From the hidden valleys of Tibet and the stunning pyramids of Mexico,
to the icy wastes of the Antarctic and the deepest ocean trenches,
our search for Atlantis will take us all across the world
to seek out ancient clues of a civilisation
that perished before history had even begun.
An object of endless fascination and relentless obsession,
it is a quest through time and space to pivotal moments in human history
as well as the dark side of man's longing for perfection.
The myth of Atlantis has cast its spell over generations,
each trying to find its own unique vision of this lost idyllic paradise.
Our journey will take us across oceans and continents
and span 10,000 years of human history.
A journey to find a magical lost world.
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The search for Atlantis has captivated some of the most restless minds
and original thinkers of every generation.
It's a search that begins here,
in the most glorious city of Ancient Greece. Athens.
In the 4th century BC, Athens was a city pre-eminent in all the world
the very epicentre of classical civilisation
and a beacon of cultural and artistic excellence
that has shone through the ages right down to the present day.
And it was here, in the world's first democracy,
that the philosopher Plato wrote a story
three and a half centuries before the time of Christ
that is the first account of Atlantis in all literature.
The fact that Plato originated the story of Atlantis
gave it a great amount of weight.
Plato was essentially the father of Western philosophy and because what
he had to say was so important, has remained so important
it became much more acceptable, much more respectable, if you will,
than if someone else had written it.
Plato wrote his account of Atlantis towards the end of his life,
but it was first told at a dinner party that took place
when he was only a young boy.
An account that somehow he must have overheard.
The gathering hosted by Plato's uncle
was traditional to the day, where wealthy and learned Greek men
would eat, drink, tell stories and exchange ideas.
Among the guests was Plato's teacher the great philosopher Socrates
and perhaps it was to be near his brilliant mentor
that the young Plato sneaked in to listen to all that the men had to say.
The legend of Atlantis, he learned, was already generations old,
handed down by a famous Greek sage and law-giver
called Solon who learned the tale in Egypt.
Solon was one of the seven sages of Ancient Greece.
He was a very, very important person historically
because he was a law-giver and he established the basis from which
Athenian democracy eventually developed.
He was a poet and a scientist and a statesman,
and one of the things that he did is to have visited Egypt.
It was almost like a pilgrimage that all the ancient sages made
and in Egypt he first supposedly heard the story of Atlantis.
In the holiest shrine of the ancient Egyptian capital,
Solon was shown records of unsurpassed antiquity
the secrets of a long-lost age when a civilization of incomparable power
and prestige had dominated the world nine thousand years before.
The empire of Atlantis. The description the Egyptian priest
gave to Solon of this mighty vanished civilization
is the starting point for every search ever undertaken to find Atlantis.
A description which Plato says:
"has the great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction."
Atlantis was said to lie beyond the Pillars of Hercules outside
the Mediterranean Sea in an ocean we now call the Atlantic.
Plato was very, very specific about where Atlantis was and what size it was
and he described it as being larger than the continents of Africa
and Asia put together and he located
it very carefully outside the Pillars of Hercules.
The Pillars of Hercules are what we know now as the Straits of Gibraltar,
and when you locate something outside the Pillars of Hercules
you are locating it in the Atlantic Ocean
just to the west of Spain and North Africa.
Atlantis was dominated by a vast, almost perfectly rectangular plain,
surrounded on three sides by high, very beautiful, mountains.
Possessed of abundant natural resources,
rare plants and precious flowers of every description,
even elephants and other exotic animals,
Atlantis was a land like no other where the people wanted for nothing.
"That sacred island, which then beheld the light of the sun,
brought forth infinite abundance and the blessings of the earth."
He tells us about the flowers, the plants,
the kind of metals the people used.
The kind of the way that each canal and each channel is built.
He puts in elephants. In fact it's only the second time
that they are mentioned in Greek literature when Plato describes Atlantis.
What does all that piling up of detail and very strange detail do?
Well it does two things. First, it makes it very exotic
and something very strange, but because there's so much of it
also makes it seem real.
On the edge of this plain, facing the open sea,
was the spectacular capital city of Atlantis.
Laid out in a series of concentric circles of land and water.
The circle for the Greeks, for Plato in particular
but for the Greeks in general, the circle is a perfect geometrical shape.
Circular motion is a perfect kind of motion.
By building it in circles, he allows it to manifest
that geometrical perfection that he finds the world really exhibits,
even if we don't see it every day.
Each ring of land was home to new wonders and marvels.
There were docks for huge numbers of ships
and a causeway over which they could offload
the riches that were coming into Atlantis.
In other words everything that human beings
could need was available in Atlantis itself.
Connected to the ocean by an immense canal
a hundred feet deep and several miles long,
at the very centre of the city was the dazzling citadel of Atlantis,
which housed the most spectacular treasures that ever graced the earth.
"They had such an amount of wealth as was never before
possessed by kings, and is not likely ever to be again."
Plato tells us that for long ages the Atlanteans
Iived at peace with the rest of the world on their beautiful island paradise.
Unspoilt by their material possessions and great wealth,
they were concerned only with learning, cultivating virtue,
and living in harmony with nature.
Yet finally this Golden Age passed and
the Atlanteans became like other mortals.
"Human nature got the upper hand.
They became tainted with unrighteous ambition and power."
Insatiable for wealth and glory, the Atlanteans
pushed forward the bounds of their empire enslaving all before them.
Finally only one city stood between Atlantis
and world domination, Athens.
But here at the hands of the Athenians,
the armies of Atlantis suffered a crushing
defeat for the first time, a defeat that was swiftly
followed by a natural disaster that laid waste to most of the world
completely destroying the islands of Atlantis.
"Violent earthquakes and floods and in a single day
and night of misfortune the island of Atlantis
disappeared in the depths of the sea."
And within a day and a night both Atlantis and the Athenians
who fought the Atlanteans disappear from the face of the earth.
The only ones who are left are a few uncultured,
as the Egyptians tell Solon, Athenians
who no longer remember the story of their triumph
against the foreign invaders and that's why
they have to learn it again from the Egyptians when Solon visits them.
It was this tragic tale, first relayed to Solon in Egypt,
which many years later was told at an Athenian dinner-party.
A story that might have been entirely lost
were it not for the uninvited young guest
who it seems remembered every word.
All of the other guests scoffed at this incredible story
of a lost paradise, all save Plato's teacher, Socrates.
In order to convince the others of the story's truth,
Plato's uncle agreed to explain more.
Zeus, he said, had convened a council of the gods,
and spoken to them thus.
But at this point Plato's account abruptly stops.
It's almost as if something or someone
prevented him from writing more.
Why did he never finish the story?
We don't know why he never finished the story.
He stopped it in mid- sentence actually
and we can assume that he intended to finish it
he didn't die at that moment and in fact there are works of Plato's
that can be dated after the completion of Timeaus and Critias,
the dialogues in which Atlantis is discussed.
Nevertheless, Plato's short account of an after-dinner conversation
was the beginning of a myth that continues
to inspire and provoke twenty- four centuries later.
Strangely though, despite Plato setting up
the world's first university called the Academy,
the subject of Atlantis seems to have been largely neglected by his pupils.
The myth of Atlantis, the story of Atlantis is one that people
seem to have been disputing about from the very beginning,
whether it was true or not true, and we have one of his successors
who actually believed it was a true story which suggests
that there are others who didn't believe it was a true story.
However, what is interesting about the story of Atlantis
is that unlike many other stories, that people knew not to be true,
this inveterate race of story-tellers never picks up to make anything of.
