it normally rose and twice rising where it normally set. Legends from other parts of the world—South America and Scandinavia, for example—also refer to this phenomenon. The events that could have caused it and the effect on all life on earth hardly bear thinking about. If, for some awful reason, the earth’s rotation had suddenly stopped, what would have happened to the oceans? Would they have kept moving in a giant wave around and over the world?
Returning to Mrs. Wishaw’s conclusions in southern Iberia, these were not mere intuition: they were based on hard evidence. Early in her explorations, she had been befriended by a local man, the owner of the area’s quarry, who showed great interest in her work. He took her around the quarry, which he was convinced was just as old as she had concluded that Niebla had been. She was fascinated by his knowledge of the different quarrying techniques. He demonstrated the current methods, then explained how the process had been carried out in different eras: by the Romans, by the Carthaginians, and during the Neolithic, Stone Age, and Paleolithic periods.
This information proved invaluable. Whenever she unearthed old stone walls—or even the odd separated quarried stone—she could now establish the period when it had been hewn.
One example was the desembarcadero. From her earliest time at Niebla, she had been fascinated by what transpired to be a large harbor quarried out as an extension of the Tinto River, directly below the city walls. Desembarcadero loo
sely translates as a pool where goods were loaded and unloaded; this one, however, was long out of use. Mrs. Wishaw was never able to conduct the detailed investigations she would have preferred, the major obstacles being the water, the deep silt, and working on her own with primitive tools and local peasant labor. She was, though, able to examine it sufficiently well to become convinced that it was Stone Age work and dated back ten to fifteen thousand years.
Progressively back upstream on the river were innumerable mills for grinding flour, many of them ancient. There were far too many for merely supplying the surrounding area. Mrs. Wishaw concluded that the ore was brought down from the mines in the mountains about thirty miles to the north, initially on mules over mountain tracks and then by river. The mills would have been needed for the provision of sustenance for the many people involved in the large volume of transportation, who would also have required a considerable amount of policing.
From Niebla, the ore was floated a further two kilometers on a canal she discovered, to a point where the tide on the Rio Tinto provided enough clearance for larger boats to carry it down to the ports of Moguer and Palos, close to Huelva. Palos, incidentally, was where Columbus sourced his ships and crews before embarking on his epic voyage of discovery. If Atlantis had ruled parts of America, it was ironic that more than eleven thousand years after the demise of the Atlantis civilization, seamen from the same region rediscovered it.
Old mines, mostly copper, are dotted all over the Algarve’s hinterland. The biggest, at São Domingos in the northeast corner of the region close to the Guadiana, was one exploited by Julius Caesar, initially for gold. It lies on the same metal-rich seam that runs through the Algarve mountains to the Rio Tinto mines and beyond, in Spain. Until last century, the mine, owned by an English company, was still in production. The gold had long been exhausted, but it had become one of the largest copper mines in the world. The site now boasts a hotel and a museum and is marketed as a tourist attraction.
Early in 2009, a company was granted permission to examine the mountainous areas of the Algarve for valuable ores such as gold and silver, since the region was known to have produced such substantial amounts in the past.
One of the Romans’ favorite activities was plundering the treasures of the local Portuguese tribes they had conquered. They were often astonished by the amounts they gleaned. Between 209 B.C. and 169 B.C., the haul totaled a staggering eight hundred tons of silver and four tons of gold.
It was not until I was putting the finishing touches to this book that I discovered another unique fact linking southwest Iberia to Plato’s Atlantis account. One of his most debated clues is the one related to the mysterious metal orichalcum. He stated that it was no longer mined and only known by its name but was regarded by the Atlanteans as the most valuable metal after gold. Clue 42 reads: “… and that which is now only name and was then something more than a name. Orichalcum was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island being more precious in those days than anything except gold.”
Exactly what orichalcum was has captured imaginations and occupied learned minds ever since. Different theories have been proposed, mostly suggesting that it was a naturally formed alloy comprising copper and another metal. The main reason for this is that the Greeks had two words for copper. One of them was kipros, from which the name “Cyprus” probably derived, as copper was extensively mined in the island’s Trudos Mountains. The other word was chalcos, which could mean “copper” or “brass.” As ori was also similar to a Greek word for mountains, it was presumed that Plato was referring to something called “mountain copper or brass,” but that uses the Greek vocabulary, and Solon’s information came from the Egyptians.
What appears to be the definitive solution came out of the blue when I was ruminating around Plato’s clues with Carlos Castelo, a local Portuguese expert on the ancient Kunii people and their alphabet (see Chapter Eighteen). “It was obvious,” he declared, “ori or oro was the word used for gold in the ancient local Kunii tongue at various times.” Even today, ouro is gold in Portuguese. During the same ancient period, calcos meant copper and, like other ancient Iberian words, it found its way into Greek. The current Portuguese word for copper is cobre.
