Atlantis: What is it all about?

[Birdjaguar]

Up to half of Earth's water may come from solar wind and space dust

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-earth-solar-space.html

The source is the same as your previous post about earth's water.

 

[Berzerker]

Quoting Genesis for science isn't a good idea

[1:16] God made the two great lights - the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night - and the stars.

The moon isn't even a light; it reflects that of the Sun. God was supposed to know that since he created them.
I also like that "and the stars" is just something secondary

People understood the moon was reflecting the sun and they included light giving (reflecting) celestial bodies as heavenly luminaries. I noticed that about how the stars were just thrown in like an after thought. Before that Genesis talks about lights in the vault of Heaven, lights to serve for time keeping, signs, etc... then comes, oh yeah, btw, and the stars. So what are these others lights? The planets.

The authors were monotheists editing a polytheistic creation story with a dozen gods playing roles in creation. So they all became lights, they wont be competing with God. Even Marduk slaying Tiamat the dragon is gone from the story (well, not entirely), just "light".

They dumped the metaphorical hero kills monster and narrowed creation down to... light... the light of colliding worlds. What was the immediate result of God's 'light'? The dark, water covered world in Gen 1:2 was spinning. God called the light 'day' and the dark 'night' and that was the 1st day.

It is also not part of all mythologies. For example in the Thegonia Earth (Gaia) exists before water (Oceanos). Furthermore, Oceanos was born from Gaia and Ouranos (the sky).

Oceanos represents the seas/rivers, Chaos represents the primordial world before Gaia. Chaos is a common theme in myth, the creator typically defeats Chaos to establish order. In the Enuma Elish the water dragon Tiamat represents Chaos and Marduk slays her to create heaven and earth.

oh... Tiamat was split in two like a flatfish to form heaven and earth

heaven isn't the universe

 

[Berzerker]

It's not that the lifespan is 120 years, it's 120 years from when God gets disgusted to when He wipes out humanity with the Flood. It's a countdown. That verse is commonly misunderstood.

To be fair to God, according to Sitchin's reading of the flood texts he thinks the gods couldn't stop the flood and had to flee in horror themselves but they agreed to keep it a secret from man, Enki warned the Sumerian Noah anyway.

That is not a creation story. It is like saying: the earth was covered in molten rock before dry land and life.

BTW, can you point to a science link that confirms that water did cover the earth before dry land appeared?

But that is our creation story, molten rock covered everything before land and life. Our ancestors believed water covered everything, that is how their creation stories begin. Both are possible depending on where Earth formed and how. If the Earth formed at the asteroid belt it would have been surrounded by water, impacts were hitting a very deep ocean. Water would immediately begin pouring into molten craters and the atmosphere would have been extremely thick with steam constantly rising from the surface.

Or... the Earth formed here and astronomers are looking for ways to import our water. What environment did Earth's first known rocks/minerals form?

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/03/ancient-earth-may-have-been-a-water-world-without-any-dry-land

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks

The graph down the right shows water from 4.4 - 4 bya. Frankly they're guessing at what came before water at 4.4 bya. I think they're still assuming there was a period where a molten surface covered everything, maybe after the Theia-Moon forming impact, but it wouldn't take long at all for water to cover the damage done by Theia.

https://earthsky.org/earth/ancient-earth-water-world-global-ocean-harvard/

the last link is to a researcher who says the mantle was hotter in the past so more water was pushed toward the surface. Makes sense... As mantle temps cooled more water could be stored thereby lowering sea levels.

Misunderstood by some. I think we would agree that much more of the bible is "misunderstood". The 120 year prophecy goes along with Noah being 480 years old at the time and the entire flood story. There is little point in accepting "X means this" unless you also accept all the rest that goes with it. I do recognize that a now outdated interpretation sets the `120 years as man's lifespan and "improved reading" of the bible has changed what is true.

In any case @Berzerker is saying that the "120 years" were actually 432,000 years. the bible is wrong.

