Note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Human Invention of Gods: How the Talking Primate Searched for Meaning.

Chapter 1 Plato’s Lost Continent

The search for [Atlantis]… has generated an immense literature, much of it very unscholarly. One should take a hard look at the possibility that Plato really did use some Egyptian source material with a historical content.

John V. Luce, Associate Professor of Classics, Dublin University

As I have said, I am an Atlantis skeptic. However, as the quote above suggests, I did “take a hard look at the possibility that Plato really did use some Egyptian source material with a historical content.” This fictional story of Atlantis is one of the strangest, most mysterious, and most bizarre stories in the history of civilization. I had no special interest in this story until about 1995. It was a few years after my total eclipse adventure. I had been substitute teaching and spending time studying Buckminster Fuller’s books. I had also written several mathematics papers. (Sometimes I wish I had stayed in the field of mathematics writing. I found mathematics to be calming.) One of my papers discussed a series of numbers I had independently discovered which I later found out are called highly composite numbers: 2, 4, 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 120, 180, 240, 360, 720, 840, 1260, 1680, 2520, 5040, .... I suggested that these numbers were quite useful as they have so many factors, more factors than any smaller number, which of course is why the Babylonians used them for measuring time. I called them “versatile numbers,” and I stated they allowed things to be shared easily, such that they could be used to lubricate social interactions. In my paper, I was combining mathematics with the social sciences. I had also found that an famous Indian mathematician, Ramanujan, had also studied these numbers. In addition, I had written a computer program to find these numbers. I first went to the Glendale Library and got a book on computer programming. The last time I had studied programming we were still using punchcards. I was proud of myself when my computer started listing out these numbers using my algorithm. I posted a paper about them on an Internet newsgroup which got a lot of attention. I also sent the paper to a couple of scholars including Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter. Gardner wrote back and said my paper was “eminently publishable.” However, I never published it because every time I looked for a place to publish it, the bureaucratic paperwork was a bit overwhelming, and I also had to give away my rights to my intellectual property. I have owned very little in my life and I didn’t want to give up ownership of my intellectual property. Also, I was usually busy just trying to make ends meet, so I didn’t have much time. So I never formally published the article, but I did put it on my personal website. I said in the paper that these numbers are somewhat the opposite of prime numbers because primes have minimal factors. However, both of these numbers are infinite and chaotic. In other words, there is no pattern to them such that you can predict the next one. Mathematicians seem to hate to admit that there is this chaos in the middle of numbers, but there is, and I find it fascinating. Doug Hofstadter, a mathematician and writer of popular books on thinking and artificial intelligence, said the paper was “interesting,” and he asked me several questions about it. One question was whether the numbers had ever been formally proven to be infinite. (In the paper, I had stated that the numbers were infinite, based on my intuition.) One of the other members of the newsgroup immediately provided an elegant proof which I included as an appendix to the paper. About this time, one scholar from Austria, Meyer Rainer, wrote to me and said his Ph.D. dissertation had been concerning these numbers and did I know that Plato himself discussed one these numbers (5040) as being the ideal number of citizens for a city-state? Plato, one of the most famous philosophers in history, helped lay the foundation of Western philosophic thought. He came from a wealthy Athenian family and Aristotle was one of his students. His most famous writings concerned Socrates, his teacher. Plato had said, “The number of our citizens shall be 5040--this will be a convenient number ... Every legislator ought to know so much arithmetic as to be able to tell what number is most likely to be useful to all cities…” I was amazed to find Plato discussing some of the same issues that I had discussed in my paper. He

found these numbers interesting and useful for the same reason that I and the Babylonians did: they have a great number of factors and this could be of benefit to society. However, my mathematical interests were somewhat derailed when I began to read Plato’s story about Atlantis. Plato said his story came from the Egyptians, a story that describes a marvelous civilization, a civilization with a large city that had a royal palace made of ivory, gold and silver, a city with bridges, canals, harbors, ships, fountains, temples, baths and even a track for racing horses. According to Plato’s account, these people came into the Mediterranean and battled with the Egyptians. The Greeks then helped defeat the intruders in battle and drove them from the Mediterranean. However, Plato says, “Afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune … the island of Atlantis … disappeared into the depths of the sea.” Plato’s story has been an intense topic of interest ever since. In this chapter, I will briefly present some of the highlights of the controversy surrounding “Atlantis,” and then I will examine my theory that the Atlantis fiction was inspired by events that took place on or near the Sunda Plain. This plain is a huge expanse, mostly underwater now, that extends from Borneo in the East to Thailand in the North, to Indonesia in the South and West. Finally, I will examine some of the difficulties with this inspiration theory.

Many people have had some exposure to the Atlantis fiction by way of TV documentaries. On these shows, there is often mention of outlandish ideas such as Alien visitations, atomic power, levitating rocks, genetic engineering and past lives. Unfortunately, TV producers emphasize these bizarre or occult ideas to temporarily receive higher ratings. Wherever there is lack of any firm evidence or firm knowledge, it is fertile ground for growing unsubstantiated and bizarre beliefs. In other words, since no one seems to know where Atlantis really was, why not just “channel” the information from an extraterrestrial source? Who can disprove you? Why not go into a “trance state” and contact your own past life on Atlantis. Again, who is to say you are wrong? I waded through many volumes of occult books to try to find something of value. I found much hope and much hype, but no firm evidence. The occult can be seductive, intoxicating and exhilarating. However, reality often is not. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Location

The many suggestions for an Atlantis location include (but are not limited to): an island-continent in the Atlantic, North Africa, America, Crete, Carthage, Spain, South Africa, Malta, Central France, Tunisia, the Arctic, the Netherlands, Palestine, Nigeria, North Sea, Mexico, Greenland, Brazil, West Indies, Sweden, Morocco, Great Briton, and recently, unbelievably, Antarctica and Peru. However, none of these could have provided any inspiration for Plato’s fiction and we shall see why. “Atlantis” Time Line

Here are a few highlights from the occult, the scholarly and the scientific, along with my comments. I published this timeline on Wikipedia around 1999. It has since been removed due to various political and economic interests, but you may still see it online in some places. I am the original compiler.

560 BC: according to Plato, a famous Greek statesman, Solon (whose brother was an ancestor of Plato, six generations earlier), visits Egypt and hears from the priests at Sais, then the capital of Egypt, the story of an ancient civilization that was destroyed 9000 years earlier.

360 BC: Plato writes Solon’s story and calls the civilization “Atlantis.” 300 BC-100 AD: Various classical Mediterranean authors such as Crantor, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny

the Elder and Plutarch mention Atlantis. Belief in the lost continent is divided. 1553: A Spaniard, Francesco Lopez de Gomara, makes the suggestion that Atlantis was in America.

However, in many ways America does not match the description given by Plato. 1860: Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, a French scholar, travels through Middle America for many years. He

feels that Mayan glyphs document the volcanic destruction of Atlantis. I think Brasseur was partly right about the Mayan glyphs documenting destruction, but I do not think that this was the destruction of Atlantis. I think it was the destruction of local villages and cities in Mayan America by volcanoes and earthquakes.

1879: A famous Mayan archeologist, Edward Herbert Thompson, defends the idea that the Maya were descendants of an Atlantean race. (Of course, if Atlantis were the first civilization, or first place that Homo sapiens evolved, then all civilizations would be descendants of it.)

1880s-1890s: Augustus Le Plongeon publishes Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayans and Quiches (1886) and

Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx (1896) after ten years of study in the Yucatan with his wife. He claims that Egyptian civilization, as well as all other civilizations, came from the Mayan. He states that Queen Moo was originally from Atlantis (which Le Plongeon calls Mu and situates in the Atlantic Ocean), but when Queen Moo seeks refuge there, she finds it gone, and goes on to Egypt were she was known as Isis and founded the Egyptian civilization. Le Plongeon’s work is interesting, but he made some fundamental errors. Although there may have been limited contact between Egyptian and Mayan cultures, a point that has yet to be proved, it appears that the two cultures largely evolved separately.

1883: Ignatius Donnelly, a former member of the US Congress writes Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, a popular book that went through fifty editions and is still in print after 100 years. He claims Atlantis was the source of all cultures of the world. Many scientists call his approach slanted and find technical errors in his work. Donnelly was a lawyer and took a lawyer’s approach to his writing. Instead of presenting the pros and cons, he stated only the pros. We shall see why his location for Atlantis was wrong. (Whether different cultures developed independently or by diffusion is a hotly debated question. I tend to think there were minute amounts of communication between places.)

