Our Cosmic Ancestors (26 page)

THE MYSTERY OF ATLANTIS

Around 580 BC, when the Athenian statesman Solon had established the code of law that made him famous, he took a long vacation and went to Sais, then the capital of Lower Egypt. Sais was the centre of culture at that time and people of fame and talent used to congregate there to hone their intellects. It was there that Solon met the high priest of Egypt, Sonchis, who generously showed him a part of the famed Egyptian archives, dating back many thousands of years, and also told him a fascinating story about a terrible disaster that had occurred 9,000 years before. It was the story of the sunken continent of Atlantis.

This legend, which is still considered by many as pure mythology, was retold by Solon to his nephew Dropides, who in turn transmitted it to his descendants, one of whom told it to the philosopher Plato. Two of Plato's most famous works,
Timaeus
and
Critias,
have preserved most of the legend of Atlantis in all its passionate and tragic greatness.

Personally I am convinced that the story of Atlantis, as Solon heard it from Sonchis, and as Plato has given it to us, is true from beginning to end; and someday the ruins of Atlantis will be found, just as one after another we found the once legendary Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Knossos. Meanwhile, we can look at the information that has been assembled about Atlantis and the catastrophe that made it disappear.

According to Sonchis, 9,000 years before his time, there was an immense island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, due west of the Pillars of Hercules, now called the Strait of Gibraltar. This island was bigger that all of North Africa and the Near East put together. Its name was Atlantis and it was inhabited by very advanced people of unknown origin, who were great mathematicians, astronomers, land cultivators, and masters in metallurgy. Their capital city, Poseidon's, was named after the god of the sea, Poseidon, and built in the
middle of a vast plain, protected by mountain chains and connected with the ocean by a manmade waterway 600 ft. wide and 100 ft. deep. The canal ringed the entire city and served not only for local transportation but also for ocean-going vessels. The fields around Poseidonis were rich with crops; and horses, cattle, and elephants grazed there. Atlantis was protected both from east and west by a maze of small islands, and navigators had to go through these archipelagoes to come to the fabled place.

Atlantis had lived many thousands of years in peace and prosperity until one day the leadership of the land was taken over by a military clique who decided to conquer all the people who lived around the Mediterranean. The generals of Atlantis raised an army of 750,000 men with many war chariots and easily conquered both sides of the Mediterranean, all of southern Europe except Greece, and all of North Africa except Egypt. Then they decided to push forward and make their victory total by smashing Greece and Egypt.

At that time the highly cultured Egyptians were no match for the invader; but the best warriors of that era, the Greeks, saved the Egyptians by winning decisive victories over the invaders. They even liberated all the conquered Mediterranean land. When the invader fled, the Greeks put together an expeditionary army and sent it to Poseidonis to make sure that there would be no new invasions. It was while the Greeks were in Poseidonis that, within one day and one night, powerful earthquakes and devastating tides destroyed Atlantis. The prospering continent sank beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Both armies and all the people perished. And, according to the description that Sonchis gave Solon, all that was left where once plains and mountains stretched to the horizon, was a huge morass and swamp, something like today's Sargasso Sea.

This detailed and dramatic story is probably one of the greatest recollections of mankind; but until recently it was very hard to take it for anything but legend. Today, however, we know many things not known until relatively recently. We know that human beings have been around for much more than 100,000 years and highly civilized people existed for at least 12,000 years. We know that our continents drift, that the poles shift, that ocean levels change, and those islands emerge and sink. It is no longer possible to say the legend of Atlantis is plain myth because the events it describes were impossible.
To the contrary, the disappearance of Atlantis is now known to have been quite possible, geologically as well as historically.

But there is still serious argument as to where Atlantis was located before it disappeared, and for a while it was even believed that Atlantis was the Aegean island of Thera (now called Santorin); and that the great earthquake that made Atlantis disappear into the sea was actually the eruption in 1521 BC of the volcano on Thera.