We don't have versions of Atlantis in the same way
we have versions of the Trojan War or of Jason's expedition
to get the Golden Fleece or all the other great stories of Greek mythology.
Nobody picks up that story to make something of it.
It sort of sinks very much in the way that Atlantis itself
sank in the depths of the ocean for a very long time.
The myth of Atlantis would be lost
disappearing into the shadows of the Dark Ages.
It wouldn't be until European explorers inaugurated an age
of discovery that the search for a lost island paradise began with fervour.
A search that would begin with the dogged pursuit of a mythical isle
by history's most famous explorer, Christopher Columbus.
The Holy lnquisition of Spain.
Men of God scour the land, searching for any sign
of deviation from the One True Faith.
In less than a decade thousands have already perished
Jews and Moors, lapsed Christians and social outcasts
all consumed by the cleansing fire of religious zeal.
In such an atmosphere of terror, Spain would seem
an unlikely starting point for Christopher Columbus'
unprecedented voyage of discovery.
Yet it was to King Ferdinand and Queen lsabella of Spain,
the very people who had set the lnquisition in motion,
that Columbus would have to appeal
to finance his bold plan to cross the ocean.
Long neglected by the history books,
the great navigator had a secret reason
to undertake such a perilous voyage.
Columbus had heard of a lost island paradise
of untold riches and wealth, a mythical land called Anthilia.
A land that had replaced Atlantis in the medieval imagination.
Since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 6th century,
much of the learning of Antiquity had been forgotten.
Suspicious of Pagan wisdom, Christianity had evolved
a very different vision of the world, one defined
by the battle between good and evil.
At the centre of this world was Jerusalem,
surrounded by the three known continents: Europe, Asia and Africa.
Beyond this was a netherworld populated by people
who were not descended from Adam and Eve.
Making them, in the minds of many,children of the devil.
But some, like Columbus had radical ideas about
the real geography of the world, ideas
that made him an obvious figure of suspicion.
Columbus had a great ally: knowledge.
Knowledge gained from travel stories and maps of dubious origin.
Knowledge that might threaten his very life.
It took Columbus a very long time to convince
Isabella and Ferdinand that he ought to be able to find something
because for the most part his ideas were ridiculed
and this was of course during the lnquisition so that people
who had strange or antithetical ideas were not only ridiculed.
They were sometimes burned at the stake.
Mocked and abused, even by children,
it had taken Columbus eight long years to persuade
Ferdinand and lsabella to finance his voyage.
They did so for trade. Muslim conquest of the Holy Lands
had reduced their valuable commerce with the Far East to a trickle.
A new route to the riches of the lndies had to be found.
Up until the mid fifteenth century,
all of these precious goods got to Europe by way
of overland caravans but in 1453 when the Turks invaded,
they cut off these trade routes so if the nations of Europe
wanted to get these goods, they had to find an alternate way
and that would have to be a sea route.
Above all, maps were the key.
To a European King a map was treasure beyond anything else
in the world because it gave him access
to the new world, to treasure, to the future.
And everybody kept their maps under lock and key
and to steal a map from another country was a great coup.
Armed with the most recent maps of Europe's best cartographers,
Columbus had a better picture of the world than most of his contemporaries.
His maps were much like our own,
save for one all-important exception
the undiscovered continent of America was entirely absent.
These maps also suffered from another dangerous defect.
No one knew what lay in the Atlantic itself.
The ocean was a mystery.
It was a fearful undertaking, it was one that one would not be taken lightly
and there was still the existence of legends of sea monsters
that would grapple with their ship and pull them down.
And there's always the problem of the potential
of making it there, but can we make it back?
Christian folklore suggested an ocean teeming with islands,
but how many of them really existed?
There was one mythical island whose existence
the great navigator considered absolutely certain: Anthilia.
I don't think it was doubted that Anthilia existed
and it was constantly shown on maps.
No one ever doubted it.
Its position was always in the middle of the Atlantic
and it would have been what they called
the 'stepping stone route', that Columbus saw
this as a good stepping stone on the way to the far east.
According to the writing of his son, Ferdinand,
Columbus' fascination with Anthilia began
when he met a one-eyed sailor in the Azores.
It was while sailing in the Azores, that my father,
the Admiral, met a one-eyed sailor to seek the story of Anthilia.
The sailor claimed to be a survivor of an expedition
that had glimpsed this legendary realm,
and told him of a land of seven cities
founded by seven bishops in the distant past.
Home to wonders and marvels beyond the imagination,
Anthilia was said to be a land of limitless wealth
even its beaches were sprinkled with gold.
The final motive my father, the Admiral,
undertook was the hope of finding,
before he arrived in the lndies,
some island and land of great utility.
An island of great utility that was almost certainly Anthilia.
We only have Columbus' journal. We know that he
thought he was looking for the lndies,
but we know also that he was looking for gold
and spices and riches and certainly
at least part of what he was doing was looking for Anthilia or Atlantis.
On August 2nd, 1492, as Columbus finally set off
on his epic voyage to cross the Atlantic Ocean,
he had not one, but two goals in mind.
Crossing the endless expanse of an uncharted sea.
And discovering the mysteries of an island called Anthilia.
History has recorded only scant evidence
for the events of Columbus' momentous journey.
We do know that when his expedition was twelve days out
from the Canary lslands and two thousand miles from Spain,
he ordered his tiny three-ship fleet to set a north westerly course
in precisely the direction that Anthilia was thought to be.
Two days later he ordered the ships to turn west again
and two days after that they set a course south west.
After six days of searching, Columbus abandoned
what appears to have been a frantic search for Anthilia.
The decision probably saved the expedition.
Columbus had made a potentially fatal error
in common with the mapmakers,
he had estimated the size of the world
based on calculations of Arabic scholars.
Now the problem is that measurement was made
in Arabic miles which are much longer than ltalian miles
with the result that the, er, all geographical thinkers
take the Earth to be much, much smaller than it really was.
On the 12th of October, after nearly three months at sea,
Columbus and his men finally made landfall.
They had crossed the vast ocean and reached the Americas.
Returning to Spain a hero, Columbus managed to persuade the king
and queen to support three further voyages to colonise the New World.
But Anthilia and its legendary riches were never found.
Its name now lives on in a chain
of islands in the Caribbean Sea: the Antilles.
When the Caribbean colonies he established, rebelled against him,
Columbus suffered the ultimate humiliation.
Dragged back to Spain in chains, he died a broken man in 1506.
But without realising it, Columbus had played
an essential role in the history of Atlantis.
They expected to sail across the ocean and bump into Japan
but there was a whole continent in the way and this therefore,
especially because it was across the Atlantic Ocean,
this gave rise, I think, to much more speculation about Atlantis.
A good example of how the legend has been adapted
or is different in each age, is the time of great discoveries.
When Columbus was crossing the Atlantic
in search of the Spice lslands, he knew the myths.
He wasn't a stupid mariner just hoping to head off
and find something on the far side of the ocean.
He was looking for things related to the Atlantis myth.
We know that other seafarers were doing the same thing
at the same time so there was actually one of the impetuses
for the exploration westwards across the Atlantic,
was the Atlantis myth.
Amid the spectacular ruins of the New World,
the story of Atlantis would now take a different turn:
becoming the focus for one man's bold quest to discover
the truth about his country and himself.
Thirty miles from modern- day Mexico City,
Iies Teotihuacan, the spectacular 'City of the Gods'.
It was already an abandoned ruin long before the time of the Aztecs,
who regarded it as the birthplace of the sun.
