In the dialogues of the ancient thinker Plato, there is still a grain that speaks of the reality of the legendary island. The legend of Atlantis has been living for over two thousand years. But only a few decades ago, people desperate to find traces of a once prosperous state, ranked Plato's works as utopias. And here's a sensational twist: today, some historians and archaeologists have recognized that Plato's dialogues still contain a grain of real facts. We present three newest hypotheses suggesting where and when Atlantis died.
Plato, retelling the Egyptian legend about Atlantis, described in detail the capital of the island swallowed by the ocean. Following his text, the contemporary artist reproduced the panorama of the mysterious city.
Tradition of the Egyptian priests
In 421 BC. e. the Greek philosopher Plato, in two of his works - Timaeus and Critias - outlined the history and sad end of the island state of Atlantis. The story in the form of a dialogue is led by Plato's great-grandfather, Critias: he conveys the content of the conversation with his grandfather, who heard a story about Atlantis from a contemporary, Solon, an Athenian legislator and poet, who, in turn, learned about Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. And Plato in his texts repeatedly emphasizes that this is not a myth, but a true story about historical events.
Atlantis, according to Plato, is a huge island lying in the ocean behind the Pillars of Hercules, that is, behind Gibraltar. In the center of the island there was a hill on which there were temples and the royal palace. The Acropolis, the upper city, was protected by two rows of earthen embankments and three water ring canals. The outer ring was connected to the sea by a 500-meter channel, through which ships entered the inner port. The life of Atlantis appears to be full of prosperity.
The temple of the main deity of the islanders - Poseidon, the lord of the seas, was, according to Plato, laid out with gold, silver and Orhilak (the recently solved word means an alloy of copper with zinc). Another temple dedicated to Poseidon and his wife Kleito, the progenitor of all Atlanteans, is surrounded by a golden wall. There were also a golden statue of Poseidon and golden statues of the Nereids - the numerous daughters of the sea deity. The Atlanteans had bronze weapons and thousands of war chariots. The bowels gave copper and silver.
The people enjoyed horse racing, thermal baths were at their service: there were two springs on the island - cold and hot water. The ships were hurrying to the harbor of Atlantis with pottery, spices, and rare ores. To supply the port with fresh water, the river bed was turned.
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The island belonged to a powerful alliance of kings. And then the moment came when he decided to subjugate other countries, including Greece. However, Athens, showing valor and strength in the war, won. But, as Plato says, the Olympic gods, dissatisfied with the warring nations, decided to punish them for greed and violence. A monstrous earthquake and flood "in one terrible day and one night" destroyed the Athenian army and all of Atlantis. The waters of the ocean swallowed the island.
47 years after the death of Plato, a resident of Athens, Krantor, went to Egypt to see if the sources of the information used by the philosopher were really there. And he found, according to him, in the temple of Neith hieroglyphs with the text about the events described.
Search
The search for Atlantis began at the very beginning of a new era - in the 50th year from the birth of Christ. For almost two thousand years since that time, many hypotheses about the location of Atlantis have appeared. Many were attracted by the riches mentioned by Plato. Just think: take possession of the golden walls and statues! Most of the interpreters of "Cretia" and "Timaeus" pointed to the existing islands of the Atlantic Ocean. But there were other landmarks as well. Among the 50 points on Earth, identified by enthusiasts for the search for Atlantis, there are also quite fantastic ones, for example Brazil or Siberia, the existence of which the ancient philosopher did not even suspect.
A new rise in interest in the search for the legendary island emerged after the First World War. Underwater technology, improved during the war, prompted adventurous businessmen to organize companies in several countries to search for the mysterious Atlantis. For example, in the French newspaper "Figaro" there was such a note: "A society for the study and exploitation of Atlantis has been created in Paris." Companies, of course, burst one after another, but the Russian writer Alexander Belyaev found in a newspaper publication a plot for his fantastic story "The Last Man from Atlantis".
