Researchers Find Possible Atlantis Location

An AC writes"It seems that Plato's Atlantis has a new spot candidate. Some archaeologist used satellite imagery to identify a structure in an once tsunami-ed Spanish plain. From the article: '"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters. "It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.'"

Comments

Yawn

[mseeger]

Yet another repeating news story.... How many times Atlantis has been located by now? 100+ times at least. What's the next news? Transparent Aluminium again?

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument. His contemporaries understood this, but eventually it got out of hand and people took it literally. Atlantis really doesn't exist. There may be a lot of "lost" cities and small civilizations, but I doubt any of them are Atlantis.

Re:Yawn

[schmidt349]

This from a soon-Ph.D in Classics.

Atlantis was a story Plato made up in the course of a philosophical discussion. It goes no further back in the literary record unless you want to twist a couple mentions of "Atlas' island" in the earlier corpus like balloon animals.

Re:Yawn

[Trepidity]

Even this particular proposal isn't new. A half-dozen archaeologists have been studying this national park in southern Spain as a possible site for the past 15 years or so, and this is just the latest round of press releases.

Re:Yawn

[Dan541]

It's only a matter of time until people start searching for middle earth.

Re:Yawn

[Bender0x7D1]

It's only a matter of time until people start searching for middle earth.

Middle-earth can be found in the area we now call New Zealand.

Re:Yawn

[schmidt349]

Yeah, and _they_ had records going back to 8,000 BCE that the aliens gave them. Unfortunately the data was all on NASA 1" tape, so the Egyptians couldn't read it until Plato cheerfully loaned them an Ampex machine...

Re:Yawn

[Scrameustache]

The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument.

People used to say that about Troy. Then someone dug it up.

Re:Yawn

[schmidt349]

See, a lack of evidence leads _reasonable_ people to extreme skepticism. It is not an open invitation to invent a crackpot theory and then plug your ears while shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

Moreover, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you want to take Plato at his word you don't just get to point to a previously-undiscovered set of ruins somewhere in the Med and say "Atlantis!" You need to prove

a) that it was inhabited 8,000 years ago
b) that Athens was inhabited 8,000 years ago
c) That an apocalyptic war was fought between the two

because these are all parts of Plato's story.

You also don't get to say "the Egyptians told Solon/Plato/whoever" because archaeology proves that at the alleged time of this apocalyptic war the Egyptians (if you can call the Faiyum A culture "Egyptian" for any reason other than that the happened to leave near the Nile river delta) were still a Neolithic people with no system of writing.

Moreover, since all available evidence tells us that b) is not only not true but impossible, you're putting the cart before the horse trying to prove a) or c). If someone tells me, in earnest, that the CIA has been instructing him to kill the Pope by way of a radio embedded in his brain, nothing short of a CT scan showing me the radio and a bug detector showing signal origin at Langley is going to convince me that he's not insane. I don't start speculating on why the CIA would want the pope dead.

I realize that this type of reasoning from evidence rather than speculation is not the usual fare at the UFOlogy seminars and astrology club meetings you drag your knuckles to every night, but do pay attention, you might learn something.

Re:Yawn

[blincoln]

"The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument. His contemporaries understood this, but eventually it got out of hand and people took it literally."

I've seen this statement before, and I've always wondered - is there a Cliff's Notes version of the alleged supporting evidence for it? I mean, actual statements from people of Plato's era along the lines of "that Plato sure does like inventing ancient cities that never existed as back-story for his work! I bet in a few thousand years, people will think Atlantis actually existed, even though all of us here in Ancient Greece know that that is completely false!".

I ask because art critics and members of the "soft sciences" have a terrible habit of making statements like this, and then those statements become accepted as fact, when really it was just someone's opinion. One of the great things about art is that different people take away different things from each work, but the downside is that many of those people also assume that whatever *they* took away was what the creator of that work actually intended.

Re:Yawn

[ebuck]

Well, either the ancient historian Strabo is lying when he said that Aristotle said that Atlantis was just "made up" to further examine a hypothetical argument, or Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, but without some "key" knowledge of one of his most important thought experiments, or Plato was telling the truth but he couldn't get his key pupil to agree?

