The Atlantis/Amazon Connection

The story goes that Solon, a great sage of ancient Greece – and grandfather of Plato – went to Egypt and spoke with a high priest, who told him the story of Atlantis. Solon told the story to his grandson, who wrote it down and passed it, eventually, to us. It seems that Atlantis is seen as a Grecian society because of Plato and, before him, Solon. But there are two points often overlooked: Solon heard the story from an Egyptian, and the Egyptian high priest was talking about a foreign civilization.

Atlantis was a prosperous culture, virtuous, angels and saints living in paradise. But they became corrupt and greedy. Their culture began to crumble as they set out to conquer the world. It was the army of Athens – so goes Plato’s story – that finally stopped them. And then a natural disaster struck and Atlantis sank.

I think that Atlantis did not sink – it dried up. But I’ll get to that in a bit. There is evidence of Atlantis (not necessarily by that name, however) trying to conquer the world. Just as every culture speaks of giants and ghosts, they also speak of Atlantis or an Atlantis-like civilization: a culture that had paradise, became greedy and egotistical, and finally became lost. The descendants of those conquered lands would have remembered from stories passed down by their forebears. But it wasn’t Athens that stopped Atlantis – I can’t say who it was, if anyone – because the dates don’t match. Athens would have come along far later than Atlantis.

The Egyptians came to the Americas. It was once believed that the Egyptians and the Native Americans had no idea of each other, but there is evidence that says otherwise. Traces of cocaine and tobacco have been found in Egyptian mummies; cocaine and tobacco only grow in the Americas. As far as how they got to the Americas, Egypt had one of the grandest navies of the ancient world.

The Egyptians took stories home with them, as is only natural. Egypt and Greece have a long and entwined history, as trading partners, battlefield opponents, and they have both, at different times, ruled the Mediterranean. Thus, it would make sense that an Egyptian story of a far-off land would come to Greek ears. Perhaps the high priest was an old friend of Solon, someone the sage had met many times before in his travels.