August 15, 2025 • 27 mins
For over two thousand years, the legend of Atlantis has inspired explorers, scholars, and dreamers. Was it a real city swallowed by the sea, a cautionary tale invented by Plato, or something stranger entirely? In this episode of The History Of, we dive into the myth’s ancient origins, its many reinterpretations through the centuries, and the modern-day quests to find the lost city.
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The History Of is your daily dose of weird, wonderful, and occasionally ridiculous history. Each episode takes one topic an object, a place, a job, a trend and unpacks the surprising story behind it. No homework, no boring lectures, just history you’ll actually want to share.
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New Episodes: Mon/Wed/Fri
(If people enjoy, and feedback via reviews and ratings is good, will release daily)
The History Of is your daily dose of weird, wonderful, and occasionally ridiculous history. Each episode takes one topic an object, a place, a job, a trend and unpacks the surprising story behind it. No homework, no boring lectures, just history you’ll actually want to share.
A podcast for all ages, if you enjoy please share it and leave a review because that tells me you want more.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hello, and welcome to the History of the Show for
anyone who flunked history but still wants to impress At
Trivia Night. Each day we take one topic, an object,
a place, a job, a trend and uncover the weird, messy,
and sometimes ridiculous truth behind it. No homework, just history
you'll actually want to tell people about. Ready, let's get
(00:30):
into it, History of Atlantis. If you ask ten people
where Atlantis was, you'll probably get ten different answers. Some
will point to the bottom of the Atlantic, Others will
say the Caribbean, someone will insist it was Antarctica before
the ice, and at least one person will mention alien
crystals and claim to be a reincarnated Atlantean priest. The
(00:52):
legend of Atlantis has grown so bloated and bizarre over
the last two thousand years that it's easy to forget
where it actually came from. It wasn't an ancient civilization,
it wasn't a buried map, It wasn't a lost city
waiting to be discovered. It came from one place, the
mind of Plato, specifically from two of his philosophical dialogues
(01:13):
to Maus and Critius, written in the fourth century Bce.
Plato was not trying to start a mystery. He was
trying to make a point. To understand why he invented
Atlantis in the first place, you have to look at
what Plato was doing at the time. He was writing dialogues,
stories that featured his old teacher Socrates, debating important topics
with other philosophers. These dialogues weren't meant to be historical records.
(01:36):
They were more like intellectual theater conversations, meant to explore
big ideas like justice, the soul, politics, and the structure
of the universe. To Maaeus and Critius were part of
a planned trilogy of dialogues only to survive, and in
these Plato introduces Atlantis as a cautionary tale about power, corruption,
(01:57):
and the downfall of civilizations that lose their way. Atlantis
appears as a story within a story in Timaeus. A
character named Critius claims to have heard an old tale
pass down from his grandfather, who heard it from his father,
who got it from the famous lawgiver Solon. Solon supposedly
learned it in Egypt from priests who told him that
Athens once fought a mighty empire across the sea a
(02:20):
land called Atlantis. According to the story, this Atlantis was
a massive island beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which we
now call the Strait of Gibraltar. It was home to
a powerful civilization that had conquered parts of Europe and
Africa before trying to invade Athens. But Athens, heroic and virtuous,
stood alone and defeated them. Then, in a moment of
(02:41):
divine judgment, Atlantis sank beneath the sea in a single
day and night. Now, if you're thinking that sounds like
the set up to a summer blockbuster, you're not wrong.
Atlantis is described with just enough detail to feel real.
It was big. It had rings of land and sea,
carefully engineered canals, grand palaces, and temples covered in precious metals.
(03:03):
The city gleamed with orichalcum, a fictional metal that sounded valuable,
even though no one really knew what it was. The
Atlanteans had hot and cold running water, elaborate baths, stadiums, docks,
and a giant navy. They lived in luxury, raised fine horses,
and were blessed with fertile land and a perfect climate.
It was basically the ancient Greek version of a five
(03:24):
star utopia, but then comes the twist. According to Plato,
the people of Atlantis started off noble. Their society was
well ordered and virtuous, but over time they grew greedy
and decadent. They lost their moral compass, Their leaders became
obsessed with wealth and conquest. They abandoned wisdom in favor
of ambition, and that, Plato says, is when Zeus intervened.
(03:47):
The gods decided that Atlantis had become too arrogant and
needed to be punished, so they destroyed it. The story
ends with the entire island vanishing into the sea. It's dramatic,
it's vivid, it has everything myth morally, a satisfying, splashy ending.
But here's the part people often miss. Plato didn't expect
anyone to take this literally. He wasn't writing history. He
(04:09):
was writing a philosophical parable. Atlantis was a device, a
narrative tool, meant to contrast with Plato's vision of the
ideal city, which he lays out in other works like
The Republic, in that ideal society is built on justice, balance,
and the rule of the wise. Atlantis, on the other hand,
starts strong but collapses under its own corruption. The point
(04:30):
wasn't to describe a real place. The point was to
warn about what happens when people chase power without virtue.
Plato loved using stories to explore ideas. He did it
all the time. The myth of the Cave, the myth
of air, the story of the Ring of Jijis. These
weren't literal accounts. They were teaching tools. Atlantis fits the
same pattern. It structured like a memory passed down through
(04:52):
generations to give it an air of credibility, but it's
not meant to be verified. Plato even ends Critius abruptly
with the story unfinished, as if to signal that this
is less about geography and more about ethics. He wasn't
hiding a secret map. He was making a point about hubris.
Despite this, some of Plato's readers weren't convinced it was
(05:13):
all fiction. Even in antiquity, there were debates. Aristotle, Plato's
most famous student, reportedly dismissed the tale of Atlantis outright,
saying his teacher invented it for the sake of argument.
Others were more generous, suggesting that maybe there was a
kernel of truth behind the story. Maybe Plato had heard
rumors of a real city that was destroyed in a
(05:34):
natural disaster and spun it into a larger myth. That
idea would return centuries later, but in the classical world,
most scholars treated Atlantis the way modern readers treat Gulliver's
Travels or The Handmaid's Tale, as political fiction rapped in fantasy.
For the next few hundred years, Atlantis faded into the background.
