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History of Atlantis by Lewis Spence
Index | Chapter: 1 | 2 |3 | 4 |5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |9 | 10 |11 | 12 |13 | 14 |15 | 16
CHAPTER IV.
ATLANTEAN HISTORICAL SOURCES EXAMINED
BEFORE proceeding farther it will be necessary to submit the sources of the Atlantean tradition at our disposal to a thorough examination, both as regards their historical integrity and the likelihood of the facts they contain. As regards Plato's account, many of his commentators, from Proclus to Jowett, have given it as their considered opinion that it was merely a fable, "a noble lie," invented by Plato. " It appears to me," says Archer-Hind, "impossible to determine whether Plato has invented the story from beginning to end, or whether it really more or less represents some Egyptian legend brought home by Solon." Elsewhere he remarks upon the improbability of the story. Yet he rebukes Stallbaum for adopting Proclus's misinterpretation of Plato's words that his tale is "not a mere figment of the imagination, but a history of facts which actually occurred." Plato is, indeed, abundantly clear on this point. In the Timaeus alone he lays stress upon the historicity of his account in several passages. It is, he says, "strange, yet perfectly true." Solon, indeed, intended to make it the subject of an epic, Critias recalled its circumstances vividly, through hearing them as a boy, and they were "indelibly fixed" in his mind "like encaustic pictures" on tiles. Socrates in the Timaeus is made to say: "The fact that it is no fictitious tale, but a true history, is surely a great point In the Critias Plato further makes Critias say that his great-grandfather had possessed an account of Atlantis in writing. Plato, then, took more than usual care to stress the historicity of his account.
The fact of Solon's visit to Egypt also appears as indubitable. Plutarch in his Life of Solon (ch. 26) and his De hide et Osiride (ch. 10) states that Solon visited Egypt and spoke with the priest Sonchis at Sais. This, according to Clement of Alexandria, was also the name of the priest who instructed Pythagoras in the science of the Egyptians. Proclus in his dissertation on the Timaeus says that Plato also visited Egypt and conversed at Sais with the priest Pateneit, at Heliopolis with the priest Ochlapi, and at Sebennytus with the priest Ethimon. He mentions that Pateneit is undoubtedly the priest alluded to in the Timaeus.
It is stated in the Critias that Solon had written a great epic poem on Atlantis, and that his notes on the subject had come down to the younger Critias. These he had received from his grandfather, Critias, the son of Dropidas. Now the second Critias, according to a genealogy preserved by Proclus, was a cousin-german of Plato's mother. Ast and Kleine, in their critiques on Plato's works, give it as thejr belief that it was he who first brought the Atlantean tradition from Egypt. Plutarch expressly upholds Plato's statement that Solon intended to write a poem on Atlantis, but was compelled to renounce his intention on account of his great age. In the Timaeus Plato eloquently expresses his regret that he had not carried out his plan. Martin in his Dissertation sur Atlantide (p. 323) gives it as his considered judgment that Plato, knowing himself to be related to Solon, had piously attempted to carry out the intention of his blood-relation, and for this purpose had employed the traditional material which had come down to him as the basis of his narrative.
Grantor, who died thirty-three years after Plato, and who was one of his best known commentators, states that in his time the Egyptian priests had shown to the Greeks certain columns or pillars on which they affirmed the history of Atlantis was inscribed. It is, of course, well known that Sais, where Solon heard the story of Atlantis, was a city closely associated with Greece. It was, indeed, a centre of Greek culture. The period of its greatest prosperity was between 697-524 B.C., and one of its monarchs, Psammetichus, maintained himself on the throne by aid of Greek mercenaries. He educated his sons in Greek learning, and encouraged the resort of Greeks to his capital. This intercourse between Sais and Athens was especially promoted by their worshipping the same deity, Neith-Athene, and hence there arose the notion that Cecrops the Sake had led a colony to Athens. The priests of Sais seem, indeed, to have been anxious to curry favour with the Athenians by discovering resemblances between Attic and Egyptian institutions. A separate quarter in Sais was assigned to the Greeks. So strong, indeed, was the Hellenic element in Sais that it was a matter of debate whether the Saites colonized Attica or the Athenians Sais.