1880s: Madam Blavatsky, sometimes called the Grandmother of the “New Age” movement, includes Atlantis in her occult and bizarre reconstruction of history. For example, because of humanity’s widespread preoccupation with dragons, she believes that humans existed at the time of the dinosaurs. In 1908, Rudolf Steiner, a cohort of Blavatsky, continues with his bizarre version of Atlantis. He eventually breaks away from Blavatsky, and forms his own schools. Today, they are known as Waldorf schools.

1909: In an anonymous letter to the London Times, classical scholar K. T. Frost points out similarities between the Mediterranean culture of Crete (also known as Minoan after King Minos who lived on Crete) and Atlantis. Although there are similarities, we shall see that Plato’s description of his Lost Continent does not match well with that of ancient Crete.

1930s: Edgar Cayce becomes famous in the US for going into a trance and then prescribing remedies for ill people. During these trance states he sometimes mentions living in Atlantis in a past life. He predicts that a mysterious “Hall of Records” will be found near the Sphinx describing Atlantis. He also predicts Atlantis would rise again from the ocean. He makes mostly bizarre guesses that are often interpreted by followers as somehow correct. For example, when certain symmetrical rocks, natural formations called “beach rocks,” were found near Bihimi Island in the Bahamas, followers claimed that these were evidence of Atlantis “rising again.”

1931: Author James Churchward writes, The Lost Continent of Mu. He claims to have seen “sacred” tablets in India, which described the creation of the world and the lost continent, which he calls Mu. He places Mu in the Pacific. His work seems to be largely derived from that of Le Plongeon. No one ever saw these ancient tablets, and of course many people wonder if they really ever existed. Although interesting to read, his work remains in the category of very questionable speculation.

1939: A Greek archeologist, Spyridon Marinatos, suggests that the volcanic destruction of the island of Thera (near Crete and now part of Greece) in 1500 BC, and the resulting tsunami was what caused the collapse of the Minoan civilization. In 1950, he suggests that Atlantis derives from this event. But his paper is not published in English until 1969. Many modern scientists accept Thera as a possible location, however, we shall see that Plato’s description is not a good match with Thera.

1954: L. Sprague de Camp first publishes Lost Continents, a Dover classic. However, de Camp is better known for his “Conan: the Barbarian” science fiction. De Camp is a firm skeptic when it comes to Atlantis. He flatly states that Plato made up the story. Interestingly, he also says that Wagner’s Continental Drift Theory is “very doubtful.” (A 1970 edition, however, corrected this statement.)

1973: Geologist Dorothy Vitaliano writes Legends of the Earth and includes a chapter on Atlantis. She correctly points out that there is nowhere in the Atlantic Ocean that Atlantis could have existed. An excellent scientific book, even though the geology is somewhat dated nowadays.

1974: James Bramwell writes Lost Atlantis, perhaps one of the most rational and balanced accounts of the controversy ever published. Though parts of it are dated, his book often amazes one with its insight and depth.

1975: Indiana University hosts a panel discussion “Atlantis: Fact or Fiction,” including several notable scholars. While most of them dismiss the Atlantis story as pure fiction, John V. Luce (Associate Professor of Classics, Dublin University) presents the view that Plato’s Atlantis story is part fiction, part fact, and based on ancient legends.

1960s-1970s: A Greek seismologist, A. G. Galanopoulos, also tries to link “Atlantis” to the volcano on the island of Thera. He claims that an error in translation of Plato’s text multiplied all numbers by 10, and that is why Thera is ten times smaller than Plato described. Scholars (Vitaliano, Luce) have very effectively refuted this “ten error.” Also, there are many other mismatches between Thera and Atlantis as

described by Vitaliano. 1

1995: I state on the Internet the hypothesis that South East Asia (SEA) could have been the location that inspired the Atlantis story. Two years later I travel to the Sunda Plain of South East Asia to investigate this theory.

1998: Arysio Nunes dos Santos of Brazil, posts an article on his web site stating that the Sunda Plain was Atlantis.

1998: Steven Oppenheimer writes Eden in the East, a scholarly work that presents evidence from oceanography, archeology, linguistics, genetics and folklore that civilization did not begin in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, but on the (now mostly sunken) Sunda Plain, which is sometimes called Sundaland. 2

1999: I publish the first draft of this book including this chapter on “Atlantis.”

In sum, several thousand books on the subject of Atlantis have been written and none of them has 3

given a really satisfactory answer to the question of “Where was it?” or “What was it?” or “Did it exist”? In addition, oceanographic and geological research during the last several decades essentially have removed the possibility that a lost continent could have existed beneath what is the current Atlantic Ocean.

However, as I said, I will present the evidence for (and against) the theory that the story of the destruction of “Atlantis” was inspired by geological activity in South East Asia. I base my study on oceanography, geology, mythology and religion, and present the idea that periodic massive explosion-eruptions of the volcano Krakatau, on the Sunda Shelf between Sumatra and Java, may have developed into the legend that eventually became the Atlantis myth.

In other words, I suggest that Plato was inspired for his fictional account of Atlantis not from a continent in the current Atlantic Ocean, but from an area in the ancient Atlantic Ocean. For the ancient Egyptians considered the Atlantic Ocean to be the ocean surrounding all of Africa, not what we consider the Atlantic Ocean today.

I limit myself to evidence that relates to aspects of the lost continent that can be found in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias as this is the only valid source of the story.

The Ocean of the World

R. Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller was a lone genius. Like many creative thinkers he didn’t prosper in the traditional academic establishment and he was expelled from Harvard. In 1927 he had a bad year financially and his daughter died. He struggled with alcohol and contemplated suicide while looking out at Lake Michigan in Chicago. Then he saw a white light and heard this message:

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

Fuller went on to accomplish many things. He coined the terms “synergetics” and “Spaceship Earth”

to encourage total system thinking. He invented many innovative and futuristic architectural designs and popularized the geodesic dome which has been called “the strongest, lightest, and most efficient means of enclosing space yet devised by man,” by the American Institute of Architects. (I wrote a paper about geodesic domes which is on my website.) Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents, many honorary doctorate degrees and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Fuller was a very strong proponent of renewable energy in the 1960s, long before it became popular (and necessary).

In 1990, I also suffered a severe depression. I had been trying unsuccessfully to write screenplays for about 5 years, chasing money and glamour unsuccessfully, had used up all my reserves, and was financially and emotionally burnt out. I knew I had to make some changes in my life.

I decided I would no longer chase money but rather do what interested me. It was at that point I picked up my first book by Fuller, and subsequently studied all his books and patents. I also built all the models in his Synergetics books using drinking straws and string, table tennis balls, toothpicks, PCV tubing, and other materials. Then, while substitute teaching, I let school children build them. I’d always take a large bag of bright

Vitaliano, D. B., Legends of the Earth: Their Geological Origins, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1973.1

I only became aware of this book recently.2

Martin Gardner (1952) says a conservative estimate is “several thousand.” L. Sprague de Camp (1954) says “two thousand.” Charles Berlitz (1969) 3

says 5,000 “books and pamphlets.” C. W. Cernan (1951) says “twenty thousand volumes.”

red drinking straws and a big roll of string with me in the morning and when I got to the class, if I found no lesson plan, (which happened a lot in the inner city of Los Angeles in the 1990s), I would teach the school children how to make the various shapes and show them how the triangular structures held their shape but the others did not. Of course, the children loved building these various shapes.

Fuller correctly showed that the world has only one ocean. You can find his map projection online with the South Pole at its center. This fact is known by modern oceanographers. The ocean currents travel to all parts of the globe. Any particle of water can therefore end up in any part of that globe. We have split the “one ocean” into various names just as we have split the land-masses into different nations. From a space shuttle, these national boundaries are not visible. Also, the artificial boundaries between oceans are not visible.

We could say that the ocean acts as a kind of circulatory system for the planet. Our bodies, like the surface of the Earth, are composed of about three-fourths water. The body circulates its water, and the Earth, or Gaia, circulates its water.

The point is that when I looked for possible Atlantis source material, I did not confine myself to the “Atlantic Ocean.”

