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Atlantis: Discovered at Last?
Henry G. writes "The BBC is reporting that recent satellite pictures may show the location of the fabled city of Atlantis, as described by Plato. It is in Southern Spain, though, and not on an island as is commonly believed. Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area." This story has gotten a lot of submissions; it's worth noting that it's also shown up off Cyprus, or near Cuba, or is Crete, or... It is worth noting that that Ubar was found this way.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
This site doesn't need "satelites" to prove atlantis exists
But these days everyone's finding Atlantis
This article reminds me of the great Lucasgame Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
t s/indy4_7.jpg
:)
Screeny here: http://www.sebelinteractive.de/scummvm/images/sho
I hope there will be something interesting to find down there
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I always thought that Santorini and its adjacent islands were "Atlantis": it was one big island,but it went pompeii and thus you get a big ring of smaller islands. They have excavated and found ancient stuff, of course, etc. Same with Crete. How far do you think the story of Atlantis travelled geographically?
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Nope, I don't see it either. I think this is one of those BBC stories that sounded good until they started writing it ...
... is that part of Spain really so inaccessible that we can't just call up the local museum operator and have 'em go see if they see Atlantis in their neighborhood... heh heh, okay, scratch that.
... how on Earth can we be so sure that we've interpreted a few clay tablets here and there correctly? I know this is an arcane science, with its own rules and regulations, but I can't help feeling that such fundamental issues as the difference between the word for "coastal land" and "island" could have radically confused our understanding of ancient history...
... hmm ... odd analogy I suppose, but I'm just too lazy to smooth out the wrinkles. Like so many archaeologists before me, perhaps?
...
What I don't get is why someone just doesn't go there and start having a look around? Great, we've got satellite images
Bad Idea.
Still, this story highlights just how much we take for granted in archeology today. We can't even deal with language barriers today, here and now, and the issues they can cause for two human beings trying to understand each other
Its like, great, we've got the source, but what the heck kind of CPU does it run on, and what version of the compiler do we use to build the project with? Give someone a "snippet of C" and have them re-build the PC with it
That, and the fact that most 'modern' schools of archaeology seem to have been founded by Christian Faith movements over the years, leads me to a very nasty suscpicion that we've completely misunderstood the Ancients, too many times to be sure
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
would be if we discovered a very old, very advanced civilization that threw historians a curveball. For example, what if some ancient civilization was just as advanced as us but nuked themselves out of existence? This could explain much: the gods of Greek mythology, etc. Just a thought.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I agree. While I believe that remote sensing techniques can certainly show things like what it supposedly in these pictures, don't let someone tell you they are an expert and then believe them on that basis. If everyone did that then we'd believe all the nonsense that Richard Hoagland preaches about glass tubes on Mars and vast superstructures on the Moon.
Smeghead every day of the week.
The Mediteranean Sea has been rising for as long as it's existed (it's essentially a big basin that's filling from the other water sources around it). Cities have been built on the coast of the Mediteranean for millenia.
If we call any sunken city in the Mediteranean "Atlantis", we'll never get any work done. There are just too many of them.
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Open mind, insert foot.
The original Antiquity article is here.
Aside from a great deal of speculation about correlations between Egyptian records, tales of the Peoples of the Sea, and a selective reading of the Dialogues, the only "data" the author points to are the satellite images which may be the remains of rectangular structures. Nothing in situ to indicate dating.
As there is almost certainly evidence of Bronze Age settlements practically anywhere one cares to dig along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, this article is roughly the equivalent of speculating that an unattributed burial in a 6th century Wessex tomb must necessarily be the remains of Arthur.
Trusted by cats.
So, in near future we will have dozen places that claim to be Atlantis. Is this going to be as with Santa Claus. There are atleast ten different countries claiming to be Santa's home countries.
How do you define which is the real Atlantis? I bet there are many forgotten cities that distantly match description written almost 3000 years ago.
Can Atlantis be identified without a doubt? If so, then how?
There's a chain of islands called the Mid Atlantic ridge, which, if the water level were lowered 300-500 feet (as it was before the end of the ice age) would be a very large island. You could even call it an island continent.
