The Pyramids

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While I'd like to see the archaeological findings, for now, I'm guessing the Spanish government is probably right.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

That's just one of the current hypotheses. Others being:

1. The Black Sea Inundation:



2. The Doggerland Collapse:



3. The Great Thaw ... which I have outlined in a previous post, and that likely occurred some time around 10,000 BC.

According to Plato, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune". If we allow for a slow thaw (after all, the current Ice Age began about 2,580,000 years ago) of 100 to 1000 years, this puts the inundation of Plato's Atlantis right in the middle of a major rise in sea level at the beginning of the Holocene Interglacial Period.

Of course, we have only Plato's accounts as "evidence" for the alleged existence of Atlantis, and many scholars believe that Plato created the myth himself merely to teach a lesson about hubris.

There exists no valid empirical evidence to indicate that any one location is THE location of mythical Atlantis -- no stellae, no cartouch, no papyrus scrolls, and no signpost saying "This Way to Atlantis"; not even on Thera/Santorini, although many people believe this one, nondescript Greek island is all that's left of the mythical Atlantean Empire.

That last ice age began between 100,000 and 10,00 ybp. Maximum glaciation occurred about 22,000 yb p.

ruveyn

First of all, why the f*ck did you even bring up Doggerland? That has nothing to do with the Atlantis myth and there is nothing in Plato's description to suggest that it was anywhere NEAR that area.

As it turns out, the error in the popular account of Plato's description of Atlantis was the last digit: It wasn't 9000 years before the time of Solon, but 900. Also, ANY signposts to Atlantis would not have survived by this time due to rotting. AFAIK the ancient Greeks, including the Aegeans, did not use petroglyphs as they were used by people with no written language.


Furthermore, there was no Atlantean Empire! Atlantis was part of the Aegean civilization which flourished in the 2nd millenium BC and mysteriously vanished. The only known catastrophic event was the eruption on Thera. Frescoes found at Akrotiri do indeed suggest that the people who built this city-state were indeed highly proficient seafarers.

The problem however, is that the ancient writings found at Akrotiri, and there are many of them, are written in Linear A which to this do is undeciphered. But other than that, the objects found suggest a city that is astonishingly similar to Plato's description and would be easily accessible to the Ancient Egyptians by boat.

Last edited by AspieRogue on 01 Oct 2012, 11:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Aspierouge, I think you might want to tone done the personal attacks on Fnord. If a mod sees the language you're using, you could get in trouble.

You can say its just a matter of stacking stones, just as much as you can say space exploration was a matter of merely flinging a projectile at the moon. There's technological difficulties and complexities that this type of flippant over-simplification evades.

I don't know if there's empirical evidence for a civilization called Atlantis, but there is empirical evidence that there were advanced societies building megalithic structures that existed 10,000 years ago, like Gobekli Tepe and arguably the Sphinx, some of which drowned out due to seal level rise, like Yonaguni. There just had to be ocean level rise to destroy coastal centers of commerce.The reason why the Greeks didn't have any scrolls either was because Atlantis was a city of ancient antiquity, even at that time. I also find it interesting that other cultures reference advanced, pre-diluvial societies, whether it be the story of Noah, Pre-Columbian folklore, the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Chinese folklore, or references to Dwarka in the Vedas, which resembles the Atlantis story in a lot of ways.

As it turns out, Atlantis was not an antediluvian civilization after all. It was very much part of the Aegean civilization and plato got the number wrong by a factor of 10 in terms of how long ago before Solons time.

I have no problem with describing the space exploration as an act of flinging a projectile at the moon... It may be an very inaccurate description of the engineering needed to reach escape velocity, but I'll prefer such a flippant over-simplification (and the stacking stones one, as well) any day over the claim that one needs to invoke extra-terrestrials or metaphysical entities to explain the concept of "engineering".

But let's assume that you in fact have a point about the technological difficulties and complexities in constructing the Pyramids without modern knowledge. Then, we arrive at something like this:

A. Our current knowledge of the scientific and engineering tools available to the ancient Egyptians suggests that they could not have built the Pyramids.
B. The Pyramids exist

From this, which of the following conclusions would be the most obvious when applying Occam's Razor?

C. The Pyramids were built by extra-terrestrials
D. Our current knowledge of the scientific and engineering tools available to the ancient Egyptians is incomplete.
E. The Pyramids were built by metaphysical entities.

About Doggerland: Rachel Carson ( author of 'Silent Spring', and 'Sea Around Us') was probably the first to suggest a version of that theory. The way she described( in "the Sea Around Us") it was more logical than the way fnord described it.

Its not really about all of "doggerland" ( a recent term like 'beringia")but about a small region of the north sea long known as a rich fishing ground called "Dogger Bank".

Dogger Bank is big shallow area- kinda an upland plateau- in the middle of the North Sea- that draws both fish and fishermen.

