One of the great mysteries and enigmas of our time is Atlantis. Despite the passage of thousands of years, nobody has been able to solve the riddle of Atlantis.
Plato was the person who started all of the difficulty with regard to Atlantis. In his Timaeus and Critias stories, he spoke of Atlantis in glowing terms. He identified this as an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Basically, we mean huge. Plato, it was claimed the size of North Africa! The people of Atlantis allegedly controlled much of the Mediterranean, but were defeated by the ancestors of the Greeks. The two companies were then destroyed as "a great flood."
With just these bits of information, we can assume Plato has taken some liberties in his writing. Then a strange thing happened. Archaeologists have discovered Egyptian records detailing Atlantis, its ruling family and a utopian vision of the kind of culture. There are many contradictions between the time the two stories, but the race to discover Atlantis has been since. We do, after all, like a good puzzle.
So, where is Atlantis? There is the problem. The descriptions are so vague that Atlantis could be just about anywhere. Heck, you could be sitting above the main town in what you read. At one time or another, the popular theory has suggested Atlantis is Antarctica, Turkey, North America, South America, Santorini, Crete, Indonesia and pure figment of the imagination of someone. After years of research, the theory of imagination seems the most credible.
Although theorists rage and back, there was an event in the life of Plato, which might have given rise to the base of the Atlantis story. A huge earthquake struck the city of Helike. Located on the shores of the Bay of Corinth, he literally sank into the sea Both then and now, you can take a boat on the city and despise the ruins of Helike. That does Helike the lost civilization of Atlantis? It is unlikely since Helike was a basic Greek city. Yet, it certainly would have formed the basis of the Atlantis story.
Jumat, 09 November 2007
Selasa, 06 November 2007
Atlantis Located on Bermuda Triangle?
One of the rare Bermuda Triangle facts that can be confirmed is the Bermuda Triangle location. In fact, the location of the Bermuda Triangle is somewhat arbitrary as well. There are no official limits. However, the triangle is generally supposed to run from Bermuda to Puerto Rico to Miami and back to Bermuda.
A fact that is unexplained in the Bermuda Triangle is that electro-magnetic compasses that normally point to the magnetic north pole, the point to the true north pole inside the zone of the Bermuda Triangle. This happens in one place other than the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil's sea off the east coast of Asia.
Bermuda Triangle, the term is used for the first time Argosy Magazine in an article written by H. Vincent Gaddis in 1964. Since then, a number of "nicknames" were immersed for the Bermuda Triangle-Limbo of the Lost, Hoodoo Sea, and even Devil's Triangle-some forged in the literature.
One thing is undeniable about the Bermuda Triangle. There have been a number of strange and sometimes unexplained disappearances in the Triangle. The tale of Flight 19-a group of five Navy torpedo bombers and a search plane disappeared in the region of the Bermuda Triangle (perhaps!) - Is the most notorious of these.
However, there have been some strange events observed in the area of the Bermuda Triangle, as well. Even as far back as the 1492 Atlantic crossing by Columbus, it was recorded. Columbus documented in his diaries strange events with his compass in the field which we now consider the Bermuda Triangle.
Another fact about the Bermuda Triangle that is undeniable is that the region has claimed over 1,000 lives in the past 100 years. Some of them are the result of "human error" sailing in the area. However, there are always suspicious or unexplained disappearances going on in the Bermuda Triangle.
There is a wide range of legends surround the existence of the Bermuda Triangle. Some of this stems from the idea that with - in the Bermuda Triangle is the lost city of Atlantis in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Large off the coast of Bimini, there is a package of measures submarine believed to be part of this civilization. Few exploration can be done because the Bermuda Triangle includes some of the deepest trenches in the Atlantic Ocean, far too deep to explore.
Today, thousands of trips are made through the Bermuda Triangle each year. Almost all Caribbean cruise from the east coast of North America pass under the Bermuda Triangle. Modern aircraft to the Caribbean hot spots and the southern United States to Europe through the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe the next time you travel through the Bermuda Triangle by air or sea, you think of the lost civilization of Atlantis and its power?
A fact that is unexplained in the Bermuda Triangle is that electro-magnetic compasses that normally point to the magnetic north pole, the point to the true north pole inside the zone of the Bermuda Triangle. This happens in one place other than the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil's sea off the east coast of Asia.
Bermuda Triangle, the term is used for the first time Argosy Magazine in an article written by H. Vincent Gaddis in 1964. Since then, a number of "nicknames" were immersed for the Bermuda Triangle-Limbo of the Lost, Hoodoo Sea, and even Devil's Triangle-some forged in the literature.
One thing is undeniable about the Bermuda Triangle. There have been a number of strange and sometimes unexplained disappearances in the Triangle. The tale of Flight 19-a group of five Navy torpedo bombers and a search plane disappeared in the region of the Bermuda Triangle (perhaps!) - Is the most notorious of these.
However, there have been some strange events observed in the area of the Bermuda Triangle, as well. Even as far back as the 1492 Atlantic crossing by Columbus, it was recorded. Columbus documented in his diaries strange events with his compass in the field which we now consider the Bermuda Triangle.
Another fact about the Bermuda Triangle that is undeniable is that the region has claimed over 1,000 lives in the past 100 years. Some of them are the result of "human error" sailing in the area. However, there are always suspicious or unexplained disappearances going on in the Bermuda Triangle.
There is a wide range of legends surround the existence of the Bermuda Triangle. Some of this stems from the idea that with - in the Bermuda Triangle is the lost city of Atlantis in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Large off the coast of Bimini, there is a package of measures submarine believed to be part of this civilization. Few exploration can be done because the Bermuda Triangle includes some of the deepest trenches in the Atlantic Ocean, far too deep to explore.
Today, thousands of trips are made through the Bermuda Triangle each year. Almost all Caribbean cruise from the east coast of North America pass under the Bermuda Triangle. Modern aircraft to the Caribbean hot spots and the southern United States to Europe through the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe the next time you travel through the Bermuda Triangle by air or sea, you think of the lost civilization of Atlantis and its power?
Minggu, 04 November 2007
Atlantis through Science
ICE AGES: - The impact of the ice ages and inter-glacial effects on the rise and fall of ocean levels and the earth readjustments to the departure of the ice cap cannot be over-looked in the human historical picture. Research in the area is far greater than in the recent past and we can learn what might have happened to earlier civilizations on earth. Atlantis is a given name for a civilization that inhabited many islands and coastal regions, in my mind. The idea of one central location makes little sense when one considers such things as Ice Ages and changes in the flow of the Gulf Stream and climate that resulted. Because it lasted for from 30,000 to 100,000 years and may have co-existed with other civilizations rising and falling it is most inauspicious to debate one specific time when it was in Tara or Crete or the Azores or Bimini or even Finias. That seems to be the usual debate among the over 25,000 books written about just this one lost civilization. As long as people don't integrate all facts they inevitably just come up with theories to fit pet or prevailing concepts. In Gateway to Atlantis, 'The Search for the source of a lost Civilization' we see a far better scholar who is doing the right kind of investigation. Mapping of the ocean bottoms and geological understandings as well as studying glacial deposits and tree rings gives a better picture of history than history books.
"In 1960 a scientific paper by Wallace S. Broecker and his colleagues Maurice Ewing and Bruce C. Heezen, of Lamont Geological Observatory at Columbia University, Palisades, New York, appeared in the 'American Journal of Science'. Entitled 'Evidence for an Abrupt Change in Climate close to 11,000 years ago', it advanced the theory that a 'number of geographically isolated systems suggested that the warming of world-wide climate which occurred at the close of Wisconsin glacial times was extremely abrupt. (3)
By examining sediment cores taken from various deep-sea locations, Broecker and his team were able to demonstrate that around c. 9000 BC. the surface water temperature of the Atlantic Ocean increased by between six and ten degrees centigrade, (4) enough to alter its entire ecosystem. More significantly, it was found that the bottom waters of the Cariaco Trench in the Caribbean Sea, off Venezuela, suddenly stagnated, {The Gulf Stream being sent back south from hitting the land around the Azores when the water level was lower suddenly started warming the Iceland and British Isles regions, again.} showing that an abrupt change in water circulation had taken place coincident to the warming of the oceans. (5) Additionally, the silt deposits washing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi Valley abruptly halted and were retained in the delta and valleys, as the waters from the glacier-bound Great Lakes switched direction and began draining through the previously frozen northern outlets. (6) With extreme rapidity, the water levels of these lakes shrank from maximum volume, down to the much lower level they occupy today. (7)
Among the data drawn on by Broecker and his team to make their findings was the work conducted in 1957 by Cesare Emiliani of the Department of Geology at the University of Miami. He found that deep-sea cores displayed clear evidence of an abrupt temperature turn around in 9000 BC. was responsible for the other changes set out by Broecker et al. (8) However, since other cores examined by Emiliani had not shown the same rapid transition, he decided that the anomalous cores lacked vital sediment layers covering a period of several thousand years of ecological history, and so dismissed them as unreliable. (9) Yet Broecker and his colleagues disputed Emiliani's interpretation of the results. They could find no reason to suppose that key sediment layers could have been lost in the manner suggested. As a consequence, they reinstated Emiliani's controversial findings as crucial evidence of a major shift in oceanic temperatures around 11,000 years ago. (10)
Although Broecker et al seemed keen to promote a date of c. 9000 BC for the rapid transition from glacial to post-glacial ages, there are indications that this event did not occur until a slightly later period. At least three lake sites in the Great Basin region revealed carbon-14 dates around 8000 BC for a maximum water level shortly 'before' they experienced a sudden desiccation after the withdrawal of the ice sheets. (11) In addition to this, marine shells from the St. Lawrence Valley, which provided evidence of an invasion of seawater coincident to a rapid ice retreat, frequently produced dates 'post' 9000 BC. (12)
Broecker and his colleagues accepted the presence of these much lower dates and suggested that the whole matter was complicated by the fact that there had been an estimated 200-year resurgence of glacial conditions, known as the Valders re-advance, around the mid-ninth millenium BC. They therefore acknowledged that their own findings might in fact relate to the recession of the ice fields after this time, bringing the dates of their suggested 'major fluctuation in climate' and the 'sharp change in oceanic conditions' down to well below c. 9000 BC. (13)
THE EVIDENCE OF POLLEN SPECTRA
Further evidence that dramatic changes accompanied the transition from glacial to post-glacial ages came from the work of Herbert E. Wright Jnr, of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (14) and J Gordon Ogden III of the Department of Botany and Bacteriology at the Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware. (15) Both examined the pollen spectra range from sediment cores taken from various lake sites in the Great Lakes area and found they provided clear evidence of an abrupt shift in flora at the end of glaciation. The spruce forests that had thrived in the cold harsh climate for many thousands of years were supplanted swiftly, first by pine and then by mixed hardwood forests, such as birch and oak. Deciduous trees, as we know, only thrive in a warmer climate.