Plato said atlantis was 9000 years before him, or about 11,500 years ago. We've only learned in the past couple of decades that almost exactly at that time, the mean temperature of the earth raised a significant amount in a short amount of time. If a bunch of ice (North America had a mile-thick layer of ice) melted all at once, and you lived on an island continent, it would seem that your island sank into the ocean.
Someday I'll be proven correct. I just know it.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I thought the land mass under the South pole was Atlantis, the piece fits into the Pangea puzzle , and it is said to have landed up there when the poles revesed there polarity around the same time the great lakes , and the scotish lochs where formed since those two places used to be the poles, I saw it on National Geographic or Discovery a while back
As with all of these things, the trick is that you're shown the message while listening to it, and you tend to make it fit. It's even more convincing after a few listens -- it really sounds like, "There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan." Almost poetic.
So, rings? They have the scientific method backwards. If, say, a meterologist was looking through some satellite photos happened to notice some rings, that is one thing. But some dude looking for rings in satellite photos is totally different.
It's /. so I'm too lazy to look at the article, but from the story I should point one thing:
As little as we know about alleged Atlantis, one thing is sure from Plato's tales -- Atlantis was beyond the Pilars of Hercules (Gibraltar Strait). So anything on the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian Ocean is a good candidate, whether it is in Amercia, Asia or Antarctic.
Anything on Mediterranean Sea, or Black Sea is NOT beyond the Pilars of Hercules.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Of course, the whole thing is probably an optical illusion, a la the face on mars, but I'd probably be grasping at straws too after a couple years of searching for (likely non-existent) patterns in satellite images :)
The problem is that a lot of people looking for Atlantis aren't good scientists and make stupid announcements. There are two reasons why I'm still hoping that we'll find Atlantis. Troy was assumed to be mythological right up until somebody found it. Also, Plato is very clear that Atlantis was a real place. He hears about it from an Egyptian priest who says Atlantis existed 9000 years prior. Many people assume there was a bad translation somewhere from 900 to 9000. That would make Atlantis Minoan Crete. I have faith that Plato knew what he was talking about and we'll find it someday.
-B
IAAA (I am an archaeologist)
... broad sweeps of history and identifying trends therein. eg one can say that over a 100 year period this site switched from using pots made at site y to those made at site z. We can't always say why those changes occurred - although historical facts help. Looking at a single pot can't tell us an awful lot.
Archaeology is great for looking at the 'duree longue'
With your C analogy (IAAACP - I am also a C programmer) we'd look at lots of snippets of code identify differences between them, date them (except there is no scientific method for dating code) and hypothesise as to what changes and why.
Archaeology is not a science, certainly not an 'arcane science'. It's a discipline which employs (amongst other things) scientific techniques, such as C-14 dating.
--
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Umm...the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is kinda deep for this sort of thing. I mean, sure, the Bering Strait/Land Bridge was exposed at that time, but the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a bit deeper. Plus, don't forget the reason the Ridge exists: It's the fault line between two major techtonic plates, and new crust is constantly erupting in the middle. Not exactly the most hospitible place for a civilization, I would think.
Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things" does a decent job of summing up the problem and how it works with ideas like this: People's minds are wired to look for patterns. They look for patterns that relate to other patterns they're familiar with, mostly, or those are the ones they think they see anyway. Show me a Rorschach blob, or a random scattering of data, and I'm going to try to figure out what it means. Faces on Mars! My fate, written in the tea leaves! Your character, in the lines on your palm! And so on.
In the case of Atlantis, though, it takes a special kind of thinking to ignore all the obvious political context for Plato -- his and his family's opposition to the way Athens had gone, the whole Republic-as-an-ideal-Sparta thing -- but to seize on the few physical details he describes for Atlantis. They're not missing the forest for the trees: they're imagining the forest where they imagine there's a tree. Based on two rectangles near some concentric circles, no less. Yow.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
except there is no scientific method for dating code
...If you're examining the raw data off the disk, look at the encoding. Is it big-endian or little-endian? Or is it ASCII or EBCDIC?
