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The
Lost Continent
Rediscovered

A Speculation on the
Location of Atlantis, its Empire,
And its Submergence

Gerry Forster


Foreword
Being a keen partcipant in the search for the true whereabouts of the legendary
lost realm of Atlantis, I have endeavoured to read up just about everything discoverable
that might conceivably help in the location of its anciently-vanished site. Thanks to a
great amount of carefully-considered reasoning , deduction plus a modicum of good old
fashioned common sense, I have finally come to the conclusion that it was exactly where
Plato claimed it to be just beyond the Straits of Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules.

Many historians and scholars have attempted over the past two millennia to make
Plato out as some kind of high-flown liar, and that his famous Dialogues of Critias and
Timaeus, were nothing but fables. Additionally, they have claimed that the alleged
teachings of Solon, his maternal ancestor (who had it all directly from Sonchis, the highly
learned chief of the Egyptian scholar-priests of the goddess Neith at Sais) were nothing
more than the fictitious inventions of his fertile imagination.

But why would Plato want to lie about such a thing - that was there for any sea
captain to prove or disprove with his own eyes? The Phoenicians had already plyed the
seas for over 600 years prior to the days of Plato, and had travelled far and wide beyond
the Pillars of Hercules down the Ivory Coast of west Africa, in search of ivory and other
precious cargoes and even as far north as the Southern tip of Britain to fill their holds with
valuble tin and lead.

Surely they would know if there was, or had been, a continent-sized landmass
almost as large as Libya and/or Asia Minor? And they most probably did, too, at least by
repute, even though it might well have vanished long before their time. Atlantis (or
Poseidonis) enjoyed a great reputation as a trading-nation with a veritable navy of both
merchant and fighting ships. So it would be likely that Atlantean sailors would have been
known in almost every ancient port in the eastern Atlantic region.

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But what could he possibly expect to gain from such foolishness? What could
possibly be in it for him? It sounds to me suspiciously like the same sort of disbelief with
which Herodotus was also regarded when he reported all the interesting Inside Info he
had learned from the priestly sages of Egypt, in the 5
th
century BC, as well as from his
own eye-witness accounts of the many wonders he saw there as he was conducted on a
tour of that country. Herodotus has also been branded a liar by many modern scholars,
and yet in his own day, he was very highly regarded by his contemporaries as a reputable
philosopher and a meticulous historian, just as had Plato 300 years before! I just cant
buy this ridiculous conspiracy of discredit which was levelled by later mediaeval
academics at both Plato and Herodotus. This same omniscient attitude persists even to
this day in our so-called modern philosophical and intellectual society, who, despite a far
better understanding and comprehension of Ancient Greek, still follow blindly in the steps
of their counterparts of the Early and Middle Ages, accepting their ignorant commentaries
as gospel truth. (Probably because they were some four to eight hundred years closer to
the time of these famous sages).

A Word about Scholarly Critics
This same attitude is also still rife in our modern scholarly fraternity. Anyone
who reports anything which flies in the face of Orthodox Scientific Belief that
Repository Of Academic Knowledge which still has its roots buried, rather like the
Norse World Tree, Yggdrasil, in the dark depths of ancient ignorance and which is ALL
it is is regarded as a either a liar, a crank, a gullible fool, or a raving loony!

This includes even those modern alternative free-thinkers including myself -
who delve in more remote fields, such as the Hollow Earth and Planets, the Outside-
Inside Earth Cosmogony theory, and even the monumental Cydonian Face on Mars and
other clearly-observed and photographed Martian anomolies. They are all lumped
together as a bunch of poor demented self-deluding idiots by these tremendously-clever
self-righteous intellectuals who havent even bothered to seriously read up or consider
anything of such alternative possibilities to their own spoon-fed concepts.

They simply brand them all as purveyors of wildly fantastic and unproveable
hypotheses of nonsense. Just as if the Scientific Establishment themselves had actually
been down and personally verified the existence of a vast nickeliron core at the center of
the Earth, by way of their three-thousand miles thick mantle of molten white-hot magma.
Or that they have finally unearthed all of the sequential and intact skeletons of the many
thousands of interstage evolutionary Missing Links purported to have existed between
Homo Sapiens and the ancestor of ourselves and the anthropoid apes. Or, furthermore,
that they have found conclusive evidence that there is absolutely nothing awaiting
discovery on Mars except rust and dust! This patronizingly omniscient and patently
dishonest attitude on the part of the Scientific Establishment really makes me choke with
frustrated anger!
After all, when the alternative scientist or layman speaks of his own particular
subject of study as being purely a theory or a speculative hypothesis, he means exactly
what he says. Until incontrovertible evidence is discovered, his beliefs can be nothing
more. But not so the august Orthodox Scientific Establishment. Yet, when one gets
right down to it, the vast bulk of their own alleged Indisputable Scientific Knowledge,
especially in the realms of the universe and its origins, and in the field of Darwinian
Evolution, or even in the study of subterranean geology, are all founded very largely upon
pure speculation, hypothesis and theory.
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Transmuting Fiction into Fact
But these insubstantial concepts have somehow miraculously evolved into
Factual Truth and Affirmated Knowledge simply by means of the magical, time-
honored Philosphers Stone of Tradition, over the past decades and centuries, and
through their docile acceptance as such by the mentally-lazy lay-public of the world. No
one actually knows how the Universe got started or how our own Solar system came into
being. Yet every new science-book we pick up particularly those created specifically
for young children is crammed with totally unproven Facts, all beautifully illustrated
and printed in glorious four-color offset-lithography, accompanied by glibly-worded text
which might convince even Einstein himself if he were to be reincarnated tomorrow!

However, having got all of that off my chest, let me return to my point which, I
might hasten to add, IS all based upon nothing but the purest of carefully-considered
speculation and educated guesswork ably assisted, I should add, by some considerable
measure of carefully considered input from very much greater and far more ancient
philosophers and uncertificated scholars than myself!

I personally believe that Plato meant just what he said when he posited Atlantis (or
Poseidonis) as lying Beyond the Pillars of Heracles. I dont think he made it up at all,
but he may have adopted the custom of ancient Greek writers and historians in choosing
his words and presenting them in the form of a discouse between two scholars, in order
to present both sides of his argument impartially. Herodotus tended to use a similar style
of hyperbolic presentation in his discourses upon history especially that which he had
learned from the Egyptians. My own view is that Platos lectures were presented in this
circumlocutory manner to save a lot of endless argument, heckling and interjection by his
listeners, and maybe some modern scholars could benefit much from using his approach.

What did Plato Know about Atlantis?
I think its important before we go any further to determine and note down just
what Plato had gleaned from the writings of his ancestor, Solon - who himself had been
apprised of the facts about Atlantis by the chief priest of Neith, in the priestly Nile Delta
city of Sais - regarding the general statistics of Atlantis. What do we know? As far as
can be ascertained, Atlantis (which was believed to exist at least 11,000 years ago, and
more likely thrice that time), was destroyed somewhere around 9,500 to 9,000 BC,
somewhere close to the last polar tilt and the corresponding crustal displacement. (Some
have tried to relate this to the ending of the last Ice Age, but according to all the leading
authorities, the last one ended between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. However, if one
replaces Ice Ages with Polar Shifts or Tilts things come into better perspective).

The Land of Atlantis
As to the land of Poseidonis (or Atlantis as it is now called). Apparently it
consisted originally of either a single large island-continent (or, according to the
theosophist, Scott-Elliot, of two joint-islands; the larger being Daitya, and the slightly
smaller one being Poseidonis*) together with various minor islands, especially on its
western side (toward the Mesoamerican sub-continent). We have no exact dimensions
for the principal home-island of Atlantis, Poseidonis, but we are told in Critias that
there was a huge central plain, sheltered to the north, west and east by a volcanic
mountain range. From all acounts, within this large plain at its southern side, was a
smaller plain hedged around by hills, that was of some hundred stadia in diameter and in
its center was the small hill upon which Poseidon first built his palace.
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*(NOTE: Before I go any further, let me clarify matters by saying that, since we obviously cannot
be certain of Scott-Elliots idea of an Altlantis comprised of two joint major islands as being correct, we
must assume that Poseidons chosen island, to which he gave his own name - even if a little smaller than
Scott-Elliots Daitya - must be regarded as the principal central landmass of Atlantis, since Poseidon is
said to have chosen to make his home there, and the city of Atlantis eventually developed around his triple-
moated island palace.
It is also interesting to note that Scott-Elliot claimed that the other Atlantean island of Daitya was
the original homeland of the Semites, who were then a sub-race of Atlantean sorcerers!)

However, even the figure for the largest inland plain of the principal island of
Poseidonis which Critias quotes as extending in one direction 3000 stadia, but across
the centre inland it was 2000 stadia - still gives us a smooth and even plain of an oblong
shape around 600 miles long by 400 wide, or around the size of Scandinavia which is
then surrounded at least on three sides by large mountains! We are told that this part of
the island looked toward the south and was sheltered from the north. So this is no tiny
island between Greece and Crete! And lets not forget that this was only the main island.
There were several lesser islands, as well as many small ones. (Probably many of these
latter still exist in the Carribean area as well as in the North Western Atlantic). The
actual land area, according to Plato, was equal to that of both Libya and Asia Minor
combined, so we would be looking at a total area, including all the smaller islands,
roughly equal in size to Arabia!

Atlantis had many large areas of plain country, as well as great forests and huge
mountains, among its main islands and its coastlines were renowned for being edged with
massive cliffs. The land was certainly large enough to warrant being ruled over by no less
than ten kings or princes. No doubt the first ten would have been the original children of
Poseidon and Cleito, and then the custom continued. We have no indication of its human
population, except for legendary reports of the vast military and naval might of the nation
and the many thousands of Atlanteans who died in the recurrent series of subterranean
cataclysms which overtook their islands sporadically over a fairly long span of time.

The land of Atlantis was aparently much famed for its beautiful scenery and
plentious fruits which were hard to store but provide drink, food and oil. So there
were clearly many vinyards and olive groves, plus other types of soft fruit, such as
bananas, oranges, melons, etcetera, as well no doubt, as many tropical and temperate
vegetables. It also possessed abundant timber in its verdant forests, and whilst the
animal life isnt dealt with in great detail, we can be sure there were great herds of
elephants and horses, since these latter were the principal focus of sport in Atlantis, and
the former no doubt fulfilled roles in both the timber forests as well as in the military
might of Atlantis. This may well indeed have been the historical inspiration for the
Carthaginian general, Hannibals great martial strength in millennia to come, when he
invaded Italy via the Alps in 218 BC, using elephants as his walking armored tanks!

Other geographical features of Atlantis that received mention in Platos discourses
include marshes and swamps, so we may safely guess at the plentiful presence of
alligators and other swamp-life, such as snakes, and wading birds. The presence of
thermal springs in the main islands, coupled with frequent earthquakes gives a more than
adequate indication of the tectonic turmoil going on beneath the larger islands of Atlantis.
In fact they remind us of nothing more clearly than those enormous subterranean high-
pressure gas chambers to which James Churchward attributed the final overthrow and
subsidence of the main continents of MU!
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The City of Atlantis
Several peculiar types of stone were mined and quarried on Atlantis for the
building of the palaces and temples, and even the walls and docks, of the citys central
hub. A special metal was also mined in Atlantis in great quantity, and it was second only
to gold in value. Plato names this metal Orichalcum, but it was unknown to him.
Perhaps a golden chalcedony quartzite of some sort, or maybe some form of copper
amalgam? It was extensively used in lining the walls of the circular harbours in the
heart of the city, so they must have presented a splendid and magnificent sight!

Poseidonis (as the island-continent was first named) was a great seafaring nation,
and its central city of Atlantis was precisely that. The city center was said to have been
in the form of a great concentric set of three huge circular excavations or moats, said in
legend to have been dug by Poseidon himself, comprised of two concentric circular rings
of land each separated by a circular and navigable canal, and all surrounding a central hill-
topped island. Thus one must imagine three great circular harbours alternating with raised
thick circular rings of land, surrounding a central circular island, and all connected to the
sea by a 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep ship canal, 50 stadia in length.

The first circular waterway was the Grand Harbor, where all the might merchant
ships berthed to discharge their precious cargoes from around the then known world.
Then came a thick circular ring of land whose principal feature was a magnificent horse-
racing course. Beyond this lay the Second Harbor, which was used mainly for berthing
the private vessels of the leading merchants and nobility of the city. This enclosed
another less thick ring of land upon which the high nobles of Atlantis had their palatial
dwellings. These were surrounded by luxuriantly vegetated parklike gardens. At the hub
of this city center, guarded by the Third and Royal Harbor, was a beautiful island upon
which several magnificent palaces surrounded a central temple dedicated to Poseidon, the
god of the ocean, and Cleito, his mortal wife, the daughter of normal human parents.

Boat-access to all of these concentric moats or canals were by means of water-
passages tunneled through each of the rings of land, but not located directly in line with
each other. In this way, any enemy vessel that infiltrated a connecting water tunnel would
have to sail openly around at least half the circumference of that canal, and thus, if it was
an infiltrating enemy craft, was easily exposed to attack from its banks.

It is said that when Poseidon first found the island of Poseidonis (and Cleito, his
human wife), he built a house for Cleito and himself on its central hill, and then dug three
concentric moats around it for the protection of her, and also later, his ten children - five
pairs of male twins. This temple is said to have been inaccessible to the ordinary citizenry
of Atlantis, and was fenced around by an enclosure of gold. I will not attempt here to
describe the contents of this great temple, but will instead refer the interested reader to
Platos dialogues Critias and Timaeus where all is described in lavish detail!

Thus the focal royal hub of the city of Atlantis was centered upon that hill, with a
surrounding ring of mountains fifty stadia away. Much of the intervening flat plain was
eventually occupied by the urban sprawl of the city. As mentioned earlier, the central
circular hub of Atlantis was approached from the seacoast by a wide channel or canal
some 50 stadia long. A stadium was the equivalent of 606.75 feet long, so fifty stadia
would equal around 5 miles. In other words, the actual city-plain itself must have been
around 11 miles in diameter quite a sizeable city for such an ancient time! But Critias
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tells us that this main city area was enclosed by a high circular wall, the ends of which
met at the opposite sides of the mouth of the shipping-channel entrance where it met the
sea. However, this was merely the capital city of Atlantis. The actual land of Poseidonis,
as mentioned previously, was equal to that of both Libya and Asia Minor combined, so
we have to think of a total land surface roughly equal in area to India!

The True Location of Atlantis
As we have noted from the foregoing, the original position of the land of Atlantis
(by which name it is now generally known) was first stated by Plato to be located
somewhere in the Altantic Ocean just beyond and directly in front of the ancient Pillars of
Heracles (or Hercules), where a wide gap occurs in the North African Atlas Mountain
chain. This mountain range is believed to have anciently run straight up through
Morocco, uninterrupted, into the southerly tip of Spain, where it connected on to what is
today the Serrania de Ronda and eventually becomes the Sierra Nevada. From one
account I came upon, a major earthquake or similar tectonic event lowered the central part
of the range, creating a lowish gap right at the western end of what was once the
Mediterranean Valley.

Apparently, it did not come down low enough to permit any inlet for the waters of
the Atlantic. The sea level of the Atlantic at that time was still well below the reduced
section of the mountain chain even at high tide. It must have remained as some sort of
natural sea-barrier or isthmus, much as was the case with the Bosporus Isthmus between
the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, prior to the strait splitting open. (This is a 20-
miles thick landbridge upon which Istanbul stands at the mouth of the Bosporus Strait,
which is a natural rift, to 2-mile wide, in the isthmus that once separated the two seas).

The Mediterranean Valley
According to various antiquarian authorities and other works I have read,
including modern bathymetric charts, I understand that the Mediterranean valley was once
a vast and extremely fertile lowland depression, which was watered by several large
rivers. Rivers such as the Nile (then called the Styx), the Po, which brought melt-water
down from the Alps across the northern end of Italy, and down through what is today the
Adriatic Sea, but was then a large, freshwater lake. Another major river that flowed into
the valley basin was the Rhone, which still flows voluminously through southern France
from the Swiss Alps and empties into the Mediterranean at Marseille. The Rhone also
created a deep lake in the Mediterranean valley between Corsica and the Balearic Islands.
The Nile/Styx had also created a long deep lake which ran from the eastern sector of the
vast valley right up to what are now the islands of Malta and Sicily, The river continued
on westward between Malta and the Tunisian coast, through what are today the Straits of
Sicily into the Tyrrhenian basin where it formed a fourth large lake.

It was this constant influx of fresh water, which kept the great valley in such a lush
and Edenic state, and these large freshwater lakes must have been alive with fish. So one
can imagine that this region, even if a little humid, must have been a prime piece of real
estate for ancient settlers from the surrounding rocky highlands. However, there is some
fairly strong geological reason to believe that the Mediterranean valley had previously, on
two or three occasions over many long millennia, been inundated to varying degrees by
the Atlantic Ocean - perhaps by tectonically-generated tidal waves sweeping up across the
North African plains which once surrounded the large and shallow inland Triton Sea, but
are now the Sahara Desert. However, Ill try to get back to this particularly interesting
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proposition later on. Having now set the stage, so to speak, let me now explain why I
believe Platos location of Atlantis to be the correct one. I certainly believe that the site is
as good as any other, and infinitely better than most!

