Jun 9, 2021
Finding the Lost City of Atlantis
Proof that Plato’s Dialogues are both Historical and Allegorical
According to Alfred North Whitehead, philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”, and this is particularly interesting in regards to Atlantis. You see, according to academics, who are all the descendants of Plato’s Academy (including his best pupil, Aristotle), Atlantis was nothing more than a fictional island mentioned in an allegory regarding the hubris of nations. Granted, it’s true that in Timaeus and the unfinished Critias, Atlantis does represent an antagonist naval power that besieges “Ancient Athens”, which was the embodiment of the ideal state in The Republic. Nonetheless, Plato repeatedly stated that Atlantis was a real place, and I, for one, believe him. Truth be told, I think Plato lacked the kind of imagination that would have been necessary to create such a fantasy land in such great detail.
The thing is that like the great philosopher Socrates, Atlantis was much more than a mere literary device used by Plato. Ultimately, Socrates was a real person, and Atlantis was a real place, albeit somewhat fictionalized in Timaeus and Critias. This is especially pertinent since Plato is the oldest surviving written source of knowledge regarding the otherwise lost city. This means that archaeological evidence needs to be used to either prove or disprove what Plato wrote. That’s the best way to properly separate fact from fiction. As an example of what I mean by this, Plato stated that there were “alternate zones of sea and land, larger and smaller, encircling one another”. The way he described it, “there were two of land and three of water”. So, my point is that the ruins of the city should be unmistakable.
This was ancient city planning at its finest, expertly fusing sacred geometry with utility, combining the land and sea. As part of this, the first land ring was the religious sector of the city, where priests performed sacrificial rites in temples, primarily devoted to the god of the ocean who was a powerful merman deity, much like Poseidon in the ancient Greek pantheon. In addition to that, the second land ring housed the soldiers that gave the Atlanteans their military might. They were well-equipped with 10,000 battle-ready chariots, among many other implements of war. As part of that arsenal, the second water ring was a naval harbor that docked at least 1,200 warships. Along with this, the third water ring functioned as a means of public transport, ferrying citizens from one part of the city to another.
According to Plato, “they bridged over the zones of sea which surrounded the ancient metropolis, making a road to and from the royal palace...they built the palace in the habitation of the god and of their ancestors, which they continued to ornament in successive generations, every king surpassing the one who went before him to the utmost of his power until they made the building a marvel to behold”. In Critias he then went on to say that the “stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the center island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black, and a third red”. More importantly, this kind of attention to detail is what makes finding the lost city possible.
With that being said, based on Plato’s accounts, there were a number of specific features by which Atlantis could be identified, such as the presence of white, black, and red rocks, as was just indicated. Of course, there were also the concentric circles of land and water that were described, as well. On top of that, the Atlanteans were said to possess an abundance of copper and gold. This allowed them to become the first copper smelters in human history. Plus, the land was said to have been grazed by wild elephants, which further restricts where Atlantis could have been, merely based on the places that elephants are known to have lived prior to the Holocene Epoch, which began 12,000 years ago at the close of the Paleolithic Ice Age. Finally, the island of Atlantis was said to have been destroyed by a series of back-to-back natural disasters. Together, these things form a kind of checklist to use in the search for Atlantis.
So, the question is, does anyplace from anywhere around the world match Plato’s description of Atlantis? Well, the answer is a resounding yes, and the remnants are surprisingly landlocked in a forgotten corner of what is now the Sahara Desert, not at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, or even the South China Seas, as one might expect. As proof of this, a NASA satellite took the first picture of what is known as the Richat Structure, many years ago. In that photograph, the mud-buried remnants of the lost city are clearly, and unmistakably, visible from a high altitude, even with the severely eroded features. More importantly, the dimensions line up perfectly with the measurements given by Plato.
