[HN Gopher] Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?
___________________________________________________________________
Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?
Author : petburi
Score : 121 points
Date : 2023-11-06 11:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (greekreporter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (greekreporter.com)
| NeoTar wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any
| headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word
| no."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| Larrikin wrote:
| Thank you for the Wikipedia article that is linked to in every
| thread where the original article ends in a question mark.
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| As a young boy I decided to discover Atlantis. I deduced that it
| must be under water but not too deep. So I just searched for the
| shallowest place of the Mediterranean and declared it Atlantis.
|
| Despite this early breakthrough no further discoveries have been
| made.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Interestingly, Plato claims that the waters beyond the Pillars
| of Heracles are very shallow and full of mud shoals because of
| the sinking of Atlantis. I've always thought this a puzzling
| detail, since a) it certainly isn't shallow now and b) it would
| have been well-known at the time whether it was shallow or not,
| since the Greeks were well-established in that area, so Plato
| could have been easily refuted in his own time...unless it
| really was shallow, and that's changed in the time since due to
| some geological process we're unaware of.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > since the Greeks were well-established in that area
|
| Wait, were they? I thought they never really made it much
| past the southeastern coast of Spain, the west being full of
| Phoenicians.
| Amezarak wrote:
| "Well-established" may be too strong wording, but Greek
| sailors and traders were certainly familiar, and people
| generally were familiar with Gades and other settlements. I
| am not sure if there really was a Greek colony as well at
| the time of Plato in the Portus Menestheus, although the
| Greeks believed they had founded one there after the Trojan
| War.
|
| There's also Greek stories and lesser familiarity as well
| at some point with Tartessos (another possible Atlantis.)
| jcranmer wrote:
| I'm not sure of the chronology of ancient Greek writers,
| but Greek geography was largely aware of the Atlantic coast
| from roughly the English Channel to around Guinea.
| johngladtj wrote:
| There are places that could classify as shallow ie: cape
| bojador
| tremon wrote:
| Such very shallow waters and mud shoals do exist on the north
| side of Europe, following the flooding of Doggerland (around
| 6000 BC). Those waters are "beyond" the Pillars of Heracles
| if you circumnavigate the entire Iberian coastline. It's
| likely that tales of this region could have made it to
| Greece, but I don't think many Greeks had seen it themselves.
| themanmaran wrote:
| > In the 16th century BC ... this volcanic island erupted.
|
| > the eruption emptied the magma chamber beneath the island. This
| caused large sections of the island to literally collapse 'into
| the depths of the sea'.
|
| I wonder if any exploration has been done in the (now submersed)
| portions of outer ring. Was this land fully above the surface and
| previously inhabited? If so can divers find any kind of artifacts
| in that submersed outer rim.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I suspect any explosion of the caldera volcano that would blow
| the island out of existence would thrown artifacts far out to
| sea instead of burying them.
|
| Nobody would survive an explosion that destroyed the inner most
| island, the middle ring island, and half the outer island. All
| bronze age people would know was that there was a great noise,
| some smoke, and then they whole island was gone into the sea.
| Of course they would assume it sank rather than got blown up.
|
| Finding artifacts from 3,700 years ago that were thrown out to
| sea would be difficult. Differentiating them from other
| artifacts of similar age in that area would sadly be beyond
| belief.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > any explosion of the caldera volcano that would blow the
| island out of existence would thrown artifacts far out to sea
| instead of burying them.
|
| Modern Santorini has a crescent shape because of the "missing
| middle" part.
|
| But there is also a site called Akrotiri, which is still on
| land, and was buried in volcanic ash. It is a bit like
| Pompei, only about twice as old:
|
| > The settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption
| sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash,
| which preserved the remains of fine frescoes and many objects
| and artworks. Akrotiri has been excavated since 1967 after
| earlier excavations on Santorini.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_(prehistoric_city)
|
| There are many artefacts there, pottery and others.
|
| It's quite possible that other settlements were blown into
| the water and not buried.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told
| literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them
| symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now
| dumb enough to take them literally."
|
| --John Dominic Crossan
| mablopoule wrote:
| I sometime wonder if in the 25th century people will be
| searching for the exact location of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
|
| To be fair, Troy was also mostly thought to be mystical before
| Heinrich Schliemann went on a quest to find it (and
| subsequently destroyed most of it as he used explosives to
| perform archeological digs).
| abakker wrote:
| Evidence supports that it is, in fact, located just outside
| of Orlando, FL.
| some_random wrote:
| Unfortunately it was mostly demolished by the explosives
| used to dig it up
| arethuza wrote:
| Or on the banks of Loch Shiel in Scotland?
|
| [NB This is based on me recognising the landscape in some
| of the movies, apparently the books say it is near Dufftown
| - which is on the other side of Scotland].
|
| I had also assumed it was the school on Lauriston Place in
| Edinburgh, but apparently that's definitely not true...
| ggm wrote:
| i.e. George Heriots
| dboreham wrote:
| Definitely is true. She also sent her own kids there.
| arethuza wrote:
| Apparently Rowling thought of Hogwarts before moving to
| Edinburgh - but it seems a _bit_ of a coincidence that
| Heriots school is right next to the graveyard with Tom
| Riddle 's grave:
|
| https://www.pottertour.co.uk/blog/george-heriots-school-
| harr...
|
| Mind you - I'm not really that big a Harry Potter fan but
| I did live in that part of Edinburgh for many years and
| my son went to Heriots after adventures at other
| schools...
| FFP999 wrote:
| "We know that they generally had good diplomatic
| relationships and there was a great deal of cross-border
| trade, but the historical record is still unclear about the
| exact relationship between the United States of America and
| the Magic Kingdom."
| lapphi wrote:
| The way things are going, history may see you as the
| Nostradamus of this century.
| FFP999 wrote:
| I'll take it.
| adolph wrote:
| _Over drinks one night, Cardozo shared with Brosnan a
| short, somewhat cheeky passage in DeMille 's 1959
| autobiography in which the director cryptically confirmed
| the burial. The book's section reads: "If, 1,000 years from
| now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of
| Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the
| amazing news that Egyptian civilisation... extended all the
| way to the Pacific Coast of North America... The sphinxes
| they will find were buried there when we had finished with
| them."_
|
| https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230212-a-city-under-
| the...
| FFP999 wrote:
| FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGIST: "We've found what we believe to be the
| ruins of Platform 9 3/4." [gestures at ruins of Slough
| railway station]
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The one i like is imagining some poor schnook of a grad
| student in 500 years writing a dissertation on "american pie"
| and the complex interrelationship of food culture and
| religion, and if the Jester in the song is the same as the
| joker that batman killed (or didn't), and if so was he
| talking to the thief in the watchtower -- and what really
| does that have to do with band camp?!