Atlantis in Thera-Santorini?
Some experts have tried to make a solid case for the ancient Minoan island of
Thera (or Santorini), which was once a fairly largish island around 70 miles north of
Crete, at the mouth of the Aegean Sea, but is now little more than a semicircular lagoon of
rock. Apparently the mythical story goes that the giant sea-god, Triton (a son of
Poseidon by a sea-nymph, Amphitrite), gave Jason and his Argonauts a large lump of
earth, and asked them to drop it into the sea at a designated place, which they did. (One
never aroused the anger of a god by disobeying him especially if he was the sea-god
and you were a mere sailor!) The result was that the clod of earth swelled up until it
formed a beautiful island, with a fine conical mountain at its center.

Of course, the reality of this legend was simply that Santorini (a corruption of St.
Irene) was in fact a volcano, which arose quite rapidly from the Mediterranean seabed to
form the usual conical island - such as are often seen to rise from the sea around Iceland.
(Which event, incidentally, immediately rules Thera out of this discussion, if we accept
that Atlantis existed prior to the Mediterranean valley inundation!) Eventually plants
began to grow upon its rich volcanic soil, and soon Minoan people from Crete began to
settle upon it and erect houses and temples there, as it gradually turned into a sort of
demi-paradise. For many centuries it was a very popular religious centre for the Minoans
(or Minyans), until quite suddenly the volcano exploded into full, violent eruption.

Here we begin to get into various difficulties with explosion-dates, since some
histories claim the island exploded and was destroyed in a single night in 1450 BC.
Others say, equally categorically, that it exploded in 196 BC, then was replaced by
another volcanic cone, which in turn exploded in 1650 AD! However, since it is largely
agreed that many temples and palaces on Crete were also destroyed in a great localized
explosion around 1450 BC, it seems to underline that date as being correct and that it was
the sudden demise of Thera which was the cause.

Quite apart from the dates being way out of range, Thera was far too small to be
the continent-size landmass described by Plato. In any case, Plato lived from 427 347
BC, whilst his great ancestor, Solon, lived from 638559 BC, and the story of the demise
of Atlantis was already ancient history long before Solons time. So it would seem from
all aspects, both in size and in timeframe, Thera-Santorini simply could not have filled
the bill! Let us not forget, too, that the Mediterranean had already long been filled with
water from the overflowing Atlantic by then. Other modern theorists, however, have
attempted to locate Atlantis in other areas altogether.

Other Locations for Atlantis
One for example makes a fairly good case for the Amazon basin as once being
the site of Atlantis, prior to a rise in sea-level flooding much of Brazil. (I will return to
this rise in sea-level presently!) Others, like Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, have put
forward an extremely convincing case for Antarctica having originally been the continent
of Atlantis. I thoroughly enjoyed their book, and would dearly have loved to accept their
Antarctic theory, but I feel certain that Plato could never have heard of a place as far off
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as Antarctica at that time, nor would the Phoenicians, despite them being such
tremendously well-travelled sailors for their time-frame in history.

Similarly, some have posited Atlantis in North America, and even in Greenland,
before it became a mountain of ice! Even the North Seas Dogger Bank and the region
around the Scilly Isles off the Cornish tip of Britain have been suggested. One rather
overzealous fan of the Piri Reismap even suggested Cuba as being the original site of
Atlantis! But before the reader finally gives up in disbelief, there is at least one highly
honored academic in Brazil who proposes that Atlantis was actually in SouthEast Asia!
Lauritzen also suggests this region. This particular concept isnt quite as outrageous as it
sounds, since both the Egyptians and the Phoenicians had sailed to India, South-East Asia
and even as far as Australia! Egypts Paraoh, Ramses I, had a ship-canal dug from the
Nile to the Red Sea, in 2,000 BC, with an extra direct link to the Mediterranean, so the
Phoenicians could have regularly used this route also, as well as the Gulf of Aqaba. (Its
of interest to note that this same canal was later cleared of inblown sand, repaired and
returned to use first by Necho II, then Darius Persians, and later again by the Romans.)

However, given the fundamental description of Atlantis, as being a large sea-girt
landmass (an island-continent the size of Asia Minor and Libya combined!) it could only
have existed where Plato says it did - in the Atlantic Ocean opposite the Pillars of
Hercules. The only other possible location with sufficient space would have been the
Southeast Asian one, but that was a actually a wide peninsula and not an island, so we
can safely rule it out as being a likely candidate. In any event, we have good reason to
believe that this region was under the sway of the Muvian Empire at that particular time
in ancient pre-history. My own personal view, derived from all the research Ive done on
the subject, is that the principal island of Atlantis covered the area which is now centred
upon the Azores, and that its other, lesser landmasses lay west of it, on the other side of
the mid-Atlantic ridge, reaching into the Carribean and up to Bimini and the Bahamas.

The present Canary Islands and Madiera also formed part of the mighty
Atlantean Empire, as eventually did portions of the African and Portugese coastlines.
Ancient Mauritania, in north-western Africa, where the Triton Sea spread inland from the
Atlantic, was also a vital part of their empire, since it brought them closer in to their
enemies in and around the Mediterranean valley. According to some sources, they had
even setted a colony in a large sector of the valley floor, and it might have been from there
that they warred against the Athenians, as well as other nations, who occupied other
sectors of the Mediterranean valley and the highlands on its opposite northern and
northeastern sides. But one wonders if the classical Athens existed at that time.

The Wars of Atlantis
This belligerent and imperial attitude toward its neighbouring lands, is a major
factor, which must be included in this equation regarding ancient Atlantis. For example
there are many reports in ancient writings of their great clashes with the Rama Empire of
India, as well as with the Athenians. However, before going into this, let me make some
mention of the technological warfare achievements that have been attributed to the
Atlanteans both in ancient Greek history and in that Sanskrit epic of the Hindus, the
Mahabharata. There is no doubt that there was a great enmity between the Atlanteans
and the Athenians as recorded by no less an authority that Dr. Heinrich Schliemann, the
great archaeologist who discovered the site of ancient Troy. He discovered a great bronze
vase at Troy which bore an inscription that indicated it to be a gift from Kronos, King of
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Atlantis to the then King of Troy. It is a matter of general history that the ancient
Athenians and the Trojans were deadly enemies, so this fact alone supports an enmity also
existing between the Athenians and the Atlanteans, even if only because the latter were
allies of Troy. However, the factor we really need to consider here is that of time. If this
took place before the flooding of the Mediterranean basin, did Athens exist then?

History tells us the Greek civilization didnt really come into its own until about
1000 BC, and modern Athens was then still a mere village, the implication being that
Atlantis may still have been a great power long after the Atlantic Ocean had filled the
Mediterranean basin, and before the Athenians had developed any noteworthy military
might. So the classical Athenians may not have fought the Atlanteans until at least 500
BC if they ever did. No signs of any technological warefare have been found there, yet
the Atlanteans were reputedly greatly advanced in military technology, probably even
outrivalling our own today! Should we be considering a more ancient race of Athenians?

We know that the other major enemy of Atlantis, the Raman Empire, a pre-
Aryan culture in north-western India (or what is today Pakistan) lasted roughly between
3500 and 2500 BC, after which it collapsed, quite possibly following the high-tech war
waged upon it by Atlantis. This resulted in the cataclysmic destruction of the two great
Rishi cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa by what modern investigators can only
conclude to have been atomic weapons! The surrounding ground is vitrified exactly like
that of Nagasaki and Hiroshima after their atomic bombing at the close of WWII. Some
researchers claim that after Rama fell, it was for some time part of the Atlantean Empire!

But the epics of the Mahabhatara, the Drona Parva, the Bhagavad Gita and the
Ramanyana also tell us that the Nagas (or Nacaals) also possessed similar high-tech
atomic weaponry, as well as advanced flying-craft known as vimanas, which sound
amazingly like double-decked Flying-Saucers which emitted a pleasant humming
sound as they flew! These were used both as bombers and for defence against the
Atlantean aerial craft - which were called vailixi, and which in many respects
resembled zeppelins with wings!

It is believed by many researchers today that, at that point in time, similar craft
and technology were known and used over much of the ancient allegedly prehistoric
world! From the famous Readings of Edgar Cayce, (if we can truly accept them) we
learn that the Atlanteans also had many other scientific accomplishments including radio,
and other electrical appliances, elevators and even computers! They also developed a
form of crystalline energy source for certain applications. Their navy is also believed to
have possessed some kind of submarine and other self-propelled craft.

Whilst a few other details are known about Atlantean weapons, such as death-
rays, explosives and atomic bombs, we can assume that they would have been on a
parallel with advanced Nacaal weapons. Weapons such as Kapilas Glance, a ballistic
atomic-fire device that could burn an army or a city to ashes in seconds, and Flying
Spears, which sound suspiciously like rocket-powered missiles fitted with atomic
warheads. However, we must return again to the question of a time frame for all this.

If we work backwards from the dating of the ruins of Mohenjo Daro and
Harrapa, both of which Rishi cities are believed to have been atomically destroyed
around 2500 BC at the latest, we can accept that Atlantis was still very much alive and a
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powerful nation at that time. But as we move forward in time from there, we see that
Greece was not a power to be reckoned with until at least 500 BC, by which time the
Mediterranean had been already filled with water for at the very least two or three
millennia, if not, in fact, a great deal longer.

Thus, if the Atlanteans had fought a war with the Athenians they could have
traveled there by sea. This really presents no problems since they were a great sea-going
people with a huge navy. However, we run into an even greater problem here!
According to Plato, Atlantis was totally destroyed in its final submergence in 9,500 BC!

Another major problem also arises in connection with their offshoot and possibly
renegade colony, the Osirians, who were believed to have dwelled on the floor of the
Mediterranean basin whilst it was still a demi-paradise of luxuriant tropical vegetation
and great freshwater lakes. From what can be gleaned about this ancient empire, the
Osirians were forced to move from the floor of the Mediterranean, after Atlantis sank and
the Atlantic Ocean finally broke through the Pillars of Hercules, and began steadily filling
the Mediterranean basin. These two events seem to be mentioned as occurring almost
concurrently, or within a few decades, which in turn implies that the one, by weakening
the underlying sub-strata, eventually caused the other.

Plato seems, via Solon, to date the final sinking of Atlantis at around 9,500 BC, so
we are faced with the difficulty of reconciling the destruction of the two Indus Valley
cities in 2,500 BC with the actions of a nation that was engulfed 7,000 years earlier!
Obviously, something is way out of kilter here! If the Osirian Empire was still ex-
officio a part of the Atlantean Empire, and thus its possible successor, could it be that they
were still regarded as Atlanteans? Or did Atlantis still survive in its large empire?

Some Speculative Considerations
From what we have subsequently gleaned through various sources, it would seem
that this empire did inherit the mantle of the Atlanteans, since they evacuated to, and took
over the occupation of, some of the North African highland side of the newly-forming
Mediterranean Sea, which had previously been a large part of the original Atlantean
Empire, together with what is today Morocco and northern Algeria. According to
Ignatius Donelly, the great 19
th
century scholar on Atlantis, most of Spain, Portugal,
north-western Africa, and the northern highlands of the Mediterranean valley,
including Italy (now possessing sea-coastlines), had already been occupied by Atlantean
military colonists. So there is really no reason to assume that, with the sudden
catastrophic submergence of their homeland, Atlantean colonists would immediately give
up the ghost, without making some effort to reestablish a new mainland Altantean state.

Following a False Scent?
On the contrary, it is more than possible that these surviving Atlantean colonists
resolved to extend their remaining territories, rather than let their culture simply fade
away. Donnelly claims that the Atlanteans invaded Italy, displacing the indigenous culture
and replacing it with their own. (In which case, the Etruscans and Romans must have
been partially of Atlantean origin.) So he must be suggesting an attempt to perpetuate
the Atlantean nation and its traditions, even if it involved some degree of interbreeding.

It also suggests that, in the fullness of time, they might indeed have conducted a
war against the Athenians, just as Plato had claimed though not as the stated original ten
11
-kinged oligarchy of Atlantis! However, even this could conceivably be explained if the
subsequently successive kings or princes had divided up the remains of their entire
offshore empire into separate but closely allied kingdoms. But sadly, I feel, as probably
does my reader, that this is becoming rather an enormous stretch of credulity, and its
entirely possible that Plato may have become somewhat confused, if not completely
carried away, by this portion of his account!

I personally feel inclined to discount this suspect part of his story altogether, and
prefer instead to follow up the Osirian Empire lead. So why dont we do just that and
see where it leads us? True, since there is only scant reference to the Osirians in the
works Ive read on ancient lost empires, we will have to follow our own noses to a large
degree. But as my readers are doubtless well aware by now, Im not afraid to go with a
little speculation and gut-instinct when the supply of unassailable fact runs out!

The Osirians
According to people like David Hatcher Childress and others, the Osirian Empire
was, as I have mentioned previously, originally located both on the fertile floor of the
Mediterranean valley, and upon the edge of the North African continent, where, because
they themselves were of Atlantean origin, they lived in some sort of trucial peace with the
surrounding Atlantean-dominated peoples of the surrounding lands. Childress claims
that there are over 200 sunken cities and towns on the Mediterranean seafloor some of
which have recently begun to be actually located and examined by deep-sea divers.
There is clearly little doubt, if any at all, that there have been quite advanced civilizations
living within this once dry and fertile valley, but far, far back in what our academic
scholars would probably describe as pre-history, when the bulk of mankind elsewhere
were still allegedly humble savages living in caves and chipping at flints!

But why were these Osirians living as a separate people if they were themselves of
Atlantean blood? Had there been some sort of rift or falling-out between this group and
their brethren? Were they some kind of breakaway splinter group? Why had they
chosen to go their own way, when their land of origin was doing so well for itself? From
what pieces of the puzzle Ive been able to put together thus far and believe me, theyre
hard to find it seems to come down to a matter of kingship. Let me now relate a little
highly speculative story. It may not be the exact truth, but I think I can guarantee that
youll find it of interest, and that it will give you plenty of food for thought!

The Story of the Osirian Empire
It appears that one of the original princes of the customary ten-crowned rulership
of the Atlantean Empire, disagreed with some nefarious self-aggrandizing plot connected
with the new cult of The Sons of Belial. This was a totally evil and hellish cult in
which several of his brother princelings, under the leadership of the depraved Prince
Belial, a puppet controlled by his satanic elder brother, Prince Seth (or Set), were all
deeply involved. It was entirely against the health, morality, welfare and indeed the very
safety of the Atlantean state, and Prince Osiris, a very good man and a champion of the
benevolent Law of One threatened to publicly expose them.

Because of his unswerving loyalty to the Sun God and to the populace of the
Empire, his evil kinsmen expelled this eminently wise and honest prince from the
oligarchy - together with his wife Isis and her sister, Nephthys, and his son Horus - upon
pain of death. The Law of One was a monotheistic religion, which revered only the
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Sun-God, Ra (who was thought to have his throne inside the Sun), as being the sole ruler,
benevolent entity, and the original creative force of the Earth, stars and the Universe.
But when news of this treachery reached the region over which Osiris ruled, his
loyal subjects vowed to follow their prince and leave the island of Atlantis. They were
also adherents of the Godly Law of One religion, so, rather than live among Belial
Satanists, they resolved to secede from its Empire, and to set up their own nation in some
unoccupied area of the adjacent mainland. Many of the populace of Atlantis, who had
heard rumors of the cultish plot sympathized deeply with Osiris, his family and their
followers and joined them to escape the growing heathen depravity of their own rulers.

In due course, Osiris and his people found a most suitable location in the
Mediterranean valley, and before long they had established great goodwill with their new
neighbouring nations and the new Osirian nation began to prosper and grow. Because of
their great wealth of Atlantean wisdom and knowledge of technology, several other
nations and tribes elected to join them, and thus the Osirian Empire was born.

Osiris himself became a greatly sought-after fountain of knowledge and wisdom
upon all manner of technological and structural matters, by many of the surrounding
nations. He is even said to have designed and and directed the construction of the
massive stone platform at Baalbek in Lebanon which is famous for its gargantuan stone
blocks that are believed to weigh up to 1,500 tons each! From all appearances, it was
originally intended for much grander purposes than being merely a foundation for the two
or three very ordinary temple structures which it later carried, and whose ruins can still be
seen today. Could it perhaps have been the base platform for some enormous towering
structure that would have dwarfed even the pyramids? Some historians have even
speculated that Osiris may possibly have been the original Biblical Nimrod, who built
the Tower of Babel! However, we have no idea of the massive constructional
engineering marvels that still await eventual discovery, should the Mediterranean Sea
ever become a dessicated sandy depression again!

It is also reported that a huge 100-foot stone or marble statue of him was produced
by one of the grateful nations had he assisted in a like manner, and probably still stands,
buried in the mud and silt of the Mediterranean Sea, amid the ruins of his capital city. As
a one-time ruling prince of Atlantis, Osiriss mental fund of esoteric and technological
knowledge must have been enormous. However, to discover just how much this was, it
seems that we will have to await the eventual solving of the puzzles and secrets which
will lead to the final unlocking of the hidden repository chambers that lie inside the
mysterious Great Pyramid of Giza.

21
st
century man has already proved what woeful gaps exist in his constructional
knowledge of such enormously solid works by his complete inability - despite all of his
modern high-rise building technology plus steel scaffolding, cranes, and reinforced
concrete - to reproduce the wondrous massive stone structures of those ancient times!

