World Ocean : Path to Atlantis

"It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced civilization." SRK. Glanville

The trail followed has led us along the haunting tracks of a lost civilization of navigators, builders and astronomers. To sum up, one or more cataclysms appear to have been involved in its ultimate demise, but not its total extinction - some survivors escaped with scattered remnants of their science and civilization to start again elsewhere. At least one of the cataclysms involved was of a global nature, and is now thought to have had something to do with the end of the last Ice Age, around twelve thousand years ago.

The survivors appear to have successfully settled, colonized and sown the seeds of their science and civilization in some parts of the world, and met with defeat - either from the original inhabitants, further cataclysmic violence, or just the passage of the time - in others. And though the ages have all but effaced the traces of their presence in the mists of prehistory, what remains to us has still been enough to tantalize and polarize thinkers for more than a couple of thousand years, and continues to do so today.

Let it be summed up in the words of Charles H. Hapgood, from the final chapter of his work, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, and chapter; 'A Civilization that Vanished.'

'The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilization, of an advanced kind, which either was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilizations of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. It was only in the 18th century that we developed the practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.'[4]

Hapgood never referred to any one 'ancient civilization' by name, such as Atlantis. It would have been more than his reputation was worth and, in his own words, 'the book contains enough hard evidence to stand on its own.' Nevertheless the echoes of Atlantis ring like sunken bells beneath the surface, and can hardly fail to occur to the reader.

Graham Hancock adds more of the details which we have seen in our lost civilization:

'A nation of navigators, then. And a nation of builders, too: Tiahuanaco builders, Teotihuacan builders, pyramid builders, Sphinx builders, builders who could lift and position 200-ton blocks of limestone with apparent ease, builders who could align vast monuments to the cardinal points with uncanny accuracy. Whoever they were, these builders appeared to have left their characteristic fingerprints all over the world in the form of cyclopean polygonal masonry, site layouts involving astronomical alignments, mathematical and geodetic puzzles, and myths about gods in human form.'

So why choose Atlantis as our focus? The legends, discourses and myths point to a pre-eminent civilization that existed before the flood. Call it Poseidia, Lemuria or Mu, it was known by many names, and by many cultures. There are more myths that point to Atlantis than any of the other sunken civilizations, and these myths seem the most strongly branded in our collective consciousness. Anyway, my favorite Greek philosopher has much to say about Atlantis, and I can't just gag an eminent soul, can I? Or, said in other words, those of Rand and Rose Flem-Ath:

'The astonishing significance of Plato's account of Atlantis is the remarkable fact that in three short sentences he describes with amazing accuracy the fundamental geographic features of our planet as seen from Antarctica. Somewhere and somehow amidst the chaos of history, perhaps as a dying legacy, the Atlanteans entrusted their world view to the priests of ancient Egypt. One of these priests disclosed this secret geography to Plato's ancestor, Solon. This ancient, yet accurate depiction of our planet proves that not only did Atlantis exist on Antarctica, but it was an advanced civilization, capable of conceptualizing and mapping the entire planet.'[3]

Let Plato speak:

'This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean. In those far-away days that Ocean could be navigated, as there was an island outside the channel which your countrymen tell me you call the "Pillars of Heracles". This island was larger than Libya and Asia together, and from it seafarers, in those times, could make their way to the others, and thence to the whole opposite continent, which encircles the true outer Ocean. For this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.'

For the Greeks of Solon's time the Atlantic Ocean was a body of water that completely surrounded the world. Click on the globe below for the map of the world as they then knew it:


click here

From our own global perspective, it has been suggested that Atlantis was lost partly because we lost the original meaning of the term "Atlantic Ocean".

It was only later when the age of exploration discovered (or invented) new oceans that 'Atlantic' came to mean just the water between Europe/Africa and North/South America. Atlantic Ocean in Solon's time was the World Ocean that oceanographers teach us today.[3]

So the evidence points to a continental-sized island civilization which was destroyed - or sank - in a series of cataclysms. It appears to have been located in the 'Atlantic', 'real', and 'world ocean'. The problem is, there is no such inhabitable place on the earth, and despite our best efforts, we haven't yet found the remains of one. So how do you lose a continent? It is a problem that has plagued theorists and scholars for centuries.