|
| https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/10/12/bye-
| bye...
| moomin wrote:
| The funny thing is this has already happened. They erected a
| platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross. The only problem being that a)
| it doesn't even vaguely correspond to the description in the
| book and b) in fact, from the description it's likely they
| were actually talking about old St Pancras station.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Well they couldn't put it in St. Pancras because that was
| already in use by former Norse gods waiting to get into
| Valhalla.
|
| https://www.scld.org/st-pancras-station-sparks-
| imaginations/
| gpderetta wrote:
| Life imitates art.
| toyg wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/221B_Baker_Street
|
| Humans model their world on stories.
| contingencies wrote:
| _The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive.
| People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic.
| But when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in
| space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed
| to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality -
| people don 't seem to notice - this is a virtual reality.
| These are all ideas - ideas that have been forced into
| matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our
| imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in
| which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of
| baseline of what it is to be human._ - Terence McKenna
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| There's no reason to believe that what Evans found was the
| mythological Troy (note the "mythological"). Maybe it was the
| city called Wilusa by the Hittites, or maybe it wasn't, and
| maybe Wilusa was Troy ("Ilion") or maybe it wasn't. There's
| no way to know for sure.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad#Hitti.
| ..
|
| Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of
| Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical
| account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient
| as the Iliad, after all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
|
| As to Schleimann, he was certainly all too ready to
| "discover" elements of the Homeric epics. For example, "the
| mask of Agamemnon":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon
|
| Or "The Jewels of Helen":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File.
| ..
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Crossan's work as a scholar and pop-history author involved a
| particular sceptical interpretation of very early Christianity
| that is not shared by most of the sceptical historians of early
| Christianity. So, his scepticism is particularly extreme.
|
| There are plenty of Mediterranean historical fiction-like tales
| where an original grain of truth does seem promising. Besides
| popular cases like Atlantis, and Troy as a site, there's e.g.
| Aeneas coming from Troy to Rome as a possible reflection of an
| Bronze Age-collapse era migration from western Anatolia to
| Italy bringing the Etruscan language.
| bnralt wrote:
| Crossan always seems to be well respected whenever I've heard
| him mentioned by other academics that study historical
| Christianity. That's not to say that he doesn't have some
| heterodox views, but they at least seem to exist within the
| broader academic consensus.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| There's no way to figure out which lost event/place is
| symbolical and which is real other than looking for the real
| thing long enough.
|
| I dislike this quote since it basically discourages further
| research.
| seiferteric wrote:
| I basically just says, if you think this might be real, you
| are dumb, for no reason, which is itself dumb.
| astrange wrote:
| In Atlantis's case, Plato's story is based on quoting someone
| who lived 150 years before him, also includes Poseidon as a
| historical figure, and Aristotle called it symbolical in his
| own writing[0].
|
| [0] not sure where, have only seen other people mention this
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| And yet in Plato's Timaeus, you find statements like this:
|
| > On the side toward the sea, and in the center of the whole
| island, there was a plain which is said to have been the
| fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again,
| and also in the center of the island, at a distance of about
| fifty stadia (one stadia=606 feet), there was a mountain, not
| very high on any side.
|
| > And, beginning from the sea, they dug a canal three hundred
| feet in width and one hundred feet in depth, and fifty stadia
| in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone,
| making a passage from the sea up to this,
|
| > Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut
| from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land
| which came next of equal breadth; but the next two, as well the
| zone of water as of land, were two stadia, and the one which
| surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The
| island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five
| stadia.
|
| These are features of a geographical account.
| lolinder wrote:
| > It was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill,
| and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.
| But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the
| City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next
| faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro
| upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the
| Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face
| of the hill.
|
| > And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it
| went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock
| whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of
| the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping
| of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old,
| there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the
| Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-
| keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the
| topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so
| that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a
| mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate
| seven hundred feet below.
|
| > The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was
| delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope
| ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High
| Court, and the place of the Fountain before the feet of the
| White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to
| the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a
| thousand feet above the plain.
|
| This is also a geographical account, by Tolkien of Minas
| Tirith.
|
| There are actually striking similarities in style, which is
| unsurprising given that Tolkien was a scholar who patterned
| his works on ancient epics. The main difference is that the
| ancient text has more numbers, which, given the timescales a
| historical Atlantis would have to have occurred on, were
| certainly not literal measurements recorded by Plato or a
| contemporary.
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| No measurements though
| lolinder wrote:
| There is one--"a thousand feet"--but also you can't use
| the existence of measurements as evidence of
| authenticity.
|
| For one, those measurements can't possibly have been
| recorded by Plato or a contemporary, because if there
| were a historical Atlantis all claims point to it being
| centuries older than Plato. Any numbers he's using are
| either completely fictitious or passed down and distorted
| through generations. Either way, Plato clearly didn't
| care that they were accurate.
|
| Second, ancient literature is kind of obsessed with
| giving precise measurements for things that can't
| possibly be accurate. The numbers are inserted to give a
| sense of grandeur, and are just a part of the style of
| this kind of work. Where they seem odd and out of place
| to us, they were common at the time. See the Bible,
| Herodotus, and many others.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Any major event must last 40 days and 40 nights, for
| example.
| bombcar wrote:
| Tolkien's writing is accurate and descriptive enough to
| not only produce an atlas [5], and a legendarium of
| plants [24356] but for said atlas to not only describe
| the routes, but the types of land/mountains traversed,
| and how they would have come to be.
|
| [5] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-
| Karen-Fons...
|
| [24356] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Flora_of_Middle-
| Earth
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| But, how do we know the atlas etc are accurate? There's
| no real places or objects to compare them with.
| bombcar wrote:
| They're accurate to the text, and "how things are on
| earth" which is all we can compare them to.
|
| The point being you can have a description of an entirely
| fantastical area with no inherent contradictions.
| atmosx wrote:
| Isn't Tolkien's Atlantis reference Numenor? Like, he didn't
| change a comma :-P
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Yeah, a fictional geographical account. What about that
| description suggests it's real to you? If it's the specific
| measurements used, then I don't think you've read very much
| ancient literature, because that's not at all an uncommon way
| of describing fictional things.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The "physical details" of the new jerusalem are given in
| exhausting detail in Revelations, but this is well understood
| by scholars to be rife with symbolic and numerological intent
| and was not likely to have been intended by john of patmos to
| be understood as representing any material place.
