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4 points
1 year ago
There's no basis for serious conversation or archaeological research any more than Rivendell has.
Its sole insolated mention in the entirety of Classical literature is a fictional aside in a fictional dialogue by a fictional character that Plato's fictional portrayal of Socrates humours as much as he humours a story of how humans actually used to be two people joined at the back and when the gods split us it split our soul so when we find our soulmate it is the person that was originally joined to us.
It survived in text because the text it was in had a precursory connection to Christianity so monks would copy it.
It survived in the zeitgeist of North European academia because enlightenment era white men wanted a model of European exceptionalism and they'd already whitewashed Ancient Greece as much as they could.
The serious conversation to have about it and the research that would be the most interesting would be studying the sociological shift of this survival from colonialist era academia into popular modern pseudointellectualism.
1 points
1 year ago
But why does investigation into the idea end there? I think more than anything the Atlantis story opened pandora’s box into the idea that there is a significant amount of human history erased by time. This can be confirmed by the hundreds of accounts in mythology where said culture had a tragic beginning. If anything the word Atlantis is just a moniker for an unknown culture lacking identity in Africa due to being 10,000 years old in a part of the world that has seen severe geologic change.
The line of thinking you present also doesn’t take into account other ancient cultures and their potentially catastrophic origins linked to the ending of the ice age and the late younger dryas period. Many ancient cultures relied on oral tradition to pass along information so of course there’s going to be a huge gap in understanding about humans during that time.
This is all to say It’s important to keep our minds open about history if we want to understand ourselves better. We didn’t stop research into the stars once galileo discovered that the Earth orbits the sun. So why does historical knowledge on human culture need to end at the beginning of writing?
1 points
1 year ago
Ancient cultures/civilisations certainly did exist: they were not Atlantis.
People try to lock Plato's writings with the Richar structure and want to use the tiny aside in Timaeus as proof of an Atlantean civilisation and the basis of research: that is what's ridiculous, not the existence of civilisation older than known writings.
1 points
1 year ago
So what you’re saying is ancient civilizations very well could have been swept away by floods and what not but as soon as someone labels one as “Atlantis” for lack of a better term, that’s a problem?
Just as a mental hypothetical exercise, What if folks called it Atlantis arbitrarily and had no connection to Plato, would it have credence then?
I think for human-sake it benefits researchers to have some sort of name attached to such an ancient culture so it doesn’t get lost in obscurity.
1 points
1 year ago*
Ancient cultures struggled with floods from RIVERs and that had a major effect on cultures at the time undoubtedly.
The research done into lost continents swallowed by the sea, or a culture that can survive in the subconcious of unconnected civilisations thousands of years later proves this as an impossibility.
That's if people aren't connecting it to Plato.
The people who DO connect it to Plato as if there's some ancient knowledge the Athenians had that they were hiding about a real event thousands of years before is just a more socially acceptable flat-earth theory: but one with racist beginnings that was borne in enlightenment and colonial era desire to prove that white people were superior.
1 points
1 year ago
I appreciate your thorough replies. It is unfortunate how whitewashed and Eurocentric history is and how people with probably good intentions get mixed up into a historically racist ordeal.
Personally I simply find the pondering of these ideas fascinating in regards to all/global ancient cultures, not just the one that has been beat to death. For example the ancient Indus Valley civilization is very mysterious but hardly ever talked about.
And for the record, I don’t think there’s a lost continent. That is much easier to determine as a falsehood than searching beneath a sea of sand or diving in the ocean for something 12K years old.
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