It wasn't a central part of ancient mythology. It didn't
(05:56):
inspire pilgrimages or treasure hunts. It wasn't even especially popular
as a subject for poetry or art. Unlike Troy, which
people at least believed had existed at some point, Atlantis
was treated more like a fable. Plato's other dialogues got
more attention, his ideas about forms, politics, and philosophy continued
to shape Western thought, but Atlantis stayed tucked away as
(06:19):
one of his more colorful side projects. That might have
been the end of it, just another allegory from a
philosopher with a flair for drama, if not for what
happened more than a thousand years later, when the Renaissance
hit and Europe rediscovered the works of ancient Greece and Rome,
Plato's writings were brought back into circulation. Suddenly, thinkers, explorers,
(06:40):
and mystics were reading Timaeus and Critius with fresh eyes,
and some of them didn't see a moral tale, They
saw a mystery. They started asking questions. What if Plato
had based Atlantis on something real. What if the Egyptians
had told Soul in a true story. What if there
really was advanced civilization that got wiped out in a cataclysm?
After all, didn't some ancient cities vanish without a trace,
(07:04):
didn't entire cultures rise and fall without leaving much behind.
If Troy had been dismissed as myth for centuries and
then discovered under layers of dirt in the nineteenth century,
why couldn't Atlantis be out there too. It's easy to
see why this idea stuck. Atlantis isn't just a lost city.
It's a lost better city, a place of wealth, beauty,
(07:25):
and advancement, destroyed in a single day. It taps into
something deep, our fascination with what might have been. It's
a story about pride and punishment, but also about mystery
and possibility, and the fact that Plato gave it just
enough detail to sound plausible only adds to the allure.
But if you go back to the source, to the
(07:46):
actual words on the page, you find something different. You
find a philosopher building a thought experiment, a fictional civilization
meant to illustrate how a society can rot from the inside,
no matter how impressive it looks on the outside. Atlantis
wasn't supposed to be a puzzle for future archaeologists. It
was supposed to be a mirror. That mirror shows us
(08:07):
what happens when ambition overtakes wisdom, when technology races ahead
of ethics, when power becomes the goal instead of the responsibility.
That's the real core of Plato's tale, not the lost
island or the gleaming towers, but the warning underneath them.
And yet over time the warning got drowned out. People
latched onto the surface details, the size of the navy,
(08:29):
the concentric canals, the gold covered temples. They forgot the
part where it all ends in disaster. Atlantis became less
of a cautionary tale and more of a treasure hunt,
which is probably the opposite of what Plato intended. Still,
you can't really blame people. Atlantis is a good story.
It's dramatic, it's mysterious. It invites questions, and those questions
(08:51):
have launched centuries of theories, books, documentaries, and yes, some
very strange websites. But before we get to the treasure
maps and alien theories, it's worth remembering where it all began.
Not in the middle of the ocean, not buried under
volcanic ash, but in the pages of a philosophical dialogue
written by a man who wanted to warn Athens about
(09:12):
the dangers of forgetting its principles. Atlantis didn't sink because
of a bad storm or angry gods. It sank because
it stopped living up to its own ideals. That's Plato's
perfect island. It was never about geography. It was about philosophy,
and if we listened closely, the message is still there,
floating just below the surface. If Plato had known what
(09:32):
people would eventually do with his story of Atlantis, he
might have written a follow up called You Missed the Point.
For about one eight hundred years, his tale of a
lost island stayed mostly where he left it, buried in
the footnotes of philosophy. But then came the Renaissance and
the printing press and the age of exploration. Suddenly everyone
was sailing around the globe, mapping coastlines, stumbling across ancient ruins,
(09:56):
and asking big questions like where did all these old
civilizations come from? Why do so many cultures have flood myths?
And hey, what if that island Plato mentioned was totally real?
It started slowly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European
explorers began reaching new continents, at least new to them.
The Americas were full of unfamiliar landscapes, advanced civilizations, and
(10:20):
architectural wonders that didn't match anything in their European textbooks.
Faced with the Maya, the Inca, and the massive stoneheads
of the Omec, Europeans scrambled for explanations. Some of them
decided that these mysterious peoples must be linked to stories
from classical antiquity, and Atlantis, with its grand temples and
mighty empire, made an irresistible candidate. The logic was wobbly
(10:43):
but appealing. Atlantis was said to be across the sea
west of the Mediterranean. The Americas were across the sea
west of the Mediterranean. Coincidence probably, but back then that
was enough to start building theories. Cartographers labeled islands with
names like Antilla, imagining they were remnants of the Lost World.
Writers speculated that Native Americans might be descendants of Atlanteans.
(11:06):
Spanish conquistadors pointed to the grandeur of Inca roads and
cities and asked whether they might have come from some advanced,
ancient source that had since disappeared. Of course, this wasn't
about giving credit to indigenous peoples. It was about making
the unfamiliar feel familiar. If the ruins in Peru or
the pyramids in meso America could be tied to Atlantis,
(11:27):
then Europeans could shoehorn those discoveries into their own historical frameworks.
It was less about history and more about narrative control.
And once people started to believe that Atlantis was real,
it became a kind of historical duct tape used to
patch together all sorts of mysteries. By the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the flood gates were open. Atlantis started turning
(11:50):
up in all kinds of speculative geography. People scoured ancient
maps and texts for clues. Some argued that Atlantis had
been in the Caribbean. Others placed it in the middle
of the Atlantic. A few decided it must have been
Antarctica before it got icy. There were claims that the
Canary Islands were the last mountaintops of the sunken continent,
(12:11):
or that the Azores, those lonely islands far off the
coast of Portugal, were once its peaks. One popular idea
was that Atlantis had been destroyed in the same flood
described in the Bible. This was when Atlantis became tangled
up with Noah the Nephelum, and every half remembered myth
people could get their hands on. Suddenly Atlantis wasn't just
(12:32):
a Greek fable. It was the lost cradle of all civilization,
a place where all knowledge had begun, a proto nation
that had scattered its wisdom across the globe before vanishing
beneath the waves. And this is where things start to spiral,
because once you decide Atlantis was real, you can plug
it into almost anything. Egyptian hieroglyphs probably Atlantean stonehenge, Sure,
(12:55):
why not pyramids in Mexico, temples in India, statues on
Easter Island must have been the Atlanteans. It didn't matter
that these sites had different styles dates, languages, and cultural contexts.