|
| Plato, fond of such rhetorical devices himself, is more than
| likely to be following a similar game.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Plato frequently gave detailed descriptions of utterly
| fanciful situations. He wasn't a historian and wasn't
| particularly interested in details of the physical world. He
| wrote dialogues about philosophy and was interested in the
| world of forms, and any story he told that was seemingly
| grounded reality was in service of making a larger point. In
| fact, even the dialogues themselves purported to be actual
| conversations between real people and almost certainly were
| not in most cases, no matter how much detail he provided
| about the event.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| "Ancient people where to stupid to imagine measurements in a
| fictional account, therefore the presence of measurements is
| evidence of the story being factional" is a quite arrogant
| take, don't you think?
| rightbyte wrote:
| An island caving into the sea is not more far fetched than a
| city being covered with rock flowing like water.
| davidw wrote:
| Similar story with Oregon's Crater Lake.
| buddy4711 wrote:
| counterexamples
|
| city of troy
|
| niebelungenlied
|
| noah's ark
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The city of Troy is not positively identified actually.
|
| The Song of the Nibelungs has many purely fictional parts.
|
| Noah's Ark and the Flood are mere myths with 0 proof of any
| kind of historical reality, and 0 chance of there ever being
| one.
| buddy4711 wrote:
| the city of troy was found
|
| what is fictional about the niebelungen?
|
| the ark is about the creation of the black sea
|
| there are stories that might be 100000 years old
| https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-
| astronom...
| ghaff wrote:
| I thought it had been pretty well established for a very long
| time that, to the degree there was some historical basis for the
| legend of Atlantis, it is probably tied in with the Minoan
| civilization and Santorini.
|
| While an interesting enough piece, it certainly isn't a novel
| theory.
| Amezarak wrote:
| This is one theory, but it is certainly not established or the
| consensus view.
| ghaff wrote:
| To the degree that there's a consensus view, it's probably
| that Atlantis didn't exist in reality. (Or, at best, is based
| on very weak echoes of something that existed.) To the degree
| that it is based, however loosely on historical reality,
| Santorini is one of the better candidates.
| pard68 wrote:
| I was under the impression that Atlantis had to be further west
| towards Spain as it was something of a gateway to the
| Mediterranean.
| regularfry wrote:
| It is in the right place to be a "gateway to the Mediterranean"
| if you're coming south from the Aegean. If you squint a bit.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| More like Cuba.
| kitd wrote:
| Southern Spain, in the Dona Ana National Park near Cadiz, was
| the location decided on by this project:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42072469
| tgv wrote:
| Just like someone had very convincing evidence that Delphi
| was actually Delft, in The Netherlands. I can't find any
| reference to it anymore, but he published a book. Odysseus
| apparently traveled the North Sea, or something silly like
| that.
|
| Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Troy_Once_Stood
|
| Troy was located in Cambridgeshire.
| pard68 wrote:
| Makes sense if true. The Norse were renown in the Arabian
| and Rome as excellent mercenaries. I suspect travel
| northward occurred as well.
| wholien wrote:
| perhaps also related to the "Sea Peoples" during the bronze age
| collapse ~3,0000 years ago?
|
| Could see how the people of the Aegean could produce myths like
| Atlantis when they themselves were invading Egypt and most likely
| became the Philistines of the Old Testament, aka Goliath's people
| (local greek pottery discovered there, as well as descriptions of
| helmets etc lend credence to Philistines being the invading
| Greeks)
| csomar wrote:
| The sea people are probably what we consider now barbarians.
| They can be powerful when an empire is going through a weak
| period but they do not have an established civilization (they
| are nomads and survive from plunder)
| Maken wrote:
| For what I understand, the Sea Peoples invasions are the basis
| for the Iliad stories, with real Troy being destroyed in the
| Bronze Age collapse.
| kromem wrote:
| Kind of. Homer is combining two separate events into one.
|
| You have the LBA Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia establishing
| a foothold which correlates to the catalogue of ships
| (~1400-1350 BCE).
|
| And then you have the sea peoples conquest of Troy taking it
| back from the Hittites in the early Iron Age (~1200-1180
| BCE).
|
| In between that time you have letters from the Hittites
| pursuing a refugee asking the Ahhiyawa to hand him over from
| Troy (so presumably the pre-Greeks already had influence over
| Troy), then later referring to their own vassal in charge of
| the city.
|
| The sea peoples are primarily Anatolian and from the Aegean
| isles. They don't seem to be from the Greek mainland, whereas
| the Mycenaeans were.
|
| So you have a predominantly Greek story of the initial LBA
| conquest, and then a quite mixed group conquering their own
| homelands which happens in the early Iron Age.
|
| Homer rolls them up into one story of a predominantly Greek
| conquest of Troy, and as a result the Greeks had an entirely
| broken picture of the LBA/EIA period, from Perseus being his
| own grandfather based on the sources to thinking the
| Argonauts (a sea people story) happened before the Mycenaean
| catalogue of ships when it was the other way around.
|
| You can even match details in both parts of the story to
| independent events recorded in Egypt during each of the
| respective periods.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Yes, it's well established that Philistines were Greek sailors
| that were invading Egypt. After Revolt of Maccabees against
| Greek Seleucid empire (Jewish holiday of Hannukah), a
| Philistine Gaza that was a Greek stronghold, was conquered by
| one of the revolt leaders (Jonathan the Hasmonean).
| kromem wrote:
| You actually see the story about an elite sea peoples warrior
| being killed by a shepherd throwing a stone in the Argonautica.
|
| The thing is, it's shortly after their prophet Mopsus died in
| the desert as they wandered by foot back from a conflict in
| North Africa, remarkably similar to a prophet Moses dying in
| the desert as different tribes wander by foot back from a
| conflict in North Africa.
|
| Which ends up very interesting given the Aegean style pottery
| made with local clay in Tel Dan, the mention of Dan staying on
| their ships in Judges 5, the descendent of Moses going with Dan
| in Judges 18, and then the Denyen sea peoples in Adana
| recording their rulers as belonging to the House of Mopsus.
| Particularly in light of Ezekiel 27:19 where Dan and the Greeks
| are trading together with Tyre in goods that seem likely to
| come from the Ahhiyawa and Denyen geographies.
|
| There's an important missing piece to understanding the context
| of the sea peoples that's unfortunately overlooked given the
| version of the story that was claimed by Hecataeus of Adbera to
| have recently been changed by subsequent conquests is the only
| version seriously looked at while the Greek and Egyptian
| accounts are broadly ignored.