How do you mine gold on earth for 432,000 years and never run out or leave a trace?

Noah was 600 when the flood happened but the Bible was not wrong, the 120 years was God talking to his colleagues just as the Sumerian god Enlil decreed man's end via flood to his fellow gods. The Bible makes a distinction between God's time and human time, Berossus is key to understanding that distinction - 120 Sars = 432,000 years. A year to God is 3,600 years to us. Thats why Sitchin thinks Nibiru's orbit takes ~3600 years. I dont know about evidence of ancient mining.

The source is the same as your previous post about earth's water.

Good timing... The sun produces water, fresh water. According to the Enuma Elish the Abzu's (sun) fresh water mixed with Tiamat's (proto-Earth) salt water. Your article says Earth's water is a mixture of the Suns fresh water and water found at the asteroid belt. Thats more evidence in support of Sitchin.

 

[r16]

just an another pointless r16 post but the Japanese were onto it long before anyone ... Supposedly this relates to some Dr. Who episode ?

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Supposedly this relates to some Dr. Who episode ?

"Pyramids of Mars" I presume. I guess with Sutekh defeated, UNIT figured it could repurpose the site as a field base.

 

[Kyriakos]

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

(by H.G. Wells)

 

[r16]

have both ends covered ...

Spoiler :

edit: stupid gif works even slower than r16 the starfighter designer ! Now inside to lessen the eyesore . Thanks for the TV episode and full text of a famous thing , both them two posts above .

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Noah was 600 when the flood happened but the Bible was not wrong, the 120 years was God talking to his colleagues just as the Sumerian god Enlil decreed man's end via flood to his fellow gods. The Bible makes a distinction between God's time and human time, Berossus is key to understanding that distinction - 120 Sars = 432,000 years. A year to God is 3,600 years to us. Thats why Sitchin thinks Nibiru's orbit takes ~3600 years. I dont know about evidence of ancient mining.

A year is the time it takes whatever planet you're on to revolve around its primary once. Otherwise you're expressing it in terms of how many Earth years it takes for whatever planet, comet, etc. to make one orbit.

Pluto hasn't made even one orbit since its discovery in 1930. Its orbit is 248 Earth years. Pluto is a very cold place. And you're still insisting that people live on a planet that takes 3600 years to make one orbit?

As for mining... gold mines can play out in a matter of years, or decades. You're not going to find ANY gold mines that last for over 400,000 years.

"Pyramids of Mars" I presume. I guess with Sutekh defeated, UNIT figured it could repurpose the site as a field base.

We had an open house in our hotel room, the year that NonCon (the Alberta regional science fiction convention) was held in Red Deer. A friend of mine had several dozen Doctor Who videos - mostly Tom Baker stories - and brought them with her from Calgary. We rented a VCR, and had an open room for 12 hours/day on Saturday and Sunday (this was over Thanksgiving weekend in 1984) so any Doctor Who fans who wanted to watch videos could come in, sit, and watch. They could ask for whichever stories they wanted after the current one was finished... and for some reason nearly all of them kept asking for Pyramids of Mars .

I saw that one about 3 times that weekend (keeping in mind that entire Doctor Who stories were approximately 90 minutes long back then).

I am so sick of that one that I've never watched it since.

 

[Harv]

It looks like I'm the only person who voted that we don't know enough to determine one way or the other. That means I'm very likely to be wrong, because a lot of very highly intelligent people hang out here. I was torn between choosing that one and choosing the "kernel of truth" theory.

I will read some more posts here and edit more comments if I still have time tonight.
......
When I was a kid, I read a lot of the books from the Time Machine series. My best description of it was they were published in the 1980's and they are what I would call historical fiction where they center the story around you (or your character). They had one book about Atlantis, so they had you exploring the world centered around Mycenean Greece.