Very soon the Osirian Empire even extended up into the North African highlands
from Algeria eastward across Libya and toward Khem and Kush. At that time, there was
no actual land of Egypt. What was later to become the river Nile, was then known as the
Styx by the mountain people of Crete and Cyprus. It had carved out a 900 mile-long
ravine from the Aswan plateau where it thundered over a high precipice, to where it
flowed out northward into the enormous Mediterranean valley. There it had gouged out a
13
great freshwater lake to the south of Crete and Cyprus, before turning westward to flow
between Malta and Sicily, finally terminating in another deep lake between the highlands
of modern-day Italy and Corsica. Even though two other large rivers also flowed into the
Mediterranean valley, their waters were all evaporated from similar lakes as rapidly as
they were filled, thus the great depressed basin remained largely dry land. Egypt as we
shall soon see, is, quite literally, a comparatively new land!

Swiftly, most of the vast valley came under the benevolent rule of the Osirians,
and they built many large cities and towns upon its luxuriantly fertile floor. (A
comparatively recent bathymetric survey of the Mediterranean sea-floor has shown up
the remains of at least 250 cities! Some have even been studied quite recently by deep-
sea diving expeditions and many ancient Egyptian (or Osirian) artifacts were recovered
and brought to the surface!)

The Death of Atlantis
In the meantime, however, the evil rulers of Atlantis, led by Seth, had not
forgotten Osiris, nor did they admire his success in establishing a new empire of his own,
and they sought ways and means to rid themselves of him once and for all. If they could
cut off its head, his empire would be helpless, and they could graft it back into that of
Atlantis. But they had not reckoned upon the unpredictable hand of Nature. For many
millenia, Atlantis and its several islands had been subjected to sporadic volcanic outbursts
and frequent earth tremors. In fact, there were records of at least two quite large
catastrophes having already engulfed some of its larger islands over the past forty
millennia.

The first such event occurred around 50,000 BC, and the second around 28,000
BC, in which the major continent was split into five portions. However, all had been
reasonably quiet for some nineteen millennia until this new bout of tectonic
disturbances. But it all finally came to a head with appalling suddenness, in 9,500 BC
when, entirely without any warning, the entire major landmasses of Atlantis simply burst
asunder in a final series of cataclysmic explosions, and, within a single day and night,
most of Atlantis vanished almost without trace beneath the Atlantic Ocean!

Millions of native Atlanteans died in the catastrophe, but quite a large number of
survivors escaped in ships, rafts, or whatever they could cling to. These eventually
struggled ashore on the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and the shores of Morocco. There
were few if any of the original leaders among these survivors, except for Seth, who now
bent every effort toward taking sole control over what he could of the Atlantean colonial
power on the mainland of Europe and Northwest Africa. In this, it would seem he was
successful, since many lands surrounding the Mediterranean valley were already vassal
states of mighty Atlantis, and by intermarriage with its soldiers, their people bore the
blood of Atlantis in their veins. (Many modern Europeans probably still do possess
Atlantean genes.)

The Murder of Osiris
However, this vile prince, Seth, blamed Osiris for the disaster, assuming that he
had called upon his god, Ra, to bring down this final cataclysm on Atlantis, and one day,
he decided to gain his revenge. He sent forth scouts to locate the Osirian royal capital,
then after learning its whereabouts, with a troop of his soldiers, under cover of darkness,
Seth descended the steep incline from the Libyan highland and approached Osiriss city.
14
There, choosing only a handful of his most brutal henchmen, Seth silently
infiltrated Osiriss unguarded royal palace and surprised the king alone at his midnight
devotions It was a foul deed of terrible butchery that took place in the kings private
chapel dedicated to Ra. Osiris had no time even to cry out before his head was smitten
from his shoulders by a fell sword slash from behind. Then his murderers set about the
bloody task of hacking his body into unrecognizable gobbets of flesh and bone. Even
Osiriss gentle face was hacked and slashed beyond recognition. Then, after a final
gloating inspection of their hideous work, Seth led his blood-soaked team of butchers
silently away, compeletly undetected, out of the still-sleeping palace.

Still-sleeping, that is, except for one. Osiriss wife, Isis, had woken suddenly in
response to some unbidden sense of urgent dread, and discovered that her lord had not yet
come up to bed. Fearfully, she went and roused her sister, and together, they descended
to his dimly-lit chapel to find the door standing slightly ajar, revealing part of a blood-
spattered wall. As she opened the door wider and saw the bloody carnage the murderers
had wreaked, Isis screamed out a great cry of horror. Despite the savage butchery and
mutilation, Isis instantly recognizing her husbands mangled remains. Just as she also
knew instinctively who had murdered him, and why. Seth!

When Horus, now a grown man, woken by his mothers screams, entered a few
seconds later and witnessed the horrific sight, he was seized with a terrible admix of
horror, grief and a towering paroxysm of uncontrollable rage. Like his mother, Horus
guessed at once who had done the deed, and, after doing his best to comfort her, he left
his mother to the tender care of her sister, Nephthys, and her handmaidens. Swiftly
marshalling a large troop of royal cavalry, he set off at a wild, maddened gallop into the
darkness to catch up with the killers. But alas, by then they had vanished like ghouls into
the night. He and his cavalry troopers scoured the surrounding region all the rest of that
night and much of the following day, before finally abandoning the fruitless search.

However, Horus pledged himself to a solemn vow that he would strive to have
Seths head upon a spear before he died. A black pall of sadness and despair descended
upon the entire Osirian Empire for many days thereafter. But eventually, as Time began
its healing work, Isis and Horus realized that Osiriss Empire must go on, and returned to
their now onerous duties of leadership, guidance and justice for his people..

Horus now reluctantly ascended his dead fathers throne, and ruled over them
jointly with his mother, Isis. One of his first acts as king was to declare bloody war upon
that last, evil Altlantean king and uncle who had murdered his own brother. They
engaged in many battles with imperial forces led by Seth. In this they were aided by a
large colony of ancient Athenians, (the forerunners of those Athenians mentioned in the
more recent and familiar Greek classics) who occupied the northeastern end of the vast
valley, and who had no reason to love Atlantis, since they had long been their deadliest
enemies, and had once even triumphed gloriously over them.

However, the Osirians and the Atlanteans proved to be too evenly matched in
these battles, since both shared the same advanced weaponry and military stratagems, and
the only material results of such often bloody and bitter encounters were thousands of
dead warriors, as well as many casualties among the Osirian and Athenian civilian
populations who were greatly exposed on the low valley floor to the pitiless fire of Seths
heartless soldiers, far more safely positioned high upon the Libyan plateau above them.
15
Eventually, though his hatred of Seth had in no wise diminished, Horus had to call
a reluctant halt to the fighting, since both their unarmed women and children and their
valley cities were suffering far more than the Atlanteans above on the highlands. An
uneasy cease-fire was mutually agreed to - at least, for the time being. But Horus still
nursed a burning, hateful desire for personal revenge upon his fathers murderer.

In the fullness of time, poor, dead Osiris became a god to his people and their
descendants, and his memory was greatly revered and venerated. So much so, that, at the
behest of his aging widow, Isis, they undertook a great task in his honor, by building a
great stone pyramidal cenotaph to perpetuate his memory, high upon a great plateau of
solid rock that formed the towering western corner at the mouth of the deep gorge of the
Styx, near the Mediteranenan Valleys eastern end.

Strangely, there was already a giant monument on that plateau, in the shape of a
great, elongated stone lion, resting upon its belly, with long forepaws outstretched before
it, within a shallow depression and facing toward the rising sun. The Osirians had no idea
who had built it, or how long it had lain couchant there gazing toward the eastern horizon.
But, judging by the deep weathering upon its worn stone surface, it was obviously the
totem or god of some archaic race that had vanished into the mists of ancient time even
before Poseidon founded Atlantis!

As mentioned before, this deep, dark and narrow gorge which the River Styx had
gouged out over many millennia, ran back for nine hundred miles to the huge thousand-
foot high waterfall at Aswan. The Pyramid of Osiris was completed within a single year
using the ancient, almost miraculous technological skills and mental powers of the
Atlanteans, by a team of men only three hundred strong. Vast blocks of stone were
quarried and precision-trimmed from carefully selected sections of rock strata by the use
of crystal-powered drills and cutters, as well as melting-wands, which cut through the
stone like a hot knife through butter. Then they were teleported along the long canyon and
levitated up to the great flat plateau entirely by the concentrated mental power of groups,
each consisting of ten chosen sages, chanting in unison and focussing their minds as one.

The huge Atlantean-style pyramid, whose shape was designed to withstand the
ravages of tsunamis and earth-shaking catastrophes over an eternity, was constructed
primarily as a cenotaph to the memory of their god, Osiris. But it also became a
repository for all his collection of scrolls and tomes of ancient Atlantean wisdom and
technological secrets especially enscribed for the purpose of preserving this knowledge.
These were carefully sealed inside secret air- and water-tight chambers deep within and
below the pyramid, which could only be discovered by some future race who might
develop the required degree of intellect to unlock its hidden secrets. Some of these
keys related to the stellar constellations of their time, some to mathematical and
geometrical puzzles, and some to plain mental prowess and abilities of logic and reason.
But all the answers were there, hidden in plain view in the pyramids structure for those
in the future who might have the intellect and mental perception to work them out.

Once the great pyramid was completed, it was sealed up by various cunningly
devised mechanisms operated by natural physical forces, the damp air was expelled by a
chemical explosion through specially constructed ducts, and then its exterior was coated
with pure colloidal-silver cladding which was blended, again by technological wizardry,
and allowed to run down the beautifully smoothed and polished sides. The gleaming
16
silvery-white structure was finally surmounted and crowned by a gold-sheathed pyramidal
capstone. The memory of Great Osiris and his achievements would live forever!

The finished pyramid was a brilliant sight to behold, especially during the first
moments of the sunrise, whilst the valley still lay in darkness and the Suns first rays
struck its silver eastern side and its glistering golden pinnacle. The nation gathered far
below to watch this wondrous spectacle and pray for the Spirit of their great God Osiris.

The Death of Isis
A few years later, Osiris widow, Queen Isis died peacefully and full of years.
This time the people required no urging by their grief-stricken King Horus. Again the
same men came forward and began work upon a second pyramid to honor the beloved
widow of the great god. Again the work was done swiftly and with total perfection, but
this pyramids hidden chambers contained new secrets pertaining to the future of the
Earth, and the Universe. It also housed a wonderful library of all the arcane knowledge
that Isis had acquired during her lifetime, since she had been a great seer and prophetess
in her latter years, and had been granted many great visions of the future, the Universe
and the Unseen Kingdom of its great Creator, the glorious Emperor of All the Gods.

This time, the finished Pyramid of Isis was covered with brilliantly white
alabaster, lovingly hand-polished to a mirror finish by the women of the kingdom, and it
was capstoned with a silver-coated pyramidal block, so as not to outshine the great gods
memorial. Nevertheless, the two pyramids both made a truly glorious sight in the rays of
the morning sun, and the whole empire sent representatives to observe the awsome
spectacle, and to pay obesience to their venerated god and his widely-beloved wife, Isis.
Pilgrims and travellers came from all quarters of the then known world to witness and
bow before these magnificent memorials, and many of them stayed to join the growing
nation of the Osirians, which now lay under the single benevolent kingship of King
Horus, himself now a man of mature years, and full of his illustrious fathers vast
wisdom, great knowledge and amazing gentleness.

The Mediterranean Flood
Sadly, however, there was a disastrous aftermath to the Atlantis catastrophe. It
was during the latter part of the lifetime of Prince Horus, that the last great judgmental
cataclysm occurred. - the grand finale of the series of cataclysmic explosions and
subsidences in which the last vestiges of mighty Atlantis had vanished forever in a welter
of scalding steam and plumes of red-hot lava and smoke, beneath the boiling ocean.

The same explosions of the vast subterranean gas-chambers which had finally
blown Atlantis apart, and then caused the sinking of its remains as their depressurized
caverns collapsed under the weight of rock and ocean, also caused a great weakening in
other nearby strata. The Atlas mountain barrier, that ran from Morocco into Spain,
barricading the Mediterranean Valley from the cold gray-green waters of the Atlantic,
suddenly began to breach a couple of decades later, permitting the ocean to start leaking
into the valley. It was just a mere dribble at first, but, like a breached dam-wall, the rock
soon began to crack and collapse under the pressure of the inrushing ocean, and began
flooding the great valley with a vengeance. The newly-forming Pillars of Heracles at
last stood open wide allowing the dark salty Atlantic seawater to pour into the lovely
valley, polluting its great crystal-clear freshwater lakes, drowning its luxuriant park-like
vegetation, and poisoning the rich soil that had made the valley so wonderfully fertile.
17
As the cold Atlantic began slowly to fill up the once-lush Mediterranean valley,
the Osirians, along with their neighbouring occupants of the valley floor had to seek
higher ground, taking what they could of their great treasures with them. The southern
wall of the valley was the more accessible, especially by way of the Malta ridge, which
was part of their territory, and up on to the Libyan plain of North Africa. And it was
there that the Osirians, the last direct repositors of Atlantean wisdom and technology, led
by Horus, established a new domain among the green plains and palm-groved vistas of the
open highlands. Many of their former neighbours from the valley, especially a large
number of Athenians who had also occupied a large area of the northeastern end of the
valley, joined forces with them and soon Osiria became a strong and mighty empire,
spreading westward to Morocco and eastward to what is now the Nile valley.

In the meantime the steadily inflowing waters of the Atlantic had reached the
farther end of the Mediterranean valley and had begun to deposit heavy layers of silt
along the floor of the long Styx ravine, raising it ever higher as the sea-level rose in the
outer basin, by sluicing in the stirred-up mud and gravel along its length. By now the
ocean tides had begun to take effect upon this newly-forming sea, and this sped up the
process considerably. In the fullness of time, the Nile which the Styx had now become
instead of crashing over a great waterfall at Aswan, now flowed along much more
slowly and widely, and at an ever-increasing height.

Since the seawaters had been forced backwards to the rivers mouth by its much
stronger flow, the Nile was now able to deposit its rich sediment all along the length of
what was to become the fertile river valley of Egypt. Thus the 1000-mile gloomy Styx
canyon was rapidly filled up, and the valley of the Nile, a new stretch of land, became
even more fertile and green than the adjoining Libyan savannah grasslands and swamps.

The Foundation of Egypt
It was this wonderful change that attracted the Libyan Osirians into the new land
that was to become Egypt, where they set about establishing yet another great empire.
One that was to become almost as powerful and rich as the one from whence they had
originally hailed beyond the now-famed Pillars of Hercules. Needless to say, they
brought with them all the ancient wisdom of Atlantis. And part of this was their vast and
jealously preserved fund of technological knowledge and skill in the art of handling
enormous feats of high-tech stone construction of which, we still know nothing.

Sadly, by this time King Horus himself was a fading but beloved memory. He had
died soon after his Libyan Empire had begun to develop, lying propped up on his
deathbed facing east toward the pyramids of his beloved parents, to witness his final
sunrise. As he lay dying, he had a great vision, and rallied his wasted frame into a sitting
position his frail arms held out to greet the rising sun. Behold! he cried in an
awesomely strong voice for a dying man, The sun-boat of Ra brings my father Osiris
upon his daily rebirth to gaze again upon his children! I go now to join him upon his
flight across the heavens! and so saying, he fell back dead upon his couch. At that very
moment, his favorite falcon, which had been perched upon the foot of his bed, took to the
air with a loud clapping of wings and soared upwards into the dawning sky until it was
lost to the view of the gathered elders. Surely, this was a sign from Ra!

The Kings final words registered deeply with all present, and they marveled
greatly at them. From thence forward, the ship of the Sun-god, Ra, who had been a god
18
of Atlantis, but somewhat less than Poseidon in their pantheon, became revered as the
great shining barque of the God of Life, who ressurrected Osiris every dawn, and carried
him back into the Underworld each evening. A sign of hope for a new and glorious
future life to everyone after their life on earth was done! King Horus became as one with
the falcon who was able to accompany Ras celestial boat across the sky.

So it was that the falcon became a god, an embodiment of Horus, who could carry
prayers and supplications to Ra, and who kept close watch over his subjects below. Woe
betide any whom Horus reported to Ra, as they would later have to face trial before Osiris
in the Underworld for their misdeeds, and he had the power to destroy their souls if they
were found wanting! Thus Osiris became both the god of Ressurrection and Life for the
good, and of Soul Death for the wicked. So the Eye of Horus glyph became a symbol
of fear for all who worked evil, for Horus was the Eye of Ra!

Although Horus had not seen Seths evil head raised upon a spear, at least he had
eventually confronted his wicked uncle when he challenged his right to the Osirian
throne, and had fought a mighty battle against him. In this, he had succeeded in
emasculating Seth and mortally wounding him, at the cost of one of his own eyes. But at
least Horus had retained his throne honorably, whilst the now impotent, but still
malevolent spirit of Seth was relegated by the God Ra to serve a minor role as the God of
Storms, wherein he could only vent his vicious spleen with thunder, hail and lightning-
bolts. Horus himself now became recognized as the Protector of the Righteous, and was
later frequently included in sculptures of Pharaohs, being shown shielding the kings head
from behind with protective wings even though all future pharaohs to come would not
necessarily be good or righteous men!