'For Graham Hancock, the Antarctica theory of the Flem- Aths came as a kind of deliverance. A few months into work on his book about the problem of a lost civilization, he received a letter of resignation from his researcher. It explained that, as far as he could see, the search was quite pointless, since such a civilization would have to be enormous - at least two thousand miles across, with rivers and mountains, and a considerable history of long-term development. There was no known land mass in the world that could have accommodated such a civilization. As to the notion that it could lie at the bottom of the Atlantic, the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, now so thoroughly mapped, showed no sign of a lost continent. The same was true of the floor of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. So in spite of all the evidence for some earlier civilization - such as that contained in Hapgood's maps - it looked as if there was nowhere its remains might be lurking.'[4]

On the trail of the cradle of human civilization himself, Dr. William Fairfield Warren found many traces of the lost civilization in myths. He believed it could be at the North Pole. He wrote in 1885:

'Students of antiquity must often have marveled that in nearly every ancient literature they should encounter the strange expression "the Navel of the Earth". Still more unaccountable would it have seemed to them had they noticed how many ancient mythologies connect the cradle of the human race with this earth-navel. The advocates of the different sites which have been assigned to Eden have seldom, if ever, recognized the fact that no hypothesis on this subject can be considered acceptable which cannot account for this peculiar association of man's first home with some sort of natural centre of the earth.'[5]

So when we are looking for a lost civilization that acted as the cradle of the human race, Warren suggests, we are looking for some sort of natural centre of the earth.

The main contenders for the so-called 'cradle of civilization' are Sumeria, Egypt, China and India. Besides the fact that the myths of the 'Navel of the Earth' originate from these ancient cultures, none of these 'cradles' fit the physical description of a 'natural centre', as myth suggests. We have to look elsewhere. Plato has more clues for us:

'I have described the city and the environs of the ancient palace nearly in the words of Solon, and now I must endeavor to represent the nature and arrangement of the rest of the land. The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea.'

'The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist, having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts, abundant for each and every kind of work.'[2]

Plato recorded these words and left the audience hanging by leaving his last work Critias, unfinished. Of all the colorful myths of Ancient Greece and Rome, mankind seems to have remembered and been the most fascinated by those of the lost continent. Curiously, it has also shifted over the centuries from a matter of philosophical inquiry into something little less than scientific controversy.

"Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia."[1]

The description the Egyptian priest, Sonchis, gave Solon, as retold by Plato, contains many clues to the site of the country the lost civilization inhabited. Let's review the points;

First it was an island, and a continent bigger than what the Greeks of Solon's time termed 'Libya' and 'Asia'. The land was very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea - or high above sea level. There were numerous high mountains and impressive cliffs rising from the ocean. Other islands lay near the main island of Atlantis, and it had rich mineral resources and could be found in a distant point in the 'Atlantic', or the 'real' Ocean. Lastly, it lay beyond the known world - the Pillars of Heracles, and was in its own way surrounded by a 'true continent'. Curiously also, it appears that the Egyptian priest gave Solon clues and a date for the final catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis. There was a change in the course of the sun, and the world was concussed by earthquakes of extraordinary violence, which were followed by worldwide floods. The date was 9560 BC.

If we turn to Whitakers Almanac we get the following description of the geology of Antarctica:

"The most conspicuous physical features of the continent are its high inland plateau (much of it over 10,000 ft.), the Transantarctic Mountains ... and the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula and off-lying islands. The continental shelf averages 20 miles in width (half global mean, and in places it is non-existent) ..."

At an average elevation of 6,500 feet, Antarctica is the highest continent in the world, in fact, it averages more than twice as high as Asia with 3,200 feet, and three times as high as South America and Africa, who come a distant third with an average elevation of 2,000 feet each. Antarctica fits the picture in several other aspects as well. The extensive mineral resources found on Antarctica make it a prize for the fossil-fuel industry, and thus a politically important piece of property for every self-respecting nation in the modern world.

