The Atlantis Blueprint Read Online Free Page A

island-continent called Atlantis, ‘as large as Libya and Asia combined’. (By Libya he meant all of North Africa and by Asia he meant an area equivalent to the Middle East.)
    The priest then made a baffling statement. From Atlantis, he explained, it was possible to reach other islands that formed part of Atlantis, ‘and from them, the whole opposite continent that surrounds what can be truly called the ocean’.
    It is conceivable that, by the ‘opposite continent’, the priest was referring to America – for there is evidence that Europeans visited America thousands of years before Columbus – but to say that the opposite continent
surrounds
the ocean sounds odd. Sea can surround a continent, but surely a continent does not surround the sea?
    On Atlantis, said the priest, a powerful dynasty of kings had succeeded in extending their empire as far as the borders of Egypt. Their next ambition was to conquer Egypt and Greece. But Greece had resisted; an alliance led by Athens succeeded in defeating the Atlanteans. After this, a tremendouscatastrophe, involving earthquakes and floods, destroyed most of the Greeks, and engulfed Atlantis under the waves.
    This is not the usual version of history. According to the
Oxford Classical Dictionary,
Athens probably dates from about 900 BC, possibly a few centuries earlier. Even though it admits that ‘the more substantial remains of later periods have largely effaced prehistoric settlement evidence’, there is still a huge gap between 900 BC and 9,000 BC. On the other hand, we know that archaeology is continually pushing back the age of civilisation. In the 1960s, Jericho – the first walled city – was believed to date from about 6,500 BC, but it is now believed to date from at least 2,000 years earlier. ‘The great stone wall, some twenty feet high and nine feet thick, was joined by at least one apsidal tower which… would not have disgraced one of the more impressive mediaeval castles,’ says one expert. 8 But early settlers do not build walls and towers like that; they build one-room huts. It took European man about 1,000 years to move from fortified wooden barricades to medieval castles. So Jericho might well be as old as 8,000 BC. And in that case, why not Athens?
    In the
Critias,
Plato continues the story. Atlantis was founded by the sea god Poseidon (Neptune), who fathered five pairs of twins on a mortal woman. The god built her a home on a hill, and surrounded it with concentric rings of sea and land. The twins were each allotted a portion of the island, and over the generations extended their conquests to other islands and to the mainland of Europe.
    Great engineers, the Atlanteans built a circular city, 11 miles in diameter, with a metal wall and a huge canal connecting it to the sea. Behind the city there was a plain 229 by 343 miles wide, on which farmers grew the city’s food supply. Behind this were mountains with fertile meadows and every kind of livestock, including elephants. Plato spends many pages describing the magnificent buildings, with hot and cold fountains, communal dining halls and palaces of many-coloured stone, then goes on to describe the Atlantean social structure at equal length.
    As time went by, the
Critias
goes on, the god-like element among the Atlanteans became diluted with human stock and they were no longer able ‘to carry their prosperity with moderation’. The meaning is quite clear: undisturbed prosperity makes human beings lazy, and those who are too aggressive to allow themselves to vegetate fly from boredom by using up their energies in a struggle for power and wealth (things have not changed all that much). Although the Atlanteans regarded themselves as fortunate and contented, the gods were fully aware of their corruption. So Zeus summoned all the gods to a meeting in his palace…
    And at that point, the
Critias
breaks off. Plato never completed it, or went on to write the third dialogue of a projected trilogy,