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SCIENCE AND LIFE / Archive of the journal "SCIENCE AND LIFE" / Science on the march/ Hypotheses, assumptions, facts
№9, 1999
ATLANTIS IS NOT A LEGEND!
G. ALEXANDROVSKY.
In the dialogues of the ancient thinker Plato, there is still a grain that speaks about the reality of the legendary island.
The legend of Atlantis has been living for more than two thousand years.
But only a few decades ago, people who were desperate to find traces of a once prosperous state ranked Plato's writings as utopias.
And here is a sensational twist: today, some historians and archaeologists have recognized that Plato's dialogues still contain a grain of real facts.
We present three new hypotheses suggesting where and when Atlantis died.
Plato, retelling the Egyptian legend about Atlantis, described in detail the capital of the island absorbed by the ocean.
Following his text, the modern artist reproduced the panorama of the mysterious city.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who first told the world about Atlantis.
This is how the Egyptians depicted captives captured in battles with the "peoples of the sea".
A map of only some of the supposed places where Atlantis could be located.
The search for the disappeared island began in ancient times and continues to this day.
In 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean was invaded by the "peoples of the sea", whose origin has not yet been established.
‹ ›
The legend of the Egyptian priests
In 421 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato in two of his works - "Timaeus" and "Critias" - outlined the history and the sad end of the island state of Atlantis.
The story is told in the form of a dialogue by Plato's great grandfather, Critias: he conveys the content of the conversation with his grandfather, who heard a story about Atlantis from a contemporary, Solon, an Athenian legislator and poet, who, in turn, learned about Atlantis from an Egyptian priest.
And Plato in his texts repeatedly emphasizes that this is not a myth, but a true narrative about historical events.
Atlantis, according to Plato, is a huge island that lay in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, that is, beyond Gibraltar.
In the center of the island there was a hill on which there were temples and a royal palace.
The Acropolis - the upper city was protected by two rows of earthen embankments and three water ring channels.
The outer ring was connected to the sea by a 500 meter channel, through which ships entered the inner port.
The life of Atlantis appears full of prosperity.
The temple of the main deity of the islanders - Poseidon, the lord of the seas, was, Plato tells us, lined with gold, silver and orchilac (a recently solved word means an alloy of copper with zinc).
Another temple dedicated to Poseidon and his wife Kleito, the ancestor of all Atlanteans, is surrounded by a golden wall.
There was also a golden statue of Poseidon and golden statues of Nereids - numerous daughters of the sea deity.
The Atlanteans had bronze weapons and thousands of war chariots.
The subsoil yielded copper and silver.
People had fun with horse racing, thermal baths were at their service: there were two springs on the island - cold and hot water.
Ships hurried to the harbor of Atlantis with ceramic dishes, spices, rare ores.
To supply the port with fresh water, the riverbed was turned.
The island belonged to a powerful union of kings.
And then the moment came when he decided to subjugate other countries, including Greece.
However, Athens, having shown valor and strength in the war, won.
But, as Plato says, the Olympian gods, dissatisfied with the warring nations, decided to punish them for greed and violence.
A monstrous earthquake and flood" in one terrible day and one night " destroyed the Athenian army and the whole of Atlantis.
47 years after Plato's death, a resident of Athens, Crantor, went to Egypt to make sure that the sources of the information used by the philosopher were really there.
And he found, according to him, in the temple of Neit hieroglyphs with the text about the events described.
The search for Atlantis began at the very beginning of the new era - in the 50th year of Our Lord.
For almost two thousand years since that time, many hypotheses about the location of Atlantis have appeared.
Many were attracted by the riches mentioned by Plato.
To think of taking possession of golden walls and statues!
Most of the interpreters of "Critias" and "Timaeus" pointed to the existing islands of the Atlantic Ocean.
But there were other landmarks.
Among the 50 points on Earth identified by enthusiasts for the search for Atlantis, there are also quite fantastic ones, for example, Brazil or Siberia, the existence of which the ancient philosopher did not even suspect.
