Open Veils · Answer
What does Plato say about atlantis?
Plato's own text is far more geographically and chronologically precise than allegory alone requires — 9,000 years before Solon, larger than Libya and Asia combined, destroyed in a single day and night. Graham Hancock and Robert Schoch argue that such specificity, transmitted through the Egyptian priestly archive at Sais, encodes genuine cultural memory of a pre-ice-age civilisation. The question is not whether Plato invented the story, but why an avowed philosopher embedded such exact coordinates, dimensions, and dynastic genealogies in a fiction.
Evidence
- In the Timaeus, Critias relays what Solon heard from an Egyptian priest at Sais: that beyond the Pillars of Heracles lay an island 'larger than Libya and Asia put together,' seat of a naval empire that had conquered most of Europe and North Africa before being repulsed by a virtuous Athens.
- Robert Schoch and John Anthony West point to the Egyptian priestly tradition as a genuine repository of pre-Younger Dryas civilisational memory.
- Zecharia Sitchin read the Atlantean lineage — Poseidon, Atlas, the ten kings — as garbled Sumerian records of Anunnaki governance of a pre-flood civilisation.
- What Plato actually writes — attested by Solon, sourced to Egyptian priests, destroyed 9,000 years before the dialogue — is a claim of documentary transmission, not philosophical invention.
- The priest explicitly frames the account as historical record preserved in Egyptian temple archives, not mythology.