fri 29/03/2024

Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC Two | reviews, news & interviews

Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC Two

Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC Two

Did Atlantis really exist? Set aside the crackpot theories and look at the evidence

Did Atlantis really exist? Hughes’s infectious enthusiasm carried us along nicelyBBC/Seamus McCracken
Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never guess. They were both obsessed with discovering that great, drowned civilisation of antique myth, Atlantis. Gladstone thought it was located somewhere on the South Atlantic, so he proposed a government sponsored expedition but was turned down by the treasury, and Himmler thought that the Ayrian master race was directly descended from Atlantians and that Tibet was the place, so he organised an expedition in 1939 (as if there wasn’t enough to occupy him that year). Excluding the finer details of master-race lineage, could either of them have been right? Did Atlantis, as first envisaged by Plato, and subsequently spawning thousands of books, really exist?

Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never guess. They were both obsessed with discovering that great, drowned civilisation of antique myth, Atlantis. Gladstone thought it was located somewhere on the South Atlantic, so he proposed a government sponsored expedition but was turned down by the treasury, and Himmler thought that the Ayrian master race was directly descended from Atlantians and that Tibet was the place, so he organised an expedition in 1939 (as if there wasn’t enough to occupy him that year). Excluding the finer details of master-race lineage, could either of them have been right? Did Atlantis, as first envisaged by Plato, and subsequently spawning thousands of books, really exist?

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Bettany Hughes, should actually read the book properly, before surmising plato spun the Atlantis story from things he had heard here and there. Plato was told the story by Solon, an Egyptian priest, who also told Plato how ,the Greeks had fought and stopped an advancing army before it reached Egypt, and, how that army was destroyed by the same force that destroyed Atlantis. (Which was due west of the pillars of Hercules.) The pillars where more than likely volcanic in nature and close enough together to be seen as twin pillars, to the east of Thera.

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