This being so, if the priests of Sais related the story of Atlantis to Solon, they must almost certainly have retailed it to the many other Greeks with whom they constantly associated. That no other definite account of their doing so is in existence is not surprising when we take into consideration the commercial character of the Hellenes with whom they must have come into contact. But, if Plato's account had not been inherited from Solon, and had its Egyptian form not been current in Sais, there were thousands of Greeks there who could have contradicted it, and that some negative of the kind would have reached Athens sooner or later seems very clear, when we recall the extraordinary interest which Plato's tale certainly aroused in the ancient world.
With regard to a totally different aspect of Plato's account, it is extraordinary how well the circumstances of his story fit in with those which the science of archaeology assures us must have obtained in early Europe. This point will be treated in detail later on. It is sufficient to say here that the approximate date of Plato 's account of the Atlantean invasion agrees with that at which the Azilian-Tardenoisian peoples, the ancestors of the Iberian race, undoubtedly swarmed into Europe, and those European and African regions which he regarded as tributary to Atlantis. "Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe to the borders of Etruria," are precisely those regions in which the proto-Iberians found their firmest footing.
The Timaeus states that Athens set Europe free from the Atlantean tyranny. That there was no Athens existing at that date (9600 B.C.) of which Plato speaks, is certain. The date in question is thousands of years prior to the First Egyptian Dynasty, and all that has been found on the site of Athens of an older date is a small quantity of Neolithic or New Stone Age pottery. At the same time, as we shall see, Europe and Africa were not then in a state of abject barbarism, and it may be that the memory of the resistance offered by the natives to the increasing hordes of proto-Iberians was dimly remembered by their peoples across the intervening centuries.
"In later times," said Solon's Egyptian informant, "after there had been exceeding great earthquakes and floods, there fell one day and night of destruction; and the warriors in your land all in one body were swallowed up by the earth, and in like manner did Atlantis sink beneath the sea and vanish away." Here it is noticeable that the Greeks are destroyed by a terrestrial, and the Atlanteans by a marine agency, and I believe that we have in this passage a clue to the true historical character of Plato's account. Pallas Athene, the patron goddess of Athens, was the sworn enemy of Poseidon, the god associated with Atlantis as its eponymous deity and founder, and the strife she waged with him for possession of Athens is celebrated in Greek mythology. Now one of the scholiasts of Plato states that the victory of the Athenians over the Atlanteans was actually represented in a symbolical peplum or woman's garment, dedicated at the Lesser Panathenaea, or festival of Athena. The inference, then, is that the strife between the Athenians, the people of Athene, and the Atlanteans, the folk of Poseidon or Neptune, god of the sea, came to have for the former a definitely historical character, enshrining a veritable folk-memory. The Panathenaea, it may be mentioned in passing, was founded at least 125 years before Plato's time, so that, if we can rely on the scholiast's statement, the tradition of the Athenian war with the Atlanteans, whether mythological or historical, must have been well known to the Athenians more than a century before Plato's day, and this would at once dispose of the oft-repeated assumption that he deliberately manufactured the story. "That it was entirely an invention of Plato's," remarks the shrewd Philip Smith, in his article on "Atlantis" in William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography , is hardly credible. . . . The legend is found in other forms which do not seem to be entirely copied from Plato." This reminds us of Strabo's quotation from Poseidonius, that it is more reasonable to believe that Atlantis once existed and then sank, than to say that "its inventor caused it to disappear."
