Pre-deluvian civilisations

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Santorini isn't near the pillars of hercules though

It didnt "work that way".

The Thera disaster, like the Trojan War, would not have been been "in Greek records" the way the battle of Waterloo is modern British records. AT BEST it wouldve been like the tales of King Arthur (in British ancient written fiction derived from even older oral folk tales from dark age British pre history).

The Minoans were a non Greek people of Crete WAY back in the Bronze Age. The mainland Greeks evolved a crude civilization largely based upon the Minoan civilization modern archeologist call "the Mycenean Civilization". Then came the upheavels at the end of he Bronze Age. Minoans were destroyed, and a little later the mainland Mycenean Greeks were also destroyed by invaders from the north around 1200 BC. Then the Greek "Dark Ages" ensued. Then in the Iron Age gradually the classical Greek Civilization emerged around 800 BC, and it reached its zenith around 400 BC in Plato's time. So any memory of ANY thing happening back in pre 1200 BC Minoan/Mycenean times would either have been totally forgotten by Plato's time, or would only have been remembered as scraps of oral myth and legend. It wouldve been "written down in thier national archives" the way that the battle of Marathon, say, might well have been.

Well...back in the 1990s National Geographic had an issue devoted to the latest archeological finds in the island of Thera, and related stuff on Crete. Beautiful photos of the Aegean etc and of ancient frescoes. It made a good case for linking that with Atlantis, but...it did mention that there is an inscription in Egypt that mentions a lost land to the west, and that this inscription was dated to 2000 BC (prior to the Thera Eruption of around 1500). So that inscriptioin would be an escape hatch for romantics who want to place the tale somewhere else and somewhen else than the Minoan Aegean. But I havent been able to track that down- if that inscription really exists- or what it was or where they found it.

That's my understanding of it.

There's the most famous Pillars of Hercules nearest the Atlantic, then there's a number of other Pillars of Hercules around the Mediterranean, including near Thera.

True, but that pair of "pillars" is the most famous. Gibralter, to the north, and Jebul Musa, to the south, of the narrow strait between Spain and Africa at the end of the Mediterranean at the entrance to the Atlantic.

There is no evidence that there was ever a big landmass in the Atlantic that sank. But some Atlantic islands were bigger in the ice age than now because of the lower sea level. The Canary Islands were all one big island. And then there is Dogger Bank - a shallow area of the North Sea that was a sizeable island for a couple thousand years after the Ice Age that gradually sank over thousands of years from steady sea rise- AND also got clobbered once by a sudden prehistoric tidal wave at one nasty moment for the stone age folks living there- some resemblance to Atlantis.

I find it strange the Greeks learned everything from the Minoans and then forgot them within several hundred years? Surely Plato would not have to invoke such a long trail of contacts leading back to Egypt to explain something that apparently happened at their doorstep?

If I'm correct the Myceanan Greeks were in contact with the actual Minoans when they started their own empire in 1750BC so that means when the Minoans disappeared it wouldn't have required Plato to rediscover that event. Surely survivors from Minoans would have come to Greece and it was crystal clear. The Greeks were in the habit of keeping scrolls and libraries.

I am not disputing they weren't capable of embellishing events through bardic tales so that maybe the original were distorted in beer halls through oral transmission.

In India one of the most famous tales is the Ramayana which is supposed to be based on true events from thousands of years ago. In the story a north Indian king named Rama invaded the island of Lanka (modern Sri Lanka). Rama was assisted by a tribe of monkeys led by the famous monkey king Hanuman. It's today suspected the bards of the time distorted the identity of the people at the southern tip of India who assisted King Rama who because of their dark appearance were caricatured as monkeys.

So there's a few candidates beyond the pillars of Hercules. If one has to traverse the Atlantic to the Canary islands then it's only a hop, skip and jump to the Bimini islands of the coast of the US
https://allthatsinteresting.com/bimini-road

The Bimini road is indicative of an ancient harbour in north America which is interesting since North America was supposed to have been discovered by Columbus in 1500

There is too much flawed logic and bad grasp of the facts in this post to address.

I will try to make it brief and simple.

It was the Bronze Age. The Minoan created a civilization on Crete. They had writing in Linear A. The mainland Greeks evolved their civilization. They adopted the Minoan alphabet to write thier own early Greek language. That was linear B.

The whole East Mediterranean went into upheavel at the end of Bronze Age. On top of that Minoans were wiped out in a tidal wave from a volcano eruption in Thera island, followed by invasions from the mainland Greeks. But soon after the Greeks themselves became overrun by a second wave of Greeks (the Dorians)coming down from barbarian Europe who destroyed Mycenean civilization itself. Both Minoans and Myceneans...gone and destroyed ...cities destroyed...AND their Linear A and B alphabets forgotten. Greece descended into a dark age darker than Europe's post Roman Dark Age.

They depended upon bards like Homer to keep alive tales of old like the Iliad and Oddyssey because they had become illiterate and could not "keep records":.

Then around 800 the Greeks began to rise out of it, and to create a whole new civilization- what we now of think of as classical Greece. And only then did they become literate again because they had adopted a new alphabet from the Phonecians unrelated to the then long forgotten linear A and B. The ruined palaces built by their Myceneans ancestors were assumed by the classical Greeks to be the works of non Greek "barbarians" (thats how little they remember of their own ancestors). But some scraps of memory survived in folk tales and in bard tales. Plato may have made up the whole Atlantis thing up out of whole cloth. Or he might have drawn upon distorted memories of the lost Minoan civilization and thera. The Egyptians were trading partners with the Minoans and may have better records of the Minoans than the Greeks themselves (the Egytian civilization had more continuity from that time than did the younger Greek civilizaiton as I showed above). Or Plato may have just claimed the Egyptian said so precisely because the Greek audience had a reverence for Egypt as an older civilization than theirs.