The Spanish conquistadors had been so overwrought
by the city's majesty, one of their earliest chroniclers had written:
"There is now no cause why we should any longer doubt of Atlantis
the discovery and conquest of the lndies do
plainly declare what Plato had written."
A hundred and fifty years after Columbus had discovered America,
such sentiments would inspire one man to come
to this city of silence and search for physical proof
of the lost legacy of Atlantis, a search that was bound up
in his own quest to discover himself.
Though much of his story has been forgotten,
Don Carlos Seguenza was among the most brilliant men of his age.
A poet, mathematician, astronomer and engineer,
Seguenza was also one of the first archaeologists in history.
Born in Mexico City, Seguenza was a Creole
and considered an inferior by the country's Spanish rulers.
Seguenza was a Creole, which means
he was descended from Spanish parents.
Although we know now that perhaps there were Creoles
who had part indigenous blood.
They were not at the same level as Spaniards.
That they were not equal. They were inferior.
Overcoming the prejudices of Mexico's Spanish overlords
had become Seguenza's self- appointed task from an early age.
He was determined to prove that the ancestors
of Mexico's lndians had once forged a culture to rival ancient Rome.
Seguenza had first learned of Atlantis
while studying to be a Jesuit where he came across the work
of Athanasius Kircher, whose 1665 map
of the lost continent was the first in history.
Expelled from the Jesuit order for his lack of discipline,
Seguenza turned to science, making ground-breaking studies
of eclipses before journeying to Teotihuacan
to see the city's ruins for himself.
What he found there overwhelmed him.
Carefully measuring and recording everything he could,
Seguenza found Teotihucan's lay-out truly mystifying.
A puzzle that appealed to his mathematical talents
and would bring him back to this ruined city time after time.
The city bore all the hallmarks of an advanced civilization
and Seguenza found evidence of astronomy,
hieroglyphic writing, and pyramid-building
that was uncannily similar to that of ancient Egypt.
He saw many parallels between Egypt
and the early Mexican culture in
the calendar, in the way of dress,
in the hieroglyphics and in the pyramids.
Could the two civilizations have been related?
"I have been stimulated by the great love
which I have for my country,
and in which would be found exceedingly strange information.
These data will probably die with me on account of my great poverty."
But fortunately some of Seguenza's works
did survive and we know that amid these vast monumental ruins
he believed he had found the answer to the ancient riddle of Atlantis.
What he was trying to do, I believe, was to connect Atlantis
Plato's ideas, with the Bible.
Seguenza would have jumped from the myth of Atlantis,
which would have been kind of the foundation for him,
to biblical prophecy of
people dispersing across the globe after the deluge.
Fusing scientific ideas with his deeply-held belief
in the truth of the Bible, Seguenza concluded
that the destruction of Atlantis and Noah's flood
had actually been one and the same event.
A vast deluge which had swept away
a forgotten civilization,
whose survivors sought refuge in both Egypt and Mexico
where they built the pyramids before vanishing from history.
Seguenza believed that if he could show that Mexico's pyramids
contained hidden chambers, as the pyramids in Egypt do,
his theory about Atlantis would be confirmed.
Under the hot Mexican sun, Seguenza and his servants
spent many days trying to find a way
into the abandoned city's pyramids.
But the attempt ended in failure leaving Seguenza
frustrated and in despair that he could ever convince
sceptical Europeans of the true achievements
of Mexico or its connection with Atlantis.
Even worse, disaster was about to strike.
In 1691, a riot broke out in Mexico City.
Provoked by cruelty and mistreatment from their Spanish overlords,
Mexico's native population rebelled.
Fires spread throughout the city.
A mob broke into the Viceroyal Palace
and set the country's national archives ablaze
in one senseless act of vengeance.
Seguenza raced to the scene.
The archives contained countless documents
that dated back to the time of the conquest.
It was a vast body of evidence in which Seguenza
hoped one day to find proof of his theories
about the Atlantean origins of Mexico.
Again and again Seguenza plunged into the inferno,
trying to save whatever he could.
In desperation, he began paying rioters
to salvage books from the flames.
His entire wealth spent on saving just a few records.
"I cut beams and pried open doors and by my own efforts
the best archives of the city were rescued from the fire. "
Because of his efforts, much of our knowledge
of early Mexico and its conquest has been preserved.
Tragically, after his death in 1701,
most of Seguenza's own works were lost.
With no means to date the great citadels
and pyramids of Teotihuacan, Seguenza could never have known
that the city did not reach its height until 750 AD
ten thousand years after the date Plato gave for Atlantis' destruction.
But Seguenza was right about the secret of these pyramids.
They did contain burial chambers hidden deep within them
a fact that was only discovered three centuries after his death.
Don Carlos Seguenza was the first Atlantis seeker
to search for physical proof of the lost continent.
But he was not alone in wanting
to cast new light on an ancient legend.
Across the ocean in 17th century England,
two courtiers of Queen Elizabeth l were also immeasurably
broadening the scope of the quest for Atlantis.
One of the reasons that by the 17th century the Atlantis myth
had become re-introduced was because there was
much more exploration under Elizabeth I and there was
a renewed interest in science, in Elizabethan England.
This obviously would have encouraged people
to re-open the Atlantis story and therefore people
began once again, if not to look for it specifically,
certainly to refer to it specifically.
Francis Bacon was a statesman,
playwright and one of the first modern scientists.
Eager to promote the merits of science
to still a largely unscientific world,
Bacon wrote a fable called "The New Atlantis",
the first re-working of the myth since Plato.
The New Atlantis told the story of how survivors
from the original Atlantis had founded an idyllic society
in the still unknown reaches of the Pacific Ocean,
and used science to uncover the mysteries of the universe.
Like Plato, he left his story tantalisingly incomplete.
Bacon refers to Plato so this was the origin of his story
but it is not seriously an attempt to resurrect Plato's Atlantis
but to create a Utopian society that the British could look
at as a way of re-writing the way people could live together.
But Bacon's linking of Atlantis to advanced technology
would stay with the myth ever after,
as would Atlantis's association with a rather
different field of human investigation.
Dr John Dee was an alchemist, spy,
philosopher and physician.
Astrologer to the Queen herself,
Dee was also the most famous magician of the Elizabethan age.
Using a method of crystal-gazing,
Dee claimed to have communicated with the spirits of Atlantis
in a series of terrifying occult experiments.
Both Dee and Bacon considered their Atlantis work
so subversive they refused to publish anything about them
in their own lifetimes and it would be England's great rival, France,
that opened the next chapter in the story of Atlantis.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1799
he took with him the largest collection of scholars
ever to accompany a military campaign.
The finds and discoveries made by Napoleon's archaeologists
generated a national obsession with all things ancient.
In time inspiring a fellow Frenchman, Jules Verne,
to take the story of Atlantis from the arcane libraries
of a few lonely scholars into the imagination of the whole world.
"Here were the encrusted remains of an Acropolis,
with the floating forms of a Parthenon,
here were the vestiges of an ancient port
on the shore of a vanished sea,
which had once given shelter to merchant ships and craft of war.
Further still, was the outlines of crumpled walls
and long lines of wide, deserted streets,
an ancient Pompeii buried beneath the sea. Atlantis."
Jules Verne's image of Atlantis in 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea' was perhaps the most spellbinding
description of the lost city since Platos.
It was published in 1870. Enormously popular book.
