The Lost World
Friday April 11, 2008 8:32 AM
In the 1880s, a politician from Minnesota ensured that the world would always remember the tale of the lost continent of Atlantis. Ignatius Donnelly, who served variously as a senator, congressman and lieutenant governor of Minnesota authored several books on the topic, including Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Donnelly's work, and his reputation as a statesman, helped to bring the story of Atlantis out of the shadows of fringe myth, inspiring serious research into the question of whether Atlantis really existed.
More than a hundred years later, people are still wrestling with that question. Although it is attributed to an Egyptian source, the story of the lost continent of Atlantis first appeared in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato. In his works, Timaeus and Critias, Atlantis is described as an island nation that sunk beneath the seas in a terrible catastrophe that took place in the course of a night and a day. As compelling as the story of the sunken nation may seem, Plato recounted the story primarily as a cautionary tale for the city-state of Athens. Athens is the real focus of Plato's work, and Atlantis is, at most, an interesting aside. There is nothing to indicate whether or not Plato himself took the tale of the lost civilization as fact.
Many scholars argue that Atlantis was intended as nothing more than a metaphor. And yet belief in the lost continent persists.
From the few details given in Critias, Donnelly and the many other Atlantis scholars who came after him have extrapolated a great deal of speculation. Theories on the exact location of Atlantis abound. The text in Critias pretty clearly places Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, as it states that this sunken nation once could be found "beyond the pillars of Hercules" which we now know as the Straits of Gibralter. The "Sleeping Prophet," Edgar Cayce, claimed that one of his past lives had been in Atlantis. Cayce foretold that Atlantis would rise again in the 20th century, and that evidence would be found in the Atlantic that would prove the existence of this lost continent once and for all. The Bimini Road, located off the coast of the Bahamas, is often cited as the proof Cayce foretold.
If the Bahamas are not your thing, there are many other supposed locations for the site of the island country of Atlantis. From the island of Thera in the Mediterranean to locations that stretch as far afield as the Phillipines, Atlantis scholars continue to search for the most likely location of a lost civilization. Some theories even purport that, due to shifts in the Earth's crust around the end of the last Ice Age, the fabled Atlantis actually lies frozen beneath the ice on the polar continent of Anarctica.
Given that large portions of the ice that covers Anarctica have been tumbling off into the ocean lately, it may not be too long before archaeologists get a chance to explore that theory. Of course, if Antarctica loses much more of its ice, Atlantis won't be the only sunken nation in Earth's history.
