Aquaman's Atlantis - Truth, Fiction, Or Something In Between?...'Lost' City of Atlantis: Fact & Fable

It has been a busy year for Atlantis. The legendary lost city has been ‘found’ in the Sahara Desert, in the heart of Antarctica, along the boggy coastline of Spain and just off-shore from Los Angeles. NASA astronaut, turned oceanographer, Paul Scully-Power, renewed his own vow to find the city. Comic book author Zack Kaplan became so wrapped in researching his new series Lost City Explorers that he thinks Atlantis might be under Manhattan! And, of course, Aquaman bursts onto movie screens across the nation today in a battle to save his Atlantean homeland.

This is all good fun, right? Everyone likes a good legend, especially when it is about a golden age when humans dared great deeds. The problem is that an increasingly large percentage of Americans believe that Atlantis was a real place. The 2018 survey of paranormal beliefs carried out by Chapman University found that 56.9% of Americans agree or strongly agree that “Ancient, advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed.” This number is troubling to scholars who study the ancient world, including myself.*

Atlantis was not intended to be taken for a real place when it was first imagined. The sole source for the legend of Atlantis are the dialogues Timaeus and Critias by the Greek philosopher Plato. As a philosopher, Plato regularly used hypothetical or mythical examples in his writing, thereby allowing the characters in the dialogue to debate the relative merits of an idea in a mock version of the Socratic method. The story of Atlantis is no different. The characters in Plato’s dialogues claim to have heard the story of the lost city from a man named Solon, who himself claimed he was told the story by Egyptian priests, who themselves said the events took place 9,000 years ago, beyond straits of Gibraltar (a long time ago, in a place far, far, away).

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The story that follows is one of pride and hubris. Atlantis was once a great and mighty empire, the envy of the ancient world. In their success, however, they had forgotten to give proper respect to the gods. A resistance movement against the Atlantean empire rose up in Athens, which just so happened to be Plato’s home town. Despite overwhelming odds, the resistance overcame the empire and the gods caused Atlantis to sink beneath the sea in punishment for their hubris. The tale is simple narration that urged present day Athenians to remain humble and honor the gods. But, how do we get from a simple moral parable to Aquaman making a splash on the silver screen?

When DC comics debuted the “King of the Seven Seas” in 1941, he was drafted as a response to Marvel Comics’ Submariner. Both superheroes had a variety of aquatic powers and could trace their roots back to fabled Atlantis, but like many comic book characters Aquaman’s popularity fell in the late 40s. During the comic book revival of the 50s, Aquaman made his own comeback with his Atlantis backstory deepened by artist Ramona Fradon and writer Robert Bernstein.

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In the rebooted Aquaman, the inhabitants of Atlantis survived the sinking of their home by building a glass dome atop the city. Then, overtime, the city’s inhabitants were said to have gradually adopted to their new surroundings, learning to breathe water and subsist in an ocean world. With these technological and evolutionary marvels, Bernstein painted a picture of Atlantis built off the claims of 19th and early 20th-century spiritualism writers, not Plato’s dialogues.

Plato described Atlantis as wealthy and powerful, but at its core Atlantis was simply another Greek city-state. With the development of the Spiritualism movement in the 19th-century, a new vision of Atlantis emerged among authors such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, and Edgar Cayce. These authors claimed to have new knowledge of the ancient city gained from spiritual gurus, psychic readings of past lives, and other mystical sources. Through these authors, the image of Atlantis was reshaped as a place of human evolution, profound spiritual wisdom and marvelous scientific knowledge.

Attempts to find physical evidence of Atlantis also began in the 19th-century. The public’s interest in the ancient Greek culture had been peaked in the 1870s when German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann claimed his excavations at the site of Hisarlik, Turkey, had confirmed that the site was the legendary city of Troy. Schliemann’s claims are controversial, but as far as the public was concerned, if one legendary ancient Greek city could be found why not another? In 1882, the book Atlantis: The Antedilluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly was released to great success, once again reshaping the public’s vision of Atlantis.

