Masters Phil - The Wars of Atlantis

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Osprey Publishing, Midland House, West Way, Botley, Oxford, OX2 0PH, UK 4402 23rd St, Suite 219, Long Island City, NY 11101, USA

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: HISTORIANS OF THE ATLANTEAN AGE

The study of the Atlantean Wars is the art of extracting truths from ancient texts.

In general, the deeper scholars look into the past, the more they are obliged to study physical objects rather than textual sources. The transformation from history to prehistory comes when this shift from history to archaeology is complete; when there are no written texts, knowledge must be derived from the artefacts and other physical remains.

Atlantean studies flip this right back around. Atlantis is, famously, lost sunk beneath the ocean waves. Our knowledge of that era comes almost exclusively from written materials, themselves quite ancient, and from more exotic sources yet. There are few physical remains of the Atlantean age.

PLATO

The name of Atlantis comes to us, originally, through the father of western philosophy. The classical Greek philosopher Plato presented his ideas in the form of a series of dialogues between the earlier philosopher Socrates and other citizens of Athens. One of these, the Timaeus , is primarily about the creation and nature of the world, but early on, one of the speakers, Critias, mentions a story which he heard in his childhood from his aged grandfather, also named Critias. The old man claimed in turn to have received the story from Solon, a legendarily wise Athenian leader, who was a friend of his family.

Solon visited Egypt at one point in his life, and according to this story, while he was there, in the city of Sais, he fell in with some friendly local priests. One of them, amused by Solons discussions of ancient history, told him that the Athenians had forgotten most of their own past but the Egyptians had preserved much important information, notably including the story of Atlantis.

Atlantis was, the priest said, a great island in the Atlantic Ocean (beyond the Pillars of Hercules, those being the promontories on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar), which was once ruled by a great empire. This was linked to the history of Athens because, when the Atlanteans grew arrogant and attempted to conquer the rest of the world, the Athenians of the time took the lead in stopping them and driving them back. However, shortly afterwards, Atlantis sank beneath the sea in some kind of catastrophe, which, the priest implied, also shattered civilization in much of the rest of the world, explaining why so few records or memories remained from the era.

However, Critias stops himself before the digression goes too far; the intention is that the details of the story should appear in the next dialogue, known as the Critias . This does indeed take up the story of Atlantis. However, unfortunately, although this describes the geography and government of Atlantis in some detail, the text is incomplete; it seems that Plato never finished the book. It actually stops at a point where the gods have observed that the Atlanteans have fallen into decadence, and are about to decide how to chastise them; the implication is that, if the war of conquest had not already started, the gods probably encouraged it, and then devastated Atlantis in its aftermath because the inhabitants had shown themselves to be beyond hope.

However, none of this is stated or described, and no one else offered any continuation of the story. Some of Platos followers thought that the whole thing was a fable; others believed otherwise, even travelling to Egypt in search of confirmation, but although some Egyptians were prepared to agree with them, nobody turned up any more of the history at the time. And so the story of Atlantis went on hold for a few centuries.