More than 50 thousand publications are devoted to the problem of the sunken island. Cinema and television also contributed to this story. Over 20 expeditions explored the places where, according to the ideas of their organizers, the people of Atlantis once prospered. But they all returned empty-handed.
To the two main questions - where? and when? - already in our century, the objections of archaeologists were added, who considered it a fantasy story about the abundance of gold and silver on the island. They also attributed the network of canals - circular and leading to the sea, the inland port and other hydraulic structures to Plato's inventions: it was beyond the power, de, there were such large-scale affairs in those days. Researchers of the philosophical and literary heritage of Plato considered that, telling about a prosperous Atlantis, the ancient idealist thinker called on his contemporaries to build an exemplary state without dictatorship and tyranny. And in this sense, Plato is called the creator of the genre of utopia. (Plato indeed in some of his writings called for the construction of an ideal state based on goodness and justice. He traveled from Athens to Syracuse three times, the last time as a deep old man,hoping in vain to instill humane ideas into the tyrants there.) As for the time of the death of the island in the ocean abyss, Plato named a date that contradicts all the data of modern science: according to his information, the catastrophe occurred 11,500 years ago to the present day or 9,000 years, counting to the time of Plato himself … 12-10 thousand years ago, humanity was just emerging from the Paleolithic, the ancient Stone Age, and it is difficult to imagine that somewhere there lived a people who, in their development, outstripped the human race for many thousands of years. The primary source of such an error could be the incorrect determination of the age of the Egyptian state, carried out in ancient times. For example, Herodotus counted Egypt as 11,340 years old.according to him, the catastrophe occurred 11,500 years ago to the present day, or 9,000 years, counting to the time of Plato himself. 12-10 thousand years ago, humanity was just emerging from the Paleolithic, the ancient Stone Age, and it is difficult to imagine that somewhere there lived a people who, in their development, outstripped the human race for many thousands of years. The primary source of such an error could be the incorrect determination of the age of the Egyptian state, carried out in ancient times. For example, Herodotus counted 11,340 years to Egypt.according to him, the catastrophe occurred 11,500 years ago to the present day, or 9,000 years, counting to the time of Plato himself. 12-10 thousand years ago, humanity was just emerging from the Paleolithic, the ancient Stone Age, and it is difficult to imagine that somewhere there lived a people who, in their development, outstripped the human race for many thousands of years. The primary source of such an error could be the incorrect determination of the age of the Egyptian state, carried out in ancient times. For example, Herodotus counted Egypt as 11,340 years old. The primary source of such an error could be the incorrect determination of the age of the Egyptian state, carried out in ancient times. For example, Herodotus counted Egypt as 11,340 years old. The primary source of such an error could be the incorrect determination of the age of the Egyptian state, carried out in ancient times. For example, Herodotus counted Egypt as 11,340 years old.
Is it Atlantis?
"The Russians have found Atlantis!" - With such sensational sold-out many newspapers in Western Europe accompanied in 1979 photographs of the seabed. In the photographs, under the layer of sand, vertical ridges were clearly visible, resembling the walls of a destroyed city. The impression of the ancient city ruins was reinforced by the fact that other ridges ran along the bottom at right angles to the first.
The underwater images were taken by the Moscow University research vessel "Akademik Petrovsky". Actions took place where Plato pointed out - “behind the Pillars of Hercules”. Out into the Atlantic Ocean, the ship stopped over a sandbank to test its underwater equipment. Pure chance helped to choose a parking spot just above the Ampere underwater volcano. It was possible to establish that the Ampere volcano once protruded from the water and was an island.
In 1982, the Soviet ship "Rift" here lowered the underwater vehicle "Argus" into the ocean. “A panorama of the ruins of the city opened up to us, since the walls very similarly imitated the remains of rooms, streets, squares,” the commander of the “Argus” V. Bulyga reported to the Institute of Oceanology of the Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, the next expedition of the Vityaz, which took place in the summer of 1984, did not confirm such encouraging impressions of the aquanaut. Two stones of a fairly regular shape were raised from one of the walls, but their analysis showed that this was not the creation of human hands, but volcanic rock. The commander of the "Argus" crew, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences A. Gorodnitsky writes: "Most likely, the stone is solidified lava that once poured out through the cracks of the volcano." Another seamount, Josephine, was also explored, also an ancient volcano, and in the past - an island.