A new surge of interest in the search for the legendary island arose after the First World War.
Improved in wartime underwater technology prompted adventurous businessmen to organize companies in several countries to search for the mysterious Atlantis.
For example, in the French newspaper "Figaro" there was such a note: "A society for the study and exploitation of Atlantis has been established in Paris."
Companies, of course, went bust one after another, but the Russian writer Alexander Belyaev found in a newspaper publication a plot for his fantastic story "The Last Man from Atlantis".
More than 50 thousand publications are devoted to the problem of the drowned island.
Cinema and television also contributed to this story.
More than 20 expeditions explored the places where, according to the ideas of their organizers, the people of Atlantis once flourished.
But they all came back empty handed.
To the two main questions - where?
and when?
- already in our century, the objections of archaeologists were added, who considered the story about the abundance of gold and silver on the island to be a fantasy.
They attributed the network of canals - circular and leading to the sea, the inner port and other hydraulic structures to Plato's inventions: they were not able to do such large scale things at that time.
Researchers of the philosophical and literary heritage of Plato considered that, telling about the prosperous Atlantis, the ancient idealist thinker called on his contemporaries to build an exemplary state without dictatorship and tyranny.
And in this sense, Plato is called the creator of the utopia genre.
(Plato, indeed, in some of his writings called for the construction of an ideal state based on goodness and justice.
He is three times went from Athens to Syracuse, the last time an old man, hoping in vain to convince the local tyrants humane ideas.)
As for the time of the death of Islands in the ocean depths, that Plato called contrary to all the data of modern science date: according to him, the accident occurred 11,500 years ago to the present days, 9000 years before the time of Plato.
12-10 thousand years ago, humanity was just emerging from the Paleolithic, the ancient Stone Age, and it is difficult to imagine that somewhere there lived a people who in their development surpassed the human race by many thousands of years.
The primary source of such an error could be incorrect definitions of the age of the Egyptian state, carried out in ancient times.
For example, Herodotus counted Egypt 11340 years old.
Is it really Atlantis?
"The Russians have found Atlantis!" - in 1979, many Western European newspapers accompanied photos of the seabed with such sensational full houses.
In the pictures, vertical ridges resembling the walls of a destroyed city were clearly visible under a layer of sand.
The impression of the ancient city ruins was enhanced by the fact that other ridges passed along the bottom at right angles to the first ones.
The underwater images were taken by the research vessel of the Moscow University "Academician Petrovsky".
The actions unfolded where Plato indicated- "behind the pillars of Hercules".
After entering the Atlantic Ocean, the ship stopped over a shoal to test its underwater equipment.
Pure chance helped to choose a parking place just above the Ampere underwater volcano.
It was possible to establish that the Ampere volcano once protruded from the water and was an island.
In 1982, the Soviet ship "Rift" here lowered the underwater vehicle "Argus"into the ocean.
"We saw a panorama of the ruins of the city, as the walls very much imitated the remains of rooms, streets, squares, "the commander of the Argus V. Bulyga reported to the Institute of Oceanology of the Academy of Sciences.
Unfortunately, the next Vityaz expedition, which took place in the summer of 1984, did not confirm such encouraging impressions of the aquanaut.
Two stones of a fairly regular shape were lifted up from one of the walls, but their analysis showed that this was not a creation of human hands, but volcanic rock.
The commander of the Argus crew, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences A. Gorodnitsky writes: "Most likely, the stone is a solidified lava that once poured out through the cracks of the volcano."
Another seamount, Josephine, was also examined, also an ancient volcano, and in the past an island.
A. Gorodnitsky proposed his model of a grandiose geological catastrophe of the distant past.
It arose due to a sharp shift in the northern direction of the African tectonic plate.
Its collision with the European plate caused the eruption of the Santorini volcano in the east, and in the west - the immersion of the mentioned volcanic islands into the ocean.
