Source Writings and Accounts

Plato
Plato's accounts of Atlantis come observed within his works entitled "Timaeus" and "Critias" and are a earliest known information to the mythologic civilization of the Atlanteans. Inside his story, Critias (360 BCE) describes a origins & form of Atlantis to Socrates & his guests. A dialog of Timaeus occurs as continuation of Critias' tale, & delivers a further thorough history of ancient civilizations & mentions the state of Atlantis & its foreign relations, albeit briefly.

Based on data from Critias, a (Hellenic) Gods of old divided higher a l& thus that every can have much for themselves & Poseidon was fittingly and to his liking bequeathed a island of Atlantis. A islet was big than Libya and Asia Minor combined, and when existence sunk by an earthquake became an unpassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel between a Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. A Egyptians described Atlantis as an isl& some 700 kilometers from side to side, comprising mostly mountains in a northern portions & right along the shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south "extending in one direction three thousand stadia [~ 600 km], but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia [~ 400 km]".

Fifty stadithe inland from either a center of the southern coast was a "mountain not very high on any side". On this text lived the native woman using whom Poseidon fell enamored & wore 5 pairs of male twins. A firstborn one, Atlas, was made rightful king of a entire isl& and a ocean (okay, the Atlantic Ocean), & wwhen given a mountain of his birth and a encompassing locality as his fiefdom. Atlas' twin Gadeirus or Eumelus in Greek, was given the eastmost part of the island which besides lay at its northern extreme facing Gades, a town inside southern Spain. A more quartet pairs of twins: Ampheres & Evaemon, Mneseus & Autochthon, Elasippus & Mestor, & Azaes [the Azores?] and Diaprepes "were the inhabitants and rulers of divers islands in the open sea".

Poseidon carved the inland mountain in which his love dwelt into a palace and enclosed it with trine round moats of increasing width varying from either 1 to 3 stadia & separated by rings of land proportional around size. the Atlanteans so built bridges northbound from either a mountain, making a road to the rest of the island. It dug a great canal to a sea, & alongside a bridges carved tunnels into a rings of rock & then that ships can pass into a city in a area of the mountain, and docks were carved into the rock bulwarks of the fosse. Each passage to a city was guarded by gates & towers, & ternary bulwarks surrounded the city & its rings. A bulwarks were constructed of red, white & blacken rock which was quarried from either a fosse, & were covered sustaining brass, tin and orichalcum, respectively.

Based on data from Critias, nine thousand years prior to his tale, a war took place between victims outside the Pillars of Heracles & people world health organization dwelt inside the two. A Atlanteans got conquered a Mediterranean when far east when Egypt and the continent into Tyrrhenia, and subjected its population to slavery. A Athenians led an alliance of resistance against a Atlantean empire & when a alliance became broken, prevailed alone against a empire, liberating a occupied lands. “But later there occurred violent earthquakes & floods; & around one every day of misfortune 100% your computers warrather men inside a person sank into a globe, & the island of Atlantis around like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea."

Critias' tale of Atlantis is possibly a work of fiction, an extended parable intended to illustrate Plato's philosophy of the ideal government, much as Plato's allegory of the cave. Plato's account purports to be based on a visit to Egypt by the Athenian lawgiver Solon. Sonchis, priest of Thebes, is purported to have translated it into Greek for Solon.

Aristotle
Aristotle wrote of a large island in the Atlantic Ocean that the Carthaginians knew as Antilia. Proclus, the commentator of "Timaeus" mentions that Marcellus, relying on ancient historians, stated in his Aethiopiaka that in the Outer Ocean (which meant all oceans, not just the Atlantic) there were seven small islands dedicated to Persephone, and three large ones; one of these, comprising 1,000 stadia in length, was dedicated to Poseidon. Proclus tells us that Crantor reported that he, too, had seen the columns on which the story of Atlantis was preserved as reported by Plato: the Saite priest showed him its history in hieroglyphic characters. Some other writers called it Poseidonis after Poseidon. Plutarch mentions Saturnia or Ogygia about five days' sail to the west of what is called nowadays Britain. He added that westwards from that island, there were the three islands of Cronus, to where proud and warlike men used to come from the continent beyond the islands, in order to offer sacrifice to the gods of the ocean.

