Most of the theories about Atlantis were invented by amateur enthusiasts. Their method was to select several supposedly similar characteristics of the culture, archeology or geography of a given region, build up this backbone with fictitious details and, finally, announce the discovery of the "real" Atlantis. This methodology has led to numerous discoveries. To date, Atlantis has been "discovered" in North America, Ceylon, Palestine, Mongolia, Carthage, Spain, Malta, central France, Nigeria, Brazil, Peru and the Caucasus Mountains, Morocco, the Sahara Desert, Arctic, Antarctic, Holland, East Prussia, the Baltic Sea, Greenland, the South Pacific, Mexico, Iran, Iraq, the Crimea, the West Indies, Sweden, the British Isles and, of course, the Aegean Sea.
None of these conjectures - with the possible exception of the Minoan theory - addresses the question of how Plato could have had reliable information about all of the above places. They simply rely on the idea that Plato was telling the truth in one way or another. On the other side of the "believers" are skeptics who consider the search for Atlantis a futile occupation and call Plato a dreamer.
The only real way to get out of this impasse is to give up the hope of finding the "real" Atlantis and focus on the central question: can we identify the source of Plato's description?
Although Plato has always contributed a bit of his vision to the traditional materials he used, no one has ever been able to prove that he was guilty of outright falsification. If we proceed from the principle of the presumption of innocence, it would be better to investigate the "line of Solon" through which Plato learned the details of the story of Atlantis. However, was Plato wrong in his assumption that Solon originally learned this story from the Egyptian priests?
The root of the problem lies in the veracity of the Egyptian origin of the Atlantis legend. The ancient Egyptians had an extremely vague idea of foreigners, so the idea that they preserved a detailed description of the history of two distant civilizations - Atlantis and ancient Athens - seems implausible, to put it mildly. (The only ancient Egyptian descriptions of foreign states refer to Egypt's closest neighbors, with whom it had direct political and commercial contacts. It should also be remembered that the purebred Egyptians considered foreigners an "inferior" race.) It is even more difficult to assume that the Egyptians, who were proud of their culture and called its most ancient in the world, readily agreed to talk about the civilization of Atlantis, which was significantly older and, therefore, superior to their own. Besides,how could the Egyptians keep records of events that supposedly took place a thousand years before the emergence of their own culture?
The role of Athens in the legend of Atlantis is even more confusing. It was assumed that the ancient Athenians repelled the Atlantean invasion; however, Athenian society, by all accounts, was formed much later than ancient Egyptian. In the III millennium BC. e … in the era of the pyramid builders, the Athens region in Attica was inhabited, but at the level of simple peasant farms. The city of Athens appeared not earlier than the XIV century BC. e. We have absolutely no evidence that the "great Athenian civilization" could have existed much earlier. We can twirl the elements called "Egypt", "Athens" and "Atlantis" as we like, as if in a Rubik's cube, but the dating still does not add up to a more or less harmonious picture. As long as we acknowledge the role of the Egyptian priests in conveying the legend of Atlantis, everything remains meaningless.
On the other hand, maybe Plato was right in thinking that Solon learned the legend during one of his travels, but was mistaken in his assumption that this happened during his famous visit to Egypt? Solon traveled to various places, in particular to the Kingdom of Lydia on the coast of Anatolia (present-day Turkey). There - at the court of King Croesus (ruled from 560 to 547 BC), proverbial due to his enormous wealth, but nevertheless actually existed - Solon, according to legend, exchanged stories not only with the king, but also with the great fabulist Aesop himself.
It is to Anatolia that many other threads stretch, starting with Atlas, the famous titan from Greek myths who supported the firmament. According to Plato, Atlas was the first king of Atlantis to be named after him. Thus, he is a key mythological character in the story of Atlantis and can best tell us about its origin. The Greeks believed that when the Titans, the eldest race of the gods, were overthrown by Zeus and the Olympic deities, their leader Atlas went into exile to the western edge of the world, where he had to carry the enormous weight of the firmament on his shoulders for ages. It eventually turned into a mountain (Atlas Mountains in Morocco) and also gave its name to the Atlantic Ocean.
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However, prior to his exile, Atlas and his relatives had possessions much further east. The daughters of Atlas were the ancestors of several royal dynasties, the most significant of which was the Trojan, in northwestern Anatolia, while others ruled the island of Lesvos off the Aegean coast of Anatolia. It was believed that Atlas' sister founded cities in Cilicia (southwestern Anatolia), and his mother was the nymph Asia, whose name now bears the entire vast mainland east of the Mediterranean. In Roman times, it meant only Anatolia (Asia Minor), and before that it was a term for a small coastal area in Lydia.
Numerous references to Anatolia in Atlas myths suggest that the Greeks got acquainted with the idea of a giant supporting the sky in this part of the Mediterranean (in comparison, although the history of Crete is full of mythological associations, none of them is associated with the Atlas - this is another weakness of the Minoan theory). The depiction of figures of Atlanteans in the form that is familiar to us from more modern statues has been found in Anatolia since the 15th century BC. e., a thousand years before the earliest Greek images. They come mainly from the great Hittite civilization, whose empire ruled in central Anatolia in the 2nd millennium BC. e. Various works of art - from sculptures to stone seals - depict a human figure with raised arms, supporting the firmament. In one Hittite text there is a description of the giant Ubelluri,whose legs stood in the underworld, and their shoulders supported the earth and sky. When the ancient Greeks say that the Atlas clan comes from Anatolia, we have every reason to believe them.