Donnelly claimed that while he could not find the actual city of Atlantis, he could use archaeological evidence to prove it once existed. Employing an extreme form of diffusionism, Donnelley argued that the ancient temples and pyramids of the Egyptians and the Maya were so similar that they had to originate from one source, Atlantis. To find these similarities, however, Donnelley had to ignore countless differences in chronology, culture history and tradition. On occasion he would even stretch his evidence to fit. For example, while his claim that both ancient cultures had glyphic writing systems is true, it ignored the fact that these writing systems were fundamentally different in the structure of their characters, the uses to which they were put and in the languages they represented.

Despite the deep problems with Donnelly’s argument, he helped to build a wave of Atlantis popularity as well as a century-long tradition among ‘alternative history’ authors whereby superficial similarities among ancient cultures are used as shocking evidence of cultural contacts. Donnelly’s legacy lives on with each new ‘discovery’ of Atlantis, but the reality is there are no historical or archaeological data that support the claim that Atlantis was ever a real place.

Plato’s story was always intended as a moral parable, not a tale of human history. In his recent book, The Search for Atlantis, Dr. Steve P. Kershaw states “There is no need to seek [Plato’s] Atlantis in Antarctica, Bolivia, Cuba, Dholavira, Egypt, Florida, Greenland or anywhere else, because its location is not the ‘mystery’ that enters the titles and subtitles of so many Atlantean publications. It certainly existed, but it existed in Plato’s imagination. And so it should have done. Myths are good to think with.”

Atlantis is powerful, sage and even entertaining as a legend, but to claim that it was a real city is another thing altogether. Our understanding of the human past is well established in its basic outline through archaeological and historical data; the idea that an ‘ancient, advanced civilization, such as Atlantis, once existed,’ is best left to the pages of comic books and [fingers-crossed] good movies.

*The phrasing of the Chapman University survey question is meant to refer to claims made by several authors of pseudoarchaeological texts, which state that an Atlantis-like civilization existed in humanity’s deep past but is being ignored by professional archaeologists. It is likely that some respondents to the survey took this question instead to refer to any documented ancient civilization.

David S. Anderson

www.forbes.com/sites/davidanderson/2018/12/21/aquamans-at...

The idea of Atlantis — the "lost" island subcontinent often idealized as an advanced, utopian society holding wisdom that could bring world peace — has captivated dreamers, occultists and New Agers for generations. Thousands of books, magazines and websites are devoted to Atlantis, and it remains a popular topic. People have lost fortunes — and in some cases even their lives — looking for Atlantis.

The origins of Atlantis

Unlike many legends whose origins have been lost in the mists of time, we know exactly when and where the story of Atlantis first appeared. The story was first told in two of Plato's dialogues, the "Timaeus" and the "Critias," written about 360 B.C.

Though today Atlantis is often conceived of as a peaceful utopia, the Atlantis that Plato described in his fable was very different. In his book "Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology," professor of archaeology Ken Feder notes that in Plato's story, "Atlantis is not a place to be honored or emulated at all. Atlantis is not the perfect society ... Quite the contrary, Atlantis is the embodiment of a materially wealthy, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful nation that has become corrupted by its wealth, sophistication, and might." As propaganda in Plato's morality tale, the Atlantis legend is more about the city's heroic rival Athens than a sunken civilization; if Atlantis really existed today and was found intact and inhabited, its residents would probably try to kill and enslave us all.

It's clear that Plato made up Atlantis as a plot device for his stories, because there no other records of it anywhere else in the world. There are many extant Greek texts; surely someone else would have also mentioned, at least in passing, such a remarkable place. There is simply no evidence from any source that the legends about Atlantis existed before Plato wrote about it.

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In his book "Meet Me In Atlantis: Across Three Continents in Search of the Legendary Lost City" Mark Adams explains how an otherwise unremarkable Greek legend became so widely known. It was due to a Minnesota man named Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901). Donnelly was a Congressmen and amateur historian who claimed, in his 1882 book "The Antediluevian World," that all great advances in civilization and technology could be traced back to the long-lost island mentioned by Plato. But Donnelly went beyond merely popularizing Plato's story; he added some of his own "facts" and ideas that have become part of the Atlantis myth. Donnelly promoted what is now called "diffusionism," the idea that all great cultures can be traced back to a single source.