It may be said that if the statement regarding the peplum is true, Plato merely took a local myth for the basis of his tale. Wherefore, then, did he lay stress upon the truth of his account, and derive it from an Egyptian source? It is manifest that Plato must have known of the Athenian version depicted on the peplum. He says little of its local sanction, although he must have been well aware that it had a bearing on the festival of the Panathenaea, possibly because he regarded Athenian knowledge of it as notorious and needless to mention. It was, as Socrates says in the dialogue of the Timaeus, specially appropriate to this festival of the goddess, owing to its connection with her," sure proof that Plato knew of the Athenian associations of the Panathenaea. The reason that he laid stress upon its Egyptian version was, perhaps, merely because that gave it a more ancient sanction, and corroborated and strengthened what might seem to the ignorant a mere local tradition, which had no documentary evidence behind it, and which might have been mistaken for a local invention but for its collation with and amplification by the Egyptian account. Indeed, it is quite possible that Plato had this intention quite as much in view as the illustration of his political thesis.
When we recall the strife between Pallas Athenae and Poseidon, which appears, as we have already said, to have a distinct bearing upon the Atlantean legend in Greece, it is scarcely strange to find a writer in The Occult Review for September, 1923, discovering in the "Odyssey" of Homer further evidences of the Atlantean implications of this mythological feud. Odysseus, on his return from Troy, lands on the island of the Cyclops, and succeeds in escaping from that dangerous proximity only after many desperate adventures. Indeed, as the writer states: "We have in the Odyssey, as narrated by Homer, an account of the Homeric hero, Odysseus, whose wanderings and adventures were in reality one prolonged struggle with Poseidon, that is with the Atlantean deity." In the isle of Ogygia, where he is made prisoner by the enchantress Calypso, the daughter of the "magician" Atlas, he is aided by Athene, who has taken him under her protection. Once more, then, we discover the Athenian goddess at odds with the deity of Atlantis, and this time in a manner which more strikingly than before, casts light upon the Atlantean associations of the quarrel. Thus we find Pallas Athenae, the goddess of Athens, doubly connected with the personalities of Atlantis. The circumstances that she takes Odysseus' part against Poseidon the Atlantean god and his granddaughter, Calypso, the daughter of Atlas, goes to strengthen the assumption of her connection with the Atlantean myth as already outlined above.
The truth of the statement that "to this day the ocean is impassable and unsearchable, being blocked by very shallow shoals, which the island caused as she settled down," is abundantly testified to by several writers of antiquity. Scylax of Caryanda, who wrote prior to the time of Alexander the Great, and was approximately a contemporary of Plato, states in his Periplus that Cerne, an island on the African Atlantic Coast, "is twelve days coasting beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the parts are no longer navigable because of shoals, of mud and of sea-weed. . . . The seaweed has the width of a palm, and is sharp towards the points so as to prick."
When Himilco parted from Hanno in the course of their voyage from Carthage in quest of lands unknown about 500 B.C., he encountered, according to the poet Festus Avienus, "weeds, shallows, calms and dangers," in the Atlantic. Avienus wrote about the fourth century A.D., but professes to repeat Himilco 's account. He says "No breeze drives the ship forward, so dead is the sluggish wind of this idle sea. He (Himilco) also adds that there is much seaweed among the waves, and that it often holds the ship back like bushes. Nevertheless he says that the sea has no great depth, and that the surface of the earth is barely covered by a little water. The monsters of the sea move continually hither and thither, and the wild beasts swim among the sluggish and slowly creeping ships." Avienus also says elsewhere "Farther to the west from these Pillars there is boundless sea." Himilco relates that . . . " none has sailed ships over these waters, because propelling winds are lacking. . . . likewise because darkness screens the light of day with a sort of clothing, and because a fog always conceals the sea."
Aristotle, too, says in his " Meteorologica " that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was muddy, shallow and almost unstirred by the winds. Aristotle was at one time a pupil of Plato, and this would seem to afford good proof that the latter's statement was founded on the best available information, and was probably acquired from Phoenician or Greek seamen.
But we have other than classical evidence for the unnavigable character of the Atlantic, evidence dating from a considerably later period. Edrisi, the Arabic writer, says that the Magrurin, certain Moorish sailors of Lisbon who set sail thence in quest of an Atlantic island at some undefined period between the eighth and twelfth centuries, encountered an impassable tract of ocean, and were forced to alter their course, apparently reaching one of the Canaries. The Pizigani map of 1367, too, has a rubric containing a solemn protest against attempting to sail the unnavigable ocean tract beyond the Azores, in the neighbourhood of which the Sargasso Sea begins.
