Imagining Atlantis - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Ellis is the author of seven previous books, including The Book of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises, Monsters of the Sea, and Deep Atlantic. He is also a celebrated marine artist whose paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, and has written and illustrated articles for numerous magazines, including Audubon, Reader's Digest, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He lives in New York City.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Ever since Plato created the legend of the lost island of Atlantis, it has maintained a uniquely strong grip on the human imagination. For two and a half millennia, the story of the city and its catastrophic downfall has inspired people--from Francis Bacon to Jules Verne to Jacques Cousteau--to speculate on the island's origins, nature, and location, and sometimes even to search for its physical remains. It has endured as a part of the mythology of many different cultures, yet there is no indisputable evidence, let alone proof, that Atlantis ever existed. What, then, accounts for its seemingly inexhaustible appeal?
Richard Ellis plunges into this rich topic, investigating the roots of the legend and following its various manifestations into the present. He begins with the story's origins. Did it arise from a common prehistorical myth? Was it a historical remnant of a lost city of pre-Columbians or ancient Egyptians? Was Atlantis an extraterrestrial colony? Ellis sifts through the "scientific" evidence marshaled to "prove" these theories, and describes the mystical and spiritual significance that has accrued to them over the centuries. He goes on to explore the possibility that the fable of Atlantis was inspired by a conflation of the high culture of Minoan Crete with the destruction wrought on the Aegean world by the cataclysmic eruption, around 1500 b.c., of the volcanic island of Thera (or Santorini).
A fascinating historical and archaeological detective story, Imagining Atlantis is a valuable addition to the literature on this essential aspect of our mythohistory.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

Ever since Plato created the legend of the lost island of Atlantis, it has maintained a uniquely strong grip on the human imagination. For two and a half millennia, the story of the city and its catastrophic downfall has inspired people--from Francis Bacon to Jules Verne to Jacques Cousteau--to speculate on the island's origins, nature, and location, and sometimes even to search for its physical remains. It has endured as a part of the mythology of many different cultures, yet there is no indisputable evidence, let alone proof, that Atlantis ever existed. What, then, accounts for its seemingly inexhaustible appeal?

Richard Ellis plunges into this rich topic, investigating the roots of the legend and following its various manifestations into the present. He begins with the story's origins. Did it arise from a common prehistorical myth? Was it a historical remnant of a lost city of pre-Columbians or ancient Egyptians? Was Atlantis an extraterrestrial colony? Ellis sifts through the "scientific" evidence marshaled to "prove" these theories, and describes the mystical and spiritual significance that has accrued to them over the centuries. He goes on to explore the possibility that the fable of Atlantis was inspired by a conflation of the high culture of Minoan Crete with the destruction wrought on the Aegean world by the cataclysmic eruption, around 1500 b.c., of the volcanic island of Thera (or Santorini).

A fascinating historical and archaeological detective story, Imagining Atlantis is a valuable addition to the literature on this essential aspect of our mythohistory.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

WHAT PLATO SAID
Our records tell how your city checked a great power which arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic Ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia. For in those days the Atlantic was navigable. There was an island opposite the strait which you call . . . the Pillars of Heracles, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travelers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For the sea within the strait we are talking about is like a lake with a narrow entrance; the outer ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it is properly termed continent. On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings. . . .
--PLATO
Timaeus

It is of course impossible to know, or even guess, when men first looked out over the gray Atlantic and thought about crossing it. For eons, men had no idea what lay on the other side, or if indeed there was another side. In The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, James Romm wrote that "early writers seemed to have assumed, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that Ocean's waters stretched unbounded toward a distant horizon." The prospect of sailing out of sight of the comforting and familiar terra firma must have terrified the earliest sailors, and great credit must be assigned to the first of those brave navigators who ventured toward what must have seemed literally the end of the world. (While the story of Christopher Columbus's men fearing that they were going to sail off the end of the world if they kept going is certainly apocryphal--men have known the earth was round since Ptolemy's second-century calculations--they were unquestionably apprehensive as they sailed steadily toward the setting sun and the unknown.)

To the Greeks, the Pillars of Hercules--the name given to the twin rocks that define the passage we know as the Straits of Gibraltar--represented the gateway from the known Mediterranean to the unknown mysteries beyond. The poet Pindar wrote that the Pillars of Hercules were, almost literally, the end of the world: "Now Theron, approaching the outer limit of his feats of strength, touches the Pillars of Hercules. What lies beyond cannot be approached by wise men or unwise. I shall not try, or I would be a fool."