As I said, there is evidence that the Atlantic Ocean did not originally refer to what it refers to now. In ancient times, people considered what we now call the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea to be part of the Atlantic Ocean. Alexandre Bessmertny states, regarding the Asian scholar Karst:

Very remarkable is [Karst’s] observation that according to the earliest language forms the Atlantis sea was considered as double, with an eastern basin and a western basin. In its original sense the conception of Libya and Ethiopia was applied to countries in south-western Asia, in touch with the Indo-Arabian ocean; but this sense gradually fell into disuse and the words, losing their locality value, became applied to the African territory in the other Atlantic basin. For Strabo, the South Asiatic sea is still an ‘atlantic’ sea that he supposes to be joined to the western Atlantic sea … 4

If one takes a globe and turns it over so that the South Pole is at the top, and then orients the globe so that Egypt is at the bottom and center (ancient Egyptians considered the South to be “up” on their maps, so this is the way they would have viewed it), one will see Africa sticking “up” into a large body of water. The continent of South America will be barely visible on the right, and the islands of Indonesia will be barely visible on the left. This large body of water may have been the “Atlantic” at one time.

Fuller was also an ex-navy man and a boat-builder and traveled extensively in Southeast Asia. He claimed that along a river (on which Bangkok lies), there are current examples, which demonstrate the evolutionary history of boat building for the past 10,000 years:

The shipbuilders usually keep the logs soaking for up to 100 years before using them in their ships’ hulls. After a century of soaking, the teak becomes highly stabilized structurally. They then haul out and dry the logs sufficiently for their shipbuilders to work them into long planks and frames with their metal tools … They make their planks so carefully that they fit watertightly together without any caulking … I am absolutely confident that Bangkok is the center of the beginnings of the best ship technology and design engineering of world-around civilization. Prototypes of every type of hull from gondolas to barges are there, including the prototypes of the powerfully ribbed, deep-bellied ships that the Phoenicians sailed across the Indian Ocean and to Mesopotamia. 5

Prehistoric Circumnavigation of the World

Fuller also claims that ancient seafaring people circumnavigated the globe. This hypothesis is controversial, but let us see where it leads. Fuller was led to this position through his experience with ships and ocean currents. He states that the Phoenicians could have sailed southward after leaving the Mediterranean, rounded the tip of Africa, and crossed the Indian Ocean:

… northeastwardly on its main current to pass just north of Australia, then turning northward with the Japan Current and prevailing winds to transit China, Japan, and the Aleutian Islands to Alaska, and then on the same current southwardly to the west coasts of both North and South America … the ‘Roaring Forties’ winds and current swept them around the Horn into the South Atlantic, whence the northerly current took them along South America’s east coast … Thereafter the Atlantic Gulf Stream swept them northward … past Cape Hatteras, Nova Scotia, south of Greenland,

Bramwell, Lost Atlantis, p.133. Bessmertny, Das Atlantisrätsel: geschichte und erklärung der Atlantishypothesen, R. Voigtländer, 1932.4

Fuller, 1981, p. 21.5

Iceland, and Spitzbergen, where the ice forced them to go westward until they discovered their familiar Scandinavia, British Isles, etc., from which they returned home to the Mediterranean. 6

Fuller does not mention the fact that at times this circumnavigation goes against the prevailing currents. Of course, ancient people could have used wind power and even sailed into the wind by zigzagging or “tacking.” What seems reasonable is that ancient seafarers would hug the shoreline, just like a beginning swimmer hugs the wall of a swimming pool. Then they would make what I call “shore-hugging leaps” of greater and greater length. As they became more confident, they would make trips across the middle of the ocean. So, we would see an evolution from “shore-hugging” by the ancients to “ocean-going” by more recent explorers.

The ancient Greek geographers, such as Hecataeus and Herodotus, envisioned the world as a circular plate surrounded by an ocean. This view is curiously similar to Fuller’s projection and one wonders if these ancients had something like this in mind. “Oceanus” was the river surrounding the Earth.

In fact, I think it is possible that Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, was based on earlier stories of a circumnavigation of the Earth. It did not take ten years to sail around the Mediterranean, even in ancient times, but it may have taken ten years to travel around the Earth.

World maps attributed to Hecataeus, Herodotus and Eratosthenes were drawn much later, based on partial descriptions from the works of these men. The men who drew them probably knew nothing about North and South America. Fuller interprets these ancient maps as world maps showing Asia, North and South America, the Gulf of Mexico, etc. 7

Of course, Fuller is not the only person to suggest that ancient mariners traveled widely from place to place. There is a large body of literature suggesting that this happened, and probably just as large a body of literature suggesting that it did not happen. Especially popular are books suggesting that ancient people came to America before Columbus. Some books are: American Discovery and The Friar’s Map of Ancient America, both by Gunnar Thompson. The Friar’s Map of Ancient America contains an interesting map (sometimes called the De Virga World Map, which is available at Wikipedia and reproduced here). 8

Thompson claims, like Fuller, that it shows the shoreline of both North and South America long before Columbus. If you look at the image and compare it to a globe you can see that South America would be at the upper right hand part of the map. If you follow the coastline to the left you come to a large inlet in the upper left of the map, which would be the Gulf of Mexico. Following the coast further would be, of course, North America.

It is difficult for us to see how these maps could be world maps. However, this was before all the various modern map projections we have today. Also remember the “shore-hugging” seafarer: imagine an ancient ship slowly following the shoreline, with someone marking the rivers, bays and inlets as it sails. A left turn is marked with a left turn on the map and right turn is marked with a right turn on the on the map until one arrives back where one started.

Ibid., p. 34.6

See Fuller’s book, Critical Path.7

Available at Wikipedia.8

Now and then, the seafarers would go ashore to collect food, or to hunt or perhaps to trade with the indigenous people. Coming home after many years, they would try to fit all this information onto a single flat map. I made a map like this as an experiment. (See image.) This would be a useful map, especially for a shore-hugging sailor. It shows the land in relation to the sea and one could hug the shore and know where one was. Also, in support of the idea of world circumnavigation, we have this account from Plato’s Atlantis story: an ancient Egyptian priest says,

… for this sea which is within the Straits of Hercules [the Mediterranean] is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

A large, “boundless” continent may be a good description of what a sailor would meet with if he hugged the shoreline upon leaving the Mediterranean and then just kept going. Eventually he would arrive back at the Mediterranean. Fuller states that the sea-people crossbred with each other, but were essentially a separate culture and that they went by various but related names: the V-Kings (V from the shape of the bow of the ship) or Vikings (pronounced veekings in Scandinavia), Veenetians, Phoenicians, Punitians, Pundits, Punic wars (Punt meaning boat and Pun in some languages meaning red as in the Red Sea). 9

On March 12, 1998, researchers reported in Nature having found stone tools on Flores Island, between Java and Australia,

dating to 800,000 years ago. A more recent article in Nature, 2010, suggests that hominids were on Flores by 880,000 years ago. 10

It is believed that there was no land bridge between Java and Flores during the last ice age, so the researchers (Moorwood and associates) suggest that Homo erectus was capable of water crossings using sea craft. This finding, if proven, would radically alter our view of Homo erectus and his capabilities. And if Home erectus were capable of building watercraft 800,000 years ago, then certainly Homo sapiens could have 50,000 years ago. In fact, we think that Homo sapiens did cross to Australia around 40,000 years ago.

Robert G. Bednarick is an Australian prehistorian, cognitive archeologist (someone who studies how ancient people thought), and experimental archeologist (someone who might try to make a stone axe, or who might sail a raft from Peru to Polynesia, or who might try to move a megalith using primitive technology).

Bednarick supports the idea of Homo erectus as a seafarer. He says that the first ocean journeys began 900,000 to 800,000 years ago , and he has taken some hazardous voyages in primitive rafts to help 11

prove his point. In 2000, he crossed from Bali to Lombok Island with a dozen men. There has been a paradigm shift occurring among archeologists regarding the peopling of America.

The old paradigm, the Clovis model, or the land bridge model, states that humans crossed the land bridge from Siberia by following the animals as the glaciers melted around 11,500 years ago. However, a new site in Monte Verde, Chile, far south of Clovis, New Mexico, with a date of at least 12,500 years ago (some date it at 14,500) has cracked this paradigm, for it is difficult to believe that these early Americans could have migrated so quickly to a point so far south. The date of this site has recently been verified.

So, many scientists now think that people came from to the Americas in canoes. This would have been much faster. They would have followed the coastline south by water, fishing and hunting seals as they went. This “shore-hugging” would tend to support Fuller’s circumnavigation theory.

Nowadays there is much further evidence in support of this and researchers use these terms: “coastal migration hypothesis”, “southern coastal route”, “rapid coastal settlement”, “coastal migration theory” and “coastal migration model.” I used to scuba dive in the kelp beds on the islands off the coast of Southern 12

Ibid., p. 17. Also see Tetrascroll by Fuller.9

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature0884410

Science News, Oct 18, 2003, p. 248-250. Also see http://www.semioticon.com/people/bednarik.htm11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration12

A map like the early human seafarers might have made and used. Compare to Friar’s Map. Drawing by author.

