Atlantis Found. Again.

Tufriast writes "Paul McCartney and Mythic eat your heart out! BBC News has an interesting revelation regarding the lost city of Atlantis: "American researchers claim to have found convincing evidence that locates the site of the lost kingdom of Atlantis off the coast of Cyprus."" Hey, here's an idea: The idea of an almost mythical lost civilization is common thread throughout all old human societies - much like, say, really big Floods. Perhaps there could be more then one story that fits? But, no, that wouldn't be a simplistic enough answer to be sound-bitten into oblivion.

Comments

Atlantis -- antarctica?

[madaxe42]

I remember reading a while back about the possibility that Atlantis had been on the Northern edge (yep, that'll be all of them) of the Antarctic continent, before we entered the current ice-age (we're in an interglacial at the moment, technically still an ice age). See levels would have been higher, but Antarctica/Atlantis would have had a climate similar to modern britain.

Contrasting this, early greek explorers who went to 'Atlantis' noted that the natives were 'red skinned with horse-like hair', almost identical to Christopher Columbus' description of Native Americans!

Re:Atlantis -- antarctica?

[Ubergrendle]

Unfortunately history of civilisations is not seriously considered anywhere prior to 10,000 BC, and probably more realistically 6,000 BC. There is no significant historical evidence pre-ice age that homo sapiens were anything more than small nomadic bands. Primitive language was probably available, as well as iconogaphy and basic tools. Large groupings of people would have been nigh-impossible in the absences of farming, husbandry, and written language.

Its an interesting hypothesis, but historical record does not support the notion. It would be an interesting theory though... HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard certainly filled in the pre-Ice Age gap nicely in the realm of fiction. :)

Re:Atlantis -- antarctica?

[Ubergrendle]

Stonehenge and the Spinx don't even get close to the 10,000 year mark. The nile was settled as far back as 6,000 BC, but what we're recognise as the First Dynasty of Egypt occurs as recently as 3,300 BC.

Just because something ~looks~ complex, even in comparison to modern day technology, does not make it such. 10 years ago when I was at the University of Toronto, the Egyptology masters program sent a number of students over to Egypt to prove how easy it was to build a pyramid. A team of 10 men, using nothing more complex than wood planks (greased with animal lard), a pulley, and large sticks to act as levers, were able to move 2 ton stone blocks with ease.

Stonehenge doesn't even approach the 10,000 year mark either. Roughly carbon dated to 3,000 BC as well. Those stones are NOT as hard to move as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe.

Re:More than one story that fits?

[krymsin01]

It's just as likely that a few stories migrated into other cultures via cultural diffusion. Want to see this in action? Look at the Christian Bible.

Would be nice

[Gr8Apes]

if they finally did find the actual atlantis. They believe they've found the real Troy, finding the real Atlantis will hopefully put much speculation to rest.

Personally, I'm just eager to see what they find, if it is found. Ancient archeological surprises are pretty cool, as it always astounds me how relatively advanced some of these civilizations were, to only fall back into ignorance before we finally moved into the modern age.

Plato made it up this parable.

[Charles Dodgeson]

In "western" civiliation there is no history of this story prior to Plato. Plato has a fictional character, Timeos (sp?), tell the story of Atlantis. The story is an obvious parable illustrating Plato's ideas about how things decline.

Re:Plato made it up this parable.

[nine-times]

I keep an open mind about Atlantis because Troy was ficticious right up until someone found it.

That's an interesting comparison, but at least there are indications that the Illiad, along with being a good story, may have been intended to be a sort-of "historical account". Certainly, as with many oral traditions, historical accounts become mythologised, re-interpreted with each generation, and generally skewed. However, since we don't anything like written documentation of the creation of "The Illiad", and it was supposed to be the story of how the Greek peoples united into being, together, "Greek", I find the idea that there was some historical intention hard to argue with.

We are much more certain, however, about Plato. Plato was essentially a writer of fiction, and it's commonly agreed that he had little intention of being historically accurate. That being said, it's hard to know for sure if the Atlantis myth from the dialog was even a common Greek myth at the time, or if Plato invented it out of thin air.