Other Greek accounts
An important Greek festival of Pallas Athene, the Panathenaea was dated from the days of king Theseus. It consisted of a solemn procession to the Acropolis in which a peplos was carried to the goddess, for she had once saved the city, gaining victory over the nation of Poseidon, that is, the Atlanteans. As Lewis Spence comments, this cult was in existence already 125 years before Plato, which means that the story could not have been invented by him. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that the intelligentsia of Alexandria considered the destruction of Atlantis a historical fact and described a class of earthquakes that suddenly, by a violent motion, opened up huge mouths and so swallowed up portions of the earth, as once in the Atlantic Ocean a large island was swallowed up. Diodorus Siculus recorded that the Atlanteans did not know the fruits of Ceres. Pausanias called this island "Satyrides," referring to the Atlantes and those who profess to know the measurements of the earth. He states that far west of the Ocean there lies a group of islands whose inhabitants are red-skinned and whose hair is like that of the horse. (Christopher Columbus described the Indians similarly.) A fragmentary work of Theophrastus of Lesbos tells about the colonies of Atlantis in the sea. Hesiod wrote that the garden of the Hesperides was on an island in the sea where the sun sets. Pliny the Elder recorded that this land was 12,000 km distant from Cádiz, and Uba, a Numidian talks of an enormous island outside the Pillars of Hercules. He describes it as having a climate that is very mild; fruits and vegetables grow ripe throughout the year. There are huge mountains covered with large forests, and wide, irrigable plains with navigable rivers. Scylax of Caryanda gives similar account.

Marcellus claims that the survivors of the sinking Atlantis migrated to Western Europe. Timagenes tells almost the same, citing the Druids of Gaul as his sources. He tries to classify the Gallic tribes according to their origins and tells of one of these claiming that they were colonists who came there from a remote island. Theopompus of Chios, a Greek historian called this land beyond the ocean as "Meropis". The dialogue between King Midas and the wise Silenus mentions the Meropids, the first men with huge cities of gold and silver. Silenus knows that besides the well-known portions of the world there is another, unknown, of incredible immensity, where immeasurably vast blooming meadows and pastures feed herds of various, huge and mighty beasts. Claudius Aelianus cites Theopompus, knowing of the existence of the huge island out in the Atlantic as a continuing tradition among the Phoenicians or Carthaginians of Cádiz. Perhaps the Byzantine friar Cosmas Indicopleustes understood Plato better than the ancient and modern "Aristotelians", says Merezhkovsky. In his Topographia Christiana he included a chart of the (flat) world: it showed an inner continent, a compact mainland surrounded by sea, and this was surrounded by an outer ring-shaped continent, with the inscription, "A globe beyond a Ocean, in which men lived prior to the Flood." The Garden of Eden is placed in the eastern end of this continent.

Modern interest
With rare exceptions, such as Francis Bacon's book The New Atlantis, interest in Atlantis mostly languished, until, some 2,200 years after Plato, the 1882 publication of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly took Plato's account of Atlantis seriously and attempted to establish that all known ancient civilizations were descended from its high-neolithic culture.

In middle and late 19th century, several serious Mesoamerican scholars, starting with Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and including Edward Herbert Thompson and Augustus Le Plongeon proposed that Atlantis was somehow related to Mayan and Aztec culture; several of the researchers later recanted their controversial claims.

Around this same time, the mythical nature of Atlantis was combined with other lost continent myths such as Mu and Lemuria by popular figures in the occult and the growing new age phenomenon. Helena Blavatsky, the "Gran of the Up to date Age movement" writes in The Secret Doctrine that the Atlanteans were cultural heroes (contrary to Plato who describes them mainly as a military threat), and are the fourth "Root Race", succeeded by the "Aryan race". Rudolf Steiner based much of his writings on occult revelations of Mu or Atlantis. Famed psychic Edgar Cayce likewise proposed that Atlantis was an ancient, now-submerged, highly-evolved civilization which had ships and aircraft powered by a mysterious form of energy crystal. His work Toward the Light (1920) claims to describe Atlantis, including its exact geographical location.

Oddly enough, the concept of Atlantis also entered Nazi Mysticism through Theosophy and Anthroposophy. In 1938 Heinrich Himmler organized a search in Tibet to find a remnant of the white Atlanteans. According to Julius Evola (Revolt Against the Modern World, 1934), the Atlanteans were Hyperboreans -- Nordic supermen who originated on the North pole. Similarly, Alfred Rosenberg (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930) spoke of a "nordic-atlantean" or "aryan-nordic" master race. Aleister Crowley has also written an esoteric history of Atlantis, although this may be intended more as metaphor than as fact.

As continental drift became better understood and accepted during the 1950's, most "Wasted Continent" theories of Atlantis were proven conclusively false. In response, some recent theories propose that elements of Plato's story was derived from earlier myths including that of the (now mostly sunken) Sunda Plain, which is sometimes called Sundaland in Southeast Asia. Proponents of this idea include Bill Lauritzen, Steven Oppenheimer and Arysio Nunes dos Santos. There is stronger evidence, however that some of Plato's story elements were drawn from the natural disasters that have taken place in the Mediterranean, such as the volcanic eruptions around Santorini which may have destroyed the Minoan civilization. As yet there have been no conclusive results.