A. Gorodnitsky proposed his own model of a grandiose geological catastrophe of the distant past. It arose due to a sharp northerly displacement of the African tectonic plate. Its collision with the European plate caused the eruption of the Santorini volcano in the east, and in the west - the immersion of the mentioned volcanic islands into the ocean. This hypothesis does not contradict the geological and geophysical data of modern science. However, once again Atlantis turned out to be not an exciting hypothesis, but just a myth: scientists have not found any traces of the remnants of the material culture of the Atlanteans.
New facts about the old world
The latest methods: ultra-precise measurements, sensitive sensors, improved methods for determining the age of finds, the use of penetrating radiation - all this has come to archeology in recent years. Excavations of recent years have helped to find out a lot of amazing information about the technical achievements of distant ancestors who lived 10-5 thousand years ago.
Swiss archaeologist Eberhard Zangger decided to look at the facts cited by Plato, relying on the latest discoveries in archeology. For example, the Braunschweig University expedition discovered in the ancient countries of the East man-made lakes, harbors and other hydraulic structures, even larger in size than those referred to in Plato's dialogues. For thirty centuries BC. e. Pharaoh Menes ordered to block the mighty Nile with a stone dam and forced the river to flow around the capital of the ancient kingdom from the south. Buildings in Urartu reached even more astonishing proportions - tunnels for collecting groundwater, tunnels as high as human height, stretching for many tens of kilometers. In Egypt, Sumer, Babylon - everywhere modern archaeologists come across the remains of grandiose structures that operated long before Homer and Plato. So why should the story of the ancient philosopher about Atlantis be attributed to myth or utopia?
Plato wrote about the golden teeth on the roof of the temple, about the wall covered with noble metals, about golden statues. When the archaeologist E. Push in the capital of Pharaoh Ramses II (1271-1209 BC) cleared from the ground 180 square meters of stone floor, shimmering with a metallic, gold, coating, scientists remembered the ancient Egyptian hymn, which contains words about gilded gates and pavements in the residence of the monarch. So the hymn captured the truth.
The study of the gilding of the tiles revealed its technology. The ancient builders ground gold into the finest powder, mixed it with quicklime, and this paste was used to cover floor and wall slabs. According to current experts, this method of gilding is very economical.
An explanation was also found for the strange dating of the catastrophe that plunged the island into the waters of the sea. Some archaeologists are convinced that either the priests or Solon were wrong: their error is based on incorrectly read Egyptian hieroglyphs. In their system, the number "9000" is represented by nine lotus flowers, and the number "900" - by nine rope knots, which look very similar to the lotus, and later scribes could easily confuse the date, push it back thousands of years.
Along with the above-mentioned material evidence of the veracity of Plato's work, modern researchers put forward another, so to speak moral, circumstance. Plato belonged to the family of the law-giver Solon, highly revered by the Greeks, who, according to folk tradition, is one of the wisest of the "seven wise men." It is known how the ancient Greeks protected the purity of a kind. The memory of their ancestors was sacred to them. Could Plato, referring to Solon, release fiction, insisting that it is true?
Atlanteans and the Sea Peoples
The already mentioned archaeologist from Switzerland Tsangger, comparing some data relating to two states, to Atlantis and Troy, concludes that they are identical. Seekers were encouraged by important coincidences. Plato's fleet of Atlantis numbered "twelve hundred ships," while Homer's Troy had 1186 galleys. In Atlantis strong northerly winds were blowing, but the surroundings of Troy differed in the same way, which made it difficult for rowing ships to enter the Black Sea. Of course, random coincidences cannot be ruled out here, but the historical framework of both states is strikingly (apart from the dubious Platonic dating) repeat each other.