Adams describes Donnelly "as the first great Atlantis fundamentalist, in that he believed that Plato's story was factually accurate outside of the supernatural elements like Poseidon." Donnelly sent a copy of his book to Charles Darwin, who found it interesting but unpersuasive — reading it, he said, "in a very skeptical spirit." Adams, after poring over much of Donnelly's materials, comes to a similar conclusion: "Donnelly was ... a bag of winds. He knew the results he wanted and rummaged through his sources searching for only those facts that fit his needs, without pausing to note any reasonable doubts."

Later, less skeptical writers elaborated on Donnelly's theories, adding their own opinions and speculations. These included mystic Madame Blavatsky (in her 1888 book, "The Secret Doctrine") and famous psychic Edgar Cayce in the 1920s. Cayce, who put a fundamentalist Christian spin on the Atlantis story, gave psychic readings for thousands of people — many of whom, he claimed, had past lives in Atlantis. Unfortunately, none of the information was verifiable, and Cayce wrongly predicted that the continent would be discovered in 1969.

The 'lost' continent

Despite its clear origin in fiction, many people over the centuries have claimed that there must be some truth behind the myths, speculating about where Atlantis would be found. Countless Atlantis "experts" have located the lost continent all around the world based on the same set of facts. Candidates — each accompanied by its own peculiar sets of evidence and arguments — include the Atlantic Ocean, Antarctica, Bolivia, Turkey, Germany, Malta and the Caribbean.

Plato, however, is crystal clear about where Atlantis is: "For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' (i.e., Hercules) there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together." In other word it lies in the Atlantic Ocean beyond "The pillars of Hercules" (i.e., the Straits of Gibraltar, at the mouth of the Mediterranean). Yet it has never been found in the Atlantic, or anywhere else.

The only way to make a mystery out of Atlantis (and to assume that it was once a real place) is to ignore its obvious origins as a moral fable and to change the details of Plato's story, claiming that he took license with the truth, either out of error or intent to deceive. With the addition, omission, or misinterpretation of various details in Plato's work, nearly any proposed location can be made to "fit" his description.

Yet as writer L. Sprague de Camp noted in his book "Lost Continents," "You cannot change all the details of Plato's story and still claim to have Plato's story. That is like saying the legendary King Arthur is 'really' Cleopatra; all you have to do is to change Cleopatra's sex, nationality, period, temperament, moral character, and other details, and the resemblance becomes obvious."

The most obvious sign that Atlantis is a myth is that no trace of it has ever been found despite advances in oceanography and ocean floor mapping in past decades. For nearly two millennia readers could be forgiven for suspecting that the vast depths might somehow hide a sunken city or continent. Though there remains much mystery at the bottom of the world's oceans, it is inconceivable that the world's oceanographers, submariners, and deep-sea probes have some how missed a landmass "larger than Libya and Asia together."

Statue of Plato at Academy of Athens, Greece
Statue of Plato at Academy of Athens, Greece (Image credit: Anastasios71 shutterstock)
Furthermore plate tectonics demonstrate that Atlantis is impossible; as the continents have drifted, the seafloor has spread over time, not contracted. There would simply be no place for Atlantis to sink into. As Ken Feder notes, "The geology is clear; there could have been no large land surface that then sank in the area where Plato places Atlantis. Together, modern archaeology and geology provide an unambiguous verdict: There was no Atlantic continent; there was no great civilization called Atlantis."

Ignatius Donnelly was certain of his theory, predicting that hard evidence of the sunken city would soon be found, and that museums around the world would one day be filled with artifacts from Atlantis. Yet over 130 years have passed without a trace of evidence. The Atlantis legend has been kept alive, fueled by the public's imagination and fascination with the idea of a hidden, long-lost utopia. Yet the "lost city of Atlantis" was never lost; it is where it always was: in Plato's books.

www.livescience.com/23217-lost-city-of-atlantis.html

Taken on: March 4, 2020

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