ext week will see the opening of Disney's latest animated feature, Atlantis, which portrays a civilization some 10,000 years old hidden beneath miles of ocean and rock. The story is, of course, based on a real myth, which is popular not only among fans of New Age mysticism and UFO lore, but among respectable historians and archaeologists as well. The story is handed down to us by the Greek philosopher Plato, who transcribed it from the verbal account of Critias the Younger, who got it from Critias the Elder, who got it from his father, King Solon. Solon himself heard the tale while traveling in Egypt, which at that time was the great seat of culture and recorded history for the Western world.
Plato's account runs as follows: 9,000 years before the time of Solon (roughly 9400 B.C. by our modern calendar), there existed a great military empire beyond the Pillars of Hercules. This kingdom was based on "an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia," but had conquered many other islands, plus portions of Egypt, Africa and southern Europe, including Greece. The island itself was rich with timber, fruits, grains and assorted animal life, which Plato describes in great detail. The island also had hot and cold running water, and included an inhabited plain 330 by 110 miles across, open to the sea on the south and surrounded by mountains to the north, whose population, based on statistics he cites, would have supported an army of 800,000 foot soldiers, 200,000 horses and 10,000 chariots, plus a navy of 1,200 ships. (For contrast, the U.S. military consists of roughly 1.5 million active soldiers, 50,000 air and ground vehicles and 250 major warships.)
The most interesting part of the account is its lengthy descriptions of Atlantean architecture, which included buildings, walls, canals, bridges, covered docks and other structures built of white, black and yellow stone. The empire's capital was a harbor city shaped like a bullseye, with three rings of water separating three rings of land, each about 1,500 feet across. The rings were surrounded by walls faced, respectively, with brass and tin and a gold-silver-bronze alloy known as orichalcum. The rings were connected by walled bridges 100 feet wide, with guard towers and gates at their ends. As if this weren't enough, there was also a canal 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep, leading from the center ring out to the ocean some five and a half miles away, and an 1,100-mile-long, 600-foot-wide, 100-foot-deep trench surrounding the entire plain. Plato openly doubted that such features could be artificial, implying instead that the Atlanteans had enhanced the natural features of an already striking (and highly defensible) landscape.
Unfortunately, while Atlantis could not be defeated militarily, it fell victim to "an earthquake" and was destroyed in a single day and night, leaving the surrounding ocean an impassable sea of mud.
Plato's retreat from reality
Despite the richness and authenticity of detail in Plato's story, reconciling his account with today's historical, geological and archaeological record is, shall we say, a bit difficult. First of all, while Plato and Solon and the Egyptians couldn't have known this, 9400 B.C. falls during the end of the last ice age, when the Mediterranean Sea as we know it did not exist, metal had not yet been discovered and the most advanced form of maritime transport was probably the hollowed-out log. Even assuming there could have been an "empire" at that time, there would have been no nations in Greece and Libya and Egypt to be conquered by it, or to record the fact of its untimely demise. Strike one.
Also, "outside the pillars of Hercules" is usually interpreted to mean "east of the straits of Gibraltar, in the Atlantic Ocean." But we modern folk, being very interested in buried oil and mineral deposits, have mapped the sea floor and the continental drift rather extensively, and if a land mass the size of "Libya and Asia" had existed between the Americas and Europe/Africa at any time--especially in the past 11,000 years--we would surely know about it. And anyway, earthquakes don't last a full day and night, and don't reduce entire continents to mud. Strikes two and three.
So unless you choose to disbelieve the entire body of 20th-century geology and archaeology, there are really only two ways to make sense of the story: either (1) it's a complete fabrication, with no basis in fact, or (2) it's a garbled version of something which actually did happen. The first hypothesis is impossible to disprove, and has a great many believers in the world today. But one of the other things the 20th century taught us is that the people of the classical world were immensely practical, and not given to flights of fancy. One by one, from Troy to Ur, from Jericho to Shangri-La, the "mythical" places of ancient record have been checking in as real, physical ruins. The details don't match the legends precisely, but well enough to leave little room for doubt. So while (1) may credit Plato as an unusually gifted teller of tall tales, it's likely to be a tall tale as well.