|
| If you're interested in the topic, I recommend looking over the
| details of the battle of Kadesh inscriptions, particularly
| noting how Ramses II captured twelve groups of tribes, one for
| each son with him. At least one of those tribes (the Lukka) are
| among the first mention of "sea peoples" when they are allied
| with Libya in a single day battle against Merneptah - which
| bears striking resemblance to Odysseus's single day battle in
| Egypt right after Troy falls. He hangs out in Egypt for 7 years
| until "a certain Phrygian" shows up and tries to ransom him to
| Libya. Interestingly, exactly seven years after the sea peoples
| battle is when the usurper Pharoh Amenmesse (going by 'Msy' in
| Papyrus Salt 124) conquered Egypt.
|
| The picture is a bit more complex than any one ethnocentric
| story centuries later retells it, and the scholars in antiquity
| that had Moses as one of the Argonauts or had Greek ancestors
| as part of the Exodus may have been more relevant than we give
| tend to regard them.
| dormento wrote:
| Just wanted to say that this is really interesting, and part
| of why I keep coming back to hn. Thanks for the new
| perspective.
| dlisboa wrote:
| I'm becoming interested in comparative mythology and
| religious historiography, it seems you have some pointers in
| this area. Do you have any books to recommend? I'm very
| interested in a materialistic explanation of religion, the
| relation of myths to events at the time is intriguing to me.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Worth noting Atlantis wasn't some widely known legend like Troy.
| We literally only know it from Plato, who used it as a moral
| fable.
|
| No Greek historian mention Atlantis. No Greek myth or epic
| mention Atlantis.
|
| We might also ask where the fabled cave from The Republic is
| actually located.
| civilitty wrote:
| A surprising number of the cultural myths that have entered
| western canon were born out of obvious fiction. The Holy Grail
| and Fountain of Youth being prime examples.
| emblaegh wrote:
| I'd be very careful about assuming the legend was made up by
| Plato just because it's not widely attested in writings of the
| time.
|
| It's likely that most of stories from oral tradition have never
| been put down to writing, and most of those who did were
| probably lost through the filter of time (along with the vast
| majority or ancient Greek literature).
| andsoitis wrote:
| Which do you think is more likely:
|
| - Plato conceived of it a as part of an allegory on the
| hubris of nations, OR
|
| - it actually was real and there's zero evidence for it
| rustymonday wrote:
| Plato says that the story is absolutely true multiple
| times. I don't think we should blame Plato for what may be
| attributed to our own ignorance.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| "Plato" absolutely does not say the story is true.
| "Plato" almost never spoke in his dialogues and you can't
| assume that anything that anyone says in one of his
| dialogues accords with his own beliefs, although
| frequently the closest speaker to Plato's beliefs is
| Socrates.
|
| The story of Atlantis is told by Critias, who heard the
| story second hand.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| Plato saying something is absolutely true actually makes
| me think it's more likely he's talking about an allegory,
| given his hierarchy of what he considered 'real'.
| emblaegh wrote:
| Third option, it was legend going around for generations
| (with maybe a kernel of truth), that Plato picked to make a
| point.
| hnfong wrote:
| Since you're trying to attribute subjective probabilities
| to things with "zero evidence", it seems the only
| disagreement here is about one's priors.
|
| You probably think your methodology is "evidence based"
| though.
| weatherlight wrote:
| There's is evidence for it. (Plato's account) Is it good
| evidence? that's up for debate clearly.
|
| whats strange is that plato's account of Atlantis is
| detialed with specific measurements and descriptions of the
| layout of the city, ( and its temples, and the organization
| of the society.) This level of detail interpreted by some
| as an attempt to describe a real place rather than a purely
| symbolic or allegorical one.
|
| Unlike other Greek myths (or allegories), the story of
| atlantis is not populated with gods interfering in the
| affairs of men, mythical creatures, or heroes of divine
| descent. Plato didnt have a track record of fabricating
| tales completely, especially since he presents atlantis in
| a matter-of-fact way within dialogues that are otherwise
| serious philosophical texts.
| weatherlight wrote:
| also, if you go and check out Homer's description of
| Troy, there isn't the level of detail that Plato provides
| for Atlantis, or at least his understanding of Atlantis.
| Whether or not Atlantis existed, it would seem to me that
| at least Plato thought of fit as a real place rather than
| an allegorical one.
|
| Usually when a mythical city is described, the author
| highlights their mystery, utopian qualities, or moral
| lessons they impart, rather than providing a blueprint of
| their layout and structure.
| astrange wrote:
| Some people have pointed out that the layout is similar
| to Syracuse, which Plato had recently been living in.
| d0mine wrote:
| There is a map of Middle-Earth. It doesn't mean the place
| is real.
| weatherlight wrote:
| The map of middle earth isn't in the middle of a
| philosophical treatise on understanding the nature of the
| physical world and the composition of the universe.....
| :/
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| It's rather in the middle of a story populated with
| (demi-)gods interfering in the affairs of men, mythical
| creatures, and heroes of elvish descent. And hobbitses.
| Filthy, nasty hobbitses!
| weatherlight wrote:
| :)
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Absolutely, need we not mention when maps mention something
| like Terra Australis which clearly denote a continent that
| hasn't been discovered by historians then it must clearly be a
| moral fable. May we trust in the dogma of the great
| interpreters of history.
|
| Example of the beautiful wash of mind (see talk page):
|
| > Terra Australis is a legendary/theoretical continent, not
| based on sightings of the real Antarctica
|
| Ah, such conviction for someone to have of a past that they
| never directly experienced. It's remarkable! Especially when
| the map is the same size of the object it represents. Lest you
| not think in haste, it is certainly not that which it is.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > Especially when the map is the same size of the object it
| represents.
|
| Which map? Most maps that have the hypothetical landmass
| place it with the South Pole at its center, with land
| spreading outward as far as will fit with the known
| landmasses.
|
| They also make it many times larger than Australia (usually
| to conform to the theory that the hemispheres should have
| equal landmass).
| speak_plainly wrote:
| The reason for the lack of Greek history on the topic is
| because it was a closely guarded Egyptian piece of knowledge,
| apparently.
|
| The story of 'Atlantis' as Plato knew it, came to him from
| Critias (the younger) through his father, Critias (the elder,
| also Plato's great grandfather), who got it from his father
| Dropides who received it directly from Solon, who learned of
| the story from his time in Egypt, specifically via priests in
| Sais who supposedly maintained an artifact from this lost
| civilization.
