Atlantis and the Silver City (4 page)

47.   … and also for those which live in mountains and on plains, so there was for the animal which is largest and most voracious of all [i.e., the elephant].

48.   Also whatever fragrant things there are now in the earth, whether roots, herbages, or woods, or essences which distill from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in that land.

49.   Also the fruit which admits of cultivation, both the dry sort, which is given us for nourishment and any other which we use for food— we call them all by the common name pulse.…

50.   … and the fruits having a hard rind, affording drinks and meats and ointments,

51.   … and a good store of chestnuts and the like.…

52.   … and are fruits which spoil with keeping, and the pleasant kinds of dessert, with which we console ourselves after dinner.

53.   Meanwhile they went on constructing their temples and palaces and harbors and docks. And they arranged the whole country in the following manner:

54.   First of all they bridged over the zones of the sea which surrounded the ancient metropolis, making a road to and from the royal palace.

55.   And at the very beginning they built the palace on the habitation of the god and their ancestors … which they continued to ornament in successive generations … until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and beauty.

56.   And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length [nine and a quarter kilometers] which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this.

57.   … which became a harbor and leaving an opening sufficient to allow the largest vessels to find ingress.

58.   They divided at the bridges the zones of land which parted the zones of the sea leaving room for a single trireme to pass out of one zone into another.

59.   … and they covered over the channels so as to leave a way under-neath for ships.

60.   … for the banks were raised considerably above the water,

61.   Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth and the zone of land which came next was of equal breadth, but the next two zones, one of water and the other of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width.

62.   The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia.

63.   All this, including the zone and the bridge … they were surrounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges, where the sea passed in.

64.   The stone which was used in the work was quarried from underneath the center island, and from zones on the outer as well as the inner side.…

65.   … one kind was white, another black, and a third red.

66.   … and as they quarried they at the same time hollowed out double docks, having roofs formed out of the natural rock.

67.   Some of the buildings were simple, but in others they put together different stones, varying the color to please the eye.

68.   The entire circuit of the wall which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass … the next wall they coated with tin … and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum.

69.   In the center of the citadel was a holy temple dedicated to Poseidon and Cleito [his mortal wife] … which remained inaccessible … and was surrounded by an enclosure of gold.

70.   Here was Poseidon’s own temple which was a stadium in length, and half a stadium in width.

71.   All the outside of the temple, with the exception of the pinnacles, they covered in silver, and the pinnacles with gold.

72.   And around the temple on the outside were placed statues of gold of all the descendants of the ten kings and of private persons, coming both from the city itself and from the foreign cities over which they held sway.

73.   In the next place, they had fountains, one of cold and another of hot water, in gracious plenty flowing.

74.   They constructed buildings about them and planted suitable trees.…

75.   Also they made cisterns, some open to the heavens, others roofed over to be used in winter as warm baths.

76.   Of the water which ran off, they carried some to the Grove of Poseidon, where were growing all manner of trees of wonderful height and beauty, owing to the excellence of the soil.

77.   … while the remainder was conveyed by aqueduct bridges to the outer circles.

78.   … gardens and places of exercise, some for men, and others for horses in both of the two islands formed by the zones.

79.   … guardhouses at intervals for the guards, the more trusted of whom were appointed to keep watch in the lesser zone, which was nearer the Acropolis, while the most trusted of all had houses within the citadel.

80.   The docks were full of triremes and naval stores.

81.   … a wall which began at the sea and went all around: this was everywhere distant fifty stadia from the largest zone or harbor, and enclosed the whole, the ends meeting at the mouth of the channel which led to the sea.

82.   The entire area was densely crowded with habitations: and the canal and the largest of the harbors were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts.…

83.   I have described the city and the environs of the ancient palace NEARLY (author’s capitals) in the words of Solon.

84.   The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea.…

85.   But the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain.

86.   … itself surrounded by mountains which descended toward the sea.

87.   It was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia.

88.   This part of the island looked toward the south, and was sheltered from the north.

89.   The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist.…

90.   Having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts.

91.   I will now describe the plain as it was fashioned by nature and the labors of many generations of kings through the ages.

92.   … for the most part rectangular and oblong and where falling out of a straight line followed the circular ditch.

93.   The depth, and width and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told.

94.   It was excavated to a depth of a hundred feet and its breadth was a stadium everywhere. It was carried around the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length.

95.   It received the streams which came down from the mountains and winding round the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea.

96.   Farther inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea. The canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal to another, and to the city.