Surprisingly, the site is situated in what is now the remote country of Mauritania. As part of this grand reveal, since the design and scale of the “Eye of the Sahara” so closely matches Plato’s description of Atlantis, two explorers set off in search of the site to find out anything and everything they could about the copper-smelting fish-worshipers who once lived there. As a result of those efforts, George Alexander and Natalis Rosen found an abundance of ancient artifacts from a prehistoric maritime culture dating back more than 10,000 years, putting the objects well within the range of the antediluvial period in which the Atlanteans must have lived. With that being said, the Richat Structure is without a doubt the no-longer-lost city of Atlantis.
Going back to the origin of the Atlanteans, the Chalcolithic was the period right after the Neolithic. This actually began thousands of years earlier than textbooks assert, tracing back at least 11,600 years. It goes as far back as the end of the last glacial period of the Ice Age when sea levels rose by a few hundred feet. As a result, the so-called “myth” of the deluge emerged from anecdotal disaster reports that were handed down from one generation to the next in an effort to remember what had happened. As Graham Hancock and other authors have indicated, the survivors sent out an envoy of emissaries, in an effort to help rebuild civilization. Circa 9600 BCE, they mentored the people who built the Great Sphinx in Egypt (back when it was a lion) and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey (in its original form). Thus, Atlantis was the true “Cradle of Civilization”.
Of course, back then, Africa was inundated with a sea-level that was a few hundred feet higher than it is now, so the continent had a radically different coastline. As part of this, there is a legend about a great port city, that had been violently destroyed by an earthquake, a tsunami, and a mudslide in rapid succession. This was a reference to Atlantis, the rather primitive mortarless stacked rock walls of which all came tumbling down in the natural disasters. Then, the epic tale of this tragedy was told and retold until the lost legendary land found its way into the extensive historical records of the ancient Egyptians. After all, Egypt was once a colony of the Atlantean Empire. As part of this, in 568 BCE, the history of the first great civilization on Earth was told to one of the seven sages of ancient Greece by an Egyptian priest named Sonchis.
The studious Athenian who was shown those records of unsurpassed antiquity from a civilization of incomparable power and prestige was none other than the founding father of democracy. This is particularly important to note because six generations after Solon died Plato obtained his notes, including the history of Atlantis. Then, Plato referenced a real prehistorical place in Timaeus as well as Critias by using those meticulous accounts of the distant past, as told to Solon by Sonchis, who literally read the writing on the wall (of the temple of Neith, in the city of Sais). However, Plato inevitably made Atlantis allegorical in the process. As a consequence of this, Aristotle thought Plato was being metaphorical, which he was, but at the same time wasn’t. So, the bottom line was that Plato fully believed that Atlantis was real, but Aristotle did not.
With that in mind, based on Plato’s description of the island, during the Age of Atlantis, the sea washed right up against the cliffs of the Adrar Highlands. Again, you have to understand that this was during the time of the “Great Flood”, so global geography was much different than it is now. The Adrar Plateau which is currently well above sea level used to be beachfront property for the Atlanteans, around 12,000 years ago. This explains why the patron deity of their capital city was the god of the sea, and why Atlantis was the hub port of the world. It was protected by a natural barrier of mountains in the north, which opened to the south, thus allowing ships to travel in relative safety. This was the key to the success of their society.
In this way, Atlantis played a crucial role in the evolution of our species. Long before the Sumerians built their first port city, the Atlanteans had established something far grander. During the Age of Atlantis, the ancient metropolis was the central hub of global maritime trade, around which the entire ancient world moved. It was also the richest fishing area on Earth, again making it crucial to human evolution. In spite of this, the myth of Atlantis is relegated to the lunatic fringe who write alternative histories that read like science fiction and fantasy novels. This is why it’s so unfortunate that the true history of Atlantis is more or less lost. Fortunately, now that researchers know where to look, given enough time, there’s a good chance that archaeologists and anthropologists will be able to piece together more and more facts about the Atlantean Empire. Then, and only then, people will be able to pick up where Plato left off and finish telling the story of Atlantis, which can then be told and retold forever…