Horus, perhaps feeling unworthy for not avenging his father in quite the way he
had vowed, had requested that no pyramid be built for him, lest he might intrude upon the
memory and dignity of his beloved parents. However, his court advisers were determined
that he deserved a lasting memorial, if only for the solace of his subjects, and built him a
smaller pyramid beside those of Osiris and Isis. In this way they felt that the cenotaph of
Horus would not in anyway detract from those of his parents, who had now been elevated
to full godly status, but he would still have a fitting memorial close beside them. It was a
compromise, but one that was acceptable to the populace. Better a smaller memorial than
none at all! Horus had been greatly loved by all his subjects

Thus did the great culture and architectural splendor of glorious Egypt spring from
the Osirian Empire which had, in turn, sprung from the wondrous lost continent of
Atlantis - and the rest of this story is all recorded in ancient Egypts marvellous and
colorful history. With the passage of time, a whole new pantheon of gods appeared,
many of them being deified animals and birds, following the elevation of the falcon to full
godly status, to symbolize the new god, Horus. And even though the glory that was
Egypt is now long since faded and gone, the pyramids upon the plateau still wait ever
patiently to render up their Atlantean secrets. And the ancient and enigmatic Sphinx
maintains his own silent and expectant vigil toward the east, awaiting the return of
something we cannot even begin to guess at

There, dear reader, ends the amazing if speculative saga of the Osirian Empire.
Now we must return again to that of Atlantis - but this time we shall instead
be looking westward for further evidences of its mighty influence.
19
Other Aspects of the Atlantean Legend
We have examined many of the possible relationships of Atlantis with the Old
World, but what about those which relate to the New World the world of the Olmecs,
the Mayans, the Toltecs, and the Aztecs of Central America, and even the Quichu and
Incas of the far western coast of South America? Did the Atlanteans relate to any of
these, and if so, how? I believe that, because he had much to say about the New World
in connection with Atlantis, we really need to introduce a relatively moderate portion of
Ignatius Donnellys thoughts and conclusions into the equation!

Special Note: Due to its extensive scope and size, I wont attempt to cover all the many aspects of
Donnellys work. So for those people who wish to read his book in its entirety, I can only suggest the
online version of his Atlantis book, of which the current Internet URL is to be found at the website
address given below:
http:www.sacred-texts.com/atl/ataw/index.htm

Ignatius Donelly on Atlantis
Let us begin then with perhaps the greatest champion of Atlantis Ignatius
Donnelly, whose great book: Altlantis, The Antediluvian World was first pubished in
1882 and is STILL in print in 2001! Donnellys book contains a huge collection of
data, legendary, geological and archaeological, which he had amassed over a long period
of time to back up his beliefs. He fully supported Platos story with an extremely well-
argued case, as would befit a long-standing, erudite senator for Minnesota, who had full
access to explore all the resources of the vast Library of Congress. Which he did, and
very exhaustively, too! Since Ignatius Donnelly produced a voluminous work on this
topic I will try to only mention the major proposals that Donnelly has advanced in his
magnificent opus: Atlantis, The Antediluvian World.

The Reception of Donnellys Book
As one might expect, Donnellys highlycontroversial Atlantis work attracted both
enthusiastic support and deep skepticism on both sides of the Atlantic. His skeptics strove
immediately to challenge and ridicule his theory, both in its sources and its logic, and
such skeptics still abound, even a full century later. However, Britains then Prime
Minister, William Gladstone, was so completely convinced by Donnellys carefully-
reasoned and highly-persuasive work, that he sought to gain funds from the British
Government to finance an expedition to scour the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for traces
of the lost continent. Sadly the skeptics also won the day in the British Parliament, and no
funds were forthcoming for such a madcap adventure!

It was Donnellys primary intent to prove conclusively to the full extent of his
undoubted ability that Atlantis had once existed in factual reality as a large island-
continent in the central Atlantic Ocean. His utter faith in the truth of Platos allegedly
fabulous story was unshakable. To Donnelly, Atlantis was, beyond all doubt, the very
birthplace of western civilization. He believed that its rulers and heroes were directly
identifiable with the great deities of the Greeks, Scandinavians, Phoenicians and Hindus.
The great mythical activities of these various pantheons of gods were simply jumbled
records of actual historical events and deeds of the Atlanteans!

Donnelly viewed Atlantis as the essential aggregation in human memory of a real
place which was the foundation of all the great legends, such as the Gardens of Eden, and
of the Hesperides, Mount Olympus, and all other such mythical places that were fabled
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dwelling-places of peace, harmony and happiness. Its people were sun-worshipers and
they spread their religious beliefs wherever their vast merchant fleet conducted its trade.
From such far-flung places as Peru in the west, including all of the Americas, South,
Central and North, across to Northern Europe and Scandinavia. From Britain, Spain, and
coastal lands around the continent of Africa, including Ethiopia and Arabia via the Red
Sea and perhaps as far east as western India.

His powerful imagination led him to deduce that the Atlanteans were the first to
produce bronze and iron, and that their alphabet was the precursor of both the Phoenician
alphabet and the Mayan glyphs. In fact, in Donnellys view, Atlantis was very likely the
original homeland of both the Aryan Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples, including
the Egyptians, Assyrians and Arabs! It was also his opinion that after the ultimate
destruction of Atlantis, the survivors of its submergence fled both to the east and the west,
bearing tales of the cataclysm, and that these accounts became legends of universal
deluges and massive inundations among many different nations.

Because Plato was held, in the ninteenth century, to be a trusted scholar and
philosopher, Donnelly had the greatest faith in his integrity, and believed completely that
his account of Atlantis was founded upon fact. Plato had described Atlantean history as
that of a pragmatic race who built great temples, huge earthworks and ships, as well as
many other marvellous machines. They were a race of human beings that traded with their
friends and warred with their enemies. Plato spoke very little of gods and heroes in his
account, so it was no doubt this realistic attitude which convinced Donnelly that Plato was
far above inventing fiction

On taking my first cursory glance through Ignatius Donnellys Atlantis book, I
was forcibly reminded of the rather later series of books on The Lost continent of Mu,
published by Colonel James Churchward in the Mid-1920s to late 1930s. I noted the
same unswerving scholarly dedication to what must then have been a greatly scorned and
ridiculed area of research. What the Scientific Establishment of that day would have
mockingly dismissed as Fictitious Nonsense or Heathen Gibberish. Even though
they themselves were the ones who had gladly welcomed Darwins Origin of Species
and Descent of Man with open arms and minds as if it were a miraculously truthful
Godsend! (Sadly, many otherwise seemingly learned and wise scientists still do!)

However, to return to Donnellys excellently-researched opus. It has more than
just a ring of truth about it although some sections are possibly a little outdated now
and I, for one, am convinced that he was on the right track. In Chapter One, Donnelly
sets out the purpose of his book, and the reader will doubtlessly bear with me if I quote
verbatim some of his propositions and comments inscribed in this opening chapter from

Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Part 1. Chapter 1.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK.
This book is an attempt to demonstrate several distinct and novel propsitions. These are:

1. That there once existed in the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, a large
island which was the remnant of an Atlantic continent, and known to the ancient world as Atlantis.

2. That the description of this island given by Plato is not, as has long been supposed, fable, but veritable
history.
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3. That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.

4. That it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores
of the gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the
Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were
populated by civilized nations.

5. That it was the true Antediluvian world; the Garden of Eden: the Gardens of the Heperides; the Elysian
Fields; the Gardens of Alcinous; the Mesomphalos: the Olympos: the Asgard of the traditions of the ancient
nations; representing a universal memory of a great land, where mankind dwelt for ages in peace and
happiness.

6. That the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the
kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis; and that the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused
recollection of real historic events.
7. That the mythology of Egypt and Peru represented the original religion of Atlantis, which was sun-
worship.

8. That the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilization was a
reproduction of that of the Atlantic island.

9. That the implements of the Bronze Age of Europe were derived from Atlantis. The Atlanteans were
also the first manufacturers of iron.

10. That the Phoenician alphabet, parent of all European alphabets, was derived from an Atlantean alphabet,
which was also conveyed to the Mayas of Central America.

11. That Atlantis was the original seat of the Aryan or Indo-European family of nations, as well as of the
Semitic peoples, and possibly also of the Turanian races. (The Persians and the Turks)

12. That Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sunk into the ocean,
with nearly all its inhabitants.

13. That a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and carried to the nations east and west the tidings of
the appallling catastrophe, which has survived to our own time in the Flood and Deluge legends of the
different nations of the old and new worlds.

Donnelly then goes on to explain the important effects that these propositions will
have upon mankind if proven true especially with regard to our understanding of
religious beliefs and our historical knowledge, both of which would be widened, and how
many of the remarkable similarities that exist between ancient civilizations of both Old
and New Worlds would be explained. He also points out that such proofs would help us
to re-establish our kinship and bloodline-ties with these people who lived genteel civilized
lives long before the Aryans descended upon India, or the Phoenicians setted in Syria, or
the Goths reached the shores of the Baltic. He also adds the following pithy remarks:

The fact that the story of Atlantis was for thousands of years regarded as a fable proves nothing. There is
an unbelief which grows out of ignorance, as well as a scepticism which is born of intelligence. The people
nearest to the past are not always those who are best informed concerning the past.

For a thousand years it was believed that the legends of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were
myths: they were spoken of as the fabulous cities. For a thousand years the educated world did not
credit the accounts given by Herodotus of the onders of the ancient civilizations of the Nile and of Chaldea.
He was called the father of liars. Even Plutarch sneered at him. Now, in the language of Frederick
Schegel, the deeper and more comprehensive the researches of the moderns have been, the more their
regard and esteem for Herodotus has increased. Buckle says, His minute information about Egypt and
Asia Minor is admitted by all geographers.
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There was a time when the expedition sent out by Pharaoh Necho to circumnavigate Africa was doubted,
because the explorers stated that after they had progressed a certain distance the sun was north of them; this
circumstance, which aroused suspicion, now proves to us that the Egyptian navigators had really passed the
equator, and anticipated by 2100 years Vasquez de Gama in his discovery of the Cape of Good Hope.

If I succeed in demonstrating the truth of the somewhat startling propositions with which I commenced this
chapter, it will only be by bringing to bear upon the question of Atlantis a thousand converging lines of light
from a multitude of researches made by scholars in different fields of modern thought. Further invest-
igations and discoveries will, I trust, confirm the correctness of the conclusions at which I have arrived.

Let us now proceed to follow Donnellys thinking, even if only in basic outline
form for the sake of brevity, as he develops his propositions and theories further.

A Quick Run Through Donnellys Book
In the interests of time and space within this document, and with the expectation
that the reader will take the time to read through Atlantis:The Antediluvian World, I
have decided to first hurry through the first part of the book with some speed, selecting
any key elements which I feel need to be updated, in order to relate better with current 21
st

century knowledge and thought on Atlantis and its catastrophe. Then I shall return to
consider the ancient MesoAmerican ramifications of Donnellys conclusions regarding
the influence of Atlantis upon its neighbouring lands.

After a reiteration of Platos history of Atlantis, via an imagined dialogue between
Critias and Socrates, Donnelly discusses the probability of Platos story being true. Like
myself, he concludes that it must have been a historically correct account, for the same
reasons. He next goes on to ask if such a catastrophe was possible, and if so how did it
happen? He then goes into various disatrous volcanic explosions which all destroyed
islands around the world. Unfortunately Donnellys book was already published just one
year before one of the greatest such disasters in history. This was the explosion of the
volcanic island of Krakatoa, in Indonesia, between Java and Sumatra, which took an
enormous toll in human life and produced spectacular atmospheric lighting effects by its
pulverised dustcloud in the upper atmosphere for many months afterwards!

Donnelly then delves into the testimony of the sea or rather the seabed - as
revealed by the rough-and-ready deep-sea weighted-line soundings of his day. By and
large, these indicated much of what has been confirmed since by more hi-tech methods,
regarding a large uneven submarine plateau in the cenral region of the Atlantic, the
volcanic peaks of which still protrude from the ocean to form the Azores group.
However, Donnelly was born too early to know that there is a long volcanic ridge with a
central rift that continually oozes magma, running the entire length of the Atlantic, from
the North Pole right down toward the south polar region!

From what uncertain traces of this ridge the sounding vessels were able to detect,
he concludes that a long arm of Atlantis connected it to South America and on down the
Atlantic, almost touching Africa at one point. He concluded that this central ridge must
be the sunken backbone of the elongated Atlantean landmass.
However, we now know, thanks to the newly emerged science of crustal
expansion between continents, that this extended ridge is really quite unrelated to
Atlantis, and that this same expansional mechanism may be steadily removing all
geological traces of the continents subsidence Still, one has to admire Donnellys
amazing conclusions drawn from so little real data!
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I will skip over his chapter on flora and fauna here, since it is not so immediately
relevant to the main issue of the actual existence of Altantis. Interested readers can check
this biological evidence out for themselves from his book. But his following chapters on
the Deluge Legends and the Biblical Deluge are of more immediate interest, since there
are many who tend to attribute the submergence of Atlantis to this cause, rather than its
subsidence and sinking by tectonic action.

From its very title, we have to assume that Donnelly is discussing Atlantis prior to
the Deluge or Flood, not only of the Bible, but similar Deluge records of many other
peoples outside the orbit of the Hebrew Book of Genesis. And he makes this clear as he
goes along. However, I personally dont necessarily connect the drowning or inundation
of Atlantis with any such localized or even worldwide-flood, Biblical or otherwise. Nor, I
believe, did Donnelly. I feel that, given the heavily-religious climate of thought in the
late 1880s, he was duty-bound to give this possibility some sort of an airing, even if only
to avoid being regarded as a heathen and a heretic. Darwin had already created a furore
many years earlier with his ideas on evolution, and had brought himself into bad odor
among upright Christans.

Inundated or just Plain Sunk?
True, I believe it possible that there may well have been a rapid rise in world sea-
level due to a sudden melting of the polar ice packs possibly associated with a polar
topple or tilt which caused the Atlantic to overflow the Atlas mountain-chain and fill up
the Mediterranean basin and subsequently the Black Sea, via the Bosporus. Thanks to
modern marine technology and bathymetric advances, this has been conclusively proven
to be true. But I remain convinced that the sinking of Atlantis was due solely to a
tectonic upheaval, and that the so-called Deluge occurred much later on in time. As I
have already hinted, the filling of the Mediterranean might have been a long-term follow-
up event from the same tectonic collapse that sank Atlantis, as the lower strata of the local
crustal area shifted and settled even further.

This flooding itself might easily have been the origin of the Old World Deluge
legend. But it still doesnt account for the legend of a very similar Deluge in the Asia-
Pacific region. There is, nevertheless, traditional evidence for a Deluge in the Americas.

Donnelly mentions such an American Deluge in his chapter on The Deluges of
America: Atlantis and the western continent had from an immemorial age held
intercourse with each other: the great nations of America were simply colonies of
Atlantis, sharing in its civilization, language, religion, and blood. From Mexico to the
peninsula of Yucatan, from the shores of Brazil to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, from
the gulf of Mexico to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, the colonies of Atlantis
extended; and therefore it is not strange to find, as Alfred Maury says, American
traditions of the Deluge coming nearer to that of the Bible and the Chaldean record than
those of any peoples of the Old World.

Churchward versus Donnelly?
As I may have already pointed out, Donnelly wrote his book some 38 years before
Churchward produced his own masterly work on The Lost Continent of Mu, in which
he demonstrated (at least to my satisfaction) how that mid-Pacific continent (or group of
continents) sank after the explosion of highly-pressured natural gas-chambers deep in the
underlying crust. An explosion that was due, I understand, to them being ignited by the
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intrusion of molten lava from surrounding magma layers. The gas could have been a
mephitic by-product of local volcanic formations. Alternatively, it might have been plain
methane gas, produced in the formation of hydrocarbon oil from decayed and compressed
biological matter, which is obtained from such chambers via deep-drilled oil wells.

These chambers, once emptied of the highly-pressurized gas, would inevitably
collapse under the enormous weight of overlying rock and ocean. Thus they could cause
a great and sudden subsidence of the upper crustal layers, to depths of anywhere between
hundreds or even thousands of feet, depending on their original volume and height. This
is my first major difference with Donnellys view, in which he appears to simply credit a
vast volcanic explosion as the sole and complete cause of its demise.

Is Civilization Inherent?
Donnelly next discusses civilization and whether or not it is an inherent feature of
our species. He points to the past and our supposed advances in this area then makes the
profound statement that: In six thousand years the world made no advance on the
civilization which it received from Atlantis. Thats quite a statement! He says that
whilst Phoenicia, Egypt, Chaldea, India, Greece and Rome passed on the torch from one
to the other, they added nothing to such arts as architecture, sculpture, painting, mining,
metallurgy, navigation, ceramics and glassware, or to road, bridge or canal construction!

And whilst this modern age of ours has entered an alleged new era, by
subjugating steam, electricity, and now even atomic energy, we have still only really
begun to catch up with the backlog from the Atlantean technologies list. In actual truth,
we are still living in an age of barbarism, and it will still take many thousands of years for
us to attain again to that once Golden Age of long-forgotten technology and truly
civilized culture. To all evident intents and purposes, we are still only just managing to
hold the status quo. Human civilization in the 21
st
century is merely Marking Time!

He then goes on to point out that civilization isnt communicable to all many
savages are incapable of it. We humans, he claims, are divided into two groups. Civilized
and savage. However, I personally wonder if its really that clear-cut, and if even those
of the races which are supposedly cultured in the arts and crafts, really only wear
civilization in the form of a smooth outer veil over a rough hide of natural savagery.
One which can be discarded at a seconds notice if the wearer is goaded sufficiently!

One has only to think of the horrendous events that took place in ancient Rome,
once hailed as being the heart of world civilization, and then compare that to the horrors
of savagery to which the civilized nations have descended since Donnellys time! Two
major world Wars in which unspeakable acts of debased savagery and butchery were
perpetrated, not just by the Germans and Japanese and their allies, but by all the parties
involved, in one manner or another. As well as the dramatic decline in Western morality
and civility since then.

