The story goes that Solon, a great sage of ancient Greece - and grandfather of Plato - went to Egypt and spoke with a high priest, who told him the story of Atlantis. Solon told the story to his grandson, who wrote it down and passed it, eventually, to us. It seems that Atlantis is seen as a Grecian society because of Plato and, before him, Solon. But there are two points often overlooked: Solon heard the story from an Egyptian, and the Egyptian high priest was talking about a foreign civilization.
Atlantis was a prosperous culture, virtuous, angels and saints living in paradise. But they became corrupt and greedy. Their culture began to crumble as they set out to conquer the world. It was the army of Athens - so goes Plato's story - that finally stopped them. And then a natural disaster struck and Atlantis sank.
I think that Atlantis did not sink - it dried up. But I'll get to that in a bit. There is evidence of Atlantis (not necessarily by that name, however) trying to conquer the world. Just as every culture speaks of giants and ghosts, they also speak of Atlantis or an Atlantis-like civilization: a culture that had paradise, became greedy and egotistical, and finally became lost. The descendants of those conquered lands would have remembered from stories passed down by their forebears. But it wasn't Athens that stopped Atlantis - I can't say who it was, if anyone - because the dates don't match. Athens would have come along far later than Atlantis.
The Egyptians came to the Americas. It was once believed that the Egyptians and the Native Americans had no idea of each other, but there is evidence that says otherwise. Traces of cocaine and tobacco have been found in Egyptian mummies; cocaine and tobacco only grow in the Americas. As far as how they got to the Americas, Egypt had one of the grandest navies of the ancient world.
The Egyptians took stories home with them, as is only natural. Egypt and Greece have a long and entwined history, as trading partners, battlefield opponents, and they have both, at different times, ruled the Mediterranean. Thus, it would make sense that an Egyptian story of a far-off land would come to Greek ears. Perhaps the high priest was an old friend of Solon, someone the sage had met many times before in his travels.
Plato claims that Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Modern scholars generally believe that refers to the Straits of Gibraltar. I've researched this, and many other places that seem to match some - or many - of Plato's descriptions, but I believe that Atlantis is in perhaps the one place that very few even consider for candidacy.
Plato spoke in his dialogues of a certain metal that was found only in Atlantis. It's an alloy, a natural mixture of gold and copper. One local tribe called it “atl.” Another called it “lantis.” And from those two names for the same thing, someone - Solon or perhaps Plato - made the name “Atlantis.” The only place in the world where that alloy is found is South America.
All the stories of Atlantis speak of a great inland sea. It's true that there is no inland sea of such description in South America today, only desert. But geological studies have shown that there was an inland sea that dried up when the last mass extinction happened. This was the last great flood that happened at the end of the last ice age, about twelve thousand years ago. The Egyptian high priest told Solon that his story of the vanished civilization took place nine thousand years before their time, which would place it at the end of the last great flood.
Some say that no advanced culture could have lived at that time. Yet, they overlook many points. One is how many holes we have in human history. The Sumerian culture may be younger than that, having lived six thousand years ago, but they were an advanced culture - to my knowledge, they - not Athens - had the world's first democracy. A thousand years from now, will anyone believe that the United States existed? Or ten thousand years from now? True, we are far more advanced than ancient civilizations, but the term “advanced” should apply to its time. And there are different types of human that are now extinct; archeology is still discovering these long-lost cousins.
The Aztecs claimed that their ancestral home was Atlantica; they claimed to have left this place when they moved into what we know as Mexico. And they moved out of South America. Their story of this ancestral place is almost identical to other stories of Atlantis (or whatever it's called in a culture's legends; it's the details that match, not the name).