'Antarctica is our least understood continent. Most of us assume that this immense island has been ice-bound for millions of years. But new discoveries prove that parts of Antarctica were free of ice thousands of years ago, recent history by the geological clock. The theory of 'earth-crust displacement' explains the mysterious surge and ebb of Antarctica's vast ice sheet.'

The fact that coal has been discovered in Antarctica further points to the fact that it was once forested. Plants cannot grow with the meager light afforded at the earth's poles, so if it was indeed forested it could not always have been centered on the planet's southern pole.

As a continent comparable in size to North America, Antarctica thus had the potential to host a rich and wealthy, and necessarily maritime civilization. Plato describes Atlantis as an island, ringed by the 'boundless continent'. When looking at the world from the perspective of Antarctica, it indeed looks little more than an island, bounded by a massive continent.

Plato is of course not the only one, but few cultures have as much detail as he about the actual site of Atlantis, or the 'home of the gods', itself. Most describe the local circumstances of the cataclysm. Nevertheless, there are many scattered tales that are also quite revealing, commonly describing heavenly disturbances, the onset of the great flood and the story of those surviving it. Of them all, those of the Avestic Aryans of pre-Islamic Iran are the most striking, and again point to their original 'paradise' that was destroyed by the cataclysm. It appears to describe the same story of Noah, Deucalion and all the other Deluge survivors, but curiously alludes to a part of the world where another aspect of the cataclysm seemed to be taking place:

'The Avestic scriptures take us back to a time of paradise on earth, when the remote ancestors of the ancient Iranian people lived in the fabled Airyana Vaejo, the first good and happy creation of Ahura Mazda that flourished in the first age of the world: the mythical birthplace and original home of the Aryan race.

'In those days Airyana Vaejo enjoyed a mild and productive climate with seven months of summer and five of winter. Rich in wildlife and in crops, its meadows flowing with streams, this garden of delights was converted into an uninhabitable wasteland of ten months' winter and only two months summer as a result of the onslaught of Angra Mainyu, the Evil One:

"The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created was the Airyana Vaejo ... The Angra Mainyu, who is full of death, created an opposition to the same, a mighty serpent and snow. Ten months of winter there are now, two months of summer, and these are cold as the water, cold as the earth, cold as the trees ... There all around falls deep snow; that is the direst of plagues..."

'When Angra Mainyu sent the 'vehement destroying frost' he also 'assaulted and deranged the sky' and had mastered 'one third of the sky and overspread it with darkness'. Ahura Mazda calls a meeting of the gods, and tells us that 'the fair Yima, the good shepherd of high renown in Airyana Vaejo,' attended this meeting with all his excellent mortals. It is at this point that the strange parallels with the traditions of the biblical flood begin to crop up, for Ahura Mazda takes advantage of the meeting to warn Yima of what is about to happen as a result of the powers of the Evil One:

"And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima saying: 'Yima the fair ... Upon the material world a fatal winter is about to descend, that shall bring a vehement, destroying frost. Upon the corporeal world will the evil of the winter come, wherefore snow will fall in great abundance...

"And all three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and those that live on the tops of mountains, and those that live in the depths of the valleys under the shelter of stables.

"Therefore make thee a var [a hypogoeum or underground enclosure] the length of a riding ground to all four corners. Thither bring thou the representatives of every kind of beast, great and small, of the cattle, of the beasts of burden, and of men, of dogs, of birds, and of the red burning fires.

"There shalt thou make water flow. Thou shalt put birds in the trees along the water's edge, in verdure which is everlasting. There put specimens of all plants, the loveliest and most fragrant, and of all fruits the most succulent. All these kinds of things and creatures shall not perish as long as they are in the var. But put there no deformed creature, nor impotent, nor mad, neither wicked, nor deceitful, nor rancorous, nor jealous; nor a man with irregular teeth, nor a leper ..."

'Apart from the scale of the enterprise there is only one real difference between Yima's divinely inspired var and Noah's divinely inspired ark: the ark is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water; the var is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating 'winter' which will destroy every living creature by covering the earth with a freezing blanket of ice and snow.'[1]



The Avestic Aryans also maintained that in later years Airyana Vaejo was a place in which:

"The stars, the moon and the sun are only once a year seen to rise and set, and a years seems only a day."