Can we seriously delude ourselves into believing that any of our own modern
nations are not suffering from the same downhill slide of morality, honour, trust, chivalry,
religion, and true appreciation of real art and music that once were the hallmarks of
civilization? We need only look at the soaring crime-rate, and the ever-deepening
decline in moral values Lack of religious values, pornography, blatant homosexuality,
child-prostitution, paedophilia and drug-addiction. Not to mention all the evils that
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follow in their wake: AIDS, rape, home-invasions, cowardly attacks upon the aged and
frail for drug-money, and rampant depression and suicide. No. It is all too clear that
civilization isnt an inheritance, nor is it a true reality in todays world, either!

What Does Modern Civilization Mean?
All we mean today by modern civilization is simply the preparedness of a
group of totally dissimilar people from many different cultures to share living-space and
public amenities in common; to live cheek by jowl with people they dislike; to allow their
children to be forcibly brainwashed into accepting a corrupt ethical and legal code and
to be taught a pack of outrageous theories disguised as fact and history. And, as if
this werent enough, to allow themselves to be governed, taxed, administered and directed
by an over-large body of egocentric, power-hungry, get-rich-quick, ineffectual political
opportunists and a veritable army of so-called public-servants (who mostly serve only
themselves), whom the populace totally distrust, and wouldnt allow into their homes!

Moving On
Donnelly then goes into a rambling diatribe about the identity of civilizations in
both old and New World. However, it is essentially a sort of catalogue of the different
customs, relgions and mythologies of various ancient civilizations, the origins of which
which Donnelly attempts to relate back to Atlantis. So I will skim over this chapter, and
leave the reader to delve into it at his or her leisure from Donnellys original text.

Central American Evidences of Atlantean Influence?
In Chapter III of Part III, he discusses American Evidences of Intercourse with
Europe or Atlantis. This is getting closer to what we are seeking, as he goes into the
clear evidences in Central American legends and religious beliefs, which can only be
related to visits by people from the Old World. He begins by describing those
MesoAmerican cultural influences which could only have come from the East - such as
are today found in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East region of Asia,

But what Donnelly is really saying is that the true origin of all such cultures was
Atlantis - since many of the Old World nations themselves appear to have derived many
aspects of their own seemingly nativecultures from a single common source. I will not
attempt to go into any detail about the many examples which Donnelly points out, but will
again leave readers to discover them for themselves from his book.

Most of these, however, are basically a recital from such works as the Popol Vu
and other Olmec, Mayan or Aztec legends, regarding strangers arriving in ships from the
direction of the Rising Sun. Often gray-bearded men who taught them many skills, arts
and crafts, including the recording of the days, years and seasons by means of the
calendar. Also it would seem that much of the MesoAmerican etymology has been
strongly influenced by the common tongue of the Atlanteans. That great leader and god
of the ancient Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, (better known as the Feathered Serpent) is
inferred by Donnelly to have been an Atlantean sage.

Difficulties With Dates
However, here I have to say that I personally wonder if any part of Atlantis was
still in existence during the time of the Aztecs or even their ancestors, the Maya and
Olmecs, since they are now believed to have first come upon the scene around 2,000 -
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1,500 BC, and the last remnants of Atlantis are claimed by Plato to have sunk in 9,600
BC! I feel that here we may really be looking at a bearded European, quite possibly
from Ireland or Britain, according to his description! We know that both the Welsh and
Saint Brendan are reputed to have sailed to Central America, as well as other northern
people, such as the Vikings from Scandinavia, long before the advent of Columbus.

Thus its possible that Queltzalcoatl (who is the Kuculcan of the Toltecs, and the
Gucumatz of the Maya, but still the Feathered Serpent to them all) might possibly
have been white-bearded man from northern Europe, (like the Viracocha of the Inca),
who taught them the arts of agriculture, science, numbers, and the idea of the calendar.

According to Donnelly, the Olmecs and the Xicalaucans were the most important,
since they were the forerunners of the Toltecs in Mexico, and they came from the East
in ships or barks to the land of Pochantan, which they proceeded to populate.
Furthermore, according to his introduction of a translation of the Popol Vuh by the
Abbe Brasseur de Bourburg, (who also translated the Aztec Codex Chimalpopoca),
both the kingdom of Xibalba and Atlantis itself bore striking parallels: both countries
are magnificently fertile, and abound in the precious metals. The empire of Atlantis was
divided into ten kingdoms, governed by five couples of twin sons of Poseidon, the eldest
(Atlas) being supreme over the others; and the ten constituted a tribunal that managed
the affairs of the empire. Their descendants governed after them.

The ten kings of Xibalba*, who reigned (also in couples) under Hun-Came and
Vikub-Came (and who together constituted a grand council of the kingdom), certainly
furnish curious points of comparison. And there is wanting neither a catastrophe for
Xibalba had a terrific inundation nor the name of Atlas, of which the etymology is found
only in the Nahuatl tongue: it comes from atl, water, and we know that a city of
Atlan** (near the water) still existed on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama at
the time of the Conquest. (Note. * It is interesting to discover, that according to
modern Mayan myth, Xibalba was actually the Underworld of the Maya! Could
Donnelly have been unaware of this? ** Atlan, or Aztlan, of course, means
Atlantis.)

Donelly remarks that Plato tells us that Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean were so
named after Atlas, the eldest son of Poseidon, the founder of the kingdom. And the
prefix (and often suffix also) Atl (which means water), often crops up in ancient
MesoAmerican Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, such as Quetzelcoatl, Ehecatl and
Omecihuatl which are all names of Aztec gods. This immediately makes one think
again about the possibility of a direct connection between Atlantis and the Meso-
Americans, regardless of the apparent wide differences of dates. Could Plato have
perhaps been misinformed regarding the date he gave for the demise of Atlantis - or were
the last vestigial remnants of the Atlantean Empire still lingering in some modified form
among the Maya, the Olmecs, Toltecs, and thus down finally to the Aztecs? We have
no way of verifying Platos dating of the demise of Atlantis, but we can be much more
sure of the Mesoamerican dates, so once again, as with the war between the Athenians
and Atlantis, we run into a stone wall in attempting to establish any firm dates on the
events surrounding Atlantis.

One feasible solution to this conundrum is to consider that Atlantis might possibly
have actually been engulfed after the time-slot Plato ascribed to that event, and also
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possibly after the time of the filling of the Mediterranean Valley by the inflow of the
Atlantic Ocean. Such a re-dating, however, would in no way compromise the original
existence of the Osirian Empire in the Mediterranean Valley, or of their eventual ascent
into Libya and their subsequent settlement in the brand-new land of Egypt. If anything,
this would actually serve to enhance the likelihood of Egypt having become an Osirian
country whilst Atlantis still existed.

This would then account for Sonchis, the chief priest of the holy city of Sais,
being so vastly well-informed about Atlantis when he talked with Platos great-ancestor,
Solon, because Sonchis may have actually visited that land and spoke from his own
personal knowledge of it and its people! It would also then allow for a direct hand-to-
hand war to be fought between the classical Athenians and Atlantis, since they could sail
directly into the Mediterranean Sea up to Greece. So, unless Donnelly can produce a
convincing argument against this, further on in his book, I am prepared to stand by the
thought that Plato - whilst not a liar - could easily have been given incorrect information
as to dates. Thus if we move the final submergence of Atlantis forward by perhaps a few
thousand years, we will find that all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place quite well.

However, on the other hand, it might well be true that the major sinking of the
largest island of Atlantis did occur when Plato said it did, but that some final Atlantean
island outposts might still have remained until far more recent times. (His ancestor,
Solon, incidentally, was created the sole Archon (Ruling Magistrate) of Athens in 594
BC, and Plato was a noted Greek philosopher some 200 years later.)

This is, in fact, borne out quite well by a very close reading of what Critias told his
audience in the Dialogues, regarding what Sonchis of Sais told Solon. Sonchis told him
in around 550 BC, that 9,000 years had passed since the the war between the Atlanteans
and the original Athenians (who subsequently became the Greeks), and that during that
9,000 years many great deluges had occurred, and that the consequence was that, in
comparison to what Atlantis once was, and what little now remained (in the form of
islets), were like the bones of a wasted body.

Was an Atlantean-Athenian War possible?
With regard to the alleged AtlanteanAthenian War. This problem calls for a
little applied common sense. It should be noted as a matter of historical fact that Athens
in very ancient times was not the powerful city-state we learned about in college. It was
the Pelasgian town of Athenae. The Pelasgians were the prehistoric inhabitants of
what we now know as Greece and who had originated in west-central Asia. Their
occupation of the Athenae region probably dated back to around 4,0003,500 BC, even
before Khem and Kush (later to become Egypt) began to be settled by nomadic farmers.

The historically-famed Athenians* did not exist at the time of Atlantis demise, so
it must have been their ancient Pelasgian precursors from Athenae, who fought the
stranded descended remnants of the Atlantean Army, who came overland from their
secondary capital in Cadiz or Gades, (named after Gadir, the second son of Poseidon.
(Poseidons first son, the elder of a pair of twins, was Atlas, who was created the first
King of Atlantis, which country was named after him).
(*An interesting sidelight in relation to the historically-famed classical Athenians - renowned for
their exploit against Troy, circa 1,200 BC, in which they used the ploy of the giant woodenTrojan Horse
to gain entry into the besieged city. Heinrich Schleimanns great discovery of ancient Troy was actually
made in Turkey, and not in Greece, as so many people tend to imagine!)
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Donnelly on Racial Appearance
In Chapter 5, Donnelly focusses his attention on the racial characteristics of the
people of the world at large and how they might have related to those of Atlanteans. He
points out the general misconception as to the actual coloring of European and American
races, (by which, of course, he means ancient or aboriginal Americans, and not the
present complex mixture of racial features and colors seen in modern-day Americans).

He shows that although Europe was (in his day) supposed to be exclusively
peopled by white men, in reality, every shade of color was represented, from the fairest of
Swedes to the darker complexions of Mediterranean coastal inhabitants: only a shade
lighter than the Berbers or Moors, on the opposite side of that sea. One cannot help but
wonder what his reaction would be today to find every major city in every Western nation
thronged with people of every imaginable color and race! He continues on to mention
that the same gross error has been applied to the idea that all Indians are red men of the
same hue, from Hudsons Bay to Patagonia.

However, he indicates that almost every shade, from the ash-color of the
Menominees through the cinnamon-red, copper and bronze tints, may be found among the
tribes formerly occupying the territory east of the Mississippi, until we reach the dark-
skinned Kaws of Kansas, who are nearly as black as the negro. Then he adds that:
The variety of complexion is as great in South America as among the tribes of the
northern part of the continent. In short, over the following couple of pages he
indicates, from several authoritative sources, that the indiginous native Indians of
America possess the same degree of wide variation in skin, eye, and hair color as might
be found among the races of Europe or the USA!

He then continues by discussing the racial types that are said to have descended
from Adam, and that not only were his own direct Adamic descent red men, with
ruddy skins, but so too were the Cushites, Ethiopeans and Phoenicians, whom Donnelly
describes as all being of Atlantean stock, as also were the ancient Egyptians. The
Arabs, however, (although in my own view of direct Semitic descent, just as were the
Hebrews,) were claimed to be distinguished into two races, one red, the other black.

He points to the fact that whilst the ancient Egyptians were themselves red men,
they recognized four races of men the red, yellow, black and white men. In Egyptian
art, they represented themselves as being red-brown skinned, and they colored the
Palestinians as yellow-brown, and the Libyans as yellow-white. But curiously, in all
this, Donnelly seems to have overlooked the jet-black Nubians, the blue-black Tuaregs,
and the dark-brown Berbers! However, he does mention that Herodotus tells us that
there was a nation of Libyans called the Maxyans, who claimed descent from the people
of Troy (the walls of Troy, we shall see, were buit by Poseidon: that is to say, Troy was an
Atlantean colony). But here I must pose an important question: If Donnelly is telling
us here that all of these races emanated originally from Atlantis, why does he not include
the black men? Especially since the Olmecs seemed to have venerated ebony-black
persons of high rank, if not been such themselves!

Giant Stone Olmec Heads
I believe that we should pay some particular attention to the fact that Negroid
people were not only present in Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula some 1500 years BC,
but they were regarded as persons of high standing. This is evident from the production
29
of these great solid stone-carved heads, which weighed several tons apiece, and must
therefore have been objects of almost religious veneration and great significance. The
faces of these heads themselves are quite unmistakably negroid, and they are shown as
wearing some form of banded helmet with ear-protectors. These are either soldiers
helmets, or the type of headgear that might be used in certain rough sports, such as
football or ice hockey.

To my mind, this indicates that they may have represented either a warrior-class of
the Olmec race, or possibly a class of Negro superstar sports-heroes, rather after the style
of the Harlem Globetrotters. However, before we go leaping to the idea that maybe the
Maya and Olmecs were in the habit of importing negroid athletes or warriors, we should
also ponder those curious little figurines of Olmec priests, which have been discovered
standing in circular groups around some form of totem-stone. These were carved from
some jet-black stone and all appear to have deliberately elongated skulls!

It is known that many of these curiously elongated skulls have been found, and
there is every indication that they are the result of deliberate artificial malformation since
infancy. This is still done in certain parts of Asia, by tightly bandaging the feet of
growing female children to give them a permanently small and dainty appearance. There
is every reason to believe that this same method was used on Mayan and Olmec children
to produce the curiously-elongated heads that are so often seen in ancient Mesoamerican
drawings and carvings. Its my guess that this strange deformation was perhaps confined
only to the nobility.

There is certainly no sign of it in the large helmeted stone Negroid heads found in
the jungles around La Venta in Mexico. The presence of Negroid people in Central
America is not so surprising when one sees that many modern investigative scholars are
coming to the conclusion that the Negros are not necessarily the original indiginous
inhabitants of Africa. They are believed to have originated elsewhere perhaps even in
MU, as Chuchward believed - or even in Atlantis, according to some researchers.

However, my own theory is that Churchward may have been right, and that, after
the Muvian catastrophe, most of the negroid race (many of whom still inhabit the
southwestern Pacific region, in places like Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Australia) fled
eastwards instead. After residing in Central America for some generations, they made
their way gradually across Atlantis again taking several generations and then to
Africa, a short boat trip away, where they finally decided to sink their roots. This isnt
any more far-fetched than the Celts of Ireland and Scotland migrating over many
generations across the whole of Europe from Central Asia, via the Slavic lands of the
southern Danube. Or of the Innuits of northern Canada migrating from northern Asia, via
a long-submerged landbridge that existed before the Bering Strait was inundated.

Back To Donnelly
To continue with our tour of Donnellys book. We find that the next few chapters
are essentially an attempt to posit the Garden of Eden in Atlantis, as well as the general
early history of mankind as outlined in the Book of Genesis. He indicates many parallels
between the ancient tribal customs of the world as well as religious similarities.

Whilst he offers many seemingly-convincing parallels, even including the
development of alphabets and bronze age artifacts, I tend to feel somewhat skeptical in
30
this regard. The nations of the world could just as easily have learned many of these
customs, beliefs and metal working skills from foreign visitors, or by visiting other lands
themselves. The coincidence of the coming of a wide-spread Bronze Age could very
easily have been due simply to the passing on of technology in this manner. It doesnt
necessarily imply that those races were all living together upon one island-continent.

Writing.
The same thing could have also applied to written alphabets, but I am not
convinced at all that the alphabets of the various nations were all stemmed from a single
fundamental Atlantean script. And in any case, since Donnelly is so convinced that the
Maya or Olmec were essentially Atlantean, why did they not continue to develop a
regular written script like so many others did? Instead, their written language
degenerated further and further into a system of graphic, technical-looking ikons, rather
than the definitely written inscription languages of the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Greeks.

The only ones who could in any way be compared to the Mesoamericans in this
aspect are the ancient Egyptians, who also relied largely upon hieroglyphs for most public
and religiously communicative purposes. But even they eventually developed a demotic
script, a sloping cursive form of scribing down their hieroglyphs, for the simple sake of
speed in setting down lengthy communications, if for no other reason. No doubt the
Mayans and their descendants did the same, but materials such as papyrus paper, would
not last long in such a humid climate as prevails in Central America.

Parchments, kidskins, and pulped reed or other vegetable-based documents seem
to have weathered the millennia far better in the Old World than in the New, particularly
in the dessicated desert regions of Egypt and the Middle East. But I will concede
Donnelly his connections between Egypt and MesoAmerica via Atlantis, since they both
have much more in common with each other than either do with any other land. True
pictographic icon-based alphabets, pyramid-building, similar royal and priestly classes,
and, of course, religions based upon sun-worship, although this latter was not unique to
them.

Religion.
However, one should aways remember that the Churchwards Lost World of Mu
was also renowned as a sun-worshipping civilization, and thus probably comes closer to
claiming the origin of this ancient practice. Their God was Ramu, that of the Indian sub-
continent was Rama and that of the Peruvians was Raymi, so it isnt hard to make out a
good case for the Egyptian sun-god, Ra, as being rather stemmed from ancient Mu rather
than from Atlantis as also might Atlantean sun-worship also have been!

Another Solution!
There is only one other way in which this connection could have come about, and
that is if we look upon Atlantis as being itself originally an offshoot or colony of Mu! If
we could accept this, it would at once solve a multitude of vexing problems and stumbling
blocks. It seems obvious to me that, since Donnelly was involved in the pursuit of
antiquarian matters so much earlier than Churchward, he simply had no way of making
such a connection. However, I am more than happy to offer that connection here and now
as an intriguing alternative - and as a solution to the entire puzzle! I will endeavour to
31
elaborate on that particular concept in a further article. But, for the present, I must get on
and finish my brief analysis of Donnellys great work.