Some historians complement these considerations. They see the root cause of the campaign of the Atlanteans against Greece, mentioned by Plato, in the expansion of the mysterious "Sea Peoples" to the east of the Mediterranean - one of the dark and bloody chapters of human history. Egyptian hieroglyphs brought to us the details of this brutal aggression. In 1200 BC. e. the invading armies from the north, moving to Egypt by land and sea, destroyed many states of the East on their way: the Hittite empire, Crete, Mycenae, the Levant. Only Egypt managed to repel the attack of the northern aggressor. It was in 1180 BC. e., under the pharaoh Ramses III. After such a devastation, many countries fell into decay for a long time. Hunger reigned everywhere, and earthquakes and floods completed the tragedy. The development of culture was interrupted. In Greece, writing was lost.
In the Bible and in Homer, you can find hints that during the Bronze Age, flourishing cities, grandiose dams and canals already existed. Many archaeologists believe that Plato's works reflect the rise of civilizations in those days and their collapse due to the invasion of the "peoples of the sea". But if these assumptions are correct, then Atlantis should be sought in the east of the Mediterranean Sea. This statement is supported by the fact that it was there - on the islands of the Aegean Sea and on the shores of western Anatolia - in those days there were pirate settlements. Troy should be one of them.
Quite recently, the wealthy English athlete T. Severin decided to repeat the feat of the Argonauts - to swim to the Caucasus on a gallery built according to the Greek model. The vessel had 20 rowers and a simple sail. Before entering the Sea of Marmara, rowers in the latitude of Troy were exhausted many times, struggling with the oncoming northern current that escaped from the Dardanelles. This natural obstacle allowed Troy to firmly hold an important trade artery. In any case, the city had constant sources of wealth, there was also a need for a large fleet and a large harbor - this is what Plato also speaks of.
The Swiss scientist Tsangger and his German colleagues, using a helicopter equipped with a magnetometer capable of distinguishing the location of soil layers from a height up to 150 meters deep, are planning to undertake research in the near future to see if the Troy channel was pierced from the sea to an inland port of 500 meters. The depth of the channel, according to Plato, speaking of Atlantis, was 30 meters. But the depth is clearly not enough for ships to freely enter it from the sea: at the time of Atlantis, the sea level was five meters lower than it is now. Tsangger, however, believes that ships were pulled into the canal on a solid frame, and there was no way for uninvited ships. The ancient Greeks knew this way, it is described by Homer in the Odyssey. There is also a historical example: before the canal was dug near Corinth,across the narrow Peloponnesian isthmus, ships pulled on a frame along a stone road.
Myths give way to facts
"Hunters for Atlantis" do not shy away from new guesses, based not on Plato's dialogues, but on the facts of our time. Relatively recently, some researchers transferred the search for Atlantis from the unjustified hopes of a distant globe to the vicinity of Greece itself. For example, the French archaeologist Louis Figier explored the islet of Thira in 1872, 120 kilometers north of Crete. This small island is all that remains of the volcano now called Santorini. The island in the past was called Strongili (round) or Calliste, that is, the most beautiful. Doesn't this epithet correspond to the excellent assessments that Plato gave to Atlantis?
One of these hypotheses belongs to E. Milanovsky, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, a geologist, tectonist who has visited the islands of the Aegean Sea more than once: in Crete, Tire and others. In Plato, in his dialogues, one can find an indication that Atlantis consisted of two islands - a large, rectangular in plan (this corresponds to the plan of Crete), and a more modest in size, rounded (now such an island is called Tyra).
As we already know, Plato describes the port of Atlantis, located in a ring-shaped sea bay or channel. This inland body of water went out into the sea by a narrow strait (or channel) and was protected from storms by a mountainous coast. “Many facts and details reported by Plato,” E. Milanovsky writes in his article published in one of the collections of Moscow State University, “make it possible to identify in the ancient metropolis of Atlantis, consisting of several, as it were,“nested”into each other, rounded rings and horseshoe-shaped in terms of mountainous islands and straits, polygenic, that is, a long-term, repeatedly active volcano of the central type.
