Atlantis & Orihalcum... They existed or not

I don't know about this "Orihalcum", but there's pretty good evidence that Atlantis was a Minoan city built on an "island" that turned out to be a volcano. It was destroyed when the volcano erupted and destroyed most of the island.

 

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And that "pretty good evidence" is....?

 

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I did, indeed. In one post, I observed that you mentioned Thera to be a likely origin of the Atlantis myth and in another you attempted to qualify the Thera hypothesis as one that fit Occam's Razor since it is the most parsimonious (if memory serves correct about each).

However, I didn't see any evidence given. There are some very basic questions and problems that go unanswered if we accept the Thera explanation. First, why did Plato place Atlantis in the Atlantic ocean as an island much larger than Crete (Thera was smaller)? Second, why did none of Plato's contemporaries seem to be aware of this "Atlantis?" Third, the date of the Thera eruption is between the 15th and 17th centuries BCE (depending upon which dating one relies upon), which is only 900-1000 years before Plato rather than the 9,000 years prior he assigns to the destruction of Atlantis. Why the difference if it truly was Thera?

I saw no good evidence to link Thera to Plato's Atlantis. Occam's Razor doesn't favor the Thera hypothesis at all. It just becomes too complicated to sustain an appeal to Occam. A more parsimonious explanation is that Plato was concerned with the fate of Athens and used an allegory of a very ancient, but very similar to Athens, city. Greece and the Aegean knew well the catastrophic force of volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. The story of a great city that perished and was lost forever to history is a warning and core message behind Plato's trilogy, Timaeus, Critias, and Laws. The parsimonious explanation takes into account that the best story tellers begin their tallest tales with "this is absolutely true" as Plato did, and that Plato's chief concern was Athens. Finally, the most parsimonious explanation considers that if such a city actually existed that one as prolific as Plato might have made more careful mention of it in a work dedicated to Atlantis and not one dedicated to Athens.

So, I ask again: that pretty good evidence is....?

I would really like there to be an "Atlantis." It would be nice. But if there were "pretty good evidence," there would be at least some documented in the field of archaeology.

 

Could Atlantis have disappeared like Port Royale did? It didn't take a volcano, just an earthquake and it was gone...sunk into the ocean.

 

There are many simililarities in the story of Atlantis and Thera. The history channed had a really good show on the subject which is how I became aware of the theory. The primary problems are the time and location. Both of these can be accounted for by a simple translation error and a factor of 10.

 

I have been to Thera and the palace of Knossos in Crete-the red pillars are hard to miss. Even though that theory seems promising I, personally, am not yet convinced.
However it is wrong imo to assume that all of what Plato said is true and exact. Even though the Iliad and Odyssey were mostly fictional, the city of Troy did exist -as someone already posted.

 

orichalcum... it must be the metal the ancients used to make their magic staffs (moses, red sea). but i didn't know the name... until now.

check out these maps of atlantsi: http://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/soa/soamap.htm

 

I'm saying they never heard of "Atlantis," a continent (not an island) which Plato said was "bigger than Libya and Asia put together."

I'm saying that philosophical dialogs are nearly always created with fictional characters, places and events.

I'm saying that the real topic of Plato's discussion was Athens and his fear that they might go the way of the fictive city-state he used (which bears a striking resemblance to his Athens.

I'm saying that "good evidence" is the kind that has some bit of verifiability with it; or it has some predictive power. "Good evidence" for "Atlantis" would be corroboration of Plato's account. The argument frequently gets put forth that "they found Troy, so they could find Atlantis." It hasn't, however, been shown that the site found by Schliemann and Calvert is definitively the "Troy" in the Homeric tales. It probably is, since it fits the right model geographically, temporally and culturally. But "good evidence" that Thera is "Atlantis" isn't being presented on these scales. There is no evidence that Minoans fought with Athens; there *is* evidence that the Minoans survived Thera's eruption; Thera was far smaller than Plato's Atlantis; it wasn't in the Atlantic Ocean; etc., etc. In addition, there is evidence that Troy was part of an oral tradition that existed prior to Homer. Moreover, the legend of Troy played a more integral part of the Homeric epics in the story of the Trojan war, whereas Atlantis is only used by Plato to deal with the problems of Athens. Nor is there an evidence that the story existed prior to Plato, despite the account he gives of its origin. This account is part of the dialog, after all, not independent of it and is therefore subject to the same fictional quality.

The Homeric epics were designed to tell stories of heroism and adventure; the Platonic dialogs were designed to create a thought experiment regarding the future and well-being of Athens. Literature has born out the use of historical events and places for the former; philosophical discourse over the centuries has born out the use of completely fictional people, events and places for the latter.

The conclusion is that there is no evidence that an actual Atlantis existed beyond the imagination of Plato. There may be many civilizations that share similarities to Plato's Atlantis, but none apparently are this fictive device of a philosophical dialog.