Hindu tradition maintains that the literary monuments of the Indus Valley, the Vedas, are revealed texts, meaning that they were passed down from the time of the gods. Like the myths of the 'First Time' in Egypt, the Vedas originate from the period of the 'gods' - not in the Indus Valley however - but at a place called Mount Meru, the land of the gods. These again seem to describe the sun in polar conditions. The Mahabarata describes:

'At Meru the sun and the moon go round from left to right every day, and so do all the stars ... The mountain by its lustre, so overcomes the darkness of night, that the night can hardly be distinguished from day ... The day and night together are equal to a year to the residents of the place ...'

'In the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient Indian text, we read, "The gods behold the sun, after it has once arisen for half a year." The seventh Mandala of the Rig Veda contains a number of 'Dawn Hymns.' One of these (VII, 76) says that the dawn has raised its banner on the horizon with its usual splendour and reports in Verse 3 that a period of several days elapsed between the first appearance of the dawn and the rising of the sun that followed it. Another passage states, 'many were the days between the first beams and the dawn and actual sunrise.'

That Antarctica was once ice-free and capable of sustaining an influential civilization ties in with the unexplained nature of Ice Ages on this planet. Hancock muses:

'If earth-crust displacements don't happen on earth, how do we account for the otherwise awkward fact that not a single one of the ice-caps built up around the world during the previous Ice Ages seems to have occurred at - or even near - either of the present poles. On the contrary, land areas bearing the marks of former glaciation are very widely distributed. If we cannot assume crustal shifts, we must find some other way to explain why the ice-caps appear to have reached sea level within the tropics on three continents: Asia, Africa and Australia.'

Without going into whether or not Antarctica once harboured a civilization, Charles Hapgood's solution to the problem of the Ice Ages is simple:

'The only ice age that is adequately explained is the present ice age in Antarctica. This is excellently explained. It exists, quite obviously because Antarctica is at the pole, and for no other reason. No variation of the sun's heat, no galactic dust, no volcanism, no subcrustal currents, and no arrangements of land elevations or sea currents account for the fact. We may conclude that the best theory to account for an ice age is that area concerned was at the pole. We thus account for the Indian and African ice sheets, though the areas once occupied by them are now in the tropics. We account for all ice sheets of continental size in the same way.'

Was Antarctica the continent that harboured the lost maritime civilization of builders and navigators? Was the lost civilization, to which most of the world's cultures ascribe their paradisical origin, that which Plato calls Atlantis? Did the entire continent slip, in one or more cataclysmic earth-crust displacements, directly into the position of the south pole?

If the planet is indeed subject to cyclical floods and cataclysms, and the Atlantean civilization is as old as it must be to have achieved the advancement it did, then Antarctica, with it's elevation, seems like the continent that would have weathered the world's global storms the longest. It would have been the continent with the size and the resources to support such a civilization for many thousands of years, largely unhindered.

If extracts gleaned from the ancient works of civilizations that associated themselves to the elder culture can be held as any kind of evidence, then the evidence clearly points to their home at the navel of the earth and the greatest island in the World Ocean, Antarctica.



CONTINUE

[Apocalypse Aerie] [The Einstein Connection] [Ancient Maps] [Earth Crust Displacement] [Myths of Catastrophism] [History & Science in Myth] [Egypt; The Call of the Sphinx] [India; A Cradle for Civilization] [America; Fear of the Dark] [World Ocean; Path to Atlantis] [Precession; Warning of the Ancients] [Epilogue & Links]
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Copyright © Marc Bergvelt. 1998-2003. All Rights Reserved.

CLICK BACK ON BROWSER TO RETURN TO FOOTNOTE
[1] Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, Mandarin, 1995
[2] Plato, Critias.
[3] Rand & Rose Flem-Ath When the Sky Fell, Orion, 1995.
[4] Colin Wilson, From Atlantis to the Spinx, Virgin Books, 1997.
[5] William F. Warren, Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. (1885)