This hypothesis does not contradict the geological and geophysical data of modern science.
However, once again Atlantis turned out to be not a fascinating hypothesis, but just a myth: scientists have not found any traces of the remnants of the Atlantean material culture.
New facts about the old world
The latest methods: ultra precise measurements, sensitive sensors, improved methods for determining the age of finds, the use of penetrating radiation - all this has come to archaeology in recent years.
Recent excavations have helped to learn a lot of amazing information about the technical achievements of distant ancestors who lived 10-5 thousand years ago.
An archaeologist from Switzerland, Eberhard Zangger, decided to look at the facts given by Plato, based on the latest discoveries in archaeology.
For example, an expedition of the University of Braunschweig discovered man made lakes, harbors and other hydraulic structures in the ancient countries of the East, even larger in size than those mentioned in Plato's dialogues.
For thirty centuries BC, Pharaoh Menes ordered to block the mighty Nile with a stone dam and forced the river to flow around the capital of the ancient kingdom from the south.
Even more amazing were the buildings built in Urartu - tunnels for collecting ground water, tunnels as tall as a man, stretching for many tens of kilometers.
In Egypt, Sumer, Babylon - everywhere modern archaeologists come across the remains of grandiose structures that operated long before Homer and Plato.
So why should the story of an ancient philosopher about Atlantis be attributed to a myth or utopia?
Plato wrote about the golden battlements on the roof of the temple, about the wall covered with precious metals, about the golden statues.
When the archaeologist E. Push in the capital of Pharaoh Ramses II (1271-1209 BC) cleared 180 square meters of stone floor from the ground, shimmering with metal, gold coating, scientists remembered about the ancient Egyptian anthem, which contains words about the gilded gates and pavements in the monarch's residence.
So, the hymn captured the truth.
The study of the gilding of tiles revealed its technology.
The ancient builders ground gold into the finest powder, mixed it with quicklime, and this paste was covered with floor slabs and walls.
According to current experts, this method of gilding is very economical.
An explanation was also found for the strange dating of the disaster that plunged the island into the waters of the sea.
Some archaeologists are convinced that either the priests or Solon were mistaken: at the heart of their delusion are incorrectly read Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In their system, the number "9000" is represented by nine lotus flowers, and the number "900" is represented by nine rope knots, very similar in appearance to the lotus, and later scribes could easily have confused the date, pushed it back thousands of years.
Along with the above mentioned material proofs of the veracity of Plato's work, modern researchers put forward another, so to speak, moral, circumstance.
Plato belonged to the family of the lawgiver Solon, who is very revered by the Greeks, whom folk tradition refers to the wisest of the "seven sages".
It is known how the ancient Greeks protected the purity, the purity of their kind.
The memory of their ancestors was sacred to them.
Could Plato, referring to Solon, have published a fiction, insisting that it was true?
Atlanteans and " peoples of the sea"
The archaeologist from Switzerland, Zangger, who has already been mentioned, compares some data relating to two states, to Atlantis and Troy, and concludes that they are identical.
Important coincidences inspired the seekers.
Plato's fleet of Atlantis numbered "twelve hundred ships", Homer's Troy had 1186 galleys.
Strong northerly winds were blowing in Atlantis, but the surroundings of Troy were also different, which made it difficult for rowing vessels to pass into the Black Sea.
Of course, random coincidences cannot be excluded here, but the historical framework of both states strikingly (except for the dubious Platonic dating) repeat each other.
Some historians supplement these considerations.
They see the root cause of the Atlantean campaign against Greece mentioned by Plato in the expansion of the mysterious "peoples of the sea" to the east of the Mediterranean - one of the dark and bloody chapters of human history.
Egyptian hieroglyphs have brought to us the details of this brutal aggression.
In 1200 BC, the armies of invaders from the north, moving to Egypt by land and by sea, destroyed many states of the East on their way: the Hittite empire, Crete, Mycenae, the Levant.
