Andrew Collins

In his works the TIMAEUS and CRITIAS Plato implies that it was the famous Athenian archon, or chief magistrate, named Solon who first learnt of the story of Atlantis during a visit to the Temple of Sais in Egypt's Nile Delta around the year 570 BC. His account was preserved by Plato's family until it was made known to Critias, Plato's own uncle, or grandfather, who recounted the story during a created dialogue headed by the philosopher Socrates in 421 BC. Solon was related to Plato's family and was thus a distant relative of Plato himself.

Plato places the destruction of Atlantis at a date post 8570 BC in the TIMAEUS and c. 9421 BC in his later work the CRITIAS. Scholars, such as the Greek geologist A. A. Galanopoulos, have got around this dating problem by suggesting that the figures given in Plato's dialogues must be wrong. This was due to a mistranslation of the assumed Egyptian texts shown by the temple priest at Sais to Solon on his visit there in c. 570 BC. In the process, he managed to confuse the hieroglyph that denotes the number 100 with the character representing a figurative value of 1,000. If this were so, it would change the date implied for the destruction of Atlantis from 9,000 years before Solon's visit to just 900 years, giving a revised date of c. 1470 BC, close to the traditional date of c. 1450 BC for the Thera eruption.

Although this might seem like a neat and logical solution to both the problem posed by the very early time-frame suggested for the destruction of Atlantis and the unimaginable dimensions of Atlantis' city and plain outlined in the CRITIAS, this argument is seriously flawed. Those Egyptologists who have taken time to examine the problem assert that no such confusion can have occurred. The hieroglyphs used to denote the numerical values of 100 and 1,000 are visually quite different. Solon - or anyone else for that matter - could not have made such a mistake.

In addition to these facts, there is no contemporary evidence to back up the role played by Solon in bringing the Atlantis legend to the attention of the world. Moreover, it remains a distinct possibility that Plato only introduced him into his dialogues to lend credibility to the story, since Egypt was seen as the home of the most ancient philosophical wisdom of the classical world. Even Plato himself went to Egypt and `consorted with the priests'.

We know also from Plato's final work THE LAWS that he really did intend to mean thousands, as opposed to hundreds, of years, when referring to the antiquity of ancient races. For here he states that Egyptian art goes back 10,000 years. Since Solon does not feature in THE LAWS, we can say that this early time-frame was not determined from a misreading of Egyptian numerals. These early dates almost certainly derive from Egyptian king-lists, like the Royal Canon of Turin, which speak of divine and semi-divine beings who ruled for many thousands of years before the appearance of the first mortal pharaoh around 3100 BC. It was these mythical reigns that defined the greater antiquity of the Egyptian civilisation, and not those of the traditional 30 dynasties. Thus Solon's, and thus Egypt's, role in the Atlantis legend is seriously flawed, implying that it might well have come from another source altogether. But from whom, and how did the story reach Plato's world? Where exactly was Atlantis, and how was it destroyed by `earthquakes and floods' in one `terrible day and night'?

In the fifth century, the neo-Platonist Proclus, quoting a first-century BC geographer named Marcellus, spoke of three islands of `immense extent’ located in the Atlantic Ocean. The inhabitants of the central of these islands was said to have preserved the memory of a former landmass, identified by Proclus with Atlantis, which had existed thereabouts. In 1962, British historian Geoffrey Ashe identified Marcellus’ three great islands with the Greater Antilles. Moreover, he pointed out that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean preserved the memory of a cataclysm which had split up a former landmass leaving behind the islands that make the archipelagos we see today. All but a few human beings were drowned in this all-encompassing event.

Could this have been a memory of the destruction of Atlantis preserved in the Caribbean and brought across the Atlantic by ancient mariners such as the Phoenicians and Carthaginians?