Before the year 1100 b.c., the Phoenicians, from their outpost at Carthage on the North African coast, had in all probability explored the shores of the Atlantic outside the protection of the Pillars of Hercules, that is, the Straits of Gibraltar. From archaeological evidence, it has been ascertained that the Carthaginians had established a trading post at Essaouira (modern Mogador), about six hundred miles south of Gibraltar on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, some twenty-five hundred years ago.
The first chronicler of an Atlantic voyage was Herodotus, the fifth-century b.c. Greek historian, who also mentions the first known map of the world, a bronze tablet "showing all the seas and rivers" compiled by his predecessor the historian Hecataeus. Also according to Herodotus, Pharaoh Necho II sent a Phoenician expedition to find a route around Africa. It will probably never be known if they completed the circumnavigation, but Herodotus's account (written some one hundred fifty years after the event) suggests that they may have done so:

Accordingly these Phoenicians set out and from the Red Sea sailed into the southern ocean. Whenever autumn came, they went ashore wherever in Africa they chanced to be on their voyage to sow grain in the earth and await the harvest. On reaping the new grain they put again to sea. In this wise, after two years had elapsed, they rounded the Pillars of Heracles and in the third year reached Egypt. Now they told a tale that I personally do not believe (though others may, if they choose), how they had the sun on their right hand as they sailed along the African coast.

Although some analysts of Herodotus have been inclined to question this account, the statement "they had the sun on their right hand," which would refer to the sun's midday position only if the Phoenicians were sailing west while south of the equator, actually supports the claim for authenticity. Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison believes they succeeded, and called their circumnavigation of Africa from east to west "one of the most remarkable voyages of history." In Beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which contains a meticulous analysis of Herodotus's account, the historian Rhys Carpenter wrote, "The curious detail that Herodotus refused to believe this becomes our surest warrant for believing the Phoenician claim that they circumnavigated Africa."


A century or so later, Hanno, the magistrate of Carthage, set out from the Mediterranean and sailed south with "sixty ships of fifty oars each and a body of men and women to the number of thirty thousand," which works out to approximately five hundred persons per ship, an obvious exaggeration. This story can be found in the Periplous of Hanno, a Greek translation of an inscribed tablet that has never been found. The narrative tells of the establishment of several colonies along the Atlantic coast of Africa, to safeguard the Carthaginian access to the Canaries and Madeira, the sources of the Murex snails that provided the royal purple dye. Hanno passed the Saharan coast, and easily made Cape Bojador, which was to prove such a formidable psychological and physical obstacle to the first Portuguese explorers. The success of this pioneer voyage can be found in Hanno's own narrative, where he describes a tribe that he calls "Ethiopians," various active volcanoes, and also such exotic animals as elephants, hippopotamuses, and "gorillas" (probably chimpanzees--the expedition killed three females and brought the hairy pelts back to Carthage). This coast of Africa would not be seen again by European eyes for another thousand years, when sailors from Portugal would cautiously navigate south around the bulge of Africa, culminating in Bartholomeu Dias's doubling of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.

In the Timaeus, Plato tells us that Solon (630-560 b.c.) reported that the Egyptian priests of Saïs told him the story of a great island that lay in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the Pillars of Hercules. Its generals mounted an invasion of Greece: "Our records tell [Plato wrote] how your city checked a great power which arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia."

The invasion ended not in a military victory for either side but in a double defeat, where the only winner was the force of nature: "But afterward there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea" (my emphasis). This is the full extent of the original story of the destruction of Atlantis.

With Socrates and Aristotle, Plato is considered one of the authors of the philosophical foundations of Western culture. He was born in 428 b.c., either in Athens or in Aegina, to Ariston and Perictione. We know few details of his life, but after the suicide of his mentor Socrates in 399 b.c., he became disillusioned with Athens and traveled in Greece, Italy, Egypt, and Sicily, and when he returned to Athens, he founded an academy dedicated to the systematic pursuit of philosophical and scientific research. Around 368, when he was forty, Plato was invited to Sicily to educate Dionysius II, but the experiment was a failure and Plato returned to Athens. Rather than adopting the role of "philosopher-king" that Plato...