Sure there is. Look for deprecated system calls, or relatively new "requirements" (such as stdafx.h in C++ programs in Visual Studio. That really pisses me off.)
Then there's less reliable methods such as timestamps
It still requires some knowledge of how coding practices have changed, though.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The difference between coastal land and island wouldn't necessarily be very different from each other, and could be similar enough to cause translation errors when reading an eroded clay tablet. I study Japanese, so that's where i'll get my example from: the symbols related to water (such as beach, sea island, etc.) all contain the symbol: (ignore the dots, they are there for layout)
.\|
./|
/.|
in the symbol (and no, i can't remember the rest of the symbols). So for reasons like erosion, it could be easy to misread coast as island, or similar.
I'm not great at Japanese, but i know that there are 50,000 of those symbols, and alot are related to each other. I now know 14!
I'd say that the use of concentric rings would be relatively common in very early settlements as a basic form of self defense. Hill forts with circular earthen walls are found in England and Ireland. It is simply the shortest and simplest wall you can make around a site. I wouldn't be surprised if prehistoric settlers in Spain and England were in contact and used similar construction styles. To say that this is an automatic sign that it is Atlantis is like saying everyone who wears a baseball cap must be on a major league baseball team.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Archaeology is not a science, certainly not an 'arcane science'. It's a discipline which employs (amongst other things) scientific techniques, such as C-14 dating.
I almost belived you were an Archeolog up until you wrote that..
For something to be a science, you have to be able to do studies, using methods based on theories, and to get results that can be independently verified by repeating the study by peer scientists.
Archeology is exactly that ..
If you want an example of something that is not science, take psychoanalysis as an example. It's not even a theory, and as such, can't be disproofed. Everything is based on two subjects of Freud that he found interesting, and used to get him out of his financial troubles.
I'm sure he is laughing hysterically in his grave.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Plato's work describes a rather agressive and widespread empire. Hindu legends of the Deva Nahusha also tell of a similar, widespread empire around the same time. Atlantis is not mentioned by that name anywhere outside of Plato's work, but strikingly similar entities are told of in other place under different names.
There's lots of other myths and legends in other cultures around the world that seem to point to some sort of largish civilization at the time Atlantis was supposed to have peaks. No UFOs, no advanced technology, no silliness... just *something* that is, for the most part, still undiscovered. It's not a big deal, really. So the dawn of civilization gets pushed back a bit. So what? It'd be interesting. Look at Caral in Peru. That discovery pushed back the birth of city life and organized farming in the "New World" a full 1000 years in one shot.
As for the features being spotted by an Atlantis enthusiast, well, use scientific method here: who else is looking for it? ;-)
--- Ban humanity.
That "Atlantis" referred to most of Indonesia, under the South China Sea, since it was a full continent rather than a bunch of islands during the last ice age. It's pretty novel, and I can't recall any other work putting forth this theory (ie, anything on TLC - heh).
A Brazillian Professor has a pretty informative site about this where he talks about his research. Since they added a forum, it seems that more other people than I realized have been following this as well.
How does this work, you say? Well, if you consider the mediterranian philosophy of flat earths and rings going out, they considered the "Atlantic Ocean" to be a sort of "world ocean", not the specific ocean we call it today. Plus, there are a whole other number of Atlantis "checklist items" that the area has in its favor that really don't exist in the Mediterranian or South America (ie, lots of elephants, dual rice harvests, etc...)
Anyway, now that it's posted... I'd be interesting in seeing some other Slashdotters' opinions about it.
=)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Are we supposed to believe that the some great ancient civilization that possessed mythological technologies and a naval fleet some sort lived in a city with just 2 buildings? The map says there is a temple and a castle. That doesn't sound like a city let alone a civilization to me. Please, someone tell me what I'm missing.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
No it isn't. Many aspects of archaeology are non-repeatable. Excavation is the obvious example. If you cannot have a control and it is non-repeatable then I'd argue that it is not a science.
Secondly, although archaeology uses many scientific techniques, it is fundamentally subjective. Once you've excavated a site, got dates from objects and contexts one is still left with the subjective opinions of the primary excavator. What was Stonehenge for? Different archaeologists have different views, though they all may agree on the layout, size and age of the site. And don't even get started on Biblical archaeology!
