Atlantis Level of Development?

I know that there are a lot of people who have it in their minds, fed by folks like Edgar Cayce and George Pal, that Atlantis (if it existed) was some kind of wonderful supercivilization with bigger and better constructions than the Egyptians, helped by power crystals and alien technology.

More realistically, though, what level of development are we talking about here? What size population could have been supported on a large island the size of the Azores Plateau?

Seems to me that we're talking about a primarily seafaring culture with some agriculture. Not too many people. They had the ability to make a few large structures, but nothing like the Egyptian pyramids. They didn't apparently have enough resources to build and maintain far-flung outposts of any size. And their army/navy was significant for the time, but could also be repelled by the ancient Athenians, who probably weren't the biggest, toughest fighting force around. You might be able to give them credit for being one of the first people to develop a system of writing, although there has been no specific type of writing attributed to them.

I just think it might be a better idea to try and define exactly who these people could have been, then compare artifacts and mythology to see if they might match up. I also wonder, given a smaller size and less sophistication than is commonly imagined, what amount or level of artifacts could remain after 13,000 years or so that could be associated with these folks? Probably not a whole lot. Attributing a few bits of carved rock or something to them would be pretty difficult.

Well, given the fact, though I do believe that Atlantis was very real, that Atlantis is considered by academia as "mythological," we may never know the particulars of that civilization.

However, I'd surmise to say that population wise, it probably wasn't all that big. I figure maybe a few 100 thousand people at the most resided on the continent.

Now, if we are to assume that Atlantis experienced some type of "fall from grace," if you will, then any evidence of a supercivilization would have collapsed with it. In the end, trying to find evidence for or against some super civilization dating back pre-diluvian is like arguing about what existed before existence.

As an academic exercise, though, it might be useful to establish some basic parameters about the hypothetical civilization, then see what artifacts may or may not fit into the profile. For instance, Plato suggested that Atlantis had elephants (North American mastodons?). I always thought that these might be used for construction, as they are in India. As a result, the Atlantis folk probably wouldn't have commonly used a wheel, so artifacts indicating wheels or carts probably can be dismissed as belonging to a different culture.

Of course, like any culture, a hypothetical Atlantis culture would have probably evolved over time. That would obviously make it a little more difficult to attribute some artifacts to them, as the artifacts would change and evolve.

On the other hand, one could argue that a particular artifact might represent an "early" or "late" Atlantean culture. If it was destroyed by cataclysm around 13,000 years ago, it would had to have developed over some period of time before that. A few thousand years, possibly. The earlier material would be much more difficult to find, in that case, as it was buried and supplanted by the later culture as well as the cataclysm. That sure wouldn't make it any easier to find, either.

Nohup, true.

The common theme is that technology kind of trickled down to other cultures from Atlantis rather than the other way around. However, Atlantis, assuming that it did exist, didn't exist until about 9500 B.C..

Source

Given that the accepted timeline for civilization is dated between 200,000-250,000 years ago, some estimates even make the claim that civilization existed as far back as 800,000 years, it would seem that technology, like you suggest, would have trickled down from other cultures to Atlantis.

If that indeed is the case. and Atlantis was a supercivilization, then they must have revised the technology which was filtered down to them.

I'm sorry to interject, but what does this topic have to do with this forum?

It just seems like this topic has nothing to do with Scott's work, I've read through the posts and looked at his power point presentations and I see no mention of Atlantis...

If I'm wrong please correct me, but it seems like this should be somewhere else...