Only Egypt managed to repel the attack of the northern aggressor.
It was in 1180 BC, under the Pharaoh Ramses III.
After such a ruin, many countries fell into decline for a long time.
Famine reigned everywhere, and earthquakes and floods completed the tragedy.
The development of culture was interrupted.
Writing was lost in Greece.
In the Bible and in Homer, one can find hints that during the Bronze Age there were already flourishing cities, grandiose dams and canals.
Many archaeologists believe that Plato's works reflect the rise of civilizations at that time and their collapse due to the invasion of the "peoples of the sea".
But if these assumptions are correct, then Atlantis should be looked for in the east of the Mediterranean Sea.
This statement is supported by the fact that it was there - on the islands of the Aegean Sea and on the shores of western Anatolia - that there were settlements of pirates at that time.
Troy should be one of them.
Quite recently, a rich English athlete T. Severin decided to repeat the feat of the Argonauts - to sail on a galley built on the Greek model to the Caucasus.
The vessel had 20 rowers and a simple sail.
Before entering the Sea of Marmara, the rowers at the latitude of Troy were exhausted many times, struggling with the oncoming northern current that broke out of the Dardanelles Strait.
Such a natural obstacle allowed the Three to firmly hold an important trade artery.
In any case, the city had constant sources of wealth, there was also a need for a large fleet and a large harbor - Plato also speaks about this.
The Swiss scientist Zangger and his German colleagues, using a helicopter equipped with a magnetometer capable of distinguishing the location of soil layers up to 150 meters deep from a height, plan to undertake research in the near future to make sure whether a channel from the sea to the inland port with a length of 500 meters was broken in Troy.
The depth of the channel, as Plato reports, speaking of Atlantis, was 30 meters.
But the depth is clearly not enough for ships to freely enter it from the sea: at the time to which Atlantis belongs, the sea level was five meters lower than now.
Tsangger, however, believes that the ships were pulled into the channel on a strong frame, and there was no way for uninvited ships.
The ancient Greeks knew this method, it is described by Homer in the Odyssey.
There is also a historical example: before the canal was dug at Corinth, ships were dragged on a frame along a stone road across the narrow Peloponnesian Isthmus.
Myths are replaced by facts
The "Hunters of Atlantis" do not shy away from new guesses based not on Platonic dialogues, but on the facts of our time.
Relatively recently, some researchers have moved the search for Atlantis from the unjustified distances of the globe to the vicinity of Greece itself.
For example, the French archaeologist Louis Figuier in 1872 explored the island of Tyre, located 120 kilometers north of Crete.
This small island is all that remains of the volcano, now called Santorini.
In the past, the island was called Strongili (round) or Kalliste, that is, the most beautiful.
Does this epithet not correspond to the excellent estimates that Plato gave to Atlantis?
One of these hypotheses belongs to the Doctor of geological and mineralogical sciences E. Milanovsky a geologist, tectonist, who has repeatedly visited the islands of the Aegean Sea: Crete, Tyre and others.
In Plato's dialogues, one can find an indication that Atlantis consisted of two islands - a large, rectangular in plan (this corresponds to the plan of Crete), and a more modest in size, rounded (now such an island is called Tyra).
As we already know, Plato describes the port of Atlantis, located in a ring shaped sea bay or channel.
This inner reservoir opened into the sea by a narrow strait (or channel) and was protected from storms by a mountainous coast.
"Many facts and details reported by Plato," writes E. Milanovsky in his article published in one of the collections of the Moscow State University, " allow us to identify in the ancient metropolis of Atlantis, consisting of several rounded ring - and horseshoe shaped in terms of mountainous islands and straits, a polygenic, that is, a long term, repeatedly active volcano of the central type."
Each eruption of the volcano ended with a partial subsidence of the central volcanic structure, which turned into a caldera - a hollow left after the eruption.
The repeated ejections of the volcano piled up the calderas as bowls of different sizes inserted into each other.