Additionally, with the discovery of Troy, an ancient city which archeological evidence seems to indicate was distroyed by Greeks at about the right time frame was discovered in about the right area, and many people agree that it is likely to be the city being referenced in the stories of Troy. However, this evidence verifies very little of the Greek's historical accounts of the war with Troy.

Atlantis = Plato's fairytale.

[DeafDumbBlind]

The only mention of the place comes from Plato. He was telling a story about an evil, technologically superior force( The Atlantians) getting defeated by the 'just and moral' Athenians. Plato was telling a tale with similar themes to Star Wars, etc : The just and moral will overcome the wicked and powerful.

There was nothing more to it. No other historians wrote about it, none of Plato's contemporaries made any mention of it.

Now, were there civilizations that got zapped by a flood/volcano/earthquake, etc? Sure.

But was there an advanced civilization on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that got its ass kicked by the Greeks sometime between 1200-10000 BC (Depending on if you take Plato's words of 10k years literarly or not)?
Doubt it.

I wouldn't get all excited

[belmolis]

Any new archaeological find is potentially interesting, but I wouldn't get all excited about this, for two reasons. First, nothing much is known. Sonar doesn't tell you very much, not even whether it is really an archaeological site. It is all too common for people to decide that something must be manmade because the edges are too straight or something like that, only for it to turn out to be a natural geological formation. Without further evidence, we won't know what this is.

Secondly, supposing that these are the remains of a city, what makes this one more exciting than any other? I submit that what makes it exciting is the association with the Atlantis legend of a particularly advanced society. But that is precisely the part of Plato's story that is most likely false. Even if his story is based on a real city that was submerged, it was most likely an ordinary city of its time, perhaps well off by the standards of the day, but not the amazingly advanced civilization of sci-fi movies. We can't of course rule it out entirely, but we will only have reason to believe it if actual evidence is found, and at present there isn't any.

Re:More to the point ...

[theMerovingian]

including important chronicles about Moses, Solomon, and others, were actually made up for the first time by scribes hired by King Josiah

It is important to note that the Bible does make mention of Moses recording historical and legal material in written form, as in Exodus 17:14, 24:4, and 34:27, and in Numbers 33:2. Modern scholarship would suggest that these words of Moses were passed down and later recorded in the form that we have today.

Read the first few chapters of this book for a Christian perspective on the same topic:
The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament. Ed. William LaSor, David Hubbard, and Frederic Bush. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI. 1996.

Re:More than one story that fits?

[Vinnie_333]

"Stories of fire-breathing dragons are also common among almost all of the world's cultures. That doesn't make it any less likely that they are all handed down from one great experience."

Hey, maybe dragon mythos does have basis in fact. If you ask this guy. He claims they were dinosaurs that forgot they were suppose to be extinct.

Is there a better URL? The Minoans are fascinating

[ultraworld]

I'm fascinated by the culture of the ancient Minoans, that lived in this area during the late Bronze Age. The Atlantis myth is almost certainly about them. They thrived for at least 2000 years, until a series of volcanic events around 1700 BC that appear to have destroyed their major cities (and others) and ended in the assimilation of their culture into others, most notably the Mycaenians - the ancestors of the ancient Greeks, and the beginnings of a long dark age in the Mediterranean that halved the population or more, lasted several hundred years and reduced many area cultures to pre-literacy. Our historical era begins in the dawn of literacy out of the ashes of this time.

The Minoan millennia's history is still almost completely unguessable. Archaeological sites that exist are difficult to find, sometimes obscured by this volcanic action, water (changing sea levels) or by the massive desertification that occurred in North Africa. There may be still much to learn from seawrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean, though.

These events probably also formed the factual basis for the Biblical plagues of Egypt. (huge volcano-caused climate changes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. resulting in a 'nuclear winter' lasting several years in which a significant portion of the Northern Hemisphere's population died of starvation.) The volcanic caldera of the present-day Aegean island of Santorini was probably the location of this explosion. The surviving Minoans clearly were scattered across the world...the Phoenecians, the Carthaginians, and many other ancient Semitic cultures (the Sephardic Jews and the Arabs) may all be descended from them. So were the Pelasgians. And perhaps the Philistines of the Biblical era.