California and I saw first-hand the rich amount of marine life that is available in the kelp and so my favorite term is the “kelp highway.” In Europe there are about 35,000 megaliths. There has been a lot of debate about whether these spread by diffusion, and from where, or whether they were independently developed and built. Historian B. Schultz Paulson analyzed 2,410 radiocarbon dates of megalithic and megalithic-related sites and published his findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. His paper, “Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe,” offers some validation of what Bucky Fuller said 40-50 years earlier and what I published in my first book in 1999.

…the earliest megaliths originated in northwest France and spread along the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts…This prompts a radical reassessment of the megalithic horizons and invites the opening of a new scientific debate regarding the maritime mobility and organization of Neolithic societies, the nature of these interactions through time, and the rise of seafaring. 13

As one geologist has said: “The sea does not stand still. Find the right current, and it will take you where you want to go … To people who understand the sea, the ocean is a waving road that connects one land to the next. And humans have been making use of this transportation route for much longer than we computer-bound landlubbers might imagine.” 14

The Sub-Oceanic Plain

Bucky Fuller describes flying over Cambodia and Thailand and seeing networks of canal patterns penetrating for hundreds of miles inland. Also, in Plato’s account of Atlantis he says that it had an extensive canal system.

So in about 1992, I first began to think that perhaps the Atlantis story was inspired by the vast sub-oceanic plain between Australia and Southeast Asia. That area was dry land until the end of the ice ages, which caused the melting of the glaciers and a resulting rise in sea level. However, I had no time or resources to do a thorough investigation.

About this time (1992), I attended a lecture at the California Institute of Technology by Dr. Ronald Blom called “Space Technology and the Discovery of the Lost City of Ubar.” Like Troy, many scholars doubted that this city, mentioned in both the Koran and A Thousand and One Nights, ever existed. It was the center of trade for a rare resin, frankincense. The discoverers, two amateur archeologists, teamed up with NASA scientists and used satellite photography to pinpoint ancient roads in the desert that eventually led them to the remains of the city. (Lawrence of Arabia called this city the “Atlantis of the sands.”)

I contacted NASA (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) shortly after this lecture and told them I was interested in viewing satellite photos of Southeast Asia for archeological studies. (I was hesitant to mention Atlantis.) It was my idea, following the success of Ubar’s discovery, to look for some pattern that might lead me to the location of the ancient civilization. They were willing to cooperate, but I was unable to pursue the matter at that time.

As I said, in 1995, I posted this idea to an anthropology newsgroup: that due to the large number of canals in Southeast Asia, and the rising ocean waters at the end of the ice age covering this area, Atlantis may have been inspired by this area.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/9/346013

Schoch, p. 168-169.14

A year later, I picked up Plato again along with an ocean floor map. (See photo.) Despite my prior knowledge, I was struck by the vast area of land in SE Asia that was submerged when the glaciers melted. In the image of the ocean floor, one can see the vast smooth area that was dry during the last ice age. One can see what is now Java at the bottom, Sumatra on the left, and Borneo on the right. This dry area was big enough to be called a “continent”; big enough to hold something like “Atlantis.”

I imagined the Mae Nam Chuo Phraya, the river on which the port city of Bangkok lies, crossing this plain, the Sunda Plain, and then emptying into the South China Sea.

If a city like the one described by Plato existed, I imagined that it would have been located at this point, as the river flowed into the South China Sea. This seemed like a good port location. Bangkok, I imagined, would have been moved farther and farther back, as the water level rose over the centuries. However, as we’ll see, I had to revise my idea several times as I continued my research.

Plato says that the city of Atlantis was located on a part of the island that faced south. I dutifully began to look up information about Indonesia (the country in the South containing the islands of Sumatra and Java), and I was amazed to discover that there are more than one hundred active or recently active volcanoes in Indonesia. In fact, Java is the most volcanically active location in the world.

To get an idea of what Java is like, imagine a land mass about the size of New York State, long and narrow, but with 17 active volcanoes, five of which tower more than 10,000 feet. All this volcanic activity is due to the crustal plate of Australia pushing northward into the Eurasian Plate. The creation of the Malaysian arc (including Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Bali, etc.) was due to this plate collision activity.

This geological activity seemed to fit well with the idea that something like Atlantis had been destroyed by a cataclysm. However, it did not seem likely that a major city would exist along this rugged coast. There seemed to be no harbor except for perhaps one place. That was somewhere in the narrow strait between Sumatra and Java called the Sunda Strait.

About this time, I ran across the name of a volcano that I had heard about, but that I did not know was located in Indonesia. Every geologist in the world knows of Krakatau. Several books have been written (and one Hollywood motion picture, which I don’t recommend) about its 1883 eruption-explosion, which resulted in a tidal wave killing 36,417 Indonesians. Sound waves from its explosion reverberated across the globe for the next 12 hours, often called “the greatest volume of sound recorded in human history.”

I quickly searched for the location of Krakatau on the map. It is between Sumatra and Java, directly in the middle of the Sunda Strait. Krakatau is at the “elbow” of Sumatra and Java. This elbow is slowly bending, which increases the geological activity. 15

Confirming the Sub-Oceanic Plain

I drew on the map the approximate dimensions that Plato gave for the continent of Atlantis. He said that it extended roughly 3000 stadia by 2000 stadia. This is about 345 miles by 230 miles (using one estimate of a stadia at 607 feet). Perhaps, if a civilization were destroyed, about 11,500 years ago, (as Plato dates it) the Ice Age was almost over, and the ocean level had risen to cover most of the Sunda Plain. Just this portion remained.

I imagined that at this time, as the Sunda Plain filled with water, people might have migrated to various locations around the world, thus leading to the many flood legends. Oppenheimer agrees with this interpretation, but I later decided that although some migration occurred, the rising water level might have been too gradual to be called a “flood.”

The gradual shrinking of the Sunda Plain would explain apparent contradictions in Plato’s description, which have puzzled Atlantean scholars for millennia. At one point, he says Atlantis is larger than Libya and Asia combined (Asia is usually interpreted here to mean Asia Minor or modern Turkey). At another point, he gives the above dimensions while at another point he calls it an island. In other words, when the ice age began to melt 15,000 bp (before present) perhaps it was a large continent (or subcontinent). Later, as the Sunda Plain became covered with seawater, Atlantis could have become smaller and smaller and eventually an island.

I checked Plato’s dimension for the exact location of the city. He says that it was 50 stadia inland or about 5.7 miles. This seems to fit with the distance of Krakatau from the Indian Ocean at the time of the great disaster.

Plato also says that from the islands beyond Atlantis “you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean.” Traditionally, the “true ocean” has been thought to be the Atlantic, and the “opposite continent” the Americas. Compare the Pacific and Atlantic on a globe. The huge

Furneaux, Krakatau.15

difference in size is easily seen. To a people who may have navigated the Pacific, the Atlantic would hardly seem like an ocean. The distance between Africa and South America at one point is less than the distance from New York to Albuquerque or San Francisco to Hawaii. The “opposite continent” in Plato’s description would still be North and South America, but “true ocean” would be what we now call the Pacific. Of course, the Pacific makes a much better “true ocean” than the present day Atlantic.

Plato also gives this account, The whole country was said by him [the Greek, Solon, who went to Egypt where he heard the story of Atlantis] to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia. This part of the island looked towards the south, and was sheltered from the north. The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty …

This certainly could be a description of Krakatau and the Sunda Plain before the melting of the ice-age glaciers about 12,000 to 7,000 years ago. Krakatau sits nestled between two mountain chains, looks toward the South, and is sheltered from the Northwest by mountains on Sumatra.

In other words, the Sunda Plain and Krakatau loosely approximate the size and orientation characteristics of the plain described by Plato for Atlantis.

Confirming the Volcanic Mountain

The eruption-explosion of Krakatau in 1883 was, as I have said, immense. The tidal wave generated was 100 feet high. One book about the volcanic explosion says:

Several of the survivors attempted to describe the great wave. The magnitude of the experience was too great for them. The sight of the gray wall of water appearing from nowhere was an experience which no one could have adequately described. The air was filled with swirling dust and falling pumice. It was blacker than the blackest night. Huge tracts of land were submerged. Towns and houses were in ruin. Corpses lay everywhere. 16

Debris from the coast was found seven to ten miles inland. Entire towns and villages disappeared without a trace. Particulate matter from the explosion affected sunsets around the world for the next three years. Of the 36,000 people who died, most were killed by the tidal wave.