The drawings that accompanied the book showed people
marching around in Greek, sunken Greek temples
and this is course was a kind of interesting concept
and probably was the element that got people
more and more interested in Atlantis,
the idea that underwater you could walk around in sunken Greek temples.
Written in the 1870s as the effects of the lndustrial Revolution
and new technologies were rapidly changing the world,
Verne's story of undersea exploration was a prescient guess
at the shape of things to come.
It was really a Da Vinci kind of prophecy.
The general population of the day
had no idea about the oceans really.
Most people didn't know how to swim.
Most people certainly had never been under water.
All they knew was that the ocean was populated by monsters of one kind
of another that probably ate ships and certainly ate people.
Verne's description of Atlantis, located in a abyss
of undersea volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
was so convincing that within a decade it would inspire
a writer half a world away to prove that Atlantis truly did exist.
Here in his study in Minnesota, lgnatius Donnelly,
a failed politician, wrote one of the greatest best-sellers of his age,
making him the founding father
of the modern hunt for a real Atlantis.
His ideas launched a wave of Atlantis-mania
that has been with us ever since.
A former congressman and Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota,
Donnelly had railed against the tycoons
of big business who controlled the politics of the day,
choosing to champion the cause of the common man.
His idealism unfortunately brought
only political and financial disaster.
He started a commune in Minnesota with a man called Nininger.
The commune was called Nininger City.
It didn't seem to work very well
as an idealistic commune and by the time it was over,
there was exactly one resident there and that was lgnatius Donnelly.
By 1880 Donnelly was out of office
and down on his luck, and so he retired to his study
to begin the work for which he is now most famous
a book entitled Atlantis the Antediluvian World.
Donnelly had studied Plato as a boy
and the story of Atlantis had always intrigued him.
With time on his hands he decided to read everything
and anything he could to find out
once and for all the truth about Atlantis.
Donnelly had been galvanised in his quest
to find the location of the sunken continent
by an archaeological find that had thrown
all preconceived ideas about the myths of the ancient world into chaos.
Ten years earlier, German businessman turned archaeologist,
Heinrich Schliemann uncovered on the coast of Turkey
the ruins of the city of Troy and many of the treasures
from this mythical war between Greeks and Trojans.
When Schliemann discovered Troy
it completely changed the way people looked at
mythology and archaeology.
Before Schliemann people had thought
that what Homer had written was fiction.
He made this up, there wasn't really a city of Troy,
but what Schliemann did was he read Homer
carefully and he figured out, correctly, where Troy
would be located if you performed a literal translation of Homer.
It was this astonishing find that persuaded Donnelly
that if Schliemann could discover Troy by carefully
re-reading Homer, then he too might discover Atlantis by re-reading Plato.
Obsessed in his quest, Donnelly tirelessly
searched for Atlantis in everything around
him until a thesis slowly began to emerge.
Donnelly found evidence of Atlantis
having existed in the similarity of plants,
animals and ancient cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
"We find on both sides of the Atlantic
precisely the same arts, sciences, religious beliefs,
habits, customs and traditions.
It is absurd to say that the people of the two continents
arrived separately at precisely the same ends."
The pyramids of Mexico were very similar to the pyramids in Egypt.
Their methods of writing, the hieroglyphics were very similar.
So he deduced from that there must be a
common source which must lie somewhere
in between those two continents therefore in the middle of the Atlantic.
But where in the Atlantic might the remains of the lost continent be?
By an amazing coincidence the British Navy
had just conducted the first undersea survey of the Atlantic seabed.
It indicated that deep beneath the Atlantic
a vast ridge of undersea mountains stretched from lceland
to South America: their highest peaks being
the islands of the Azores and the Canaries.
For Donnelly the riddle was solved.
These undersea mountains had once been wholly
above the surface, but due to their volcanic nature had sunk
destroying Atlantis in the process.
When it was published in 1882, Donnelly's book
Atlantis the Antediluvian World
was an overnight bestseller that portrayed Atlantis
as a highly advanced seafaring empire
with colonies all over the world.
An empire that Donnelly believed:
"Lived under a kingly government and had their courts,
judges, records, their boats, their highways,
aqueducts, wharves, docks and canals.
They knew the use of the magnet and of gunpowder.
In short they were in enjoyment of a civilisation
nearly as high as our own."
Donnelly's book sparked debates from every fashionable salon
to the most prestigious academies of science.
Atlantis-fever swept the nation.
In 1883, the New Orleans Mardi Gras even adopted it as its theme.
Letters of congratulations arrived from all over the world,
including one marked only lgnatius Donnelly, America.
To Donnelly's astonishment it came from William Gladstone,
Prime Minister of the British Empire.
Though much pressed by public affairs,
I have contrived to read an already appreciable
portion of your book and I am much disposed to believe in Atlantis.
Gladstone sent this letter
and addressed it to lgnatius Donnelly Esquire, America.
And lgnatius being an lrishman and not wishing to be outdone
decided to reply to him and his reply said:
The Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone, The World.
"I could not but smile.
I was corresponding with a man whose word was fate
anywhere in the British empire.
I could have uttered a war whoop of exultation."
Because his book was so popular,
people tended to believe that it was fact.
A good parallel, I think, is with Peter Benchley's book 'Jaws.'
What Benchley has the white shark
doing in Jaws does not actually happen
but think about how many people read this book and
became absolutely terrified to swim in the ocean.
It is possible for people to take what is essentially a work of fiction
but if it's presented cleverly enough
and if it has enough science woven into it,
to believe that its absolute fact.
Flushed by the overwhelming success of his book,
Donnelly, now a wealthy man, turned his attention
to the truth behind other ancient myths.
But none of his other books ever came
close to matching the success
of 'Atlantis the Antediluvian World.'
Disappointed he returned to politics, again without success.
He died in 1901.
In many ways politics was his undoing.
There's a quote from an obituary
which says the memory of Donnelly the politician
will die, it is for Donnelly the author which we weep.
Which I thought summed it up.
Donnelly's book began a tradition of armchair exploration
that has accompanied the search for Atlantis ever since.
The father of Atlantology, Donnelly
was the first man to convince the public
that Atlantis really could be found.
Little did he realise that his work would prompt a search
for the lost continent that was literally out of this world.
In the late nineteenth century a new fad swept America.
Spiritualism took the country by storm.
Here, in the New York apartment of an eccentric Russian aristocrat,
the story of Atlantis was about to move into a whole new dimension.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky arrived in New York in 1873,
penniless after years of travelling the world.
But she was soon to become one of the greatest occult gurus
of the modern era: the herald of a New Age of spirituality
in which Atlantis would hold the key to cosmic enlightenment.
She was very ugly in conventional terms, and her
dress sense was not very good.
Somebody once described her as a badly wrapped parcel
or looking like a badly wrapped parcel.
She smoked like a trooper, she swore like a trooper
in broken English, she had gross eating habits.
She's thought very rarely to have washed,
and so she wasn't really a very good prospect
in terms of any gainful employment.
The only talent she claimed to have was an affinity to spirits.
With her air of cultivated mystery,
her almost incomprehensible Russian accent
and her outlandish behaviour, Madam Blavatsky
soon became one of the stars of New York seance scene.
Revealing to her guests, through a series
of bizarre spiritual contacts, that she was in communication
with mysterious forces. Mysterious forces from Atlantis.
Although exposed as a trickster on numerous occasions,
somehow Madam Blavatsky's appeal just kept on increasing.
Before long Madam Blavatsky attracted
the attention of Colonel Henry Olcott,
a former member of the committee that
had investigated President Lincoln's assassination.