So the very name used by Plato that had been passed on by the old Egyptian priest originated in southwest Iberia, a combination of ori and calcos. It graphically described a metal that was a natural or manufactured alloy of gold and copper. Its gold content would explain why the Atlanteans valued it so highly. It is logical that its origin would have been in the same place as the name.
Carlos supplies ample evidence that this old language and script long preceded others, including Phoenician, Greek, and Latin (see Chapter Eighteen). It must be presumed that, as the metal was unknown to the Greeks, its name had been preserved by the Egyptians for thousands of years and was not invented by Plato. It is a unique, exciting, and telling link between southwest Iberia and Atlantis.
Interestingly, the inhabitants of the Andes in South America also had an alloy of gold and copper, which they called tumbago.52 If this area was influenced by the Atlanteans (as discussed later, in Chapters Fifteen and Seventeen), then the same alloy appearing there would not be a surprise. It is reported to have consisted of a fifty-fifty ratio of gold to copper. The alloy was harder than copper but retained its flexibility even when hammered; consequently, it was very useful in the making of intricate objects with the appearance of gold.
The Spaniards were reported to be somewhat enraged when melting down what they thought were gold objects, only to discover that they were made from this alloy.
There are very few other historic reports of this enigmatic metal. One recounts that it was used for the vessels in Solomon’s Temple and another that the wand, the ancient symbol of authority and office, had been traditionally made from it. Chapter Nineteen briefly discusses wands and rods of power; after reading it, you will appreciate that this offers another intriguing link with southwest Iberia. It would, coincidentally, also be an extremely good conductor of electricity. King Solomon is also thought to have obtained some of his gold from southwest Iberia—Tartessos. Maybe a small amount of this unique alloy was still available then, or even other objects made from it existed. Perhaps his merchants obtained some for use in the temple simply because of its rarity.
There is one other clue that chimes with the importance of the area around Niebla. Clue 34 relates to the area that the second-born son was given dominion over. “To his twin brother, who was born after him, and obtained as his lot the extremity of the island toward the Pillars of Hercules, facing the country which is now called the region of Gades in that part of the world, he gave the name in the language of the country which is named after him, Gadeirus.” Plato did not say “eastern,” but elsewhere he made it very clear that he was talking about the Atlantic, so it must have been the eastern extremity. “Gades” is today’s Cádiz, across the bay from Niebla. Many people have wondered why Plato specifically mentioned the inheritance of this son and not those of the others—apart, that is, from his firstborn: Atlas.
It is now clear. If southwest Iberia was where Atlantis was situated, apart from the citadel itself, this eastern zone was the next most important area of the kingdom, the font of much of its vast wealth … precious metals. Certainly a fitting area of responsibility for Poseidon’s second born.
Gades is the only specific place name quoted by Plato for anywhere in Atlantis.
So far, so good. The most implacable cynic could not argue against southwest Iberia’s conformity with Plato’s description of immense wealth. This was all starting to get very exciting indeed.
In view of my comments in Chapter Three, wealth was one of the most promising and obvious clues to examine first. But would the others prove more problematical? What, for instance, about the climate, the plants, and the animals?
CHAPTER TEN
Mysterious Fruit, Warm Sun, and Big Beasts
Twenty-one of Plato’s clues give informat
ion about what the climate was like, the rainfall, which crops and fruits grew there, what the landscape looked like, and a limited amount concerning animals. Taken together, they are crucial in helping to place the legendary land accurately in the right latitude—and are also the basis for ruling out so many sites suggested over the years. If previous authors had noted them, they might not have plunged into writing their hypotheses for some far-flung spots.
Climate
Most of the information is interlinked like a giant spider’s web. The weather details, for instance, are not only given directly but can also be deduced from a study of the crops and fruits listed. Perhaps the most pertinent climate clue is that regarding bathing. Clue 75 reads: “They made cisterns, some open to the heavens, others roofed over to be used in winter as warm baths.” It was obviously too cold for open-air pools to be used in the winter. This information is reinforced by the disclosure in clue 97 that it was warm enough for two crops annually and, although there was plentiful rainfall in the winter, water had to be carefully conserved in a hugely ambitious storage system for irrigation in the summer. “Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth, in winter having the benefit of the rain from heaven, and in summer the water which the land supplied by introducing streams from the canals.” This clearly indicates a climate of hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. Any resident of the Algarve or southwest Andalucía, asked about the local climate, would describe it exactly thus.
In southern Iberia, summer lasts from May to the end of September, with hardly any rain. The temperatures vary between 27ºC and 35ºC, with occasional heat waves causing spikes up to 40ºC.
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