The details of the Critias now command our attention. The first point that strikes us here is the statement of Critias that the priests of Sais had already given the names of the Atlanteans in the account an Egyptian aspect, and that he (Critias) had been forced to render them "into Greek." Had the story been fabulous he would scarcely have taken the trouble to make this clear. But it is difficult to see how, precisely, the names of Poseidon or Atlas could have been translated into Egyptian. The Egyptians had no deity corresponding to Poseidon, and none could very readily be equated with Atlas, the earth-bearer.
However, the deities mentioned in the account of Diodorus can readily be associated with Egyptian forms, and it may have been that Critias or Plato merely fell back on the names current in the local Athenian version of the Atlantean legend connected with the Panathensea. This would certainly account for the appearance of Poseidon, who was closely associated in myth with Pallas Athenae, the patroness of the city, and who was the sole begetter of the Atlantidae.
The only name of the sons of Poseidon which has been vouchsafed us in its Atlantean form is that of Gadir, "who had for his portion the extremity of this island near the Pillars of Hercules, and that part of it has since borne the name Gadiric." This equates with the classical name for the vicinity of Cadiz in Spain, and assumes a close proximity between the Spanish and Atlantean coasts.
The details concerning the topography and site of Atlantis I propose to discuss in the chapter which deals with its geography. Here it may serve to consider some minor but nevertheless striking points. The climate of Atlantis appears, according to Plato's account, to have corresponded closely to that of the Canary Islands, but two circumstances combine to give it a distinctly African aspect: the statement that large herds of elephants roamed the marshland, and that "a fruit with a hard rind" affording both meat, drink and ointment, flourished there. This can refer only to the coconut. Much has been made of these statements, pro and con. The presence of the elephant as a contemporary of man in southern Europe is usually regarded as "not proven" by archaeologists, but there seems no good reason for doubting its relatively late existence in an environment better fitted to it climatically, and probably African in character.
As the government and religion of Atlantis will also be separately considered it will not be necessary in this place to criticise the passages in Plato's account which allude to them. But it may be remarked in passing that Plato's observations upon them are in consonance with what we know of the early "Azilian" civilisation of Spain and Southern France. In these areas the bull was worshipped and the ceremony attending its sacrifice, which Plato describes, might well have been illustrative of some dim folk-memory of a barbaric rite of the Azilian era, which in some of its aspects continued to survive to "classical" times, and the last vestiges of which still linger in the sport of bull-fighting. Bull-baiting, even in England, continued to have a semi-religious significance until the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was associated with a ceremonial undoubtedly of pagan descent. That it survived elsewhere in Europe until a relatively late period can also abundantly be demonstrated.
Plato's account of Atlantean history breaks off short, and was probably left unfinished because of his death. He undoubtedly employed it to illustrate his ideas regarding the perfect human political state, but that is not at all to say that he invented it for this reason. That its architectural details have a Greek as well as a Persian colouring is only natural, but it is not necessary to infer from the latter circumstance that he intended it as an allegory of the Persian War, as has so often been stated. Indeed, many of its details, for example, the insular and maritime character of Atlantis, render such a theory quite untenable. But Plato's account, considered as a whole, is in itself the best refutation of such an assumption.