The two soon moved in together.
They called each Jack and Maloney which doesn't suggest
a sexual relationship, but they did live together.
They lived together perhaps as pals, chums, friends.
Mysterious letters soon began appearing all over the apartment.
Written in her own handwriting,
Blavatsky claimed these materialised letters had been dictated
to her by Cosmic Masters who were eager
to inform Olcott of their shared mission.
The messages told him he'd been admitted
into the secret order of these Cosmic Masters
whose ranks included such great spiritual teachers
as Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Solomon and Plato.
A very few people are admitted to this wisdom,
and the knowledge of Atlantis is part of that
wisdom, because, of course, the continent of Atlantis
was the original settlement of these arriving cosmic masters,
coming from a different part of the universe
to set up, as it were, human life or what was to become human life.
After Atlantis' destruction the Cosmic Masters
had retreated to hidden valleys in the Himalayan Mountains
venturing out only rarely to monitor the progress of the human race.
Blavatsky claimed she had first encountered
these Cosmic Masters when she herself had been
travelling in Tibet many years before.
Now after an apprenticeship of twenty years,
the Cosmic Masters wanted her to bring about
a New Age of Spiritual Enlightenment with Olcott's help.
In 1875, the two companions set up an organisation
dedicated to universal brotherhood,
the investigation of man's latent psychic powers,
and spreading the wisdom of the East to the West.
They called it The Theosophical Society.
Incredibly, within a decade they had branches all over the world,
including lndia, where Mahatma Gandhi would become a member.
You could say that without it the New Age wouldn't exist,
so in that sense it's had hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of heirs who are members
of other religious movements which owe a great deal to Theosophy.
There were, however, contradictions.
From the very start it was clear to Colonel Olcott
that the woman entrusted with leading this New Age
of Atlantean spirituality was anything but a model
of Eastern serenity and contemplation.
He was a natural administrator, in a way,
with a great deal of experience. She was an odd ball,
she was an eccentric, she was headstrong,
she was reckless, she was mad, she loved stirring up trouble.
She loved dramas, she loved scenes,
She loved screaming, swearing
she loved upsetting people: she wanted excitement.
In 1888 Blavatsky wrote a book called The Secret Doctrine
in which she attempted to establish the principles of Theosophy
or god-wisdom that the Cosmic Masters had imparted to her.
Blavatsky cited most of Donnelly's theories about Atlantis
with approval, but she had one major disagreement.
In her opinion Donnelly's belief in Darwin
was a grave error and in one corner of her room sat
a stuffed baboon as a constant reminder of how
wrong she thought the theory of evolution was.
Instead Blavatsky proposed that the Cosmic Masters of Atlantis
had been the real progenitors of the human race.
"Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man
from the ape tracing the origin of the species
to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period."
Blavatsky argued that while some peoples,
notably the Aryan Hindus, had retained the Atlantean purity
of their ancient ancestors others had not.
"The Aryan Hindu belongs to the oldest race now on earth,
the Semite Hebrew to the latest.
There was a day when the lsraelites had beliefs
as pure as the Aryans, but now Judaism
has become a religion of hate and malice."
Blavatsky's linking of Atlantis to ideas of racial superiority
would later be seized upon by the most
sinister forces of the twentieth century.
Madam Blavatsky died in 1901, and true to form,
the grandmother of the New Age refused to go quietly.
Her last years, alas, were fraught with endless traumas,
because although she had officially retired from
the Theosophical Society, she couldn't stop meddling.
And being a hellraiser she took every possible opportunity to stir the pot.
So she died rather sadly really, because she was
in the middle of a maelstrom of anger
and scandal when she died.
But somehow that's entirely appropriate.
One feels she rather enjoyed it.
Madam Blavatsky's ideas cast a long shadow
over the story of Atlantis, providing fertile ground
for the mythmakers of New Age spirituality.
But ironically, it would be the propagandists
of the Third Reich who would first seize upon
her theories of a pure Atlantean race.
The year is 1933 and in Central America
one of the forgotten chapters in the story of Atlantis is about to unfold.
Deep in the Guatemalan jungle a German
archaeological expedition believes it has unearthed finds
which challenge many of our most cherished ideas about human evolution.
Buried deep in the earth are the mortal remains
of a people who don't even appear to be human,
remains which local people believe
to be the forgotten race of Atlantis.
From the moment the Nazis seized power in Germany
in 1933 they inaugurated a series of quests in search
of fabulous objects and places from mankind's earliest myths.
The Lost Ark of the Covenant. The Holy Grail.
The Spear of Logenius, which pierced Christ's side.
And the lost continent of Atlantis.
For Adolf Hitler, such places and objects held
a dark promise of secret knowledge and limitless power.
If the Nazis could find them, their armies would be invincible.
Missions were dispatched all over the world from Wewelsburg Castle:
the sinister heart of the Third Reich.
Built on the intersection of four prehistoric pathways called ley-lines,
Wewelsburg was believed to lie in a zone
of magical earth-power and thus a befitting place
for the home of the Nazis' most elite troops, the dreaded SS.
"Never forget we are a knightly order
from which we cannot withdraw, to which we are recruited by blood."
Headed by Hitler's trusted lieutenant,
Heinrich Himmler, the SS modelled themselves on an order of knights.
The purest members of the Aryan race,
they were the only men considered fit enough
to such ancient secrets as Atlantis.
The search for these objects had a dual purpose.
On the one hand it made for great publicity.
I mean this kind of stuff just looks good in the headlines,
you know, with the archaeologists out looking for the Ark,
or have found the spear of Logenius and it's coming to Berlin
and you know, the archaeologists actually
were out there in teams looking for these types of objects.
That is, in fact, an accurate element in Spielberg's films.
In fact there was a major concern within the profession that
German archaeologists were going to become
the laughing stock of their colleagues outside
Germany because of this this type of lunatic fringe research.
How and why German archaeologists became
so obsessed with pursuing these mythical objects and places,
has its roots in the disaster of World War One
and its terrible aftermath, in which the myth of Atlantis
played a fateful role in the Nazis' rise to power.
The Great War had been greeted almost with celebration.
After decades of peace, European leaders saw
a chance for the manhood of their nations to be tested.
Many people at the outset of the First World War,
many extremely distinguished, sensitive, refined people
were to be found writing peans in praise
of the war, of the anticipated slaughter,
because they believed it would spiritually purify Europe.
Well, they didn't believe that for long.
By the war's end millions lay dead and the map
of Europe had been completely redrawn.
Defeated by the allies, the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires
fragmented, leaving German- speaking people all over Europe
feeling humiliated and deeply insecure.
Military disaster brought economic disaster
and Germany plunged into chaos,
an unstable hotbed of hyperinflation and extremist politics.
Insecure about themselves and their role in the world,
Germans turned to history, hoping that in the ancient past
they might find a way to reinvent themselves in the present.
We're dealing with a nation, in the 1920s
in Germany which is going through a kind of identity crisis.
It's feeling under-appreciated and obviously
it's in search of symbolism that will allow it
to feel better about itself, and basically it's
sort of a self-esteem issue
and archaeology was one of the ways that
Germans attempted to kind of create
a picture of themselves that they could be proud of.
As archaeologists began excavating Germany's remote past,
so a number of 'volkish' or 'people groups'
sprung up all over the country.
Formed to promote the unity of German-speaking peoples
all over Europe, these 'volkish' movements organised festivals
and sports events which celebrated
the strength and vitality of the German race.
