Historical Events  Geography
Atlantis

Alternate:
Atlantis was a continent

Current:
Atlantis was a city on an island

Changed?

Plato described Atlantis in some detail, and said it was destroyed 9000 years before his time.

Reading today what he wrote, we find he described a city of concentric circles each separated by waterways. The problem is most people remember Atlantis being described as a continent, which is vastly different, and are pointing to this discrepancy as being an MMDE.

Of course there is huge debate over whether it existed at all, but that's not the issue here. The fact so many remember being told if it did exist, it was a continent, is what's causing all the fuss.

Found in Africa?

The Richat structure, more commonly known as the "Eye of the Sahara", is a series of rings in the African country of Mauritania.

This is so prominent that it even served astronauts in orbit as a landmark, yet no-one know what really formed it. New research is suggesting it is the mythical city of Atlantis, which appears as Plato described yet has risen over the centuries, not sunk as everyone supposed. It also has features which suggests it could have been subjected to a great flood, such as washlines extending out for hundreds of miles.

richat 600x352

Antarctica

Wikipedia has speculation on the location of Atlantis. It's been known for centuries there is a large land mass under the ice of Antarctica, and that would certainly fit the "continent" hypothesis. The idea is that 9000 years before Plato, the climate could have been so different that sea passages were open from South America, and even Europe back then. This idea became quite popular in the 1960's when the Piri Reis map was studied in detail, because it seemed to show what the land mass actually looked like from the air, which matched the actual shape which cartographers were able to then document.

There's even speculation it could have been at the North Pole for the same reason, but the lack of a land mass there makes it seem far less likely.

The great flood

Was it destroyed by the flood described in the bible? Plato wrote of "the Island of Atlas" in Timaeus and Critias, but many speculate these were deliberately constructed fictional antagonists which fought "Ancient Athens", which would not have existed 9000 years before his time, at least in a form recognisable to the people of his day.