Kings and Gods.
After discussing the sun-worship of many lands, from Peru, throughout the
Mediterranean, to the Middle East and India, Donnelly comments upon Atlantean sun-
worship as follows (and I trust that the reader will forgive me if I abbreviate his words):
Sun-worship as the ancient religion of Atlantis, underlies all the superstitions of
the colonies of that country. The Samoyed woman says to the sun, When thou, god,
risest, I too rise from my bed. The Brahmans stand on one foot, with their hands held
out before them and their faces turned to the east, adoring the sun. In Germany or
France, one may still see the peasant take off his hat to the rising sun. The Romans, even
in later times, worshipped the sun as Emesa, under the name of Elagabalus, typified in the
form of a black conical stone, which was believed to have fallen from heaven. This was
the emblem of Bel (or Baal). Did it have relation to the mounds and pyramids?

Sun-worship was the primitive religion of the red men of America. It was found
among all the tribes. The Chichimecs called the sun their father. The Comanches have a
similar belief.

But compared with such ancient nations as the Egyptians and Babylonians, the
Greeks were as children. Sonchis the high priest of Sais said to Solon: You Greeks are
novices in knowledge of antiquity. You are ignorant of what passed either here or among
yourselves in days of old. The history of eight thousand years is deposited in our ancient
books, but I can ascend to a much higher antiquity, and tell you what our fathers have
done for nine thousand years; I mean their institutions, their laws and their most brilliant
acheivements.

The Greeks, too young to have shared in the religion of Atlantis, but preserving
some memory of that great country, proceeded to convert its kings into gods, and to depict
Atlantis as the heaven of the human race. Thus we find a great solar or nature worship
in the elder nations, while Greece has nothing but an incongruous jumble of gods and
goddesses, who are born to eat and drink and make love and ravish and steal and die;
and who are worshipped as immortal in presence of the very monuments that testify to
their death.

These deities to whom the affairs of the world were intrusted, were, it is believed,
immortal, though not eternal in their existence. In Crete there was even a story of the
death of Zeus, his tomb being pointed out.

The history of Atlantis is the key of the Greek mythology. There can be no
question that these gods of Greece were human beings. The tendency to attach divin e
attributes to great earthly rulers is one deeply implante in human nature. The savages
who killed Captain Cook firmly believed that he was immortal, that he was yet alive, and
would return to punish them. The highly civilized Romans made gods out of their dead
emperors. Doctor Livingstone mentions that on one occasion, after talking to a Bushman
for some time about the Deity (God), he found that the savage thought he was speaking of
the local chief of the district.

32
We find the barbarians of the Mediterranean coast regarded the civilized people
of Atlantis with awe and wonder: Their physical strength was extraordinary, the earth
shaking sometimes under their tread. Whatever was done was done speedily. They
moved through space almost without the loss of a moment of time. This probably
alluded to the rapid motion of their sailing vessels. They were wise, and communicated
their wisdom to men. That is to say, they civilized the people they came into contact.
They had a strict sense of justice, and punished crime rigorously, and rewarded noble
actions, though it is true they were less conspicuous for the latter. We should
understand this to mean that where they civilized, they established a government of law,
as contradistiguished from the anarchy of barbarism.

There were tales of personal visits and adventures of the gods among men,
taking part in battles and appearing in dreams. They were conceived to possess the form
of human beings, and to be, like men, subject to love and pain, but always characterized
by the highest qualities and grandest forms that could be imagined.

Another proof that the gods of the Greeks were but the deified kings of Atlantis is
found in the fact that the gods were not looked upon as having created the world. They
succeeded to the management of a world already in existence.

The gods dwelt on Olympus. They lived together like human beings; they
possessed palaces, storehouses, stables, horses, etc; they dwelt in a social state which was
but a magnified reflection of the social system on earth. Quarrels, love passages, mutual
assistance, and such instances as characterize human life, were ascribed to them.

Where was Olympus? It was in Atlantis. It was a great island, the then civilized
world. The encircling ocean was spoken of in all the ancient legends. Okeanus lived
there with his wife, Tethys. These were the Islands of the Blessed, the garden of the gods,
the sources of nectar and ambrosia on which the gods lived. Nectar was probably a
fermented intoxicating liquor, and ambrosia a bread made from wheat. Soma was a kind
of whiskey, and the hindoos deified it. The gods lived on nectar and ambrosia simply
meant that these blessed islands were civilized, and possessed a liquor of some sort and a
species of food superior to anything in use among the barbarous tribes with whom they
came in contact.

This blessed land answers to the description of Atlantis. It was an island full of
wonders. It lay spread out in the ocean like a disk,with mountains rising from it. On the
highest point of this mountain dwelt Zeus (the king), while the mansions of the other
deities were arranged upon plateaus, or in ravines lower down the mountain. These
deities, including Zeus were twelve in number: Zeus, (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Poseidon
(Neptune), Demeter (Ceres), Apollo, Artemis (Diana), Hephaestos (Vulcan), Pallas
Athena (Minerva), Hermes (Mercury), and Hestia (Vesta). (NB. The second name in parentheses of
each Grecian god is its equivalent in the Roman pantheon.)

According to the traditions of the Phoenicians, the Gardens of the Hesperides
were in the remote west. Atlas lived in these gardens and Atlas, as we have seen, was
the King of Atlantis. The Elysian Fields (the Happy Isles) were also commonly placed in
the remote west, and were ruled over by Kronos. Tartarus, the region of Hades, the
gloomy home of the Dead, was also located under the mountains of an island in the midst
of the ocean in the remote west. Atlas was described in Greek mythology as an
33
enormous giant, who stood upon the western confines of the earth and supported the
heavens on his shoulders, in a region of the west where the sun continued to shine after he
had set upon Greece.

Greek tradition located the island in which Olympus was situated in the Far
West in the ocean beyond Africawhere the mighty Atlas held up the heavens. And
Plato tells us that the land where Atlas and Poseidon ruled was Atlantis.

The Garden of the Hesperides(another name for the dwelling-place of the
gods) was situated at the extreme limit of Africa. Atlas was said to have surrounded it
on every side with high mountains, and it is here that we find the golden apples! This is
very much like the description which Plato gives of the great plain of Atlantis, covered
with fruit of every kind, and surrounded by precipitous mountains descending to the sea!

Donnelly then goes on to add further back-ups to his claim for Atlantis as the
home of the first Greeks (who became their gods), by telling us that Chronos (Saturn),
Dionysios (Bacchus), Hyperion, Atlas and Hercules, were all connected with a great
Saturnian continent, and that they were all kings of countries on the western shores of the
Mediterranean, Africa, and Spain. One account says that Hyperion, Atlas and Kronos
were sons of Uranos, who ruled a great country around the western end of the
Mediterranean, together with certain islands in the Atlantic. Uranos succeeded his
father, and was then killed by the Titans. The kingdom was then divided between Atlas
who took Northwestern Africa (where we now find the Atlas mountains), together with
the Atlantic islands, and Kronos (Saturn) taking those lands on the opposite shores of
the Mediterranean to Italy and Sicily. (Tunisia and Libya, or Albania and Greece?)

But it is here that Donnelly undoes much of his good work by dwelling overlong
upon the Greeks and their possible royal connections with Atlantis, and attempting to
make absolutely too much of a good thing. Unfortunately, there were twelve Titans, and
we have already been told that Atlantis (and its Empire) was always ruled by ten kings or
princes! So on that rather sadly damaging note, I think that it is time to move on and
complete our whirlwind tour of Donnellys book!

Readers who wish to pursue this connection with the ancient Greeks and their
Olympian pantheon in fuller detail can do so in Donnellys book. I will simply sum up
this section on howThe Kings of Atlantis Become the Gods of the Greeks with
Donnellys own conclusions, which are as follows:
It is not necessary to pursue the study of the gods of Greece any farther. They
were simply barbarian recollections of the rulers of a great civilized people who in early
days visited their shores and brought with them the arts of peace. Here then, in
conclusion, are the proofs of our proposition

1. They were not the makers, but the rulers of the world.

2. They were human in their attributes; they loved, sinned, and fought battles, the very
sites of which are given; they founded cities, and civilized the people of the shores of
the Mediterranean.

3. They dwelt upon an island in the Atlantic. in the remote westWhere the sun shines
after it has ceased to shine on Greece.
34

3. Their land was destroyed in a deluge.

4. They were ruled over by Poseidon and Atlas.

5. Their empire extended to Egypt and Italy and the shores of Africa, precisely as stated
by Plato.

6. They existed during the Bronze Age and at the beginning of the Iron Age.

The entire Greek Mythology is the recollection by a degenerate race, of a vast, mighty
and highly civilized empire, which, in a remotepast, covered large parts of Europe, Asia,
Africa and America.

Note. Since the next portion of Donnellys extremely in-depth opus relates to the gods of
Phoenicia and of Scandinavia also being the Kings of Atlantis, as well as an ineffectual
endeavour to identify Atlantis with the Garden of Eden, which I believe to be a stretch of
credulity, I think it will be better, in the interests of brevity, to avoid more rambling
complexity, and move on to an area of discussion that will be of greater interest to most
readers. some further supportive remarks by Donnelly regarding Atlantean Meso-
american and Aryan colonies, and a direct connection between Egypt and Atlantis.

Atlantean Central American Colonies
Since the western shores of Atlantis were so close to the American continent, there
would have been little difficulty for people in ships to island-hop between the two.
When Columbus arrived in that region, he found that the local natives made such journeys
quite easily in open canoes. It is highly probable that after the first discovery of their
proximity with each other, there would very soon have been a thriving trading of goods
between the Mesoamericans and Atlanteans much like that which occurred between
natives of a newly discovered land and the Hudson Bay Company in Canada or the British
East India Company in the Far East.

As Donnelly says, (and I trust that the reader will understand if I edit some of his
rather long-winded verbage in the interests of brevity): We can therefore readily believe
that trade between Atlantis and Yucatan, Honduras and Mexico, created colonies along
the shores of the Gulf, that gradually spread inland to the high tablelands of Mexico.
Thus we find that all the traditions of Central America and Mexico point to some country
in the east, beyond the sea, as the source of their first civilized people; and this region,
known among them as Aztlan, lived in the memory of the people as a beautiful, happy
land, where their ancestors had dwelt in peace for many generations.

Le Plongeon, who spent four years exploring Yucatan, says. (and again, I will try
to abbreviate): A third of the Maya tongue is pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of
Homer to America? Or who took that of the Maya to Greece? Greek is the offspring of
Sanskrit. Is Maya? The Maya is not devoid of words from the Assyrian.

There can be no question that the population of Central America (including
Mexico) was at one time very dense, and had attained to a high degree of civilization;
higher even than that of Europe in the time of Columbus.

35
And it is also probable that they originally belonged to the white race. Dsir
Charnay, who explored the ruins of Central America, says: The Toltecs were fair, robust
and bearded. I have often seen Indians of pure blood with blue eyes Quetzelcoatl was
represented as large,with a big head and a heavy beard. The same author speaks of
the oceans of ruins all around, not inferior in size to those of Egypt." At Teotihuacan he
measured one building at two thousand feet wide on each side, and fifteen pyramids, each
as large in the base as that of Cheops at Giza.

The city is indeed of vast extentthe whole ground, over a space of five or six
miles in diameter, is covered with heaps of ruinsruins which at first make no
impression, so complete is their dilapidation. He asserts the great antiquity of these
ruins, because he found the very highways of the ancient city to be composed of broken
bricks and pottery, the debris left by earlier populations.

This continent he says, is the land of mysteries; we here enter an infinity
whose limits we cannot estimateI shall soon have to quit working in this place. The
long avenue on which it stands is lined with ruins of public buildings and palaces,
forming continuous lines, as in the strees of modern cities. Still, all these edifices and
halls were as nothing compared with the vast substructures which strengthen their
foundations. We find the strongest resemblances to the work of the ancient European
races: the masonry is similar; the cement is the same; the sculptures are alike; both
peoples used the arch; in both continents we find bricks, glassware, and even porcelain
with blue figures on a white ground. Also there is bronze composed of the same elements
of copper and tin in like proportions, coins made of copper, round and T-shaped, and
even metallic candlesticks.

Dsir Charnay believed he had found in the ruins of Tula, the bones of swine,
sheep, oxen, and horses, in a fossil state, indicative of an immense antiquity. The Toltecs
possessed a pure and simple religion, like that described of Atlantis by Plato, with the
same sacrifices of fruits and flowers. They were farmers; they raised and wove cotton;
they cultivated fruits; they cut and engraved precious stones; among their carvings have
been found representations of elephants and lions, both animals unknown in America. The
forms of sculpture were the same as those of the ancient races of the Old World; they
burned the bodies of their great men and enclosed the ashes in funeral urns; some of their
dead were buried in a sitting position, others lying at full length, and many were
embalmed like the Egyptian mummies.

The Mexican Colony
After this, Donnelly next turns his attention to ancient Mexico, telling us of their
early government by an elective monarchy, and the structure of their society being based
upon a five-teired system - the royal family; an aristocracy of wealthy nobles; a privileged
priesthood, a judiciary; and a common peasant-class people. From his further remarks we
read that it was essentially a feudal system, that issues like marriage and divorce were
much the same as those of modern Christian societies, and that slavery was tolerated, but
not to the degree of neglect and cruelty exhibited in the Old World.

Their religion was so much akin to Christianity, that priests who accompanied the
first intrusions of the Spanish invaders, declared it to be a bogus imitation of Christianity
given to them by Satan for the purpose of destroying their souls!
36
I will not delve further into the many refinements of ancient Mexican society, as
the interested reader can check out all the details from Donnellys book.

As a final note on Mexico, let me add that much of their architecture compares
quite closely with that of ancient Mycenae, as well as that of those other interesting
people who appear to have stemmed from the same source as the Greeks, the ancient
Etruscans of northern Italy. In concluding his comments on Mexico, Donnelly remarks
that Mexico, under European rule, or under her own leaders, has never again risen to
her former standar of refinement, wealth, prosperity or civilization.


The Egyptian Colony
Now let us move on to Donnellys views on the Egyptians as an Atlantean colony.
Although my own personal thoughts on the relationship between Egypt and Atlantis must
obviously differ, since, in my own opinion, Egypt did not exist concurrently with Atlantis
in its heyday, but followed afterwards. I will nevertheless pass on a general outline of
Donnellys version of their connection and relationship. (Here I will again quote a
shortened version of Donnellys text, edited purely for the sake of brevity.):

1. They claimed descent from the 12 great gods, which must have meant the 12 gods
of Atlantis Poseidon and Cleito and their ten sons.

2. According to Phoenician traditons, the Egyptians derived their civilization from them:
and, as the Egyptians far antedated the rise of the Phoenician nation as such, this
must have meant that they derived their civilization from that to which the
Phoenicians owed their own origin. Phoenician legends show that Misor, from
whom the Egyptians were (allegedly) descended, was the child of the Phoenician gods
Amynus and Magus. Misor gave birth to Taaut, the god of letters and inventor of the
alphabet, and Taaut became Thoth, god of history to the Egyptians. Sanchonathion
tells us that Kronos (king of Atlantis) visited the south and gave all Egypt to the god
Taaut as his kingdom. (Misor is probably the king Mestor named by Plato.)

3. According to the Bible, the Egyptians were descendants of Ham, one of the three sons
of Noah, who escaped the Deluge the destruction of Atlantis.

4. The great similarity between the Egyptian civilization and that of the American
nations.

5. The fact that Egyptians claimed to be red men.

6. The pre-eminent religion of Egyt was sun-worship with Ra as their sun-god. Rama
was the sun-god of the Hindus, Rana a god of the Toltecs, Raymi was the great
festival of the sun in Peru, and Rayam, a god of Yemen. (And let us not forget that
Ra-mu was the sun-god of Mu!).

7. The presence of pyramids in Egypt and America.

8. The Egyptians were the only people of antiquity who were well informed as to the
history of Atlantis. They were never a maritime people, so they were unlikely to have
sent ships to Atlantis. The Atlanteans must have brought that knowledge to them.
37

9. We find more proof of Egyptian descent from Atlantis in their belief in the
Underword. This Land of the Dead was situated in the West hence all tombs
were placed whenever possible on the west bank of the Nile. The mourners constant
cry was To the West! To the West! This Underworld was beyond the
waterhence funeral processions always crossing a body of water. Where the tombs
were in most cases, on the West bank of the Nile, the Nile was crossed; where they
were on the eastern shore the procession passed over a sacred lake (R.S. Poole) In
the procession was a sacred ark of the sun.

All this is very plain: the underworld in the West, the land of the dead, was
Atlantis, the drowned world, the world beneath the horizon, beneath the sea, to which the
peasants of Brittany looked from Cape Raz, the most western cape projecting into the
Atlantic. It was only to be reached from Egypt by crossing water, and it was associated
with the ark, the emblem of Atlantis in all lands.

The soul of the dead man was supposed to journey to the underworld by a water-
progress. His destination was the Elysian fields, where mighty corn grew, and where he
was expected to cultivate the earth. They were the Abode of the Blessed to the Greeks,
on an island in the remote west. The Egyptian belief referred to a real country. We must
not forget that Plato described Atlantis as that sacred island lying beneath the sun.