Let's assume, then, that there really was an Atlantis. It may not have been called that, since the Egyptian version of the legend, handed down to us through other channels, calls the island Keftiu, meaning "one of the pillars which holds up the sky." This by itself is suggestive, since Atlantis means "island of Atlas," which is the name Plato gives for the island's first king, but also the name of the Greek demigod who was supposed to hold up the sky. So the Greeks may have slapped some familiar names on the story to make a better lesson of it.
Another thing the Greeks probably did was confuse their word for "thousand" with the very similar Egyptian word for "hundred." Problems like this were common in the ancient world, and we see echoes of it even today--the word billion means "one thousand million" in English but "one million million" in French. A good argument for using scientific notation! Also, if the right words are chosen in ancient Egyptian, the phrase "greater in extent" is only one misplaced letter away from the phrase "midway between." What's more, the northeasternmost "pillar" of the Egyptian sky is not believed to be near the straits of Gibraltar, but further east in the Mediterranean, where there is another rock formation which was also sometimes called "Pillars of Hercules" by the Greeks. Given the number of hands and lips this story must have passed through before being written down by Plato, these errors are not particularly unlikely.
And as it happens, there was an island in the eastern Mediterranean, roughly midway between Libya and Asia, which was destroyed by unfriendly geology in 1400 B.C., a little more than 900 years before the reign of Solon. And there was a civilized empire--the Minoan--which had conquered about half of the Mediterranean coast by that time, and was almost completely wiped out in the catastrophe. The largest volcanic eruption in modern history was the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa island in the eastern Pacific Ocean, which created a bang so loud it was heard over 500 miles away, and blew so much sun-dimming rock and dust (about two cubic miles of it) into the atmosphere that there was no summer that year, anywhere in the world.
History hits a bullseye
That's a big freaking bang, but unfortunately for the Minoans, the eruption of the island of Thera was about four times bigger. The resulting tidal waves would have scoured the coastline for hundreds of miles, wiping away cities and villages and farms, and the tremors would have been felt throughout the Mediterranean, and the surrounding waters, like the rivers below our own Mount Saint Helens, would indeed have been impassably choked with mud. Too, the inevitable darkness and dust storms and crop failures downwind of the disaster coincide neatly with another "legend" from the same period: the ten plagues of Egypt, supposedly called down by Moses to punish the Pharaoh Ramses for the enslavement of his formerly nomadic tribe, the Jews. Too bad for Egypt. Too bad for Thera.
Of course, this evidence doesn't link the Minoans to the Atlanteans in anything more than a circumstantial way. Similar stories, with discrepancies explained by a few convenient slips of the pen or tongue. But there is physical evidence as well: despite the loss of seven cubic miles of its substance, the island of Thera--also known as Santorini--still exists. And beneath its modern-day villages and towns it does indeed bear the ash-buried remains of at least one large and probably wealthy city. And it is shaped rather like a smashed-up bullseye, a ring of hills rising up out of the water, surrounding an almost-enclosed harbor with a small, round-ish island at its center. And the various strata of the island's geology include thick layers of black, white and yellow stone.
It's difficult to say how closely the pre-cataclysmic Thera would have resembled Plato's Atlantis, but the similarities are eerie enough that we can almost suspect his account is as literal as it sounds. Which is a tragic thought: a doomed civilization larger and wealthier and more technologically advanced than the world would see again for a thousand years or more, with such refined aesthetic sensibilities that they remain, arguably, unmatched even today. The world's very hippest bunch of people, ironically huddled around the world's very deadliest geological trap, to be snuffed out in a day and a night, their wonders drowned or vaporized or smothered in blankets of hot ash.
The ancient world was like that: brittle, unforgiving, poised eternally at the brink of disaster. Not like a Disney cartoon. Not like the world of today, either, where our wisdom and cleverness make disasters like this one impossible because ... because ... What was that reason, again?
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, science fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots, and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short fiction has graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Science Fiction Age and other major publications, and his novel-length works include Aggressor Six, the New York Times notable Bloom, and The Collapsium.