The significance of these findings is the acceleration at which this transition took place. In an article for the journal 'Quaternary Paleoecology' in 1967, Ogden pointed out that some pollen spectra samples showed a 50 per cent replacement from spruce to pine occurring in just 10 centimetres of sediment. (16) In one sample taken from a site named Glacial Lake Aitken in Minnesota, the transition from 55 per cent to 18 per cent spruce pollen occurred in only 7.6 centimetres of sediment, re- presenting a deposition corresponding to just 170 years. (17) The problem here is that conventional geologists and paleoecologists consider that the transition from glacial to post-glacial ages occurred over several 'thousand' years, not just a few hundred {The time it takes for one or two trees to live and die.} years.
These findings so baffled Ogden that he was led to comment: 'The only mechanism sufficient to produce a change of the kind described here would therefore appear to be a rapid and dramatic change in temperature and/or precipitation approximately 10,000 years ago.’ (18)
What kind of climatic 'event' might have been responsible for this 'rapid and dramatic change in temperature’ {Could this relate to the buttercups found frozen and undigested in Mammoth mouths of the Arctic?} in the American Midwest, sometime around c. 8000 BC? Had it been a consequence of the proposed cometary impact that devastated the western hemisphere during this same epoch?
The knowledge that some 65 million years ago the Cretaceous period had been abruptly brought to a close by just such an impact has softened the most stubborn of minds concerning such a possibility. Broecker himself, in an article written for 'Scientific American' in 1983, now accepted that asteroid or comet impacts might be responsible for the instigation and termination of glacial ages. (19)
This is indeed what Emilio Spedicato has suggested as the mechanism behind the revolution in climate and ocean temperature experienced during this period…” (20)
We will return to implications related to this and the work of Mr. Collins throughout this encyclopedia as we develop real history from actual facts rather than the Bible Narrative. It should be evident that these climate changes had significant impacts on society and created a loss of culture and technology in certain areas of the world. There were probably people who took advantage of these spiritual and other perceptions that resulted as well.
Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com
"In 1960 a scientific paper by Wallace S. Broecker and his colleagues Maurice Ewing and Bruce C. Heezen, of Lamont Geological Observatory at Columbia University, Palisades, New York, appeared in the 'American Journal of Science'. Entitled 'Evidence for an Abrupt Change in Climate close to 11,000 years ago', it advanced the theory that a 'number of geographically isolated systems suggested that the warming of world-wide climate which occurred at the close of Wisconsin glacial times was extremely abrupt. (3)
By examining sediment cores taken from various deep-sea locations, Broecker and his team were able to demonstrate that around c. 9000 BC. the surface water temperature of the Atlantic Ocean increased by between six and ten degrees centigrade, (4) enough to alter its entire ecosystem. More significantly, it was found that the bottom waters of the Cariaco Trench in the Caribbean Sea, off Venezuela, suddenly stagnated, {The Gulf Stream being sent back south from hitting the land around the Azores when the water level was lower suddenly started warming the Iceland and British Isles regions, again.} showing that an abrupt change in water circulation had taken place coincident to the warming of the oceans. (5) Additionally, the silt deposits washing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi Valley abruptly halted and were retained in the delta and valleys, as the waters from the glacier-bound Great Lakes switched direction and began draining through the previously frozen northern outlets. (6) With extreme rapidity, the water levels of these lakes shrank from maximum volume, down to the much lower level they occupy today. (7)
Among the data drawn on by Broecker and his team to make their findings was the work conducted in 1957 by Cesare Emiliani of the Department of Geology at the University of Miami. He found that deep-sea cores displayed clear evidence of an abrupt temperature turn around in 9000 BC. was responsible for the other changes set out by Broecker et al. (8) However, since other cores examined by Emiliani had not shown the same rapid transition, he decided that the anomalous cores lacked vital sediment layers covering a period of several thousand years of ecological history, and so dismissed them as unreliable. (9) Yet Broecker and his colleagues disputed Emiliani's interpretation of the results. They could find no reason to suppose that key sediment layers could have been lost in the manner suggested. As a consequence, they reinstated Emiliani's controversial findings as crucial evidence of a major shift in oceanic temperatures around 11,000 years ago. (10)
Although Broecker et al seemed keen to promote a date of c. 9000 BC for the rapid transition from glacial to post-glacial ages, there are indications that this event did not occur until a slightly later period. At least three lake sites in the Great Basin region revealed carbon-14 dates around 8000 BC for a maximum water level shortly 'before' they experienced a sudden desiccation after the withdrawal of the ice sheets. (11) In addition to this, marine shells from the St. Lawrence Valley, which provided evidence of an invasion of seawater coincident to a rapid ice retreat, frequently produced dates 'post' 9000 BC. (12)
Broecker and his colleagues accepted the presence of these much lower dates and suggested that the whole matter was complicated by the fact that there had been an estimated 200-year resurgence of glacial conditions, known as the Valders re-advance, around the mid-ninth millenium BC. They therefore acknowledged that their own findings might in fact relate to the recession of the ice fields after this time, bringing the dates of their suggested 'major fluctuation in climate' and the 'sharp change in oceanic conditions' down to well below c. 9000 BC. (13)
THE EVIDENCE OF POLLEN SPECTRA
Further evidence that dramatic changes accompanied the transition from glacial to post-glacial ages came from the work of Herbert E. Wright Jnr, of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (14) and J Gordon Ogden III of the Department of Botany and Bacteriology at the Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware. (15) Both examined the pollen spectra range from sediment cores taken from various lake sites in the Great Lakes area and found they provided clear evidence of an abrupt shift in flora at the end of glaciation. The spruce forests that had thrived in the cold harsh climate for many thousands of years were supplanted swiftly, first by pine and then by mixed hardwood forests, such as birch and oak. Deciduous trees, as we know, only thrive in a warmer climate.
The significance of these findings is the acceleration at which this transition took place. In an article for the journal 'Quaternary Paleoecology' in 1967, Ogden pointed out that some pollen spectra samples showed a 50 per cent replacement from spruce to pine occurring in just 10 centimetres of sediment. (16) In one sample taken from a site named Glacial Lake Aitken in Minnesota, the transition from 55 per cent to 18 per cent spruce pollen occurred in only 7.6 centimetres of sediment, re- presenting a deposition corresponding to just 170 years. (17) The problem here is that conventional geologists and paleoecologists consider that the transition from glacial to post-glacial ages occurred over several 'thousand' years, not just a few hundred {The time it takes for one or two trees to live and die.} years.
These findings so baffled Ogden that he was led to comment: 'The only mechanism sufficient to produce a change of the kind described here would therefore appear to be a rapid and dramatic change in temperature and/or precipitation approximately 10,000 years ago.’ (18)
What kind of climatic 'event' might have been responsible for this 'rapid and dramatic change in temperature’ {Could this relate to the buttercups found frozen and undigested in Mammoth mouths of the Arctic?} in the American Midwest, sometime around c. 8000 BC? Had it been a consequence of the proposed cometary impact that devastated the western hemisphere during this same epoch?
The knowledge that some 65 million years ago the Cretaceous period had been abruptly brought to a close by just such an impact has softened the most stubborn of minds concerning such a possibility. Broecker himself, in an article written for 'Scientific American' in 1983, now accepted that asteroid or comet impacts might be responsible for the instigation and termination of glacial ages. (19)
This is indeed what Emilio Spedicato has suggested as the mechanism behind the revolution in climate and ocean temperature experienced during this period…” (20)
We will return to implications related to this and the work of Mr. Collins throughout this encyclopedia as we develop real history from actual facts rather than the Bible Narrative. It should be evident that these climate changes had significant impacts on society and created a loss of culture and technology in certain areas of the world. There were probably people who took advantage of these spiritual and other perceptions that resulted as well.
Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com
Jumat, 26 Oktober 2007
Search Atlantis: Getting Closer
Around 355 BC Plato describes an ancient exotic island kingdom catastrophic buried beneath the sea, when his people virtuous times angered the gods with their indulgence in sin and corruption. The city of Atlantis was a wonder of architecture and engineering. The city was composed of a series of walls and concentric canals around 9,000 years before the time of Plato. When the people of Atlantis became corrupt and greedy, the gods decided to destroy them. A violent earthquake shook the earth, rode giant waves on the shore, and the island sank into the sea, never to be seen again. In the book of Plato's Timaeus, a character named Kritias describes an account of Atlantis has been in his family for generations. According to the character, an Egyptian priest told the story of his ancestor, Solon.
The first thing to realize is that it would be surprising that the description of Atlantis by Plato is precise and exact, not because Plato was not true, but because the story has been passed down through thousands of years , first orally and not in writing. This description reached by Plato Egyptian priests. It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact date of the submerged Atlantis for the same reason. However, there is little doubt that the whole truth would be in the history prior to 3300 BC. There is no example of the drafting of full descriptions prior to 3300 BC. Some elements of writing brief description of the symbols shown with lots is all that exists in the form of writing from a period prior to 3300 BC. The names, size and time are perhaps inventions or modifications of the story was handed down through the centuries.
The essence of the story, that of a former well-planned and prosperous town known civilizations that preceded it on earth may be true. In fact, archaeologists and historians have postulated the existence of such a civilization. Scheduled cities and other technologies suddenly begun to spring in the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt during the period from 3500 to 3000 BC, as if they had fallen from the sky. Since the design and construction of these cities involved technical skills that take time to develop, it was suspected that they came from a civilization that has developed has not yet been discovered. Various suggestions were made as to Atlantis could be located from the Antarctic, South America and even other planets.
A line of the survey is to find out where the Egyptian priests obtained the story of Atlantis. Management is the most probable or Sumer ancient Mesopotamia. There is also the possibility that the first priests of Egypt dynastic were actually Akkadians - Sumerian. The first pharaoh of Egypt-dynastic Menes unified upper and lower Egypt, and built a new capital in Memphis by diverting a portion of the Nile. The technical skills required for all of this seems to be in Mesopotamia. It takes a lot of time and learning to develop the necessary skills, even if one is very bright. There is no evidence of those existing in Egypt before Menes (or Manas, the Egyptians did not write vowels and they must be guessed). Menes and its priests and engineers were likely although all Mesopotamians of the labor force was local. In any event, even if it is challenged Menes and that its engineers are not in Mesopotamia, it can not be denied that Egypt had links with several Mesopotamia that went beyond mere trade.
In addition, the likelihood of being Atlantis stories of Sumer origin is reinforced by the fact that the flooding of the ancient cities has been a strong part of the Sumerian mythology. It dominates their historical tradition. The destruction of the ancient city as a result of sin was also part of their beliefs. Therefore, there is a strong likelihood that the ancient city of Atlantis is an old town submerged Sumerians.
If one traces the origin of the story of Atlantis to Sumerians can inquire as to who were the Sumerians, and where they came from? They are not local people, because they speak a foreign language to the parties. For a long time it was thought that their language is an isolated case, unrelated to other languages. However, the situation has now changed as a result of new studies. The study of language, as well as anthropological examination of the skeletons Sumerian can trace their origins.