Even before that though subjectivity comes into play - where do we dig? where are the bounds of the excavation? what methods of excavation are we going to use?
Check out some of the writings of Ian Hodder or Phil Barker to explore some of these ideas further.
BTW, IAAA.
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This sig is inoffensive.
Secondly, the ancient unit of measurement used by Plato - the stade - may have been 20% larger than traditionally assumed.
If the latter is true, one of the rectangular features on the "island" matches almost exactly the dimensions given by Plato for the temple of Poseidon.
I would love to know, if they have any particular reason for deciding that they need to redefine the size of a stade. Or if they just decided they needed to change the facts, to match the current situation.
Sure seems like one of those cases, where you could choose to make almost anything fit the description that Plato gave, with the proper adjustment to the measure of a stade.
Isn't Washington DC built in concentric circles too? Perhaps the Lincoln monument, or some such, can be said to match the temple, with teh proper adjustment to stade size, and we've actually recreated Atlantis w/o even trying.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
My $0.02 US is that the ancient city they just found is a colony of Atlantis. Atlantis was supposedly a powerhouse of a civilization. All great imperial powers set up colonies. The Greeks, the Romans, and the British. Just because this place has the rings and the temple does not mean its the *Real Slim Shady*. Think about how many places in the US are named after older cities and counties of Ireland and England (or for that matter, other cities in Europe). This could be a colony of Atlantis and the colonists chose to set up their colony just like from their homeland.
What I do find interesting that nobody has brought up here on Slashdot that's read the article is how this explains the Basques. The "homeland" of the Basques is in portions of Spain and France. Their language is not related to any other language in Europe. They claim they are the descendents of the Atlanteans. So finding this city, whether it be Atlantis or a colony thereof, easily now explains where the Basques came from.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
/begin rant The problem I have is how they choose to selectively belive whatever parts of Plato's story that suit their particular purposes. They can't accept his timescale because it flys in the face of "known" history, so the just butcher it until Atlans tis can be anywhere. It's just too hard for people to accept that the Greeks and Romans got every bit of their 'advanced' knowledege from the egyptian libraries. But if you look at every great Greek thinker, they always came back from Alexandria with thier astounding new discoveries, without fail. It's plain for me to see that these men got there grand new ideas by reading them in very old books. IMO, If you want to find Atlantis, you have to accept Plato's story as a whole, and not discount parts as it suits you. It may or may not ever be found, it may not even exist, but changing the criteria to match the find is not the way to go about it. / end rant
And this is different today, how? Our culture is loaded with myths of cosmic origin (the scientic guess work doesn't change the lack of direct observation and mythic style of presentation), national origin (George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and crossing the Delaware), and story telling (Superman, Star Wars, Tolkein).
This is greatly misunderstood- but his Dialogues were PLAYS.
This is so true. Not only of Plato, but of the Bible and any other literature both ancient and modern. When the director of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was criticized for the implausibility of an ice age developing in three days, he replied, "I had only 2 hours, and the movie is fiction, not a documentary."
It is worth noting that a story may be both myth and historical reality. A story is mythic because of the way is it told, not because it is untrue. Thus, although you might believe the story of evolution to be historically true, it is nevertheless usually told in a mythic style. "Millions of years ago, the earth was covered with a reducing atmosphere and a complex solution of dissolved chemicals - the prebiotic soup. One day ..." Similarly, I believe that the story of George Washington crossing the Delaware is historical (but not the story about the cherry tree). But both are mythic stories.
Now having made point about understanding literature in light of its intended style, let me say that a popular style today is "historical fiction". In historical fiction, the background events and significant actions of well known characters are expected to be historical, whereas the actions of other characters and day to day actions of well known characters are fictional - although consistent with the historical background.
In the same vein, many of Shakespeare's plays were the historical fiction of the day, and it is not unreasonable to use them as a source for what was generally known at the time about Richard III and other historical characters. Similarly, Plato's stories about Socrates are usually considered to be either historical fiction or "based on a true story" - as opposed to pure fiction like Star Wars.
Julius Caesar was a historical figure, yet he manages to be a Shakespearian character. Maybe he would have been a more appropriate example than Hamlet.
There are many indications that Socrates was an actual person, but that doesn't mean Plato was writing transcripts of actual conversations. Some Platonic dialogues have characters that would have been historical by the time Plato was writing, and even if any of the conversations took place, it's unlikely that Plato could have been present at more than a couple of them. I'll grant you that Plato even appears as a character in a couple of dialogues, but John Malkovich appeared in "Being John Malkovich" too.
Plus, there are a few discussions about writing/writers in Platonic dialogues that imply he's carefully crafted each dialogue for a meaning, and that the characters in place and the words put in the mouth of each character are chosen for symbolic purposes.
Now, if you still don't believe me, and I'd love to have a book handy so I could give you a quote, but Aristotle (who was Plato's student and knew him personally) said something to the effect of "Plato didn't really believe any of the literal meanings of his dialogues" (not meant to be a quote, but something to that effect. I think it was in the Metaphysics, if you want to look it up sometime). Plato's dialogues were meant to be very symbolic and guide you towards some more abstract philosophy that, for strict philosophic reasons, couldn't be written down.
And on a side note, if you've ever read any Platonic dialogues in the original Greek, it's hard to miss that they're filled with jokes, puns, and sarcasm. What's described is often impossible, or at least very improbable, to the point of being rediculous. It's been said that Plato slept with a copy of Aristophanes' plays under his pillow, and if you don't know, Aristophanes is an obscene satirist.
So yes, there was a Socrates, and there may be an Atlantis. Just like Shakespeare writing "Julius Caeser" didn't proclude the possibility of there being a real life Julius Caeser and a real life Rome. But that doesn't mean the play is accurate, and I wouldn't want to use a play as my sole source of proof.
Part of the problem is that the BBC article seems to be missing some history behind the story that makes a non-island city a possibility. Plato pretty much lifted the Atlantis (city) story from the Egyptian tale of Keftiu (as well as embellished on it), a city that supposedly existed past the Pillars of Hercules (Straight of Gibraltar today, which separates Spain and Morocco). Keftiu is rooted in the Egyptian word for Pillar and was believed to be the end of the earth where the sky was held up. Atlantis means isle of Atlas - recognize the similarity? Atlas held up the world in Greek mythology. Keftiu also wasn't necessarily an island - it can either mean the Isle of Keft or the People of Keft. So, possibly due to a simple translation error, an island was born.
This could very easily be Atlantis. Minoan Crete never made sense (it never sunk) - Santorini island made more sense as most of it blew up (flooding Minoan Crete). It seems to me, though, that it was described as "west of Egypt" and that island's really NW.
Its not exactly the ONLY story dating back to that time. India has several legends going back to that time. Most of it has been simplified over time, and a little bit too much cheesy drama added, but you still have some basis in collective BS of an event, if not fact. Sometimes the BS can tell you more than any truth anyone of the time is willing to tell.
Was there some advanced civilization back then ? Maybe. If you look to someting in more recent history you have this massive tome by Galen that it took 1800+ years to catch up with.
Just because you get lucky now and then with some freak talent super genius doesn't mean its will keep going.
I hate to say it but in the end, its the lowest common denominator of a society that gets passed on as a sure thing though the ages. When the library of alexandria went it was only the most popular, and probably cheesy tales that carried on over the ages because EVERYONE retold the tales.
Farenheit 451 was based in the purest fact. Maybe noone is trying to kill every idea, but entropy will eat up anything that isn't massively distributed and repeated. Think to your most interesting paperback in your collection. Maybe a one off book by some unknown author. It will no doubt fall apart in less than 15 years.
Now think of some book everyone has, even though it wasn't that great. Piers Anthony and Terry Prattchet are gonna be around in some archive in 1200 years like it or not. The works of Vernor Vinge, Patrick McManus, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling will be nothing but dust most likely.
Maybe there will be some saving grace in the future and they will have some Niven, Heinlein, Clarke, and Hunter S Thompson will survive. No doubt it probably won't be their best work. Entropy sucks doesn't it ?