Too Much Ado About Atlantis

Plato’s myth actually begins with the account of Solon’s diplomatic visit to Sais and what its priests told him of antiquity. Their account centers on a mysterious sea people raiding the eastern shores of the Mediterranean with seemingly military precision. It was assumed they came from beyond the Pillars of Heracles which was the terra incognito of the time. Inspired by this mystery, Plato embellishes this with the idea of Atlantis, a prestigious Neptunian nether realm of demi-gods that fall in disfavour with their creators.

Romanticists like to believe Atlantis actually existed before the alleged great flood; an esoteric utopia of super humans from which all civilization allegedly spawned. From the Russian perspective, there is Tartaria, and from the American; Ignatius Donnally’s flights of fantasy, trying to assume the Mayans and Egyptians had anything to do with each other. Then there’s Helena Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine of some genealogically white master race. The list of esoterics that followed this trend is endless to this day, with people like Graham Hancock trying to assume some magical cosmic connection between every megalithic build he can find, oblivious to the undertones of colonizer supremacism that motivates this fantasy. All the symptoms of classical old school imperialism.

The priests’ reference to the primordial great flood is actually a creation myth of humanity’s first appearance, and not necessarily the domain of these sea people. It is a reference to Egyptian records being kept of the known world since antiquity. According to these, flood and famine have been seen to recur in random cycles and in their wake; catastrophe. There is no mention of knowledge or commodities being shared or traded by these sea people. They came out of nowhere in hoards until they were subsequently defeated by the pharaoh’s armies. The End.