It was found that the Sumerian Austric language is a language spoken by a group of former Australoid people in India, Southeast Asia and Australia (Austric The Origin of the Sumerian language, Language Form, vol. 22 , No. 1 - 2, 01-12. 1996). . An examination of the old Sumerian skulls has also confirmed that the ancient Sumerians Australoid actually belonged to the race. A branch has evolved from the same tribe seems to have created the Indus Valley Civilization, as well as the Sumerian one after the immersion of their coastal cities. In northern and western India that they would have encountered Neolithic people of Indo-European origin with which they have established a workforce of the Indus cities. An analysis of skeletal remains of the Indus valley confirms this mixture. The Sumerian language persist alongside local languages as in the official language of the rulers being Sumerian. In the Indus Valley, Sumerian would have persisted with Aryan languages. So far, researchers have tried to decipher the Indus script based on a comparison with the Aryan and Dravidian languages, and it has failed. An attempt may be more successful if they made Austric used for this purpose. As in Mesopotamia, ancient Sumerian was eventually replaced by the language of the majority (Akkadians) in the Indus valley, it was finally replaced by an Indo-Aryan language.
If we assume for the moment that the Sumerians originally from the west coast of India and their ancient capital, which submerged then we must ask whether any such evidence has been found. The recent discovery made in the Gulf of Cambay, made some sit and watch with interest. It has clearly established the existence of an ancient civilization that has been immersed in the sea The methods adopted for this study were new and different, in which advanced marine technology of the most modern and scientific applications from different disciplines have been put into service. Most of the structures that have been discovered in the Gulf of Cambay had many similarities to the Citadel, Great Bath, grid home, attic, etc. of the Harappan civilization. But many artifacts and the types are different and distinctive, and with the presence of many microorganisms tools appears to be much older than the Harappan. The north of the city was right pieces of pottery, etc. mud wattle around 7506 BP leave. She said well-organized city life. Therefore, it is possible that this metropolis came after BP 8450, but before 7506 BP. After the flooding on the southern shore of the metropolis, the former appears to have changed and founded the north of the metropolis. This beautiful metropolis of twins prehistoric Cambay lasted about 13,000 to about 3,000 BP BP makes it the oldest and largest city of civilization not only in Asia but also throughout the world. Scientists described in a manner similar to Plato, the submersion of the city due to violent earthquakes, and floods. The existence of a submerged circular port as described by Plato was also found in the vicinity of the site. In addition the area has gold, elephants and coconut as in Plato's Atlantis. The existence of other cities in the region can still be found at the continuation of underwater explorations.
An important question is whether Atlantis actually existed in the Indian sub-continent then it should be of some records in India since India itself has had a written literature since ancient times. In Islam, an old and well-known Hindu scripture there is a specific account about the flooding of the city by the sea, which reads:
"The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the city. The sea covered everything in the city. Even if they were all looking, Arjuna saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. Arjuna took a last look at the house of Krishna. The sea covered soon. In a matter of a few moments, it is all the more . The sea had now as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the beautiful city, which had been the favorite haunt of all the Pandavas. Dwaraka was just a name; Just a memory. "
The important thing to note here is that the city is described by Arjuna Aryan origin as a city of Krishna, which was dark, as dark Sumerians. Thus, based on this study considers that the author is a former Atlantis submerged city on the west coast of India. Not all the evidence and arguments of this analysis could be presented here because of the brevity of this article. The capital city of Atlantis is probably not yet discovered and may require further exploration in the coastal region.
The first thing to realize is that it would be surprising that the description of Atlantis by Plato is precise and exact, not because Plato was not true, but because the story has been passed down through thousands of years , first orally and not in writing. This description reached by Plato Egyptian priests. It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact date of the submerged Atlantis for the same reason. However, there is little doubt that the whole truth would be in the history prior to 3300 BC. There is no example of the drafting of full descriptions prior to 3300 BC. Some elements of writing brief description of the symbols shown with lots is all that exists in the form of writing from a period prior to 3300 BC. The names, size and time are perhaps inventions or modifications of the story was handed down through the centuries.
The essence of the story, that of a former well-planned and prosperous town known civilizations that preceded it on earth may be true. In fact, archaeologists and historians have postulated the existence of such a civilization. Scheduled cities and other technologies suddenly begun to spring in the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt during the period from 3500 to 3000 BC, as if they had fallen from the sky. Since the design and construction of these cities involved technical skills that take time to develop, it was suspected that they came from a civilization that has developed has not yet been discovered. Various suggestions were made as to Atlantis could be located from the Antarctic, South America and even other planets.
A line of the survey is to find out where the Egyptian priests obtained the story of Atlantis. Management is the most probable or Sumer ancient Mesopotamia. There is also the possibility that the first priests of Egypt dynastic were actually Akkadians - Sumerian. The first pharaoh of Egypt-dynastic Menes unified upper and lower Egypt, and built a new capital in Memphis by diverting a portion of the Nile. The technical skills required for all of this seems to be in Mesopotamia. It takes a lot of time and learning to develop the necessary skills, even if one is very bright. There is no evidence of those existing in Egypt before Menes (or Manas, the Egyptians did not write vowels and they must be guessed). Menes and its priests and engineers were likely although all Mesopotamians of the labor force was local. In any event, even if it is challenged Menes and that its engineers are not in Mesopotamia, it can not be denied that Egypt had links with several Mesopotamia that went beyond mere trade.
In addition, the likelihood of being Atlantis stories of Sumer origin is reinforced by the fact that the flooding of the ancient cities has been a strong part of the Sumerian mythology. It dominates their historical tradition. The destruction of the ancient city as a result of sin was also part of their beliefs. Therefore, there is a strong likelihood that the ancient city of Atlantis is an old town submerged Sumerians.
If one traces the origin of the story of Atlantis to Sumerians can inquire as to who were the Sumerians, and where they came from? They are not local people, because they speak a foreign language to the parties. For a long time it was thought that their language is an isolated case, unrelated to other languages. However, the situation has now changed as a result of new studies. The study of language, as well as anthropological examination of the skeletons Sumerian can trace their origins.
It was found that the Sumerian Austric language is a language spoken by a group of former Australoid people in India, Southeast Asia and Australia (Austric The Origin of the Sumerian language, Language Form, vol. 22 , No. 1 - 2, 01-12. 1996). . An examination of the old Sumerian skulls has also confirmed that the ancient Sumerians Australoid actually belonged to the race. A branch has evolved from the same tribe seems to have created the Indus Valley Civilization, as well as the Sumerian one after the immersion of their coastal cities. In northern and western India that they would have encountered Neolithic people of Indo-European origin with which they have established a workforce of the Indus cities. An analysis of skeletal remains of the Indus valley confirms this mixture. The Sumerian language persist alongside local languages as in the official language of the rulers being Sumerian. In the Indus Valley, Sumerian would have persisted with Aryan languages. So far, researchers have tried to decipher the Indus script based on a comparison with the Aryan and Dravidian languages, and it has failed. An attempt may be more successful if they made Austric used for this purpose. As in Mesopotamia, ancient Sumerian was eventually replaced by the language of the majority (Akkadians) in the Indus valley, it was finally replaced by an Indo-Aryan language.
If we assume for the moment that the Sumerians originally from the west coast of India and their ancient capital, which submerged then we must ask whether any such evidence has been found. The recent discovery made in the Gulf of Cambay, made some sit and watch with interest. It has clearly established the existence of an ancient civilization that has been immersed in the sea The methods adopted for this study were new and different, in which advanced marine technology of the most modern and scientific applications from different disciplines have been put into service. Most of the structures that have been discovered in the Gulf of Cambay had many similarities to the Citadel, Great Bath, grid home, attic, etc. of the Harappan civilization. But many artifacts and the types are different and distinctive, and with the presence of many microorganisms tools appears to be much older than the Harappan. The north of the city was right pieces of pottery, etc. mud wattle around 7506 BP leave. She said well-organized city life. Therefore, it is possible that this metropolis came after BP 8450, but before 7506 BP. After the flooding on the southern shore of the metropolis, the former appears to have changed and founded the north of the metropolis. This beautiful metropolis of twins prehistoric Cambay lasted about 13,000 to about 3,000 BP BP makes it the oldest and largest city of civilization not only in Asia but also throughout the world. Scientists described in a manner similar to Plato, the submersion of the city due to violent earthquakes, and floods. The existence of a submerged circular port as described by Plato was also found in the vicinity of the site. In addition the area has gold, elephants and coconut as in Plato's Atlantis. The existence of other cities in the region can still be found at the continuation of underwater explorations.
An important question is whether Atlantis actually existed in the Indian sub-continent then it should be of some records in India since India itself has had a written literature since ancient times. In Islam, an old and well-known Hindu scripture there is a specific account about the flooding of the city by the sea, which reads:
"The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the city. The sea covered everything in the city. Even if they were all looking, Arjuna saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. Arjuna took a last look at the house of Krishna. The sea covered soon. In a matter of a few moments, it is all the more . The sea had now as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the beautiful city, which had been the favorite haunt of all the Pandavas. Dwaraka was just a name; Just a memory. "
The important thing to note here is that the city is described by Arjuna Aryan origin as a city of Krishna, which was dark, as dark Sumerians. Thus, based on this study considers that the author is a former Atlantis submerged city on the west coast of India. Not all the evidence and arguments of this analysis could be presented here because of the brevity of this article. The capital city of Atlantis is probably not yet discovered and may require further exploration in the coastal region.
Kamis, 30 Agustus 2007
The Spanish investigators have discovered the archaeological evidences of Atlantis below the sea, near the coasts of Gibraltar…
The Spanish investigators have discovered archaeological evidences below the sea, near the coasts of Gibraltar, that could belong to the Atlantic civilization described by Plato with the name of Atlantis and that exactly located the Greek philosopher in front of the columns of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar), Next to the region of Gadeira (Cadiz, Andalusia) and of the atlas (Morocco).
The first results were done in the summer of the 2003. A report with the preliminary results was done, consulted to the great experts of the reputation the international as under George F. and Cemal Pulak and the report were sent to the authorities and the competent organisms of Spain and UNESCO.
It has spent a year, and still no scientific institution has demonstrated interest to study the solid evidences discovered by the team of the explorers of collaboration of the investigator and the escriptólogo Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, intellectual author of the theories that support these discoveries in the identification of the kingdom of the Atlantis with the Atlantic cities of the coasts of Iberia and Morocco.
It is the first time in all the history that is discovered architectonic devices of the rest and of the metal underneath the sea in a location that agrees upon a 100% with the descriptions offered by Plato in the geographic place where it was the island and the Acropolis of the Atlantis.