The account of Diodorus raises a very different set of problems. It at once involves us in a consideration of the question as to how far the Greek myth of the Hesperides has a bearing on the question of Atlantis. In one passage Diodorus seems to place Atlantis on the West Coast of Africa, in any case it "borders upon the ocean," and does not definitely appear as an insular region. Indeed, the island Hesperia, inhabited by the Amazons, agrees much more closely with the details of Plato's account, as regards its site, except that it is described as destitute of corn. It is volcanic and prone to earthquakes, and is full of fruit trees and herds of sheep and goats, as the Canaries still are. But I think I can discern in the description of the Amazons a close resemblance to the Azilian people who invaded Europe some 10,000 years ago, as observed in their cave-paintings still extant. This race, the progenitors of the Iberians, were the first inventors of the bow, and their effeminate appearance, and their manner of wearing their hair dressed on the crown of the head, may have struck their enemies as womanish. The history of Atlantis, as alluded to by Diodorus, can only be understood by comparison with the details of Greek mythology. But the statement of Diodorus that "it is reported " that an Atlantic tract was swallowed up by the sea, is valuable as illustrating the fact that nearly four hundred years after Plato's time the belief in the foundering of an Atlantic region was widely current. We should also not ignore the statement of a writer so comparatively early as Poseidonius that the account of Plato ought not to be regarded as fiction, as the earth was known to have undergone changes, a statement in which he is backed by Strabo, and which shows that in the late pre-Christian era geological opinion in support of the Atlantean theory was beginning to take shape. Indeed, as Philip Smith observes in the account already alluded to: "Those who regard it (the story of Atlantis) as pure fiction, but of an early origin, view it as arising out of the very ancient notion, found in Homer and Hesiod, that the abodes of departed heroes were in the extreme west beyond the river Oceanus, a locality naturally assigned as beyond the boundaries of the inhabited earth. That the fabulous prosperity and happiness of the Atlanteans was in some degree connected with their poetical representations is very probable, just as when islands were actually discovered off the coast of Africa, they were called the Islands of the Blest. But still, important parts of the legend are thus left unaccounted for; its mythological character, its derivation from the Egyptian priests, or other Oriental sources; and what is, in Plato, its most important part, the supposed conflict of the Atlanteans with the people of the Old World."
This shrewd writer has, in these remarks, probed down to the very root of the argument. He says in effect that, if the belief in Atlantis was a mythological one, or in some way connected with the religious or fictional history of the Greeks, the protagonists of that theory cannot leave it at that, but must adduce proof to account for its mythological origin. It cannot be too strongly stressed that all tradition has a basis of fact. Races, when semi-civilised or barbarous, do not deliberately manufacture such notions as that which averred that the Fortunate Isles in the west were the places of reward of departed heroes. A hundred myths could be adduced to show that such ideas actually arise out of a memory of a western region from which early migration proceeded. And it is of special interest in connection with the problem before us that some of the skull-burials of the Azilian people already mentioned are so disposed that the faces look towards the west a certain sign that that region was regarded as of especial sanctity. The myth of the war between the Gods and Titans seems to the writer to supply that proof to account for the mythological origin of the story of Atlantis which Smith demanded.
As regards Plato's chronology, it can be shown that this is by no means based on improbability when all the circumstances of the Azilian invasion of Europe are taken into account. The argument that Plato's date is erroneous has recently been touched upon by M. F. Butavand in his La Veritable Histoire de Atlantide, where he says (pp. 6-7): "This date is certainly erroneous, for at the period mentioned the Grecian Republic did not exist; the civilisation of Egypt was not in existence; the statements of the priest of Sais are not comprehensible. Mathematical, and above all chronological matter, as touched upon by the writers of antiquity, frequently present errors, and these we are able to rectify in dealing with two well known erroneous computations. The people of the Mediterranean and many others, at a certain fixed epoch, counted by eights before arriving at the use of a decimal system. Those authors who have transmitted ancient accounts have frequently neglected to transform the ancient to the decimal system . . . the figure nine is out of the question, as it does not exist in the octonal system."
For this statement, so far as I can discover, there is no basis of fact whatsoever. An octonal system may well have been employed in early Europe, just as a system equally dissimilar to the decimal was employed in ancient America, but that it has any possible bearing on Plato's chronology, I fail to see. More seemingly reasonable is M. Butavand's statement that Eudoxus of Cnidus, who had studied astronomy in Egypt, and was well qualified to check the account of the priest of Sais, declared that the duration of time indicated by Critias was not nine thousand years, but as many months. This would bring the date of the founding of Atlantis to about 1,400 years before our era, or about the date of the XIX Dynasty in Egypt. But the Egyptian system of chronology, on which Plato's account must manifestly have been based, was certainly decimal in character, and the substitution of months for years in estimating Atlantean chronology is by no means an innovation.