I am very drawn to stories about Atlantis. Can you tell me more about it?
A lot of people in the world today have quite a strong attraction to Atlantis. There are two good books on this subject written by a man by the name of Frank Joseph.* One is The Destruction of Atlantis, and a couple of years later, he wrote The Survivors of Atlantis. He puts together all the different information available from geologic surveys, people who study myths, historians, astronomers, and archeologists.
He says that Plato got the date wrong for the final sinking of Atlantis. Plato put it at about eleven thousand to twelve thousand years ago. But what Plato didn’t know when he got the story from Solon, who got it from one of the Egyptian priests, was that the Egyptians had four different ways of reckoning time.
Plato was thinking in terms of the way we think of a solar year—three hundred sixty-five days or so. But the Egyptian priests had another way of looking at it where a year was about a month, which was a lunar year. And when you apply this time calculation to twelve thousand years, you come up with a date as recent as about 1200 BC for the actual sinking of Atlantis.
This was during the Bronze Age. And it fits. Eleven thousand or twelve thousand years ago, there would still have been Stone Age people. To suddenly have a big, strong empire with all the enormous buildings Plato spoke of would have been totally out of time and place then. Things don’t happen like that.
There’s a good argument for the sinking of Atlantis having occurred in 1198 BC. In fact, by different evidence gathered from astronomy, myths, and elsewhere, the author even narrows it down to November of that year.
There were four cataclysms in Atlantis. Three of them had happened over the previous several thousand years, and then came the final one around 1200 BC. The final one was also accompanied by a comet that had been going around the earth and getting closer and closer, so that people were literally scared to death.
The Atlanteans were much bigger than the indigenous people of any other lands. To some, they were giants. The Bible mentions something to this effect: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” That’s in Genesis.
Frank Joseph also points out that Atlantis wasn’t actually a continent. This land mass just west of the Pillars of Heracles, or Gibraltar as we know it today, was an island about the size of Portugal. It was a maritime nation, and the Atlanteans traveled widely. They went up by the British Isles (though the land masses were a little bit different then) and all the way to the Americas. They were widely traveled people. They went over toward the east also, and they came to Egypt. There’s a record in Ramses III’s victory temple of a battle that had been fought with the Sea People. The Egyptians had another name for them, but it equates to the Sea People.
It’s just a fascinating history. The Egyptians were defeated at first, time and again, but Ramses III was a very wise and clever general. Eventually he arranged it so his forces overcame the invading Atlanteans. The Egyptians asked, “Why did you come here?” And the Atlanteans said, “Because our homeland sank. We had to go somewhere.”
The Egyptians even drew pictures of what the Atlanteans looked like. You can’t really tell what dress they would have worn, because when they were captured, they were put into chains. After that, they were executed, and that was the end of it.
In Frank Joseph’s next book, The Survivors of Atlantis, the author makes a very compelling case as to why the Bronze Age had flourished during the time of Atlantis—how the Atlanteans were key players, and how there are mines in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that were worked at that time and which were abandoned at the time of the sinking of Atlantis.
It’s all a very intriguing story. And the reason people have such a strong affinity for Atlantis today is that so many of today’s people were Atlanteans.
* Use discretion in considering this author’s other titles. His works on Atlantis and Lemuria are well documented and support a compelling case. However, the author has been known for criminal behavior and extreme political views that Eᴄᴋᴀɴᴋᴀʀ completely rejects.
—Sri Harold Klemp