Some investigators protest to have Atlantis found in other places of the world like Jim Allen, of which the places in a place so moved away of Gibraltar as mountains of Bolivia, whereas Roberto Samarst is conceited now to have discovered the Atlantis near the coasts of Cyprus, but Sarmast have still not discovered nor a single archaeological evidence, the only thing that does since it initiated to his expeditions is to demonstrate the pretty drawings of the virtual maps reconstructed by the computers of knoll and the natural geologic formation that it interprets like the rest of Atlantis buried by the marine bottom.
Spanish investigator Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, German Ulf Ritcher and the Dutch Jonas Berghman is the only investigators who defend with scientific rigor and the adjustment to texts and many other authors of Plato of the antiquity the only possible location of Atlantis: the one that describes Plato, that is to say, near the columns of Hercules (Gibraltar), Gadeira (Cadiz, Andalusie, Spain) and the atlas (Morocco).
The equipment of Georgeos Diaz-Montexano of the collaborator is the unique one who has demonstrated that the submarine archaeological evidences of the world that have been analyzed by the experts and they have still not been possible to recognize or to classify. These evidences are to the depths that correspond with the old level of the sea of several thousands of years before the times of Solón and Plato.
He is paradoxical which the team of Spanish investigators has still not demanded the discovery of Atlantis, in spite of being those that evidences scientists have more and who nevertheless, Roberto Sarmarst does not concern him to affirm to the world that has discovered Atlantis already when the only thing that it has at the moment is not more than some natural hills and formation - until it on the contrary demonstrates and to some maps and virtual reconstructions where it is reconstructed what Sarmast thinks that they must have, but that not still exists.
Roberto Sarmast not still has demonstrated to the world nor a single archaeological evidence that is solid and worthy to consider, whereas Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has demonstrated to not one but to several deposits with the archaeological evidences “sui generis” that they would have to be object of the study between the scientists. Roberto Sarmast has directed fundamental by the speculations of the book pseudo-monk of Urantia, whereas Jonas Berghman, Ulf Ritcher, and in special, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, prefer to go by the scientific and philological study of the Plato well-known the oldest manuscripts, and of the scientific evidences contributed by geology, oceanography, paleogeography, sismology and archaeology.
Nevertheless, and against all the logic, Roberto Sarmast who it is receiving, probably the greater aid of publicity in the level the international that never has received a finder of Atlantis.
The first results were done in the summer of the 2003. A report with the preliminary results was done, consulted to the great experts of the reputation the international as under George F. and Cemal Pulak and the report were sent to the authorities and the competent organisms of Spain and UNESCO.
It has spent a year, and still no scientific institution has demonstrated interest to study the solid evidences discovered by the team of the explorers of collaboration of the investigator and the escriptólogo Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, intellectual author of the theories that support these discoveries in the identification of the kingdom of the Atlantis with the Atlantic cities of the coasts of Iberia and Morocco.
It is the first time in all the history that is discovered architectonic devices of the rest and of the metal underneath the sea in a location that agrees upon a 100% with the descriptions offered by Plato in the geographic place where it was the island and the Acropolis of the Atlantis.
Some investigators protest to have Atlantis found in other places of the world like Jim Allen, of which the places in a place so moved away of Gibraltar as mountains of Bolivia, whereas Roberto Samarst is conceited now to have discovered the Atlantis near the coasts of Cyprus, but Sarmast have still not discovered nor a single archaeological evidence, the only thing that does since it initiated to his expeditions is to demonstrate the pretty drawings of the virtual maps reconstructed by the computers of knoll and the natural geologic formation that it interprets like the rest of Atlantis buried by the marine bottom.
Spanish investigator Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, German Ulf Ritcher and the Dutch Jonas Berghman is the only investigators who defend with scientific rigor and the adjustment to texts and many other authors of Plato of the antiquity the only possible location of Atlantis: the one that describes Plato, that is to say, near the columns of Hercules (Gibraltar), Gadeira (Cadiz, Andalusie, Spain) and the atlas (Morocco).
The equipment of Georgeos Diaz-Montexano of the collaborator is the unique one who has demonstrated that the submarine archaeological evidences of the world that have been analyzed by the experts and they have still not been possible to recognize or to classify. These evidences are to the depths that correspond with the old level of the sea of several thousands of years before the times of Solón and Plato.
He is paradoxical which the team of Spanish investigators has still not demanded the discovery of Atlantis, in spite of being those that evidences scientists have more and who nevertheless, Roberto Sarmarst does not concern him to affirm to the world that has discovered Atlantis already when the only thing that it has at the moment is not more than some natural hills and formation - until it on the contrary demonstrates and to some maps and virtual reconstructions where it is reconstructed what Sarmast thinks that they must have, but that not still exists.
Roberto Sarmast not still has demonstrated to the world nor a single archaeological evidence that is solid and worthy to consider, whereas Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has demonstrated to not one but to several deposits with the archaeological evidences “sui generis” that they would have to be object of the study between the scientists. Roberto Sarmast has directed fundamental by the speculations of the book pseudo-monk of Urantia, whereas Jonas Berghman, Ulf Ritcher, and in special, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, prefer to go by the scientific and philological study of the Plato well-known the oldest manuscripts, and of the scientific evidences contributed by geology, oceanography, paleogeography, sismology and archaeology.
Nevertheless, and against all the logic, Roberto Sarmast who it is receiving, probably the greater aid of publicity in the level the international that never has received a finder of Atlantis.
Minggu, 26 Agustus 2007
Atlantis from Plato Sight
History - The Lost City of Atlantis
Plato started all the hoopla about the lost city of Atlantis.
Plato
Around 350 BC, Plato wrote about a beautiful island in the Atlantic Ocean that went under the ocean waves in one day and one night. It took two books to describe the history and details of this almost magical island. For years people have been looking for this mysterious lost city, Atlantis. Plato described Atlantis as a island nation existing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was said to be populated by a great a powerful race and was a center for trace and commerce during that era. The sheer scale of everything he said about Atlantis, from the grandeur of its buildings tot he enormous timescale involved, have provided a controversial debate that has extended for over 10,000 years. Plato claimed to have gotten his information from his family. The fact that Plato would never perpetrate a fraud involving deceased members of his revered family, and the common knowledge that Plato was never known for wholesale fabrication, indicates that Plato indeed told the story as a truthful account of this mysterious civilization.
Living In Atlantis
Plato describes the Atlantians as great engineers and architects. There were palaces, harbors, temples and docks. The capital city was built on a hill and surrounded by rings of water, which were joined by tunnels large enough for a ship to sail through. A huge canal connected the outer rings of water to the ocean. On the outskirts of the capital city there were huge fields where farmers grew the city's food. Past the field there were mountains where wealthy villagers lived. Plato goes great detail about the amazing buildings - complete with hot and cold fountains, shared dining halls and stone walls covered with precious metals. Atlantis was described as being remarkably modern for its day. It was said to have many man-made canals used for navigation and water supply. The people there were very wealthy and had considerable natural resources such as abundant plants and wildlife. Some believe that the inhabitants of Atlantis were even more 'advanced' than our modern civilization (and possibly wiser) contradicting the prevailing view of a slow, steady, linear ascent of human civilization from primitive beginnings to our modern technological society. In fact, some believe that that not all Atlanteans died in their cataclysmic event but rather survived and are the ancestors of all of our modern day 'intelligent' people. Given this belief, all of our modern day technology is simply a rediscovering of the knowledge and information possessed by the Atlantean culture.
Surrealistic tales of Atlantean intelligence propose that they had developed such technologically advanced mechanisms such as time machines, machinery to transport themselves into some sort of altered dimension, futuristic weaponry, and advanced communication devices. Some tales indicate that the Atlanteans had perfected cloning of their powerful race and/or had created intelligent robotic clones of themselves. And some tales tell of a 'alternate Earth' that the Atlanteans periodically visited, possibly by the use of the previously mentioned portal machinery.
Atlantis - Just A Story?
For over two thousand years the story of Atlantis was just a story. Then, in the late 1800s, an American named Ignatius Donnelly became fascinated with the story and wrote a book called Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, which became a bestseller. Ignatius studied flood history from Egypt to Mexico and believed that Plato was recording an actual natural disaster. Since then, several books have been written about the lost city.
Atlantis - Facts And Fiction
The most believable theory about Atlantis came from the Greek archaeologist Angelos Galanopoulos in the late '60s. He theorized that around 1500 BCE, a massive eruption from a volcano ripped apart the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean and probably wiped out most of the civilization on the Greek islands and regions of Greece. Angelos suggested this disaster is the one that sank Atlantis. If this is so, then he must have his dates wrong - or does he? He reasons that when the story was being translated, the Egyptian symbol for 100 (a coiled rope) was mistaken for the symbol for 1000 (a lotus flower). This changes the date from 9000 years ago to 900 years ago. The only thing wrong with this explanation is that Plato specifically said the city was near the Pillars of Hercules, which are thought to be nowhere near Greece.
The Destruction
As time passed, legend has it that as their wealth and knowledge reached unfathomed levels, the people began to falter and become greedy. Some legends tell us that as punishment, the God Zeus pummeled the metropolis and the entire island nation sank into the city killing all of its habitants. Some take a more practical view and believe that an earthquake of great flood destroyed the metropolis ins a single night of terror. Others believe the Atlanteans, reaching unbelievable levels of success, simply self-destructed and destroyed themselves.
Where Could Atlantis Be?
The exact location of the lost city of Atlantis has been questioned by many people, like British Royal Air Force photo interpreter J.M. Allen. He is convinced Atlantis is in Altiplano, near the Andes Mountains, in Bolivia. The famous psychic channeler Edgar Cayce believed the remains would be found off the coast of Florida near Bimini Island. Other people think it's lost somewhere in Central America, the China Sea or Africa. Others believe that Atlantis is nothing more than a myth. Some historians believe that the Atlanteans actually survived their cataclysm and migrated to other places. Common belief is that their migration took them to Egypt where the continued to forge new and innovative methods of technology. This theory concludes that that the great Egyptian marvels, such as the Sphinx and the great Egyptian writings. Others feel that Solon, the supposed family member who originally passed the story on to Plato, may have mistaken Egypt itself for the city of Atlantis.
Some researchers believe that the shifting continents may have displaced Atlantis to a location not nearly as close to the Atlantic Ocean as Plato described. Prevailing evidence using advanced calculations indicates that the lost civilization may indeed lie under the ice of Antarctica.
Bimini Island - possible site of Atlantis (5995 bytes)Other researchers and readings from the infamous Edgar Cayce, indicate that Atlantis may have been located near the Bimini Island in the Bahamas. There is evidence that the Bimini Island may have once been a mountain region with the largest part of the island now submerged beneath the ocean. Cayce believed that Atlantis actually suffered three destructive events. The first destroyed their major power source (what the power source was in not known). The second actually split the islands into 3 separate entities. The third and final catastrophe caused all three of the islands to sink into the sea. Cayce concluded his reading of the City of Atlantis with a warning - between 1958 and 2008 our modern society would be presented with the same opportunities and challenges that the Atlanteans faced. Our response to those challenges may dictate our fate just as it did the Atlanteans.