If you squinted hard enough, everything started to look like evidence.
The culmination of all this wishful thinking came in eighteen
eighty two, when an American politician named Ignatius Donnelly published
(13:19):
a book titled Atlantis The Antediluvian World. Donnelly had been
a congressman from Minnesota, but after his political career fizzled,
he turned to writing, and he wrote with the confidence
of a man who had read one too many Victorian encyclopedias.
His book was sensation. In it, Donnelly argued that not
only had Atlantis existed, it had been the original source
(13:39):
of all known civilizations. Egyptians descended from Atlanteans, Celts, Atlanteans, Phoenicians, Hindus,
Norse gods, Greek myths. All of it, he claimed, could
be traced back to the Lost Island described by Plato.
Donnelly even suggested that Atlantis had invented writing, metalworking, agriculture,
and government. Basically, if humans had ever figured something out,
(14:04):
it was probably thanks to Atlantis. Donnelly wasn't shy about
his lack of concrete evidence. He filled his book with
vague parallels, linguistic similarities, and it stands to reason arguments.
The logic often boiled down to this thing is impressive
and old, and Atlantis was also impressive and old, therefore
they must be related. It was historical mad libs, but
(14:25):
people ate it up. The book was reprinted dozens of times,
translated into multiple languages, and inspired a wave of imitators.
Donnelly's influence can't be overstated. He didn't just revive interest
in Atlantis, he redefined it. Before him, Atlantis had been
a fictional morality tale or at best, a fuzzy maybe.
After Donnelly, it was a full blown lost superpower, a
(14:47):
missing chapter in world history. He planted the idea that
Atlantis was the key to understanding human civilization, and people
ran with it. Soon Atlantis started appearing in everything from
academic lectures to spiritualist sciences. Theosophists, a group of mystical
thinkers in the late nineteenth century, claimed that the Atlanteans
had psychic powers and crystal technology. Edgar Case, the so
(15:11):
called Sleeping Prophet, gave readings in the early twentieth century
where he described the fall of Atlantis in vivid detail,
complete with flying machines and laser beams. He even predicted
that Atlantis would rise again in the nineteen sixties, possibly
near the Bahamas. It didn't. Meanwhile, actual archaeologists and historians
(15:31):
were tearing their hair out as real evidence emerged about
ancient civilizations the Sumerians, the Haropans, the Minoans. Atlantis kept
sneaking into the conversation like an uninvited guest. The Minoan
civilization on Crete, for example, was advanced maritime and wiped
out by a volcanic eruption around sixteen hundred BCE. Some
(15:52):
scholars thought this might be a kernel of truth behind
the Atlantis myth. But as soon as they floated that
theory the Atlanta, this crowd seized on it, dragged it
back through the Donnelly blender, and declared it proof. What
made all this so sticky was the seductive combination of
wonder and mystery. Atlantis was the ultimate historical blank check.
(16:12):
It let people imagine a time when humanity was more advanced,
more connected, more spiritual, or more whatever they wanted it
to be. The fact that it lacked hard evidence only helped.
It was a sandbox for speculation. You could write your
own version of Atlantis, and no one could definitively prove
you wrong. That's catnip for writers, mystics, and conspiracy theorists alike.
(16:34):
But at the core of this frenzy was a kind
of historical laziness. Instead of trying to understand ancient cultures
on their own terms, people started projecting their fantasies onto them.
The Pyramids couldn't possibly have been built by Egyptians with
simple tools and a lot of labor. It had to
be Atlantis, or Aliens or Atlantean aliens. This mindset robs
(16:56):
real civilizations of their accomplishments. It replaces hard earned human
ingenuity with speculative shortcuts, and it muddies the waters for
anyone trying to study the past with a straight face. Still,
the nineteenth century was a time of big dreams and
bigger theories. Evolution was reshaping science, archaeology was just beginning
to dig deeper. People were desperate to make sense of
(17:18):
the growing mountain of historical data, and into that mix
walked Atlantis, ready to offer simple answers to complicated questions.
Donnelly's book remains a kind of Rosetta stone for modern
Atlantis lore. Almost every wild claim made since then can
trace its roots back to something he wrote or inspired.
The idea of Atlantis as a mother culture, a hyper
(17:40):
advanced civilization, a place of magic and mystery. It all
got turbocharge in the Victorian era and never really slowed down.
Today we can look back and see the flaws. We
know that Donnelly's linguistic connections were mostly nonsense, that his
historical parallels were cherry picked, and that he leaned more
on imagination than scholarship. Impact stuck, Atlantis had escaped Plato's pages,
(18:03):
floated past Renaissance speculation, and landed squarely in the public
imagination as something that just might be real. And that's
where it stayed, teetering on the line between history and myth,
fact and fantasy. In the next chapter, we'll look at
how Atlantis continued its strange journey through the twentieth century,
weaving its way into pop culture, conspiracy theories, and New
(18:26):
Age spirituality. Because if you thought the Victorian era was dramatic,
just wait until we get to the crystal pyramids and
underwater clairvoyance. By the early twentieth century, Atlantis was no
longer just a lost city. It had become a cultural playground,
a floating stage for every half baked theory, spiritual vision,
and science fiction plot anyone could imagine. Whatever Plato had intended,
(18:48):
some careful moral allegory about hubris and ideal states, was
long gone. In its place stood something far more flexible.
Atlantis had evolved into a myth that could be bent
into any shape you wanted, and the nineteen hundreds they
were the century of bending things as far as they
could go. The madness kicked off in earnest with Theosophy,
(19:08):
a spiritual movement founded in the late nineteenth century by
Helena Blovatski. Theosophy was a cocktail of Eastern philosophy, occult science,
and mystical evolution. Its followers believed in ancient root races
civilizations that had existed long before recorded history, each one
more enlightened than the last. Atlantis naturally featured heavily in
(19:29):
this lineup. According to Theosophists, the Atlanteans weren't just builders
of stone temples. They were psychic giants. Some glowed, others
could telepathically communicate with whales, and they definitely used crystals
for power, healing and probably mood lighting. Atlantis in this
version wasn't destroyed because of tectonic plates or rising sea levels. No,
(19:50):
it was a moral collapse of the soul. Atlanteans became
too obsessed with technology and power, their third eyes clouded over,
their crystal grids, overloaded, boom, sunken continent. Lesson learned. Maybe,
But in the meantime, this version of Atlantis was spreading,
not in academic journals, but in spiritual bookstores and psychic newsletters.