|
| It's clear that Plato's recanting of the story is embellished,
| he probably made up a great number or all of details to support
| his ideas and what he was trying to get across, but it's also
| possible that there are germs of truth in the story, such an
| ancient civilization being destroyed that Egyptians were aware
| of.
|
| It's not a stretch to imagine that Egyptians had knowledge of
| ancient civilizations, or that secret knowledge was revealed to
| Greeks, and it's not stretch that civilizations rose and fell
| all over the Earth. There isn't much to hang your hat on but I
| think we can charitably assume there was some real basis to the
| story that Plato based his writing on.
|
| Did ancient Egyptians poses knowledge of the Americas and
| encounter its population? Or was it a story about a local group
| of people? Or perhaps it was a general story of a pre-historic
| civilization and the associated cataclysms that ended it? Who
| knows, but I don't think you can say with certainty that it
| existed, or it didn't exist at all.
| Sprocklem wrote:
| We also have no surviving Egyptian accounts of Atlantis. It
| was not uncommon, however, for Greeks to attribute fictional
| and fabricated information to the Egyptians due to how
| relatively ancient - and therefore, wise - they were believed
| to be.
| TheCleric wrote:
| To be fair, if there were any Egyptian accounts, they could
| very well have disappeared with the Library of Alexandria.
|
| Not that it means that Atlantis WAS historic, just we can't
| use absence of evidence to infer evidence of absence.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > I don't think you can say with certainty that it existed,
| or it didn't exist at all.
|
| Certainty is a red hearing. You cannot say anything with
| absolute certainty. The question is whether there is evidence
| to support the conjecture. For Atlantis, there isn't much and
| so there really isn't any rational reason to believe it
| existed. If more compelling evidence arises, that is the time
| to believe, but not before.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The ancient greeks (and romans) often claimed that some piece
| of writing was sourced from ancient knowledge -- the
| egyptians and the chaldeans (babylonians) being frequent
| purported sources -- sometimes they even sourced things to
| particular people/gods (Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras,
| Zarathustra). Many (probably most) of those attributions were
| probably false.
| astrange wrote:
| India and Tibet also do this; if you come up with a new
| work of philosophy, you have to say it's a newly found
| ancient work from Buddha you found under a rock or was
| dictated to you in your dreams from your past life. If you
| wrote it yourself, nobody would respect it.
| verelo wrote:
| > India and Tibet also do this
|
| Do as in, even in present day?
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I wouldn't generalize to like, the entire nations of
| India and Tibet, but it's an _extremely_ common
| phenomenon even in the US, even today. Just look at how
| many spurious quotes are ascribed to "great thinkers"
| (abe lincoln, gandhi, albert einstein). It happens even
| with relatively contemporary figures when we have
| voluminous historical evidence available to disprove it
| -- imagine how often it happened before the internet and
| printing press. I have this pet theory that the origin of
| the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source was just
| someone trying to write down all the stuff that anybody
| anywhere said that Jesus said in one place, so that
| people would stop making up shit.
| astrange wrote:
| Buddhists still do it (called "terma"), but I don't think
| it's necessary to call your secular philosophy works
| Buddhism anymore.
|
| And of course people in the US often make things up and
| call it ancient Asian wisdom too, but usually aphorisms
| rather than whole books.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| > it was a closely guarded Egyptian piece of knowledge,
| apparently.
|
| Apparently no more closely guarded than they told it to some
| Greek guy who told it to a famous author who put it a book.
|
| Apparently the Egyptians hadn't learned the secret about
| secrets: If you want to keep something a secret, you shouldnt
| tell people about it.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Interestingly, Plato himself was famously guarded about
| what he told people and he likely had esoteric teachings
| that he never wrote down or talked about in public
| (although they can be sort of derived through what
| aristotle and other contemporaries said about them)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines
| weatherlight wrote:
| > We might also ask where the fabled cave from The Republic is
| actually located.
|
| Certainly. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is clearly a metaphor
| for enlightenment, with no pretense of being a literal place.
| However, his depiction of Atlantis in "Timaeus" and "Critias"
| is detailed and concrete, lacking the overt symbolism of his
| allegories. This detail might imply that Plato intended for
| Atlantis to be considered as more than just a metaphorical
| construct, perhaps as a tale grounded in some form of
| historical tradition.
| toltek wrote:
| The name itself - Atlantis - was a late invention. There is
| more records under its older name - Lanka. And iirc, India has
| stories about Ravana - the last, rogue, king of that empire.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Do you have a source that Lanka was an older name for
| Atlantis (ie that it referred to the same specific place)?
| tdrgabi wrote:
| I liked the JRE episode with Jimmy Corsetti. He thinks he found
| the traces of Atlantis in west Africa.
|
| It was an entertaining episode to listen to, not being a scholar,
| it's hard to know if he's right or not.
|
| Here's a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_R1zoY9kWs
| pestatije wrote:
| JRE - The Joe Rogan Experience
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Jimmy has yet to utter a sensible word.
|
| At 10:45: Somebody who jumps from "A city that was busy all
| day, all night" to "it must be millions of people like New
| York" can only be described as daft.
|
| There is scholarly work on Atlantis. And this clown mentions
| none of it.
| adolph wrote:
| Was it about the Eye of the Sahara? That is quite the
| interesting geological feature.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure
| jcranmer wrote:
| Not having listened to it, I'd guess he's referring to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure, a very large
| circular rock structure in Africa. And also one where the
| archaeological evidence shows nothing more than periodic
| visitation by nomadic peoples, nothing like the supposed state
| society Atlantis would have been.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| If you can't imagine a green Sahara, can you imagine a rich
| Civilization living there?
|
| The transition is hard to believe, yet has happened multiple
| times
|
| https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/climate-change/new-
| research-...
| gherkinnn wrote:
| A rich civilisation (possibly in the millions), leaving
| absolutely no trace in any shape or form? Maybe time to
| apply Occam's Razor.
|
| On the other hand, a green north Africa is well
| established. And it turns out that the Ancient Egyptians
| might have descended from hunter-gatherers who were driven
| towards the nile as the grasslands gave way to desert. For
| all of which there is archaeological evidence.
| huytersd wrote:
| It's very easy to imagine a green Sahara. Where do you
| think all the oil in the Middle East came from.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I can imagine a green Sahara, as I could imagine a
| civilization. What I can't imagine is a civilization that
| exists without leaving any archaeological trace of itself.
| twic wrote:
| The Richat Structure is the fool's Atlantis. It's just a load
| of circles guys, that doesn't make it Atlantis.
