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The Atlantean legend has been around long enough to fire human
imagination with the tales of a lost island-civilization run by a utopian
government and peopled with highly intelligent beings who were equally
accomplished in the arts and sciences, and were capable of harnessing
the elements of nature.
But is
there a possibility of this legend being true? Did Atlantis
really exist? And even if that hoary civilization did exist, how
would a reasoning mind begin to extract fact from fictionenmeshed
as the whole narrative is in the fantastic and the fabular?
the factual validity notwithstanding, the Atlantean civilization does
lay claim to a noble ancestryPlato's Dialogues.
The first
mention of Atlantis occurs in two of Plato's Dialogues:
Timaeus and Critias, written somewhere between 370 and 350
BC. According to Plato, the story of Atlantis came to him from
certain 200-year-old records of the Greek ruler Solon, who, in turn, heard
of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. In his Dialogues, Plato
also mentions that the island-continent of Atlantis lay in the
Atlantic Ocean near the Straits of Gibraltar until its destruction 10,000
years before his time, triggered off by the Atlanteans' misuse of power.
Interest in this lost civilization was resurrected in 1882 by Ignatius
T. T. Donnelly (1831-1901), a US congressman from Minnesota, when he wrote
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. This was followed by Lewis Spence's
The Problem of Atlantis in 1924. And then there was
Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach, who gave
thousands of readings on the lost continent of Atlantis. Throughout
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a plethora of occult theories
emerged regarding the lost island raceincluding theories about the
Atlanteans being extraterrestrial creatures!
There have also been enough speculations regarding the real location of
Atlantis to match the number of occult theories surrounding it.
Interpretations have been as varied asthe Azores, Sahara, Antarctica,
North and South America, Indonesia, Bimini and Maltato name just
a few! However, for want of more clinching archeological and other scientific
evidences, the Aegean island of Thera, believed to be once part of the
ancient Minoan civilization, is for the most part considered the modern
site of the lost Atlantis.