(20:11):
Enter Edgar Case born in eighteen seventy seven. Edgar became
famous for giving trance readings while lying down with his
eyes closed. He claimed to access a higher consciousness, often
called the Akashic Records, which apparently held all the knowledge
of past, present, and future. He gave medical advice, past
life readings, and lots of commentary on you Guessed It? Atlantis.
(20:32):
Edgar described Atlantis in vivid detail, a massive continent that
stretched across the Atlantic, filled with flying machines, advanced energy weapons,
and temples powered by enormous crystals. He said the Atlanteans
had been technologically superior to anything in modern times, and
that survivors of their civilization had fled to Egypt and
the Americas after the catastrophe. Even better, claimed Atlantis would
(20:55):
rise again in the nineteen sixties, specifically near the Bemini
Islands in the Blas, when divers found a series of
submerged rock formations there in nineteen sixty eight, now known
as the Bimini Road. Atlantis believer's declared victory. Geologists for
the record said it was just natural limestone formations, but
the faithful were not swayed. If anything, that kind of
(21:17):
pushback just made the whole thing more fun. And the
twentieth century was just getting started. As mass media exploded,
so did Atlantis. It was no longer confined to fringe
books and metaphysical lectures. Atlantis leapt into comic books, cartoons,
pulp novels, and Saturday morning TV. DC comics gave Aquaman
an underwater kingdom with domed cities and sleek submarines. Marvel
(21:40):
got in on it too, with Naymor the Submariner, a
brooding anti hero from a watery world that was absolutely
not Atlantis, except it totally was. Atlantis became the go
to shorthand for secret civilizations. If your story needed ancient wisdom,
futuristic tech, and a dramatic flood, you slapped in Atlantis
and called it a day. Disney took it even further.
(22:01):
In two thousand and one, they released Atlantis the Lost Empire,
an animated film full of steampunk submarines, floating cities, crystal
power technology, and a princess with white dreadlocks. It wasn't
historically accurate, because nothing about Atlantis ever is, but it
was fun and it captured the tone that Atlantis had
settled into mysterious, magical, and unbothered by facts. Meanwhile, conspiracy
(22:24):
theorists were busy connecting Atlantis to everything under the sun.
According to various books, documentaries, and late night radio shows,
Atlantis had ties to ancient Aliens, the Pyramids of Giza,
the Lost continent of Lemuria, crop circles, Nazi science, and
the Bermuda Triangle. Some claimed that Atlantean survivors lived in
underground cities beneath the Himalayas. Others insisted they had fled
(22:47):
to space and would one day return. The crystal technology, naturally,
was still going strong. Some believers claimed that if you
meditated hard enough while holding a quartz obelisk, you could
access Atlantean memories or at least feel tingly for a while.
And then there's Lemuria. The myth's weird cousin, Lemuria, was
another supposed sunken continent, this time in the Pacific, and
(23:09):
somehow got roped into the Atlantis family tree. At various points,
people claimed Lemurians were hyper spiritual, telepathic beings with a
fondness for purple robes and underground laser chambers. Sometimes Atlantis
and Lemuria were rivals, sometimes they were neighbors, other times
they were the same place, depending on how tired the
writer was when they hit their deadline. None of this
(23:32):
was taken seriously by mainstream archaeology, of course, but that
didn't matter. Atlantis had become unfalsifiable. It existed in a
cultural echo chamber where facts weren't the point. The real
appeal was the feeling that something big and mysterious had
been lost and that maybe, just maybe we could still
find it. But even as the fantasy grew, some real
places started to get dragged into the myth. Take Santorini,
(23:55):
for instance. This Greek island, once home to the Minoan civilization,
experienced a catastrophic volcanic eruption around sixteen hundred BCE. The
blast was so massive it likely caused a tsunami that
devastated nearby coastlines, including parts of crete. The ruins at Akritiri,
buried under volcanic ash, show a sophisticated society with advanced art,
(24:16):
architecture and plumbing. Some historians suggested that this could be
the kernel of truth behind Plato's story. It's a plausible theory.
The timeline is close, the geography fits. The Minoans were seafaring, wealthy,
and capable of grand building projects. But they weren't magical.
They didn't have laser beams or flying cities. They had
(24:36):
trade routes and nice frescoes. Still, that didn't stop people
from pointing to Santorini and saying, look Atlantis. Then there's Doggerland.
During the Ice Age, this was a stretch of land
that connected Britain to mainland Europe. It was real, it
was inhabited, and it's now underwater. Archaeologists have found stone
tools and traces of human activity beneath the North Sea.
(24:58):
It's a compelling example of how sea levels can erase
entire landscapes. But again, no crystals, no temples, just Mesolithic
people doing Mesolithic things. Other candidates include Cuba's underwater formations,
the Caribbean, the Azores, and even Antarctica. If a place
had mysterious ruins, unusual geology, or just a good pr team,
(25:18):
someone somewhere claimed it was Atlantis, usually with a dramatic
YouTube thumbnail and a title like what they don't want
you to know? So, why won't Atlantis die? Why does
this particular story keep resurfacing generation after generation. Part of
it is the sheer appeal of the unknown. Atlantis isn't
just a city. It's a symbol, a stand in for
(25:39):
every forgotten marvel, every cultural golden age, every mysterious what
if we've ever imagined. It's the story of perfection, lost civilization, undone.
A warning about arrogance, yes, but also a promise that
greatness once existed and might be rediscovered. There's also a
kind of historical escapism at play. The real past is messy, slow,
(26:00):
and full of trial and error. Atlantis gives us a shortcut,
a dream where knowledge didn't have to be earned, where
progress came all at once, only to vanish in a
single night of earthquakes and waves. It's tidy, it's tragic,
and it's just vague enough to let us fill in
the blanks with whatever we want. Atlantis is also democratic
in its mythmaking. You don't need a PhD or a
(26:22):
trowel to have an opinion about it. Anyone with a theory,
a map, and an Internet connection can join the conversation.
It's part of what makes the myth so frustrating and
so fun. And finally, there's nostalgia, not for Atlantis itself,
but for the idea that something bigger and better once existed,
a place where we were smarter, kinder, more advanced, a
(26:43):
civilization that understood the world in a way we no
longer do. In that sense, Atlantis isn't just about the past.