Map of Atlantis off China Coast (7801 bytes)Probably the most sound scientific explanation of the location of Atlantis places it off the southern coast of China. This location of this site makes if somewhat difficult to study but a general scientific consensus of the world's 'map' around the end of the Ice Age indicates that a great portion of that continent is now located underwater. Depth studies of the region also indicate that there are three areas that are particularly shallow, all being less than 100 meters under the water.
This is the easiest answer - Atlantis is fiction. It was made up to suit the purposes of Plato's dialogues.
For:
Nothing to prove. Timaeus and Critias are simply stories.
Against:
It is stated several times within the dialogues that the story is true and a parts about the impassable sea and the true continent on the other side of Atlantis tend to indicate a more detailed knowledge that a fictional story
Thera & The Minoan Civilization
There are some compelling similarites between the destruction of Thera and the destruction of Atlantis.....
For
* The island of Thera, a volcanic island, was destroyed around 1500 BC by an explosion which caused more than half of the island to sink into the sea.
* Artifacts found on the island indicate a sophisticated culture, probably part of the Minoan Civilization.
* There is evidence pointing to trade between the Minoans and Egyptians. The Egyptians would certainly have been aware of the destruction or at least the tremedous damage done to one of their trading partners.
* We'll examine this possibility in more detail in upcoming issues of Enigma.
Against
* Proponents of this theory claim that Plato's date of 9000 years ago should really have been 900 years ago: somewhere along the line either Solon or Plato made a mistake. If the story was 900 years ago it would place Atlantis in the time frame of the Minoan civilization on Crete and Thera. Conveniently overlooked in this thinking is that in Timaeus the priest tells Solon that ancient Athens and Atlantis preceeded Egypt by a thousand years. Egypt however existed and was known to have existed since long before 1500 BC, the time of Crete and Thera. The times just don't add up unless you assume the Egyptian priest was ignorant of his own recorded history.
Plato started all the hoopla about the lost city of Atlantis.
Plato
Around 350 BC, Plato wrote about a beautiful island in the Atlantic Ocean that went under the ocean waves in one day and one night. It took two books to describe the history and details of this almost magical island. For years people have been looking for this mysterious lost city, Atlantis. Plato described Atlantis as a island nation existing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was said to be populated by a great a powerful race and was a center for trace and commerce during that era. The sheer scale of everything he said about Atlantis, from the grandeur of its buildings tot he enormous timescale involved, have provided a controversial debate that has extended for over 10,000 years. Plato claimed to have gotten his information from his family. The fact that Plato would never perpetrate a fraud involving deceased members of his revered family, and the common knowledge that Plato was never known for wholesale fabrication, indicates that Plato indeed told the story as a truthful account of this mysterious civilization.
Living In Atlantis
Plato describes the Atlantians as great engineers and architects. There were palaces, harbors, temples and docks. The capital city was built on a hill and surrounded by rings of water, which were joined by tunnels large enough for a ship to sail through. A huge canal connected the outer rings of water to the ocean. On the outskirts of the capital city there were huge fields where farmers grew the city's food. Past the field there were mountains where wealthy villagers lived. Plato goes great detail about the amazing buildings - complete with hot and cold fountains, shared dining halls and stone walls covered with precious metals. Atlantis was described as being remarkably modern for its day. It was said to have many man-made canals used for navigation and water supply. The people there were very wealthy and had considerable natural resources such as abundant plants and wildlife. Some believe that the inhabitants of Atlantis were even more 'advanced' than our modern civilization (and possibly wiser) contradicting the prevailing view of a slow, steady, linear ascent of human civilization from primitive beginnings to our modern technological society. In fact, some believe that that not all Atlanteans died in their cataclysmic event but rather survived and are the ancestors of all of our modern day 'intelligent' people. Given this belief, all of our modern day technology is simply a rediscovering of the knowledge and information possessed by the Atlantean culture.
Surrealistic tales of Atlantean intelligence propose that they had developed such technologically advanced mechanisms such as time machines, machinery to transport themselves into some sort of altered dimension, futuristic weaponry, and advanced communication devices. Some tales indicate that the Atlanteans had perfected cloning of their powerful race and/or had created intelligent robotic clones of themselves. And some tales tell of a 'alternate Earth' that the Atlanteans periodically visited, possibly by the use of the previously mentioned portal machinery.
Atlantis - Just A Story?
For over two thousand years the story of Atlantis was just a story. Then, in the late 1800s, an American named Ignatius Donnelly became fascinated with the story and wrote a book called Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, which became a bestseller. Ignatius studied flood history from Egypt to Mexico and believed that Plato was recording an actual natural disaster. Since then, several books have been written about the lost city.
Atlantis - Facts And Fiction
The most believable theory about Atlantis came from the Greek archaeologist Angelos Galanopoulos in the late '60s. He theorized that around 1500 BCE, a massive eruption from a volcano ripped apart the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean and probably wiped out most of the civilization on the Greek islands and regions of Greece. Angelos suggested this disaster is the one that sank Atlantis. If this is so, then he must have his dates wrong - or does he? He reasons that when the story was being translated, the Egyptian symbol for 100 (a coiled rope) was mistaken for the symbol for 1000 (a lotus flower). This changes the date from 9000 years ago to 900 years ago. The only thing wrong with this explanation is that Plato specifically said the city was near the Pillars of Hercules, which are thought to be nowhere near Greece.
The Destruction
As time passed, legend has it that as their wealth and knowledge reached unfathomed levels, the people began to falter and become greedy. Some legends tell us that as punishment, the God Zeus pummeled the metropolis and the entire island nation sank into the city killing all of its habitants. Some take a more practical view and believe that an earthquake of great flood destroyed the metropolis ins a single night of terror. Others believe the Atlanteans, reaching unbelievable levels of success, simply self-destructed and destroyed themselves.
Where Could Atlantis Be?
The exact location of the lost city of Atlantis has been questioned by many people, like British Royal Air Force photo interpreter J.M. Allen. He is convinced Atlantis is in Altiplano, near the Andes Mountains, in Bolivia. The famous psychic channeler Edgar Cayce believed the remains would be found off the coast of Florida near Bimini Island. Other people think it's lost somewhere in Central America, the China Sea or Africa. Others believe that Atlantis is nothing more than a myth. Some historians believe that the Atlanteans actually survived their cataclysm and migrated to other places. Common belief is that their migration took them to Egypt where the continued to forge new and innovative methods of technology. This theory concludes that that the great Egyptian marvels, such as the Sphinx and the great Egyptian writings. Others feel that Solon, the supposed family member who originally passed the story on to Plato, may have mistaken Egypt itself for the city of Atlantis.
Some researchers believe that the shifting continents may have displaced Atlantis to a location not nearly as close to the Atlantic Ocean as Plato described. Prevailing evidence using advanced calculations indicates that the lost civilization may indeed lie under the ice of Antarctica.
Bimini Island - possible site of Atlantis (5995 bytes)Other researchers and readings from the infamous Edgar Cayce, indicate that Atlantis may have been located near the Bimini Island in the Bahamas. There is evidence that the Bimini Island may have once been a mountain region with the largest part of the island now submerged beneath the ocean. Cayce believed that Atlantis actually suffered three destructive events. The first destroyed their major power source (what the power source was in not known). The second actually split the islands into 3 separate entities. The third and final catastrophe caused all three of the islands to sink into the sea. Cayce concluded his reading of the City of Atlantis with a warning - between 1958 and 2008 our modern society would be presented with the same opportunities and challenges that the Atlanteans faced. Our response to those challenges may dictate our fate just as it did the Atlanteans.
Map of Atlantis off China Coast (7801 bytes)Probably the most sound scientific explanation of the location of Atlantis places it off the southern coast of China. This location of this site makes if somewhat difficult to study but a general scientific consensus of the world's 'map' around the end of the Ice Age indicates that a great portion of that continent is now located underwater. Depth studies of the region also indicate that there are three areas that are particularly shallow, all being less than 100 meters under the water.
This is the easiest answer - Atlantis is fiction. It was made up to suit the purposes of Plato's dialogues.
For:
Nothing to prove. Timaeus and Critias are simply stories.
Against:
It is stated several times within the dialogues that the story is true and a parts about the impassable sea and the true continent on the other side of Atlantis tend to indicate a more detailed knowledge that a fictional story
Thera & The Minoan Civilization
There are some compelling similarites between the destruction of Thera and the destruction of Atlantis.....
For
* The island of Thera, a volcanic island, was destroyed around 1500 BC by an explosion which caused more than half of the island to sink into the sea.
* Artifacts found on the island indicate a sophisticated culture, probably part of the Minoan Civilization.
* There is evidence pointing to trade between the Minoans and Egyptians. The Egyptians would certainly have been aware of the destruction or at least the tremedous damage done to one of their trading partners.
* We'll examine this possibility in more detail in upcoming issues of Enigma.
Against
* Proponents of this theory claim that Plato's date of 9000 years ago should really have been 900 years ago: somewhere along the line either Solon or Plato made a mistake. If the story was 900 years ago it would place Atlantis in the time frame of the Minoan civilization on Crete and Thera. Conveniently overlooked in this thinking is that in Timaeus the priest tells Solon that ancient Athens and Atlantis preceeded Egypt by a thousand years. Egypt however existed and was known to have existed since long before 1500 BC, the time of Crete and Thera. The times just don't add up unless you assume the Egyptian priest was ignorant of his own recorded history.
Selasa, 21 Agustus 2007
Atlantis, Mu and the Maya
Early theories attributing Mesoamerican civilization to lost civilizations continue to deprive Native Americans of their cultural legacy today.
by Jason Colavito
Mayan pyramid at Tikal
The early history of Mesoamerican studies is characterized by a grave dispute over the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. In many ways, this dispute is an argument over two lost continents, Atlantis and Mu, and where their survivors may have settled. Proponents of the Atlantis hypothesis argued that survivors of that lost continent spread to Africa and to Central America, giving rise to advanced civilizations like Egypt and the Maya (Orser 2001), while followers of Mu claimed that refugees from the lost Pacific continent ventured to China and Central America, giving rise to advanced civilizations (Tompkins 1976). That Mesoamerican civilization began in situ is never contemplated.
The two leading advocates of their respective theories were Ignatius Donnelly and Col. James Churchward. According to Prof. Charles Orser (2001) Donnelly, a former vice-presidential candidate, built upon the myth of Atlantis laid down by Plato and created a vision of the island-continent that would last for a century after his book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World ceased to be remembered: "It is, quite simply, the most significant pseudo-archaeology book ever written, and it has provided a roadmap for the flood of pseudo-archaeology that has come after it [Orser 2001]."