Everywhere in the ancient world, we find men looking to the west as the land of
the dead. How can we account for this? It was based on a universal tradition that under
an immense ocean in the far west, there was an underworld comprising millions of the
dead, a mighty race that had been suddenly swallowed up in the greatest catastrophe
known since man had inhabited the globe.

10. There is no evidence that the civilization of Egypt was developed in Egypt itself; it
must have been transported (or imported) from some other country. To use the
worlds of a recent writer in Blackwood: till lately it was believed that the use of
papyrus was introduced about the time of Alexander the Great then Lepsius found
the hieroglyphic sign of the papyrus roll on monuments of the 12
th
Dynasty.
Afterwards he found the same sign on monuments of the 4
th
Dynasty.... little doubt is
entertained that writing was understood as early as the days of Menes, the
protomonarch.

The fruits of this investigation are truly marvellous. Instead of exhibiting the
rise of any knowledge, they tend instead to prove that everything is referable to the
very earliest dates. That as soon as men were planted on the banks of the Nile they
were already the cleverest of men that ever lived, endowed with more knowledge than
their successors for centuries and centuries could attain to As yet we have not yet
discovered any trace of the rude, savage Egypt, but have seen her in her very earliest
manifestations already skilful, eruditeand strong. It is impossible to determine the
order of her inventions. How they came by their knowledge is a matter for
speculation; that they possessed it is a matter of fact!

The explanation is simple: the waters of the Atlantic now flow over the
country where all this magnificence and power were developed by slow stages from
the rude beginnings of barbarism.
38
And how mighty must have been the parent nation of which this Egypt was a
colony! Egypt was the magnificent, the golden bridge, ten thousand years long,
glorious with temples and pyramids, illuminated and illustrated by the most
competent and continuous records of human history, along which the civilization of
Atlantis, in a great procession of kings and priests, philosophers and astronomers,
artists and artisans, streamed forward to Greece, to Rome, to Europe, to America.
Look at the record of Egyptian greatness as preserved in her works: the pyramids,
even in their ruins, are the marvel of mankind.

(Note: There is much more in praise of Egypt from Donnelly, in the same vein, but
I must leave it for the reader to find for him or herself. The simple constraints of space
forbid my inclusion of it all here! Therefore, let us close this section with a few final
remarks as to their society.)

Egypts Social Advancement
The state of society in early Egypt was very close to our modern civilization.
Religion consisted in the worship then of one god and the practice of virtue; forty-two
commandments prescribed the duties of men to themselves, their neighbors, their country
and the Deity. A heaven awaited the good and a Hell the vicious; there was also a
Judgment Day when the hearts of men would be weighed.

Monogamy was the strict rule. Not even kings, in the early days were allowed to
have more than one wife, and the wifes status was as high in the early days of Egypt as it
is today in the most civilized of nations of Europe or America.

Slavery was permitted, but the slaves were treated with the greatest humanity. In
the confessions, buried with the dead, the soul was made to declare that I have not
incriminated the slave to his master. There was also a clause in the commandments
which protected the laboring man against the exaction of more than his days labor.
They were merciful to the captives made in war; no picture presents toture being inflicted
upon them; while the representation of a sea-fightshows Egyptian sailors saving their
drowning enemies. When we consider the high ideal of the Egyptians, as proved by
their portrayals of a just life, the principles they laid down as the basis of ethics, the
elevation of women among them, their humanity in war, we must admit that their moral
place ranks very high among the nations of antiquity.

Then look at the proficiency in art of these ancient people. They were the first
mathematicians in the ancient world. The Greeks, whom we regard as the fathers of
Mathematics, were simply pupils of Egypt. The Egyptians were the first land surveyors.
They were the first astronomers, calculating eclipses and watching the periods of planets
and constellations. They knew the rotundity of the earth which it was supposed
Columbus had discovered! They also knew the signs of the zodiac and were using them
1722 yers before Christ. They had clocks and dials for measuring time. They possessed
gold and silver money.

They were the first agriculturalists in the Old World raising all the cereals,
cattle, horses, sheep, etcetera. They manufactured linen so fine a quality that, in the days
of King Amasis (600 BC), one single thread of a garment was composed of 365 minor
threads. They were great metal craftsmen and worked in gold, silver, copper, bronze, and
also in iron, which they tempered to the hardness of steel. The Egyptians were also the
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first chemists. The very word Chemistry comes from Khemi, and Khemi means
Egypt! They manufactured glass and all kinds of pottery; they made small boats out of
earthenware, and they even made large seaworthy vessels out of papyrus reeds! Their
dentists filled teeth with gold, and their farmers hatched out chickens using artificial heat.
They were also the first musicians, possessing guitars, assorted pipes, cymbals, drums,
lyres, harps and flutes.

Summation
With Donnelly, we have considered the high ideals of the Egyptians, as expressed
by their illustrations of just and fulfilling lives, the high moral principles upon which they
based their strict code of ethics, the raising to rightful status of women in their society,
their self-evident humanity in war as is portrayed in their illustrations. The magnificence
of their wonderful arts and crafts, especially in their wall-paintings, their carving of stone,
their working of gold and their intricate fashioning of jewelry.

These still-tangible examples of all of these amazing skills stagger our belief that
such an ancient nation could have attained to such a tremendously high standard. One has
but to look upon their great architectural and building attainments, and contemplate their
many other wondrously brilliant achievements in virtually every conceivable field of
endeavor, to realize their true stature in the ancient world!

Modern man, faced with so many evidences of its cultural refinement, cannot help
but admit that the moral and creatively civilized land of ancient Egypt must rank
extremely high, if not in fact the highest among all the great nations of antiquity.

Other Atlantean Colonies.
Donnelly next touches upon the various other colonies of old Atlantis. Iberian (or
Spanish), Peruvian, and African. I will not spend much time on these, since they are not
nearly so relevant as Mesoamerica or Egypt.

With regard to Iberia; these people who are descended from the people of ancient
pre-Roman Italy and Sardinia are today represented by the Basques. Donnelly describes
them, (via the then 1881 New American Cyclopaedia) as being: of middle size,
compactly built, robust and agile, of a darker complexion than the Spaniards, with grey
eyes and black hair. They are simple, proud, impetuous, merry, and hospitable. The
women are beautiful, skilful in performing mens work, and remarkable for their vivacity
and grace. The Basques are much attached to dancing, and are very fond of the music of
the bagpipe.

The Atlantean Basques
To me, they at first sounded very much like the people who currently live in
Andalusia, and whose women are famous for their Flamenco dancing. The same
description could also be very easily fitted to the itinerant Gypsies who roam over most of
Europe and Britain. However, neither is the case. The Andalusians carry much Berber
or Moorish blood in their veins, whilst the Gypsies are, in fact, descended from the
ancient inhabitants of Turkey.

The Basques are actually thought to be of some as yet unidentified and ancient
European racial type, and appear to be concentrated in the region of the Spanish Pyrenees,
40
though they come form both sides of the SpanishFrench border countries. Their principal
origin is thought to have been along the edge of the Bay of Biscay.

They are remarkably different in culture and language from either Spanish or
French, their unique language being of no identifiable European root-tongue. They are
renowned historically as being enterprising long-range seafarers, and it is also interesting
to note that representatives of their particularly unique race are also found across the
Atlantic, living in close communities in all parts of Central and South America! Some
small groups are also located in the southwestern United States in Nevada and California.

It is also interesting to learn that their ancestors successfully repelled the Romans,
the Visigoths, the Franks, the Normans and the Moors which probably accounts for the
still-intact bloodline of which they are inordinately proud.

I would venture to suggest that, in view of their great seafaring heritage, their
ancient geographical location, and their having spread across to the New World, that this
all points to their original homeland having been Atlantis! In fact, I believe that they are
probably the only true blood-descendants of the ancient Atlanteans extant on the planet
today, together, perhaps, with some of the descendants of the native inhabitants of the
Azores and the Canaries.

The Basques have ferociously resisted all official attempts to integrate them into
surrounding societies, and carefully avoid sullying their purity of line by intermarriage.
They are currently waging an internescine guerilla struggle against both Spain and France
in order to retain their unique status as non-Europeans. We can only trust, even if only
from an historical point of view, that they retain their identity.

The Bretons
Apart from the Basques, the only other dwellers on the eastern Atlantic coast of
Europe who may qualify as descendants of Atlanteans are the Bretons of Brittany, that
protruding peninsula which juts westward into the Atlantic and forms the northern edge of
the Bay of Biscay. These are largely descended from the ancient Amorcians. In my own
opinion, the Bretons are, in fact, the same identical race as the ancient Britons who
inhabited southwest England and Wales, and who proved to be such a thorn in the side of
Julius Caesar during his invasion of England.

All are black-haired and brown-eyed and of short physical stature, and share many
of the independent traits of the Basques in instinctive distrust of strangers and obstinacy
of nature. These same traits are also found in the ancient Pictish people of northern
Scotland who are though to be Britons who were driven northwards by the advancing
Roman Army. The Picts, like the Britons, were never conquered by the Romans, but
retreated to mountain fastnesses from whence they could not be dislodged. They are
reputed to have caused the total disappearance of at least two entire Roman legions that
were sent after them! The legendary King Arthur and his famous army of knights are
believed to have been either Welsh Britons or Scottish Picts.

Thus we have essentially two groups, the Basques and the Bretons/Britons in
western Europe who are extremely likely to have been of direct Atlantean origin and
members of her offshore colonies. Donnelly finds some possibly racial connection
between both European groups and the Berbers of Algeria, in northwestern Africa. He
41
quotes a Dr. Bodichon as saying that: The Atlanteans were the first known navigators.
Like all navigators, they must have planted colonies at a distance. This could also
account for the presence of Basques in the Americas, too!

I think that this is about as far as these people can be pursued in connection with
Atlantis, so I will now move on to a part of the New World thus far not discussed. I refer
to Peru, on the western coast of the Andes in South America.

The Peruvian Colony
Donnelly firmly avers that the Atlanteans, during their far-ranging expeditions into
Brazil, must, at some time, have followed the Amazon and its tributaries through all its
fever-ridden jungles and swamps, into the higher, fertile and heathy regions of Bolivia.
From there they would have travelled much more easily across a beautiful and largely
highland country until they reached the northern cordilleras of the Andes, and then
followed them southward into Peru.

I agree with him in this belief. If the Spanish and Portugese were able to make
such a journey millennia later, clad in hot and heavy armour, accompanied by horses, and
bearing heavy baggage, I see no reason why the much more adventurous, experienced and
hardy Atlanteans could not have done so, and probably with far greater ease. In any case,
I suspect that for the Atlanteans, this would have been a one-way journey with the
intention of colonizing new lands as they went.

Regarding Peru, let me again quote a few more paragraphs from Donnellys book:

Here it would establish its outlying colonies at the terminus of its western line of
advance, arrested only by the Pacific Ocean, precisely as we have seen it advancing up
the Valley of the Mississippi and carrying on its mining operations on the shores of Lake
superior; precisely as we have seen it going eastward up the Mediterranean, past the
Dardanelles, and founding Aryan, Hamitic, and probably Turanian colonies on the far
shores of the black Sea and on the Caspian.

This is the universal empire over which the Hindu books tell us. Deva Nahusha
was ruler; this was the great and aggressive empire to which Plato alludes; this was
the mighty kingdom, embracing the whole of the then known world, from which the
Greeks obtained their conception of the universal father of all men in King Zeus. And in
this universal empire, Seor Lopez must find an explanation of the similarity which, as we
shall show, exists between the speech of the south American Pacific coast on the one
hand, and the speech of Gaul, Ireland, England, Italy, Greece, Bactria and Hindustan on
the other.

Montesino tells us that at some time near the date of the Deluge, America was
invaded by a people with four leaders, named Ayar-manco-topa, Ayar-chaki, Ayar-aucca
and Ayar-uyssu. Ayar says Seor Lopez, is the Sanskrit Ajar, or aje and means
primitive chief, and Manco, chaki, aucca and uyssu, mean respectively
believers, wanderers, soldiers and husbandmen.

We have here a tradition of the castes like that preserved in the four tribal names
of Athens. The laboring class (naturally in a new colony) obtainedthe supremacy, and its
leader was named Pirhua-manco, Revealer of Pir or Light (pu~ur, Umbrian pir).
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Do the laws which control the changes of language, by which a labial suceeds a
labial, indicate that the Mero or Merou of Theopompus, the name of Atlantis, was carried
by the colonists of Atlantis to South America (as the name of old York was translated in a
later age to New York), and became in time Perou or Peru? Was not the Nubian Island
of Merou, with its pyramids built by red men a similar transplantation? And when
the Hindu priest points to his sacred emblem with five projecting points upon it, and tells
us that they typify Mero amd the four quarters of the world, does he not refer to
Atlantis and itsancient, universal empire?

Manco, in the names of the Peruvian colonists, it has been urged, was the same
as Mannus, Manu, and the Santhal Maniko. It reminds us strongly of Menes, Minos, etc.,
who are found at the beginning of so many of the Old World traditions.

The Quichuas this invading people were originally a fair-skinned race with
blue eyes and light even auburn hair; they had regular features, large heads and large
bodies. Their descendants are to this day an olive-skinned people, much lighter in color
than the Indian tribes subjugated by them.

I will avoid repeating all that Donnelly records regarding the Quichuas concerning
their exraordinary skills and constructional achievements, including pyramids, or of their
subsequent subjugation by the Incas after a long and bloody struggle, and a descent into
barbarism and ravage. This is really history and can be read by anyone interested in their
own turmoils in Donnellys book. Instead I will focus only upon what concerns our topic.

At Cuelap, in northern Peru, remarkable ruins were found. They consist of a wall
of wrought stones 3600 feet long, 560 broad and 150 high constituting a solid mass with a
level summit. On this mass was another, 600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 high, making
an aggregate height of three hundred feet! Inside it were rooms and cells which were
used as tombs. Very ancient ruins showing remains of large and remarkable edifices,
were also found near Huamanga, and described by Cieca de Leon. The native traditions
said that this city was built by bearded white men, who came there long before the times
of the Incas, and established a settlement.

The Peruvians made use of aqueducts, which they built with notable skill, using
hewed stones and cement, and making them very substantial. One such aqueduct
extended four hundred and fifty miles across sierras and rivers. Think of a stone
aqueduct reaching from New York to North Carolina!

Their public roads were no less remarkable, they were built of masonry. One ran
along the mountains through the whole length of the empire, from Quito to Chile; another
started from this at Cuzco, went down to the coast, and extended northward to the
equator. These roads were twenty to twenty-five feet wide, were macadamized with
puverized stone mixed wit lime and bitumenous cement, and were walled in by strong
walls more than six feet thick! In many places they were cut for leagues through rock,
great ravines were filled up with solid masonry; rivers were crossed by suspension
bridges, used her long before their introduction into Europe! Along these great roads
caravansaries were established for the accommodation of travellers.

As to the gold of the Peruvians. It can be estimated from the amount sent from
Peru to Spain as booty in Spanish galleons over the course of 25 years, which amounted
43
to more than 800 millions of dollars. (And that is at the value of the US dollar in
Donnellys day, over 100 years ago! One can barely imagine how many $US billions this
would equal in 2001!)

Donnelly then goes on to compare similarities between the civilizations of the Old
and New Worlds, also applicable to these ancient Peruvians:

1. They worshipped the sun, the moon and the planets.

2. They believed in the immortality of the soul.

3. They believed in the resurrection of the body, and accordingly embalmed their dead.

4. Priests examined entrails of sacrificed animals and like the Roman, divined the future
from their appearance.

5. They had an order of virgin nuns vowed to celibacy, the violation of which vow was
punished in both Old and New continents, by their being immured or buried alive.

6. They divide the year into twelve months.

7. Their system of enumeration was by tens. People were divided into decades and
hundreds like the Anglo-Saxons, and the whole nation into bodies of 500, 1,000 and
10,000 with a governor placed over each group

8. They possessed a caste-system; and the trade of father descended to son, as in India.

9. They had bards and minstrels, who sung at their great festivals.

10. Their weapons were the same as those of the Old World, made after the same pattern.

11. They drank toasts and invoked blessings.

12. They built triumphal arches for their returning heroes, and strewed the road before
them with leaves and flowers, as did the Romans and others.

13. They used sedan-chairs for important personages.

14. They regarded agriculture as the primary interest of the empire, and held great fairs
and festivals for the exchange of farmers products

15. The king opened the agricultural season in a great celebration, like the pharaohs of
Egypt, by putting his hand to the plough and ploughing the first furrow.

16. They had an order of chivalry and knighthood, in which the knight knelt before the
king to be knighted, and the attendant ceremony was as that of Middle Ages Europe.

17. There were many striking resemblances between the architecture of the Peruvians and
that of several nations of the Old World, particularly like that of the Pelasgians of ancient
Greece and northern Italy.
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18. Their palace decorations were similar to those of many Old World palaces, especially
those of ancient Egypt.

19. Their pottery closely resembled that of Egypt and Troy.

20. Their ancient language reflected many similarities to Aryan and Semitic tongues, and
to the subsequent Greek and Sanscrit languages.

All of the foregoing similarities point inevitably to a direct link between both old
and New world in ancient times; one which could only have been due to both fundamental
cultures originating from a single central source Atlantis!



The African Colony
Sadly, there isnt much that can be said of the Atlantean colony along the North
and Northwestern African coastal regions. So this section will, of necessity, be brief.