It's about longing about hope disguised as memory. So the
next time someone shows you a blurry sonar image or
a crystal pyramid or a comic book kingdom and swears
it's Atlantis, remember this. Atlantis is whatever we need it
to be, a mirror, a fantasy, a mystery. We refuse
(27:06):
to give up not because it was real, but because
we wish it could have been, and in a way
that might be even more powerful than the truth.
Hello, and welcome to the History of the Show for
anyone who flunked history but still wants to impress At
Trivia Night. Each day we take one topic, an object,
a place, a job, a trend and uncover the weird, messy,
and sometimes ridiculous truth behind it. No homework, just history
you'll actually want to tell people about. Ready, let's get
(00:30):
into it, History of Atlantis. If you ask ten people
where Atlantis was, you'll probably get ten different answers. Some
will point to the bottom of the Atlantic, Others will
say the Caribbean, someone will insist it was Antarctica before
the ice, and at least one person will mention alien
crystals and claim to be a reincarnated Atlantean priest. The
(00:52):
legend of Atlantis has grown so bloated and bizarre over
the last two thousand years that it's easy to forget
where it actually came from. It wasn't an ancient civilization,
it wasn't a buried map, It wasn't a lost city
waiting to be discovered. It came from one place, the
mind of Plato, specifically from two of his philosophical dialogues
(01:13):
to Maus and Critius, written in the fourth century Bce.
Plato was not trying to start a mystery. He was
trying to make a point. To understand why he invented
Atlantis in the first place, you have to look at
what Plato was doing at the time. He was writing dialogues,
stories that featured his old teacher Socrates, debating important topics
with other philosophers. These dialogues weren't meant to be historical records.
(01:36):
They were more like intellectual theater conversations, meant to explore
big ideas like justice, the soul, politics, and the structure
of the universe. To Maaeus and Critius were part of
a planned trilogy of dialogues only to survive, and in
these Plato introduces Atlantis as a cautionary tale about power, corruption,
(01:57):
and the downfall of civilizations that lose their way. Atlantis
appears as a story within a story in Timaeus. A
character named Critius claims to have heard an old tale
pass down from his grandfather, who heard it from his father,
who got it from the famous lawgiver Solon. Solon supposedly
learned it in Egypt from priests who told him that
Athens once fought a mighty empire across the sea a
(02:20):
land called Atlantis. According to the story, this Atlantis was
a massive island beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which we
now call the Strait of Gibraltar. It was home to
a powerful civilization that had conquered parts of Europe and
Africa before trying to invade Athens. But Athens, heroic and virtuous,
stood alone and defeated them. Then, in a moment of
(02:41):
divine judgment, Atlantis sank beneath the sea in a single
day and night. Now, if you're thinking that sounds like
the set up to a summer blockbuster, you're not wrong.
Atlantis is described with just enough detail to feel real.
It was big. It had rings of land and sea,
carefully engineered canals, grand palaces, and temples covered in precious metals.
(03:03):
The city gleamed with orichalcum, a fictional metal that sounded valuable,
even though no one really knew what it was. The
Atlanteans had hot and cold running water, elaborate baths, stadiums, docks,
and a giant navy. They lived in luxury, raised fine horses,
and were blessed with fertile land and a perfect climate.
It was basically the ancient Greek version of a five
(03:24):
star utopia, but then comes the twist. According to Plato,
the people of Atlantis started off noble. Their society was
well ordered and virtuous, but over time they grew greedy
and decadent. They lost their moral compass, Their leaders became
obsessed with wealth and conquest. They abandoned wisdom in favor
of ambition, and that, Plato says, is when Zeus intervened.
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The gods decided that Atlantis had become too arrogant and
needed to be punished, so they destroyed it. The story
ends with the entire island vanishing into the sea. It's dramatic,
it's vivid, it has everything myth morally, a satisfying, splashy ending.
But here's the part people often miss. Plato didn't expect
anyone to take this literally. He wasn't writing history. He
(04:09):
was writing a philosophical parable. Atlantis was a device, a
narrative tool, meant to contrast with Plato's vision of the
ideal city, which he lays out in other works like
The Republic, in that ideal society is built on justice, balance,
and the rule of the wise. Atlantis, on the other hand,
starts strong but collapses under its own corruption. The point
(04:30):
wasn't to describe a real place. The point was to
warn about what happens when people chase power without virtue.
Plato loved using stories to explore ideas. He did it
all the time. The myth of the Cave, the myth
of air, the story of the Ring of Jijis. These
weren't literal accounts. They were teaching tools. Atlantis fits the
same pattern. It structured like a memory passed down through
(04:52):
generations to give it an air of credibility, but it's
not meant to be verified. Plato even ends Critius abruptly
with the story unfinished, as if to signal that this
is less about geography and more about ethics. He wasn't
hiding a secret map. He was making a point about hubris.
Despite this, some of Plato's readers weren't convinced it was
(05:13):
all fiction. Even in antiquity, there were debates. Aristotle, Plato's
most famous student, reportedly dismissed the tale of Atlantis outright,
saying his teacher invented it for the sake of argument.
Others were more generous, suggesting that maybe there was a
kernel of truth behind the story. Maybe Plato had heard
rumors of a real city that was destroyed in a
(05:34):
natural disaster and spun it into a larger myth. That
idea would return centuries later, but in the classical world,
most scholars treated Atlantis the way modern readers treat Gulliver's
Travels or The Handmaid's Tale, as political fiction rapped in fantasy.
For the next few hundred years, Atlantis faded into the background.
It wasn't a central part of ancient mythology. It didn't
(05:56):
inspire pilgrimages or treasure hunts. It wasn't even especially popular
as a subject for poetry or art. Unlike Troy, which
people at least believed had existed at some point, Atlantis
was treated more like a fable. Plato's other dialogues got
more attention, his ideas about forms, politics, and philosophy continued
to shape Western thought, but Atlantis stayed tucked away as
(06:19):
one of his more colorful side projects. That might have
been the end of it, just another allegory from a
philosopher with a flair for drama, if not for what
happened more than a thousand years later, when the Renaissance
hit and Europe rediscovered the works of ancient Greece and Rome,
Plato's writings were brought back into circulation. Suddenly, thinkers, explorers,
(06:40):
and mystics were reading Timaeus and Critius with fresh eyes,
and some of them didn't see a moral tale, They
saw a mystery. They started asking questions. What if Plato
had based Atlantis on something real. What if the Egyptians
had told Soul in a true story. What if there
really was advanced civilization that got wiped out in a cataclysm?
