Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (1972)

I read Andrew Tomas’s Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery for the claims a later writer can check. The pages below record where he puts the island, which year he uses, whom he names, and which text or find he ties to which date. The quotes are short excerpts from the Sphere reprint of September 1973, for review and study. The book was first published by Robert Hale in 1972. Copyright is Editions Robert Laffont, 1972. I paraphrase the rest. Where he states a date, a place, or an event I would set beside another author, his own sentence is set under the summary.

The copy in front of me has no printed number on the copyright page. It says: first published in Great Britain in 1972 by Robert Hale & Company. First Sphere Books edition 1973. Reprinted September 1973. Set in Linotype Lectura. Printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks. ISBN 0 7221 8542 1. The book is dedicated to Nicholas Roerich (1874 to 1947). Page numbers below are the printed footers, under the running head ATLANTIS.

The book at a glance

• Title: Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery.
• Edition I read: Sphere Books, London, 1973, reprinted September 1973. First British publication, Robert Hale & Company, 1972. Copyright Editions Robert Laffont, 1972.
• Length: ten chapters. Antediluvian Colonies opens on p. 43. Chapter 10 opens on p. 143. A sources list and an index follow. Plates sit among the later chapters.
• What he claims: a real Atlantic island west of Gibraltar, large enough for Plato’s ten governors, sunk in 9560 B.C. Survivors and teachers carry metals, calendars, and writing to Egypt, Sumer, India, and the Americas. He treats drowned ground off the Bahamas, and a building in six feet of water off Andros, as the same destruction.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the claims I would take to Plato, to Donnelly, to Spence, and to the geologists and archaeologists Tomas names. The chapter notes give the pages.

