Comment by Kevin09210 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kevin09210 | Hacker News Reader

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And yet in Plato's Timaeus, you find statements like 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.

> It was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill.

> 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.

Isn't Tolkien's Atlantis reference Númenor? Like, he didn't change a comma :-P

No measurements though

There is one—"a thousand feet"—but also you can't use the existence of measurements as evidence of authenticity.

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.

Tolkien's writing is accurate and descriptive enough to not only produce an atlas [5], and a legendarium of plants [24356] but for said atlas to not only describe the routes, but the types of land/mountains traversed, and how they would have come to be.

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-Karen-Fons...

[24356] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Flora_of_Middle-Earth

But, how do we know the atlas etc are accurate? There's no real places or objects to compare them with.

They're accurate to the text, and "how things are on earth" which is all we can compare them to.

The point being you can have a description of an entirely fantastical area with no inherent contradictions.

Any major event must last 40 days and 40 nights, for example.

Plato frequently gave detailed descriptions of utterly fanciful situations. He wasn't a historian and wasn't particularly interested in details of the physical world. He wrote dialogues about philosophy and was interested in the world of forms, and any story he told that was seemingly grounded reality was in service of making a larger point. In fact, even the dialogues themselves purported to be actual conversations between real people and almost certainly were not in most cases, no matter how much detail he provided about the event.

The “physical details” of the new jerusalem are given in exhausting detail in Revelations, but this is well understood by scholars to be rife with symbolic and numerological intent and was not likely to have been intended by john of patmos to be understood as representing any material place.

Plato, fond of such rhetorical devices himself, is more than likely to be following a similar game.

Yeah, a fictional geographical account. What about that description suggests it's real to you? If it's the specific measurements used, then I don't think you've read very much ancient literature, because that's not at all an uncommon way of describing fictional things.

"Ancient people where to stupid to imagine measurements in a fictional account, therefore the presence of measurements is evidence of the story being factional" is a quite arrogant take, don't you think?

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