Each volcanic eruption ended with a partial subsidence of the central volcanic edifice, which turned into a caldera - a hollow left after the eruption. Multiple ejections of the volcano piled up calderas like bowls of different sizes inserted into each other. The gaps between the edges of the bowls are those ring channels, if we talk about the structure of the port of Atlantis.
“From the point of view of geology, it can be assumed with sufficient reason that the island or archipelago described by Plato with a concentric relief structure and thermal springs,” continues E. Milanovsky, "Petrified mud" (pumice), are quite consistent with what has become known to geologists in the last 100-150 years."
In his notes, E. Milanovsky sets forth arguments in favor of the full correspondence of the geological events on the island of Tira to what Plato wrote about, speaking about the catastrophe. At the same time, the scientist gave an impressive picture of the prosperous, spiritual life of the islanders before the volcano exploded. The city of Akrotiri covered with ash occupied several hectares, about half of it has been excavated and today is closed from the weather by a high-raised roof, part of which is made of glass. The houses are two or three floors, there are four. The first floors are trade shops, workshops, just storage of food supplies. The second and third floors are residential.
“It is amazing,” writes E. Milanovsky, “in almost every house, the walls were decorated with picturesque multi-colored ornaments or paintings on wet plaster”. All floors had toilets, the sewer system removed sewage outside the city. Archaeologists have found things that tell about the life of the townspeople.
During the excavations, not a single valuable item was found - items made of gold, silver, precious stones, unlike Pompeii, on which misfortune fell suddenly. On Tire, at the first aftershocks, before the disaster, people apparently managed to leave the island. There were no remains of people who died in the eruption, and, as you know, in Pompeii, 2,000 people became victims. At the bottom of Tyra Bay, no evidence of the death of the fleet was found. The famous explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau was convinced of this, whose expedition explored the Aegean Sea in 1981. In his book "In Search of Atlantis" he traces many parallels between Plato's Atlantis and Crete during its heyday in Minoan times, in the years 2700-1500 BC. BC: “In short, like Atlantis described in Timaeus and Critias, Crete was at the height of a powerful empire, a federation of kingdoms,having close cultural and religious ties with the island-metropolis”.
The hypothesis of E. Malinovsky was recently confirmed by the Greek seismologist G. Galanopoulos. Studying the caldera on the island of Thira, he became convinced that a volcanic explosion occurred here, probably the most powerful in the history of mankind. It caused a tsunami up to 100 meters high, the wave washed everything off the face of the earth on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.
The materials that Cousteau received gave him the opportunity to build his own hypothesis:
“The power of the Minoan Empire rested on its coastal cities, which were engaged in trade. Therefore, even if the palaces and cities located in the center of the island (Crete) did not suffer, if not all Cretans died (as, indeed, the inhabitants of the Cretan colonies in Greece, the Cyclades or in Asia Minor), if not all fields were covered ashes, the greatest civilization of King Minos was finished …
They began to forget about Crete. From real life, the Cretans moved into the realm of myth. They were turned into a semi-legendary people and expelled from history … In Egypt they became Atlanteans: Solon or Plato had already forgotten about the greatness of Crete, when from the lips of the priests of the goddess Neith they recorded a story about the greatness and fall of Atlantis … There are other data that speak in favor of the identification of Crete with Atlantis.
The scientist refers to the Bible, which contains the parables about the "ten executions of the Egyptians," set out in the book of Exodus. The parables allow us to interpret them as describing the consequences of a great catastrophe in the eastern Mediterranean.
The hypotheses of the Russian and French scientists support each other, work in the same direction. Does it make sense to continue searching for Atlantis elsewhere?
LITERATURE
Plato. Timaeus, Critias (dialogues).
Zhirov N. Atlantis. The main problems of atlantology. - M., 1964.
Jacques Yves Cousteau, Yves Pakkale. In Search of Atlantis. M.: Mysl, 1986.
German magazine "Der Spiegel" No. 53, 1998.
G. ALEXANDROVSKY