• Site. An Atlantic island, beyond the pillars of Hercules, with room in the ocean of that time. N. Lednev: a huge island, hundreds of kilometres, west of Gibraltar (p. 20). Plato’s island, in Tomas’s figure, about 600,000 square miles (p. 19).
• The date he repeats. Solon in Egypt about 560 B.C. The archives of Neith at Sais: a continent beyond the pillars, sunk about 9560 B.C. (p. 16). His arithmetic on the next pages: 9,000 years before that voyage is 9560 B.C. (p. 19).
• Santorini, rejected. Professor Galanopoulos: Thira-Santorin blew up about 1400 B.C. Tomas reports the shortened count, 900 years added to 560 B.C., which Galanopoulos lands on 1460 B.C. Tomas’s test is size and government. Plato’s island is about 600,000 square miles. The Santorini he allows Galanopoulos is 75 square miles, and he asks how ten provinces could have stood on it (p. 19).
• Ice and the Gulf Stream. Ekaterina Hagemeister, 1955: the Gulf Stream reached the Arctic between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, and Atlantis was the barrier that had held it south. On p. 35 the same writer is printed E. F. Hagemeister. I leave both forms as they stand.
• A sudden Atlantic warming. Lamont Geological Observatory: surface water warmed about 10,000 years ago, and the change of foraminifera lasted not more than a hundred years, around 8000 B.C. (pp. 20 to 21). Cold-water shells sit in the equatorial Atlantic as well as in the north-east. He asks whether the barrier was Atlantis (p. 20).
• A seamount and a ton of discs. South of the Azores, 1949, the Geological Society of America lifted about a ton of limestone discs, about 6 inches across and one and a half inches thick, with a cavity in the centre. Lamont: the limestone may have hardened in the air, and the seamount may have been an island within the past 12,000 years (p. 21).
• Other dates he puts on the same horizon. Niagara gorge, 12,500 years. The Cordilleras rose 19,000 feet (5791 meters) about 10,000 years ago. Greater Bermuda cedar forest wiped out about 11,000 years ago. Lake Knockacran, Ireland, mud 11,787 years old. Two Creeks, Wisconsin, spruce about 11,000 years. Birch in North Germany about 10,800 years. Jericho culture 6800 B.C. Plaster skulls there, 8,000 years ago (p. 21).
• High harbours. Lake Titicaca: a sea harbour at 12,500 feet (3810 meters), 200 miles (321 kilometers) from the Pacific, cable rings sized for ocean-going ships, southern water still salty. Quechua say corn was first grown there. Maize does not grow there now. Jose Garcia Payon: two huts in the Cordilleras, under ice, on an old shore, now almost 19,000 feet (5791 meters) up. Nan-Matal, on Ponape, a sea city of sun-kings. A French cable ship in 1898 brought up tachylyte from 1,700 fathoms, a lava he says forms only above the sea (p. 16).
• Calendar stack, one page apart. Zoroastrian year 1 is 9660 B.C. Egyptian solar cycles of 1,460 years, last epoch ended A.D. 139, eight cycles to 11,542 B.C. Assyrian lunar periods of 1,805 years, last ended 712 B.C., six cycles to the same 11,542 B.C. Brahmins: rounds of 2,850 years from 3102 B.C., three cycles to 11,652 B.C. Maya: cycles of 2,760 years from 3373 B.C., three cycles to 11,653 B.C. (pp. 34 to 35).
• Aztec and Maya counts on the same page. Vatican Codex A-3738: four past eras, 4,008 years (flood), 4,010 (hurricanes), 4,801 (fires), 5,042 (starvation), total 17,861. The fifth era began in 751 B.C. He traces the start to 18,612 B.C. Diego de Landa, 1566: the Maya reckoned from about 3113 B.C., and 5,125 years of former cycles stood before that, so an origin in 8238 B.C. (p. 35).
• Day length. Maya longest day 13 hours, shortest 11. The Egyptian figures he quotes are 12 hours 55 minutes and 11 hours 5 minutes, which he says belong to the Sudan. L. Zajdler of Warsaw: the reckoning came from a tropical Atlantis (p. 35).
• Tiahuanaco. Arthur Posnansky of La Paz: the uncompleted Sun Temple was suddenly abandoned about 9550 B.C. (p. 35).
• Egypt and a western teacher. Turin Papyrus: a dynasty of demigods installed in 9850 B.C. Book of the Dead: Thoth’s birthplace a far western country, a city by the sea, two live volcanoes, a darkened sun, an escape east across water. L. Filipoff of the Algiers Observatory: Thoth tied to Cancer in pyramid texts of the fifth and sixth dynasties, arrival when the vernal equinox stood in Cancer, about 7256 B.C. (p. 57).
• Metals. K. K. Doberer, The Goldmakers: between 8,000 and 10,000 B.C. a people landed in the Indus delta and at the head of the Persian Gulf. Tall, black-haired, neither Aryan nor Semitic. They worked gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, antimony, iron, and nickel. Europe, he says, has a bronze age and hardly a copper age. Central American bronze also arrived ready-made. Sumerian metalwork turns up in southern Russia, at Troy, and in Central Europe. The tin-bronze of Sumeria is gone by about 300 B.C. for lack of tin (p. 61).
• Inca blood. Five Inca mummies at the British Museum, tested in 1952 by B. E. Gilbey and M. Lubran and reported to the Royal Anthropological Institute. Three of the five had traces of Group A, which he calls foreign to the American Indian. One combination of D and c, without C and E. Another royal mummy had C, E, and c, without D, a sample he calls almost without a parallel (p. 62). The names on that page are Manco Copac and Mama Ocllo, and the Mexican god is Quetzalcoatl, Kukumatz, or Kukulkan.
• America after the sinking. Ruzo’s rock gallery: camels, horses, and cows, animals he says were absent from the Americas in Columbus’s time. Helmut de Terra at Tepexpan, Mexico: an early man with an extinct elephant, Carbon-14 about 9300 B.C., some 250 years after the traditional sinking. Cocle pottery: a flying lizard close to a pterodactyl. Two cities in the Nasca district near Pisco, older than the pre-Inca culture. Julio Tello, about 1920: jugs of a five-toed llama, and five-toed llama skeletons in the same ground. A gold Scythian buckle in the Hermitage shows a sabre-tooth tiger. Malta: rock tracks with junctions and sidings, no hoof marks, the track running out under the sea, an antiquity of 9,000 years (p. 70).
• Piri Reis. Commander Larsen, U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office: the chart goes back more than 5,000 years, implies a world-wide survey, and has been used to correct present maps. Mallery: longitude is exact, and we learned to calculate it only two hundred years ago. He asks whether Alexander’s expedition took papyri from Sais. A Columbus letter calls the earth pear-shaped. Nasireddin Tusi, thirteenth century, aware of America 220 years before Columbus. G. D. Mamedbeily: the land “Dzhezair Haldat” (eternal isles), coordinates he matches to the east coast of South America (p. 95).
• Bahamas, 1967 and 1968. Robert Brush photographed a square on the sea-bed near Bimini. Dimitri Rebikoff and J. Manson Valentine, 1968: a building, possibly a temple, about 100 by 75 feet (22.86 meters), in 6 feet (1.83 meters) of water, overgrown, near the north end of Andros. Press dates in the footnote: The Miami News, 23 August 1968, and The Miami Herald, 11 September 1968. The building faced east and west, like the Uxmal Temple of the Turtles, and they made out chambers. In 1967 Rebikoff saw a rectangle a quarter of a mile long, in 3 fathoms, on the Great Bahama Bank. Valentine photographed pathways for 60 miles (96.56 kilometers) from Bimini to Orange Cay. On 2 September 1968 he dived in 3 fathoms off the north-west coast of North Bimini: rectangular and polygonal stones, the larger ones at least 10 to 15 feet (4.57 meters), and a second layer where the sand had washed out. He would date the work as far back as the lands destroyed 11,500 years ago (pp. 120 to 121).
• Caves now under the sea. Cousteau’s Calypso, a grotto off Andros, stalactites and stalagmites 165 feet (50 meters) down. Sediments: the cave went into the sea 12,000 years ago. The Blue Hole off British Honduras, 1,000 feet (304 meters) wide, slanted stalactites. A Miami analysis: those deep grottos stood above the sea he spells Carribean, 12,000 years ago. He closes the group on violent upheaval in the Atlantic basin about 10,000 B.C. (p. 122).

