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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

There’s a fairly credible theory that Atlantis was a port city in the Richat Structure.

Aka the "Eye of Africa" (wikipedia seems to have scrubbed almost all trace of this commonly used name.)

I don't buy it it all. The lowest point of this structure is presently several hundred meters above sea level. There is almost no archeological trace of human habitation, save for some ancient stone tools (no trace of structures, no middens indicating dense population.) These tools date to the Late Pleistocene to early Holocene, when sea levels were even lower than they are today (in other words, this formation was even further from the sea then.)

Richat Structure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure

Then there is a fringe theory, that a somewhat advanced ancient civilization and a city is sunken off the West Coast of India. And that later travelers from India brought the myth of a Western sunken city into Europe. Then Atlantis would be in the Arabian Sea, East of Europe. But West of India.

It’s not credible at all: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/no-atlantis-ha...

The whole circularity of this structure actually bring Atlantis and it's rings to mind, and also we must remember that the Sahara had a much different climate not that long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

That’s true, but it beggars belief that the civilisation Atlantis conjures to mind would leave zero physical evidence of significant structures behind.

It would also have significant trade and its artifacts would show up along the traderoutes.

Not just zero physical evidence - zero evidence _at all_. Afaik it doesn't appear until Plato uses it, and he claims that its thousands of years old or something like that. That should reasonably have traces in other accounts through the years.

I did hear a fairly credible theory that it is just an allegory invented by Plato, but influenced by various other myths and political centers (such as king Minos rule on Crete).

The island Thera was destroyed by a volcanic eruption some 1200 years before Plato: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorini_caldera. The collapse of the island would have triggered tsunamis all across the Aegean Sea, so it's very likely many coastal towns had their own stories of being "swallowed by the sea".

Though Plato said 10,000 years before, this is the most likely source of the Atlantis story, as the eruption destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri as well as those on the coast of Crete. It's possible the eruption led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization.

Another quite compelling theory posits the destruction of Thera also caused the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt.

We don't know that it hasn't left any physical evidence behind. The origin of many archaeological artifacts are not known for certain. It's possible that there is pottery and other artifacts from Atlantis that we've already unearthed.

I was commenting in the context of the Eye of Africa, it’s a fascinating structure that happens to have some dimensional characteristics that vaguely resemble Plato’s description. There’s just no physical evidence of any significant architecture there of any kind.

Exactly, Atlantis is in Tunisia: https://medcraveonline.com/IJH/is-atlantis-related-to-the-gr...

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