Was there really an Atlantis?

According to Plato, Atlantis was an ancient civilization destroyed by an earthquake over 10,000 years ago. Join Katie and Sarah as they take a look at the myth of Atlantis -- and the bizarre theories surrounding its location -- in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and Sarah and I.
As usual, we're talking about books today and I had
read The Lost City of z over the summer, which

(00:22):
if you haven't picked it up, is amazing. It's all
about the search in the Amazon for a what may
or may not be a mythical city. I'm not going
to tell you the answer, something we might actually want
a podcast on in the future, but it got us
talking about how the search for lost or mythical cities
sometimes unearthed a lot of real stuff and we actually
do some real exploring. And one of the best examples

(00:46):
we thought of for this is the Golden City of
El Dorado. The streets were supposed to be page in gold,
and obviously all the gold hungry explorers went looking for
it and consequently mapped a lot of South America. And
another one was the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, which
was supposed to have castles in the air, and in

(01:07):
the hunt for this, explorers mapped a lot of the
southwestern United States. And it's not true that space is
the only unexplored frontier really, because according to Noah, of
the underwater realm is still unexplored. So all you adventurers
out there and get out your scoopa equipment. So today
we're going to talk about another lost city, Atlantis. Yeah,

(01:30):
that that no effect probably should have glued you in.
So Atlantis starts back with Plato. He's the first real
primary source we have for any of this, and he
started on what was supposed to be a trilogy of dialogues.
Book one was Timaeus. He did half of his second book, Critius,
and he never did book three. And all the dialogues

(01:52):
talk about the creation of world, the nature of man,
and they also mentioned Atlantis and Atlantis. The story of
it starts with Poseidon, the god of the ocean, who
was given the island of Atlantis when the Greek gods
divvied up everything, and he fell in love with a
mortal woman of Clito, and they had ten kids, five

(02:13):
sets of twin boys. And he remakes the island that
he's given for her, surrounding it with moats, and it's
just the ideal utopian land, right, And it's very circular
in design. There's an island in the middle, there's a moat,
there's a strip of land in a circle, another moat,
another strip of land in a circle, and then more water,

(02:34):
and no one could get to the island because of
course there weren't ships at the time, so it was
cut off from everything else. But over time he gave
the best part of this land to his oldest son, Atlas,
and it grew to be an incredibly prosperous place. They
had bridges and canals and connected it to the outside
world again, and Um just built it up, so it

(02:55):
was this splendid city with castles and um everything you
could imagine horse tracks randomly or a sign of a
really great city, so Um be assured Atlantis had them.
But like with so many great civilizations, it became greedy
and corrupt, and the Atlanteans began fighting wars and enslaving

(03:17):
the people they conquered, and they even went after the
great city state of Athens. And they finally got their
come upance when an earthquake swallowed them in UH nine thousand,
six hundred BC, which in my notes after that I wrote, bam,
so that's the end. That's what happened. So that's the story. Yeah,
that's the story. And to me it sounds like a

(03:41):
nice story about a civilization that has become too corrupt
and too violent, which, uh, from Plato's perspective, that's a
pretty good warning for the city of Athens. Watch out, Athenians.
Maybe we're also coming too combative or too money driven. Um.
But not everyone saw it as this allegory or myth. Right,

(04:06):
some of his own students that he was telling this
truth like Cranter, although Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, said
he who invented Atlantis, also destroyed it trying to say,
you know, come on, this is a story. So so
most people at the time accepted it as a myth,
as a story that Plato had created, a lesson, if
you will. But as time went on, people started to

(04:27):
get more interested in this myth and trying to interpret
it is fact and hunt for the loscity of Atlantis
and the idea that there was a huge continent that
was past the Pillars of Hercules, which is the modern
day Straits of Gibraltar, which is where Plato placed Atlantis,
was pretty unlikely. As we got sophisticated or more sophisticated