The Thera argument won't stand up for several reasons. First, if Atlantis really disappeared in 1521 BC, how come the Bible doesn't say anything about it? This was 700 years after the death of Abraham and about 100 years before the birth of Moses, when the Hebrews undoubtedly had mastered the art of keeping written records.

Next, if the disappearance of Atlantis had taken place in the Aegean Sea only 940 years before Solon lived, everybody in Greece would have known it, especially Solon, who was a very learned man. He would have known it just as most educated people today know that England was invaded by the Normans in 1066, even though it happened more than nine hundred years ago.

Equally improbable is the possibility that Atlantis, being larger than all of North Africa and the Near East together, could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean. And certainly a small island like Thera could never have mobilized 750,000 men. Nor have any remains of elephants been found in Thera. Finally we know that Atlantis disappeared after a series of earthquakes, not in a volcanic eruption, which is completely different.

Another much more likely theory postulates that Atlantis was the continents of North and South America together. Now, this total area is indeed as big as North Africa and the Near East together, and indeed there were elephants roaming the plains in America 12,000 years ago. Also, both Americas are rich in metal ores as Atlantis was, and there are many islands along both coasts.

Finally, this new theory is partially based on recent discoveries that Hindus and Phoenicians had agricultural colonies in eastern Mexico where cotton and jute were cultivated 2,900 years ago. Even older are the Sumerian and Phoenician copper and tin mines in Peru and Bolivia, which also produced gold and silver as long as 4,300 years ago. Inscriptions resembling the Cretan linear writing have been found in cliffs of the Upper Amazon, indicating that sailors from the Aegean passed that way on regular trade routes.

However, even these finds don't seem quite old enough to fit the mystery of Atlantis. They only go back to about 1,700 years before Solon, which is not the time of disappearance of the fabled island. Therefore it seems much more likely that, instead of covering both Americas, Atlantis was only located in the central part of the area, from Florida to the estuary of Amazon, which would be southwest of Gibraltar, or the Pillars of Hercules.

The Tibetan bible, the Book of Dzyan, which goes back to the very farthest past, records that in the year 9564 BC a very large part of the land sank into the ocean in what is now the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. History does not tell us how the Tibetans of that time, on the other side of the world, learned about this cataclysm; but they probably got it from the best source - refugees from Atlantis, who went all the way to Tibet to make sure they were on firm ground that wouldn't disappear beneath the waves again. The point is that the date of the catastrophe was exactly recorded and preserved, and the Tibetan record of Atlantis dovetails nicely with Solon's account; so we have no reason to doubt it.

As for the location of Atlantis, if one studies a map of the waters surrounding the American continents, none could be more probable. It is easy to trace the coast of the sunken Atlantis along the line drawn from Florida to the Bahamas, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Antilles, Trinidad, and the north coast of South America from the estuary of the Orinoco to that of the Amazon. And now new discoveries made at the centre of this region offer indisputable proofs and final evidence that Atlantis really existed.

The actual rediscovery of Atlantis began in 1967, when Robert Brush, an American pilot, flying at low altitude near Bimini in the Bahamas, noticed a huge rectangular form a few feet below the water. He photographed it right away. Now, the first law of underwater archaeology states that water and waves can create all kinds of strange forms from the sand or rocks on the bottom, but never a rectangle with four right angles. The second law states that any such form invariably belongs to an ancient temple, usually surrounded by
smaller rectangles or circles, which were the habitats of the priests, servants, or pilgrims.

Brush called in Dimitri Rebikoff, a professional diver and archaeologist, who had spent twenty years in underwater exploration in the Mediterranean and was considered the most experienced and qualified scientist in this category. He recognized the importance of the discovery right away. He himself had photographed from a plane an immense submerged rectangle 400 m long off the Grand Bahama Bank, as well as other remnants of human construction along a straight line or grouped in circles in an area covering over thirty miles between Orange Cay and Bimini in the Bahamas, Rebikoff in turn asked Professor Manson Valentine, who had discovered important Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, to join in an expedition to Bimini and the surrounding islands.