Plato sets the date of the disappearance of Atlantis at 9000 years before him, which was in 360 BC. It makes his time for the disappearance at 11,400 bp. There appear to be many possibilities for earlier or later eruptions that could have been the catastrophe mentioned by Plato.

For example, one geologist, de Neve, in a paper entitled, “Earlier Eruptive Activities of Krakatau in Historic Time and During the Quaternary,” (the last million years), suggests that Krakatau may have had as many as 10 or 12 gigantic eruptions over this time. Also, he documents evidence, mostly from ancient texts, of many major eruptions in the last 2000 years. 17

Another author, Judd, cites the Javanese Book of Kings, which states that there was a major eruption in 416 AD that caused the separation of Java and Sumatra. Judd notes that this account could have been based 18

on an earlier event. So the Indonesians seem to be aware of some violent catastrophe in

the ancient past connected with Krakatau. Of course, this ancient eruption-explosion may have been worse than the 1883 one. With this in mind, let’s read Plato’s descriptions of the destruction of Atlantis:

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank

Furneaux, Krakatau.16

de Neve, 198517

Judd, 1899, as quoted in Thornton, p. 44-45.18

A large buoy (sitting on a larger monument) from Lampung harbor that was carried a couple of kilometers inland by the tsunami of 1883. Photo by author.

into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Also later

… became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

Some geologists say that Krakatau may have been as high as 6,000 feet then. After the massive 19

eruption-explosion, the Sunda Plain (which is now mostly underwater) could have been swept by a tidal wave. The human destruction must have been unimaginable. Perhaps, as Plato says, the plain became an impassable barrier of mud.

If we examine a graph of global temperatures, we find that from 15,000 to 8,000 bp there was an extreme rise in the global temperatures. For whatever reason, the ice age did not end gradually, but came to an abrupt end in the period Plato sets for the demise of Atlantis.

As I said, one speculative possibility is that as the Sunda Plain slowly became covered with water the people pressed closer and closer toward Krakatau.

The global weather patterns that result from volcanism are studied intensively by geologists. The cooling that results is referred to as a “volcanic winter.” In the steep rise in the warming of global 20

temperatures between 15,000 to 8,000 years bp there is one very noticeable dip in temperatures about halfway between the two years. This cooling period, about 12,000 years bp, is known as the Younger Dryas (named after an “indicator” wildflower). This cooling period is remarkably close to the date Plato gave for the demise of his alleged Atlantis.

There are several possible theories to explain this cooling event including a comet impact and the eruption of the Laacher See volcano in Germany about this time. Perhaps Krakatau had a major eruption around this time.

Furthermore, I think it quite possible that the story of Atlantis was based upon a story, which was based upon a story. Who knows how far back it started? Java man, or Homo erectus, certainly witnessed the 10 or 12 gigantic eruption-explosions of the last million years. Was Homo erectus able to pass on a description of these events to his children, even if only through hand and arm gestures? Or did the description have to await Homo sapiens?

Besides Krakatau, another volcano worth studying is Mount Merapi, which I mentioned earlier, and which I visited, on the southern part of Java. I had never felt so scared as when I was near the summit of this volcano and every 20 minutes felt the ground rumble under me. I knew that a pyroclastic flow could come rushing out of the mouth and down the side of the volcano and kill us all in a few seconds, searing our lungs with hot gases. About 10,000 years ago its eruptions became more violent. The eruption in 1006 may have led to the collapse of the Mataram Kingdom in central Java. 21

Robert Bednarick, whom I mentioned earlier, says the evidence suggests that rock art, decorative beads, engraved stones and hunting spears all originated several hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens. He concludes that such accomplishments would require that individuals speak to each other and assign abstract meanings to various objects and symbols. 22

The Cultural Artifacts

According to Plato, the ten Kings of Atlantis participated in an important ritual concerning bulls and a sacrificial “pillar.” Plato gives us this description:

There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon; and the ten kings, being left alone in the temple, after they had offered prayers to the god that they might capture the victim which was acceptable to him, hunted the bulls, without weapons but with staves and nooses; and the bull which they caught they led up to the pillar and cut its throat over the top of it so that the blood fell upon the sacred inscription.

On an expedition in September 1997, I found ancient stone megalithic monuments in the Pasamah

Verbeek’s classic 1881 study in: Simkin and Fisk, Krakatau 1883.19

Interestingly, Ben Franklin wrote a paper in 1784 concerning the cooler weather due to an eruption in Iceland.20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Merapi21

Science News, Oct 18, 2003, p. 248-25022

Highlands. The stone monuments are about 150-200 miles northwest of Krakatau. One of the monuments is of a warrior subduing a bull. They are thought to date from around 0 AD to around 500 AD.

This is another parallel. I know of no other ancient civilization (with the possible exception of the Minoan) that shows men wrestling bulls.

As we read Plato, we perhaps wonder: what kind of men could sacrifice a bull over a pillar? Were they very tall men? But in one book , I saw a picture of ancient stone chairs in a circle, and in the center of 23

the chairs a cylindrical sacrificial altar, which could easily be described as a “pillar.” In other words, we are used to thinking of pillars as being tall and supporting the roofs of buildings, but an ancient sailor from Egypt or the Mediterranean, in describing this altar to his countrymen, could easily have referred to it as a pillar.

I think it is possible that sometime after a mass destruction, the survivors, who would have been in the highlands, could have built this monument in memory of the important ritual.

The Irrigated Fertile Plain

Plato makes five separate another gifts references to the fertile plain of Atlantis:

• [Poseidon] making every variety of food to spring up abundantly from the soil. • Looking toward the sea, but in the center of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to

have been the fairest of all plains and very fertile. • [The island brought forth fruits] wondrous and in infinite abundance. • …. the excellence of the soil. • Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth—in winter having the benefit of the rains

of heaven, and in summer the water which the land supplied by introducing streams from the canals.

The Sunda Plain was not completely submerged when the ice-glaciers melted. The remains of it exist as the northeastern part of the island of Java. So let us compare the above passages to the following passage about this area:

Java’s level of fertility and agricultural productivity is without parallel in any other equatorial land … because of Java’s miraculously rich volcanic soil—with loam so dark it looks like melted chocolate—farmers often harvest two or even three crops a year … wet rice cultivation is extensive, irrigated by water systems up to 3,000 years old. 24

Or this quote from Java (Hutton), “rice yields under traditional conditions … that are by far the highest in the world.” 25

In Islands of Fire, Islands of Spice, we read, “While volcanic ejecta in many parts of the world is acidic, in Java it is chemically basic, rich in soluble plant nutrients such as calcium, magnesium, nitrogen and phosphorus. For millennia this rich ash deposit has blanketed the island and turned it into a rioting garden.” 26

Pick up any reference book and look up Java (or, for example, “Indonesia,” or the “Malaysian

Oey, Sumatra: Island of Adventure.23

Dalton, The Indonesian Handbook.24

Hutton, Java, 1980.25

Bangs, P.33.26

Warrior riding a bull in Indonesia. Photo by author.

Archipelago”). They all say that the soil fertility is near miraculous or the best in the world. (Also, Java experiences most of its rain during the “winter” months as Plato says of Atlantis.)

So here we have more parallels between Java and Plato’s Atlantis: 1) soil fertility, 2) harvesting multiple crops a year, 3) a 3,000-year-old irrigation system. If one wanted to find a place somewhere in the world where the soil fertility matched the irrigated soil fertility of our alleged Atlantis, one would pick Java.

The Flora and Fauna Regarding the flora and fauna, the Sunda Plain fits neatly with Plato’s Atlantis. Here are two of

Plato’s descriptions of the biological conditions of Atlantis:

• There was an abundance of wood for carpenter’s work, and sufficient maintenance for tame and wild animals. Moreover, there were a great number of elephants in the island; for as there was provision for all other sorts of animals, both for those which live in lakes and marshes and rivers, and also for those which live in mountains and on plains, so there was for the animal which is the largest and most voracious of all. Also whatever fragrant things there now are in the earth, whether roots, or herbage, or woods, or essences which distil from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in that land; also the fruit which admits of cultivation, both the dry sort, which is given us for nourishment and any other which we use for food-we call them all by the common name pulse, and the fruits having a hard rind, affording drinks and meats and ointments, and good store of chestnuts and the like, which furnish pleasure and amusement, and are fruits which spoil with keeping, and the pleasant kinds of dessert, with which we console ourselves after dinner, when we are tired of eating-all these that sacred island which then beheld the light of the sun, brought forth fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance.

• [The mountains] having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts, abundant for each and every kind of work.

