Attos' Magazine

Volume #104, January/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

Atlantis

The story narrated by Plato of the island of Atlantis that ruled Africa as far as the border of Egypt and Europe as far as Tuscany on the Apennine peninsula and that in one fatal night was shattered by earthquakes and sank, never ceased to occupy the imagination of the literati. Strabo and Pliny thought that the story of Atlantis was an illusion of the elderly Plato. But to this day the tradition, as revived by Plato, has not died. Poets and novelists have exploited the story freely; scientists have done so with caution. An incomplete catalogue of the literature on Atlantis in 1926 included 1,700 titles. Although Plato said clearly that Atlantis was situated behind the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), in the Atlantic Ocean, as is also indicated by the name of the island, travelers and other guessers have placed Atlantis in all parts of the world, even on dry land, as, for example, in Tunisia, Palestine, and South America. Ceylon, Newfoundland, and Spitzbergen have also been considered. This was due to the fact that traditions of inundations and submersion of islands exist in all parts of the world.

Plato set down what Solon had heard in Egypt from the learned priest. “The [Atlantic] ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the Pillars of Heracles’ [Hercules], there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia [Asia Minor] together; and it was possible for the travellers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. . . . Yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, a great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent; and, moreover, of the lands here within the Straits they ruled over Libya as far as Egypt, and over Europe as far as Tuscany.”

In the nineteenth century ships sailed the Atlantic Ocean to explore its bed in search of Atlantis, and before the Second World War scientific societies existed for the sole purpose of exploring the problem of the sunken island.

Much speculation was offered, not only on the whereabouts of Atlantis, but also on the cultural achievements of its inhabitants. Plato, in another work of his (Critias), wrote a political treatise, and, as no real place in the world could have been the scene of his utopia, he chose for that purpose the sunken island. Modern scholars, finding some affinity between American, Egyptian, and Phoenician cultures, think that Atlantis may have been the intermediary link. There is much probability in these speculations; if they are justified, Crete, a maritime base of Carian navigators, may disclose some inforrnation about Atlantis as soon as the Cretan scripts are satisfactorily deciphered.

One point in Plato’s story about the submersion of Atlantis requires correction. Plato said that Solon told the story to Critias the elder, and that the young Critias, Plato’s friend, heard it from his grandfather when he was a ten-year-old boy. Critias the younger remembered having been told that the catastrophe which befell Atlantis happened 9,000 years before. There is one zero too many here. We do not know of any vestiges of human culture, aside from that of the Neolithic age, nor of any navigating nation, 9,000 years before Solon. Numbers we hear in childhood easily grow in our memory, as do dimensions. When revisiting our childhood home, we are surprised at the smallness of the rooms -we had remembered them as much larger. Whatever the source of the error, the most probable date of the sinking of Atlantis would be in the middle of the second millen nium, 900 years before Solon, when the earth twice suffered great catastrophes as a result of “the shifting of the heavenly bodies.” These words of Plato received the least attention, though they deserved the greatest.

The destruction of Atlantis is described by Plato as he heard it from his source: “At a later time there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your [Greek] warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down.”

At the time when Atlantis perished in the ocean, the people of Greece were destroyed: the catastrophe was ubiquitous.

As if recalling what had happened, the Psalmist wrote: “Destructions are come to a perpetual end: and thou hast destroyed cities, their memorial is perished with them.” He prayed also: “God is our refuge and strength . . . therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled.”

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