Their members were also among the keenest advocates
of a number of extremely unorthodox ideas that linked
Germany's past with the myth of Atlantis.
Published in the 1930s, the novels of Edmund Kiss
told the story of how in the long forgotten past an ice moon
from deep space had collided with the earth bringing
with it the seed of Aryan man.
Naturally superior to the ape-men of the earth,
this Aryan race had established the world's first civilisation
on islands in the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantis.
Most incredible of all, Kiss's novels were not meant
to be purely fantasy, they were based on ideas which
many Germans actually believed to be fact.
Edmund Kiss published a series of novels,
at least four that I know of, 'The Glassy Sea',
'The Spring in Atlantis', 'The Last Queen of Atlantis',
and then there's the sort of diaspora novel
that talks about the eventual migration to South America.
And these seem to have been quite popular.
Certainly Himmler was a big fan, and Hitler believed
that they were a true to life if fictionalised
representation of what actually happened.
Kiss' Atlantean city closely resembled Plato's,
but in the place of a fantastic temple in the centre of the city,
Kiss put a vast war office echoing plans for the Nazis' rebuilding of Berlin.
From here the purest and most noble Atlantean leaders
ruled an empire that spanned from the first cities
of South America to the classical civilisation of Greece.
As Kiss wrote, "only time will tell where the limits of our power lie.
We must build a community that will demonstrate
to all the visible signs of our Nordic blood:
the whiteness of our skin, the blueness of our eyes,
our freedom of spirit uncorrupted by the base superstitions of religion."
Yet just as an ice moon from deep space had brought
the Atlanteans to earth, so many ages later
another would bring about their doom colliding
with the earth and destroying their continent.
Kiss tells us the Atlanteans returned to the Arctic North,
seeking safety in the ice and snow
which had once given birth to them.
Far away from inferior races that might pollute their noble blood-lines.
The Aryans of Atlantis rejuvenated, purified by the icy environment
of the north. And there they reborned as the Germans
awaiting the day when a leader would emerge
to resurrect the Aryan Empire of Atlantis once more.
What Hitler and Himmler both seem to like most about this
was the cyclical nature of it and the fact that
you could extend Kiss's ideas
into the present by arguing that Germany was again
going through one of these periods where it had to purge itself,
where it had to be tested, basically.
It was beginning to become compromised
in its superiority and purity, and that of course you need
a leader to kind of guide you through
this dark period, and Hitler was that leader.
So from a propaganda perspective, Kiss's novels were,
they were gold for people like Himmler.
Enthralled by the concept of an Aryan Atlantis,
German expeditions departed for Central America,
where deep in the forest of Guatemala
they set about investigating the overgrown ruins of the Mayan civilisation.
A civilisation that had reached its height long
after the date given by Plato for Atlantis's destruction.
It was nonetheless here that archaeologists
unearthed strangely misshapen skulls
that local people claimed to be those of Atlanteans.
This documentary film lost in the German archives,
played to packed audiences in German movie-theatres in 1933.
Not wanting to dispel the illusion of a great find,
the archaeologists remained evasive
about what they had really discovered.
These misshapen skulls were actually the result
of an ancient native American practice, in which the heads
of young children are bound and deformed for religious reasons.
But the Third Reich's obsession with Atlantis
and other myths went much further than appeasing
the German public's appetite for mystery.
In 1934, a year after this film about Atlantis was made,
Himmler formed the Ahenerbe, a specialist division of the SS
recruited from some of the country's best universities.
Though many members didn't yet know it
the Ahenerbe's aim was no less than the reinvention of German history.
The academics and archaeologists who joined
the Ahenerbe soon found their leader to be
a difficult and troublesome taskmaster.
He had a habit of getting, you know,
three o'clock in the morning, getting a sudden inspiration,
jotting down a memo 'find out why butterflies migrate'
or 'find out why crows tend to sort of gather
at places of execution' and he would send this off to
the appropriate unit, and you know, if you imagine
this sort of appearing at someone's desk
and they're looking at it thinking,
'where did that come from', and if you were lucky he'd forget about it.
When war broke out in 1939, and German armies swept across Europe
the scientists of the SS Ahenerbe followed in their wake
using archaeology to claim that the Nazis weren't conquering territory,
they were merely reclaiming land that once belonged to the Aryan race.
As the war progressed, the myth of Atlantis
began to assume a far more malign role.
The lost racially pure homeland of Atlantis now
became the model for the new Nazi Germany.
That meant removing elements that were not Nordic from the population,
from the breeding population and from the culture.
And genocide then becomes an option, so I think
the Atlantis myth plays a role there, quite definitely.
Generally the myths of a Golden Age
are, are extremely double-edged because they give authority
and they give legitimacy to ideas which may otherwise find no justification.
Archaeologists and academics who had joined the SS
Ahenerbe imagining they were knights of a new order
searching for the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and Atlantis,
now found themselves justifying and implementing
the indescribable terror of the Holocaust.
You could not claim today, although people have tried,
that 'oh well, we were just archaeologists,
we didn't have anything to do with the medical research
or whatever was going on in the camps.'
That's not strictly true, because in effect Himmler
made it impossible for people to completely remove themselves
from what other branches of the organisation were doing.
Everybody was was part of this organic sort of web that had been created.
At the war's end the full extent of the Holocaust became horrifyingly clear.
Himmler, the chief of the SS, cheated
the executioner by suicide, while his footsoldiers
the men of the SS Ahenerbe slipped quietly back
into civilian life, anonymous, forgotten and unpunished.
The myth of Atlantis had come full circle
transformed from the story of an earthly paradise
into the ideology behind a genocidal nightmare.
Most of the men of the Ahenerbe escaped
punishment for their role in the atrocities.
The archaeologists who survived the war seen to have done
a pretty effective clean up job in the archives.
Atlantis's connection with the Third Reich
was forgotten almost immediately.
Nazi propaganda had hired the myth of Atlantis for deadly intents
But across the Atlantic mythmakers of an entirely different sort
were also re-inventing Atlantis as pure fantasy.
Hollywood! Most famous of all Atlantis movies
is probably the 1961 'Atlantis: the Lost Continent',
in which a humble Greek fisherman called Demetrius
saves the beautiful Princess Antillia from the evil masters of Atlantis.
But 'The Lost Continent' was only the most memorable
of a whole genre of B-movie adventure films
and serials that have continued to reinvent Atlantis.
Go ahead and ram! - Ram the gates!
There's something about the Atlantis theory
that everybody loves, and even now or in recent times
people have used it in movies. They've used it in novels.
There are serials made in the 1930s about Crash Corrigan
and the undersea kingdom of Atlantis,
and a wonderful kind of idea of Crash, on a horse,
riding through Atlantis, which looks very much like
the Monument Valley in the American West,
because I think they just happened
to be there and they said, 'well, why don't we make an Atlantis movie?'
Okay, you put the saucepan on your head and we'll do that.
From 'The Man from Atlantis', who sought to help
the US navy protect the free world, to 'The Warlords of Atlantis',
who wanted to enslave it, Atlantis has been portrayed
in almost every conceivable way, except as a real place.
Astonishingly, that would all suddenly change.
In the late 1960s archaeological discoveries would bring
Atlantis hurtling from the realm of fantasy
and Hollywood B-movies onto the front pages
of newspapers around the world.
Hidden in volcanic rock, on the Greek island of Santorini,
scientists unearthed the lost city of a forgotten people,
destroyed in an unimaginable catastrophe.
All the elements finally seemed to fit
and the great city of legend would now
make the world of science sit up and take notice.
