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Sunken Kingdom Cover
The Sunken Kingdom
*The Atlantis Mystery Solved
*A book by Peter James
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*Buy the Paperback Online from Amazon
*
but copies may be purchased directly from the author.
(Signed copies on request makes an excellent gift)
Email peter at centuries.co.uk *
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"A roller-coaster ride through Plato's thought *(brilliantly done)*,
ancient Greek and Hittite history, with a stern message at the end
of it. Superb." Nicholas Lezard, /The Guardian/, 26 September 1996).
"... certainly *the best treatment of the subject I have seen* in
years. /The Sunken Kingdom/ is a considerable achievement... James
has provided us with a benchmark in Atlantean studies. Alternative
interpretations will have to answer the points he raises or provide
a more convincing alternative - and that may be very hard to do."
(Steve Moore, /Fortean Times/ 85, Feb/March 1996).
"... a */tour de force/*, comparable in clarity of writing, wealth
of material, and boldness of purpose to /The White Goddess/." (Andro
Linklater, /The Spectator/, 11 November 1995)
Overview
/The Sunken Kingdom/ provides a solution to a mystery which has baffled
scholars for nearly 2,400 years - since Plato first wrote about Atlantis
in /Timaeus/ and /Critias/. Written by an outstanding historian and
archaeologist, this book takes an entirely new approach. It reviews
previous theories, some fantastic, some more rational, and shows why they
will not work. Atlantis could not have been in the Atlantic, nor was it
the volcanic island of Santorini near Crete, as currently held. Through a
careful analysis of the sources, it becomes clear that the story of
Atlantis came from western Turkey, where a major Bronze Age city was
devastated by an earthquake and submerged beneath a lake.
Here is a work of detective scholarship as controversial as the author's
/Centuries of Darkness /, which put an
overwhelming case for the redating of the ancient world. Besides precisely
citing the original Atlantis, the book provides a convincing explanation
of how and why the destruction of the city grew into the story of a 'lost
continent'.
Introduction
Nearly 2,400 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato posed a riddle which
has baffled scholars ever since: was his story of the lost continent of
Atlantis a complete fabrication, or did some historical reality lie behind
it?
The possibility of a real Atlantis, in the terms that Plato described it,
has long gone. For all its romantic appeal, the idea of a prehistoric
super-civilization on an Atlantic continent is vanishingly unlikely. So
was Plato simply writing science fiction? The sheer scale of everything he
said about Atlantis might suggest so - from the grandeur of its buildings
to the enormous timescale involved. Atlantean civilization, according to
Plato, began even earlier than that of the Egyptians. On his chronology,
Atlantis flourished about 10,000 years ago, before it vanished in a single
night of earthquake and flood.
This information Plato claimed to have received through his family, which
had preserved it through several generations from the great Athenian
statesman Solon who supposedly collected it during his visit to Egypt in
c. 565 BC.
The improbability of Plato perpetrating a complete fraud, involving
deceased members of his family and the revered Solon, has led many to
assume that there must be some substance to these claims. While Plato
always added his own slant to traditional material, he has never been
shown to be guilty of wholesale fabrication. As the possibliity of an
Atlantic Atlantis became geological heresy in the 1960s, some scholars
turned to the idea that the story was a memory of the glorious
civilization of Bronze Age (Minoan) Crete. The explosion of the volcanic
island of Thera (Santorini) about 1500 BC was argued to have provided the
mechanism both for the destruction of the Minoan civilization and for an
Egyptian belief in a lost kingdom 'to the west'.
Under close analysis, however, this theory breaks down. Plato described a
catastrophe involving earthquake and flood, yet the Thera event was a
volcanic explosion. The Greeks were reasonably informed about ancient
Cretan civilization - as echoed in the stories of Minos, Theseus and the
Minotaur in the Labyrinth - so it seems unlikely that they would have,
first, learnt about Crete from the Egyptians, and second, not recognised
what their source was ostensibly describing. It also became clear by the
1980s that the explosion of Thera did not, after all, bring about the end
of Minoan civilization. It was time for a new approach to the Atlantis
problem.
