A few years ago I began following a show on TV called The Naked Archeologist, with a Canadian fellow by the name of Simcha Jacobovici. Aside from that show he also worked with James Cameron on a couple of projects which took on stories of mythic proportions, like why, when, how and by what route The Exodus of the Jews from Egypt actually happened? Also under which Pharaoh? That is perhaps for another post at another time, but if you are interested the show is called The Exodus Decoded. Simcha applies very basic science to the “mystery” behind the 10 Plagues, very convincingly making the case for Moses merely taking the opening Nature offered with the explosion of Santorini.
But this diary is about another one of Jacobovici/Cameron production titled Atlantis Rising (trailer). In this exciting movie-length production Simcha delves into Plato’s description of Lost Atlantis, said to once lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It turns out in fact, just to the north a wee bit, up the coast of today’s Iberian Peninsula.
Right smack dab in Tarshish.
Atlanteans, legend tells us, were among other things a warrior race. There are Toltec stone columns called Atlantean Warriors in Latin America. They look like they were set up to stand guard against a terrible foe.
As a kid in Bible class I read all about skirmishes in far off desert scrub-lands. I can imagine that surviving kingdoms and empires might treat hostile warring foreign peoples rather harshly - if they came pillaging or seeking their “god-given” new home only to lose they all wind up in slavery . Off the top of my head (and I am no academic) the ancient hebrews were held in captivity at least twice: once in Babylon and later in Egypt. But we don’t tell the stories about how and why this ancient warring peoples ended up on the road in the first place, only getting shellacked over and over? Was it because their own ancient home had been destroyed by none other than the god Poseidon himself? It might come as no surprise a once-adherent people might find themselves having to re-invent their gods to cope with just moving on. Perhaps to never even name their god again.
Atlantis Rising walks through all kinds of available evidence that few people make the effort to piece together including following up a many false leads others have pinned their theories of the location of Atlantis on. Most intriguing to me, something I had never heard before, is that there are remains of Carthaginian temples in the Azores, requiring ships and skills we hadn’t thought existed in the 4th century BC.
But its when the show finally gets to Cadiz Spain and rehashes all of Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis being a city of circles of waterways that they find some ancient petroglyphs.
This is from the facebook page of Georgeos Díaz-montexano, who has been looking into this for a long time now. He has a theory about what happened to the survivors of lost Atlantis.
I am neither Jewish or affiliated with any big-box religion. I consider myself to be a student of all things neat to know, some of which may turn out to be useful and some of which may just be amazing. The Human Story is an amazing thing and once in awhile new insights slam into us hard enough to really challenge the truncated view of antiquity we cling to.