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

[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

[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!

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.