Open Veils · Answer
What did Plato say about where Atlantis was?
Plato's own text places Atlantis explicitly beyond the Pillars of Hercules — in the Atlantic Ocean — as a continent-sized island empire that sank 9,000 years before his time. Researchers like Ignatius Donnelly, Graham Hancock, and Randall Carlson treat this as a literal geographic datum, not allegory. The coordinates Plato gives align with the mid-Atlantic ridge and a pre-Younger Dryas civilisation that catastrophic flooding erased.
Evidence
- 360 BCE), Plato quotes the Egyptian priests of Sais as telling Solon that Atlantis lay 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules' — the Strait of Gibraltar — and was 'larger than Libya and Asia combined,' placing it firmly in what we call the Atlantic Ocean.
- The island empire controlled territory as far as Tyrrhenia and Egypt before a single catastrophic day of earthquakes and floods submerged it, reportedly 9,000 years before Solon's visit (~9600 BCE).
- Ignatius Donnelly's 1882 Atlantis: The Antediluvian World systematically mapped this against mid-Atlantic ridge geology, noting the Azores as surviving mountain peaks.
- Graham Hancock, in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and Magicians of the Gods (2015), cross-references Plato's date with Randall Carlson's Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, noting that 9600 BCE coincides precisely with the catastrophic sea-level rise at the end of the last ice age — some 120 metres globally.
- Robert Schoch, whose geological re-dating of the Sphinx points to pre-12,000 BCE civilisation, corroborates the plausibility of Plato's timeline.