Post mortem ad mythologicae…

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem- neat, plausible and wrong.”

H. L. Mencken.

I have to admit liking that quote. It is a bit of a guilty pleasure, however as, not only some of Mencken’s various ideas were quite distasteful, the quote itself is somewhat less than accurate. More often than not, indeed, Occam’s razor cuts true…

Nonetheless, sometime, one come across a seductive idea, a simple, seemingly logical explanation to an otherwise incomprehensible enigma, and it is easy to accept them without looking more deeply into the subject, easy and mistaken… Here are a two such explanations, and the reason why they are, in my opinion, most likely false…

I initially wanted to grab a handful such stories but, by the time I got around wrapping the first two, the word count was already running above 1500 words (I can be very long winded, in case you had not yet noticed)… So, because it was already running a bit long, and because both of these story are connected to each other through the same original event and form a coherent theme, I decided to stop after the second one…

Thera was Atlantis.

Santorini as photographied by NASA’s earth observatory…

Santorini, formerly Thera, is a volcanic island in the Aegean sea, about half-way between Athens and Crete and, like volcans are prone to do, in blew up a few times. One of the most significant among these was a plinian explosion (so called because of Pliny the younger’s description of another, more famous, classical era eruption, in Pompeii) happened around 1600BCE (the precise date is still under debate but it seems like the preponderance of evidence now points toward a date around 1629  or 1628BCE).

This was major event, one that put the proverbial boom in their civilization’s shakalaka and that precipitated its decline. All buildings on the island were either destroyed or buried under thick pyroclastic layers and the caldera at the center of the island collapsed, forever altering its very topography…

Predictably the story of this ponderous event quickly made its way into legend and, some people argue, this is its deformed account that Plato first heard and later reported as that of the Atlantis introduced in the Timaeus and expanded on in the uncompleted Critias. Many elements do, indeed, seem to fit, we have an natural catastrophe, we have an island disappearing under the waves and we have an advanced civilization gone…

The problem, with all that, is in the details. Plato indeed is very specific in his description of the lost civilization: it was located in the Atlantic, tremendously large, larger than Ancient Libya and Asia Minor combined, and encompassed mountainous terrain in the North and a large plain, of about 550 km long, in the South. The capital itself is surrounded by three moats of size ranging from slightly less than 200m wide to almost slightly more than 500…

The story is equally impressive and explain how, 9000 years prior, the mighty Atlantean emperor ruled the world, only to be challenged, and ultimately defeated, by Athens.

As a historical account, little of this really makes sense. The tenth millennium BCE was just at the end of the Würm glaciations period when, in its most advanced regions, mankind was slowly edging it way into proto-agriculture. The population of Europe was still firmly hunter-gatherer with the Magdalenian culture still dominating. And, while the Magdalenian culture achieved incredible artistic highs, they certainly were nowhere near mastering the technical intricacies of intercontinental travels.

And geography does not offer much more help, as the small, 73 km², island seems drastically different from the small continent described in Plato’s dialogues…

So, where did the story comes from? Well, in my opinion, the answer lies in a bit of literary criticism. The Platonic dialogues are a series of texts retracing a fictional dialogues during which Plato can expose his philosophy through the mouth of the protagonists, in particular of his master, the famous Socrates. Interestingly, Timaeus is set the day after that of the Republic. In the Republic, Socrates had presented his (or Plato’s) ideal state and, in at the beginning of Timaeus, asks for example of wars in which Athens have been involved. Critias, one of the protagonists, offers to give such an account, that he said, came to him from Solon, a legendary 6^th century lawmaker. Before he elaborates, however, it is turn to the eponymic Timaeus to speak. Start then a digression, that will last for the rest of the dialogue, into something akin to proto-physic, in which the Platonic solids are introduce and correlated to the five classical elements and, it would seem, the D&D player’s handbook. Critias’ discussion of Atlantis truly start then, in the dialogue aptly named Critias in which he details more of what is ‘known’ of Atlantis.

Nonetheless, we can clearly see here how the story of Atlantis is introduced by Plato as a literary device to contrast his ideal state to the corrupt monarchy of Atlantis and demonstrates how the former should conduct in matter of wars. This work is a political treatise, not a historical one.