After all, didn't some ancient cities vanish without a trace,
(07:04):
didn't entire cultures rise and fall without leaving much behind.
If Troy had been dismissed as myth for centuries and
then discovered under layers of dirt in the nineteenth century,
why couldn't Atlantis be out there too. It's easy to
see why this idea stuck. Atlantis isn't just a lost city.
It's a lost better city, a place of wealth, beauty,
(07:25):
and advancement, destroyed in a single day. It taps into
something deep, our fascination with what might have been. It's
a story about pride and punishment, but also about mystery
and possibility, and the fact that Plato gave it just
enough detail to sound plausible only adds to the allure.
But if you go back to the source, to the
(07:46):
actual words on the page, you find something different. You
find a philosopher building a thought experiment, a fictional civilization
meant to illustrate how a society can rot from the inside,
no matter how impressive it looks on the outside. Atlantis
wasn't supposed to be a puzzle for future archaeologists. It
was supposed to be a mirror. That mirror shows us
(08:07):
what happens when ambition overtakes wisdom, when technology races ahead
of ethics, when power becomes the goal instead of the responsibility.
That's the real core of Plato's tale, not the lost
island or the gleaming towers, but the warning underneath them.
And yet over time the warning got drowned out. People
latched onto the surface details, the size of the navy,
(08:29):
the concentric canals, the gold covered temples. They forgot the
part where it all ends in disaster. Atlantis became less
of a cautionary tale and more of a treasure hunt,
which is probably the opposite of what Plato intended. Still,
you can't really blame people. Atlantis is a good story.
It's dramatic, it's mysterious. It invites questions, and those questions
(08:51):
have launched centuries of theories, books, documentaries, and yes, some
very strange websites. But before we get to the treasure
maps and alien theories, it's worth remembering where it all began.
Not in the middle of the ocean, not buried under
volcanic ash, but in the pages of a philosophical dialogue
written by a man who wanted to warn Athens about
(09:12):
the dangers of forgetting its principles. Atlantis didn't sink because
of a bad storm or angry gods. It sank because
it stopped living up to its own ideals. That's Plato's
perfect island. It was never about geography. It was about philosophy,
and if we listened closely, the message is still there,
floating just below the surface. If Plato had known what
(09:32):
people would eventually do with his story of Atlantis, he
might have written a follow up called You Missed the Point.
For about one eight hundred years, his tale of a
lost island stayed mostly where he left it, buried in
the footnotes of philosophy. But then came the Renaissance and
the printing press and the age of exploration. Suddenly everyone
was sailing around the globe, mapping coastlines, stumbling across ancient ruins,
(09:56):
and asking big questions like where did all these old
civilizations come from? Why do so many cultures have flood myths?
And hey, what if that island Plato mentioned was totally real?
It started slowly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European
explorers began reaching new continents, at least new to them.
The Americas were full of unfamiliar landscapes, advanced civilizations, and
(10:20):
architectural wonders that didn't match anything in their European textbooks.
Faced with the Maya, the Inca, and the massive stoneheads
of the Omec, Europeans scrambled for explanations. Some of them
decided that these mysterious peoples must be linked to stories
from classical antiquity, and Atlantis, with its grand temples and
mighty empire, made an irresistible candidate. The logic was wobbly
(10:43):
but appealing. Atlantis was said to be across the sea
west of the Mediterranean. The Americas were across the sea
west of the Mediterranean. Coincidence probably, but back then that
was enough to start building theories. Cartographers labeled islands with
names like Antilla, imagining they were remnants of the Lost World.
Writers speculated that Native Americans might be descendants of Atlanteans.
(11:06):
Spanish conquistadors pointed to the grandeur of Inca roads and
cities and asked whether they might have come from some advanced,
ancient source that had since disappeared. Of course, this wasn't
about giving credit to indigenous peoples. It was about making
the unfamiliar feel familiar. If the ruins in Peru or
the pyramids in meso America could be tied to Atlantis,
(11:27):
then Europeans could shoehorn those discoveries into their own historical frameworks.
It was less about history and more about narrative control.
And once people started to believe that Atlantis was real,
it became a kind of historical duct tape used to
patch together all sorts of mysteries. By the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the flood gates were open. Atlantis started turning
(11:50):
up in all kinds of speculative geography. People scoured ancient
maps and texts for clues. Some argued that Atlantis had
been in the Caribbean. Others placed it in the middle
of the Atlantic. A few decided it must have been
Antarctica before it got icy. There were claims that the
Canary Islands were the last mountaintops of the sunken continent,
(12:11):
or that the Azores, those lonely islands far off the
coast of Portugal, were once its peaks. One popular idea
was that Atlantis had been destroyed in the same flood
described in the Bible. This was when Atlantis became tangled
up with Noah the Nephelum, and every half remembered myth
people could get their hands on. Suddenly Atlantis wasn't just
(12:32):
a Greek fable. It was the lost cradle of all civilization,
a place where all knowledge had begun, a proto nation
that had scattered its wisdom across the globe before vanishing
beneath the waves. And this is where things start to spiral,
because once you decide Atlantis was real, you can plug
it into almost anything. Egyptian hieroglyphs probably Atlantean stonehenge, Sure,
(12:55):
why not pyramids in Mexico, temples in India, statues on
Easter Island must have been the Atlanteans. It didn't matter
that these sites had different styles dates, languages, and cultural contexts.
If you squinted hard enough, everything started to look like evidence.
The culmination of all this wishful thinking came in eighteen
eighty two, when an American politician named Ignatius Donnelly published
(13:19):
a book titled Atlantis The Antediluvian World. Donnelly had been
a congressman from Minnesota, but after his political career fizzled,
he turned to writing, and he wrote with the confidence
of a man who had read one too many Victorian encyclopedias.
