Hacker News Reader

Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I think this is great! I've often wondered if the "great flood" myths and the legend of Atlantis have any factual basis carried on in oral history. The Zanclean flood stretches credulity beyond reason (as fun as it is to think about a story passed down from the first Hominins), but this event happened recently enough to ponder links to mythology... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessair

View on HN

The Gunditjmara Australian story "Dreamtime" recounts the eruption of the now-dormant volcano Budj Bim about 37,000 years ago.[1][2] So it is possible for accounts of historical events to be transmitted orally over a very long period of time.

1. https://www.awe.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/nation...

2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/study-dates-victorian...

Platos account of Atlantis which was destroyed ten thousand years prior matches geological artifacts of huge climate changes/end of the ice age. I’d say the evidence point to his stories legitimatacy

Relevant: https://www.q-mag.org/the-great-plain-of-atlantis-was-it-in-...

Great flood maybe, but we don't have any actual proof that Atlantis was some ancient legend vs something Plato just made up and said he heard from someone else since there are no previous accounts of it before him.

Also, please bear in mind that there's a good reason to suspect that Plato bent a lot of things to suit his goal of trying to explain philosophical concepts. Socrates is often hailed as one of the greatest western philosophers but we have almost no record of his character outside the dramatizations written by Plato. We're almost certain he was a real person but if Plato is to be trusted he was extremely against any preservation of his discourses - almost everything we've got on him comes from Plato describing his mentor.

So Atlantis might be much the same - the story of a city lost to flooding (maybe even the same root story as the biblical one) repurposed and embellished to express a philosophical point.

While I agree with you about Plato, I think you are underestimating our other sources on Socrates. The historian Xenephon was also one of his students and talked about him in his works, including Socrates' trial and death. The playwright Aristophanes also parodied Socrates in one of his works and while it is a parody what it is parodying is consistent with what we know of Socrates' philosophy as presented by Plato and shows he was a fairly well known figure at least among the play going audience.

There should be some traces of it still. Per the legend, the last day of Atlantis was the day Sahara became a desert, so inspecting it should reveal something. Also, "Atlantis" is a made up term (by Plato?). Again, per the legend, that nation called themselves "lanka" and I wonder if Sri Lanka ("Holy Lanka ") was named this way for a reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com