(04:51):
ocean mapping technology in the twentieth century and learning how
the plates worked, and yeah, there there probably wasn't going
to be this enormous continent under the Atlantic Ocean, and
but that hasn't stopped lots of people from placing Atlantis
pretty much anywhere in the world. We have. Recent candidates
have been the Caribbean, South America, Antarctica, Ireland, French Polynesia,

(05:14):
the Canaries, the Azores, Tunisia, West Africa, Sweden, Iceland, and Spain.
So basically anywhere. I'm sure there are other ones, do
you Basically, yeah, anywhere you can think of Atlantis. But
my favorite connection with Atlantis is the fascination the Nazis
had with it, which is completely insane. And it starts
with a Swedish guy named Olaf Redback who said he

(05:36):
had found Atlantis in Sweden, of all places, which of
course has nothing to do with anything that Plato wrote
Pillars of Hercules. Yeah, not so much. He said that
the biblical Jaffe came to Sweden after the Great Flood
and then gave birth to Atlas, which perhaps you remember's son, No,
it's someone else's, according to Redback, and he came up

(05:56):
with lots of rationalizations whenever his didn't make sense. For example,
swee and is nowhere near the straits of Gibraltar. Well,
perhaps that was a mistranslation then, and some of his
research was picked up by a theosophist named Helena Blavatsky,
who expounded on some of his stuff and added some
more of her own. I was excited to see her

(06:16):
name in Katie's outline because she popped up in an
article I wrote a few years ago about karma and secularizing. Yeah,
she's actually considered responsible for secularizing karma in the West.
So it's not just a religious thing. It's something that
can be in a pop song, right that we used
someone incorrectly all the time. But this particular religion became

(06:39):
popular when the Third Reich decided that Christianity had too
much of a Jewish influence and maybe people should find
some other religion to take a part in. And her
idea was that when Atlanta sank because some of the
elite priests escaped from the city and they went to Shambala,
a mythical place in the Himalayas, and the Arians, a
completely new race, learned from the Atlanteans all of their wisdom,

(07:02):
which she said involved things like inventing airplanes and explosives,
although I'd like to add the Theosophists also said there
was an entire sunken continent named MoU. So perhaps they're
the most reliable, and they were waiting for the Aquarian Age,
a time of enlightenment and brotherhood. So it makes me
want to see the Age of Aquarius. But I'm not gonna.
We're gonna, We're gonna avoid that. So, of course, who

(07:24):
likes this arian stuff. That would be the Nazis, especially
Heinrich Himmler, who believed in all sorts of weird stuff,
like glacial cosmogeny, which was the idea that the whole
universe was a conflict between fire and ice basically since
the dawn of time. It's kind of James Taylor esque,
it is. I'm sorry, I don't want to compare him
to the Knox. It's not what I was trying to hear.

(07:47):
But he was in charge as part of the s S,
as part of the National Heritage Institute, and so he
had access to all sorts of scientists, scholars, and archaeologists
who he sent out on missions to find Atlantis. He's
we know for sure. He sent people to Tibet to
look for this place in Shambala where perhaps the Atlanteans
might have given their wisdom to the Arians. And that's

(08:08):
a common theme in people who believe there was an
Atlantis that uh, they passed on their wisdom to the
great ancient civilizations. A lot of people have a hard
time or I don't know if it's a lot some
people have a hard time accepting that, uh, the megaliths
in Great Britain were built, you know, just people were

(08:31):
inspired to build them and think that maybe the people
of Atlantis taught them how pyramids. That's another a popular example.
Anything like that is saying, well, it's too advanced for
the people at that time to and it must have
been part of the super race. Anything that's too impressive.
The Atlanteans must have helped out. Yeah, they didn't believe

(08:51):
that particular Tibetan city that they went to could have
been formed by the people who lived there, which is insulting.
But another Himler associate named Edmund Kiss decided that it
was in the Andes, and another one came up with
some idea of polar shift in runs coming from the Atlanteans,
and then Otto Huff decided it was in the Canary Islands.
But this wasn't even about history. And that's the thing