Santorini, once called Thera, is a beautiful collection
of small Mediterranean islands encircling a central volcanic hub.
With its breath-taking views and stunning sunsets,
Santorini is a magnet for tourists from all over the world
who visit to sample the unique culture of the Greek islands.
But Santorini is much more than a picturesque holiday retreat.
Hidden under layers of volcanic rock are
the remains of a once-proud city that perished
in a terrible calamity over 35 centuries ago.
A city whose destruction many people believe
gave rise to the myth of Atlantis.
The story of this momentous archaeological find
began in the nineteenth century on another Mediterranean island
70 miles south of Santorini, an island called Crete.
In 1899 the British archaeologist, Arthur Evans,
had begun unearthing on Crete the remains
of a mysterious civilisation which seemed
to have been completely forgotten by history.
Based at Knossos, Evans uncovered the remains
of a powerful sea-trading people who worshipped
the bull and built large labyrinthine buildings,
factors which encouraged him to name this unknown culture
the Minoans after King Minos, a mythological figure
from ancient Greek history, said to have been the father of the Minotaur.
The Minoans are probably the single greatest mystery
in all of classical history.
We don't really know where they came from
and we certainly don't know what happened to them.
But they were building these elaborate palaces
and making these fabulous frescos long before
anyone else was doing it this was fifteen hundred BC,
and remember that the Parthenon
and Plato himself existed around 350 BC.
It was while excavating a Minoan villa on Crete
some 35 years after Arthur Evans
that a Greek archaeologist called Spyridon Marinatos
discovered evidence of a huge volcanic explosion.
When he reached the foundations my father found
quite a large quantity of volcanic pumice.
And so he thought, What is going on here, was there a volcano?
And he looked on the map and thought, well,
the closest volcano is the volcano of Santorini, when did this erupt?
Based on provisional calculations, Marinatos estimated
that the volcano of Santorini had erupted in around 1500 BC.
It was a cataclysmic explosion.
Equivalent to 150 hydrogen bombs,
the centre of Santorini was ripped open
as 50 cubic miles of rock vaporised.
Debris was hurtled as far afield as Egypt and lsrael,
gigantic tsunamis overwhelmed coastlines everywhere
in the Mediterranean and after-shocks were felt all over the world.
The island of Santorini was shattered into fragments of its former self.
It's the idea of cataclysm, something as violent
as a volcanic explosion of that dimension
is a bit like the extinction of the dinosaurs.
It's such a dramatic event that it must have been recorded
in history somehow and the only evidence
we've got of this eruption being recorded
in oral tradition is the Atlantis myth.
Convinced that the explosion of Santorini
held the secrets of the sudden demise of the Minoans,
Marinatos decided to investigate Santorini itself
and look for further evidence of this lost civilisation,
but war and a lack of funds held him back until 1967,
when almost immediately he discovered
the remains of an ancient city, Akrotiri.
The first trial spot he hit exactly on the city of Akrotiri.
Marinatos' find made headlines around the world.
A forgotten people from ancient history wiped out
in one apocalyptic blast.
Surely this was the real-life basis for the myth of Atlantis.
I think it was the spirit of the times the whole generation
of my father capitalised on the fact that myths are true.
They reflect some distant reality of the past, and so
as a result of that all we need to do is to search
and we will find this core of truth.
So in the late 60s, and especially the 70s, people thought
they had found scientific confirmation for the end of a culture.
And the next step was to say, Well, that's Atlantis.
Entombed by a 30-foot layer of volcanic pumice
for more than three and a half thousand years,
the city was clearly related to the ruins on Minoan Crete.
Hundreds, if not thousands of years ahead of its time,
among the city's ruins was evidence of complex drainage systems,
showers, flushing toilets, even hot and cold running water.
Here too were exquisite wall paintings,
their rich colours preserved by the centuries of confinement,
their subject matter unlike anything previously discovered in the region.
We look at the frescos and we see very free-flowing,
beautiful art and it's made scholars think
of them as gentle people, people without any violence in them.
We find that the the cities and palaces on Crete
are not fortified, so again we get this vision of a sort of utopian society.
Clearly the Minoans had been an exceptional
and artistic people, far ahead of their contemporaries in many fields,
but were they really the Atlanteans of legend?
There were both many similarities and many differences
between Plato's story of Atlantis and the discoveries on Santorini and Crete.
Like the Atlanteans, the Minoans had been in contact
with the earliest Greeks as well as the Egyptians.
But the Minoans disappeared from history nearer
nine hundred than nine thousand years before Plato's time.
And even though only a fraction of the city of Akrotiri
has been excavated, so far it bears little resemblance
to the city of Atlantis described by Plato.
It is certainly nowhere near the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Academic opinion remains divided.
What Marinatos found was very important.
He was able to produce evidence which could form
the basis for at least part of the story of Atlantis, maybe not
the whole thing but part of it and that was the crucial thing.
There is no comparison whatsoever between the Minoans and the Atlanteans.
The Minoans had a high level of culture but nothing extraordinary.
It was a very open society and they had an empire
but it was run by a fleet, none of which seems
to fit the description of Atlantis at all.
Nevertheless there is one group of people who stick firmly
to the belief that Santorini was Atlantis, the islanders themselves.
The islanders of Santorini, the residents of Santorini
obviously have a vested interest in making tourists
think that they have found the lost continent of Atlantis.
And what do you get to do with that?
You get to claim Santorini as one of the most important spots
on earth and you also get to sell a lot of T-shirts,
and mugs and posters and everything that is
possible with the word Atlantis on it.
But the entrepreneurs of Santorini would soon find
that they had competition in laying claim to
the riches of being associated with Atlantis.
Only months after Akrotiri was unearthed,
the hippy culture of the 1960s discovered its own Atlantis
and it reflected a very different image of the lost continent.
In the summer of 1968 the occupants of a small plane,
flying off the coast of Bimini, near Florida, spotted beneath
them mysterious shapes in the clear waters.
The site quickly attracted huge interest especially
when fragments of ancient monuments were also found in
nearby waters, known as the Bimini Road.
Could these strange misshapen rocks
be the corroded ruins of ancient Atlantis?
Their sudden dramatic appearance had been foretold
by one of Americas most famous clairvoyants, Edgar Cayce.
Called the sleeping prophet because of the trance-like state
in which he delivered his prophesies, Cayce
had predicted that Atlantis would rise again in 1967 or 1968.
But the circumstances of the discovery cast
a shadow of doubt on the risen Atlantis.
Not only had the Bimini Road been discovered by followers of Cayce,
it also turned out that Cayce himself had been sponsored
by a wealthy businessman to locate gold,
oil or other mineral deposits in the Bahamas.
Unfortunately, on this occasion
Cayce's powers seem to have abandoned him.
I've heard that Cayce was in the employ of businessmen
who believed he could actually find gold,
and he, Cayce, then decided to produce Atlantis
as some kind of substitute for that.
The fragments of ancient monuments also have
another explanation that is far removed from the ruins of Atlantis.
They are almost certainly the remains of ships' ballast
dating back to the time of Columbus when ships needed
to take on board and later dump extra weight.
They don't want all that ballast in a ship,
you want buoyancy to get rid of the storm
and there all of a sudden is a Corinthian capital from Rome
or from what have you in the Caribbean.
Cayce also prophesied that a long-lost haul of Atlantean
records would be discovered under the Egyptian Sphinx in 1999.
Unfortunately these records have so far failed to materialise,
further discrediting Cayce's prophesies that Atlantis would rise again.
