Atlantis: Island or World?

So considering that the end of the Ice Age heralded a rise of sea level by approximately 200 meters; what if this rise in sea level occurred in days or months or even years; rather than decades?

What if Atlantis was not an Island, but the entire world. An ancient world during the Ice Age when sea-levels were lower, when the Sahara was a vast grass land with huge rivers?

Imagine a world of trade; one common language; and though maybe not technology comprable today, certainly more than the ancient world shortly after.

A world completely drowned in a deluge with the end of the Ice Age; over-crowding leads to war and the end of civilization. People return to tribalistic savages.

Language barriers are created once more.

And trade ends as technology is a product of stable society.

Plato put the age of Atlantis' destruction at 9,000 years before his time. This is at the end of the Ice Age.

Scientists today; looking for an Island, think he must have been wrong and he meant 900 years which is the destruction of Thera.

But why is Atlantis considered an Island? Plato said it was a continent beyond the pilars of Herakles.

Perhaps when he was saying it was as large as Africa and Asia he meant it spanned across these lands.

And this entire continent was sunk; because there is no evidence of Atlantis anymore; it is beneath 200 meters of Ocean.

But around the world, we constantly find ruins in the sea...is there a coordinated effort to correlate the ages of these ruins?

doesn't sound too far out of left field to me though im hardly an expert on atlantis. i do believe atlantis existed though thats just an opinion based on thin air. there does seem to be more and more discovery's of underwater buildings and structures over the past few years, some sort of link between some of these would certainly help your case. it's not hard to imagine that it could have been just as youve outlined, though you would think more evidence may have been found.

Actually, we have a lot of evidence from civilizations that the levels rose gradually.



It's a great fantasy, truly, and would make a wonderful fantasy story. But Atlantis is a fantasy (there's no evidence for it).

Let me tell you a bit about human history... the parts they gloss over unless you're taking this in depth in college.



Actually, this did exist with our Australopithecene ancestors in Africa. As Australopithecene evolved toward Homo erectus (our immediate ancestor) we find things like "factories" where specialized tools were made. We see a lot of things that talk about the origingal cultures such as the shapes of stone axes (and of course the Clovis spearpoints.)



The human lineage has survived several ice ages in its long history. Remember that humans until fairly recently (9,000 years ago or so) were nomadic. Sea level rise, humans move.


Language divergence began more than a hundred thousand years ago (we know this by the patterns of language and by other evidence. Language isn't a dead thing but constantly evolves, so we have a continual stream of new languages being formed. For instance, someone from Liverpool today might not be able to understand an American Black from the inner city of Detroit.


Eh... not entirely. It didn't just "shoop" end. Important warming trends began only 7,000 years ago.



It was as much a fantasy as Narnia is.

Greeks loved plays and they loved tragedies and they loved art. The evidence for Troy came from plays, odes, songs, sculptures of Trojan heroes... and so forth. Trojan heroes were painted on jars, and the name Troy and Trojan War shows up all over the place.

There is no play about Atlantis (there should have been dozens), no legends of Atlantean heroes, no sculptures of "so and so of Atlantis", no paintings of them, no legendary names... nothing.

The lack of any other mention of it and lack of drawings and lack of legends is exactly what we'd expect if Plato made it up completely and didn't use any stories as basis of his tale. There are no Atlantis type myths in Egyptian mythology (I'm pretty familiar with most of the Egyptian tales.)




Oh yes, they're dated by the archaeologists. There's a Harrapan city that dates to 6,000 BC in India and other sites around the world. Here in Texas, we have coastal villages of Amerinds (temporary camps) that date even older than that, and there is an investigation of a site in North Carolina that has been submerged by the rising ocean levels -- a site believed to be nearly 20,000 years old.

Rather, it should read centuries rather than millenia.

What if Atlantis was not an Island, but the entire world. An ancient world during the Ice Age when sea-levels were lower, when the Sahara was a vast grass land with huge rivers?

Byrd can you site the evidence you claim states that the sea levels rose gradually?

Sea level will change with the amount of ice. We know that there was a slow decline in ice volumes.

I would like to know where Byrd found this evidence as well. Do you have a link to share with us?

