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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

It does make you wonder if the legend of atlantis is simply due to a myriad of ancient civilizations that vanished under rising oceans. Given human population centers cluster around ocean ports/rivers with easy access to fresh drinking water. It seems entirely plausible that estimates of human population size at the end of the last ice age may be substantially off.

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There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.

How does one discern whether a story is a history or a fiction, thousands of years afterward? Language and culture shift dramatically in that time. (Actual question, not rhetorical.)

If Plato is the only one who recounts the story, that doesn't show he invented it. Stories of actual events are lost all the time. Why would it be surprising to hear a story about a thing from only one remaining and preserved source?

You can tell by actually reading the account and knowing a little bit about the context. Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time. Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true. Given that the point of the story is to demonstrate the importance of Athens, (according to the character Critias, Athens is so important that people in Egypt are still relating this story of something that happened thousands of years ago,) it's definitely a fiction.

Plato's dialogues were works of fiction that used fictionalized versions of real people as characters in order to illustrate philosophical points. The guy who relates the story of Atlantis is Critias, one of the members of the Thirty Tyrants, a clique who ruled Athens for a while, and Critias claims that he got the story from his distant ancestor Solon who was one of the lawgivers for Athens. To a contemporary of Plato's this would be as if he'd written a story about George Bush, relating a story that he'd gotten originally from George Washington, about how the United States had once fought a war against a long-lost evil empire back in the bronze-age. You weren't supposed to think it was true.

> Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time.

To me, this barely seems relevant to any criticism of the story. Plato had, at most, 2000 years of written history to draw upon (and I’d guess far far less at his disposal), so his estimate of the age of an ancient civilization is inevitably going to be quite far off.

I don’t disagree with the conclusion, but that seems like a minor glitch.

I'd say that if Plato's account is so garbled that he gets the date off by thousands of years, the entire story is likely to be useless as a source of actual history.

This is where I think the culture barrier may have a major role. If somebody today says a thing happened ten thousand years ago, the listener has an expectation that the true year of the event is 2022 - 10000 plus or minus, what, 1000? And the more scientific the context of the communication, the smaller the expected error would be.

Is is possible that for an ancient Greek to describe an event as "ten thousand years ago", he means nothing more or less than "too long ago to remember when, exactly"? It may be unfair for us to backport our modern conception of numbers as these very precise values.

I guess your argument isn't convincing for me. A clerical inaccuracy is not evidence that whole account is false. And if Plato has some propagandish agenda about Athens (which I can totally believe), then that warns us the story may be exaggerated or one-sided---but altogether false?

It sounds like you're saying it's clear from reading the text that the dialogue is manufactured, even through the ancient language / ancient culture barrier. But why does that imply the content is manufactured?

If you told me a story about George Bush telling a remarkable story that was passed down to him orally through every president from George Washington, the only reason I'd suspect you were making it up is because it's inconsistent with the many other sources I was taught from, which don't mention such a thing, and I trust that they are relatively complete with respect to important events. Did Plato's readers have analogous sources? Do we still have them today?

>Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true.

That is an assumption.

We have many places that use the same or similar names (England vs New England (us state). New Mexico(us state) vs Mexico. Its not inconceivable that there was more than 2 locations named Athens. 1 of which is currently lost buried or unknowingly called that.

Through the grinder of mythology black can become white and up can become down. You can't trust it except in the blurriest sense.

This is what makes science so special and revolutionary. The alternative being normal horrible epistemology like everybody does it all the time since forever.

And yes, even science can be mythologized.

Not all of that older epistemology is horrible. Mathematics and logic and proof are ancient.

There’s a fairly credible theory that Atlantis was a port city in the Richat Structure.

Aka the "Eye of Africa" (wikipedia seems to have scrubbed almost all trace of this commonly used name.)

I don't buy it it all. The lowest point of this structure is presently several hundred meters above sea level. There is almost no archeological trace of human habitation, save for some ancient stone tools (no trace of structures, no middens indicating dense population.) These tools date to the Late Pleistocene to early Holocene, when sea levels were even lower than they are today (in other words, this formation was even further from the sea then.)

