r/atlantis

I think I may have stumbled onto a possible reinterpretation of Atlantis, the Pillars of Hercules, and even parts of ancient Mediterranean mythology.
Hear me out.
Most people assume Plato’s Atlantis was somewhere deep in the Atlantic Ocean because he says it was “beyond the Pillars of Hercules.” But when you actually read Plato directly, he never clearly says “far west.” He says Atlantis was before/in front of/beyond the straits called the Pillars of Heracles.
What if the LOCATION of the pillars became confused over time?
I think the original “Pillars of Hercules” may not have been Gibraltar at all.
I think they may have originally referred to the narrow maritime passage between modern-day Sicily and Italy (the Strait of Messina region).
Why?
Because:
it’s an ancient maritime chokepoint,

heavily tied to mythology,

and even today remains surprisingly shallow in places.

When sea levels are lowered by ~120 meters (Ice Age levels), Sicily, Malta, and the surrounding shelves become a MUCH larger connected landmass.
Malta especially becomes interesting.
Now combine that with Plato’s description:
a large fertile island/landmass,

advanced engineering,

canals,

rings of water,

maritime dominance,

rich metals (orichalcum),

elephants,

and destruction by flooding/earthquakes.

Malta already contains some of the oldest megalithic structures on Earth — older than Stonehenge and the pyramids — many with astronomical alignments.
And interestingly:
actual “orichalcum” ingots were discovered off the coast of Sicily.
Now here’s where my theory gets really weird:
The myth of Hercules “splitting the pillars apart” may actually preserve a much older memory of humans modifying or opening a dangerous maritime passage for trade and navigation.
I don’t think Hercules was originally Hercules.
I think the myth may descend from much older Near Eastern traditions associated with Marduk — a deity tied to:
ordering waters,

creating civilization,

and separating chaos.

Over thousands of years:
Marduk → Phoenician adaptations → Greek Hercules.
The location and story slowly drifted westward and became attached to Gibraltar.
Now here’s the part that really made me pause:
Plato says Atlantis provided easier access to:
other islands,

and “the continent beyond.”

That actually fits the central Mediterranean extremely well.
From Sicily/Malta you have direct maritime access to:
Sardinia,

Corsica,

the Balearics,

North Africa,

Iberia,

and eventually the Atlantic itself.

It functions like a gateway between worlds.
And unlike the deep Atlantic Ocean, the Sicily–Malta shelf becomes incredibly shallow after flooding.
So if a massive tsunami and post-Ice Age sea rise swallowed most of the connected lowlands, what would remain?
shallow muddy waters,

submerged shelves,

dangerous navigation,

and partially sunken coastlines.

Which is EXACTLY what Plato says happened after Atlantis sank:
the waters became muddy and difficult to sail through.
That makes far more sense in a shallow Mediterranean shelf system than in the open Atlantic Ocean.
I also don’t think Atlantis necessarily “vanished completely.”
A civilization centered around Malta/Sicily could have been:
devastated by tsunamis,

fragmented by rising seas,

and remembered by survivors as a world swallowed by water.

To later generations, the surviving highlands (modern Sicily/Malta) would simply appear as remnants of a much larger lost world.
And finally:
Plato says Atlantis controlled regions toward Libya and Tyrrhenia (Italy) — which geographically fits the central Mediterranean far better than a random Atlantic island.
I’m not claiming this is proven fact.
But honestly, a submerged Ice Age/post-Ice Age Mediterranean maritime civilization centered around Malta + Sicily feels more plausible to me than a giant lost continent in the Atlantic.
Curious what everyone thinks.

Two cases that have been on my mind lately as I've been delving into this research program.

Pinotti et al. 2025 in Nature paired ancient-genome sequencing of Picuris Pueblo individuals with Picuris oral-traditional accounts of lineage continuity back to the Chacoan era. The two converged. Lineage-group identity, migration narratives, and place-name continuity preserved across roughly a thousand years. Specific named individuals from the deeper end — their biographies, what they did, who they were — largely didn't.

Burley's 1998 paper on Tongan archaeology documents a cleaner version of the same pattern. The early Tu'i Tonga sacerdotal genealogy preserves position-ordinals and names back to ~AD 950, supported by institutional priestly recitation. The names are there. But Burley's exact phrase: "Little is known of these individuals beyond their names."

Two regions with no methodological connection. Same within-tradition pattern. Institutional infrastructure preserves the names but not the people.

The standard cumulative-culture story (Henrich, Boyd & Richerson) tells us high-fidelity transmission preserves cultural content but doesn't specify what enables high fidelity for some content and not others. The cultural-attraction story (Sperber) tells us drift goes toward cognitively easy forms but doesn't explain why some content resists that drift for millennia. Kelly's mnemonic-architecture story actually predicts that institutional infrastructure should preserve named-individual content. The Pinotti and Burley anchors suggest it doesn't, at least at this granularity.

Curious whether anyone here has worked on the granularity question explicitly. Within-tradition contrasts (named ancestors vs. lineage segments, ritual formulas vs. ritual explanations, named founders vs. named offices) seem like the cleanest empirical test — same source, same institution, same time depth, different granularity. Are there other case studies in the literature beyond Pinotti and Burley?