|
| Atlantis was in Tunisia:
| https://medcraveonline.com/IJH/IJH-05-00275.pdf
| duped wrote:
| No, it was an allegory.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| If you were there, then I trust your recollection :o)
| nologic01 wrote:
| There is tiny problem with this theory. Namely Santorini is (and
| by all accounts always was) a _tiny_ island. Contrast with:
|
| > "for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say,
| 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger
| than Libya and Asia together" [1]
|
| Whatever the definition of "Libya and Asia" implied here, its
| kinda hard to reconcile. Like by a factor between 100x - 1000x
| :-)
|
| Who knows what kind of convolution of themes, imaginary and real,
| spanning time and space may have been folded together in these
| enigmatic passages.
|
| Which leads to the broader question, what fraction of puzzles we
| inherited from these very early patchy historical artifacts we'll
| we ever be able to resolve?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis
| moffkalast wrote:
| TIL Atlantis was larger than a quarter the planet and then
| mysteriously vanished without a trace.
|
| Seems legit.
| johngladtj wrote:
| Asia was at the time understood more as Asia minor (read
| current day Anatolia/western part of turkey).
|
| Lygia too was only a small section of what we currently name
| Libya.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's a lot more reasonable, but that still doesn't
| exactly fit into the Mediterranean without making a
| continental bridge to Africa. Maybe as the Azores or Canary
| islands if they used to be higher.
| tremon wrote:
| "The pillars of Heracles" as referred to by Plato means
| the strait of Gibraltar. So yes, you're spot on with the
| location.
|
| Not that there's any islands the size of Turkey there ;)
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| One fanciful chain of hypothetical events is the Younger
| Dryas Impact leading to both higher sea levels and the
| subsidence of the Azores. That series of events is, a
| comet impacted the North American glacial ice sheet and
| melted immense amounts of ice. Simultaneously this
| removed immense amounts of weight from the continent. The
| removal of weight causes the land to rise where the
| weight was removed. This rise must be compensated by some
| other part of the globe. This would be areas that were
| being pushed out by the weight on North America. There is
| a rift below the Azores, a weak spot in the crust, that
| would be squeezed out. As the weight is near instantly
| removed from North America the rift areas sink rapidly to
| compensate.
|
| A maritime civilization on the level of the Phoenicians,
| on an island the size of Turkey, in the middle of the
| Atlantic would be in an ideal position for trans-Atlantic
| trade that is even easier than trans-Atlantic trade in
| our age of sail. If such a civilization existed it would
| be fantastically wealthy facilitating trade between the
| Amazon and the Nile. This civilization built in an ideal
| position during the 2.5 million year Pleistocene would
| have a very long time to develop a high level of
| technology.
|
| Like I said, it is fanciful. But, the physics of it are
| known. Cosmic impacts have reshaped the planet multiple
| times. Something changed the planet drastically in a very
| short amount of time that ended the Pleistocene. I like
| to entertain the idea that a previous global civilization
| existed that had conquered the long running ice age
| environment. A cosmic impact rapidly changed the
| environment and the civilization couldn't survive the
| upheaval. It doesn't matter one bit to me if it is true
| other than to remind me, like every other ancient
| civilization, that nothing, no matter how great, is
| forever.
| rmah wrote:
| Did the rest of Asia not realize they existed?
| mcv wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious that Plato's literal description is
| complete nonsense. What makes these historical fables
| interesting is when you ask whether they could be based on real
| events. Because sometimes there are real historical events that
| match them in some central details, despite being completely
| off in others.
|
| This is a field of speculation of course; there's never any
| hard proof that the author was influenced by those events, but
| the similarities are intriguing nonetheless.
|
| Other, similar examples:
|
| * King Arthur and Riothamus
|
| * Noah's flood and the flooding of the Black Sea (or more
| likely a massive flood of the Tigris and Eufrates)
|
| You can never prove that these events did influence the author,
| but it's intriguing to speculate that they might be.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I like the idea that the flood myths across the world come
| from the ice age melting 10k years ago.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| I find it so wholly unconvincing that it annoys me whenever
| it is presented as anything more than quite idle
| speculation, even if by academics (not here in this
| particular comment chain, mind you).
|
| It fails to convince me because it rests on two basic
| claims that I just cannot make myself believe: that humans
| are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories, and
| that word of mouth, so inferior to writing for conveying
| information through the ages, somehow suddenly becomes a
| gold standard that can hold the kernel of a story true for
| a multiple of the time span of history.
|
| Occam's Razor just screams that actually, every
| civilization across the world having their version of flood
| myths means that humans live in places where floods are
| important, life-defining catastrophes. this is true of
| every single habitat I'm aware of, up to and including
| deserts. It's "7000 (or whatever exactly) years of oral
| tradition before some Sumerian writes it down that captures
| anything useful" vs "Listen 'ere, grandchildren, did I tell
| you tykes the story of when I was your age, and my
| grandpappy put us all in boat with the sheep because of the
| flood? I couldn't see no land no more, so much water it
| was. Sigh, even the floods where better in my time, you
| don't know how good yer got it (repeat and aggrandize for
| three more generations)", and knowing humans, only one is
| instantly believable.
|
| It also solves the annoying conundrum of Native Americans
| also having flood myths, despite the Black Sea flood
| happening definitely well after they lost contact with the
| Old World.
| hnfong wrote:
| It may be unlikely, and perhaps "unconvincing", but
| honestly curious - why does it annoy you?
|
| The idea that the flood myths came from an oral tradition
| ten thousand years ago doesn't even require the first
| assumption you mentioned (i.e. "that humans are incapable
| of inventing grand, exaggerated stories"). It may be that
| among the myths, most of them are grand exaggerated
| stories, but this one is real.
|
| As for how long oral traditions can survive without
| writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?
|
| I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true,
| and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So
| why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not
| disproven, just merely _unlikely_ in your framework, a
| framework that 's not indisputably valid at that?
| nologic01 wrote:
| We have so thoroughly lost the art of oral information
| transmission it is hard to even have a gut feeling as to
| how it may have worked over generations.
|
| For example did people distinguish "fact from fiction" as
| they were passing along stories (in some way we would
| recognize today)?
|
| I somehow doubt that "fact checking" had to wait for
| Thucydides (in the Hellenic world) [1] as it seems like
| an important survival attribute, but how did they signal
| that the story coming up should be taken at face value or
| with a grain of salt?
