Atlantis, a land of peace, rich in commerce, advanced in knowledge, dominate over the surrounding islands and continents. The people of Atlantis became complacent and their leaders arrogant; in punishment the Gods destroyed Atlantis, flooding it and submerging the island in one day and night.

It was Plato, the Greek philosopher who brought to the world the story of the lost continent, and was the first to use the term "Atlantis". His story began to unfold for him around 355 B.C. He wrote about this land called Atlantis in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, around 370 B.C. Plato said that the continent lay in the Atlantic Ocean near the Straits of Gibraltar until its destruction 10,000 years previous.

Plato described Atlantis as alternating rings of sea and land, with a palace in the center. He used a series of dialogues to express his ideas. His thoughts are explored in a series of arguments and debates between various characters in the story. A character named Kritias tells an account of Atlantis that has been in his family for generations. According the character the story was originally told to his ancestor Solon, by a priest during Solon’s visit to Egypt.
According to the dialogues, there had been a powerful empire located to the west of the “Pillars of Hercules” (what is known as the Straight of Gibraltar) on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Poseidon, the God of the Sea, had established the nation there. Poseidon fathered five sets of twins on the island. The firstborn, Atlas, had the continent and the surrounding ocean named for him. Poseidon divided the land into ten sections, each to be ruled by a son, or his heirs.

The capital city of Atlantis was a marvel of architecture and engineering. The city was composed of a series of concentric walls and canals. At the very center was a hill, and on top of the hill a temple to Poseidon. Inside was a gold statue of the God of the Sea showing him driving six winged horses. About 9000 years before the time of Plato, after the people of Atlantis became corrupt and greedy, the Gods decided to destroy them. A violent earthquake shook the land, giant waves rolled over the shores, and the island sank into the sea never to be seen again.

In “Timaeus,” Plato described Atlantis as a prosperous nation out to expand its domain: “Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent,” he wrote, “and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.”
Plato goes on telling how the Atlanteans made a grave mistake by seeking to conquer Greece. They could not withstand the Greeks’ military might, and following their defeat, a natural disaster sealed their fate. “Timaeus” continues: “But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.”

In “Critias,” Plato tells a more metaphysical version of the Atlantis story. There he describes the lost continent as the kingdom of Poseidon, the god of the sea. This Atlantis was a noble, sophisticated society that reigned in peace for centuries, until its people became complacent and greedy. Angered by their fall from grace, Zeus chose to punish them by destroying Atlantis.

Plato recorded and embellished the story from Solon’s grandson Critias the Younger. As in many ancient writings, history and myth were indistinguishably intermixed. Plato probably translated “the land of the pillars which held the sky” into the land of the titan Atlas, who held the sky. When Plato identified the location of the land he named Atlantis, he placed it to the west-in the Atlantic Ocean.

Yet Plato preserved enough detail about the land of Atlantis that its identification now seems very likely, and rather less mysterious than many new-age advocates would like. It is likely that Atlantis was the land of the Minoan culture, namely ancient Crete and Thera. If this hypothesis is correct, Plato never realized that the land of Atlantis was already familiar to him. Let’s have a look at the evidence, which suggests that Minoan Crete and surrounding islands bear a striking resemblance to what Plato described as Atlantis.

The Minoan culture spread its dominion throughout the nearby islands of the Aegean, very roughly from 3000 years BC to about 1400 years BC. Crete, now part of Greece, was the capital for the Minoan people an advanced civilization with language, commercial shipping, complex architecture, ritual and games. It seems very likely that related islands (e.g. Santorini/Thera) may have been part of the same culture. The Minoans were peaceful: very little evidence of military activity was found in their ruins. A 4-storied palace at Knossos, Crete, was said to be the capitol of the Minoan culture. Correspondence of Minoan cultural artifacts with aspects of the Atlantis legend makes the identity of the two seem virtually certain. Perhaps the most unusual of these is the Minoan bull fighting.

Plato’s maps of Atlantis have even been argued to resemble the geography of ancient Crete.
Many ancient Greek myths take their location from Minoan Crete more than ten centuries before Plato. Daedalus, the ancient scientist, was supposedly the architect of the palace at Knossos.
There one can still find ruins alleged to be the labyrinth that housed the legendary Minotaur, the monster (half-human, half bull) haven been slain by Thesius.