On the other end of the spectrum, Col. Churchward believed in an island civilization located in the Pacific Ocean, whose remains he believed can still be seen in the cyclopean ruins of the Polynesian islands, most notably the statues of Easter Island. Alternative historian Peter Tompkins (1976:364) says that Churchward's Mu was the origin of civilization with "one branch of colonization [which] ran from Mu to Central America, thence to Atlantis." In this scheme, civilization arrived in ancient Mesoamerica by a Pacific route, and Atlantis is downgraded to a colony of the greater Mu.
The conflict among these pre-modern diffusionist theories would lead generations of diffusionists to claim external origins for Mesoamerican civilization, much to the dismay of archaeologists, who tried to stop the robbing of indigenous cultures (see Haslip-Viera et al. 1997).
THE ATLANTIC CROSSING HYPOTHESIS
Donnelly placed Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean and had its descendants populate the Atlantic rim, bringing culture to the ignorant natives after the fall of the great island. This theory was eagerly adopted among the diffusionists of the nineteenth century because, as Tompkins (1976:36) recounts, "the similarity between Mexican and Egyptian pyramids, hieroglyphs, and calendars was too strongly indicative of the existence in the Atlantic of an intervening continent or group of islands, for which Plato's account of Atlantis fit the bill." Of course, having the side-effect of denying the native peoples a culture on par with that of the Europeans did nothing to retard the spread of diffusionism.
After the twentieth century rejection of the Atlantis hypothesis, speculation transformed the Atlantis hypothesis into transoceanic contact. However, even under this scenario, the connection is tenuous at best. The Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids bear no relation to each other in either form or function. As Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:427) point out, the Mexican pyramids were step-pyramids with wide, accessible stairs topped with temples while the Egyptian were regular pyramids with no access or temple-top. Furthermore, if the Egyptians did come to the New World, why should they have taught the Olmec of 1500 BC the pyramid-building techniques they themselves had stopped using hundreds of years earlier?
The same year that Tompkins wrote his alternative history of Mexican pyramid investigation, another researcher was using the old nineteenth century theories to formulate a different view of the origins of ancient Mexican civilization. As Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Warren Barbour (1997) discuss, Ivan van Sertima proposed that ancient Mesoamerica derived its civilization from transatlantic voyages by Africans. Van Sertima was on the forefront of the Afrocentric movement, and firmly believed that African (black) people were responsible for all of the ancient civilizations of earth: "In the case of the Americas, a more complicated scenario had to be advanced in order to account for the relative isolation of these continents and the geographic obstacles posed by the Atlantic and Pacific [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420]."
Van Sertima laid out a complex scenario of transatlantic voyages that relied upon two basic pieces of evidence: African plants in the New World, and African faces carved in ancient Olmec stones. The botanical evidence may be disposed of in a few sentences, but the stone heads will take a longer, more circuitous route to understand.
The botanical evidence for transoceanic contact basically boils down to the African bottle-gourd, which, Michael Coe (2001b:34) points out, was the first domesticate of Mesoamerican peoples, cultivated around 6500 BC. Van Sertima had argued that African voyagers brought the plant to the New World, the oldest African bottle gourds cultivated in the Old World date only to 3000 BC: "Thus gourds were first cultivated in the New World much earlier than in Egypt [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:429]." For knowledge of gourd cultivation to travel from Africa to Mexico, it would be necessary for the Africans to have been growing the gourd before the Mexicans, to whom they supposedly gave it. Furthermore, since the gourd is capable of traveling across the ocean unharmed, Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:429) argue that "there is no need to posit human transport to the New World" because there is no other evidence of introduced African species before Columbus.
On the other hand, the evidence for Africans immortalized in ancient Mexican stonework requires deeper and more complex treatment.
Jacques Soustelle (1985: 10, 14) reports that the Olmec culture first became known in 1862 with the discovery of the first colossal stone head, but the culture was not identified as something apart from the Maya until 1926. Thus, the first report of an Olmec head was tinged not just with the racial attitudes of the day but also with a complete void in the archaeological understanding of the region.
When nineteenth-century traveler José María Melgar y Serrano ventured deep into the Mexican jungle to investigate rumors of colossal stone statuary hidden amidst the verdant green forests, he had no way of knowing that he would set off more than a century of speculation into the transcontinental origins of Mesoamerican civilization. For Melgar y Serrano had discovered the first signs of the oldest high civilization in the Americas, the Olmec, and he was shocked by one of their colossal stone heads which seemed to him to bear an uncanny resemblance to African peoples: "As a work of art, it is, without exaggeration, a magnificent sculpture... but what most amazed me was that the type it represents is Ethiopian. I concluded that there had doubtless been blacks in this region, and from the very earliest stages of the world [Soustelle 1985:9]."
Over the course of the next hundred and forty years, scores of authors would write about the African appearance of the Olmec and hold up these colossal stone heads as proof that voyagers from Africa had given the Olmec the boon of civilization.
In 1995, alternative historian Graham Hancock released his massive tome, Fingerprints of the Gods, in which he expanded on the old diffusionist theories for the origin of the Olmec. In claiming that the Olmec heads were of African origin, Hancock (1995: 131) argued that "It would probably be impossible . . . for a sculptor to invent the different combined characteristics of an authentic racial type. The portrayal of an authentic combination of racial characteristics therefore implied strongly that a human model had been used." These traits referred to were apparently the broad noses and thick lips of the Olmec heads, which van Sertima, Hancock and others link to Africans.
However, as any biological anthropologist could demonstrate, phenotypes have virtually nothing to do with race. As Jurmain, Nelson, Kilgore and Trevathan (1998:108) note, race is not a biological concept: "the amount of genetic variation accounted for by differences between groups is vastly exceeded by the variation that exists within groups." As a result, "race is a meaningless concept [Jurmain et al. 1998:108]." So having thus established that there are no races to be depicted on the Olmec heads, next it must be shown that the heads do not share the same characteristics with their supposed models.
Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:423) spend a considerable amount of space discussing the evolutionary history of flat noses and wide lips as adaptations to the Mexican tropical climate. The old argument that Egyptians gave civilization to the Olmec is untenable by these heads because "Nubians and Egyptians have longer, thinner noses because they have lived in a desert (Haslip-Viera et al. 1997: 423)." That the heads were of West African (stereotypically black) origin is also refuted by noting that West Africans are prognathic (jutting jawed), while the Olmec heads are markedly not. Also, the Olmec heads have epicanthic eye-folds like Asians, while African populations do not. In other words, the Olmec heads show Mexican people: "they resembled people who still live in the tropical lowlands of Mexico [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:423]."
The African-origins hypothesis seemed initially to accord well with the hyperdiffusionist movement of the late nineteenth century. It was then assumed that civilization began in Egypt and spread from there to all corners of the world, and that the peoples of the Americas had to have received their civilization from outside sources because of their biological inferiority (Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420).
Of course, the late nineteenth century thinkers were troubled by the seemingly African features of the Olmec sculptures, since the Egyptians, whose civilization was the antecedent of all, were believed then to be Caucasian people. The so-called Negroid type was thought to be biologically inferior, as well. The genius of van Sertima's hypothesis was that it made the African phenotype the biologically superior one, and thus "established" that the old views were correct, but in the wrong color: "It is curious that this hypothesis has resurfaced in the late 20th century in revised form, with the biologically superior people now being identified as blacks' [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420]."
The African origins hypothesis has been refuted successfully on purely scientific grounds. Nevertheless, the manifold theories of African origins, in the words of Jacques Sostelle [1985:10], "continue to haunt Mexican archaeology like unsuccessfully exorcised ghosts."
THE PACIFIC CROSSING HYPOTHESIS
If the Africa-origins thinkers traced the beginning of their theory to the fiery demise of Atlantis, so do the Asian-origins speculators find their own lost continent had a hand in shaping the rise of Mesoamerican civilization. Writing after the demise of Donnelly's Atlantis theories, Col. James Churchward declared in 1930 the fabulous land of Mu was a Pacific continent greater than Atlantis, and that Central America was but a colony of this great land. While Tompkins (1976:372) believes that the Mu myth could explain the origins of Mesoamerican civilization, Churward's "word can only be taken by those who wish to believe him." Without evidence to back up his claims, Churchward's theory of a lost continent fell to the dustbin of history, though the idea of trans-Pacific voyages did not.
Michael Coe (2001a:57) mentions that "the possibility of some trans-Pacific influence on Mesoamerican cultures cannot, however, be so easily dismissed." The Asian-influence hypothesis has a stronger basis in fact than its African competitor, though there is still precious little to go on.
The strongest, and indeed only hard piece of evidence for trans-Pacific contact is the use of a particular technique for the manufacture of bark paper, common to China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Mesoamerica. Coe (2001a:58) says that knowledge of this paper-making method "was diffused from eastern Indonesia to Mesoamerica at a very early date." He further argues that since bark paper was used to make books, information may have been exchanged between Pacific and Mesoamerican peoples. This seems to accord with Tompkin's (1976:353) version of ancient Chinese records, which he claims document a transoceanic voyage between China and Mesoamerica in the fifth century A.D. Yet even if true, this would provide no evidence for Asian influence, since Olmec civilization sprang into being around 1500 B.C. (Soustelle 1985:31) and Maya civilization was well into its Classic Period greatness centuries before the supposed voyage (Coe 2001b: 82). However, Tompkins (1976:353) claimed earlier connection between China and Mesoamerica around the twenty-third century B.C. He was forced to concede, however, that since "there are no known historical records for such early periods... these stories float in a limbo between fact and fiction [Tompkins 1976:354]."
Another attempt to relate Mesoamerican cosmology to the Chinese involved the calendar system. Coe states (2001a:57) that the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar cycle, with its animal symbolism, is a near-perfect analog to the Southeast Asian lunar calendar: "Furthermore, Asian and Mesoamerican cosmological systems, which emphasize a quadripartite universe of four cardinal points associated with specific colors, plants, animals, and even gods, are amazingly similar [Coe 2001a:57]." Balaji Mundkur (1978:541) challenged this idea decades ago, arguing that the comparison was faulty: "These comparisons seem feeble not only because they are superficial and intrinsically contradictory, but also because they are opposed by a vast body of [Asian] religious symbolism. Furthermore, they are chronologically incompatible with historical events." For Mundkur (1978:542), the differences between Asian and Mesoamerican art far outweigh the superficial resemblances, and art analysis can only provide a subjective connection between the Old and New Worlds, especially since so much of the Asian culture supposedly borrowed by Mesoamericans actually arose hundreds of years after the rise of the Maya and Mexican civilizations.