Most of the sea level rise was gradual - as one would expect from gradually melting ice sheets.

There were however a number of more sudden rises. Meltwater Pulse 1A which occurred around 14,500 years ago saw global sea levels rise around 20m in just 500 years.

The last big rise, which probably did occur in the space of days or weeks, was casued by the final outpoiuring of Lake Agassiz c8,200 years ago. Latest estimates put the global sea level rise from this single catastrophic event - probably the largest flood of the post ice age era - at no more than 1.2m

One Post above stated that Thera's eruption occurred 900 years before Plato. Plato's dates are ca 340 BC. Thera eruption is said by archaeologists to have occurred between 1700 BC and 1600 BC, so there would not be a "ten fold error" correlation between Plato's date for Atlantis sinking at 9000 BC ("corrected" to 900 BC) and Thera. Anyway a lot of people don't believe in the theory that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean instead of the Atlantic.

he did say that it was to the west of the "pillars of Hercules" or rocks of Gibralter. Which would be the Atlanitc right?

but that was second hand information relayed to him from the Egyptian Solon right? If only the library at Alexandria was still there....

Solon was Greek, not Egyptian. He travelled to Egypt where a priest "told" him the story. Which, (cough, cough) doesn't appear on any inscription in Egypt at all. Not one. Byrd's right - there are no legends about Atlantis other than told by Plato. No-one else ever mentions it, which is why its veracity is doubted.
The other thing is that the Pillars of Herakles have moved about a great deal. The title was once held by the Straits of Sicily (here's the Wiki link: en.wikipedia.org... ) and I think that I once read that it was also used for the Dardenelles. I'll go look that up.

I'm always amused by certainty, Byrd.

So far as I know, there's no reason to take Plato too seriously. He probably did hear a tale of an ancient advanced society and incorporated it into his teachings. There could have been a popular play based on it - we don't know - much of history from this time is lost to us (How many times did they burn the library at Alexandria ), but Plato was more concerned with the world of ideals rather than history.

Still. Atlantis is important. The way I see it, Altlantis is really the search for the birth of civilization. Who started it and why. Sumeria just doesn't seem right.

Personally, I believe civilization was created by the pressures of the Ice Age. Mankind hunted the megafauna out of Europe, and basically killed off the hunter side of the hunter/gatherer equation through mass starvation. This left primarily the gatherers, the women-folk, who were also the keepers of the camp and those best suited for maintaining a town or village. (Interestingly enough, hair color variations coincide with the end of the Ice Age - possibly in response to the lack of male companions in northern Europe).

These people probably learned to live off of fish and fruits, and by not being shackled by the traditionalism of the hunters they may have created a society which was well ahead of its time. For sanitation and irrigation they also probably built their cities as close to the coast as possible - never knowing they were building in a flood plain. When it came to being nomadic and moving around, they probably never had a chance.

So far as catastrophic glacial flooding is concerned. It happened. NOVA did a stunning program on it in the American West. The flood waters there moved at close to the speed of sound. No society hit by such a wall of water would be able to move ten feet, let alone evacuate. All that would be left of them is a distant memory carried by those lucky enough to be caught on high ground. This would be hard to study because unlike most floods, these waters never receded.

I personally, would comb the Celtic Shelf if I could. Lack of megafauna for food seems to be the key to this riddle. That is what made this last ice age different from the ones before it. The megafauna faced its earliest eradication in western Europe, therefore civilization had the most reason to begin there.

Interesting tangent on all of this. The ruins of early societies which we know about: Jehrico, Lepenski Vir, etc.... All have one thing in common. They're build at relatively high altitudes for their areas and well away from the coastline. Maybe our ancient ancestors did not want to make a stupid mistake twice :-)

[edit on 23-4-2006 by jdmcdonnell]

Global civilisation, the ruins of it being all those ruins in just about every country and land area (and underwater) that all co-incidently -

can be shown to display advanced knowledge of astronomy and / or navigation

cannot be conclusively attributed to any specific peoples and / or there remain gaps in our understanding of those peoples

So in other words it is a little bit like actually living on 'Planet of the Apes'. Except swap the Statue of Liberty in ruins for some complex such as Tiahuanaco, or the Sphinx at Giza.