Lost continents
‘Lost’ continents and islands - land masses that no longer exist, having sunk beneath the surface of the sea - have long been discussed in literature. As fictional places, they can be settings for paradise or for hell; as hypotheses for the origins of known human cultures, they have the advantage of no longer being available for inspection and so can be populated by all manner of people with any variety of culture that takes the writer’s fancy.
Atlantis
The most popular—and
best known—of the lost continents is Atlantis, a land
supposed to have lain in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. First
mentioned by Plato (428×7-347 BCE) in his dialogues
Timaeus (Τιμαιος)
and Critias
(Κριτιας), written towards
the end of the philosopher’s life, c 348 BCE, the
idea of a lost land to the west of Greece was introduced as part
of a political fable. In the first book, Plato’s relative
Critias explains how he learned the story of Atlantis: he had
heard it from his grandfather, who had learned it from his
father, who had been told it by the politician Solon (c
638-559 BCE). According to Plato, Solon had been told about
Atlantis by a priest in a temple at Saïs when he visited
Egypt c 590 BCE. The priest explained that nine thousand
years earlier (i.e. c 9590 BCE), the ancient Athenians
went to war with the ancient Atlanteans, whom they defeated. The
Atlanteans lived in a city on an island to the west of the
Pillars of Hercules (the ancient name for the Strait of
Gibraltar) and were descended from the god Poseidon, but had
degenerated from an earlier state of perfection. Both Athens and
Atlantis were destroyed in “earthquakes and floods of
extraordinary violence... in a single dreadful day and
night” nine thousand years ago.
The Critias repeats the same story, but in greater
detail, explaining how the goddess Athena had established the
city of Athens shortly after the creation of the world. The
prehistoric Athenian state was ruled by a military oligarchy,
which by coincidence was just like the ideal state hypothesised
by Plato in an earlier book, The Republic. While Athena
was allotted Greece, Poseidon got Atlantis and his descendants
(via the mortal woman Kleito) established ten kingdoms with an
over-king. Plato describes the city of Atlantis in some detail:
it lay between the coast and a large fertile irrigated plain, was
perfectly circular and contained at its centre a series of
ring-shaped islands set between canals, in the middle of which
lay the citadel. They were connected to the sea and to the plain
by a further canal. The buildings of the city were magnificently
ornamented with precious metals - including the otherwise unknown
ορειχαλχος
(orichalcum - ‘mountain copper’) - and ivory
from indigenous elephants. The kings ruled well for many years,
but when their descendants became corrupt, Zeus decided to punish
them. At the point where he is about to launch into a speech to
the other gods, the text breaks off, unfinished. The third book
of what was intended to be a trilogy was never written.
In the ancient world, Plato’s Atlantis was treated as a literary device, not as an historical city of the remote past. For instance, the Christian writer Tertullian (c 160-after 213) used it as an example of the world-wide flood of Noah and observed that it had been sought in vain (de Pallio II.3); a few paragraphs earlier in the work, he had mentioned Plato and it is likely that the two were connected in his thoughts. Ammianus Marcellinus (c 330-after 392) has been used to justify statements that the Gauls believed that they had come originally from Atlantis (e.g. Berlitz 1974, 105). In fact, Ammianus says no such thing. In Res Gestae XV.9, quoting the authority of an Augustan historian, Timagenes (c 55 BCE-?), whose work is lost, he says that “the Drasidae (Druids) recall that a part of the population is indigenous but others also migrated in from islands and lands beyond the Rhine”; this would mean that they believed they had come from the north (Britain, the Netherlands and Germany), not from a lost land in the Atlantic Ocean, to the south-west. Atlantis occasionally found its way onto maps, particularly after the discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century led some writers to speculate that these new lands were the remnants of the island. However, it did not enter the popular imagination until the 1880s, when a lawyer from Philadelphia and congressman for Minnesota, Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), wrote Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (Donnelly 1882). The book was so popular that it is still in print (in a paperback edition published by Dover Books in 1985).