|
| [1] Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of
| "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The
| contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of
| making up stories for entertainment.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
| Attrecomet wrote:
| That is a good question, and one where I had to do some
| self examination. I think it is because of the closeness
| of these claims to just-so stories, despite their posing
| as science ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
| ). That is, stories that fit empirical data to an
| explanation of it, without ever considering at any point
| if there is any reason to discard it, or if your
| hypothesis can even be disproved -- like the famous "not
| even wrong" quip by Wolfgang Pauli.
|
| > I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually
| true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does
| either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a
| possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely...
|
| I'd like to point out that I'm not at all annoyed at
| people talking about the possibility _in potentia_. I
| disagree that it 's a good possibility, but I am only
| annoyed when this is presented by professionals, most
| probably scientific journalists*, as something we should
| expect to be probable. This also extends (a bit unfairly,
| I guess) to amateurs repeating that claim as truth --
| this is just bad pop science.
|
| I do think, however, that the two quoted sentences above
| do at least imply a logical fallacy: of course we don't
| know the truth in this case. This does not make any kind
| of speculation an equally valid hypothesis to any other,
| there are distinctions, as per Russel's Teapot. And a
| claim as maximalist as "all the worlds flooding myths
| come from the Black Sea" better have some actual evidence
| to back it up, or be preceded with "In further
| publications, it might be interesting to look for
| evidence that ..." in the paper.
|
| > As for how long oral traditions can survive without
| writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?
|
| Similarly, the logical conclusion of that is not "there
| are stories that have been passed down from our common
| time in Africa 200k years ago, because who knows how far
| oral history can go" but rather "until there is actual
| evidence to the contrary, oral tradition remains suspect
| as a carrier of stories". We do know that correct
| details, at least, can be transported over centuries: the
| Iliad contains descriptions of soldiering that are, in
| part, clearly Late Bronze Age Mycenaean, though by the
| time it was written down the authors were unable to
| disentangle these tidbits from descriptions more fitting
| to the Archaic Age. That is the upper bound that I'm
| aware of: a few hundred years, information strongly
| mangled, but still recognizable if you know what to look
| for. How do you propose to go from there to an order of
| magnitude more? Of course, you might reply "you can't
| disprove it", to which my reply stays the same: then
| there is absolutely no reason to believe it true.
|
| * I checked the original paper about the deluge, the
| authors didn't mention all of the worlds flooding myths
| at all in there. The wild speculation wisely appears in a
| book they published, which I do not have and which seems
| to propose a connection of all Indo-European and Egyptian
| myths. This is a far cry from "the Chinese are unable to
| think of a flooding myth themselves".
|
| Update: a bit of searching around has mainly offered up
| thinly-disguised young earth creationist sites or sites
| clearly pointing out the problems as well as the allure
| of the "all flood myths are from the Black Sea Deluge"
| speculation. Maybe I should go softer on science
| journalism here...
| FFP999 wrote:
| My theory about the Noah's Ark story is that Noah was a real
| person, who was a bit more skilled at reading the weather
| than his neighbors, and predicted a bad rainy season in time
| to build a boat large enough to save his family and some of
| his livestock. The rest is just the tale growing in the
| telling.
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| >Exploration of the Black Sea shelf reveals two major shelf-
| crossing unconformities. The older unconformity separates
| mostly-barren deposits of late glacial age from overlying
| Neoeunxiain sediment containing fresh to brackish fauna. This
| unconformity can be traced over the shelf edge to depths
| beyond -140 m. The substrate below is dry, firm, and contains
| unchallenged evidence of subaerial exposure at least to
| depths of -110 m. The Neoeuxinian cover is present on the
| outer shelf and is preserved, though incompletely, in
| depressions on the middle and inner shelf. It is even found
| as subsurface valley fill in the coastal limans and Sea of
| Azov. The Neoeuxinian on the shelf represents a transgression
| leading to a highstand at ~ -20 m below today's sea surface,
| which was reached by 10,000 BP (uncorrected). Sediments with
| marine fauna lie above the Neoeuxinian and are separated from
| it by a sand to gravel layer that represents a younger
| unconformity. In the limans, the hiatus between the
| Neoeuxinian and overlying Bugazian is called "peririf" and on
| the shelf a "washout." Dune fields between -65 and -80 m and
| wave-truncated terraces with beach-like berms at -90 to -100
| m contain shell material dated between 9500 and 8500 BP,
| suggesting that the younger unconformity represents a post-
| Younger Dryas regression that took the surface of the Black
| Sea's lake below the level of the global ocean.
|
| https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-5302-3_.
| ..
| rmah wrote:
| There's no need to go searching for the "real" Noah and an
| "actual" flood in the distant past. It seems that most early
| civilizations that developed on alluvial _flood_ plains come
| up with flood myths that explain the destruction and rebirth
| of civilizations because they saw floods and rebuilding on a
| fairly regular basis. Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians,
| Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are
| strikingly similar to the Noah myth. Sometimes even building
| a boat to save the animals because the gods told him. IMO, it
| 's almost certain that the ancient Hebrews picked up on one
| (or more) of these myths and incorporated it into their own
| culture.
| hnfong wrote:
| > Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc.
| all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the
| Noah myth.
|
| Not sure about the others, but at least the Chinese "flood
| myth", the legend of Yu the Great, is qualitatively
| different from the Noah myth. It involves non-cataclysmic,
| recurring floods that the "government" wanted to control.
| There was no saving animals on a big boat and restarting
| civilization. It basically involved a big engineering
| project of directing water flow to where it's needed.
|
| The Noah flood myths seem to describe floods of a much
| scarier kind, the kinds that have the potential to wipe out
| civilizations, as opposed to ones happening on a "fairly
| regular basis". Given that sea water levels rose tens of
| meters during the Younger Dryas (that's what google tells
| me at least), it seems conceivable that the movement of
| such massive amounts of water during these periods would
| have given rise to such stories.
| rmah wrote:
| Civilization to early man was not global, it was local.
| And yes, the Chinese myth you mention doesn't include a
| guy saving animals on a boat. But the indian Manu and
| Matsya myth does. As does the Ziusudra myth and the
| Gilgamesh flood myth of the Sumerian. And the And the
| Videvdad of ancient Iran, and the Pu Sangkasa-Ya Sangkasi
| of ancient Thailand (though here it's a giant magical
| gourd rather that a ship), and many many more.
|
| What is common is that "everything" gets destroyed, a few
| survive to rebuild.
|
| Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
| Attrecomet wrote:
| > It seems that most early civilizations that developed on
| alluvial flood plains...