I think they went with Minoan civilization, and the eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera. That might be a barometer of the prevailing opinions of academics at the time - or they might have considered a few theories and chosen one of them.
.........

Going along with the timeline of the Mycenean civilization and the end of the Bronze Age, I understand that around 1200 BCE, the world was getting completely wrecked, but the textbooks I had said very little about it, apart from a single-sentence comment that the civilized world was going through a general crisis.

Later in life, I listened to some youtube videos about the Bronze Age Collapse, where the civilized world got wrecked in the span of about 40 years. In terms of Civ4 - somebody axe-rushed the entire Eastern Mediterranean and we know little about these people.

40 years also coincides with the biblical story of the Exodus. Maybe Moses was wandering in the desert for 40 years not because he was lost and refused to admit it and ask for directions, but because the world was getting wrecked.
.........

So back to the subject, the kernel of truth I might speculate at is it might be a reference to that time period. However........

Plato got the story from Egyptian priests, did he not?

....and what does Herodotus say about this story?

 

[Berzerker]

I think Plato said he got it from Solon who visited Egypt around 590 BC, so that would place Atlantis about 9600 BC which coincides with seas rising. Thats kinda why I think Atlantis should be under water now like the Biblical Garden, but what we might find are settlements and colonies. The 'Sea Peoples' invaded the eastern Mediterranean about the time of the Exodus and you might have a good point about the delay of 40 years in the desert.

Certainly they would have known of the invasion, might even be related to the motive for the exodus since the Egyptians were under attack too. Its possible Plato meant 900 years before his time and not 9000 years before Solon. I still think its the latter, the Greeks had extensive stories about their heroes from the time of Troy, they wouldn't need Egyptian priests to remind them about Atlantis if it happened around the same time. Gobekli Tepe makes Atlantis more believable.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Solar vs lunar calendar makes the difference. The lunar calendar puts the story approximate to Thera. The Egyptians used the Lunar calendar and they had the story. Egypt did not suffer a dark age. Homer is the sole documented story that survived the Greek dark ages. Even writing didn't.

The culture of Thera was both Cycladian and Minoan, but distinctly itself. The Mycenaeans were rivals with both Thera and the Minoans on Crete. The volcanic eruption at Thera destroyed it completely in a day and so weakened Crete that they ceased to be the dominant traders of the region and succumbed to Mycenaean invasion after the Mycenaeans recovered from the Thera explosion. Then within a few hundred years the Mycenaeans disappeared. Given the Dark Age period and the total loss of any history, from the perspective of Solon and Plato, it would seem that both Atlantis and Athens (Mycenae) were destroyed at the same time. Remember it was a thousand years in their past.

Cycladic Culture: 3200 - 1900 BCE
Minoan Culture: 1800 – 1450 BCE
Mycenaean Culture: 1600 – 1100 BCE
~1600 BCE Thera explosion destroys Santorini and wreaks havoc on Minoan Culture
~1350 BCE Atlantean War based on Egyptian Lunar calendar conversion
~1190 Trojan War
Dark Age: 1100 – 800 BCE
Archaic Greece: 800 – 500 BCE
~750 BCE Homer’s Illiad
~600 BCE Solon visits Egypt
Classical Greece: 500 – 338 BCE
~360 Plato writings

Plato is writing 1000 years after the war he is describing. The only record of that war is from Egypt 250 years earlier than Plato wrote.

 

[Harv]

The dark age you describe is from 1100 to 800 BCE. Mycenaean culture precedes this. I think they use "Linear B" script. I do not know what stories and records we have from writings from this era. The timeline you present indicates about 600 BCE Solon visits Egypt. I think Solon belonged to a different Greek culture living in the same region, but the Egyptians would have identified him as being from that people group.

A question I have is - Did Solon and the Greeks living in that area understand this script or did they forget and adopt a new one? (from the Phonecians, I believe)
.................

I don't believe anybody linked the Wikipedia article. Here it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis

Timaeus is cited in the article:

For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.[21]

Plato. "Timaeus". Translated by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library. Section 24e-25a.