(09:13):
about Atlantis. People read what they want to into it,
and for the Nazis and especially Himmler, it was a
way to figure out the racial superiority, giving the pseudo
scientific reason or pseudo historical reason as to why Atlantis
was so great and so was the Arian race. Yeah.
One of the one of the theories that's a little
more accepted than than those the Aliens and teaching ancient

(09:38):
civilizations is that Atlantis was increte. Uh. The accomplished Minoan
civilization there collapsed in the middle of the second millennium
bc UM, probably from a volcanic eruption that was on
the era which is the modern santorini Um, So that

(09:59):
that theory has holds a little more weight for some
people than the more off the wall ideas as the aliens,
which I seriously think that's my favorite one, and the
idea goes that they accidentally blew themselves up with a
nuclear bomb. It's another and more or lesson about the
dangers of technology, but a little bit different, or the
one that they were behind the cro magnan and cave paintings. Well,

(10:21):
a lot of these potential Atlantis locale sound not very
hospitable Antarctica especially. I'd say, um, there's one in particular
that might be the Atlantis you would most want to
visit should it be true, or even if there's not,
an Atlanthara and I are happy to go and explore
this to our fullest abilities. And that's a Bimini in

(10:43):
the Bahamas. Edgar Casey, who was a clairvoyant psychic, he
would go into trances and read fortunes and predict things.
He had a vision that Atlantis was located from the
Gulf of Mexico to Gibraltar, so at least we have
the pillars of Hercules in there, unlike the Sweden theory.

(11:03):
But it was destroyed in a final catastrophic event circa
ten thousand BC, which again puts it about where Plato
said or earlier, right, yeah, a lot earlier. Yeah, But
he founded an Association for Research and Enlightenment, and that
group today has focused their efforts on the Biminy Island

(11:24):
chain Uh. They go on dives and search for traces
of Atlantis, and they actually believed that bminy Uh were
mountaintops in Atlantis they were really high ground, and that
the world's oceans were a lot lower. And he claimed
that there was a record hall on Bimony, Uh that

(11:44):
was identical to one under the Sphinx, which just sounds
like a really tangential connection. Um, and this housed all
of the ancient records of Atlantis. But it's interesting how
that so many of them seemed to try to tie together,
all these cultures that have nothing in common, Like they
couldn't have sprouted up independently of one another. They must

(12:05):
have come from that one original source. One civilization basically
gave everyone the blueprints for advanced civilization. And of course
it must have been Atlantis. But you said something cool
that was a little bit more recent. Yeah, just earlier
this year, Google Earth launched a new underwater search tool,
and so, like people do on Google Earth, they start

(12:27):
looking around, and um, folks started noticing a grid like
pattern off the western coast of Africa, which of course
is another suspected Atlantis site. I mean, what isn't and uh?
The product manager of Ocean in Google Earth debunked the
rumors and said that the lines were quote artificial data

(12:48):
remnants left by sonar equipped boats collecting data from the
ocean floor. That's kind of a lot of technical jargon
for me. But um, as far as he knew, the
research from those boats, or the research that those boats
were conducting, was not Atlantis related at all. It does
look cool though. I saw a picture of it. It

(13:10):
looks kind of like an underwater street grid. Well, and
if you're looking for that kind of thing, that would
be a good place to start. But you also had
a really good quote that you told me earlier. Yeah,
and this is why people aren't going to give up
searching for Atlantis. Richard Ellis, who is the author of
Imagining Atlantis, wrote that Atlantis lives on in people's minds

(13:31):
largely because you cannot prove it doesn't exist. You can't
search every inch of the ocean bottom, and so the
hope remains alive and the promise of finding treasures in
sunken palaces. It's like that pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow. You're going to continue looking, except
under all of the world's oceans, which is a little
harder to find perhaps. But let us know what you
think about Atlantis and what your ideas are. Because I

(13:54):
talked to a couple of people who actually thought that
Sarah was a plausible explanation, So email us at has
three podcast at how stuff works dot com, and if
you're into conspiracy theories and Nazis and all that, you
should check out our newest podcast, Stuff They Don't Want
You to Know on iTunes. For more on this and

(14:14):
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