But the superficial similarity in artistic styles has given rise to another line of argument. Among the most common arguments for trans-Pacific contact with Mesoamerica is a shared cult of the serpent, based on the presumed similarity of Chinese, Hindu and Mayan depictions. Both Asia and Mesoamerica dedicated shrines to serpents, and the cult of the serpent is seen in the most ancient civilized sites of Mesoamerica, including the Olmec occupation of Chalcatzingo (Coe 2001b:77) and La Venta (Hancock 1995:131f) as well as in ancient China and India (Mundkur 1976:429). However, the similarities appear to stop there. Mundkur (1976:429) successfully casts doubt on diffusionist claims when he notes that "the characteristics of the serpent cult in pre-Columbian civilized Mesoamerica... differ fundamentally from the serpent lore of India and Southeast Asia." Further, he notes that serpent worship is common not just to Asia and America but to nearly every known ancient culture and survived hunter-gatherers, from North America to Australia (Mundkur 1976:429). Something so universal cannot be taken to indicate common origin in historical times, though could conceivably point still further back to the Jungian archetypes that Victor Mansfield (1981) identified in the Mesoamerican pecked circles.
Both Asia and America seemed to share a penchant for making mandalas, the drawn or carved circles of divine meditation favored by Hindus and Buddhists. Victor Mansfield (1981:274) says that the Mesoamerican mandalas were of Teotihuacan origin and shared a similar shape and placement in temples to their Asian counterparts. He offers an explanation for the superficial similarity of Mesoamerican "pecked circles" to Asian mandalas: "the pecked circles may serve as calendars [1981:274]" because they have a cross within the circle whose arms tend to point to the direction of solstices and equinoxes. While Mansfield (1981: 274-275) goes on to offer an Jungian interpretation of the way universal psychic forces influenced mandala (and Christian labyrinth) designs, the calendar representation is the most likely, especially when one remembers that the Mesoamericans envisioned the universe in four parts, thus the cross divides the pecked circle into four sections. Of course, to the Asian-origin hypothesis's credit, Asian (especially Chinese) cosmology emphasized a quadripartite universe.
Yet, despite the stories and rumors surrounding Asian influence in Central America, there is very little hard evidence beyond the bark paper manufacturing technique. Coe (2001a:57) makes the point more succinctly: "[I]t should be categorically emphasized that no objects manufactured in the Old World have been identified in any Maya site." However, Coe (2001a:58) did agree that the Maya may have received Asian ideas "at a few times in their early history," though in no sense are they "derivative from Old World prototypes."
BEYOND HYPERDIFFUSIONISM
Thus far we have examined hypotheses that, while routed in old ideas of lost continents, dealt specifically with trans-oceanic origins for Mesoamerican civilization in an attempt to prove an Old World origin for New World civilization. The logical extension of this line of diffusionist thinking was a return to the nineteenth-century vision of a lost motherland for human civilization, this time with a space-age twist.
Swiss author Erich von Däniken (1969:viii) caused a sensation when he claimed "that our forefathers received visits from the universe in the remote past." Part obfuscation and part wild speculation, Däniken (1969:104) claimed that the Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent deity was a space alien because in his world, space aliens flew across the sky in rocket-ships, and these rockets seemed like snakes to the ancient Maya, who were presumably too stupid to understand much of anything: "How could anyone worship this repulsive creature as a god, and why could it fly as well? Among the Maya it could [von Däniken 1969:104]." Therefore, the Feathered Serpent must have been a rocket ship.
For von Däniken, the famed sarcophagus lid of Lord Pacal of Palenque shows not the "gigantic fleshless jaws ... the World Tree [and] the bird-monster Wuqub' Kaqix [Coe: 2001a:137]" but machinery: "today any child would identify his vehicle as a rocket [von Däniken 1969:100]." Almost thirty years later, Hancock (1995:151) argued after this line of reasoning that the tomb of Pacal "resembled a technological device much more strongly than it did... the king falling back into the fleshless jaws of the earth-monster." Only for Hancock, the agent responsible for this technology was not extraterrestrials, but "an older and a higher civilization [Hancock 1995:155]," not unlike the legendary Atlantis or Mu, long ago dismissed as improbable and unsupported by evidence. Thus the circle that began a century ago with Donnelly and then Churchward closes with more of the same.
Despite criticism from the scientific establishment, including famed scientist Carl Sagan, the ancient astronaut and lost civilization hypothesis remains popular. According to Omni (1994:77) "One of Sagan's original objections was the underlying assumption that our ancestors were apparently too stupid to create the monumental architecture of our past." And indeed, this is the theme that cuts across all the diffusionist ideas about the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. Each of these authors argues that the Mesoamericans were incapable of creating a unique, vital and exciting civilization on their own, and that they needed outside agents to help them overcome their mental handicaps.
This view is not only wrong, it is also racist. It is racist whether it comes from supporters of the Caucasian refugees of a lost continent (see Hancock 1995:102-104) or the Afrocentrists who see Africans as the superior race (see Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420). What these belief systems fail to understand is that humanity has no biological determinism, that intelligence and the ability to create and to understand are not characteristics belonging to races, but individuals (Jurmain et al. 1998:109). Mesoamericans had a long tradition of civilization and culture before the Spanish conquest, and no attempt to rewrite history can deny the ancient peoples of Mexico their cultural heritage.
by Jason Colavito
Mayan pyramid at Tikal
The early history of Mesoamerican studies is characterized by a grave dispute over the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. In many ways, this dispute is an argument over two lost continents, Atlantis and Mu, and where their survivors may have settled. Proponents of the Atlantis hypothesis argued that survivors of that lost continent spread to Africa and to Central America, giving rise to advanced civilizations like Egypt and the Maya (Orser 2001), while followers of Mu claimed that refugees from the lost Pacific continent ventured to China and Central America, giving rise to advanced civilizations (Tompkins 1976). That Mesoamerican civilization began in situ is never contemplated.
The two leading advocates of their respective theories were Ignatius Donnelly and Col. James Churchward. According to Prof. Charles Orser (2001) Donnelly, a former vice-presidential candidate, built upon the myth of Atlantis laid down by Plato and created a vision of the island-continent that would last for a century after his book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World ceased to be remembered: "It is, quite simply, the most significant pseudo-archaeology book ever written, and it has provided a roadmap for the flood of pseudo-archaeology that has come after it [Orser 2001]."
On the other end of the spectrum, Col. Churchward believed in an island civilization located in the Pacific Ocean, whose remains he believed can still be seen in the cyclopean ruins of the Polynesian islands, most notably the statues of Easter Island. Alternative historian Peter Tompkins (1976:364) says that Churchward's Mu was the origin of civilization with "one branch of colonization [which] ran from Mu to Central America, thence to Atlantis." In this scheme, civilization arrived in ancient Mesoamerica by a Pacific route, and Atlantis is downgraded to a colony of the greater Mu.
The conflict among these pre-modern diffusionist theories would lead generations of diffusionists to claim external origins for Mesoamerican civilization, much to the dismay of archaeologists, who tried to stop the robbing of indigenous cultures (see Haslip-Viera et al. 1997).
THE ATLANTIC CROSSING HYPOTHESIS
Donnelly placed Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean and had its descendants populate the Atlantic rim, bringing culture to the ignorant natives after the fall of the great island. This theory was eagerly adopted among the diffusionists of the nineteenth century because, as Tompkins (1976:36) recounts, "the similarity between Mexican and Egyptian pyramids, hieroglyphs, and calendars was too strongly indicative of the existence in the Atlantic of an intervening continent or group of islands, for which Plato's account of Atlantis fit the bill." Of course, having the side-effect of denying the native peoples a culture on par with that of the Europeans did nothing to retard the spread of diffusionism.
After the twentieth century rejection of the Atlantis hypothesis, speculation transformed the Atlantis hypothesis into transoceanic contact. However, even under this scenario, the connection is tenuous at best. The Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids bear no relation to each other in either form or function. As Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:427) point out, the Mexican pyramids were step-pyramids with wide, accessible stairs topped with temples while the Egyptian were regular pyramids with no access or temple-top. Furthermore, if the Egyptians did come to the New World, why should they have taught the Olmec of 1500 BC the pyramid-building techniques they themselves had stopped using hundreds of years earlier?
The same year that Tompkins wrote his alternative history of Mexican pyramid investigation, another researcher was using the old nineteenth century theories to formulate a different view of the origins of ancient Mexican civilization. As Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Warren Barbour (1997) discuss, Ivan van Sertima proposed that ancient Mesoamerica derived its civilization from transatlantic voyages by Africans. Van Sertima was on the forefront of the Afrocentric movement, and firmly believed that African (black) people were responsible for all of the ancient civilizations of earth: "In the case of the Americas, a more complicated scenario had to be advanced in order to account for the relative isolation of these continents and the geographic obstacles posed by the Atlantic and Pacific [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420]."
Van Sertima laid out a complex scenario of transatlantic voyages that relied upon two basic pieces of evidence: African plants in the New World, and African faces carved in ancient Olmec stones. The botanical evidence may be disposed of in a few sentences, but the stone heads will take a longer, more circuitous route to understand.
The botanical evidence for transoceanic contact basically boils down to the African bottle-gourd, which, Michael Coe (2001b:34) points out, was the first domesticate of Mesoamerican peoples, cultivated around 6500 BC. Van Sertima had argued that African voyagers brought the plant to the New World, the oldest African bottle gourds cultivated in the Old World date only to 3000 BC: "Thus gourds were first cultivated in the New World much earlier than in Egypt [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:429]." For knowledge of gourd cultivation to travel from Africa to Mexico, it would be necessary for the Africans to have been growing the gourd before the Mexicans, to whom they supposedly gave it. Furthermore, since the gourd is capable of traveling across the ocean unharmed, Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:429) argue that "there is no need to posit human transport to the New World" because there is no other evidence of introduced African species before Columbus.
On the other hand, the evidence for Africans immortalized in ancient Mexican stonework requires deeper and more complex treatment.
Jacques Soustelle (1985: 10, 14) reports that the Olmec culture first became known in 1862 with the discovery of the first colossal stone head, but the culture was not identified as something apart from the Maya until 1926. Thus, the first report of an Olmec head was tinged not just with the racial attitudes of the day but also with a complete void in the archaeological understanding of the region.
When nineteenth-century traveler José María Melgar y Serrano ventured deep into the Mexican jungle to investigate rumors of colossal stone statuary hidden amidst the verdant green forests, he had no way of knowing that he would set off more than a century of speculation into the transcontinental origins of Mesoamerican civilization. For Melgar y Serrano had discovered the first signs of the oldest high civilization in the Americas, the Olmec, and he was shocked by one of their colossal stone heads which seemed to him to bear an uncanny resemblance to African peoples: "As a work of art, it is, without exaggeration, a magnificent sculpture... but what most amazed me was that the type it represents is Ethiopian. I concluded that there had doubtless been blacks in this region, and from the very earliest stages of the world [Soustelle 1985:9]."
Over the course of the next hundred and forty years, scores of authors would write about the African appearance of the Olmec and hold up these colossal stone heads as proof that voyagers from Africa had given the Olmec the boon of civilization.