Atlantic Ocean and the Pillars of Heracles
I do not know what names the Egyptians had for the Mediterranean Sea, the Western Mediterranean Sea, or the Atlantic Ocean. Is a misinterpretation possible?
I have the same question about the Pillars of Heracles. What did the Egyptians call it?

When I made the first post, I was going with a reference to the Sea Peoples invasion, but I thought they came from much closer than that, but what seems to be a very long way away. That would put the Atlantic Ocean and beyond the Pillars of Heracles an exaggeration. Maybe when Solon was visiting Egypt, he was having a discussion with their priests and comparing subjects such as Geography and History - and he was lining up the Egyptian story of the Sea People invasion with whatever story he had of a similar event.

The "navigable" part of the dialog might be an addition in order to leave open open questions out of the dialog.

 

[Berzerker]

Ice age geography....what a weird world. In my limited browsing of flood myths apparently Africa doesn't have as many

the video explains why, African sea levels didn't change much. The Red Sea became a lake and so did the Mediterranean, but compared to other parts of the world they didn't see big floods

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Ice age geography....what a weird world. In my limited browsing of flood myths apparently Africa doesn't have as many

the video explains why, African sea levels didn't change much. The Red Sea became a lake and so did the Mediterranean, but compared to other parts of the world they didn't see big floods

Interesting video. It's fascinating to see how landmasses have changed over tens of thousands and millions of years. Where I'm sitting right now used to be at the bottom of an inland sea, a very considerable amount of time before the last ice age.

Traveling south between here and Calgary, you can see evidence of the last glaciers' retreat in some of the landforms. We have the glaciers to thank for our spectacular Rocky Mountain lakes.

 

[Berzerker]

unfortunately for Canada those advancing and retreating ice sheets plowed up the top soil and dumped it in the USA

I linked the video because its cool even though it didn't show the Canary Islands or Bahamas, the Canaries are tectonically active

people were traveling between old and new worlds going back thousands of years. A PBS Nova docu on the Lost Red Paint People showed them to be a maritime deep sea fishing culture using very similar technology in Maine and Rhode Island and Denmark, these were the megalith builders.

During the ice age with seas 400-500 ft lower ice shelves made boating the N Atlantic possible with plenty of sea life for hunting. When the world warmed the Atlantic became a more dangerous trip but legends of lands to the west and east are found in the myths of peoples on either side of the Atlantic.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The Nova show dates back to 1987. Surprisingly, there has been no follow up that I can find to show that the show was anything other than idle speculation. The artifacts of them shown and talked about in the last link below are just grave goods of high quality. The grave goods seem to be no older than about 3000 years.

Any traces of actual seafaring boats for your ancient navigators?

The Red Paint People are a Pre-Columbian culture indigenous to the New England and Atlantic Canada regions of North America. They were named after their burials, which used large quantities of ochre, normally red, to cover both the bodies of the dead and grave goods. Sometimes they are known as the Moorehead Phase of the Laurentian Tradition or the Moorehead burial tradition after Warren K. Moorehead who brought them widely to the attention of scientists. They flourished between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE. Alternatively, they can be called by the period in which they lived, either the "Maritime Archaic" (emphasizing a coastal and seafaring culture) or "Late Archaic" (emphasizing time and leaving open the possibility of living inland seasonally), although these terms often cover the longer period from 7000 BCE to 1000 CE. Multiple hypotheses exist as to which if any later peoples might be their descendants and there is little archaeological evidence to support any hypothesis.

Their burial culture was more elaborate than any subsequent culture in the area. In the southern portion of their range, they were succeeded by the Susquehana culture which used pottery, and no evidence of their stoneworking techniques is found in that culture.

