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June 5, 8498 BCE Atlantis
drowns
8498 BCE is a traditional date of the natural calamity that
destroyed the supposed ancient civilization of Atlantis.
One wonders what is the origin of the human love of the unlikely, the
irrational, the bizarre and the preposterous, but no amount of
wondering will solve the puzzle.
The chance that an advanced
civilization lies beneath the ocean, undetected by 21st-century
oceanography, satellite imaging, geology and any number of modern
scientific aids, is slim indeed, but here we have a persistent legend
that is probably believed by more people today than in the Middle
Ages. I confess to having my own imp of fascination for many things to
which I give no credence whatsoever. A hobgoblin, a tale from the
crypt, or a UFO or two can brighten the dreariest evening.
Atlantis, or so it is said, was a huge island
lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules (now known as the Straits of
Gibraltar) and its culture had dominated the Mediterranean nine
thousand years before Solon, the lawmaker of Athens. From its ideal
condition as an advanced culture it deteriorated into a military
aggressor, so the gods resolved to punish the civilisation. We have
this on authority of Plato in his Timaeus
and Critias (c. 350 BCE). He learned the story from his
cousin, who got it from his grandfather, who heard it from his father,
who got it from Solon himself, who heard it from the priests of Sais
in Egypt in 590 BCE.
The story was known in Egypt’s Middle
Kingdom, (c. 2040-1640 BCE). It might be related to the c. 1500
BCE eruption of the volcano on the Minoan-related island of Thera, and
40 years later its collapse into the sea. Crete’s civilisation might
have perished at this time in the cloud of ash and the tsunami. (There
was a huge volcanic eruption on Santorini in 1628 BC, calculated at between three
and four times more explosive than Krakatoa in 1883. Plato says the
island of Atlantis had a structure of concentric rings, which are
discernible on Santorini.)
Over the centuries, the position of Atlantis has been postulated by
various scholars and pseudo-scholars as being in almost every corner
of the planet. That said, it is true that many unsolved mysteries
remain with regard to the languages and cultures, myths and legends of
peoples of all nations, and the search for connections is a fruitful
one. Why are there pyramids in the Americas and distant Egypt? How do
we explain the similar gods and words across the continents? The
search for these threads of connection isn’t new: in the period of
1913 - 1925, English explorer Colonel
Percy Fawcett searched for a fabled Atlantean outpost in the
Amazon River basin. Fawcett, his companions and the fabulous lost city
of quartz buildings that they were seeking, all vanished in 1925.
Ignatius Donnelly,
populariser of Atlantis
As an interesting sidelight, one of the most prominent
19th-century Atlantist authors (he made his fortune with Atlantis: the
Antediluvian World) Ignatius Donnelly
(born Philadelphia, 1831) was an idiosyncratic and somewhat quixotic
American Congressman whose writings, particularly the utopian sci-fi
novel, Cæsar’s
Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, profoundly influenced
the working class in pre-federation (1901) Australia. On November 18,
1893, in the Worker, a radical magazine, a journalist called
"Murphy" pilloried and compared Australian poet and author Henry Lawson
to Donnelly for his blood-and-thunder political article, 'A
Leader of the Future' (Worker, 1893).
Perhaps
ironically, he died in Minneapolis on the first day of the century, January 1,
1901 (precisely 100 years before this Almanac was founded) on the
first day of the century, the very day that Australia’s federation
took effect.
Donnelly
is perhaps better known for his The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in
Shakespeare’s Plays about an alleged code in Shakespeare’s
work that reveals that Francis Bacon
wrote much of Shakespeare’s
work.
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Atlantis map from a work by
Athanasius Kircher
Ignatius Donnelly
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