3 ms·
> The line of transmission is so long and convoluted that there are literally more than a half dozen different people who could have plausibly made the story up
by cryptonector 1y ago
> The line of transmission is so long and convoluted that there are literally more than a half dozen different people who could have plausibly made the story up.
Ditto for The Iliad and The Odysee, yet Troy existed. That's the thing about oral traditions. They are like a telephone game where the story changes a bit with each retelling, so they are not trustworthy, but societies that engaged in epic storytelling did try to keep true to them word-for-word, and that's why some of them are epic poems: to help memorize them. So it's entirely possible that one of the people involved in this story just made it up, but it's also as likely that it was a story they passed down as well as they could, and possibly actually true.
This is not strong evidence for Atlantis being made up. Neither is the fact that Plato made up things like the allegory of the cave: we generally know when he's doing that.
The fact is that we can't find any actual evidence of Atlantis anywhere other than in tenuous ancient writings. A lot like it was for Troy. But since Atlantis supposedly goes back much longer, we might never find any of it, and so it might as well be made up, and that is a safe conclusion.
Those who say it existed nowadays tend to believe that it was in the "eye of the Sahara", in present day Mauritius, and was destroyed in a flood related to an impact event on the North American ice sheet around 11,900 years ago that caused the Younger-Dryas. That idea has the unfortunate / convenient feature that there is literally nothing there and nothing will ever be found there given the scale of the supposed cataclysm. There are huge debris fields off the coast of Western Africa where one could -presumably- find bits of Atlantis, though good luck finding anything obviously man-made in those debris fields, let alone anything that would be highly suggestive of Atlantis. If that theory is true then we'll never prove that Atlantis existed by finding it.
- neaden 1y ago"Ditto for The Iliad and The Odysee, yet Troy existed." - As I said in a different comment this comparison makes no sense. Troy was continuously inhabited up until around 1300, we have artifacts like coins from there and multiple attestations from contemporary sources. The only thing that was debated was if the ancient city was underneath the more contemporary one or a few miles away. That is nothing like Atlantis.
- cryptonector 1y agoPeople used to think Troy was fictional. People (myself included) think Atlantis is fictional. The difference is: Troy was much closer to us in time, and it was found.
- neaden 1y agoPeople didn't use to think Troy was fictional, where did you get that idea? Edit: to be clear there is no evidence that the Trojan war happened as described, but that doesn't mean Troy is a fiction anymore then Sparta or Ithaca are.
- virissimo 1y agoMany European scholars did consider Troy fictional. For example, Jacob Bryant's "A Dissertation concerning the War of Troy" (1796) explicitly argued that Troy never existed as a real city and that the Trojan War was purely mythological. He thought Homer's place names derived from Egyptian and Phoenician religious vocabulary, so the entire Trojan War narrative should be interpreted as imported solar allegory without any historical basis.
- neaden 1y agoBryant was a pseudo historian who came up with an elaborate alternate history. He doesn't represent the mainstream view anymore then flat earthera do today. Edit: as I said, Troy was inhabited until around 1300 and left behind many artifacts like coins. While conspiracy theorists might doubt it occasionally, it was never a mainstream view that the person I was responding to presented it as. Saying that we used to doubt Troy so therefore maybe Atlantis is real is basically saying that if we reject one conspiracy theory we should accept a separate one.
- jamiek88 1y agoThat’s like quoting harry turtledove on ww2. Bryant was writing fictional pseudo history.
- 1y ago