Graham Hancock on Atlantis and the Memory of a Lost Civilization
The Atlantis story we inherited came through Plato, and he was careful to say where it originated. He got it through his own family, descended from Solon, the Athenian lawmaker. Solon traveled to Egypt somewhere around 600 BC, and while he was there the Egyptian priests told him about Atlantis. That account eventually reached Plato, who set it down for the rest of us in his dialogues the Timaeus and the Critias.
What tends to get missed is that Atlantis is only one version among hundreds of similar accounts found across the planet. In India the sunken civilization is called Kumari Kandam. The old Indian texts describe the subcontinent reaching much farther south into the Indian Ocean, a great stretch of land that went under during a catastrophic flood, much the way Atlantis was said to vanish in a single dreadful day and night.
The dates line up in a way that is hard to shrug off. Plato and the Indian tradition both place the event 11,600 years before our own time, which puts it at roughly 9,600 BC. Plato specifically said Atlantis sank 9,000 years before Solon's visit. Solon was in Egypt around 600 BC, so the arithmetic gives you 9,600 BC, or 11,600 years ago. The Indian sources name the same moment.
That particular date matters because it matches cataclysmic upheavals that science has actually confirmed happened 11,600 years ago, right as the last ice age was ending. Once you see that overlap, the old stories stop looking like fantasy and start looking like genuine recollections of genuine events. We may be a species carrying amnesia: an entire chapter of our past, including an early and advanced civilization, could have been erased by global catastrophe.
So Atlantis is the name everyone reaches for, but the real subject is bigger. It is a worldwide account of a golden age cut short by catastrophe thousands upon thousands of years back, and it travels alongside the flood myths that turn up everywhere. More than 2,000 separate versions describe a great global deluge that closed out an earlier age of the world.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, and again in the follow-up, Magicians of the Gods, due out in the fall of 2015, I went after the hard evidence behind all of this. Part of that meant examining the kind of cataclysm capable of wiping a whole civilization out of recorded history. The other part meant tracing the survivors, the people who tried to rebuild what the Egyptians called the Former World of the Gods and bring that lost civilization back to life.