Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (27 page)

Michael Hübner’s Morocco hypothesis was the most convincing on paper: the mountains matched perfectly; the spot where the Persian sailor Sataspes’s ships had stuck fast in the water—likely inspiration for the muddy shoals—was nearby. The location was not too far south of the likeliest Pillars of Heracles. Even the name
Gadir
seemed to match. Once I subtracted the Pythagorean numbers from Plato’s story, though, Hübner’s logic instantly became less compelling. Like a beguiling online dating profile that fizzles at first sight, the precision of Hübner’s Seven Sigma correlations didn’t begin to match the real-world evidence. The ringed structure he found, while intriguing, sits several miles inland, in the foothills of the Atlas
Mountains, at an elevation that even Dallas Abbott’s six-hundred-foot-high Madagascar wave couldn’t reach.

In the end, my conclusion was inescapable. Plato stated pretty clearly where the island that Solon called Atlantis was located: Poseidon’s second son ruled over “the cape of the island facing the Pillars of Heracles opposite what is now called the territory of Gadeira,” or Gades/Cádiz. The Greeks were quite familiar with an island city in Gades: Tartessos, the trading port famous for its precious metals.

Tartessos is a good, if imperfect, match with Atlantis. The shiny orichalcum of Plato’s city could be related to the region’s famous copper and tin, which were mixed into Tartessian bronze. The Sierra Morena protect the Andalusian plains from northerly winds, and if they don’t fit exactly like a puzzle piece, as Stavros Papamarinopoulos suggests, they strongly resemble Plato’s description. The impassable mud shoals and elephants of Africa are close enough to Tartessos to have been co-opted into Carthaginian propaganda meant to dissuade curious Greeks from exploring the strange and dangerous world beyond the Pillars. The Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault has demonstrated repeatedly its ability to unleash earthquakes and tsunamis that could wipe out a city overnight.

Are the concentric rings and temples of Atlantis buried under the sand and clay of Doñana National Park? I doubt it, no matter what Werner Wickboldt sees in his satellite photos. Such details seem like Platonic embellishments. Papamarinopoulos’s natural circular craters, while fascinating, are what Donald Rumsfeld would call known unknowns: They may have existed; if they did exist, they might help explain the rings of Atlantis; and if they were ever discovered, I’d be on the first plane to Seville to check them out. But they’re a long shot.

The biggest issue with identifying Tartessos as the original Atlantis is the date of its destruction. The city seems to have still existed in Solon’s time, disappearing from the historical record around
500 BC. Wickboldt suggests that the Tartessos known to the Greeks was built on top of the ruins of a destroyed Atlantis, or whatever the island was originally called. Papamarinopoulos has a similar idea, except he thinks the predecessor was an “elder prehistoric Tartessos,” one that now lies buried under the mud and clay of the Guadalquivir River. He believes the war between Athens and Atlantis may be a “parallel history within the turbulent twelfth century BC, unknown to science so far.” Considering what we know of the general chaos of the Sea Peoples era, that seems about as close to an explanation—and a date—as we can hope for without further evidence.

Because it is so entertaining and so different from his other writings, Plato’s tale of a lost city is often mistakenly dismissed as a one-off novelty created by an otherwise brilliant artist: philosophy’s answer to Bob Dylan’s Christmas album, with a little Athenian political theory sprinkled on top. Plato knew well the power of stories, which is why he used the account of Atlantis’s rise and fall as the bridge linking two of his most ambitious works. Having wrestled with some of the heaviest questions faced by humanity (What is knowledge? How does one lead a good life?), the
Republic
ends with Socrates telling
the story of a soldier who learns the secrets of the human soul’s indestructibility and the circular design of the eternal cosmos. The
Timaeus
is Plato’s attempt to give a Pythagorean account of all that exists, from the tiniest triangular atom to the music of the spheres. The irresistible Atlantis story that Critias tells, with its enigmatic numbers and cyclical destructions, was—and still is—Plato’s invitation to engage in the only activity that could hope to make sense of it all: philosophy.

The question everyone wants answered about Atlantis is, was it real
?
If I may channel Plato for a moment, I guess that depends on the definition of
real
. I think Plato took elements of the Sea Peoples story that Solon heard in Egypt, combined them with stories about
ancient Athens that had been passed down orally, and blended that with accounts he’d heard of a lost city beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

My conclusions were similar to those of Rainer Kühne, onetime believer in the historical Atlantis, who’d changed his mind after writing his
Antiquity
article to conclude that Plato’s story was fiction, based on some true events. Stavros Papamarinopoulos, using almost the same information, concluded that Plato’s story was a bricolage of true myths based in history, mixed in with some made-up stuff and mathematical codes. Werner Wickboldt,
also
employing a similar thought process, thought the Atlantis tale was more or less factual. You say
Puh-lay-toh
, I say
Puh-lah-toh.

“Aren’t there two kinds of story, one true and the other false?” Socrates asks in the
Republic
. When discussing Atlantis, those usually seem to be the only two choices: Either Plato made it up, or he didn’t.

Plato loved mathematics because it provided definite answers, but his genius was demonstrating that everything else in the universe was worth taking a guess at, including the universe itself. After stating the binary nature of fact versus fiction in the
Republic
, Socrates concedes that there are stories that “are false, on the whole, though they have some truth in them.” At the risk of correcting the intellectual hero of the greatest philosopher who ever lived, I’d reverse that order. There are stories—“likely accounts,” in the words of Timaeus himself, clearing his throat before unleashing his wild cosmic speculations—that may contain some false information, though they are true on the whole.

Plato’s Atlantis story is one of
them.

Plato, center left, with his prize pupil Aristotle, center right, from Raphael’s
The School of Athens
. In his left hand Plato holds a copy of the
Timaeus
, the original source of the Atlantis story. The seated figure, lower left, is generally believed to be Pythagoras. The tablet at his feet shows mystical numbers that influenced Plato’s writings.
(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Ignatius Donnelly, a US congressman and the author of history’s second-most-important work on Atlantis,
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Tony O’Connell, founder of the online
Atlantipedia
and expert on all matters related to the lost city
(Courtesy of Tony O’Connell)

Richard Freund, archeologist and star of the documentary
Finding Atlantis
, with a prehistoric Spanish concentric-circle stele
(Courtesy of Associated Producers, Ltd.)

A speculative map from Athanasius Kircher’s
Mundus Subterraneus
(1666), often cited as evidence that ancient sailors voyaged to Atlantis
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The pharaoh Ramses III repulses the invading Sea Peoples, as recorded in hieroglyphics at Medinet Habu, his mortuary temple in Egypt.
(Rendering by Jean-François Champollion, courtesy of the author)

Rainer Kühne, the German physicist whose article in the journal
Antiquity
launched a new wave of searching for Atlantis
(Courtesy of Associated Producers, Ltd.)