Splendour* sorry

The Colouration of the Ridges of the Richat

The three ridges of the Richat Structure align precisely to the position and size of the the walls in the description of Atlantis and, of course, are the walls. https://aedra.co.uk/atlantis/#overlay

Topographical map of the Richat Structure

Diagram of the ridges of the Richat Structure

However they are described as each being clad in a different metal.

Critias 116c https://aedra.co.uk/atlantis/critias/

"the wall around the outermost ring they encased over its entire circuit with bronze, as if applying a coating; and the one inside they overlaid with tin, and the (third) around the acropolis itself there flashed fiery gleams from orichalcum."

Even if the walls merely had a 200m perimeter this would already be on the edge of conceivability, but the outer wall is described as having a 400km perimeter and the inner ring a 19km perimeter.

I previously thought that perhaps this could be explained if only the gate towers were coated in this metal like the decorated gate tower of Babylon but actually there's a much simpler and more prosaic solution (credit u/Porkypineer), that the stone ridges were naturally coloured differently due to their differnt stone compositions and that the idea of them being purposely coated was a narrative exaggeration.

This aligns much better with the phrase "..as if applying a coating..".

It happens that each of the ridges is made of a different rock composition and therefore they naturally have different colours that correspond to the colours described. The whole site is so dusty today that this isn't so clear but if the ridges were washed with a bit of rain and were district from a vegetated ground this might have been more obvious.

Outer ridge "bronze"

As shown in the diagram above the outer ridge is sandstone. The layer forming this ridge would need to be a slightly harder, erosion-resistant band of sandstone but still sandstone and sandstone has a naturally golden-red tone similar to bronze.

Sandstone

Middle ridge "tin"

The middle ridge is still within the sandstone layers in my simplified diagram but is described as mix of sandstone and limestone and must have a different composition because it shows up very prominently in the magnetics imagery from this paper https://www.researchgate.net/figure/D-magnetic-and-gravimetric-modelling-of-the-Richat-structure-along-a-NNE-SSWoriented_fig4_355898398, which suggests it is much richer in magnetic minerals. Limestone is naturally greyer than sandstone and magnetic mineral ore also tends to be naturally greyish. This grey tone is similar to the colour of tin.

Limestone

Central ridge "red orichalcum"

This ridge is most compositionally different being primarily made of igneous and breccia rock. Breccia is a type of rock formed by a combination of crushed igneous and sedimentary rocks and is commonly reddish in tone. It can contain shiny igneous rocks stained reddish by iron oxide such as brown chert and red jasper. This matches the description "there flashed fiery gleams from orichalcum"

Breccia

Rather disappointingly this suggests the allusive orichalcum which had been suggested to possibly be a mixture of silver and copper might actually not be a metal at all but simply these pieces of chert and jasper.

So where the text says:

"the walls and the columns and the floor [of the temple]—they lined with orichalcum."

and

"the inscriptions written by the first kings on a pillar of orichalcum, which stood in the middle of the island in the sanctuary of Poseidon [Oceanus]."

This may not be studs of copper and a pillar of solid copper but rather just a mosaic of these shiny red rocks and some big column of breccia.

Therefore these walls, and consequentially, the orichalcum of the temple are good examples of where the account from Plato has clearly exaggerated natural features into the impression of grander, highly advanced works. This begs the question of whether the entire myth is simply a exaggeration of what could have been a settlement no different in technology that any other neolithic settlement of the time, with mud huts, flint tools and no real metallurgy.

This appears to make sense at first glance but there's still the issue that sailing is incredibly central to the account. They're said to have sailed to the Mediterranean and people are even said to have sailed to America.

I don't see how it would have been possible to make boats that could stay at sea for weeks, with sleeping areas and storage, and to be able to cope with large waves, without being made out of planks of wood, and you can't create planks of wood without metal saws.

Perhaps it's possible that, although they never perfected or industrialised the process, they were able to smelt some copper or iron into primitive saws and ended up as basically neolithic people but with large sea-faring vessels.

I'd previously assumed the scaled fish/serpentine features of the Apkallu was an allusion to plate metal but actually perhaps they really were simply wearing the skins of large fish, orcas. There is already shown to be a connection between orcas and Atlanteans in the account from Claudius Aelianus. https://archive.org/details/L449AelianCharacteristicsOfAnimalsIII1217/page/n108/mode/1up

The history from Sanchuniathon appears to be the most in-depth and precise of any historian and he describes the people who first make boats coming some generations after the Titans or Aletae, called the Dioscuri: https://topostext.org/work/230#1.9.17

"They are also called Aletae and Titans. From these were born Amynos and Magus, who established villages and sheepfolds. From them came Misor and Suduc, that is to say “Straight” and “Just”: these discovered the use of salt.
'From Misor was born Taautus, who invented the first written alphabet; the Egyptians called him Thoyth, the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks Hermes.
'From Suduc came the Dioscuri, or Cabeiri, or Corybantes, or Samothraces: these, he says, first invented a ship. From them have sprung others, who discovered herbs, and the healing of venomous bites, and charms."