This link is to an old teachers study guide on the film. The guide's author is likely now dead no trace of him other than his guide.
http://bullfrogfilms.com/guides/paintguide.pdf

Lost red paint people of Maine ~2000 BC; better stuff starts about page 35.
https://penbay.org/redpaint/thelostredpaintpeopleofmaine/reppaintpg43.html

 

[Kyriakos]

The dark age you describe is from 1100 to 800 BCE. Mycenaean culture precedes this. I think they use "Linear B" script. I do not know what stories and records we have from writings from this era. The timeline you present indicates about 600 BCE Solon visits Egypt. I think Solon belonged to a different Greek culture living in the same region, but the Egyptians would have identified him as being from that people group.

A question I have is - Did Solon and the Greeks living in that area understand this script or did they forget and adopt a new one? (from the Phonecians, I believe)
.................

I don't believe anybody linked the Wikipedia article. Here it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis

Timaeus is cited in the article:



Atlantic Ocean and the Pillars of Heracles
I do not know what names the Egyptians had for the Mediterranean Sea, the Western Mediterranean Sea, or the Atlantic Ocean. Is a misinterpretation possible?
I have the same question about the Pillars of Heracles. What did the Egyptians call it?

When I made the first post, I was going with a reference to the Sea Peoples invasion, but I thought they came from much closer than that, but what seems to be a very long way away. That would put the Atlantic Ocean and beyond the Pillars of Heracles an exaggeration. Maybe when Solon was visiting Egypt, he was having a discussion with their priests and comparing subjects such as Geography and History - and he was lining up the Egyptian story of the Sea People invasion with whatever story he had of a similar event.

The "navigable" part of the dialog might be an addition in order to leave open open questions out of the dialog.

An island larger than "Asia and Libya together" would make it almost twice the size of Asia (Libya was what the continent of Africa was called by ancient Greeks). Such a thing could barely even fit in the Atlantic, one has to suppose, unless the planet was mostly land.

In mythology, Herakles open up the med to the Atlantic, in his quest to take some stuff some an island hoplite-farmer person with many heads and other limbs (Gerion), who lived in some island in the Atlantic.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The dark age you describe is from 1100 to 800 BCE. Mycenaean culture precedes this. I think they use "Linear B" script. I do not know what stories and records we have from writings from this era. The timeline you present indicates about 600 BCE Solon visits Egypt. I think Solon belonged to a different Greek culture living in the same region, but the Egyptians would have identified him as being from that people group.

A question I have is - Did Solon and the Greeks living in that area understand this script or did they forget and adopt a new one? (from the Phonecians, I believe)

Linear A existed prior to the Greek Dark Age. It has not been translated. Knowledge of it did not survive the Dark Age.

Solon lived in the pre-classical period in Greek history as the underpinnings of the Classic period were being laid down.

 

[Harv]

An island larger than "Asia and Libya together" would make it almost twice the size of Asia (Libya was what the continent of Africa was called by ancient Greeks). Such a thing could barely even fit in the Atlantic, one has to suppose, unless the planet was mostly land.

I thought Asia at that time meant Asia Minor, or Anatolia, or what is now Turkey. Area is about 770 000 km². For some reason, I thought Libya referred to the coastal region of northern Africa - or at least the known regions of Africa. I might do well to look up the geography as defined by Herodotus. He does say he does not know the extent of these continents - so it is hard to claim Atlantis is larger than Asia and Africa put together when you do not know the extent of Asia or Africa.

I was certainly not taking this literally. Otherwise, the combination of North and South America would be the closest.

Linear A existed prior to the Greek Dark Age. It has not been translated. Knowledge of it did not survive the Dark Age.

I thought Linear A was associated with the Minoans. If Linear B did not survive the dark age, that might make sense, in that the Greeks imported their alphabet.

 

[Kyriakos]

Asia wasn't explored (nor Africa), but at least as far as India was known to exist (it didn't just refer to Asia Minor).
Besides, if the egyptian priests said that about Atlantis, it would show they didn't know better geography either ^_^