It is a remarkable book, showing a huge
breadth of knowledge acquired through years of reading and
research in the Library of Congress and it is no exaggeration to
say that this book on its own was responsible for the late
nineteenth-century growth of interest in the lost continent and
its subsequent popularity. Donnelly picked up on the work of the
Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg
(1814-1874), who had worked out a translation of the Troano
Codex, half of one of only three Maya manuscripts to survive. His
attempt at translation was completely misguided (he believed that
Maya hieroglyphs were an alphabetic script), but he read the
Codex as describing a volcanic catastrophe in which a land called
Mu was destroyed. Donnelly took this translation seriously,
identified the supposed Mayan Mu with the Greek Atlantis and
began researching possible links between the Maya and the rest of
the world.
Using the diffusionist logic of late nineteenth-century archaeology, he reasoned that if institutions such as marriage and divorce, technology such as spears and sails, or beliefs such as ghosts and flood legends existed on both sides of the Atlantic, it followed that there must be a common origin for them. He found similarities between the Maya hieroglyphs published by Brasseur de Bourbourg and those of Egypt and between the languages of the Chinese, Old Japanese and the Otomi of Mexico. Needless to say, most of the supposed similarities are fanciful and are based on superficial characteristics. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that similar institutions, technologies and beliefs can be invented only once, in one place. The evidence amassed by Donnelly for an historical Atlantis is ultimately weak and has never commanded any serious academic support. Donnelly’s breadth of knowledge may have been huge, but he lacked the depth of knowledge that would have allowed him to exercise his lawyer’s critical faculties more effectively.
Most damaging for the hypothesis of a large mid-Atlantic island, there is no room for a landmass in what we know of the geological history of the Atlantic Ocean. The mid-Atlantic Ridge that Donnelly thought might contain the remnants of an Atlantean mountain range in the vicinity of the present-day Azores is not the remains of a sunken continent. Rather, it is new material forming as the North American, European, South American and African tectonic plates move apart, something that was not understood in the nineteenth century.
One of the most unusual
treatments of the Atlantis story that some writers continue to
quote as a serious source comes from what ought to have been long
since discarded as a hoax. This was a front page story of The
New York American in October 1912 by Paul Schliemann, who
claimed to be (and probably was) a grandson of the discoverer of
Troy, Heinrich Schliemann, although whether he really was a PhD,
as he claimed, does not seem to have been established. The story
was called ‘How I Discovered Atlantis, the Source of
All Civilization’. He announced that he had been left
certain secret documents by his grandfather, including one that
described the discovery at Troy of a bronze vase inscribed
‘From the King Cronos of Atlantis’ and an
owl-headed vase that he was to break open. Among the documents
was an envelope only to be opened by someone prepared to dedicate
his life to what was contained within: the family's secret,
which was the true location of Atlantis. On breaking open the
vase, Schliemann was astounded to discover a hoard of square
Atlantean coins of a platinum-aluminium-silver alloy and a metal
plaque bearing a Phoenician inscription that read 'Issued
in the Temple of Transparent Walls’.
He was the first to claim that Atlantis was an advanced civilisation with technological achievements matching those of the twentieth century (aircraft, power-driven boats and so on), although the Theosophists had also made extravagant claims about Atlantean civilisation. Schliemann’s newspaper story is the sole authority for the ‘evidence’ sometimes used to support ideas of the superior technology of the Lost Continent. He quoted the usual sources, but made serious blunders that made the hoax all too evident from the outset. Claiming to have discovered the secret of the lost continent of Atlantis in an ancient Mayan text, the Troano Codex, which he said that he had read in the British Museum, this was too obvious an error to overlook: the Troano Codex was (and still is) in the National Museum in Madrid. His story was merely a rehash of Brasseur de Bourbourg’s ‘translation’, anyway. When asked for the further evidence he had promised in the original newspaper story and to produce objects such as the owl-headed vase, Schliemann did not respond and disappeared from public view.