FROM GODDESS TO KING

A History of Ancient Europe from the

OERA LINDA BOOK

By Anthony Radford

CHAPTER 23

THE ATLANTIS QUESTION

Thestory of Atlantis began in the Western mind with
the modern translations of Plato, actually just the “Timaeus” and the “Critias”.
It has captured the imagination particularly since Ignatius Donnelly published
his work “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World” in 1882. He was the same author that
tried to prove that Francis Bacon was the real poet behind the works of
Shakespeare.

Despite the fact that Plato is almost the sole source of this
legend and the nearly total lack of hard facts from geology and archaeology to
find Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, the popular concept persists. Briefly
stated, it is that a large highly advanced civilization had once existed,
somewhere out in the Atlantic. It had ended in a geological catastrophe by
sinking beneath the waters some 11,000 years ago. Survivors of this race
influenced embryonic civilizations across the world such as Egypt and in some
cases founded new ones.

They were ruled by ten kings who chose an overlord from
amongst themselves. They were religious, possibly in the mother goddess
tradition and enjoyed all sorts of comforts brought to them by their superior
seafaring traditions. Their increasingly wanton and depraved practices such as
experimenting with changing men into animals eventually caused their downfall
into the depths of the Atlantic much to the delight of the moralistic story
tellers. “Where did this story come from.” is a question more easily answered
than why it has persisted.

Solon was known as the great lawgiver to Greece. About 595
BC, in his youth, he visited Egypt where he was told a tale by Egyptian priests
concerning both their earliest history and the founding of his own Attica, the
district of Athens, nine thousand years earlier, by descendants of a noble race
who lived long before. Those early Greeks had successfully defended the whole
Mediterranean area from a warlike power that came from the Atlantic Sea who
tried to conquer and enslave them. Subsequently to this war, there were great
earthquakes and deluges that shook and buried the island of the Atlanteans in a
day and a night. Those disturbances were felt throughout the Mediterranean.

About two hundred years later Plato incorporates this tale in
his “Timaeus”, a dialogue between Socrates, Timaeus, a scientist, Critias, an
historian, and a general named Hermocrates in which the story of Atlantis is
told. Some years later, he continues it in his “Critias”

In his description of Atlantis, Plato has developed the story
with the popular conceptions of Atlanteans of his time. They were the legends of
Hyperboria, the land beyond the north winds, with its moated citadels, earth
mothers, and sea-kings. Both Homer and Hesiod refer to lands somewhere far to
the west such as the Garden of the Hesperides with its golden apples, a paradise
for the souls of departed heroes. Plato also combined the closer legends of the
former Minoan civilization of Crete with its royal palaces, maritime wealth and
mother goddesses. It is not possible to place Atlantis at any one place because
of this fusion of sources which is not an uncommon practice in legends which
have undergone many generations of verbal tradition before being written down.

Plato did something more. The size of Atlantis was too large
to fit in the Mediterranean Sea, and the population too great, so he chose to
believe a version of the story that placed it somewhere beyond the Pillars of
Hercules. That was way out in the Atlantic that was by then known to be an ocean
rather than just a sea, the traditional home of the sea-kings. There are also
myths relating to interactions between Atlantians and Hyperboreans as though
they were separate nations but whether they were very old or more recent in the
time of Plato is not known.

The importance given to Platos writings on the subject is
not supported by what is known of their origins. He wrote them in 355 BC when he
was in his seventies. He wrote of a time when he would have been about six years
old so could hardly have kept notes on any conversations with Socrates and the
story itself is of a time nearly two hundred years previously about a
conversation Solon was supposed to have had. The “Timaeus” was to have been a
sequel to his “Republic” and is a fictional vehicle for the expounding of
opposing philosophical ideas with Platos own position not disclosed. He does
mention that Athena founded an Athenian empire, which ties in with our book. The
only value that can be ascertained from this is a collection of ideas about
their neighbors and the history that was believed by the Greeks at the time and
not of any relevance to a factual Atlantis. It is interesting to note how a
collection of maps is called an atlas. Early volumes showed a picture of the
Titan, Atlas, supporting the world on his shoulders but then seafarers like the
Atland sea-kings must have had their versions of an atlas.