His book was sensation. In it, Donnelly argued that not
only had Atlantis existed, it had been the original source
(13:39):
of all known civilizations. Egyptians descended from Atlanteans, Celts, Atlanteans, Phoenicians, Hindus,
Norse gods, Greek myths. All of it, he claimed, could
be traced back to the Lost Island described by Plato.
Donnelly even suggested that Atlantis had invented writing, metalworking, agriculture,
and government. Basically, if humans had ever figured something out,
(14:04):
it was probably thanks to Atlantis. Donnelly wasn't shy about
his lack of concrete evidence. He filled his book with
vague parallels, linguistic similarities, and it stands to reason arguments.
The logic often boiled down to this thing is impressive
and old, and Atlantis was also impressive and old, therefore
they must be related. It was historical mad libs, but
(14:25):
people ate it up. The book was reprinted dozens of times,
translated into multiple languages, and inspired a wave of imitators.
Donnelly's influence can't be overstated. He didn't just revive interest
in Atlantis, he redefined it. Before him, Atlantis had been
a fictional morality tale or at best, a fuzzy maybe.
After Donnelly, it was a full blown lost superpower, a
(14:47):
missing chapter in world history. He planted the idea that
Atlantis was the key to understanding human civilization, and people
ran with it. Soon Atlantis started appearing in everything from
academic lectures to spiritualist sciences. Theosophists, a group of mystical
thinkers in the late nineteenth century, claimed that the Atlanteans
had psychic powers and crystal technology. Edgar Case, the so
(15:11):
called Sleeping Prophet, gave readings in the early twentieth century
where he described the fall of Atlantis in vivid detail,
complete with flying machines and laser beams. He even predicted
that Atlantis would rise again in the nineteen sixties, possibly
near the Bahamas. It didn't. Meanwhile, actual archaeologists and historians
(15:31):
were tearing their hair out as real evidence emerged about
ancient civilizations the Sumerians, the Haropans, the Minoans. Atlantis kept
sneaking into the conversation like an uninvited guest. The Minoan
civilization on Crete, for example, was advanced maritime and wiped
out by a volcanic eruption around sixteen hundred BCE. Some
(15:52):
scholars thought this might be a kernel of truth behind
the Atlantis myth. But as soon as they floated that
theory the Atlanta, this crowd seized on it, dragged it
back through the Donnelly blender, and declared it proof. What
made all this so sticky was the seductive combination of
wonder and mystery. Atlantis was the ultimate historical blank check.
(16:12):
It let people imagine a time when humanity was more advanced,
more connected, more spiritual, or more whatever they wanted it
to be. The fact that it lacked hard evidence only helped.
It was a sandbox for speculation. You could write your
own version of Atlantis, and no one could definitively prove
you wrong. That's catnip for writers, mystics, and conspiracy theorists alike.
(16:34):
But at the core of this frenzy was a kind
of historical laziness. Instead of trying to understand ancient cultures
on their own terms, people started projecting their fantasies onto them.
The Pyramids couldn't possibly have been built by Egyptians with
simple tools and a lot of labor. It had to
be Atlantis, or Aliens or Atlantean aliens. This mindset robs
(16:56):
real civilizations of their accomplishments. It replaces hard earned human
ingenuity with speculative shortcuts, and it muddies the waters for
anyone trying to study the past with a straight face. Still,
the nineteenth century was a time of big dreams and
bigger theories. Evolution was reshaping science, archaeology was just beginning
to dig deeper. People were desperate to make sense of
(17:18):
the growing mountain of historical data, and into that mix
walked Atlantis, ready to offer simple answers to complicated questions.
Donnelly's book remains a kind of Rosetta stone for modern
Atlantis lore. Almost every wild claim made since then can
trace its roots back to something he wrote or inspired.
The idea of Atlantis as a mother culture, a hyper
(17:40):
advanced civilization, a place of magic and mystery. It all
got turbocharge in the Victorian era and never really slowed down.
Today we can look back and see the flaws. We
know that Donnelly's linguistic connections were mostly nonsense, that his
historical parallels were cherry picked, and that he leaned more
on imagination than scholarship. Impact stuck, Atlantis had escaped Plato's pages,
(18:03):
floated past Renaissance speculation, and landed squarely in the public
imagination as something that just might be real. And that's
where it stayed, teetering on the line between history and myth,
fact and fantasy. In the next chapter, we'll look at
how Atlantis continued its strange journey through the twentieth century,
weaving its way into pop culture, conspiracy theories, and New
(18:26):
Age spirituality. Because if you thought the Victorian era was dramatic,
just wait until we get to the crystal pyramids and
underwater clairvoyance. By the early twentieth century, Atlantis was no
longer just a lost city. It had become a cultural playground,
a floating stage for every half baked theory, spiritual vision,
and science fiction plot anyone could imagine. Whatever Plato had intended,
(18:48):
some careful moral allegory about hubris and ideal states, was
long gone. In its place stood something far more flexible.
Atlantis had evolved into a myth that could be bent
into any shape you wanted, and the nineteen hundreds they
were the century of bending things as far as they
could go. The madness kicked off in earnest with Theosophy,
(19:08):
a spiritual movement founded in the late nineteenth century by
Helena Blovatski. Theosophy was a cocktail of Eastern philosophy, occult science,
and mystical evolution. Its followers believed in ancient root races
civilizations that had existed long before recorded history, each one
more enlightened than the last. Atlantis naturally featured heavily in
(19:29):
this lineup. According to Theosophists, the Atlanteans weren't just builders
of stone temples. They were psychic giants. Some glowed, others
could telepathically communicate with whales, and they definitely used crystals
for power, healing and probably mood lighting. Atlantis in this
version wasn't destroyed because of tectonic plates or rising sea levels. No,
(19:50):
it was a moral collapse of the soul. Atlanteans became
too obsessed with technology and power, their third eyes clouded over,
their crystal grids, overloaded, boom, sunken continent. Lesson learned. Maybe,
But in the meantime, this version of Atlantis was spreading,
not in academic journals, but in spiritual bookstores and psychic newsletters.
(20:11):
Enter Edgar Case born in eighteen seventy seven. Edgar became
famous for giving trance readings while lying down with his
eyes closed. He claimed to access a higher consciousness, often
called the Akashic Records, which apparently held all the knowledge
of past, present, and future. He gave medical advice, past
life readings, and lots of commentary on you Guessed It? Atlantis.