As you read the above description by Plato, did you notice the reference to a fruit “having a hard rind, affording drinks and meats and ointments”? Is this not the coconut? With its firm rind (covering), its delicious inside drink, its white meat, and the white coconut oil, which feels so good on the skin? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “… the native home of the coconut palm is unknown, but it probably originated somewhere in Indo-Malaya, where the palm exists in many natural forms.” In other words, the coconut originated very close to the Sunda Plain. It is not naturally found in the Mediterranean area.

Also, notice that Atlantis contained “elephants,” “the animal which is the largest and most voracious of all.” This eliminates several other possible locations for Atlantis, as we will discuss later.

Pick up any reference book on Java or Indonesia or the Malay Archipelago (of which Indonesia is a part) and you will find descriptions matching Plato’s. For example:

The flora of the Malay archipelago is probably the most varied in the world. More than 30,000 species of trees, shrubs and grasses belonging to more than 2,500 families have been recorded … island groups have been joined together, then separated, then rejoined, increasing the almost unimaginable diversity of plant and animal life … While the fauna of the archipelago is very rich, there are a few large animals. Elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, wild cattle, tapir and orangutan are all part of the Asian fauna. 27

Also, the Indonesian Handbook says that Java has “35 species of fruit—20 found nowhere else.” (I saw many exotic fruit in Indonesia and rode on one of the many elephants there.)

When archeologists first found bone remains of “Java Man” (later to be called Homo erectus) in the 1800s, this was thought to be the earliest ancestor of man (before the discovery of Australopithecus, etc.), and they therefore thought that Java might have been the Garden of Eden mentioned in the Book of Genesis. The Mining

In several places throughout the text, Plato mentions a strange metal. No one has ever been able to decipher what this metal was. Here are the three relevant passages:

• In the first place, they dug out of the earth whatever was to be found there, solid as well as fusile, and that which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in

Encyclopedia Britannica, “Malay Archipelago.”27

those days than anything except gold. • The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a

coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum.

• In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum; and all the other parts, the walls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalcum.

These descriptions are very similar to the temples I saw throughout Thailand. The literal translation of orichalcum is “copper-mountain” (Random House Dictionary).

All metals have an igneous or magma origin and so we would expect the Indonesian area to have many metals. I discovered that there is, and has been, plenty of mining of precious metals in the large Malaysian arc. Just in the last few decades, a large copper mine was built in Irian Jaya, which is at the far eastern end of Indonesia on what is now called New Guinea. This copper mine is the second largest in the world and produces the largest amount of gold of any mine in the world. It was called “the largest and richest copper deposit ever found above ground … a mountain of ore.” The ore, which comes out, is a mixture of 28

copper and gold. The mine sits at 12,000 feet. When discovered it was a large unusual outcropping of copper that had been made visible by the glacial removal of the overlying sedimentary rock. The Dutch called this phenomenon “erzberg” or “ore mountain.”

What could be “more precious in those days than anything except gold” if not gold that has been mixed with another metal? Since orichalcum is reddish, like copper, I would guess that this copper-gold mixture is the ancient and mysterious orichalcum.

I found four references that tend to confirm this:

• gold with copper mixed in is called “pink gold.” 29

• the Encyclopedia Britannica, in their articles on “metallurgy” and “metalworking, decorative” notes that the first metals known to man were those occurring frequently in their native state, and that these were probably gold and copper.

• the Britannica also mentions that on the island of Crete, a particular gold metalwork was found from ancient times: “The gold was in two colours, a deeper red being obtained by the admixture of copper …” This tells us that some ancient people did, in fact, combine gold and copper.

• One author reports that a rare, red alloy of copper and gold is found around Lake Poopo in Bolivia. 30

Here we have more interesting parallels: the red flashing metal of Plato’s Atlantis, so-called “pink gold,” the ancient red gold found on Crete, the red alloy of copper and gold in Bolivia and the very large, naturally protruding copper mine containing gold and copper ore on a mountain top in eastern Indonesia.

The Mythology

Plato describes some hot springs:

He himself [Poseidon], being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm water and the other of cold …

Plato never mentions a volcanic destruction, but the hot springs that he mentions suggests that his Atlantis had geological activity. In southern Sumatra, I met an old man who had visited the child of Krakatau more than 200 times. He told me that his great-grandfather had been killed by the 1883 explosion-eruption. As we walked down to the shore and the boat, which would carry us over to the volcanic island, he pointed out some hot springs. Later, a few kilometers up the hill, I bathed in some hot springs at a small resort that had been built by the Dutch when they colonized this area.

Plato goes on to say that Poseidon,

Wilson, The Conquest of Copper Mountain, 1981.28

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. A film documentary on gold.29

Allen, Jim, Geographical Magazine.30

…. also begat and brought up five pairs of twin male children; and dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he gave to the first-born of the eldest pair his mother’s dwelling and the surrounding allotment, which was the largest and best, and made him king over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many men, and a large territory. And he named them all; the eldest, who was the first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean were called Atlantic.

It is a common misconception that Atlas held the world on his shoulders. He held the heavens. Pomponius Mela in his description of the world describes Atlas: “… its summit is higher than the eye can reach: it loses itself in the clouds; also it is fabled not only to touch with its top the sky and the stars but also to support them.” It appeared to me at this point in my investigation that Java and Sumatra, with their many tall peaks towering over 10,000 feet, would be good candidates for the real Atlas Mountains. In other words, I imagined that seeing a mountaintop disappear into the clouds could remind one of holding up the heavens. Twin peaks (of which Java has several) disappearing into the clouds could certainly remind one of two shoulders holding up the heavens.

Plato says that beyond the continent of Atlantis were many other islands. This certainly fits when all the islands of the South Pacific are considered. Some of these islands, just beyond the Sumatra-Java volcanic mountain chain, are the legendary Spice Islands. Europeans including the Dutch, British and Portuguese fought over these islands for many years.

Mountains in Indonesia are often cloud covered. The moist, equatorial air of Indonesia produces this condition. Mahameru (10,082 ft), in eastern Java is known as the “abode of the Gods.”

The largest mountain of Bali, the island just east of Java, is also known as the “abode of the Gods.” Certainly, mountain peaks that sometimes disappear into the clouds would seem to be a likely place for the Gods to gather. I wondered if these disappearing mountains, besides being the beginnings of the legend of Atlas, were also the beginnings of the legend of Mount Olympus. Perhaps as the legend traveled westward, the mountain was relocated repeatedly so the local populace would have their Gods nearby. (If this seems unlikely to you, please recall that the largest volcano on Mars, which is also the largest volcano in the solar system, has been named Mount Olympus.)

So again, we see a parallel between the local geography of the Sunda area and Plato’s Atlantis. More will be said later about mythology and its correlation with the Sunda Plain.

The Destruction of Mankind: The Probable Source of the Atlantis Story

In Egypt “the pyramid texts were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara during the 5th and 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom. The oldest of the texts have been dated to between ca. 2400–2300 BC.” In one location there is an interesting story about the “destruction of mankind.” I present parts 31

of it here, as they are similar to the tale told to Solon when he went to Egypt (from which Plato later wrote his story of Atlantis). The Atlantis story ends like this:

Zeus, the god of gods, who rules with law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honorable race was in a most wretched state, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improved, collected all the gods into his most holy habitation, which being placed in the centre of the world, sees all things that partake of generation. And when he had gathered them together he spake as follows: [Here Plato’s story abruptly ends. However, in previous passages we already have found out about the destruction of Atlantis.] 32

Compare this with hieroglyphs:

Ra … when realized that mankind was plotting against him, said to his suite: Go summon me hither my Eye, together with Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, and all the fathers and mothers who were with me in the Primeval Waters … You shall bring them to the Great Palace that they may give their advice … Behold mankind, who came from my Eye, have been scheming against me. Tell me what to do about it for I seek [a solution]. I would not kill them until I had heard what you have to say … 33

Ra then slays them with the help of his Eye and Hathor, the cow goddess. A type of beer is used to flood the fields to a depth of three palms. We can see the similarities of the two stories. Note that Zeus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts31

Plato, Critias. 32

Quoted by Clark, p. 181-183.33

gathers them in the center of the world, where the magma would be thought to be. Note the reference to a flood and primeval waters. The Eye here is the crater of the volcano again.

This story does not show that Atlantis existed. However, it does show that Plato did not merely make up the story of Atlantis, but that it was probably based on earlier stories, and undoubtably this story. Having found no apparent mention of the word “Atlantis” in the “Book of the Dead” or in other hieroglyphs, scholars have said that it never existed.