Fnord's Rule #31: It is a truth universally acknowledged that any thread that begins by pointing out why a person, place, or thing is a myth will rapidly turn into a thread focusing on schemes whereby it might be real.

Either Atlantis existed or it did not.  So far, none of the available evidence proves the alleged existence of Atlantis beyond any shadow of doubt.

Fnord's Corollary to Rule #31: The more alterations made to an original assertion to justify the claim it asserts makes the original claim progressively more irrelevant.

Either ALL of Plato's claim is valid or none of it is.  He wrote "9000 years".  If the only event that seems to verify the alleged existence of Atlantis occurred only 900 years earlier, then that one fact demolishes Plato's claim and renders the alleged existence of Atlantis a moot point -- arguable, but irresolvable.

The "Bimini Road" is probably a natural feature. But even if it were manmade and ancient we cant tell what it was built for.

The Canary Islands probably had no inhabitants at all during the ice age, and if they did they were just Typical Ice Age hunters.

Plato probably made it up out of whole cloth as a cautionary tale against hubris. And most likely his Atlantis was a fictionalized version of the Persian Empire of his own time. He says that the Atlanteans conquered the whole world west of Greece but that "we heroic Athenians stopped them in a battle". In real recent history of his time the Persians really had conquered the whole world EAST of Greece, and the Athenians and Spartans really had banded together to fight them when they invaded Greece itself and stopped the Persian's westward expanse.

But Atlantis does have features in common with the Minoan Civilization of what was already ancient prehistory in his time. Like Atlantis they had a big navy and were maritime power, and they did lord it over the mainland Greeks.

So..most likely... whole cloth...based on Persia.

Second most likely...a fable based upon surviving scraps of legend inspired by the long gone Minoans.

Third most likely...based on memories of some Neolithic tribe living on an actual sunken piece of land somewhere maybe in the Atlantic...but memories SO distorted by time that the actual "real Atlantis" was a bunch of cavemen living on a small island that bore little resemblance to Plato's splendid Atlantis.

Interestingly there are other sources that attest to Solon's visit to Egypt

Plutarch gives a more detailed description on a number of Greek philosophers who visited Egypt and received advice by the Egyptian priests in his book On Isis and Osiris. Thus, Thales of Miletus, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Solon, Pythagoras, (some say Lycurgus of Sparta also) and Plato, traveled into Egypt and conversed with the priests. Eudoxus was instructed by Chonupheus of Memphis, Solon by Sonchis of Saïs and Pythagoras by Oenuphis of Heliopolis

In his "Life of Solon" Plutarch identified the aged Egyptian priest who spoke to Solon as Sonchis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonchis_of_Sais

This is identified by Plutarch as the aged priest who spoke to Solon 9000 years earlier about Athens had been in conflict with the great power of Atlantis, which was then destroyed in a catastrophe

While archaeologists can scrunch their nose at Plato (despite his reputation for integrity/honesty) and claim he was trying to make a metaphor for some philosophical purpose, this doesn't seem to be what other eminent Greek philosophers who lived just after Plato such as Plutarch thought.

The inundation of the mythical Atlantis matches the same narrative from hundreds of other cultures so triangulating the narratives tells us this all points to an original event.

That last sentence is the problem. Plato's Atlantis tale does NOT match up with ANY tale in ANY culture.

Many ancient cultures had flood myths. But none of them resembled that of Atlantis(which isnt really even a 'flood myth'). So there is nothing to triangulate it with. The Bible's Noah story and Gilgamesh (for example) have similarities to each other, but neither resembles Atlantis.

There is one exception. In medieval times in India there were written references to a landmass called "Kumari Kandem" (or by other names) that got swallowed up by the sea. But this place was never even mentioned even in India until after 1000 AD(long after Plato's time), and it supposedly existed to the south of India in the Indian Ocean, and not in the Atlantic ocean.

Other sources might attest to Solon and or Plato going to Egypt to talk to Egyptian priests, but they dont attest to them discussing Atlantis as a topic with the priests.

While it's true there isn't a library in the modern sense in 2600BC when Solon was supposed to visited, according to Plato (writing about 360 BCE) has Kritias relate a story he heard from the elder Kritias regarding a legendary trip of Solon (law-giver of the Athenians) to Egypt to learn from Egyptian priests. (This is imagined to take place in the seventh or sixth century BCE).
I
n Timaeus Critias goes into more detail as he describes the civilization of Atlantis. Critias claims that his accounts of ancient Athens and Atlantis stem from a visit to Egypt by the Athenian lawgiver Solon in the sixth century B.C.E. In Egypt, Solon met a priest of Sais, who translated the history of ancient Athens and Atlantis, recorded on papyri in Egyptian hieroglyphs, into Greek.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Atlantis

This suggests the temples acted as keepers of records. One curious point is the level of technical details provided by Plato on Atlantis remind me of the old records of from the temple of Solomon on the technical specifications for the Ark of the covenant (a instrument that helped the Istaelite's fleeing Pharoah survive the Negev desert) and even going back to the specifications of Noah's Ark itself (which was also supposed to have save Noah from another flood).

According to the writing the priests were asked to translate papyri.

When they spoke of "Athens" being contemporaneous with Atlantis 9000 years before it points to the pre-Greek civilisations who might also have been survivors of the deluge and who's descendants could include the "Sea Peoples", Trojans, Minoans and Etruscans

Interestingly the acropolis of Athens appears to be built on an even earlier megalithic pre-Greek culture that built the foundation using strangely polygonal walls made up stone blocks weighing tonnes. This seems to be repeated throughout the ancient world.