97.   Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth, in winter having the benefit of the rains from heaven, and in summer the water which the land supplied by introducing streams from the canals.

98.   Each of the lots in the plain had to find a leader for the men who were fit for military service … four sailors to make up the complement of twelve hundred ships … such was the military order of the royal city—the order of the other nine governments varied.

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IMAGE
1)
Timeline covering the period from the date given by Plato for the sinking of Atlantis up to the present day
.

99.   There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon … the ten kings … hunted the bulls without weapons but with staves and nooses.

100. These [laws] were inscribed by the first king on a pillar of orichalcum at the temple of Poseidon.

101. There follows an amazingly detailed discourse on how the kings sacrificed the bull, and the ceremonies and contemplations to arrive at decisions and judgments, even down to the putting on “most beautiful azure robes.”

102. Plato then discourses on the people’s debasement.

It’s a long, complicated list. I’ve read and reread it countless times. I will return to each section of it as I lay out further evidence in this book. I’ll admit that from the first time I fully examined the clues, I could immediately see parallels between them and southwest Iberia. But, containing my excitement, I decided to reexamine the other major Atlantis theories first to ascertain whether any of them are relevant or, more importantly, whether any of the reasoning behind them would be useful for my own analysis.

Hopefully, this will also help readers who are not very familiar with the Atlantis phenomenon to understand the background and, particularly, the confusion that surrounds it. It’s time to think about location, location, location.

CHAPTER THREE

Location, Location, Location

T
he story of Atlantis has intrigued, entertained, and puzzled millions of people for more than two millennia, and at least two thousand books have been devoted to the subject. All over the world, people have a subliminal hankering for a lost golden age, when life and its pleasures were simpler, everyone was provided for, and there were no wars or major confrontation. There is an inexorable fascination for civilizations whose knowledge has been buried for thousands of years. Knowledge that is time-worn, mysterious, and coded.

Many authors have stimulated interest and awareness by pulling together the myriad of evidential strands from various continents and legends indicating the one-time existence of a worldwide maritime civilization, but none have been able to pinpoint it. Some of the books on Atlantis have enjoyed huge success, the first being
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
, published in 1882 by Ignatius Donnelly
³
and, more recently, three books on the subject written by Charles Berlitz between 1969 and 1984.
⁴
Some of the plethora of titles presented theories that were just plain wacky, but most of them are by intelligent researchers or academics who believe that they have finally located the site of Atlantis. But that is precisely what continues to fuel the debate: not one of the books
or any of the clutch of television documentaries has convincingly nailed that location. None of them has produced a theory, let alone evidence, that can be accepted as plausible in the light of what Plato wrote. So the debate rumbles on and the books keep rolling off the presses.

Russian, French, German, and Italian authors have contributed to the debate, as well as a host from the English-speaking world. Some of the books are incredibly detailed and scholarly. To this day, Ignatius Donnelly’s book is still much quoted. He examined evidence and legends from old civilizations all over the globe, as well as the coincidences of certain plants and place names, for example, that are found on both sides of the Atlantic, defying any explanation other than that they emanate from a common source. As I suspected, however, on serious analysis not a single hypothesis passes the “Plato test” by matching a good percentage of his clues.

In many cases, deliberately or otherwise, I found that clues that don’t sit comfortably with specific theories are simply ignored. One example is to be found in a recent book,
Discovery of Atlantis
, proposing Cyprus and its surrounding seabed as the site.
⁵
The author, Robert Sarmast, gives a list of Plato’s clues but omits key ones that would definitely preclude Cyprus, such as the one about Cádiz. To support the theory, an expedition was mounted and resulted in a claim to have discovered a hill on the seabed with a surrounding man-made wall. After the book’s initial publication, a second expedition discovered that the wall was a natural formation.

The theory that has probably had the most academic support in recent years claims that Atlantis was the Greek island of Santorini, which used to be called Thera and supported a Minoan population. Some decades ago, an archaeological team led by Spyridon Marinatos excitedly began to unearth a whole town buried under volcanic ash there. It is called Akritori and had been covered when, in around 1620
B.C.
, a volcano blew its top in spectacular style. It ripped the mountain apart, leaving only the caldera as a reformed island in a completely new bay. The explosion was heard all over the eastern Mediterranean basin, and the ensuing tsunami is even attributed with having wiped out the main Minoan civilization on Crete. Significantly, Plato used the words “violent earthquakes and floods” (clue 14)—definitely not volcanic eruptions.