In 1909, K. T. Frost suggested that from an Egyptian point of
view, the disappearance of the Minoan sea-power gave a lot of support to the
Atlantean legend if Crete had been their home. The more recent discoveries of
archaeological evidence of the ancient eruption of Mt. Thera in the Santorini
Islands has given cause to speculate that ancient Crete was Atlantis. Santorini
now consists of a ring of five islands, the southernmost member of the Cyclades
Islands in the Aegean, north of Crete. Mt. Thera is still the highest point but
was once part of a larger main island. Excavations have revealed a maritime
trading city-state of considerable wealth preserved under several feet of pumice
before a much more violent explosion destroyed anything above that covering. It
has been found that first came earthquakes followed by a recovery period that
was interrupted by four or five feet of light pumice ash permitting the
inhabitants to escape, possibly to Crete. No bodies have been found like at
Pompeii. Another quake or else the collapsing of the crust to form a caldera,
let the sea into the hot center of what is now a ring of islands. The resulting
explosion estimated to be twice the magnitude of the well-documented Krakatoa
one and many times that of Mt. St. Helens would have been heard throughout the
Mediterranean. Finally, a deluge could have occurred even in dry Egypt because
ash acts as nuclei for the formation of hail. In that event it has been
estimated that ash rose up to eighteen miles into the atmosphere.

Marinatos in 1939 proposed the volcanic destruction of Crete
at the time of the Thera eruption to satisfy the catastrophic ending of a Cretan
Atlantis but people demanded a more watery demise. A. G. Galanopoulos believed
that Plato had to consider an Atlantic home for Atlantis because the exaggerated
dimensions were the result of a translation error in the Egyptian symbol for one
hundred as opposed to that for one thousand. Large values in Solons writings
should have been reduced by a factor of ten. This makes sense for a Cretan
Atlantis as far as both age and size is concerned. Nine thousand years becomes
nine hundred so that Attica would have been founded about 1500 BC then the war
and subsequent catastrophes some time later. The destruction of the palace at
Knossos on Crete has been determined by carbon-14 dating techniques to be 1559
BC 44 years. This is a more recent estimate than the previously published
values of 1456 BC 43 years, which was in agreement with the archaeological
dating of 1450 BC, but what if the charcoal samples tested, were from palace
timbers that were themselves, hundreds of years old?

It is still necessary to combine the traditions of a wetter,
more fertile climate to the story if Crete is to be the location of the
legendary Atlantis. This speculation does fit the concepts of a maritime power,
a great trading nation ruled by kings and having a matriarchal religious system.
It lacks only the submergence contention unless there were myths of land being
lost to the sea that were part of the popular understanding in the time of Plato
and there is indeed the myth of the Deucalion deluge, possibly from the same
phenomenon. In Greek myth, Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, and father of
Helen, the ancestor of the Hellenic people, made a boat when Zeus decided to
destroy all mankind by means of a flood. The boat landed at Mt. Parnassus where
he and his wife, Pyrrha, recreated all men and women by throwing stones from the
mountain. Modern geologists attribute that flood to the tsunami wave resulting
from the Mt. Thera explosion.

Next we will consider how the stories in the Oera Linda
Book relate to this tradition. We are told that the sea-king Jon took
Minerva to Crete about 1620 BC, that they were in contact with the Greeks who
were not independent but paying tribute to some stronger power. The Cretan
government reads as though it was loosely governed, not by a powerful despot but
by local lords without strong military support, but dependent upon popular
belief in their superiority or value which was achieved by a combination of
religious fear and a payola system called taxation. This could be an
intermediate period between Minoan empires but is most likely the beginning of
Late Minoan I-B, a less than splendid era. On some charts this is listed at
about 1580 BC but has recently been moved back to possibly 1650 BC with another
hundred years to the end of Knossos. It does not take a great natural disaster
to end a strong era that is usually recognized by archaeologists as a high
taxation, palace or monument building period. All it takes is a revolt followed
by smaller autonomous units, perhaps even giving greater freedom to the common
population for a period – if that is considered one measure of civilization, but
not leaving much evidence.