The Atlantis legend, if you like, has become a new religion.
It's a new age religion, it's for all those people
who are dissatisfied with what the conventional churches have to offer.
I think modern people look to, want to find something,
something they can believe in even if it's not reachable,
not attainable so they search for a Utopia, a fabulous land
and they try and believe in that, even though
they can never really find it.
But hope springs eternal.
Using a dazzling array of hi-tech and low-tech equipment
and spurning the skepticism of conventional experts,
a new breed of fringe researcher continues to search for Atlantis.
Is it a search without end or will advances in new technology
finally reveal the location of lost Atlantis?
Based in Torbay, Engand, Jim Allen is a former aerial
photography analyst for the British Royal Airforce.
And it is by analysing aerial photography
that Jim Allen believes he has discovered one
of the lost continents most distinctive landmarks
the vast irrigated floodplain of Atlantis.
Many people talk about Atlantis, a lost continent,
city, whatever you want to call it.
But nobody bothers to talk about the rectangular plain.
And the large part of Plato's story
is a very geographic description of this actual area.
Jim Allen believes that the continent of Atlantis
was actually South America.
High up on the rugged floodplain in Bolivia,
called the Altiplano, Jim thinks he has found
the plain which Plato described:
"There was a plain said to have been the fairest
of all plains and very fertile it was smooth and even
and of oblong shape and canals of a hundred feet were cut through it."
Could the Altiplano of Bolivia
really have been the plain of Atlantis?
Despite several expeditions Jim has found concrete proof,
elusive, and academic experts refuse to even examine his ideas.
Well, some time ago I wrote to
the leading archaeologist in Cambridge,
who is head of a Cambridge college,
and he returned all my material unexamined,
and he wrote 'Atlantis is a subject in which I have never been interested.'
And I think that that reflects the archaeological opinion around the world.
Undeterred, Jim hopes that advances in technology
will eventually force sceptical experts to sit up
and take notice of what he believes is a water-tight theory.
Modern technology, the satellite mapping
which is only available in the last 20 or 30 years, shows,
we can prove quite positively, this is the elongated,
rectangular plain that Plato talked about.
Jim Allen is not alone in hoping that modern technology
will reveal the location of the lost continent.
Based in British Columbia, Canada, Rand Flem-Ath
also believes that satellite technology
holds the key to finding Atlantis.
Rand believes that in the ancient past
a catastrophic geological event shifted
the outer crust of the earth over its molten core,
moving the location of Atlantis
from the temperate Atlantic to the frozen south pole.
A theory called Earth's Crust Displacement:
it has had some notable supporters, including Albert Einstein,
whose correspondence on the subject runs to many pages.
To imagine an earth's crust displacement,
if you think of an orange and you take off
the peel and then you reattach it,
but if you had a lubricant in between, say the
the peel and the flesh of the peel,
the it, it's just the crust that's moving,
the rest of everything inside is remaining stable.
According to Rand, a few Atlanteans managed
to survive this unimaginable disaster,
and went on to found the earliest known civilisations,
Ieaving to history many of the great monuments of the world.
From esoteric and mathematical clues contained
within these monuments, Rand believes he has managed
to decode the exact location of the city of Atlantis,
still buried under miles of Antarctic ice.
I think that we have found very specific co-ordinates
on Antarctica that are, that have a striking circular object
beneath the ice about fourteen hundred metres,
about a mile down which can be seen by satellites.
Critics argue that trying to locate Atlantis under miles of ice
by satellite is doomed to failure from the start.
These people believe that the ice sheet is kind
of rotating, like the loose skin of an orange
and managed to find itself over Atlantis.
The ice moves, the plates of the earth move,
both of these things actually happen
but what doesn't happen is an ice sheet
doesn't cover existing civilisations.
If ice moves the way a glacier moves,
it mows down existing civilisation.
Scepticism is normal in science.
Ice is a good preserver, and in the location
that we're looking at, we're hoping
that, that there is still something there.
But who knows? Twelve thousand years is a long time.
Only time will tell if technology will prove
the ideas of 21st century Atlantis-seekers,
Iike Rand Flem-Ath or Jim Allen, correct.
Throughout the ages Atlantis-hunters
have diligently followed the clues laid out
in Plato's 2000-year old description.
But is it a description of fact or fiction?
I think Plato used real characters,
so that people would accept it as truth.
I think, however, that Plato knew
he was writing fiction and Plato intended to write fiction.
I don't think that Plato believed a word of it.
But what might have inspired Plato to invent such a story?
In 399 BC, Plato's revered tutor, the great philosopher
Socrates, was arrested in the dead of night.
Dragged before an open court, he was charged with
corrupting the morals of Athens with his outspoken
philosophical ideas and sentenced to death,
a fate he accepted without bitterness or regret.
"Men of Athens, I honour and love you,
but understand that I shall never alter my ways,
not even if I have to die many times,
for if you kill one such as l, you will injure yourselves
more than you will injure me."
Surrounded by his closest friends and disciples,
Socrates calmly drank poison and passed away into history
as one of the great figures of Western civilisation.
But Plato could not be consoled.
Plato thinks of Socrates as the best and the kindest
and the justest man who ever lived, and he sees Athens,
a city he loves, turn against him and kill him.
That, I believe, was devastating for him, so
a lot of Plato's work is an effort to imagine alternative political
and social organisations in which the horrible injustice
that he sees having been done in the case of Socrates
could never happen again.
He would like ideally to create a world in which philosophy,
in the person of Socrates, will be for ever safe.
And one of these ideal cities where a great teacher
Iike Socrates would be safe and respected
is described in Plato's story about Atlantis.
However, the ideal society is not in fact Atlantis.
Of course, one would say, 'oh, it's Atlantis. 'No it isn't. It's Athens.
It is the ancient Athens, the Athens that defeated
the Atlanteans, which had all the features that Plato
associates with this imaginary ideal state that he has just described.
So after all these years Atlantis may be no more
than a story invented by Plato to compensate
for the tragic loss of his mentor Socrates.
In our own age the name Atlantis resonates still.
A spiritual realm of the New Age and a substitute religion.
A space shuttle voyaging like Columbus
into new and uncharted domains.
Even a gigantic billion-dollar holiday resort where
the excesses of Atlantis are all too real.
Curiously, we have an Atlantis in our own time now.
There is a resort and casino in the Bahamas
called Atlantis, and it's everything that Plato said Atlantis was,
and this, to me, is the the epitome of at least part of our current
civilisation, and it might even be argued that its part
of the downfall of contemporary civilisation.
Each period in history, I think, reads both the accomplishment
of Atlantis and the reason for its destruction in a different way.
And I think this is probably how the myth has always functioned,
how many golden ages have always functioned.
We use them to project the things we most admire
and of which we are, at the same time, most afraid.
A myth that reaches back in time to a lost Golden Age,
Atlantis has haunted the pages of history
Iike a restless, inconsolable spirit.
A mirage sought in every age, it has been a medieval paradise
of infinite riches, the cradle of our most ancient civilisations,
an undersea ruin that captivated the world,
and a mystical homeland where humanity's
highest aspirations and most dangerous fantasies of perfection meet.
The search for Atlantis goes on.
Many of us just can't resist the idea that somewhere
in the gloomy deep Atlantis still lies, awaiting the day
when some bold adventurer or new technology
finally brings its secrets to light.
Until that day it if it ever comes
Atlantis will remain only in the depths of the imagination:
a measure of our humanity, or lack of it.
A mirror of the hopes and fears of every generation.