The gaps between the edges of the bowls are those ring channels, if we talk about the structure of the port of Atlantis.
"From the standpoint of geology, we can reasonably assume that the island or archipelago described by Plato with a concentric relief structure and thermal springs," continues E. Milanovsky, " its sudden collapse into the deep sea, accompanied by an earthquake, tsunami and the appearance of large masses of floating "petrified mud" (pumice) at the site of the failure, fully correspond to what geologists have become aware of in the last 100-150 years."
In his notes, E. Milanovsky presents arguments in favor of the full correspondence of the geological events on the island of Tyre to what Plato wrote about when talking about the catastrophe.
At the same time, the scientist gave an impressive picture of the prosperous, spiritual life of the islanders before the volcano exploded.
The ash covered city of Akrotiri occupied several hectares, about half of it was excavated and today is closed from the weather by a high raised roof, part of which is made of glass.
The houses are two to three floors, there are four storey ones.
The first floors are retail shops, workshops, just storages of food supplies.
The second and third floors are residential.
"It is amazing," writes E. Milanovsky, " almost in every house the walls were decorated with picturesque multicolored ornaments or paintings on raw plaster."
There were toilets on all floors, and the sewage system took sewage out of the city.
Archaeologists have found things that tell about the life of g orojean.
During the excavations, not a single valuable object was found - products made of gold, silver, precious stones, unlike Pompeii, on which misfortune fell suddenly.
At the Shooting Range, at the first tremors, before the disaster, people apparently managed to leave the island.
No remains of people who died during the eruption were found here, and, as is known, 2,000 people were killed in Pompeii.
No evidence of the death of the fleet was found at the bottom of the Tyra Bay.
This was confirmed by the famous explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau, whose expedition studied the Aegean Sea in 1981.
In his book "In Search of Atlantis", he traces many parallels between Plato's Atlantis and Crete at the time of its heyday in the Minoan period, in 2700-1500 BC: "In short, like Atlantis described in the Timaeus and Critias, Crete was at its heyday a powerful empire, a federation of kingdoms with close cultural and religious ties with the island metropolis."
The assumption of E. Malinovsky was recently confirmed by the Greek seismologist G. Galanopoulos.
Studying the caldera on the island of Tira, he was convinced that there was a volcanic explosion here, probably the most powerful in the entire history of mankind.
It caused a tsunami up to 100 meters high, the wave washed everything off the face of the earth on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.
The materials that Cousteau received gave him the opportunity to build his own hypothesis:
"The power of the Minoan Empire rested on its coastal cities leading trade.
Therefore, even if the palaces and cities located in the center of the island (Crete) were not damaged, if not all the Cretans died (as, indeed, the inhabitants of the Cretan colonies in Greece, the Cyclades or Asia Minor), if not all the fields were covered with ashes, the greatest civilization of King Minos was finished...
They began to forget about Crete.
From real life, the Cretans moved into the realm of myth.
They were turned into a semi legendary people and expelled from history... in Egypt, they became Atlanteans: Solon or Plato had already forgotten about the greatness of Crete, when the story of the greatness and fall of Atlantis was recorded from the lips of the priests of the goddess Neith...
There are other data that speak in favor of identifying Crete with Atlantis."
The scientist refers to the Bible, which contains the parables about the "ten plagues of Egypt", set out in the book of Exodus.
The parables allow us to interpret them as a description of the consequences of a grand catastrophe in the eastern Mediterranean.
The hypotheses of Russian and French scientists support each other, work in the same direction.
Does it make sense to continue the search for Atlantis in other places?
LITERATURE
Plato.
Timaeus, Critias (dialogues).
Zhirov N. Atlantis.
The main problems of Atlantology.
- M., 1964.
Jacques Yves Cousteau, Yves Pacquale.
In Search of Atlantis.
Moscow: Mysl, 1986.
German magazine "Der Spiegel" No. 53, 1998.
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The invasion was stopped at Byblos and in the Nile Delta.
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