The Minoans were probably the real proto-Greeks.

They are truly an enigma. It appears that they lived most of this time in peace, indeed, the remains of their cities that we have found never have walls. They had indoor plumbing, flush toilets, buildings up to five stories high. There are traces of their influence all the way from Spain to India. They were probably the model for Tolkien's "Numenorians", as well as many cultural myths.. Read Platos "Critas' and "Timmaeus' for his version of the story.. Its fascinating. They were Europe's first advanced civilization... Their written language (what little that we have) Linear A has still not been deciphered and it is one of the great mysteries in linguistics...and cryptology..

No Chinese myths of lost civilisations

[tehanu]

In Chinese mythology, there is a story of a great flood. The tale is very different from the Noah story though. Also given the nature of the story I suspect that this is due to a great flooding of the Yellow River rather related to the tales of a great flood in Asia Minor and Europe. But I can't remember any tales of a lost civilisation that disappeared beneath the waves. There are the mythological 5 emperors who were advanced in wisdom, technology, helped the Chinese people, etc. but they were very firmly based in China. I guess this means that Atlantis if it exists can't be around the Asian region then?

Erm, localisation problem.

[Gadzinka]

Every time someone finds submerged (or even simply abandoned) ruins, he claims that he has found Atlantis. Completely disregarding the only sure thing from Homer's tales, that if it even existed, Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

You can argue all you want, that "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" means "far, far away", but that still doesn't change the fact, that Cyprus, Crete, Santorini are right in the middle of Hellenistic domain!!! Hence neither "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" nor "far, far away".

Abandoned or submerged ruins of ancient civilization? Sure. Atlantis? No fucking way!

Move along, nothing to see here.

Robert

Re:More to the point ...

[Thomas Miconi]

It is very easy to see how real history can be distorted to add magic and mythological things where none existed before.

And to be honest the Chinese were rather conservative in their historic transmissions. You want to know what Europeans (folk and scholars alike) are capable of ?

Fact: There once was a germanic tribe called the Burgunds (after which Burgundy is named). Also there was a guy called Attila who kicked some serious ass more or less at the same time.

Add Germanic poets, Norse scholars (the Icelandic scribes who wrote the sagas were the intellectual elite of medieval Europe) and let it simmer for about six-seven centuries.

Result: The Nibelungenlied !

And don't even get me started about how Richard Wagner single-handedly rewrote the whole damn thing into the version that most people know today.

Thomas-

X-posted from a friend's blog

[bleaked]

The Nature of the Universe (a gooey mass of old theories and new ideas)
Pondering the subjective experience of time flowing way to fucking fast, i've come to yet another latest view on what i think the universe is and how it behaves.

I recently checked out a lecture on cosmology at the University given by a leading cosmologist in his field who informed me that omega is not equal to 1.

Quick background: Once upon a time scientists discovered the red shift, which is essentially the Doppler effect applied to light and shows that every galaxy in the universe is moving away from us. From this they decided that the universe must be expanding, and of course, an expanding universe leads to the question of whether or not this universe will continue expanding forever or eventually shrink back to a "big crunch". I was currently under the impression that they'd figured out that the universe would eventually shrink down and that it had simply existed forever and would exist forever going through cycles of blowing up, forming stars and planets etc etc etc and then shrinking down again only to blow up again.

But now i've got some guy with a Ph.D. telling me that the latest theory is that the universe will actually continue expanding forever, and even crazier than that, it appears to be expanding at an ever increasing rate.

OK, that trips me the fuck out. If there is any gravity at all, how could it possibly continue expanding faster and faster without any external energy being added to the system??? And they explain this away by not only creating "cold dark matter" but also creating "dark energy" which apparently makes up 75% of the universe's mass and has a repulsive quality stronger than gravity's attractive property. Or something. Idk, i need to read more about this. One day. When i have more time (in the past).

But i want to take this experimental evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate and play around with it.

Because there are other theories out there.

First of all there is the theory that maybe this whole time speeding up thing isn't a subjective effect but rather that time really is speeding up. And since i can't think of anyone with a Ph.D. from whom i've ripped this theory off and i came to it by my own thinking, i'm calling it my theory, until someone proves me wrong.

