Researchers Find Possible Atlantis Location 218
An AC writes"It seems that Plato's Atlantis has a new spot candidate. Some archaeologist used satellite imagery to identify a structure in an once tsunami-ed Spanish plain. From the article: '"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters. "It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.'"
Atlantis...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems like they don't know anything about Tartessos [wikipedia.org]. That would be a real explanation for the ruins found.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument. His contemporaries understood this, but eventually it got out of hand and people took it literally. Atlantis really doesn't exist. There may be a lot of "lost" cities and small civilizations, but I doubt any of them are Atlantis.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
"The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument. His contemporaries understood this, but eventually it got out of hand and people took it literally."
I've seen this statement before, and I've always wondered - is there a Cliff's Notes version of the alleged supporting evidence for it? I mean, actual statements from people of Plato's era along the lines of "that Plato sure does like inventing ancient cities that never existed as back-story for his work! I bet in a few thousand years, people will think Atlantis actually existed, even though all of us here in Ancient Greece know that that is completely false!".
I ask because art critics and members of the "soft sciences" have a terrible habit of making statements like this, and then those statements become accepted as fact, when really it was just someone's opinion. One of the great things about art is that different people take away different things from each work, but the downside is that many of those people also assume that whatever *they* took away was what the creator of that work actually intended.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, either the ancient historian Strabo is lying when he said that Aristotle said that Atlantis was just "made up" to further examine a hypothetical argument, or Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, but without some "key" knowledge of one of his most important thought experiments, or Plato was telling the truth but he couldn't get his key pupil to agree?
Aristotle's works are many things, but they don't seem to indicate that he had an axe to grind against Plato, at least not one so sharp as to make the argument that Plato was a liar. I'm inclined to believe that Aristotle was right, that his teacher made up Atlantis to flesh out an argument, much like Ann Ryan made up a series of books (and heroes) to flesh out her argument.
The weakness in the above belief is that it's more-than-second-hand information. The works of Aristotle which purport to refute the real existence of Atlantis were destroyed. We only have Strabo's account of what Aristotle said about what Plato meant to go by.
That there is some evidence that Strabo truly believed in Atlantis and that he still bothered to write Aristotle's refutation of it's existence lends me to believe in Strabo's accounting of Aristotle's refutation more.
After reading a description of Atlantis, I doubt you'll ever find it (or that it ever existed). I have a hard time believing that any civilization could be so orderly to get all citizens to build their cities in circles. And building a circular canal means a spoke and ring system of waterways, when any semi-sane engineer would just settle for a spoke and hub system, no need to lay out perfect rings. Even enormously planned communities like Washington, D. C. and Brasilia have less structural control than what's implied.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
Mind you, I'm not saying Atlantis is real, but... ...Heinrich Schliemann was laughed at until he unearthed the city of Troy. They found what is believed to be the cities referred to as Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as the Philistine city of Gath (e.g. Goliath's crib). The tomb of Tutankhamen was considered to be a myth.
Not all tales have pure fabrication as their foundation. Sometimes they drag in real places into the picture.
I'm thinking that Plato caught wind of (or maybe even grew up with) the oral stories surrounding the Santorini eruption ~1,000 years before he was born. He likely took that and ran with it.