Other theories about Atlantis

The exact location of Atlantis is not known as the continent split into many sections that moved in different directions. Many researchers believe that Atlantis is near the Azores Islands. The Azores are a group of islands belonging to Portugal located about 1500 km west of the Portuguese coast. Some people believe the islands are the mountaintops of the sunken continent of Atlantis.

Other researchers believe that Atlantis is an exaggeration of the historical destruction of Thera and the Minoan empire and can now be found in the Aegean. The island of Thera, also known as Santorini, is a volcanic island located due north of Crete in the Aegean Sea. Sometime around 1500 BC a volcanic explosion that may have contributed to the sudden downfall of the Minoan civilization devastated it.

Ancient writings from the Aztecs and Mayans like the Chilam Balam, Dresden Codex, Popuhl Vuh, Codex Cortesianus, and Troano Manuscript were also translated into histories of the destruction of Atlantis and Lemuria.

The ancient Greek historian Diodorus wrote that thousands of years earlier Phoenicians had been to the immense Atlantic island (where Plato wrote Atlantis was. Phoenician hieroglyphics have been found on numerous ruins in the South American jungles that are so ancient that the Indian tribes nearby lost memory of who built these ruins. Diodorus wrote that the Atlanteans had WAR with the Amazonians!

Greek historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote about the destruction of Atlantis. Plutarch wrote about the lost continent in his book Lives. Herodotus, regarded by some as the greatest historians of the ancients, wrote about the mysterious island civilization in the Atlantic and a city located in the region where Dr. Asher’s expedition had found just that! The Greek historian Timagenus wrote of the war between Atlantis and Europe and said tribes in ancient France said that was their original home.

Bright paintings in caves in France clearly show people wearing 20th century clothing: one painting led to an underground pyramid complex. French historian and archaeologist Robert Charroux dated them at 15,000 B.C.

Claudius Aelianus referred to Atlantis in his 3rd century work The Nature of Animals.
Theopompos - a Greek historian - wrote of the huge size of Atlantis and its cities of Machimum and Eusebius and a golden age free from disease and manual labor.

James Churchward wrote several volumes of books documenting ancient writings he claims to have translated in Southeast Asia concerning Atlantis and Mu, while geologist William Niven claimed to have excavated identical tablets in Mexico.

Dr. George Hunt Williamson, who authored several books on his Atlantean-Lemurian research in the 1950’s, was an anthropologist explorer once listed in Who’s Who in America. Williamson wrote how descendants of the Incas led him to an ancient manuscript in a temple in the Andes Mountains that told of the destruction of Atlantis and Mu, which had an advanced technology, by earthquakes and tidal waves. Williamson also visited dozens of Indian tribes in the United

The tablet from Lhasa, Tibet and also from Easter Island make It is clear from ancient writings that belief in Atlantis was common and accepted in Greece, Egypt, and Mayax (Mayan and Aztec Empires) by historians.

The Basques of Spain, the Guals of France, the tribes of the Canary and Azores islands, a tribe in Holland, and dozens of Indian tribes all speak of their origins in a large lost and sunken Atlantic land in which they all believe.

In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly, a U.S. congressman from Minnesota, brought the legend into the American consciousness with his book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

Edgar Cayce(1877-1945) became the U.S.’s most prominent advocate of a factual Atlantis. Widely known as The Sleeping Prophet, Cayce claimed the ability to see the future and to communicate with long-dead spirits from the past. He identified hundreds of people—including himself—as reincarnated Atlanteans. Cayce said that Atlantis had been situated near the Bermuda island of Bimini. He believed that Atlanteans possessed remarkable technologies, including supremely powerful “fire-crystals” which they harnessed for energy. A disaster in which the fire-crystals went out of control was responsible for Atlantis’s sinking, he said, in what sounds very much like a cautionary fable on the dangers of nuclear power. Remaining active beneath the ocean waves, damaged fire-crystals send out energy fields that interfere with passing ships and aircraft—which is how Cayce accounted for the Bermuda Triangle.

Regardless, Plato?s story of the sunken continent went on to captivate the generations that followed. Although other thinkers disputed its existence, Atlantis became entrenched in folklore all around the world, charted on ocean maps and sought by explorers.