So according to Sanchuniathon it was the Dioscuri who first invented ships. It's possible all these distinct generations of people may have been lumped together under Atlanteans in Plato's account.

The note he makes about discovering the use of salt is also important for ship travel as it's a means of preserving food on long voyages.

The Dioscuri are famous in other myth for being twins. They are thought to be akin to Ashvins of Indian Vedic mythology and Castor and Pollux of Greek mythology. If the Dioscuri were the true, sea-faring Atlanteans this would also help explain the dominance of twin sculptures from the Vinca Culture. As the Vinca Culture emerges shortly after Anatolian Neolithic Farmers colonise Greece.

Vinca Culture twins wearing masks 5400BC - 4500BC

To conclude, I think these people could have been substantially more advanced than other neolithic peoples in the sense they smelt simple saws and then created boats aided by the fact they were in a landscape that made farming substantially simpler than most places. But they possibly didn't perfect metallurgy and were likely still wearing animal skins and largely using flint tools.

I believe this animal skin, flint tool people made it to America, because it still doesn't make sense to me that the account could have described this continent of America without someone visiting.

In a previous post I was observing the similarities between the Babylonian story of Marduk (the Enūma Eliš) and the account of Atlantis. (The same account is in Norse mythology as Odin vs Ymir).

I assumed that the Enūma Eliš came from previous Sumerian myths but didn't look this up at the time, it turns out it does and that the older Sumerian myths are also preserved. Enūma Eliš is a combination of two seperately written Sumerian stories; the stories of Ninurta vs Anzû and Ninurta vs Asag, I haven't actually gone through the source texts but they're available here:

https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/1/10

https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr162.htm

Ninurta vs Anzû reflects the account of Enki vs Apsu which is the prequel to the later conflict of Marduk vs Tiamat which reflects the story of Ninurta vs Asag. Asag here is a mountain god rather than a saltwater god. I think it's possible that the later Babylonian myth may have preserved various details that we may have lost from what remains of the Sumerian versions.

To recap, Marduk is needed to fight Tiamat as Enki is unable to defeat Tiamat. I liken the resolute Tiamat to the proto-Athenians in Plato's account. Greece, along with Anatolia are mountainous regions so both mountain and saltwater attributes would fit to this territory.

Isaiah 64

So, I was in church earlier today and they were reading Isaiah 64. It's a cryptic passage http://qbible.com/hebrew-old-testament/isaiah/63.html which covers:

• Mountains flowing down at the presence of the Elohim.
• Elohim doing "terrible things".
• Human likened to being made out of clay by the father.

People in this sub might see the reference to "mountains flowing down" as a similar event that is described to have taken place in the region of Athens in Critias.

Critias 111a-c https://aedra.co.uk/atlantis/critias/ :

Since many great floods have occurred during the nine thousand years—for that is the number of years which have passed from that time to the present—the soil which has washed down from the high places during these ages and disasters has not, as in other regions, accumulated into a mass worth mentioning; instead it has continually flowed around and disappeared into the depths.
What remains now, compared with what then existed, is like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease: all the rich and soft soil having been washed away, and only the thin framework of the land left behind.
But in those days the land was still intact. In those days the mountains had high hills of earth upon them, and the plains now called the “fields of Phelleus” possessed deep rich soil; and there was much forest in the mountains, of which even now there remain visible proofs.

Timaeus 25c-d

But at a later time, when extraordinary earthquakes and floods occurred, in a single day and night of grievous calamity, all your warrior force together sank into the earth..

The Elohim doing "terrible things" is very similar to the account of the terrible things that Marduk does to Tiamat.

Humans made out of clay is also similar to how the Enūma Eliš concludes, as Marduk forms humans out of the blood of the defeated Tiamat. Formed from blood rather than clay isn't a match but the idea of humans being created as a theme of the story would be another strange coincidence, especially as it serves by junction in the gabbled account we get from Isaiah.

We know that many of the biblical myths derive from Sumerian so this isn't a great surprise. But it's the same tale of Atlantis finally defeating the stubborn Greeks helped by a climatic event involving earthquakes and the washing away of top soil by the rain.

The Elohim then is a group term for the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers in general, these in include both Enki and Marduk and were 'the gods' or the Atlanteans.

Alfred Watkins coined the term "ley lines" while riding through Herefordshire, but the concept predates him by thousands of years. Ancient Chinese geomancers called them "dragon paths" within feng shui systems. Aboriginal Australians mapped "songlines" across entire continents — invisible tracks connecting sacred sites through sound and memory. The Nazca people etched their versions directly into desert earth, visible only from above. What's striking is the convergence. Cultures with zero documented contact independently recognized invisible corridors of energy threading through landscapes. Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, Machu Picchu, and the Pyramids of Teotihuacan all sit on intersecting coordinates that modern GPS confirms align with unusual geometric precision. The Atlantean traditions preserved in oral lineages describe these lines not as passive geography but as active infrastructure — a planetary nervous system that once carried information the way fiber optic cables carry data today. Watkins didn't discover anything. He remembered something.