Aristotle's works are many things, but they don't seem to indicate that he had an axe to grind against Plato, at least not one so sharp as to make the argument that Plato was a liar. I'm inclined to believe that Aristotle was right, that his teacher made up Atlantis to flesh out an argument, much like Ann Ryan made up a series of books (and heroes) to flesh out her argument.

The weakness in the above belief is that it's more-than-second-hand information. The works of Aristotle which purport to refute the real existence of Atlantis were destroyed. We only have Strabo's account of what Aristotle said about what Plato meant to go by.

That there is some evidence that Strabo truly believed in Atlantis and that he still bothered to write Aristotle's refutation of it's existence lends me to believe in Strabo's accounting of Aristotle's refutation more.

After reading a description of Atlantis, I doubt you'll ever find it (or that it ever existed). I have a hard time believing that any civilization could be so orderly to get all citizens to build their cities in circles. And building a circular canal means a spoke and ring system of waterways, when any semi-sane engineer would just settle for a spoke and hub system, no need to lay out perfect rings. Even enormously planned communities like Washington, D. C. and Brasilia have less structural control than what's implied.

Re:Yawn

[Penguinisto]

Mind you, I'm not saying Atlantis is real, but... ...Heinrich Schliemann was laughed at until he unearthed the city of Troy. They found what is believed to be the cities referred to as Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as the Philistine city of Gath (e.g. Goliath's crib). The tomb of Tutankhamen was considered to be a myth.

Not all tales have pure fabrication as their foundation. Sometimes they drag in real places into the picture.

I'm thinking that Plato caught wind of (or maybe even grew up with) the oral stories surrounding the Santorini eruption ~1,000 years before he was born. He likely took that and ran with it.

Horatio Caine says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the idea of Atlantis... *sunglasses* ...isn't dead in the water after all.

YEAAAAAAAAAH!

Atlantis...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like they don't know anything about Tartessos. That would be a real explanation for the ruins found.

Atlantis - Plato's example of Athens in a Play

[Anonymous Coward]

Egad! The invention of "Atlantis" was part of a political satire play written by Plato to show how Athens (Represented by a mythical kingdom of Atlantis in the play) had squandered its destiny and reputation by dominating Greek shipping by warfare and demanding tithes from other Greek nations. The mythical Atlantis represented Athens in the play and was sunk to show that the result of such political arrogance resulted in destruction. There never was such a place, nor was Plato doing anything else but critiquing Athens without mentioning it by name. (He remembered the fate of Socrates.) You just as well might search for the land of the Golden Fleece. (Wait! They did just that 200 years ago. Today we laugh at the idea knowing it was just a story.)

Make it stop

[Samantha Wright]

The truly boggling thing about people who believe in Atlantis is that they believe in Atlantis. Even Wikipedia doesn't. (Or, at least, whatever corrupt bureaucrat obsessively controls that article.) Seriously, Slashdot, this is the kind of crap we're told we should expect from the "History" Channel, not our favourite hyperbolic tech news site!

Plato has a lot to answer for ...

[Kittenman]

I guess these things get funded by crackpots with more money than sense; the same breed who want to track down Noah's ark, Moses's sandal and the gourd left behind by Brian.

Atlantis real location

[lordshipmayhem]

I have it on very good authority that Atlantis is not in Spain. It's in Florida, assigned to Launch on Need Mission STS-335. Hopefully it never is needed, but instead goes directly to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

I'm appalled

[zill]

Is anyone else sickened by these people that capitalize on natural disasters?

Re:Thera/Santorini?

[rhathar]

There is no "general source" for the Atlantis "legend". There's a very specific one. It's Plato. He made it up for a story.

Typical!

[savi]

In any historical discussion on slashdot, it's only a matter of time until the gourd-deniers show up. Bunch of crazies. They're the only group more persistent than creationists and more dense than global warming deniers.

Re:Billy Batts

[coredog64]

The gods of our legends were there:

Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, the magician, the guy who invented Coca Cola. Also, Jane Fonda was there.

Oops -- I thought we were talking about the lost city of Atlanta.