Most theories about Atlantis have been constructed by believers, who have
identified its 'real' site in myriad locations from the British Isles and
Greenland to Carthage and Thera. On the other side are the sceptics who
have dismissed the search for Atlantis as futile. Many years ago I decided
that the only way forward was to suspend any naive hope of finding a
'real' Atlantis, and to concentrate instead on the key question: can we
identify a source behind Plato's claims? It had an unexpected bonus.
The crux of the problem is the supposed Egyptian connection. The ancient
Egyptians took a dim view of foreigners and the idea that they preserved a
detailed tradition describing two remote civilizations - Atlantis and its
rival Athens - is highly improbable. Even more far-fetched is the idea
that the Egyptians, who took pride in being the 'oldest' civilization,
could have recorded events which took place a thousand years before their
own beginnings.
Alternatively, is it possible that Plato was right that Solon gathered the
story on his travels, but mistaken in assuming that this was during his
famous visit to Egypt? Solon travelled elsewhere, notably to the kingdom
of Lydia in western Anatolia (Turkey). There, at the court of king Croesus
- proverbial for his riches, but historical nonetheless - Solon is said to
have swopped stories not only with the king, but with the great
fable-writer Aesop.
It was to Anatolia that many other clues began to lead, beginning with
Atlas, the famous Titan of Greek myth who was condemned to the edge of the
world to support the skies when his race was defeated by Zeus and the
Olympians. Atlas, Plato tells us, was the first king - and eponym - of
Atlantis. Analysis of the myths surrounding Atlas and his family suggests
that the Greeks believed that his 'home', before he was banished to the
west (i.e. the 'Atlantic'), lay to the east and that the Greeks may have
learnt the idea of the sky-supporting giant from that quarter. This is
confirmed by a mass of pictorial and literary evidence from the Hittite
civilization of Bronze Age Anatolia, which provides exact parallels to the
classical Greek concept of Atlas.
It was a short step from there to see what the classical traditions of
Anatolia - and in particular Lydia - had to say about the 'original'
Atlas. Classical scholars have long accepted that another mythological
figure, Tantalus, is essentially a Lydian version of Atlas. Tantalus, too,
crossed the Olympians, and was condemned to an eternal torment which gave
us the word 'tantalise'. In the version given by Homer his punishment was
everlasting hunger and thirst, but the more common tale was of a rock
which perpetually swayed over his head. Other versions say he was attached
to the rock, that he was condemned to support it and that the 'rock' was
the sky itself. And Tantalus, like Atlas, is once thought to have ruled an
earthly kingdom. When Tantalus was struck by Zeus' lightning for his sins,
the city he founded was shattered by an earthquake and drowned beneath a
lake. The name of his city was Tantalis.
I could have stopped with this bizarre mixture of cosmological myth and
local tradition. There was already enough circumstantial evidence to
vindicate Plato's claim that he had not invented the Atlantis story. His
putative source, Solon, could have picked up in Lydia the story of
Tantalis which had all the key elements for its later exaggeration into
Atlantis - from its fabulous wealth and transient empire to its
catastrophic transformation into a 'sunken kingdom'. As Tantalus was
identified with Atlas, the scene could have been mistakenly transferred to
the far west, the location of Atlas after his downfall. Once in the
Atlantic, the story of the 'sunken kingdom' could grow uncontrollably
during its retelling through the generations from Solon to Plato.
However, I was tempted to go further: could the site of the legendary
Tantalis be located, and did such a place ever exist? Clues from classical
writers such as Pausanias made it clear that Tantalus' lost city was
believed to lie near Mount Sipylus, modern Manisa Dagh, twenty or so miles
inland from the modern port of Izmir (Smyrna) on the Aegean coast.
Classical writers describe Tantalis/Sipylus not only as the original
capital of Lydia, but as the ancestral seat of the Mycenaean kings.
Substance was given to this by a lengthy text from the archives of the
Hittite Emperors, composed about 1400 BC, describing the troubles they had
with a vassal ruler from a western vassal in league with the Mycenaeans.