Richat Structure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure

The whole circularity of this structure actually bring Atlantis and it's rings to mind, and also we must remember that the Sahara had a much different climate not that long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

That’s true, but it beggars belief that the civilisation Atlantis conjures to mind would leave zero physical evidence of significant structures behind.

It would also have significant trade and its artifacts would show up along the traderoutes.

Not just zero physical evidence - zero evidence _at all_. Afaik it doesn't appear until Plato uses it, and he claims that its thousands of years old or something like that. That should reasonably have traces in other accounts through the years.

I did hear a fairly credible theory that it is just an allegory invented by Plato, but influenced by various other myths and political centers (such as king Minos rule on Crete).

The island Thera was destroyed by a volcanic eruption some 1200 years before Plato: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorini_caldera. The collapse of the island would have triggered tsunamis all across the Aegean Sea, so it's very likely many coastal towns had their own stories of being "swallowed by the sea".

Though Plato said 10,000 years before, this is the most likely source of the Atlantis story, as the eruption destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri as well as those on the coast of Crete. It's possible the eruption led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization.

Another quite compelling theory posits the destruction of Thera also caused the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt.

We don't know that it hasn't left any physical evidence behind. The origin of many archaeological artifacts are not known for certain. It's possible that there is pottery and other artifacts from Atlantis that we've already unearthed.

I was commenting in the context of the Eye of Africa, it’s a fascinating structure that happens to have some dimensional characteristics that vaguely resemble Plato’s description. There’s just no physical evidence of any significant architecture there of any kind.

Exactly, Atlantis is in Tunisia: https://medcraveonline.com/IJH/is-atlantis-related-to-the-gr...

Then there is a fringe theory, that a somewhat advanced ancient civilization and a city is sunken off the West Coast of India. And that later travelers from India brought the myth of a Western sunken city into Europe. Then Atlantis would be in the Arabian Sea, East of Europe. But West of India.

It’s not credible at all: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/no-atlantis-ha...

Don't forget about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger land (I'm sure out near European ancestors wouldn't have).

That is only about 6000bce - when Britain was joined to mainland Europe.

The piece that blows me away is how shallow the North Sea is, but also how all that sea level rise is down to glacial melt - amazing just how much water is/was tied up in glaciers (and the Antarctica).

The sea level rise is not simply because of the addition of glacial meltwater but is apparently because the weight of the glaciers in the north pressed down on the land (which is essentially floating on magma underneath), tilting it towards the north and raising the southern part. When the glaciers melted, the weight was removed and the land is settling back (the north is raising and the south is lowering, like a see saw)

Which would be the south in this example? Britain being south of the Arctic, lowering and creating a new sea?

Yes, effectively the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel. I don't know where the fulcrum would be exactly but they are all shallow.

That is certainly the fringe theory of the long lost civilizatin of Mu (contintent in the Pacific?). Apparently it, Atlantis, and another empire essentially sub-orbital bombed themselves into non-existence causing entire landmasses to submerge. That's the fringe, out there theory anyway.

Here's the thing about Atlantis: even if you know exactly where it is, and even if you can prove it, you'll find it's nearly impossible to sell.

The best way to be compensated for its discovery is probably to make a documentary, but this has been done dozens of times already by people who claimed to know where it is. Networks only have so much appetite for it. And even without that hurdle, it's extremely difficult to get a hold of anyone who might be able to help.

And if you went the academic route, you'd essentially be publishing the information for free, running the risk of someone else taking all the credit.

How would you even go about selling Atlantis? I'm seriously asking.

you don't sell discoveries like that. historically speaking, the reward was either some explicit prize, or simply the fame of being the discoverer, and the cost of the exploration, as well as the prize if any, was borne by some deep pocketed entity who wanted the discovery made (the crown, the government or some academic body).

Plenty of wealthy people sail all over the world, looking for interesting things to see and treasure to loot.

And yes, there's a finite appetite for documentaries about "I found a few rocks that kind of look rectangular if you squint real hard, I think it's Atlantis". But if you find something more substantial than that, people will perk up real quick.

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