In 1995, alternative historian Graham Hancock released his massive tome, Fingerprints of the Gods, in which he expanded on the old diffusionist theories for the origin of the Olmec. In claiming that the Olmec heads were of African origin, Hancock (1995: 131) argued that "It would probably be impossible . . . for a sculptor to invent the different combined characteristics of an authentic racial type. The portrayal of an authentic combination of racial characteristics therefore implied strongly that a human model had been used." These traits referred to were apparently the broad noses and thick lips of the Olmec heads, which van Sertima, Hancock and others link to Africans.
However, as any biological anthropologist could demonstrate, phenotypes have virtually nothing to do with race. As Jurmain, Nelson, Kilgore and Trevathan (1998:108) note, race is not a biological concept: "the amount of genetic variation accounted for by differences between groups is vastly exceeded by the variation that exists within groups." As a result, "race is a meaningless concept [Jurmain et al. 1998:108]." So having thus established that there are no races to be depicted on the Olmec heads, next it must be shown that the heads do not share the same characteristics with their supposed models.
Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:423) spend a considerable amount of space discussing the evolutionary history of flat noses and wide lips as adaptations to the Mexican tropical climate. The old argument that Egyptians gave civilization to the Olmec is untenable by these heads because "Nubians and Egyptians have longer, thinner noses because they have lived in a desert (Haslip-Viera et al. 1997: 423)." That the heads were of West African (stereotypically black) origin is also refuted by noting that West Africans are prognathic (jutting jawed), while the Olmec heads are markedly not. Also, the Olmec heads have epicanthic eye-folds like Asians, while African populations do not. In other words, the Olmec heads show Mexican people: "they resembled people who still live in the tropical lowlands of Mexico [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:423]."
The African-origins hypothesis seemed initially to accord well with the hyperdiffusionist movement of the late nineteenth century. It was then assumed that civilization began in Egypt and spread from there to all corners of the world, and that the peoples of the Americas had to have received their civilization from outside sources because of their biological inferiority (Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420).
Of course, the late nineteenth century thinkers were troubled by the seemingly African features of the Olmec sculptures, since the Egyptians, whose civilization was the antecedent of all, were believed then to be Caucasian people. The so-called Negroid type was thought to be biologically inferior, as well. The genius of van Sertima's hypothesis was that it made the African phenotype the biologically superior one, and thus "established" that the old views were correct, but in the wrong color: "It is curious that this hypothesis has resurfaced in the late 20th century in revised form, with the biologically superior people now being identified as blacks' [Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420]."
The African origins hypothesis has been refuted successfully on purely scientific grounds. Nevertheless, the manifold theories of African origins, in the words of Jacques Sostelle [1985:10], "continue to haunt Mexican archaeology like unsuccessfully exorcised ghosts."
THE PACIFIC CROSSING HYPOTHESIS
If the Africa-origins thinkers traced the beginning of their theory to the fiery demise of Atlantis, so do the Asian-origins speculators find their own lost continent had a hand in shaping the rise of Mesoamerican civilization. Writing after the demise of Donnelly's Atlantis theories, Col. James Churchward declared in 1930 the fabulous land of Mu was a Pacific continent greater than Atlantis, and that Central America was but a colony of this great land. While Tompkins (1976:372) believes that the Mu myth could explain the origins of Mesoamerican civilization, Churward's "word can only be taken by those who wish to believe him." Without evidence to back up his claims, Churchward's theory of a lost continent fell to the dustbin of history, though the idea of trans-Pacific voyages did not.
Michael Coe (2001a:57) mentions that "the possibility of some trans-Pacific influence on Mesoamerican cultures cannot, however, be so easily dismissed." The Asian-influence hypothesis has a stronger basis in fact than its African competitor, though there is still precious little to go on.
The strongest, and indeed only hard piece of evidence for trans-Pacific contact is the use of a particular technique for the manufacture of bark paper, common to China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Mesoamerica. Coe (2001a:58) says that knowledge of this paper-making method "was diffused from eastern Indonesia to Mesoamerica at a very early date." He further argues that since bark paper was used to make books, information may have been exchanged between Pacific and Mesoamerican peoples. This seems to accord with Tompkin's (1976:353) version of ancient Chinese records, which he claims document a transoceanic voyage between China and Mesoamerica in the fifth century A.D. Yet even if true, this would provide no evidence for Asian influence, since Olmec civilization sprang into being around 1500 B.C. (Soustelle 1985:31) and Maya civilization was well into its Classic Period greatness centuries before the supposed voyage (Coe 2001b: 82). However, Tompkins (1976:353) claimed earlier connection between China and Mesoamerica around the twenty-third century B.C. He was forced to concede, however, that since "there are no known historical records for such early periods... these stories float in a limbo between fact and fiction [Tompkins 1976:354]."
Another attempt to relate Mesoamerican cosmology to the Chinese involved the calendar system. Coe states (2001a:57) that the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar cycle, with its animal symbolism, is a near-perfect analog to the Southeast Asian lunar calendar: "Furthermore, Asian and Mesoamerican cosmological systems, which emphasize a quadripartite universe of four cardinal points associated with specific colors, plants, animals, and even gods, are amazingly similar [Coe 2001a:57]." Balaji Mundkur (1978:541) challenged this idea decades ago, arguing that the comparison was faulty: "These comparisons seem feeble not only because they are superficial and intrinsically contradictory, but also because they are opposed by a vast body of [Asian] religious symbolism. Furthermore, they are chronologically incompatible with historical events." For Mundkur (1978:542), the differences between Asian and Mesoamerican art far outweigh the superficial resemblances, and art analysis can only provide a subjective connection between the Old and New Worlds, especially since so much of the Asian culture supposedly borrowed by Mesoamericans actually arose hundreds of years after the rise of the Maya and Mexican civilizations.
But the superficial similarity in artistic styles has given rise to another line of argument. Among the most common arguments for trans-Pacific contact with Mesoamerica is a shared cult of the serpent, based on the presumed similarity of Chinese, Hindu and Mayan depictions. Both Asia and Mesoamerica dedicated shrines to serpents, and the cult of the serpent is seen in the most ancient civilized sites of Mesoamerica, including the Olmec occupation of Chalcatzingo (Coe 2001b:77) and La Venta (Hancock 1995:131f) as well as in ancient China and India (Mundkur 1976:429). However, the similarities appear to stop there. Mundkur (1976:429) successfully casts doubt on diffusionist claims when he notes that "the characteristics of the serpent cult in pre-Columbian civilized Mesoamerica... differ fundamentally from the serpent lore of India and Southeast Asia." Further, he notes that serpent worship is common not just to Asia and America but to nearly every known ancient culture and survived hunter-gatherers, from North America to Australia (Mundkur 1976:429). Something so universal cannot be taken to indicate common origin in historical times, though could conceivably point still further back to the Jungian archetypes that Victor Mansfield (1981) identified in the Mesoamerican pecked circles.
Both Asia and America seemed to share a penchant for making mandalas, the drawn or carved circles of divine meditation favored by Hindus and Buddhists. Victor Mansfield (1981:274) says that the Mesoamerican mandalas were of Teotihuacan origin and shared a similar shape and placement in temples to their Asian counterparts. He offers an explanation for the superficial similarity of Mesoamerican "pecked circles" to Asian mandalas: "the pecked circles may serve as calendars [1981:274]" because they have a cross within the circle whose arms tend to point to the direction of solstices and equinoxes. While Mansfield (1981: 274-275) goes on to offer an Jungian interpretation of the way universal psychic forces influenced mandala (and Christian labyrinth) designs, the calendar representation is the most likely, especially when one remembers that the Mesoamericans envisioned the universe in four parts, thus the cross divides the pecked circle into four sections. Of course, to the Asian-origin hypothesis's credit, Asian (especially Chinese) cosmology emphasized a quadripartite universe.
Yet, despite the stories and rumors surrounding Asian influence in Central America, there is very little hard evidence beyond the bark paper manufacturing technique. Coe (2001a:57) makes the point more succinctly: "[I]t should be categorically emphasized that no objects manufactured in the Old World have been identified in any Maya site." However, Coe (2001a:58) did agree that the Maya may have received Asian ideas "at a few times in their early history," though in no sense are they "derivative from Old World prototypes."
BEYOND HYPERDIFFUSIONISM
Thus far we have examined hypotheses that, while routed in old ideas of lost continents, dealt specifically with trans-oceanic origins for Mesoamerican civilization in an attempt to prove an Old World origin for New World civilization. The logical extension of this line of diffusionist thinking was a return to the nineteenth-century vision of a lost motherland for human civilization, this time with a space-age twist.
Swiss author Erich von Däniken (1969:viii) caused a sensation when he claimed "that our forefathers received visits from the universe in the remote past." Part obfuscation and part wild speculation, Däniken (1969:104) claimed that the Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent deity was a space alien because in his world, space aliens flew across the sky in rocket-ships, and these rockets seemed like snakes to the ancient Maya, who were presumably too stupid to understand much of anything: "How could anyone worship this repulsive creature as a god, and why could it fly as well? Among the Maya it could [von Däniken 1969:104]." Therefore, the Feathered Serpent must have been a rocket ship.
For von Däniken, the famed sarcophagus lid of Lord Pacal of Palenque shows not the "gigantic fleshless jaws ... the World Tree [and] the bird-monster Wuqub' Kaqix [Coe: 2001a:137]" but machinery: "today any child would identify his vehicle as a rocket [von Däniken 1969:100]." Almost thirty years later, Hancock (1995:151) argued after this line of reasoning that the tomb of Pacal "resembled a technological device much more strongly than it did... the king falling back into the fleshless jaws of the earth-monster." Only for Hancock, the agent responsible for this technology was not extraterrestrials, but "an older and a higher civilization [Hancock 1995:155]," not unlike the legendary Atlantis or Mu, long ago dismissed as improbable and unsupported by evidence. Thus the circle that began a century ago with Donnelly and then Churchward closes with more of the same.
Despite criticism from the scientific establishment, including famed scientist Carl Sagan, the ancient astronaut and lost civilization hypothesis remains popular. According to Omni (1994:77) "One of Sagan's original objections was the underlying assumption that our ancestors were apparently too stupid to create the monumental architecture of our past." And indeed, this is the theme that cuts across all the diffusionist ideas about the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. Each of these authors argues that the Mesoamericans were incapable of creating a unique, vital and exciting civilization on their own, and that they needed outside agents to help them overcome their mental handicaps.
This view is not only wrong, it is also racist. It is racist whether it comes from supporters of the Caucasian refugees of a lost continent (see Hancock 1995:102-104) or the Afrocentrists who see Africans as the superior race (see Haslip-Viera et al. 1997:420). What these belief systems fail to understand is that humanity has no biological determinism, that intelligence and the ability to create and to understand are not characteristics belonging to races, but individuals (Jurmain et al. 1998:109). Mesoamericans had a long tradition of civilization and culture before the Spanish conquest, and no attempt to rewrite history can deny the ancient peoples of Mexico their cultural heritage.
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