Unsinkable Atlantis

A number of people were outraged last week by a man named L. Sprague de Camp. Mr. de Camp announced in Natural History that Atlantis and other "lost continents" had never existed.

Plato started it all, according to De Camp, by describing in his Dialogues a marvelous country beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Ceuta). Life was beautiful in Atlantis, said Plato, but an earthquake had foundered the continent, leaving only shoals to mark its site.

Plato may have got his idea of a lost civilization from the Minoan Empire in Crete, which collapsed about 1400 B.C. Or he may have heard about Tarshish (Tartessos), a thriving city outside Gibraltar which sent "gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks" to the lush court of King Solomon.

Runaway Allegory. Wherever he got his idea, Plato did not expect Atlantis to be taken literally. He meant it as an imaginary site for an ideal city, as described in his Republic. Men who came after began to accept Atlantis as fact. For 2,000 years the legend grew. Cultists built on it, explorers searched for it.

It is a scientific fact that the world's map was very different in the geological past. Land bridges connected Alaska with Siberia, Europe with Africa. The oceans contained land areas that no longer exist. But such "lost continents" disappeared millions of years ago.

Plato Was a Piker. Modern Atlanteans go far beyond Plato, peopling their imaginary lands with super-cultured inhabitants. Greatest extender of the Atlantis myth: Author James Churchward, who invented the "lost continent of Mu" in the Pacific. Its inhabitants, the originators of civilization, colonized Atlantis 20,000 years ago. Their ships entered the "Amazon Sea" through a canal cut through the Andes Mountains, then in the puppy stage. Other Muvian colonies: Egypt, Greece, the Mayans.

Patiently and learnedly De Camp disproves the Atlantis theories, except for the possible grain of truth behind Plato's original allegory. But the Atlanteans go marching on. Last week a comic-strip character, Alley Oop, who was born in Moo (Mu with dinosaurs), was exploring Atlantis by time machine.

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