Location hypotheses
Since Donnelly's day, there have been dozens — perhaps hundreds — of locations proposed for Atlantis. Some are more-or-less serious attempts at legitimate scholarly or archaeological works; others have been made by psychic or other pseudoscientific means. Many of the proposed sites share some of the characteristics of the Atlantis story (water, catastrophic end, relevant time period), but none have been proven conclusively to be the historical Atlantis. Most of the historical proposed locations are in or nearby the Mediterranean, either islands such as Sardinia, Crete and Santorini, Malta, and Ponza or as land based cities or states such as Troy, Andalucia or Tantalus (in province of Manisa, Turkey) as possible locations. Part of these hypotheses assume that the Ancient Egyptian symbol for "hundred" was mistakenly read as "yard" (unlikely because there would be little confusion in the visual appearance of hieroglyphic symbols of Egyptian numeric values). The submerged island of Spartel near the Strait of Gibraltar is another proposed location which would coincide with some elements of Plato's account. The island of Santorini, according to geologists, experienced a massive volcanic eruption about 1640 BC, further leading some to believe that may have been the catastrophe that inspired the story.

Outside of the Mediterranean, locations as far as Antarctica, Indonesia and the Caribbean have been proposed as Atlantis' site. In the area of the Black Sea, three locations, Bosporus, Sinop and Ancomah, a legendary place near Trabzon. The nearby Sea of Azov was proposed as another site in 2003. Various islands or island groups in the Atlantic were also identified as possible locations notably the Azores off Portugal and several Carribbean islands. In the North Atlantic, Finland (by Finnish pseudohistorian Ior Bock) and Ireland have been proposed. Areas in the Pacific and Indian Ocean have also been proposed including Indonesia, Malaysia and stories of a lost continent off India named "Kumari Kandam" have drawn parallels to Atlantis. The Canary Islands have also been identified as a possible location, as they are west of the Pillars of Hercules, as is told in Plato's account.

In fiction

As a popular myth, Atlantis is frequently featured in many books, television shows and other creative works. Below is a partial listing of works where Atlantis is featured as a major part of the storyline.

Books & Stories

Jules Verne's classic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea includes a visit to sunken Atlantis aboard Captain Nemo's submarine Nautilus. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion tells of the Akallabêth, the history of Atalantë, where the Númenóreans lived (Aragorn of Lord of the Rings is descended from these people). The book Romance of Atlantis by Taylor Caldwell. The book Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler, inspired by the non-fiction, When the Sky Fell by Rand & Rose Flem-Ath. The book Decipher (also inspired by When the Sky Fell) by Stel Pavlou. In the Pendragon Cycle survivors of Atlantis settle in Britain. David Gemmell's fantasy novels make use of the Atlantean legends in the Jon Shannow series (Wolf of Shadow, The Last Guardian and Bloodstone) and the Stones of Power series (Ghost King and Last Sword of Power). In Doris Lessing's Shikasta, it is briefly mentioned in the Canopean reports that due to natural disasters certain advanced cultures have suddenly been exterminated including the culture of "Adalanterland". In Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy Hagbard Celine and crew travel to sites in submerged Atlantis. A portion of Atlantean history is also included in the book. The short story in a 2005 issue of Analog magazine titled "Adubon around Atlantis". In this story, which is an alternate history tale, Atlantis is not mythical at all, but is the result of the eastern seaboard breaking off of North America sometime during the formation of the continents. In Traci Harding's The Ancient Future Trilogy (Book 2 - An Echo in Time: Atlantis), Tory Alexander travels back in time to visit the lost city paradise of Atlantis, and its superior civilisation, where she is taught of the mind sciences and expands her psychic capabilities, and is inspired of a city plan which features in later books.

Movies

Atlantis is the subject of the 1961 film Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Atlantis is the central premise of Disney's 2001 animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire and is also featured in the 2003 sequel ''Atlantis: Milo's Return.

Television
The SciFi series Stargate Atlantis'' in which Atlantis is an ancient city created by a race of people from the Pegasus Galaxy known as the 'Ancients.' Atlantis was moved from Earth to its final resting place in the Pegasus Galaxy, only to be submerged under a great ocean . 10,000 years after, a team of human explorers lead by the civilian Dr. Elizabeth Weir and the United States Air Force officer Major John Sheppard travel to Atlantis via Earth's 'Stargate' with a team of scientists and military personnel from all over the world to discover the secrets of the Ancients. (See Stargate SG-1)

Comics/Manga

Many comic book characters including Aquaman, Namor the Sub-Mariner and Lori Lemaris - among others - were said to have come from a sunken Atlantis.

Video Games

An older LucasArts classic Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis recounts the fictional quest of Indiana Jones to the Lost World. (Supposedly, one of the possible titles for the fourth Indiana Jones film is Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent).