Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?
greekreporter.com
greekreporter.com
No Greek historian mention Atlantis. No Greek myth or epic mention Atlantis.
We might also ask where the fabled cave from The Republic is actually located.
It's likely that most of stories from oral tradition have never been put down to writing, and most of those who did were probably lost through the filter of time (along with the vast majority or ancient Greek literature).
- Plato conceived of it a as part of an allegory on the hubris of nations, OR
- it actually was real and there’s zero evidence for it
The story of Atlantis is told by Critias, who heard the story second hand.
You probably think your methodology is "evidence based" though.
whats strange is that plato's account of Atlantis is detialed with specific measurements and descriptions of the layout of the city, ( and its temples, and the organization of the society.) This level of detail interpreted by some as an attempt to describe a real place rather than a purely symbolic or allegorical one.
Unlike other Greek myths (or allegories), the story of atlantis is not populated with gods interfering in the affairs of men, mythical creatures, or heroes of divine descent. Plato didnt have a track record of fabricating tales completely, especially since he presents atlantis in a matter-of-fact way within dialogues that are otherwise serious philosophical texts.
Usually when a mythical city is described, the author highlights their mystery, utopian qualities, or moral lessons they impart, rather than providing a blueprint of their layout and structure.
For that matter Tolkien to claims that his world is actually set on our planet just thousands of years ago.
Not at all strange . The opposite, that’s exactly what I would expect from an author designing a sci-fi/fantasy/fictional world. If it was based on some old myth one would expect the complete opposite of that (vague and uncertain descriptions)
> Plato didnt have a track record of fabricating tales completel
Do you believe that’s what all people who write fiction do? Fabricate tales?
> especially since he presents atlantis in a matter-of-fact way within dialogues that are otherwise serious philosophical texts.
Yes, many authors did or still do that.
Example of the beautiful wash of mind (see talk page):
> Terra Australis is a legendary/theoretical continent, not based on sightings of the real Antarctica
Ah, such conviction for someone to have of a past that they never directly experienced. It's remarkable! Especially when the map is the same size of the object it represents. Lest you not think in haste, it is certainly not that which it is.
Which map? Most maps that have the hypothetical landmass place it with the South Pole at its center, with land spreading outward as far as will fit with the known landmasses.
They also make it many times larger than Australia (usually to conform to the theory that the hemispheres should have equal landmass).
> Especially when the map is the same size of the object it represents.
On an extremely superficial level.
The story of 'Atlantis' as Plato knew it, came to him from Critias (the younger) through his father, Critias (the elder, also Plato's great grandfather), who got it from his father Dropides who received it directly from Solon, who learned of the story from his time in Egypt, specifically via priests in Sais who supposedly maintained an artifact from this lost civilization.
It's clear that Plato's recanting of the story is embellished, he probably made up a great number or all of details to support his ideas and what he was trying to get across, but it's also possible that there are germs of truth in the story, such an ancient civilization being destroyed that Egyptians were aware of.
It's not a stretch to imagine that Egyptians had knowledge of ancient civilizations, or that secret knowledge was revealed to Greeks, and it's not stretch that civilizations rose and fell all over the Earth. There isn't much to hang your hat on but I think we can charitably assume there was some real basis to the story that Plato based his writing on.
Did ancient Egyptians poses knowledge of the Americas and encounter its population? Or was it a story about a local group of people? Or perhaps it was a general story of a pre-historic civilization and the associated cataclysms that ended it? Who knows, but I don't think you can say with certainty that it existed, or it didn't exist at all.
Not that it means that Atlantis WAS historic, just we can't use absence of evidence to infer evidence of absence.
Was greek, staffed by Greek speaking scholars and stored works written in Greek. I’m not aware that they had many Ancient Egyptian texts there
> just we can't use absence of evidence to infer evidence of absence.
Can we apply this to pretty much anything we can’t disprove beyond a shadow of doubt? So pretty much everything including loads of conspiracy theories..
Honestly, I don't have a good answer for you. I just simply don't know. It's a problem that much smarter people than me have likely already wrestled with. I'm with you in that a blanket application of this can lead us to accepting all kinds of crackpot theories.
However there are things where it's literally true that just because we didn't have evidence of something doesn't mean it didn't exist, such as the coelocanth.
Certainty is a red hearing. You cannot say anything with absolute certainty. The question is whether there is evidence to support the conjecture. For Atlantis, there isn't much and so there really isn't any rational reason to believe it existed. If more compelling evidence arises, that is the time to believe, but not before.
Do as in, even in present day?
And of course people in the US often make things up and call it ancient Asian wisdom too, but usually aphorisms rather than whole books.
Rather the question today is OMG why do we care about 1000 years ago, we are more advanced!1111, whatever problem ancient people had, we have solved.
Which is equally silly
Apparently no more closely guarded than they told it to some Greek guy who told it to a famous author who put it a book.
Apparently the Egyptians hadn’t learned the secret about secrets: If you want to keep something a secret, you shouldnt tell people about it.
Why would you ask this question? I we might as well say “Did the aliens build the pyramids? Who knows” if we assume that nobody “knows” anything..
> Who knows, but I don't think you can say with certainty that it existed, or it didn't exist at all.
For instance we know that Troy existed
Certainly. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is clearly a metaphor for enlightenment, with no pretense of being a literal place. However, his depiction of Atlantis in "Timaeus" and "Critias" is detailed and concrete, lacking the overt symbolism of his allegories. This detail might imply that Plato intended for Atlantis to be considered as more than just a metaphorical construct, perhaps as a tale grounded in some form of historical tradition.
I’m sure that many cultures had some sort of ancient flood myths because of what happened after the last glacial period. But beyond that…
> detailed and concrete,
Which would be the opposite of one might expect? If we’re talking about thousand year old myths we should assume that anything “ detailed and concrete” must have been invented?
Plato mentions that the story was heard by Solon in Egypt, and transmitted orally over several generations through the family of Dropides, until it reached Critias( a dialogue speaker in Timaeus and Critias. )
Which is more likely, he completely made up Atlantis and all that detail in a very weird way, or he just reached for something that he thought was historically true that he came across during his life.
Oral histories extremely important in the time that lead up to the time of Plato's life (and afterwards as well.) In the absence of widespread literacy and accessible writing materials, these oral narratives served as the primary medium through which historical events, cultural norms, legal statutes, and philosophical ideas were transmitted across generations.
Socrates, Plato's teacher, famously never wrote anything down, his philosophy was preserved and passed down primarily through the oral accounts of his students. (Like Plato!)
in "Phaedrus," Plato discusses the art of rhetoric and the importance of the spoken word over the written word, which can be seen as a nod to the value of oral tradition.
So I don't think it's as binary as, fact or allegory. There are other facets, to how this description of Atlantis came to be.
Maybe it’s based on the last capital of the Western Roman Empire, Ravenna? It was situated between swampland and flooding was certainly a threat.
Despite this early breakthrough no further discoveries have been made.
Wait, were they? I thought they never really made it much past the southeastern coast of Spain, the west being full of Phoenicians.
There’s also Greek stories and lesser familiarity as well at some point with Tartessos (another possible Atlantis.)
I’m not sure that’s true. Or rather the Greek civilization was so widely dispersed that whatever Plato heard might have been second or third hand information. His audience probably wouldn’t be bothered that much by it either, I don’t think there is any evidence that Athen merchant ships commonly sailed there.
> "for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together" [1]
Whatever the definition of "Libya and Asia" implied here, its kinda hard to reconcile. Like by a factor between 100x - 1000x :-)
Who knows what kind of convolution of themes, imaginary and real, spanning time and space may have been folded together in these enigmatic passages.
Which leads to the broader question, what fraction of puzzles we inherited from these very early patchy historical artifacts we'll we ever be able to resolve?
Seems legit.
Lygia too was only a small section of what we currently name Libya.
Not that there's any islands the size of Turkey there ;)
A maritime civilization on the level of the Phoenicians, on an island the size of Turkey, in the middle of the Atlantic would be in an ideal position for trans-Atlantic trade that is even easier than trans-Atlantic trade in our age of sail. If such a civilization existed it would be fantastically wealthy facilitating trade between the Amazon and the Nile. This civilization built in an ideal position during the 2.5 million year Pleistocene would have a very long time to develop a high level of technology.
Like I said, it is fanciful. But, the physics of it are known. Cosmic impacts have reshaped the planet multiple times. Something changed the planet drastically in a very short amount of time that ended the Pleistocene. I like to entertain the idea that a previous global civilization existed that had conquered the long running ice age environment. A cosmic impact rapidly changed the environment and the civilization couldn't survive the upheaval. It doesn't matter one bit to me if it is true other than to remind me, like every other ancient civilization, that nothing, no matter how great, is forever.
the physical descriptions of Atlantis seem fanciful.
This is a field of speculation of course; there's never any hard proof that the author was influenced by those events, but the similarities are intriguing nonetheless.
Other, similar examples:
* King Arthur and Riothamus
* Noah's flood and the flooding of the Black Sea (or more likely a massive flood of the Tigris and Eufrates)
You can never prove that these events did influence the author, but it's intriguing to speculate that they might be.
It fails to convince me because it rests on two basic claims that I just cannot make myself believe: that humans are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories, and that word of mouth, so inferior to writing for conveying information through the ages, somehow suddenly becomes a gold standard that can hold the kernel of a story true for a multiple of the time span of history.
Occam's Razor just screams that actually, every civilization across the world having their version of flood myths means that humans live in places where floods are important, life-defining catastrophes. this is true of every single habitat I'm aware of, up to and including deserts. It's "7000 (or whatever exactly) years of oral tradition before some Sumerian writes it down that captures anything useful" vs "Listen 'ere, grandchildren, did I tell you tykes the story of when I was your age, and my grandpappy put us all in boat with the sheep because of the flood? I couldn't see no land no more, so much water it was. Sigh, even the floods where better in my time, you don't know how good yer got it (repeat and aggrandize for three more generations)", and knowing humans, only one is instantly believable.
It also solves the annoying conundrum of Native Americans also having flood myths, despite the Black Sea flood happening definitely well after they lost contact with the Old World.
The idea that the flood myths came from an oral tradition ten thousand years ago doesn't even require the first assumption you mentioned (i.e. "that humans are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories"). It may be that among the myths, most of them are grand exaggerated stories, but this one is real.
As for how long oral traditions can survive without writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?
I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely in your framework, a framework that's not indisputably valid at that?
For example did people distinguish "fact from fiction" as they were passing along stories (in some way we would recognize today)?
I somehow doubt that "fact checking" had to wait for Thucydides (in the Hellenic world) [1] as it seems like an important survival attribute, but how did they signal that the story coming up should be taken at face value or with a grain of salt?
[1] Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
> I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely...
I'd like to point out that I'm not at all annoyed at people talking about the possibility in potentia. I disagree that it's a good possibility, but I am only annoyed when this is presented by professionals, most probably scientific journalists*, as something we should expect to be probable. This also extends (a bit unfairly, I guess) to amateurs repeating that claim as truth -- this is just bad pop science.
I do think, however, that the two quoted sentences above do at least imply a logical fallacy: of course we don't know the truth in this case. This does not make any kind of speculation an equally valid hypothesis to any other, there are distinctions, as per Russel's Teapot. And a claim as maximalist as "all the worlds flooding myths come from the Black Sea" better have some actual evidence to back it up, or be preceded with "In further publications, it might be interesting to look for evidence that ..." in the paper.
> As for how long oral traditions can survive without writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?
Similarly, the logical conclusion of that is not "there are stories that have been passed down from our common time in Africa 200k years ago, because who knows how far oral history can go" but rather "until there is actual evidence to the contrary, oral tradition remains suspect as a carrier of stories". We do know that correct details, at least, can be transported over centuries: the Iliad contains descriptions of soldiering that are, in part, clearly Late Bronze Age Mycenaean, though by the time it was written down the authors were unable to disentangle these tidbits from descriptions more fitting to the Archaic Age. That is the upper bound that I'm aware of: a few hundred years, information strongly mangled, but still recognizable if you know what to look for. How do you propose to go from there to an order of magnitude more? Of course, you might reply "you can't disprove it", to which my reply stays the same: then there is absolutely no reason to believe it true.
* I checked the original paper about the deluge, the authors didn't mention all of the worlds flooding myths at all in there. The wild speculation wisely appears in a book they published, which I do not have and which seems to propose a connection of all Indo-European and Egyptian myths. This is a far cry from "the Chinese are unable to think of a flooding myth themselves".
Update: a bit of searching around has mainly offered up thinly-disguised young earth creationist sites or sites clearly pointing out the problems as well as the allure of the "all flood myths are from the Black Sea Deluge" speculation. Maybe I should go softer on science journalism here...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-...
That's very vague. Oral tradition was replaced by writing because writing is better, and the information content decays far slower. Do you have evidence of information transmitted orally across thousands of years? Best I know of is a few measly centuries, from the Iliad, where some passages obviously show knowledge of Late Bronze Age Mycenaean gear, but mixed up with later Archaic stuff.
>and it's not just the Black Sea that flooded, it's coastlines everywhere.
Which wasn't the specific claim here, which is "all flood myths go back to the Black Sea Deluge".
Australian Aboriginal oral tradition describes flooding to create islands or bays (modern science can date the corresponding event back 7000+ years). But in certain cases the level of detail is even better [see link]:
> The story describes several named landmarks with remembered historical-cultural associations that are now underwater.
https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-5302-3_...
Not sure about the others, but at least the Chinese "flood myth", the legend of Yu the Great, is qualitatively different from the Noah myth. It involves non-cataclysmic, recurring floods that the "government" wanted to control. There was no saving animals on a big boat and restarting civilization. It basically involved a big engineering project of directing water flow to where it's needed.
The Noah flood myths seem to describe floods of a much scarier kind, the kinds that have the potential to wipe out civilizations, as opposed to ones happening on a "fairly regular basis". Given that sea water levels rose tens of meters during the Younger Dryas (that's what google tells me at least), it seems conceivable that the movement of such massive amounts of water during these periods would have given rise to such stories.
What is common is that "everything" gets destroyed, a few survive to rebuild.
I'd go even further: there is no human habitat at all where floods are not dangerous catastrophes. The coast and alluvial plains trivially so, but mountains and deserts, too.
Edited for clarity
Also at some point in prehistory the rock formation that is now the strait of Gibraltar fractured and the Atlantic ocean rushed in and drowned the entire basin of the Mediterranean,[1] so that type of cataclysm has actually occurred, although before human experience
[1.] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/09/mediterranea...
It’s indeed very tiny if we assume that Plato’s story is almost entirely fictional (I don’t think there are any reasons not to) and partially based on some ancient myth or his interpretation of it (just like many modern works of fiction).
But I’ll also take that Plato could have used an existing folk tale describing that very event as the basis for a point he was trying to make. Especially if his audience was already familiar with said folk tale.
Seems reasonable as well. What comes to mind for me is a (Western?) tradition of writing fiction as if it were reality that takes place in a foreign land. Isn't that kind of a thing? Maybe my brain is extrapolating an untrue connection, if someone here with more literary experience needs to shoot this down that's ok.
There are multiple examples of 'myth-like' stories whose only attestation is a platonic dialogue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
here's another example.
While an interesting enough piece, it certainly isn't a novel theory.
Also, one other interesting tidbit to me, is that Zeus is from Crete. I think it's interesting because Zeus is strong and intelligent, like the Titan Cronos, but more importantly is he is the God that brought justice. Maybe in ancient history there was a time period that was marked by constant war and rule of the strong over the weak, until a Minoan King named Zeus ended the cycle? Who knows, but the list of things that point to Minoan pedigree is really interesting. It's a shame we don't know more about them. I think even if Atlantis per se wasn't mentioned much in surviving writing, that nonetheless the Minoans must have left a huge impact on proto-greeks and that carried onward to archaic and classical Greece.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1571/1571-h/1571-h.htm
It's one of the shortest dialogs and can quickly be read.
Another brief part is in Timaeus, here:
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html
I'd CTRL+F for 'Atlantis' to get the relevant part, as the rest of the text isn't too relevant to the Atlantis myth. It's a very short passage, relatively.
That's all that time has left us from Plato's accounts, just the two stories. It;s really not all that much, considering the ink split since then.
Atlantis is probably mythical, but it isn't the only mythical Atlantic island to go missing. There's also Brasil (or Hy Brasil), an island once regularly shown on maps off the coast of Ireland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island) https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/hy-brasil-ireland...
https://earth.google.com/web/@57.33070588,-16.05633955,-123....
Could see how the people of the Aegean could produce myths like Atlantis when they themselves were invading Egypt and most likely became the Philistines of the Old Testament, aka Goliath’s people (local greek pottery discovered there, as well as descriptions of helmets etc lend credence to Philistines being the invading Greeks)
You have the LBA Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia establishing a foothold which correlates to the catalogue of ships (~1400-1350 BCE).
And then you have the sea peoples conquest of Troy taking it back from the Hittites in the early Iron Age (~1200-1180 BCE).
In between that time you have letters from the Hittites pursuing a refugee asking the Ahhiyawa to hand him over from Troy (so presumably the pre-Greeks already had influence over Troy), then later referring to their own vassal in charge of the city.
The sea peoples are primarily Anatolian and from the Aegean isles. They don't seem to be from the Greek mainland, whereas the Mycenaeans were.
So you have a predominantly Greek story of the initial LBA conquest, and then a quite mixed group conquering their own homelands which happens in the early Iron Age.
Homer rolls them up into one story of a predominantly Greek conquest of Troy, and as a result the Greeks had an entirely broken picture of the LBA/EIA period, from Perseus being his own grandfather based on the sources to thinking the Argonauts (a sea people story) happened before the Mycenaean catalogue of ships when it was the other way around.
You can even match details in both parts of the story to independent events recorded in Egypt during each of the respective periods.
There is a thousand year gap between that and:
> a Philistine Gaza that was a Greek stronghold, was conquered by one of the revolt leaders (Jonathan the Hasmonean).
In reality they were almost certainly entirely unconnected. There is no way that by the time the Greeks conquered the region during Alexander’s time they would considered Philistines to be “Greek” in any discernible way.
The thing is, it's shortly after their prophet Mopsus died in the desert as they wandered by foot back from a conflict in North Africa, remarkably similar to a prophet Moses dying in the desert as different tribes wander by foot back from a conflict in North Africa.
Which ends up very interesting given the Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan, the mention of Dan staying on their ships in Judges 5, the descendent of Moses going with Dan in Judges 18, and then the Denyen sea peoples in Adana recording their rulers as belonging to the House of Mopsus. Particularly in light of Ezekiel 27:19 where Dan and the Greeks are trading together with Tyre in goods that seem likely to come from the Ahhiyawa and Denyen geographies.
There's an important missing piece to understanding the context of the sea peoples that's unfortunately overlooked given the version of the story that was claimed by Hecataeus of Adbera to have recently been changed by subsequent conquests is the only version seriously looked at while the Greek and Egyptian accounts are broadly ignored.
If you're interested in the topic, I recommend looking over the details of the battle of Kadesh inscriptions, particularly noting how Ramses II captured twelve groups of tribes, one for each son with him. At least one of those tribes (the Lukka) are among the first mention of "sea peoples" when they are allied with Libya in a single day battle against Merneptah - which bears striking resemblance to Odysseus's single day battle in Egypt right after Troy falls. He hangs out in Egypt for 7 years until "a certain Phrygian" shows up and tries to ransom him to Libya. Interestingly, exactly seven years after the sea peoples battle is when the usurper Pharoh Amenmesse (going by 'Msy' in Papyrus Salt 124) conquered Egypt.
The picture is a bit more complex than any one ethnocentric story centuries later retells it, and the scholars in antiquity that had Moses as one of the Argonauts or had Greek ancestors as part of the Exodus may have been more relevant than we give tend to regard them.
> the eruption emptied the magma chamber beneath the island. This caused large sections of the island to literally collapse ‘into the depths of the sea’.
I wonder if any exploration has been done in the (now submersed) portions of outer ring. Was this land fully above the surface and previously inhabited? If so can divers find any kind of artifacts in that submersed outer rim.
Nobody would survive an explosion that destroyed the inner most island, the middle ring island, and half the outer island. All bronze age people would know was that there was a great noise, some smoke, and then they whole island was gone into the sea. Of course they would assume it sank rather than got blown up.
Finding artifacts from 3,700 years ago that were thrown out to sea would be difficult. Differentiating them from other artifacts of similar age in that area would sadly be beyond belief.
Modern Santorini has a crescent shape because of the "missing middle" part.
But there is also a site called Akrotiri, which is still on land, and was buried in volcanic ash. It is a bit like Pompei, only about twice as old:
> The settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the remains of fine frescoes and many objects and artworks. Akrotiri has been excavated since 1967 after earlier excavations on Santorini.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_(prehistoric_city)
There are many artefacts there, pottery and others.
It's quite possible that other settlements were blown into the water and not buried.
It was an entertaining episode to listen to, not being a scholar, it's hard to know if he's right or not.
Here's a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_R1zoY9kWs
At 10:45: Somebody who jumps from “A city that was busy all day, all night” to “it must be millions of people like New York” can only be described as daft.
There is scholarly work on Atlantis. And this clown mentions none of it.
The transition is hard to believe, yet has happened multiple times
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/climate-change/new-research-...
On the other hand, a green north Africa is well established. And it turns out that the Ancient Egyptians might have descended from hunter-gatherers who were driven towards the nile as the grasslands gave way to desert. For all of which there is archaeological evidence.
Anyways, theory is that giant masses of water rushed from somewhere of what is now the southern or southwestern cost of the mediterran sea(Lybia, Algeria), downwards and westwards, until reaching the Atlantic. Not gently at all.
What do you expect to find there, especially after so much time passed?
The hardened pyramid defence bunkers of the Kinks of Koulou?
It's ~400m in altitude, approximately 500-600km inland, and not along a major watercourse like the Mississippi river that might funnel tsunamis inland. So... no, it's not plausible for this structure.
https://beyondenigma.com/richat-structure-atlantis-10-pieces...
Point 6 and 10, or some video on yt by 'Randall Carlson' like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOtydLmdfV8
or 'Bright Insight': https://www.youtube.com/@BrightInsight
and countless others riding that wave.
Yes, I'm aware of their other activities, that it could be considered clickbait, scamming naive people into subscribing to their premium content elsewhere, or whatever.
While I don't believe in much other stuff they are propagating, this seems to be at least usable as 'work(ing) hypothesis' in the sense and meaning that it isn't more absurd, than so much else we subscribed to by 'tradition'.
I won't go further into that now, because I had my fun/enlightening/scam/brain wash/whatever with that a few years ago, and won't budge an inch into my acceptance of the possibilty that it could have been.
Thereby shrugging off any disagreement :-)
I do mine. You do yours.
Atlantis was in Tunisia: https://medcraveonline.com/IJH/IJH-05-00275.pdf
Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Troy_Once_Stood
Troy was located in Cambridgeshire.
--John Dominic Crossan
To be fair, Troy was also mostly thought to be mystical before Heinrich Schliemann went on a quest to find it (and subsequently destroyed most of it as he used explosives to perform archeological digs).
[NB This is based on me recognising the landscape in some of the movies, apparently the books say it is near Dufftown - which is on the other side of Scotland].
I had also assumed it was the school on Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, but apparently that's definitely not true...
https://www.pottertour.co.uk/blog/george-heriots-school-harr...
Mind you - I'm not really that big a Harry Potter fan but I did live in that part of Edinburgh for many years and my son went to Heriots after adventures at other schools...
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230212-a-city-under-the...
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/10/12/bye-bye...
https://www.scld.org/st-pancras-station-sparks-imaginations/
Humans model their world on stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad#Hitti...
Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient as the Iliad, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
As to Schleimann, he was certainly all too ready to "discover" elements of the Homeric epics. For example, "the mask of Agamemnon":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon
Or "The Jewels of Helen":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...
There are plenty of Mediterranean historical fiction-like tales where an original grain of truth does seem promising. Besides popular cases like Atlantis, and Troy as a site, there’s e.g. Aeneas coming from Troy to Rome as a possible reflection of an Bronze Age-collapse era migration from western Anatolia to Italy bringing the Etruscan language.
I dislike this quote since it basically discourages further research.
[0] not sure where, have only seen other people mention this
> On the side toward the sea, and in the center of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the center of the island, at a distance of about fifty stadia (one stadia=606 feet), there was a mountain, not very high on any side.
> And, beginning from the sea, they dug a canal three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth, and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this,
> Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two, as well the zone of water as of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia.
These are features of a geographical account.
> And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below.
> The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.
This is also a geographical account, by Tolkien of Minas Tirith.
There are actually striking similarities in style, which is unsurprising given that Tolkien was a scholar who patterned his works on ancient epics. The main difference is that the ancient text has more numbers, which, given the timescales a historical Atlantis would have to have occurred on, were certainly not literal measurements recorded by Plato or a contemporary.
For one, those measurements can't possibly have been recorded by Plato or a contemporary, because if there were a historical Atlantis all claims point to it being centuries older than Plato. Any numbers he's using are either completely fictitious or passed down and distorted through generations. Either way, Plato clearly didn't care that they were accurate.
Second, ancient literature is kind of obsessed with giving precise measurements for things that can't possibly be accurate. The numbers are inserted to give a sense of grandeur, and are just a part of the style of this kind of work. Where they seem odd and out of place to us, they were common at the time. See the Bible, Herodotus, and many others.
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-Karen-Fons...
[24356] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Flora_of_Middle-Earth
The point being you can have a description of an entirely fantastical area with no inherent contradictions.
Plato, fond of such rhetorical devices himself, is more than likely to be following a similar game.
city of troy
niebelungenlied
noah's ark
The Song of the Nibelungs has many purely fictional parts.
Noah's Ark and the Flood are mere myths with 0 proof of any kind of historical reality, and 0 chance of there ever being one.
what is fictional about the niebelungen?
the ark is about the creation of the black sea
there are stories that might be 100000 years old https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...