Don’t claim a lost city is Atlantis

Call it New Clopia or Muddyvilla or Lost Nostril. Call it anything except Atlantis They can’t prove that it’s fucking Atlantis!

Scientists say they may have discovered the lost city of Atlantis buried deep under the marshlands of southern Spain.

The legendary city is believed to have been “swallowed up by the sea,” as the Greek philosopher Plato so famously put it 2,400 years ago.

He wrote of a great city destroyed by floodwaters following an earthquake deep under the sea — an image that resonates at a time when Japan is struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake and tsunami off its northeast coast.

A National Geographic television special that aired on Sunday details the work of American, Canadian and Spanish scientists as they attempt to prove Atlantis existed by following up on space satellite images showing unusual features in an area just north of Cadiz.

Perhaps it really is the remains of a city but I think calling it the lost city of Atlantis is a bit of a stretch.

For one thing, it’s completely feasible that Plato made that whole story up in the first place.

Alan F. Alford, one of the world’s authorities on ancient mythology, claims to have uncovered the truth: the Greek philosopher invented Atlantis as a metaphor for the ancient version of our ‘Big Bang’ theory.

‘My findings allow us, for the first time ever, to get inside Plato’s mind and reconsider the story of Atlantis from an ancient, rather than a modern, perspective,’ said Alford, who has spent the last five years investigating the story.

‘Behind the tale lies a single secret of stunning simplicity: namely that although Atlantis was a lost paradise, it was not a lost city, island or continent, but a lost planet of the former golden age,’ he added. ‘The loss of Atlantis was meant to signify a totally profound event – the cataclysm of all cataclysms that disrupted the universe at the beginning of all time.’

His theory is that Plato referred to a creation myth.

It has long been acknowledged that there is strong scientific evidence for the explosion of one or more planets in our solar system from about 427 to 347BC (around the time Plato was writing), rationalised then by the creation of the ‘exploded planet myth’.

‘The myth held that the cosmos was born when a planet crashed on to a dead, dry Earth, spreading the seeds and water of life,’ said Alford. ‘I maintain that it is this myth that the tale of Atlantis was created to explain.’

Whatever city this is, they should not call it Atlantis no matter how much public pressure they might be under to do so. From the CBC article:

Freund told the Hartford Courant newspaper that the Cadiz site is the best possible candidate for the location of Atlantis that’s ever been discovered, with the most amount of evidence backing it up.

The researchers say they also discovered a series of mysterious memorial cities in central Spain, seemingly modelled on Atlantis, leading them to conclude those who survived the tsunami fled Atlantis and built new cities inland.

It’s evidence people may have fled a coastal city and built cities resembling it. It does not automatically track that the coastal city was really called Atlantis at any time over the course of its history. They’re jumping to a conclusion they shouldn’t even be trying to reach here. Why can’t they just be excited about the find as a whole? It should just be a fascinating discovery no matter what the city might have been called.

Agree or disagree?