Most of the regions colonized by the Atlanteans, were Berber, Moorish, and
Bedouin. But they did extend so far south as to incorporate Nigeria, and parts of the Ivory
Coast, so many pure Negroes became incorporated into the Atlantean Empire. However,
it would be wrong to automatically assume that the original negroid gods or sports-
stars (as exemplified by the Olmec monuments and stone heads found in the Jungles of
Central America) were necessarily taken there by the Atlanteans. They might easily have
found there way there from ancient Mu in the Pacific, before they ever reached Africa.


Conclusions on Donnellys Work.
Although that isnt the final word in Donnellys great work on Atlantis, I believe
that I have covered sufficient of the necessary bases of his theory, for the purposes of
giving the reader at least a reasonable foretaste of it. There are still two further chapters
dealing with the Noahic line of descent from Shem, and with the Aryan colonies, as well
as his final reconstructive summation of Atlantis itself that I have not covered here, but I
feel that these are not central to the basic issues I have already covered. Thus, I will leave
them for interested readers to discover for themselves.

The burning question that now remains is this. How much of Donnellys story are
we to accept, and what should we discard? This is indeed an extremely difficult thing for
a mere scribe such as myself to answer with any great conviction. True, many of his
assertions and assumptions may have perhaps fallen by the wayside, after all the vast
increase in knowledge and discovery that has taken place since 1882.

Many new, and possibly more exciting, theories have since been promulgated.
Things such as the submarine discoveries of ordered stonework and highways upon the
Atlantic seabed off Bimini and the Bermudas, and, latest of all, the finding of a
submerged pyramid (or pyramids) in the same general area! What these will eventually
turn out to be is anyones guess at present, but we can only hope that they are the first of
many really solid pieces of Atlantean evidence we have sought after for so long!

45
But it is still my own contention that many of the original finds monuments and
artifacts which were discovered way back in previous centuries, and were drawn and
written about in extremely minute detail, have long since been either destroyed or severely
damaged, so we have no other means of learning about them except through the works of
such august and seemingly tireless researchers as Donnelly and his fellow antiquarians.
Thus, I do not feel it is up to me to pass any judgment upon his ideas outlandish though
some of them may appear in the modernistic view.

At least, in my own view, Donnelly had the good scholarliness to posit Atlantis
where Plato claimed it to be, regardless of geological and tectonic difficulties, and not in
some other extremely unlikely but more easily geologically explicable location, as
appears to have become the fashion of late! (Frankly, Im rather surprised that no one
has yet gone so far as to situate Atlantis inside the Hollow Earth itself although there
are some who claim it to be a still-viable underwater city!)

Whilst I give some considerable respect and deference toward people with proven
psychic abilities, I simply cannot accept everything I read of such allegedly spiritually
channelled information. In my humble opinion, very little of the theosophical and
channelled information regarding Atlantis, currently circulating on the Internet and in
published books, cannot really be entertained in such a serious matter as the existence of
Atlantis. It is hard enough for down-to-earth researchers to produce convincing proof
without attempting to prop up logical arguments and slender proofs with such unearthly
spiritual data. There are just too many materially-minded skeptics to be convinced to
even consider putting forward such intangible otherworldly notions.

I might have included the many Atlantis readings of that famed psychic, Edgar
Cayce, if I believed for a second that they would be accepted by the vast bulk of readers.
Instead, I have striven to offer only the best supportive grass-roots evidence available,
albeit somewhat hoary with age!


Some Aspects of this Article that need Explanation
Upon reviewing what Ive written thus far, I find that there are several points
which call for some further elucidation. So, before I conclude this piece I will endeavour
to clear them up.

For example, back in my little piece relating to Osiris, some people may wonder
what on earth he has to do with Atlantis? Well, for a start, I doubt if many Atlantis fans
will doubt that ancient Egypt was very closely associated with the whole story. Especially
since the only people who appeared to be really knowledgable about Atlantis were the
ancient Egyptian priest-scholars of Sais from whom Solon got the story to begin with!
However, Alexander Braghine, in his 1940 classic:The Shadow of Atlantis, refers to the
mysterious land of Amenti, the abode of the beautiful souls mentioned in the Egyptian
Book of the Dead as lying in the far west, which was part of the Kingdom of Osiris.

The Turin Papyrus, which is the largest and most detailed version of this famous
scroll and is referred to as Anis version. Here, this mysterious land is called Aaru,
or Sekhet-Hetep - The Field of Peace and it is described as being a great fertile paradise
across which a mighty river flowed and irrigated it all. Aaru was said to be the land
where the dead socialized with the gods, and were able to occupy themselves just as in
46
their earthly life. They worked the land, hunted animals and played games. To the ancient
Egyptians it must have sounded much like America did to the wretched huddled masses
of poor Europeans who migrated there during the late19th century. Strangely enough,
the Babylonians also held a similar concept of a sacred paradise Arulla which they
said was located in the far west, in the middle of the ocean! They also claimed it to be
the dwelling-place of the their Noah Utnapishtim, and his wife!

Harking back to Osiris. Braghine mentions that the Atlanteans are believed to
have been the original great cultivators of wheat as a staple cereal, and that there is also a
legend in The book of the Dead which tells how Osiris taught the first Egyptians to
cultivate wheat. Braghine also points out that because of the testimony of several
authors of antiquity, many altlantologists have come to believe that the Egyptians
borrowed their god Osiris from the Atlanteans, as well as the notion of the continued
existence of the soul after death!

In another Atlantean book by Robert B. Stacy-Judd, Atlantis Mother of
Empires we learn that Osiris was worshipped as a god by the Atlanteans. Elsewhere,
we have found that the Atlanteans were essentially monotheistic sun-worshippers, so how
could they have had any other gods? The only logical answer I can suggest is that Osiris
must have been a king of some part of Atlantis (as one of ten), who subsequently was
made a god by the people of his own kingdom the Osirians. Hence the custom was
establishing that was to be subsequently adopted by the Egyptians, the Greeks and the
Romans, who all accorded godly stature to their kings after death.

I dont necessarily subscribe to the belief that so many scholars seem to accept,
that Osiris was ever actually an Egyptian king. I believe that Ive already illustrated this
clearly enough in my little fable earlier in this article about Osiris and his family being
hounded out of Atlantis, where he had ruled with his nine sibling royals. Nor do I
necessarily believe that the sets of ten rulers were always the twin descendants of the
original five pairs of male twins alleged to have been born to Poseidon and his wife,
Cleito.
To me this sounds completely unlikely, even allowing for any genetic tendency for
twins to run in the royal bloodline, which is at least feasible to some degree. No. I feel
that if this had become a royal Atlantean tradition, such royal twinscould hardly have
been expected to have been born to order by royal decree - no matter how much of a
godly being Poseidon might have been thought to be. In my view, he was doubtlessly as
human as you or I, and even granted a twin-begetting gene (which, incidentally, might just
as easily have stemmed from Cleitos bloodline as from his his own), there could be no
guarantee that they would necessarily be all twins, much less all boy-twins!

Therefore, the only solution to this puzzle is that similar-looking male infants were
secretly adopted by those kings who didnt have the requisite twinning-gene, and raised,
like Moses was with Pharaohs natural grandson, as royal twin princes - though only
one out of of each pair could actually succeed to their fathers throne. This trickery may
have only needed to be perpetrated for the first two or three generations. After that, the
eldest son of each of the ten kings would have automatically assumed the throne as a plain
matter of natural royal descent.

I cannot imagine that this Twin-Sons business could have persisted for long, if
in fact it ever did at all. Even the roughest of ignorant peasants could never have been
47
hoodwinked as easily as that. And from the descriptions of Atlantis we read today, there
would have been very few peasants among the native-born Atlanteans!

Thus, to get back to Osiris being deposed by his brethren, they were quite
probably not his true blue-blooded kinsmen at all, but an ill-assorted group of unrelated
and possibly adopted changelings. However, I do feel quite certain in my own mind that
Osiris himself was of the Atlantean royal bloodline. The noble image and history that
has survived him in Egyptian legend seems to testify to that belief, and the same is
probably true of Seth, his jealous brother (and let us not forget, his murderer), and Isis
and Nephthys, his two sisters. (Nephthys also being the wife of Seth).


The Question of ancient Royal Intermarriage
This point of close relationship, brings me to another matter that appears to trouble
many people who worry about the incestuous inferences of all this. The Hebrews were
forbidden from the time of the handing down of the Sinai Commandments of their god,
Yahweh, to marry their own siblings, or to have any sexual relations with their immediate
family members. Yet we see the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans blithely
marrying their own sisters and brothers, and even having sex with their own mothers and
fathers, so why were the Hebrews prevented from doing so? Obviously, prior to the time
of the mosaic Laws being handed down, the Hebrews did exactly the same. However,
their God, Yahweh, knew something that they didnt. A simple Rule of Nature that
any modern animal or bird breeder today knows only too well!

After a certain number of generations of inbreeding have passed, the genetic strain
of their forebears begins to weaken. DNA links begin to break down and faults start to
show up in their offspring. These can manifest in many ways, but perhaps the most
immediate weaknesses seem to affect the brain and the motor neuron sytem. It is seen
clearly in Romes rulers after Tiberius, particularly in Caligula, a vicious, mentally and
physically twisted cripple, and Nero, a paranoid pyromaniac who lusted after his own
mother. The sheer mad depravity and cruelty of both of these was legendary.

It was probably this tendency towards mental weakness, lunacy, and other
hereditary diseases and afflictions among its ruling classes thath led to the rapid decline
and fall of the Roman Empire. The same is probably just as true of the later Pharaonic
Dynasties of Egypt, although the familial Royal descent, there, at least, was frequently
punctuated by sudden changes in their ruling families. The only saving grace in both
groups was that there wasnt always a sister for the Pharaoh or Emperor to marry!

The Greek gods, being themselves only glorified human beings, were so utterly
inbred that it was impossible to tell who was whose child, sister, or father most of the
time. However, they were allegedly gods, and we really know little about the moral
proclivities of their actual mortal kings and queens. This was also true of the Babylonians
and the Sumerians before them who revered quite a sex-crazed pantheon of inbred gods.

Even the Biblical Abraham and his wife Sarah, who originated from Ur, in the
Chaldean region of Mesopotamia, hailed from a land where brothers and sisters frequently
married. They themselves were probably unique in being genetically unrelated.
Fortunately for people at that point in time, they were still living well within the original
period of genetic grace and cleanliness of bloodline that had begun with Adam.
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We have absolutely no reason to believe that the Atlanteans were any different in
this regard, particularly if the relationship of Osiris and Isis, and that of their co-siblings,
Seth and Nephthys is true as I believe it had to be, for the legends regarding them are
altogether too powerful and rich for their relationships to have been otherwise.



A Geological Conundrum Possibly Solved?
There remains but one gigantic problem to clear up before I conclude this article
on Atlantis. This concerns the largest stumbling-block to all the theories about an
Atlantic location of the Lost Continent. It is essentially a question which has been
often raised by geologists, and it generally goes something like this:

If there really was once a large continent-sized landmass in between America
and The Straits of Gibraltar why is there no trace of it upon the seabed? How could
such a massive landmass have simply submerged and vanished completely, without
leaving some kind of large seamount, and traces of man-made cities or other artifacts
upon the ocean floor?

Well, since the development of new bathymetric equipment, which can scan the
ocean deeps, without the necessity for laborious, and often highly erroneous line and
plumb bob soundings to be made, several startling features have been revealed upon the
seafloor which are indicative of the one-time existence of just such a raised landmass!
According to recent bathymetric charts and graphics of the central Atlantic Ocean floor
that I have seen, there is till a large uplifted area of the central oceanic ridge which has
been displaced laterally at least 200 miles to the westward of its central fault-line course.

Needless to add, it lies directly between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bahamas
and Cuba in the Carribean. This area also bears several seamounts as well as the Azores
Plateau, which is bounded upon its western side by the tectonically-active Mid-Atlantic
Ridge. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is actually a rift between two tectonic plates which,
because of their constant friction, oozes a continuous outflow of molten magma, which in
turn is solidified as it emerges at the edges of the rift, by the freezing water of the depths.
This has provided the mechanism - the engine - that has been very slowly but steadily
driving the American plate and the Euro-African plates apart for the past 65 million years.

This same oozing forth and setting solid of molten magma occurs beween all
tectonic plates, and it is this multiplied continual separation of plates - probably in
increments as small as around 3 inches a year - that has caused the Earth to expand to
more than twice its original diameter! Lets be adventurous and see what sixty-five
million times three inches works out at in miles, and you will obtain a result close to the
present mean width of the Atlantic! Somewhere around 3,000 miles! As the canny
Scots would say mony a mickle makes a muckle!

(I apologize for this digression, but Im sure readers will take my point regarding
the profound effects of tiny annual amounts over a lengthy period of geological time.)

But, in terms of years, we are looking here at a relatively short geological span
with regard to what happened to Atlantis. Perhaps eleven or twelve thousand years at
most since the final catastrophe. However, given my earlier suggestion of the collapse of
49
giant gas chambers deep under the ocean floor, and assuming that the area concerned
might have collapsed by some three thousand feet, this could have more than adequately
submerged most of the island continent. (Note: If this were to happen to Australia, for
instance, nothing would be left projecting above the oceans surface!) However, in the
case of Atlantis, which is said to have possessed a number of very large mountains, the
peaks of these would have still protruded, forming groups of islands, whilst the less
elevated portions would have created an irregular submerged plateau.

The lower plains would have sunk down into the ocean floor, and swiftly been
covered over with mud and silt by the strong Atlantic currents. Which is exactly what we
find in bathymetric scans of the ocean-bed! Close to the edge of the rift we find two
volcanic islands, Flores and Corvo, and to the east of them are two other groups, one of
five islands, Graciosa, Sao Jorge, Faial, Pico and Terceira, the other is comprised of
two islands, Sao Miguel and Santa Maria with its Formigas islets. All are volcanic and
they are estimated to rise from a mean ocean-floor depth of some two miles or more.

The original mountains may not have been anywhere near such heights, but we
have to allow for the effects of eleven thousand years or more of heavy erosion upon their
lower reaches by the powerful and deep ocean currents found out there, in the midst of the
Gulf Stream! However, the bases of these one-time powerful volcanoes are still
surrounded by, and buried in, the last eroding remains of the Azores plateau - once the
highlands of Altlantis - which still cover a curved area something like 800 to 1000 miles
across.

It is also possible that a portion of the original continent may have followed along
the edge of the mid-Atlantic ridge down perhaps as far south as the latitude of the
Venzuela or even the Amazon Basin, but this would be purely surmise, so I will be
satisfied if the Azores region and its adjacent southerly seamounts, together with the
Azores ridge, which runs east of the Azores directly toward the Straits of Gibraltar, can be
made to prove out as what I imagine them to be, in due course.

Historically, according to Plato, the northern side of the island-continent was
especially mountainous, and this would fit in well as the present location of the Azores
plateau. Beyond this, given our present limits of knowledge, we cannot venture without
getting ito a lot of rather heavy speculation.


On A Final Note
I must confess that I was originally tempted to set before my readers several
different and conflicting theories upon the site, form, nature and demise of Atlantis, as
well as the activities of its inhabitants. But, upon mature eflection, I felt that this would
only succeed in further confusing what is already a highly confused and much-argued
topic. So, out of all the many many concepts and theories on this elusive continent, I
elected to choose that of Ignatius Donnelly, one of the boldest, yet most straightforward
antiquarians on the subject, even though he has been dead for the past century;.

I feel that I made the right choice, as he was a man with an alert mental eye for the
minutest detail in rendering his account of Atlantean history. Not that others havent
presented equally excellent and convincing cases, and alternative scenarios. They have,
and I have enjoyed most of them, and concurred with many of their views. Nevertheless,
50
I feel convinced that Ignatius Donnelly (even though I sense him to possibly be in some
error on a few points) has, warts and all, to my mind at least, presented the best and most
complete overall convincing case for an Atlantic Atlantis!

I can only hope that those who have read - albeit through my eyes - this rather potted
glance through his intensely detailed and lengthy opus, will find his work of such interest
as to download or purchase his great book, Atlantis, The Antediluvian World and read
it in its entirety for themselves. It will certainly give them furiously to think!

And so, having manfully fought back the urge to conclude this piece by quoting
the final pages of Donnellys excellent book, I shall, instead, mercifully leave my readers
to enjoy that pleasure for themselves - without any further irritating promptings or
interjections from me!

Thus, I shall now rest my case (and my keyboard-weary fingers) here, totally in
favor of the concept of there once having existed an island-continent (or an aggregation
of perhaps two or three large islands) called Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.


The End



All the above text, excepting quoted sections,
is the Copyright of Gerry Forster, 2001





Bibliography

Atlantis, The Antediluvian World Ignatius Donnelly. 1882. Harper. New York 1882.

Atlantis Mother of Emires Robert B. Stacy-Judd. 1939. Adventures Unlimited Press. 1999.

The Shadow Of Atlantis Alexander Braghine. 1940. Adventures Unlimited Press. 1997.

Lost Cities of Atlantis, Ancient Europe & the Mediterranean David Hatcher Childress. 1996*.

Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of South America David Hatcher Childress. 1986*.

Lost Cities of North and Central America David Hatcher Childress. 1992*

Dakes Annotated Reference Bible Finnis J. Dake. Dake Bible Sales Inc. !979.

History of Ancient Egypt Nathaniel Harris. Chancellor Press. 1997.

Egypt Vivian Davies & Renee Friedman. British Museum Press. 1998.

Timaeus and Critias(unfinished) Plato. Circa 340 BC. Internet sources.

plus various Internet Historical References

(* published by Adventures Unlimited Press)