In Search of Atlantis

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the fate of this lost civilization has intrigued scholars, romantics and occultists. Atlantis was said to be a vast island, bigger than Asia Minor and Libya combined, lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar). Home to a great maritime nation, Atlantis was a place of fabulous wealth. It was well endowed with natural resources, including precious metals and stones, as well as abundant food. Nine thousand years before the time of the Greek law giver Solon, Atlantis had dominated the Mediterranean. But from an ideal state with an advanced civilization, it degenerated into a military aggressor and the gods, decided to punish it by sinking it under the sea.
So wrote the Greek philosopher Plato in his Timaeus and Critias around 350 BC. He said he had heard the story from his cousin, who heard it from his grandfather, who heard it from his father, who heard it from Solon, who heard it from the priests of Sais in Egypt in 590 BC. Plato was presenting a moral fable of what happens when the gods are displeased. But is the story true?

No known writer before Plato mentions a vast island that had sunk without trace under the Atlantic. But a similar tale was known in Egypt at the time of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BC). The story might be a basic myth shared by several ancient peoples, or it could be a legend based of fact.
The factual basis may well be found in the ancient volcanic island of Thera (modern Santorini) – a prosperous commercial centre related to the powerful Minoan civilization on Crete to the south. In about 1500 BC, Thera’s volcano exploded in a violent eruption heard, it has been estimated, as far away as Scandinavia. Volcanic ash buried many parts of the island, in some places 30 meters deep, but luckily the people had already fled. About 40 years later, the volcano’s cone collapsed, plunging the island’s centre deep under the sea and creating tidal waves and a rain of ash that may have destroyed Cretan civilization virtually overnight. Crete’s trade and diplomatic contacts with Egypt were abruptly broken off, and perhaps the story Solon heard from the priests of sais was all their predecessors had learnt about the sudden disappearance of the Minoans as a world power. Could the priests’ vague information be the truth behind the Atlantis legend?
In the late nineteenth century Ignatius Donnelly, an American writer, asserted that Atlantis was in the Sargasso Sea, a part of the Atlantic between the Azores and the West Indies. Its mass of weed, he claimed, made the area identical to the unnavigable shoals said by Plato to mark the site. Russian born mystic Madame Blavatsky maintained that Atlantis lay in the North Atlantic and was peopled by the highly civilized descendants of the Lemurians, themselves inhabitants of another lost continent. In the early 1900s famed American psychic Edgar Cayce, who claimed that he had been an Atlantean in a previous incarnation, described the lost race as a sophisticated technological civilization whose power source was crystals. The abuse of this power, said Cayce, led to three nuclear disasters, the last in 10 000 BC.

Cayce predicted that Atlantis would reappear in 1968 or 1969. Curiously, in 1968 pilots photographed from the air structures that looked like buildings under the sea off Bimini in the Bahamas. Later, undersea explorers claimed they had seen ancient roads, walls, pyramids and stone circles on the seabed. Nothing has been confirmed by expert archaeologists, so possibly the Bimini Roads are natural features.
Colonel Fawcett’s quest Several people have devoted their careers and fortunes to the search for Atlantis, but few have paid the ultimate price for their passion. Trailblazing the vast Amazon River basin between 1906 and 1913, English surveyor and explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett became intrigued by a largely unexplored stretch of dense scrub known as the Mato Grosso. Fawcett subscribed whole heartedly to the legend of Atlantis and his hopes soared when he found a report in the Brazilian State Archives about an ancient hidden city, with quartz buildings and statues, but no inhabitants, which had been discovered in 1753. He became convinced that this deserted city was an Atlantean outpost. Unable to return to South America until after the First World War, he mounted his first expedition to find the lost city in 1920. It ended at a remote encampment on the Kuluene River, which he named Dead Horse Camp. Five years later he returned, this time supported by an American newspaper group. Fawcett resumed the search at the edge of the Mato Grosso, accompanied by his son Jack and Jack’s young friend Raleigh Rimell. For four days local Indians saw smoke rising from the group’s campfires, but after that nothing . When Commander G. M. Dyott searched for the party in 1928, he found the route they had taken, and discovered some of their possessions, but no trace of the men themselves. It was widely assumed that the mean had been murdered by Indians, but their remains were never found. The fates of Colonel Fawcett, his companions and the mysterious lost city they sought remain unknown to this day.