Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

19 The Aegean Atlantis Deception

Was Plato’s Grand Tale Nothing More Than the Saga of an Insignificant Greek Island?

Frank Joseph

Although Atlantis has been generally associated by most investigators with the Atlantic Ocean, as a preponderance of the evidence suggests, fringe theorists have occasionally assigned the island to sometimes bizarre locations, almost always for ulterior reasons. The latest of these eccentric interpretations gained some acceptance among professional archeologists and historians, probably because it did not disturb their modern bias against transoceanic voyages in pre-Classical times.

The theory originally belonged to a pre–World War I writer for the Journal of Hellenic Studies, K. T. Frost, who moved Atlantis from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean island of Crete. Since then, his hypothesis has been expanded by (perhaps not surprisingly) mostly Greek scholars (Galanopoulas, Marinatos, et al.) to include the Aegean island of Santorini, anciently known as Thera. Their advocation of a Greek identity for Atlantis was the latest in an unfortunate chauvinist tendency on the part of some Atlantologists to associate their own national backgrounds with the lost civilization.

Such extra-scientific motivations for conveniently finding Plato’s island in the investigator’s own homeland have not done the search much credit. But the ulterior motives currently driving professional scholars of all nationalities (mostly Americans these days) to insist that Crete or its neighboring island and Atlantis are one and the same are more harmful. It is important, therefore, to understand why they want to explain away Atlantis in what has come to be known as the Minoan Hypothesis.

Thera was part of the Minoan commercial empire, and excavation on Santorini (its modern name) uncovered a high level of early civilization that once flourished there. The small island was actually a volcanic mountain that exploded in much the same way as the eruption at Krakatoa, and quite literally plunged into the sea. The resulting two-hundred-foot-high wall of water that swept over Crete wrecked havoc among its coastal ports, while accompanying earthquakes badly damaged the inland capital, Knossos. The Minoans were knocked so off balance by this natural disaster that they could not organize an effective resistance to Mycenaean aggression, and their civilization disappeared, absorbed in part by invaders from Greece. Seizing upon these events more than a thousand years before his time, Plato, it is suggested, modeled Atlantis directly after Crete and/or Thera as an analogy for his ideal state.

Although Thera is only a fraction of the size of his Atlantis and lies in the Aegean Sea instead of the Atlantic Ocean, which he specified, and was destroyed 7,800 years after the destruction described in the dialogues, these apparent discrepancies are handily dismissed by the assumption that Plato simply inflated his account by a factor of 10. He did so, it is claimed, deliberately— to make for a grander tale, his figures were mistranslated from the original Egyptian.

Both Atlanteans and Minoans, it is argued, built great palaces and powerful cities, operated thalassocracies (seaborne empires), practiced a pillar cult, traded in precious metals, and had elephants roaming about. This interpretation is not without supporting details. Eumelos, cited by Plato in the Critias as the first Atlantean king after Atlas, is echoed in the Minoan island of Melos and, in fact, is mentioned on an inscription of archaic Greek at Thera itself bearing his name.

The Minoan theorists go on to argue against the Atlantic Ocean as the correct site for Plato’s island because only in the Aegean Sea have relatively small tracts of land ever suddenly disappeared beneath the surface, such as the city of Helice, in the Gulf of Corinth. The Azores, too, are ruled out as a possible location; supposedly no islands in the area are known to have sunk over the past 72,000 years. The numerous early-flood legends, particularly the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, are cited as literary evidence for Thera’s destruction. Even the concentric arrangement of the Atlantean capital, as described by Plato, may to this day be seen in the waters of Santorini Bay.

It is true that, like Atlantis, Thera was a volcanic island and part of an advanced thalassocracy, which vanished after its chief mountain exploded and sank into the sea. But move beyond this general comparison and the Minoan Hypothesis begins to unravel. Thera was a minor colony of Minoan civilization, a small outpost, not its capital, as the dialogues have Atlantis. Mycenaean influences from the Greek mainland did supplant Minoan culture on Crete, but the transition appears to have been largely, if not entirely, nonviolent, certainly nothing resembling the scope of Plato’s Atlanto-Athenian war that raged across the Mediterranean World.