Using clues such as these, we can reassess Plato’s original account and demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the Atlantean landmass he describes is Cuba, the largest island in the Greater Antilles. Moreover, the sunken portions of the Atlantean realm can be seen as the low-lying regions of the Bahamas and Caribbean, including much of Cuba’s great western plain, drowned by a rapid rise in sea-level at the end of the last Ice Age c. 8000 BC. Over 60 sites of possible archaeological interest have been recorded in the shallow waters of the Bahamas, with the greatest concentration of them being located on the south-west corner of the Great Bahama Bank facing out towards the Cuban landmass. If these really do represent hard evidence of a former Bahaman, and indeed Atlantean, culture then it implies that it occupied both landmasses prior to the current rises in sea-level. Moreover, from the description of the rectilinear and curvilinear structures found in these waters it is clear that this culture attained a level of sophistication comparable to the Neolithic communities which had begun emerging in the Near East during this very same time-frame.

Yet the destruction of Atlantis, and its `other islands’, identified as the island chains of the Bahamas and Caribbean, would appear to have begun some 500 years earlier. Sometime around 8600-8500 BC there came out of the north-eastern sky a brilliant object - a comet perhaps 100,000 times greater than the one which detonated above the tundra forests of Tunguska, Siberia, in June 1908. It passed low overhead the United States before disintegrating into millions of tiny fragments like some unimaginable millennial firework. The air shock-waves caused by the detonation and impact of these tiny pieces of the comet nucleus peppered the coastal plain, causing an estimated 500,000 elliptical craters, ranging in size from just a few hundred metres to 11 kilometres in length. Known as the Carolina Bays they extend from New Jersey down to Florida and can be found in six separate states – the greatest concentration being in the Carolinas. Each blast was like a mini nuclear explosion which caused spruce forests to be laid flat in great fan-like patterns. Two larger fragments of the comet struck the Atlantic Ocean north of Puerto Rico and east of Florida. The immense tsunami waves created by this event would have drowned the Bahamas and Caribbean, all but destroying its primitive culture and wiping out megafauna such as the giant sloth. Those who did survive reached the American mainland carrying with them a memory of this great cataclysm.

I can demonstrate that the Carolina Bays comet brought about abrupt climatic changes, which initiated a temporary re-advance of the ice followed by a warmer period which brought an end to the glacial age. In turn, this caused a rapid melting of the ice-sheets which had covered parts of North America and Europe for anything between 25,000 and 40,000 years. The great thaw resulted in a sudden rise in sea-level which submerged, more permanently, the low-lying regions of the Bahaman landmass, as well as other regions of the Caribbean.

Much later migrations between the American mainland and the Greater Antilles, Cuba in particular, helped confuse the original source of these stories. Yet preserved in this knowledge was a belief in the sudden inundation of a great landmass and the fact that Cuba was the original homeland of the North and Central American peoples. This homeland was known variously as Aztlan, Tulan and Tlapallan. Here was to be found the mythical place of emergence of the human race, a site known as the Seven Caves, or Seven Cities.

In later times Phoenician and Carthaginian sea-traders from Spain and North Africa made landfall on Cuba en route to the Gulf coast of Mexico and learnt of these catastrophe accounts, which were then introduced to the ancient world. Eventually these stories and rumours of island landmasses, island groups and great catastrophes came to the attention of the philosophical schools in which Plato moved. Using key elements of these stories, Plato introduced them to his Atlantis dialogues. The great dates alluded to by Plato, although set in the correct time-frame of the Carolina bays cometary event, would seem to have been derived from unknown Egyptian king-lists which contained mythical chronologies spanning tens of thousands of years.

These same legends of an Atlantic Island on which was a seven-fold place of emergence remained strong in the memories of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the former Spanish and North African territories of the Phoenicians and later Carthaginians. They were re-introduced by the Moors of North Africa following their conquest of Spain and Portugal in the eighth century. Here they remained as hidden maritime wisdom until they finally resurfaced in late medieval times as the legend of Antilia, an Atlantic isle on which were located Septe cidades, the Seven Cities. Antilia was identified by key American geographer William H. Babcock as Cuba, and it was the continual search for this legendary place, particular by the Portuguese, that led in 1492 to the discovery of the New World.

Evidence of transoceanic contact with the Americas was presented after lunch by David Eccott, arguably Britain’s leading expert on the subject.