|
| I'd go even further: there is no human habitat at all where
| floods are not dangerous catastrophes. The coast and
| alluvial plains trivially so, but mountains and deserts,
| too.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I might be misunderstanding your point, but Egyptian
| civilisation was entirely based on the flooding of the
| Nile bringing fertility to the farmlands. It wasn't a
| dangerous catastrophe, it was a benevolent event that was
| celebrated with religious feasts etc dedicated to Isis
| iirc (long time since I read my Egyptian mythology).
| colanderman wrote:
| He could have been conflating Santorini and Crete, which is a
| much larger island which was also home to the Minoans. Not
| larger than modern-day Libya, but perhaps larger than the
| populated area of Libya at the time.
| neaden wrote:
| When the Greeks of Plato's time talked about Libya they
| aren't talking about the modern country, they mean Africa
| west of the Nile which is considerably larger, though they
| didn't realize the full extent of Africa's size.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| This eruption happened in the 16th century BCE, so Plato was
| writing about it over 1000 years after it happened. I'm skeptical
| a story can be passed down that long through oral tradition
| without changes, so no surprise all the details don't match up. I
| would even venture to say that since the focus of this discussion
| is "something someone once wrote down" and keeping in mind that
| "people can write down anything they want to" I would say it was
| completely invented as a thought experiment.
|
| But I'll also take that Plato could have used an existing folk
| tale describing that very event as the basis for a point he was
| trying to make. Especially if his audience was already familiar
| with said folk tale.
| macrolocal wrote:
| Nb. Plato claims Solon found written records of 'Atlantis' on a
| visit to Egypt, around 600 BC. That seems consistent with the
| Santorini hypothesis and Egyptian historians.
| digging wrote:
| > But I'll also take that Plato could have used an existing
| folk tale describing that very event as the basis for a point
| he was trying to make.
|
| Seems reasonable as well. What comes to mind for me is a
| (Western?) tradition of writing fiction as if it were reality
| that takes place in a foreign land. Isn't that kind of a thing?
| Maybe my brain is extrapolating an untrue connection, if
| someone here with more literary experience needs to shoot this
| down that's ok.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| This would be a reasonable thing to believe if plato didn't
| frequently make up tales like this as allegory out of whole
| cloth, including more than one example _in the same dialogue_
|
| There are multiple examples of 'myth-like' stories whose only
| attestation is a platonic dialogue.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
|
| here's another example.
| Balgair wrote:
| For HNer's that would like to read the account by Plato, most of
| his discussion is in _Critias_ , here:
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1571/1571-h/1571-h.htm
|
| It's one of the shortest dialogs and can quickly be read.
|
| Another brief part is in _Timaeus_ , here:
|
| https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html
|
| I'd CTRL+F for 'Atlantis' to get the relevant part, as the rest
| of the text isn't too relevant to the Atlantis myth. It's a very
| short passage, relatively.
|
| That's all that time has left us from Plato's accounts, just the
| two stories. It;s really not all that much, considering the ink
| split since then.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Reading it like this is the source of the confusion that so
| many people have about the nature of the story -- people walk
| away with the impression that the dialogue is in some sense
| "about" atlantis, and if you read the entire dialogue it's
| clear that Plato is interested in far more abstract concerns --
| it's about the nature of things, the creation of the universe
| and the nature of divinity and consciousness. Given that
| context the idea that Plato just randomly included a random
| story about an island blowing up as factual reporting is
| ridiculous. He rolls directly from atlantis to talking about
| the Demiurge -- which, btw, is another myth that seems to have
| been entirely the invention of Plato.
| pjungwir wrote:
| I can't say much about Atlantis, but my favorite Greek geography
| tale is from Herodotus, who says the Egyptians sent an expedition
| around Africa, traveling down the Red Sea then back through the
| Pillars of Hercules. But he says he's skeptical because how can
| anyone believe their claim that the sun rose & set in the north
| ("on their right")?
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| This is a good counterexample for when you should believe a
| story like this -- the author is a historian who made an effort
| to "tell the truth" as best as he could, it doesn't describe
| anything implausible, he was rightfully skeptical about his own
| sources, and information that he used to say that the story was
| probably false is now evidence that it might be true. Herodotus
| wasn't immune from spreading bullshit(to say the least:
| https://listverse.com/2015/04/08/10-historical-facts-that-
| he...), but he at least gives you a good idea of where he was
| getting the bullshit from and gives you all the information you
| need to figure out if it was bullshit.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| no, Atlantis was a rhetorical device used to denounce the
| profligacy of democratic rule, and how it will cause the collapse
| of society (by nature overthrowing a corrupt and unnatural, as
| they saw it, way of life.)
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| There is no mention that Plato placed Atlantis beyond the Pillars
| of Hercules, which are usually identified with the Strait of
| Gibraltar, i.e. in the Atlantic Ocean.
|
| Atlantis is probably mythical, but it isn't the only mythical
| Atlantic island to go missing. There's also Brasil (or Hy
| Brasil), an island once regularly shown on maps off the coast of
| Ireland:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)
| https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/hy-brasil-ireland...
| asimpletune wrote:
| A few interesting things to mention about the Minoans. Their
| artwork largely depicts leisure activities. Compare this to the
| Mycenaeans whose artwork mostly depicted war. It's hard to say
| for certain without being able to read their writing, but there's
| a high chance that Minoan woman were equal members of their
| society. The Minoans also are noteworthy for not having any major
| defensive structures unlike the Mycenaeans, although around the
| time of their collapse there is evidence of burn marks from war.
| They were a very mercantile people trading all around the
| Mediterranean, but with especially close ties to Egypt.
| Specifically they imported advanced goods from there. Again, a
| huge stumbling block is that we can't read their writing, but by
| all accounts the Minoans seem to have been super wealthy,
| educated, and civilized people. The Mycenaeans who took over most
| likely adopted some of their customs, along with their vast trade
| networks. Probably not unlike how the Romans reacted to the
| Greeks when they conquered them.
|
| Also, one other interesting tidbit to me, is that Zeus is from
| Crete. I think it's interesting because Zeus is strong and
| intelligent, like the Titan Cronos, but more importantly is he is
| the God that brought justice. Maybe in ancient history there was
| a time period that was marked by constant war and rule of the
| strong over the weak, until a Minoan King named Zeus ended the
| cycle? Who knows, but the list of things that point to Minoan
| pedigree is really interesting. It's a shame we don't know more
| about them. I think even if Atlantis per se wasn't mentioned much
| in surviving writing, that nonetheless the Minoans must have left
| a huge impact on proto-greeks and that carried onward to archaic
| and classical Greece.
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