So like i can't even remember why i started thinking that time was speeding up, but look at the implications. If time is speeding up, that means it was once going a lot slower. Let's say that around 5,000 revolutions around the sun ago time was going really really slow. In fact, let's say the graph forms an asymptote and that at a certain point in time it was approaching infinity and essentially not moving at all. Now, let's assume that in the first "day" after this asymptote time was going so slow that it what we consider a second actually took a million of our years, or even....4.6 million if you want to entertain science and religion...

If this were true, "God" could have easily created the heavens and the earth in one day. Hell the guy had millions or billions of years to do it. We could even stretch this so far as to perfectly match it up with how long science thinks it took from the big bang until we had a solar system and a relatively cooled earth. And the next day would be going a little faster, not quite as much could have been done in that second "day", and so on and so forth throughout the creation story, eventually by the 6th day there were human beings already and eventually that exponential curve hit that special point where the timelessness felt in Eden started moving fast enough to record and these primeval beings felt the effects of aging and pain. I think this can explain quite nicely why life expectancy was so much higher back then too: Methuselah didn't live any longer than any of us, but it sure as hell felt like 900 some odd years to him!

From this I also thought about extrapolating the graph to try to predict the future. One extra

Re:More than one story that fits?

[CAIMLAS]

What you say is only true about the New Testament books. And it's only partially true.

The Old Testament is pretty much just the Torah, the Hebrew holy book. So you claims on the "Bible" are patently false in the regard to them fudging the Old Testament.

The New Testament is a compilation of multiple books that were written by the Apostles and various other people that were close to Jesus. Not all of them were included - books such as The Book of Mary and The Book of Steven were excluded. These excluded books are called the aprocraphal books of the Bible. The books they included were the ones they were the most legit - that is, the ones that could be verified to be the most original, written by people that could be traced by association to Christ, and in posession of reputable Church leaders. The earliest manuscripts of various books of the NT have been found, and it's been shown that what was put into the canonized Bible indeed meshes with the original manuscripts.

Now, the legitimacy of the books they did pick is likely suspect, in my opinion. It is claimed by the modern Church that the Bible was dictated by God, to man, and that the selection of books was also dictated by God.

I don't personally buy this, due to the various political motivations, as well as the unlikelyhood. I think it far more likely that the choice of books was strongly influenced by the aspiring political motivations and religious beliefs of those picked to select the included books. I don't recall whether the people selected were Jewish rabis, priests of the old order of religions, or even the leaders of the Christian church of the day. I don't doubt that depending on which group, or combination of group members, selected the Bible, it had an outcome on the final books chosen. For instance, there are books that talk about Christ potentially being married, and kissing Mary Magdeline "passionately" on the lips, and him saying that man should treat his fellow man in such a fashion. I don't recall if this was a legit book (chronologically), but it obviously wasn't included.

I'd say that there's certainly a lot of truth in the Bible, and that it presents a good moral guideline, or handbook, if you will, for living. I don't think that serious alteration attempts were made, in the least. I do think that it was made from a composition of stories, written by mortals, and that, when taken in it's componet parts, it is imperfect. As a whole, it provides a template to live by, which if taken as the whole that it is, will provide someone with the knowledge and wisdom to live a spiritually fruitful life.

That said, I am a Christian, believing Jesus was the Son of God, and that he died for my sins. I don't know whether the definition of 'sin' is definate, or if it's an abstract principle. I do know that my observations of the world lead me to believe that Christianity, in it's purest form (Love God with your whole being; love man as yourself) is the best thing out there and that it is Truth. You can have truth without being completely factual - look at any ficticious story with a moral.

Re:More to the point ...

[RobotRunAmok]

Oh, it's in Wikipedia. It must be true.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you...

I thought I was the only one sitting here scratching my head and murmuring "WTF?!?" every time wikipedia was cited as if it was some kind of legit reference on par with Britannica. I'm guessing that on that parallel Bizarro world where blogs are regarded as journalism, the wikipedia can be viewed as a reference, but, man, I'm sure glad I don't live there...