His seat, 'the mountain land of Zippasla', can be reasonably located in
Lydia, and identified with Sipylus. Slice by slice, the ruler of Zippasla
(Madduwattas by name) swallowed up all the smaller states of western and
southern Anatolia and even challenged Hittite authority in Cyprus. How far
the men from Zippasla got is hard to say - but Hittite authority was only
properly re-established in Anatolia some fifty years later.
If the kingdom of Zippasla lay at Sipylus, where was its capital? Here
history, archaeology and legend seem to converge neatly. When I went to
Turkey in 1994 it was not too difficult to locate the site of legendary
Tantalis. Until about thirty years ago there was a small lake just to the
north of Mt Sipylus and a few miles away from a magnificent (and almost
undatable) rock-cut tomb which Pausanias described as 'the by-no-means
inglorious grave' of king Tantalus. A hundred and fifty years ago the lake
was much bigger, and I was pleased, after doing the initial groundwork, to
find that 19th-century scholars, including Sir James Frazer, had already
identified it as the spot where the ancients believed the lost city lay
submerged underwater. As the location for a real city, it would be hard to
improve: it lies on a fertile plain between the ancient caravan route
skirting the mountain and the river Gediz, main artery of Lydia. Yet we
are not reliant on merely theoretical considerations. Three hundred feet
up the mountain-side a thirty-foot sculpture of a Mother Goddess gazes out
over the very spot where Tantalis was thought to lay. Pausanias claimed
that it was carved by the son of Tantalus and that it dates to the Late
Bronze Age is undeniable - from its style and from the Hittite
hieroglyphics which were incised into the carving about the 13th century
BC.
It would be strange to imagine that this unique sculpture was not prepared
for the worship of a highly organised community, settled in the plain
below. For this, and a host of other reasons, I am happy to believe that
here there was once an important Late Bronze Age centre. Most likely it
was the Zippasla of the Hittite documents and almost certainly it was the
Sipylus or Tantalis of classical texts. For its fate we only have the
traditions to go on, but the belief that it was totally devastated by an
earthquake is not outlandish. The Izmir region, as travellers to Turkey
will know, lies in one of the worst earthquake zones of the world, while
the appalling damage suffered by the cities of Lydia during the great
earthquake of AD 17 is well documented. Hopefully excavation will one day
determine whether a Bronze Age city at Mt Sipylus - like the Atlantis of
legend - was really destroyed by an earthquake and consigned to a watery
grave.
(c) 1995 Peter James
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Book Table of Contents
# Acknowledgments # Introduction # PART ONE: ATLANTIS * (1) The Lost
Continent (2) The Origin of Civilization? (3) The Destruction of Thera #
PART TWO: PLATO * (4) Plato's World (5) A Platonic Affair (6) Athens of
the Heroes (7) The Egyptian Connection # PART THREE: TANTALIS * (8) In
Search of Atlas (9) In the Kingdom of Tantalus (10) A Sunken City (11) The
Travels of Solon (12) The Unfinished Story # Appendix 1: The Atlantids #
Appendix 2: The Tale of Silenus # Appendix 3 The Bull Cult of Atlantis #
Notes and References, Bibliography, Index
Other books by Peter James
# *Centuries of Darkness * (with I J Thorpe, N
Kokkinos, R Morkot and J Frankish) # *Ancient Inventions
* (with Nick
Thorpe) # *Ancient Mysteries
* (with
Nick Thorpe)
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Publishing details:
338 pages, 27 line drawings, endpapers, 18 plates. ISBN 0-224-03810-9
*In the UK/Europe:* (Jonathan Cape, London), £18.99; paperback Pimlico
(London), £8.99. all other rights contact Artellus Ltd, London (UK tel:
+44 171 935 6972 fax: 487 5957).
*In the USA:* order from "British Books at American Prices
".
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*Buy the Paperback Online from Amazon
*
*The hardback is temporarily out of print, but copies may be purchased
directly from the author. (Signed copies on request makes an excellent
gift) Email peter at centuries.co.uk *
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other sites of interest:
*Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) <../../../sis/index.htm>*
The SIS journals /Review /and /Workshop /feature many articles by Peter
James.
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