(20:32):
Edgar described Atlantis in vivid detail, a massive continent that
stretched across the Atlantic, filled with flying machines, advanced energy weapons,
and temples powered by enormous crystals. He said the Atlanteans
had been technologically superior to anything in modern times, and
that survivors of their civilization had fled to Egypt and
the Americas after the catastrophe. Even better, claimed Atlantis would
(20:55):
rise again in the nineteen sixties, specifically near the Bemini
Islands in the Blas, when divers found a series of
submerged rock formations there in nineteen sixty eight, now known
as the Bimini Road. Atlantis believer's declared victory. Geologists for
the record said it was just natural limestone formations, but
the faithful were not swayed. If anything, that kind of
(21:17):
pushback just made the whole thing more fun. And the
twentieth century was just getting started. As mass media exploded,
so did Atlantis. It was no longer confined to fringe
books and metaphysical lectures. Atlantis leapt into comic books, cartoons,
pulp novels, and Saturday morning TV. DC comics gave Aquaman
an underwater kingdom with domed cities and sleek submarines. Marvel
(21:40):
got in on it too, with Naymor the Submariner, a
brooding anti hero from a watery world that was absolutely
not Atlantis, except it totally was. Atlantis became the go
to shorthand for secret civilizations. If your story needed ancient wisdom,
futuristic tech, and a dramatic flood, you slapped in Atlantis
and called it a day. Disney took it even further.
(22:01):
In two thousand and one, they released Atlantis the Lost Empire,
an animated film full of steampunk submarines, floating cities, crystal
power technology, and a princess with white dreadlocks. It wasn't
historically accurate, because nothing about Atlantis ever is, but it
was fun and it captured the tone that Atlantis had
settled into mysterious, magical, and unbothered by facts. Meanwhile, conspiracy
(22:24):
theorists were busy connecting Atlantis to everything under the sun.
According to various books, documentaries, and late night radio shows,
Atlantis had ties to ancient Aliens, the Pyramids of Giza,
the Lost continent of Lemuria, crop circles, Nazi science, and
the Bermuda Triangle. Some claimed that Atlantean survivors lived in
underground cities beneath the Himalayas. Others insisted they had fled
(22:47):
to space and would one day return. The crystal technology, naturally,
was still going strong. Some believers claimed that if you
meditated hard enough while holding a quartz obelisk, you could
access Atlantean memories or at least feel tingly for a while.
And then there's Lemuria. The myth's weird cousin, Lemuria, was
another supposed sunken continent, this time in the Pacific, and
(23:09):
somehow got roped into the Atlantis family tree. At various points,
people claimed Lemurians were hyper spiritual, telepathic beings with a
fondness for purple robes and underground laser chambers. Sometimes Atlantis
and Lemuria were rivals, sometimes they were neighbors, other times
they were the same place, depending on how tired the
writer was when they hit their deadline. None of this
(23:32):
was taken seriously by mainstream archaeology, of course, but that
didn't matter. Atlantis had become unfalsifiable. It existed in a
cultural echo chamber where facts weren't the point. The real
appeal was the feeling that something big and mysterious had
been lost and that maybe, just maybe we could still
find it. But even as the fantasy grew, some real
places started to get dragged into the myth. Take Santorini,
(23:55):
for instance. This Greek island, once home to the Minoan civilization,
experienced a catastrophic volcanic eruption around sixteen hundred BCE. The
blast was so massive it likely caused a tsunami that
devastated nearby coastlines, including parts of crete. The ruins at Akritiri,
buried under volcanic ash, show a sophisticated society with advanced art,
(24:16):
architecture and plumbing. Some historians suggested that this could be
the kernel of truth behind Plato's story. It's a plausible theory.
The timeline is close, the geography fits. The Minoans were seafaring, wealthy,
and capable of grand building projects. But they weren't magical.
They didn't have laser beams or flying cities. They had
(24:36):
trade routes and nice frescoes. Still, that didn't stop people
from pointing to Santorini and saying, look Atlantis. Then there's Doggerland.
During the Ice Age, this was a stretch of land
that connected Britain to mainland Europe. It was real, it
was inhabited, and it's now underwater. Archaeologists have found stone
tools and traces of human activity beneath the North Sea.
(24:58):
It's a compelling example of how sea levels can erase
entire landscapes. But again, no crystals, no temples, just Mesolithic
people doing Mesolithic things. Other candidates include Cuba's underwater formations,
the Caribbean, the Azores, and even Antarctica. If a place
had mysterious ruins, unusual geology, or just a good pr team,
(25:18):
someone somewhere claimed it was Atlantis, usually with a dramatic
YouTube thumbnail and a title like what they don't want
you to know? So, why won't Atlantis die? Why does
this particular story keep resurfacing generation after generation. Part of
it is the sheer appeal of the unknown. Atlantis isn't
just a city. It's a symbol, a stand in for
(25:39):
every forgotten marvel, every cultural golden age, every mysterious what
if we've ever imagined. It's the story of perfection, lost civilization, undone.
A warning about arrogance, yes, but also a promise that
greatness once existed and might be rediscovered. There's also a
kind of historical escapism at play. The real past is messy, slow,
(26:00):
and full of trial and error. Atlantis gives us a shortcut,
a dream where knowledge didn't have to be earned, where
progress came all at once, only to vanish in a
single night of earthquakes and waves. It's tidy, it's tragic,
and it's just vague enough to let us fill in
the blanks with whatever we want. Atlantis is also democratic
in its mythmaking. You don't need a PhD or a
(26:22):
trowel to have an opinion about it. Anyone with a theory,
a map, and an Internet connection can join the conversation.
It's part of what makes the myth so frustrating and
so fun. And finally, there's nostalgia, not for Atlantis itself,
but for the idea that something bigger and better once existed,
a place where we were smarter, kinder, more advanced, a
(26:43):
civilization that understood the world in a way we no
longer do. In that sense, Atlantis isn't just about the past.
It's about longing about hope disguised as memory. So the
next time someone shows you a blurry sonar image or
a crystal pyramid or a comic book kingdom and swears
it's Atlantis, remember this. Atlantis is whatever we need it
to be, a mirror, a fantasy, a mystery. We refuse
(27:06):
to give up not because it was real, but because
we wish it could have been, and in a way
that might be even more powerful than the truth.
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