All of the north sea was dry land at the glacial max (though alot of it was under ice).

But at one point in the period of glacial retreat water refilled the north sea, but what is now Dogger Bank remained a big island about the ( kinda midway between britian and norway and the north german coasts)-in the middle of the north sea for some centuries. It probabaly had both great hunting and fishing resource for its stone age human inhabitants.

So by paleolithic standards- they probably had a sedentary and rather advanced and rich lifestyle for hunter gatherers (perhaps comparable to he Tlingit Indians of alaska's southwest coast-one of the totem pole cultures). So this island culure thrived for a while, but then-the ice thawed a little more- the water rose a little more- and now that nice piece of real estate belongs to the fishes. The inhabitants fled by boat- but the memory of the place lived on - but in ever more distorted form as the generations passed the story on- to become the myth of atlantis.

Maybe.

Dogger Bank was in the north sea-which is part of the Atlantic- which makes it "beyond the pillars of Herakles".

It drowned shortly after the ice age in 9 thousands BC ( about the time atlantis is supposed to have sunk).

So the Dogger Bank theory is niether more nor less crazy than any other Atlantis theory ive ever heard!

Keep in mind that all of these "theories" -- even the one about Santorini/Thera -- are based on assumptions. Mere belief in any one of them being the real story of mythical Atlantis does not prove any of them. Not one of them is "any more or less crazy" than any of the others (thanks, NP!).

That 9000 v. 900 years is also an assumption. Timeus was written about 360 BC. The Thera eruption occurred about 3600 years ago, which places the event at about the year 1600 BC. 900 years before 360 BC is 1260 BC -- an error of over 300 years. A. G. Galanopoulos -- in the spirit of Greek nationalism -- claimed that Plato's dating of 9,000 years before Solon's time was the result of an error in translation from Egyptian into Greek, yet there is no evidence of any "original" Egyptian text other than Plato's own second- or third-hand account.

The "Pillars of Hercules" that Plato also describes in Timeus are located at the Straight of Gibraltar. Santorini is located near the Straight of Bosporus, several hundred kilometers to the east.

If we accept all of Plato's account as valid and true, then Santorini could not have possibly been Atlantis; and if we accept that only part of Plato's account is inaccurate, then which part should it be? Why not all of it?

Atlantis is a myth, plain and simple.

Actually, the most doubtful parts of Plato's account may very well be the actual location as well as the time scale. ESPECIALLY given the fact that there is a historical gap, a "dark age" between the fall of Mykenai and the rise of "classical" Greek civilization(the Poleis). So the fact that Plato erred in the location and the time frame of Atlantis is not surprising given the roughly 4 centuries without any written records in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. So the logical conclusion I have come to is that knowledge of Atlantis survived among the Greeks through oral stories and myths and the knowledge of where and when become distorted completely. The historical record shows a sudden and apparently catastrophic end to Greek bronze age civilization.

AspieRogue is only about three steps away from declaring preventative buttrape is the only way to discover the truth about the pyramids

I look at the available evidence -- including the empty gaps -- and conclude that Atlantis and extra-terrestrial involvement in the Pyramids are both myths. This is like looking at the knowledge gap involving conditions before the universe came to be and claiming that there was nothing before the universe began.

Others seem to see only the gaps, and then fill those gaps with assumptions that lead them to conclude that they were not myths at all. This is like looking at the knowledge gap involving conditions before the universe came to be and claiming that "God did it".

Maybe the best answer* then becomes, "Nobody knows", because it all seems to come down to a matter of personal faith.

* For Atlantis, the Pyramids, and the beginning of the universe.

I love it how people say "there's no evidence" even when there IS some evidence but not enough Yet to make a conclusive positive. Skeptics usually are proven right, but cynics often get proven wrong. That being said, extra-terrestrial involvement in the building of the Pyramids is absolutely a myth as there really is zero evidence for it. As for Atlantis, to claim that there is zero evidence is BS. I may be wrong, but I'm willing to BET hard currency that Akrotiri is indeed Atlantis. If you, Fnord, had been born 200 years before you were I'm pretty sure you'd be arguing the same thing about Troy. Troy was dismissed by European cynics as being nothing more than a myth just like Avalon and Asgard......And then in 1865 an Englishman named Frank Calvert began digging near the Turkish village of Hisarlik next to the coast and discovered mysterious ruins which 2 years later Heinrich Schliemann identified as the ruins of Troy(originally called Truva by the Hittites who founded it).

The central problem remains that Linear A has not yet been translated. If and when it is, the mystery of Atlantis will finally be solved.

It wasn't Aegean. Atlantis was said to be beyond the gates of Hercules. in the Atlantic, thus the name. I don't know what you're basing this from. Ok, so there was some city, but it was in a different region and existed at a different time? Couldn't it be that this city is just completely different from Atlantis? If it doesn't fit the basic description, its probably not what Plato was referring to in Timaeus.