Plato says the ancient Egyptian priests told Solon that the story of Atlantis was recorded in the Egyptian temples in their “sacred registers.” “Atlantis” was probably a name coined by Plato. When Solon, Plato’s ancestor, went to Sais (which at that time was the capital of Egypt) I think he was told this story and shown the hieroglyphs and then this story was passed on to Plato.

Thus we have a fallacy: the Atlantic Ocean was the body of water between Europe-Africa and the Americas. Revision: the Atlantic Ocean once included the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Southern Atlantic.

Difficulties with the Various Theories

Here are some of the major difficulties with some of the primary locations suggested for Atlantis. Perhaps astute readers do not need to have these difficulties pointed out to them, but since some people favor these locations, I will mention them.

Difficulty with the Sunda Plain Theory

As noted in the chart there is a difficulty with the Sunda Plain (Sundaland) Theory of Atlantis. One scientific theory is that civilization spread to Sumatra and Java about 2,000 BC from Taiwan.

Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, discusses this expansion, which anthropologists and archeologists call the “Austronesian expansion.” It describes the expansion from mainland China (via Taiwan) to Australia and Polynesia. It is one of the “biggest population movements of the last 6,000 years.” Around 3,000 BC these people already were to the Philippines, by 2000 BC to Java and Sumatra, by 1600 BC to the Solomon Archipelago, by 500 AD to Hawaii.

Diamond states that there is no archeological evidence that any civilization, except hunter-gatherers, existed in southern Sumatra or northwestern Java before 2,000 years ago.

Diamond says that independent evidence from linguistics supports this idea. In depth studies of language families and sub-families and sub-sub-families all point to Taiwan as the source of this expansion.

Diamond, however, states that what the evidence shows is that a people came out of Taiwan with a cultural package including pigs, chickens, dogs, a type of pottery, certain stone tools and language and spread this cultural package to Indonesia, parts of Australia and throughout most of the islands of the Pacific. This is known as the “out of Taiwan” model.

They also spread it to one other location, which is important for our purposes. These people, who were obviously a seafaring people, somehow established themselves on the island of Madagascar, near Africa, on the far side of what is today called the “Indian” Ocean. Diamond states that the evidence supports the fact that they might have crossed the “Indian” Ocean directly, rather than following the coast (shore-hugging) along India and Africa. They apparently established themselves on Madagascar by 800 AD and possibly as early as 300 AD. How they got there is not known. This direct trip would have been just a bit

Suggested Location Difficulties with this LocationAn island-continent in the Atlantic

No evidence, despite extensive sea-floor mapping.

Thera (volcanic Greek Island)

Much too small, no tropical fruits, no coconuts, poor soil fertility, no elephants, no canal system, not beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Bahaman Islands Too small, no elephants, no canal system. Great Briton No elephants, not tropical, too small, no

canal system.Islands of the Caribbean No elephants, too small, no canal system.Antarctica No elephants, not tropical, no evidence for a

recent crustal shift.A l a k e i n t h e A n d e s highlands

No elephants, no seacoast.

Sunda Plain of SE Asia No current evidence of any civilization in the area before 2,000 BC.

farther than Columbus sailed from Europe to the West Indies. Diamond calls this migration, “… the single most astonishing fact of human geography for the entire world.” The ancestral population of the South American coconut is the Pacific coconut so it is possible that this seafaring people traveled even further than Madagasca. 34

However, in Eden in the East, author Steven Oppenheimer gives 500 pages of evidence from genetics, linguists, oceanography, archeology and mythology bringing him to the conclusion that when ocean waters rose at the end of the ice age, the early talking primates went from Sundaland, to Taiwan and China, and then came back out of China-Taiwan to create the “Austronesian expansion.”

Recent finding from genetics (2008, 2009) suggest that “Asia was populated primarily through a single migration event out of Africa whereby an early population first entered South East Asia before they moved northwards to East Asia.” Chinese people have a smaller genetic variation than people of Southeast 35

Asia perhaps because the rapid increase in China’s population occurred only after the cultivation of rice about 10,000 years ago. 36

There is another theory by Wilhelm Solheim’s called the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network (NMTCN). He suggests this network existed around 5000 BCE and may date back to 30,000 BCE. Soldeim’s theory is of a sea-people that spread culture in many different directions. 37

A Speculative Scenario

Wherever they may have begun, the Austronesian’s, or the Nusantao, by shore-hugging or ocean-crossing, crossed a large body of water, a body of water that may have been at one time part of the ancient Atlantic Ocean (as we discussed earlier) and may have gone around the Cape of Good hope, in Africa, and reached South America.

To establish a permanent presence somewhere, usually it is first necessary to do exploratory expeditions. For example, the first expeditions to the American continent did not establish a permanent presence. Only later expeditions established successful colonies. Also, as Oppenheimer suggests, they may have been driven out at the end-of-the-ice-age-rising-waters.

In any case, after arriving in the Mediterranean, perhaps these Sea People battled the Egyptians and Ancient Greeks. This battle may have found its way into Plato’s story. This speculative scenario is similar to a well-documented battle by the Egyptians against a so-called “Sea People” that occurred sometime around 1200 BC. This battle is described on the walls of Egyptian monuments. Scholars assume that the Sea People arrived in Egypt and Palestine somewhere from within the Mediterranean, possibly the island of Crete. However, this has never been firmly established.

Oppenheimer, after extensive analysis comes to these three conclusions: 1) The genetic markers that have spread radially out of Southeast Asia, carried by people speaking

Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic Tongues, had both been in this island region back in the ice age if not much longer. This contradicts the conventional view of the recent Austronesian dispersal out of Asia through the Philippines, and supports a Sundaland origin of civilization.

2) Where genetic trees have been constructed for East Asian genetic markers, including those in aboriginal populations still found in Southeast Asia and speaking either Austro-Asiatic or Austronesian tongues are placed at the earliest branches.

3) These markers were carried out east to the Pacific, west to India, and the Middle East, north to Taiwan, China, Burma and Tibet and south to Australia since the last ice age. All these findings are predicted by the prehistoric models outlined earlier [a Sundaland origin for civilization]. 38

In short: 1. The ancient “Atlantic” Ocean may have included the modern day Indian Ocean. 2. Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines are very active geologically. 3. Ancient people somehow established themselves throughout Indonesia, the Pacific Islands of Polynesia

and across the Indian Ocean, on the island of Madagascar (near Africa) by 300 AD. This is known as the

from Wikipedia article on Austronesian Expansion: Gunn, Bee; Luc Baudouin; Kenneth M. Olsen (2011). "Independent Origins of Cultivated 34

Coconut (Cocos nuciferaL.) in the Old World Tropics". PLoS ONE. 6 (6): e21143. Bibcode:2011PLoSO...621143G. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021143. PMC 3120816 . PMID 21731660.

see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples35

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples36

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusantao_Maritime_Trading_and_Communication_Network37

Oppenheimer, p. 217-218.38

Austronesian expansion. These people may have originally come from Sundaland during the rising ocean waters at the end of the ice age.

4. Plato wrote about a sea people coming into the Mediterranean in 9000 BC and fighting with the Egyptians. He called these sea people Atlantians as they came from (according to his story) the Atlantic Ocean.

5. In 1200 BC, Egyptian monuments describe battles with a “Sea People.” Scholars do not know where these people came from, but assume it was from within the Mediterranean.

There are several possibilities: 1. 9000 BC: Ancient humans, driven from Sundaland by rising ocean waters or volcanic explosions, spread

throughout Southeast Asia and also sailed into the Mediterranean Sea and fought with ancient Egyptians. (Some of Plato’s story is correct.)

2. 1200 BC: Ancient humans established a settlement near Krakatau, or Merapi, then went on to Africa (Madagascar), and then around Africa to the Mediterranean (Egypt). They fought with the Egyptians. This became documented on Nile River monuments where the Austronesians are dubbed the “Sea People.” (Plato wrongly ascribed an ancient date of 9000 BC, rather than circa 1200 BC.)

3. 1200 BC: The Sea People came from inside the Mediterranean (perhaps Crete). Plato ascribed a wrong date to the event (9000 BC) and a wrong geographical source (outside the Mediterranean) to the people. Plato confuses or blends together various stories of destruction (Thera, Krakatau), various civilizations, various times and creates a tale of an ideal society that is destroyed.

Further Testing of the Theory

Remote sensing from orbiting telescopes of Southern Sumatra and Northwestern Java may find evidence of ancient canals, which are not obvious from ground level. This would tend to support Plato’s story and the Sunda Plain theory.