In August 1968, this expedition discovered a 75-by-90-foot temple of very great age off the coast of Andros, the largest island in the Bahamas. But the most important discovery came on 2 September, 1968, when at the northwest extremity of North Bimini, under only fifteen feet of water, Valentine found a vast expanse of pavement made of flat, rectangular or polygonal stone slabs. All were obviously manmade. These stone slabs had been submerged for many thousands of years, as evidenced by their edges, which had been rounded by the movement of sand over a very, very long time. The biggest slabs were nine to fifteen feet long and formed the whole width of the paved avenues, and in some spots more than one layer of stones could be seen.

The size and form of these slabs, as well as the precise cuts and joints, reminded one of the stone slab ruins on both sides of the Atlantic - the Giza and Baalbek monuments and the temples of Cuzco and Tiahuanaco. Along the coast of Andros at a depth of 150 ft. the French undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau has found a huge stalactite and stalagmite cave, a type of cave that could only have been formed by drops of lime water falling over long periods of time in free air, not under water. And the sediment in this cave is about 12,000 years old.

During the same expedition Cousteau explored the Blue Hole, a deep abyss near the coast of Belize, in Central America, where he discovered a labyrinth of stalactite and stalagmite caves, all at an angle, which is contrary to the way these formations can grow. The only explanation is that a strong earthquake tilted these caves and their formations of calcite deposits. Again, the analysis of the stalactites showed their age to be about 12,000 years.

This is clear evidence that some 12,000 years ago a large part of the American continent, now under the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, was submerged during a seismic catastrophe so that only the highest mountain peaks remained above water. These are, of course, the Caribbean islands of today.

All this sounds strangely similar to what the Book of Dzyan tells us about Atlantis. Everything is there, including the right date, 9564 BC. The location, too, is the same - the Gulf of Mexico, the Bahamian area of the Atlantic, and the Caribbean Sea. Is it still possible to assume that the authors of the Tibetan bible invented it? Personally I do not think so. I sincerely believe the ruins of human constructions on the submerged plateau off the Bahamas are indeed offering us the first indisputable evidence that Atlantis really existed and that at least part of this sunken continent was in that very area.

Also, if Atlantis had never existed, we would have to invent it to explain several mysteries that are otherwise totally unexplainable. First, there is the mythological mystery. How is it that the gods of nearly all civilizations around the world came from the sea, after they had descended from the skies, like the Mayan god Kukulkan? His sarcophagus, which has been discovered in Palenque, in southern Mexico, has the shape of a fish. The god Oannes emerged every day from the deep sea to teach the Sumerians assembled on the shore in order to listen and learn. We could also ask how come the gods arriving on the American continent always came from the east, while the gods coming to Europe always arrived from the west, all indications of one central Atlantic origin long since forgotten.

Then we have the mystery of the Atlantic dialects different from those of the Mediterranean: a group of rough, guttural dialects still spoken, from the Guanche dialect of the Azores and the Canary Islands to the many tongues of unknown origin spoken between Morocco and Ireland. And the impossible-sounding names, even more difficult to write in our Greek-Latin alphabet, consisting of letters that we use very little, like x and z, found in places inhabited by the Bretons, the Basques, the Gaels, the Andalusians, and the Berbers. All of these mysterious languages are related to the Guanche dialect, all the way across the Azores and the Canary Islands to the Mayan land of the Yucatan with its ancient religious centres like Chichen ltza, Iszamal, Tzebtun, Uxmal, Uxul, Yaxuna or Oxkintok.

There is the story of the Basque missionary, who arrived in the Yucatan and discovered that the best way to make himself clear to the local Indians was to talk to them in his native dialect! Someday, when we decipher the mysterious ancient inscriptions found in the Azores and the Canary Islands, we might learn more about these languages, too. Even the Basques themselves are an unsolved enigma. Tall and strong, they have all of the characteristics of the Cro-Magnon people who emerged suddenly about 65,000 years ago, while the lesser Neanderthal man continued to exist for a while longer. Could the Cro-Magnons have been colonists from Atlantis, who established their new homes in Europe and survived there the destruction of their land of origin, continuing the culture that they had brought along?