The Minoans never made a move to occupy Italy or Libya, nor did they threaten to invade Egypt, as the Atlanteans were supposed to have done. From everything scholars have been able to learn about them, the Minoans were an extremely unwarlike people more interested in commercial than military conquests, while the Atlanteans are portrayed as aggressively bellicose. As Kenneth Caroli, a leading writer on the subject, concludes, “Thera’s candidacy as Atlantis rests largely on its cataclysmic destruction alone, while Plato’s story had far more to do with a war between two antagonistic peoples than with the disaster that later overwhelmed them both.”

A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

The Minoans operated a dynamic navy to combat piracy and keep open the sea routes of international trade, but their Cretan cities were not ringed by high walls or battlements of any kind; compare Knossos or Phaistos with the armed towers and defense-in-depth of the walls surrounding Atlantis. Moreover, these leading cities of Minoan Crete were laid out in the architectural canon of the square grid, unlike the concentric circles upon which Atlantis was built. Some theorists claimed to have actually seen such a concentric arrangement underwater, within the bay created when Thera’s volcanic mountain collapsed into the sea.

But Dorothy B. Vitaliano, a prominent geologist specializing in volcanology with the U.S. Geological Survey, reports that the subsurface topography at Santorini “was not in existence before the Bronze Age eruption of the volcano; it has been created by subsequent activity which built up the Kameni Islands in the middle of the bay, to which a substantial amount of land was added as recently as 1926. Any traces of the pre-collapse topography would long since have been buried beneath the pile of lava whose highest portions emerge to form these islands.”

Clearly, a recent geological feature has been mistaken for an ancient city. Structures designed in concentric circles prevailed, not in the Mediterranean World, but in the Atlantic, such as the circular temples of the Canary Islands and Britain’s Stonehenge.

Caroli points out that “the Atlantean capital lay on a substantial plain surrounded by high mountains on a large island.” Thera does not fit this description.

The Cretans and Therans did not plate floors, walls, and columns with metal, as Plato says the Atlanteans did. Plato’s description of Poseidon’s temple implies a structure with metal-covered walls, decorative pinnacles, and at least two pillars that were metal-plated. All this sounds like a Bronze Age Phoenician temple.

Atlantis featured interconnecting canals and lay close to the sea; Phaistos and Knossos are inland and have no canals. Nothing of the kind existed at Knossos or any other Minoan city. Neither of these Aegean locations had a harbor, because their lightweight ships could be hauled up on the beach, unlike the oceangoing Atlantean ships, which required the deep-water ports mentioned in the Critias.

In any case, the harbor arrangement described by Plato was impossible in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, because its main channel would have been fouled by stagnation without the ebb and flow of tides that do occur “beyond the Pillars of Heracles.” This point alone is sufficient to prove that he was describing a real place in the Atlantic Ocean, not in the Aegean.

Melos, the Minoan island associated with the king Eumelos of Plato’s dialogues, is so tiny that it could never have supported the capital of an allied kingdom. Actually, we learn in the Critias that Eumelos ruled over that region closest to the Pillars of Heracles called Gades, today’s Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain. That much in Plato is certain. It takes quite a stretch of the imagination, to say nothing of the facts, to relocate Eumelos in the Aegean. Although it is the only name mentioned in the dialogues that does indeed appear in the eastern Mediterranean, no other Atlantean king finds a correspondence in that part of the world.

The island of Atlantis was supposed to have been rich in precious metals; Crete and Thera have few. Then there is the self-evident fact that Crete did not sink into the sea, as Atlantis was alleged to have done. Thera’s volcanic mountain did collapse beneath the Aegean, but its island survives to this day; in the Critias, both city and island were utterly destroyed.

That rituals involving bulls were practiced by both Atlantean and Minoan civilizations proves nothing, because the animal was similarly venerated in mainland Greece, Egypt, Assyria, the Hittite empire, and Iberia, as far back as Neolithic and even Paleolithic times.

AN OCEAN OF SUNKEN ISLANDS

Contrary to the Minoan theorists, who assert that no sizable territories have sunk into the Atlantic Ocean, as recently as 1931 the Fernando Noronha Islands were points of contention between Great Britain and Portugal, until they sank after one week of seismic activity. Nor was Atlantis the only island-city to have gone under the Atlantic. The Janonius Map of 1649 identified Usedom, formerly a famous mart, which was swallowed up by the waves of the sea. The same island was mentioned five centuries earlier by the Arab cartographer Edrisi. Actually, the town in question was Vineta on the northwest corner of the island of Usedom, near Rugen Island in the North Sea. The North Frisian island of Rungholt, although not as large as Usedom, was likewise once inhabited before it sank at about the same time.