Additional archeological and genetic research in the areas of Southern Sumatra and Northwestern Java may eventually find artifacts tending to support or refute the theory. Artifacts dating from before 4,000 years ago would of course tend to support an earlier date.

Summary

There are some interesting matches between the Sunda Sub-Oceanic Plain (including the volcano Krakatau) and Plato’s Atlantis. I have brought these together and discussed them briefly under these headings: 1) the sub-oceanic plain, 2) the extreme geological activity (including the earthquake in 2004 which killed about 250,000 people—more on this later), 3) the climate, 4) the irrigated-fertile plain, 5) the flora and fauna, 6) the mining, 7) the cultural artifacts, 8) the mythology.

Although many suggestions have been made regarding the location of Atlantis (or rather an event that inspired the story of Atlantis), such as Great Briton, Thera, Peru, Antarctica, the Azores, the Bahamas, North Africa, etc., I believe that none of them make as good a match as Southeast Asia. The Sunda Sub-Oceanic Plain, or Sundaland, is large enough to match Plato’s alleged Atlantis. It also has an equatorial climate, volcanic mountains to the North, and a sea to the South. When we add several other factors: the climate, the irrigated-fertile plain, the flora and fauna, the mining, the cultural artifacts, and the mythology, the evidence becomes much stronger.

When you add the evidence presented by Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, and more recent genetic studies from humans and coconuts, the evidence becomes more compelling.

Conclusion

There is no need for us to invoke UFOs, aliens, advanced technology, past lives, “high wisdom” of the ancients, “channeling,” and other such matters. None of these things existed in Plato’s account. They were all invented by people and then perpetuated in various media out of ignorance or greed.

Plato’s “Atlantis” was part fact and part fiction. As Professor Luce said in 1975, “Plato in his Atlantis narrative utilized materials not entirely devoid of historical content.” 39

Plato’s fiction was his attempt to portray an ideal society. His facts may have been his use of oral legends carried westward by the Austronesian expansion, originating in Sundaland, and strengthened by volcanic or other geological disasters in other areas including the Mediterranean. These oral legends may have included the explosion of the volcano Krakatau, which exploded several times in prehistory, as it did in 1883, killing 36,000 people.

Ramage, p. 50.39

I posted this chapter online on my website in about 1998. For some reason the approach of the year 2000 had generated a lot of interest in “Atlantis.” I got a lot of emails asking me questions about it. One German publisher asked permission to translate it to German and put it on his website. However, mostly I got emails from school children who were doing a report on Atlantis for their class and wanted to interview me by email.

I sent a copy to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, well known as a “hard” science fiction writer, mostly famously for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He also wrote several important science articles and was the first person to publish an article on how to use satellites for radio transmission.

I had corresponded with Arthur Clarke throughout most of the 1990s and into the 2000s, and one time I talked with him over an early Internet connection. He was usually quite happy to reply to my letters, and when I sent him this article about “Atlantis,” he forwarded it to another author and told him that I was “some kind of genius.”

I had spent a lot of time, mostly pre-Internet era, buying and reading books, and hanging out at many used book stores throughout the Southern California area. It was a time of wondrous discovery and insight for me. The Dot-Com era was bubbling up and I could have been a part of it, but I was too immersed and excited by what I was discovering.

Troy

Like Atlantis, for many centuries the city of Troy, written about by Homer in the Iliad, was considered to be a mythical city. As you might remember, during the Trojan War, the Greeks sailed off in a thousand ships to Troy to rescue the beautiful Helen. They couldn’t accomplish their breach of the city walls and so they retreated, leaving a huge horse in their place. When the Trojans wheeled the horse into their city out popped Greek soldiers who massacred all the men and sold many of the woman and children into slavery. Nowadays we have computer “trojans horses” that can likewise steal into our computers and wreak havoc if we click on the wrong link. And we have condoms called Trojans that likewise hide soldier-like sperm that can potentially be set free to fertilize the eggs of a unsuspecting female, but in most they cases don't. Frank Calvert was an English consul in the Mediterranean who loved Homer’s stories and was convinced that these “myths” were at least part historical. His brother eventually bought some land in Turkey where Calvert thought Troy might be located. He began digging but it was not until he met a wealthy German businessman by the name of Heinrich Schliemann that the site really got “excavated.” Schliemann had made a fortune from various business deals including selling the raw materials for ammunition to the Russian government during the Crimean war, 1854-1856. He had also began to search for the ancient city based on Homer’s writings. He was about to give up his search when he met Frank Calvert, who convinced him to excavate on his land about 1868. Schliemann apparently was a bit overeager and used blasting powder which may have destroyed the walls of Troy. Schliemann found thousands of precious artifacts, and most academic archeologists now believe that the site was indeed the location of ancient Troy. Historians and archeologists are divided on whether Schliemann was a great discoverer or more of a con man and self-promoter. In 1996 Calvert’s heirs sued the Schliemann estate for part of the treasure found by Schliemann. 40

Egypt

Next I turned my attention to Egypt since that was the source of Plato’s story. In my search for truth, I dug deeply into the mythological writings of the Nile River civilization, and for the second time, I was completely stunned and amazed by what I discovered there.

At that time there was not much on the Internet in terms of content about ancient Egypt. So I searched through used bookstores and public and university libraries for obscure and ancient texts. 41

In Pasadena, California there were a couple of good used bookstores in the downtown area across from Vroman’s Bookstore. I don’t know if they are still there. Also there were other used bookstores in Los

Most of this material on Calvert and Schliemann I got from Wikipedia although I also read some books by Schliemann back when I was researching 40

this in the 1990s.

There was the Pasadena Library, the Glendale Library, and the Santa Monica Library, and the large Los Angeles Library. (Finding inexpensive 41

parking was always a problem, but I somehow managed, using various side streets and a bit of hiking.)

Angeles and Long Beach. I still remember the excitement I felt when I found a used copy of Volume I of 42

An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary by E. A. Wallis Budge, and then finally, a few months later, Volume II. Budge lived from 1857 to 1934 and worked for the British Museum. He went frequently to Egypt to

participate in various digs and published many books. I also found a used copy of his Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, which I still remember particularly fondly.

Budge also collected various artifacts for the British Museum. In fact, in his book By Nile and Tigris, Budge admits stealing the Papyrus of Ani, a marvelous and colorful 78 foot scroll, from an Egyptian government storeroom, in 1888. It still lies in the British Museum today. He was knighted by the British government for his service to the museum in 1920. I eventually bought a large folio color copy of this papyrus.

One problem was that my small apartment in Glendale was becoming too full of books: popular math books, popular science books, many scientific books from the Great Books series, the complete Oxford Dictionary (albeit in small print with an accompanying magnifying glass), an Encyclopedia Britannica, geology books, biology books, genetics books, etc. I had about 1700 books placed on wall-to-wall bookshelves.

It was difficult to part with them. But eventually I realized I had to make room for new ideas as well as make myself more mobile. I slowly began donating them to various libraries, and eventually, over a period of several years was able to move out of my apartment and eventually relocated to China. Now I collect digital books, and although convenient, I miss the feel of paper and I notice my mind does not remember the contents as well. Perhaps this is due to the lack of physical interaction (such as page turning) that occurs with a paper book in which the location within the book is more firmly embedded in my mind.

So in the next chapters, I give a summary of all this research that led me to an astonishing and unexpected conclusion: that the Great Pyramids represent volcanoes. 43

I remember one huge bookstore in Long Beach that I think was called “Acres of Books.” What a delight to visit! What hidden gems I found there! 42

(I remember one book by Buckminster Fuller that I found there that cost me 10 dollars which I later sold for 65.)

Though perhaps this is not so astonishing when you realize that at least some scholars, believe this word (pyro + mid), means “fire in the middle.” 43

Etymology is often guesswork, and since most etymologists have not read this book, they see no connection between fire and pyramids, and so look for other possibilities. However, see The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Word-Analysis, by William Swinton, 1879. He gives the root word: “PUR, fire--pyramid, pyrotechny.” http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/3/4/19346/19346-8.txt Also see: http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/a/19915-archaeological-essays-vol-1-by-simpson?start=135 which states, “Fifteen centuries ago, Ammianus Marcellinus derived the word pyramid from another Greek word [Greek: pyr], _fire_; because, as he argues, the Egyptian Pyramid rises to a sharp pointed top, like to the form of a fire or flame.” Also, “In his elegy of Adonais, Shelley, in alluding to the resting-place of Keats beside this remarkable monument, brings in, with rare poetical power, the idea of the word pyramid being derived from [Greek: pyr], and signifying the shape of flame.”