There was piracy or wars at the time causing Minerva to
choose to stay on the very poor country of Crete from where her fame spread to
Attica, which they considered less developed. A delegation from Greece wanted
her help in throwing off the foreign domination. This is why she moved to Attica
to found a citadel she called Athens, the City of Friends and soon afterwards
her followers built the two fortified arms to the sea that characterize Piraeus,
the port of Athens. After her death, the people chose Geert as a new mother but
the princes with the help of an Egyptian priest named Cecrops drove her away.
This was a powerful period in Egyptian history, possibly during the reign of
Tutmosis III because Egypt had considerable influence over the Phoenicians as
well, whom they solicited to attack Piraeus, by sea. Perhaps this was the war
that was told to Solon with nationalistic exaggeration.

The escaping Geertmen went through the Nile to the Red Sea
and were immediately cut off from pursuit by an earthquake that closed access to
that sea. That earthquake was certainly felt in Egypt but if it was the one at
Thera or a precursor of that quake it would put the date to approximately 1555
BC instead of 1650. According to one record in the Book, another statement would
put it thirty years later but in either case, it agrees well within the modern
carbon-14 dating values. We are also told that the Geertmen witnessed new land
being built in Persia on their journey to India, which they, much later, named
New Geertmania in the time of Alexander. If that uplifting were related to the
quake in Egypt then it must have been a very active period in geological
history.

The war, the quake, the founding of old Athens, but not
Attica has been recalled in the Book. The maritime prowess and stories of
citadels with circular moats housing wise priestesses is also supporting
evidence for Plato, and of course the name “Atlantis” is so close to “Atland”
that it is undoubtedly a word known to ancient Greece and Egypt. The trading
wealth, the sophistication of their society all fit, even the stories of giants
in those days can be believed if one calls a seven foot woman with a seven foot
sword a giant. Ulysses must have brought back quite a tale when he finally
returned to the eastern Mediterranean.

According to classical mythology, the Giants were the fourth
race of mankind before the Heroes. The first children of Heaven (Uranus) and
Earth (Gaea) were three monsters with fifty heads and a hundred hands
representing the violent forces of nature. Their father did not care much for
them and imprisoned them in the earth hence the earthquakes and eruptions. This
tale has striking similarities to many-headed gods depicted in Indian mythology.
The next offspring were one-eyed, man-eating Cyclops followed by the more
manlike Titans and then came the Giants. It is interesting to note that a ship
with a standard compliment of twenty-five rowers per side has fifty heads and a
hundred hands. The ornamental bowsprit would make it appear as a monster.

Some of the dates of the Oera Linda Book fit very well
with what we know of the ancient Mediterranean, but others, particularly the
Egyptian calendar, may need revising. However, as this calendar is used to date
most other events in the history of the time, including the Minoan calendar of
events, it will be very difficult to accomplish. Some have tried to relate the
event of the Biblical Exodus to this time and to the Pharaoh Tutmoses III,
suggesting that the explosion on Santorini influenced the strange events
recorded in the Old Testament but that is another story. Others want an
ancient Atlantis and talk about the three or more hundred feet that the last ice
age lowered the sea as “evidence” enough but let us try to keep our feet on the
ground. Even if, as a modern theory suggests, the Gulf Stream suddenly broke
through the land barrier formed by the lower sea level of an ice age and started
flowing under the ice cap, melting and flooding would still take thousands of
years, not a day and a night.

Though we were born out of an ice age some ten thousand years
ago who is to say we are the first? Our own individual memories and feelings do
not convince anyone else not sharing them, so we continue to wait for both
geological and archaeological evidence for the existence of an antediluvian
Atlantis. It is the authors contention that the old Atlantis may never have
existed according to the Plato concept but that both a northern Atland and a
Cretan royal power contributed to the myths of Atlantis that Plato recorded as
legend.

If this were so then Minnos adventures would have had to occur either
centuries before Minerva and Jon or, more likely, just after during a period
when Cretan royal power was at a minimum. It is also likely that the subsequent
Mycenaean influence on Crete has been exaggerated or limited to part of the
island and also that the foreign domination of Attica was not Cretan but from
Asia Minor, even Egyptian. There is no dating of the writings of Minno, but he
does make reference to Athens as an existing place, dating him to be either
contemporary or after their time. It is possible his name was not related to
“Minoan” or that he himself picked up his name from Crete.