And yet, history can also yield some insight into this work as it is not without reason that the very Atlantis the Athenian ultimately defeated is described as ‘larger than Libya and Asia together’. It is estimated that the two dialogues must have been written around 350BCE. And, it just so happened that in 387BCE, the various cities of Greece, and Athens first among them, had been forced to accept the humiliating “peace of Antalcidas”, a peace settlement so humiliating that it was generally referred to as ‘King [Artaxerxes II of Persia]’s peace”, following the betrayal of their former Persian ally. Artaxerxes II was a member of the Achaemenid dynasty, a time when the Persian was as its most powerful ruling over the regions that the Greeks would have referred to as… Asia and Libya…

The Persian Empire around the time of Plato’s writing (map from W. Carey at the Latin Library).

At the heart of the dialogues is the promise that, wisely ruled, Athens could rise to defeat the power that had just humiliated it so, as it had done in the past. Once again, it is a, very topical, political and philosophical commentary, maybe even a piece of propaganda. But it was never intended as history.

Certainly, the events at Santorini might have helped inspiring Plato about the final fate of the mighty empire. But, the disappearance, in similar circumstances, of the Greek city of Helike just 20 or so years earlier, would have been much fresher in Plato’s mind. Seriously, why isn’t the fate of Helike so poorly known? Shouldn’t it be the first thing mentioned in any discussion about Atlantis?

Santorini also explains the miracles of the Exodus.

While we are on the subject of the Thera explosion, it must be pointed out that it has also been correlated, for example by British historian Graham Phillips in his book “Act of God” or in Simcha Jacobovici’s “Exodus decoded”, to the series of miraculous events that surrounds the book of Exodus in the Old Testament.

In this particular scenario (introduced at about 30 minutes in Jacobovici’s documentary), the tectonic activities trigger a series of event that explain the ten Biblical plagues, including the turning of the Nile water into blood, to epidemics, the fall palpable darkness and finally, the death of the first sons… Later, the earthquake is said to trigger a landslide, raising the land above water level just in time for the Israelites to cross, just prior to a Tsunami coming down and drowning the Egyptian army…

The story, certainly, seems to come around quite nicely and paint a fascinating and coherent picture. Too bad, it is pretty much all BS.  Jacobovici takes separate events from over two centuries apart and arbitrary decides that they all happened at the same date, around 1500BCE and jam them together. He then picks up individual artifact and events, strip them down of their context and give them his own interpretation, in effect, acting like a conspiracy theorist, he cherry-picks individual shards of reality, without regards as to where they normally belong, and them rearranges them into his own mosaic… Indeed, some people, for example, here, or, in more detail, here, have made a great job of going through all the evidence and pointing out what their real meaning is and why they do not, in fact, support Jacobovici’s scenario at all.

I’ll just mention one last point that the website seems to neglect (it is a Biblical apologetic website, interestingly), is that the whole Exodus event is itself highly unlikely and unsupported by evidence. There is no good evidence that the Hebrews were ever slaves in Egypt, not as the Hyksos, and not as anything else. There is no evidence of a people (an estimated two million people, according to the Bible, two third of the total of Egypt’s population at the time) wandering in the Sinaï for 40 years and there is no evidence for the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites or for a change in the culture around that time. And all evidence indicate that the Israelites at the time, and for many centuries later, were very much a polytheistic people… Absence of evidence, is, as often said; not evidence of absence, but one would certainly expect more signs from such a tremendous series of events…

On the other hand, many scholarly works do, in fact, date the writing of the Exodus, at least in its final form, to around the time of the Baylonian exile. The narrative of Moses, send on the Nile, for example was often correlated to that of Sargon of Akkad, which would illustrates the Mesopotamian influence. In fact, this story was part of a common corpus of legend over the ancient Middle-East, the motive, indeed, comes often enough that infant nautical sports seem to have been something of a tradition there. That the literary origin of the Exodus story finds is route at a time and place, the Israelite diaspora that was in danger of being culturally assimilated into the surrounding Babylonian culture, where its central message: “stick to your God and he will see you back to the promised land of your ancestors”, seems, in my opinion, too perfect a fit to be a mere coincidence…

Now, I realize that some could argue that these explanations are just as simplistic that the one they claim to replace… But I disagree, I think that understanding the cultural context of these writers is vital to understand their goals and what was ‘on their mind’. After all, they were not writing for us, but for their contemporaries… Certainly, it at least allows to repair an injustice: the ancients were not unimaginative chronicler of events but rather the participants of a living culture that was just as able of our own to product imaginative works of fiction. Truly, I can imagine the ancients gathering on their forum to complain how Aeschylus’ latest Prometheus Bound was totally sub-par compared to the previous three plays and, like, ‘totally ruined the original trilogy for me…’

Anyway, that’s it, for today, as I mentioned, it is already running exceedingly long.

I’d like to revisit this general idea at a later date, especially if you, dear reader, liked it. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to shout me some suggestions in the comment section…