Of course, none of these islands may be identified with Atlantis, but each does demonstrate that an Atlantean event was by no means beyond the geologic purview of the Atlantic Ocean.

A LABYRINTH OF MISINFORMATION

As for the flood legend common to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and early myth, it cannot have resulted from the destruction of Thera, because the deluge myth prominent in Middle Eastern civilization traces back to Sumerian origins, predating the downfall of Minoan Crete by more than a thousand years. The Greek tradition of Theras, the mythic founder of Thera, has no elements in common with Plato’s story, nor does it hint of anything remotely Atlantean.

The Minoan Hypothesis was so much in vogue among archeologists during the 1970s that the famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau spent the better part of his time, energies, and nearly two million dollars provided by the government of Monaco searching the depths around Santorini. Lured to the Aegean by a fashionable theory designed to dismiss Plato, not explain him, Cousteau turned up nothing resembling Atlantis.

A CONFUSION OF DATES

While at first glance and from a distance the Minoan Hypothesis may appear tenable, it begins to disintegrate the closer one approaches it. Practically point for point, an Aegean Atlantis does not match Plato’s straightforward account and is uniformly contradicted by the evidence of geology, history, and comparative mythology. As a last-ditch effort to save something of their excuse for a Cretan interpretation, its advocates claim that Plato merely used the general outline of events at Thera as a vague, historical framework on which to present his notion of a consummate culture in the fictionalized guise of Atlantis.

But here too they err because the dialogues define Atlantis as the enemy of Plato’s idealized state. So often has it been repeated that he invented Atlantis to exemplify his “ideal society.” In any case, the ideal city Plato does describe, Megaera, is square, not circular.

But only one piece of evidence is required to invalidate the Minoan Hypothesis in a single stroke. The cornerstone its supporters depended upon was the date for the collapse of Thera’s volcano into the sea, because it was this disaster, they argued, that brought down Minoan civilization in 1485 B.C.E. The attendant tsunamis that crashed along the shores of ancient Crete, and the earthquakes that toppled her cities, were compounded by Greek armies who took advantage of the natural catastrophe to wage war on the disorganized Minoans, plunging them into a dark age from which they never reemerged.

The pivotal date was arrived at by a process of ice-core drilling. Caroli explains: “Ice cores reveal ‘acidity peaks’ at the times of major eruptions, because ash falls on the ice caps and affects their chemistry. Long cores by hollow pipes used as drills (some hundreds of feet in length) taken from both Greenland and Antarctica have been examined to determine the past climate of the Earth.

“By analyzing the chemistry of these cores, ‘acidity peaks’ can be found,” he says, “many of them visible to the naked eye as dark streaks in the ice made by the ash that fell long ago. Some of these cores, mainly those from Greenland, have annual layers, like tree rings, or sedimentary glacial deposits at lake bottoms. These can and have been counted back for thousands of years. The oldest of these ‘long cores’ was drilled in 1963 at Camp Century in north-central Greenland. For years, it was the only core that went back far enough and had been studied in sufficient detail to potentially reveal the timing of Thera’s eruption.”

It is now understood that Thera erupted between 1623 and 1628 B.C.E., almost 150 earlier than the Minoan theorists believed. The significance of this discrepancy renders their entire interpretation invalid, because Minoan civilization did not disappear in the wake of a natural disaster. “By all indications,” Caroli points out, “the Minoans not only survived the eruption, but reached their peak after it.”

Proponents of an Aegean Atlantis call upon Egyptian history for corroboration, but here too they find contradiction to their assertion that Minoan civilization was shattered by Thera’s eruption. Pharaoh Amenhotep III dispatched an embassy to the cities of Crete and found them still occupied nearly a century after their supposed destruction. The Egyptian records were confirmed in the late 1970s when excavators around Knossos discovered evidence for the final occupation by the Minoans in 1380 B.C.E. This was one hundred years later than even the original, incorrect date for the eruption of Thera and its assumed destruction of Aegean civilization, the alleged source for Plato’s story of Atlantis.

Caroli’s assessment seems conclusive: “And so the Minoan hypothesis is left with no war, no maritime civilization destroyed by catastrophe, the wrong kind of disaster, the wrong date, and no comparable dark age as a result. What does that leave us? To my mind, not much.”