mch

THE MYSTERY OF ATLANTIS
I77
Solon, all that was left where once plains and mountains
stretched to the horizon, was a huge morass and swamp, something
like today's Sargasso Sea.
This detailed and dramatic story is probably one of the
greatest recollections of mankind, but until recently it was very
hard to take it for anything but legend. Today, however, we
know many things not known until relatively recently. We know
that human beings have been around for much more than loo,-
000 years and highly civilized people existed for at least 12,000
years. We know that our continents float, that the poles shift, that
levels of the oceans change, and that islands emerge and sink. It
is no longer possible to say the legend of Adantis is plain myth
because the events it describes were impossible. To the contrary,
the disappearance of Atlantis is now known to have been quite
possible, geologically as well as historically.
But there is still serious argument as to where Atlantis was located
before it disappeared, and for a while it was even believed
that Atlantis was not Atlantis but the Aegean island of Thera
(once called Santorin) and that the great earthquake that made
Atlantis disappear in the sea was actually the eruption in 1521
B.C. of the volcano on Thera.
The Thera argument won't stand up for several reasons. First,
if Atlantis really disappeared in 1521 B.C., how come the Bible
doesn't say anything about it? This was 700 years after the death
of Abraham and about 100 years before the birth of Moses, when
the Hebrews undoubtedly had mastered the art of keeping written
records.
Next, if the disappearance of Atlantis had taken place in the
Aegean Sea only 940 years before Solon lived, everybody in
Greece would have known it,
especially Solon, who was a very
learned man. He would have known it just as most educated
people today know that England was invaded by the Normans in
1066, even though it happened 910 years ago.
Equally improbable is the possibility that Atlantis, being
larger than all of North Africa and the Near East together, could
have been anywhere in the Mediterranean. And certainly a small
island like Thera could never have mobilized 750,000 men. Nor
have any remains of elephants been found in Thera. And finally
we know that Atlantis disappeared after a series of earthquakes,