Damned Muddy Shoals... - by nbohr1more
nbohr1more on 2/8/2011 at 05:11
I decided to take a peek at maps of the "Greek Work View" to fact check my recollection of the ancient perceptions about the pillars and found that the Greeks knew of the Black Sea and Azov as surrounded by land but thought that Gibraltar and the Gulf of Suez lead into a world encircling Ocean.
The importance of the "world ocean" in the Atlantis narrative means that the Black Sea is excluded unless Egypt had poor knowledge of that geography. Carthage controlled Gibraltar at the time of Solon so it's all too likely that Greek scouts would've seen it to assess it's military importance. If so, did Egypt also know what Greece knew?
Where are those Library of Alexander documents when you need them... Oh yeah... possibly in Timbuktu library...
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts_Project)
Nicker on 2/8/2011 at 05:26
Quote Posted by nbohr1more
I'm sure you meant Atlantic coast of Spain ;)
It was a test and you passed. ;)
It's possible there never was a singular location called Atlantis. If Plato's account is largely history, not fiction, Atlantis might be a conflation of several disparate times, locations and events, even of disparate civilisations.
There are a number of submerged sites around the world which appear to be huge, artificial structures. They lie in what were once coastal areas, often near ancient and also submerged river deltas. But these areas were dry land during the last ice age, and would have become submerged 18,000 years ago or so, about 8,000 years before stone age humans developed agriculture and domestication.
It would seem that there are some discrepancies in the record somewhere.
Sg3 on 2/8/2011 at 11:32
Quote Posted by Nicker
There are a number of submerged sites around the world which appear to be huge, artificial structures. They lie in what were once coastal areas, often near ancient and also submerged river deltas.
Can you give a few examples?
demagogue on 2/8/2011 at 12:08
The one I know is Caesarea on the Israeli coast, a big chunk of which is now underwater.
You can go scuba diving through the ruins. :cool:
Sea levels rise and towns get inundated.
It's happened forever and is still going on right now.
demagogue on 5/8/2011 at 08:53
Way too modern to be remotely a possibility. But cool looking.
On a sidenote I love surfing google world sometimes.
I like exploring remote places I don't know anything about, either vast open areas on a map or the areas around borders always tend to be interesting, and where human influence seems tenuous or contested. Last thing I did was explored NW China, way into the hinterland, but also around the Kazahk & the -Stans' borders. There's a lot of just mountainous countryside, but then I'll find a road, and follow it as if in a car, until eventually it comes to a few abandoned looking buildings, and I'll wonder what it'd be like actually driving down that road. A little like Minecraft (or vice versa). You're exploring but you don't know what for and you just see where it takes you and let the world reveal itself.
nbohr1more on 29/11/2011 at 22:02
I've got my perfect candidate.
Tunisia!
Specifically, the in-land lakes and marshes known as Chott el Djerid just past the "Gulf of
Gabes". These marshes and lakes (since antiquity) are rumored to be the remnants of the legendary Lake Tritonis.
Let's look at how well this works out:
1) It's to the West of Greece and Egypt
2) It's within the occupied territory (ancient Libya) that Atlantis is claimed to have presided over
3) It's a location that is mired in Greek mythological status included the residence of King Atlas
4) It's climate was hospitable to Elephants until the late bronze age
5) Gabes is closer to "Gades" than "Cadiz"
6) Petroglyphs from Morocco to Libya attest the ancient use of Chariots
7) It meets most of the same hierarchical constraint criteria that places Morocco in the 99.99% percentile as a match (per Hubner)
8) It's a body of water that "use to be navigable" but is now a "muddy shoal"... (something that NEVER happened to Gibraltar or the Atlantic ocean).
9) It has a history of geological instability with a major seismic upheaval between 1300BC to 1200 BC (which is younger than the anchor date for the earliest known chariots around 2000 BC)
10) Ancient texts attest the existence of islands in Lake Tritonis
11) The western north African tribes were called the Atlantois by Strabo
12) It doesn't require improbably linguistic twists, impossible geology, improbable geographic misinterpretation, asteroids collisions with no crater, ice-age oral traditions, extra-terrestrials, time-scales that predate homo-sapiens, blindness to known history (Minoans)...
It's the best theory I've read and it fixes the muddy shoals question.
(
http://www.atlantis-scout.de/HofmannU_2005_AtlantisBronzeAgeMetropolisNorthAfrica.pdf)
I like it. I like it a lot!
Edit:
My new ACME mapper location of interest:
(
http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=33.96187,9.80800&z=17&t=S&marker0=33.70000%2C8.43000%2CChott%20el%20Djerid&marker1=33.96187%2C9.80800%2C6.9%20km%20N%20of%20El%20Hamma)
demagogue on 30/11/2011 at 01:56
I just saw that NatGeo show Nicker mentioned.
I like that series. Another one of the episodes was a guy tracking down the tomb of Ghengis Khan.
Or shows like that generally... Another one I liked was when the Naked Archaeologist was going over the evidence for different Sinai peninsular mountains being Mt. Sinai.
Sort of a cool mix of history, science, and geography.
By the way, I was actually reading some Plato... He had this vision of our world like the air in our sky was a great ocean in a bowl, like an analog to our water ocean, and if you could "swim" to the top of our sky, you'd reach a "surface" to a higher world of beings that would look down on us like we look down on fish. Also presumably where the Platonic categories reside ("The Good", "The Beautiful", "The Perfect Circle", etc), as well as the heavenly bodies. It's actually not too crazy, since the atmosphere does have depth pressure, and zones, and currents, and fluid dynamics, just not such a smooth surface. But this is just to note you can't say he didn't have a great imagination.
nbohr1more on 30/11/2011 at 06:35
Yeah, Naked Archeologist is great stuff.
(Even though Simcha is pretty heavy-handed with the narrative and conclusions he does it all with a knowing wink letting folks know that his conclusions are partly for his own amusement. He seems to be saying "lighten-up" to both conservative religious folk and staunchly skeptical scientific folk...)
Plato isn't too far off. If the atmosphere was only made of heavier gasses you could arguably say that the edge is like the water surface.