For Plato’s own text, see Timaeus & Critias. For other sites, see Where Was Atlantis. For a 9600 BC Atlantic land argued from races and customs, see Lewis Spence’s The History of Atlantis.

Opening pages

The prelude is a travel note. He names the places the later chapters use: Mexico, Japan, China, Australia, the Himalayas around Kanchenjunga and Manali, the pyramid of Khufu and the Sphinx, a steel cube in Austria, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and Jean Bailly, the Denderah zodiac in the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Hermitage. I use that list as his own map of sources. The argument starts in chapter 1.

Chapter 1. The Doom of Atlantis

Sea, harbours, and a lava from deep water

He opens on ground that has risen or sunk within the time of ships. The page I can cite in full is p. 16.

In 1898 a French cable ship found vitreous lava, tachylyte, at 1,700 fathoms. He says this lava forms only above sea level, so the ocean bed there was dry land when the eruption ran. He then pairs two harbours that sit in the wrong place for their present height. Lake Titicaca has a port at 12,500 feet (3810 meters), 200 miles (321 kilometers) from the Pacific. The cable rings on the piers were large enough, he says, only for ocean-going vessels. Seaweed and shells remain. The southern water is still salty. Raised beaches are numerous. Quechua Indians say corn was first grown near the lake. Maize will not grow at that height now. Nan-Matal, on Ponape in the Carolines, is a stone port built out into the sea. The people there do not claim it. They speak of sun-kings who ruled the island and sent ships out. He asks whether most of Nan-Matal sank when the Titicaca port was lifted, and whether the sinking of Atlantis lifted the Andes.

If we reject this assumption, the presence of a sea harbour in Lake Titicaca at the altitude of 12,500 feet (3810 meters) and 200 miles (321 kilometers) distant from the Pacific coast, is utterly inexplicable.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 16

Jose Garcia Payon found two huts in the Cordilleras under a thick layer of ice. Shells mark a former shore. The huts now stand almost 19,000 feet (5791 meters) above the sea.

Neith of Sais, and 9560 B.C.

The same page turns to the texts. Plato’s Timaeus and Critias hold a chronicle that came from Solon, who travelled to Egypt about 560 B.C. The college of the goddess Neith at Sais told him its archives were thousands of years old.

These records spoke of a continent beyond the pillars of Hercules which sank about 9560 B.C.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 16

On p. 19 he shows the sum. Plato had the story from Solon. Atlantis perished 9,000 years before the Egyptian voyage. He prints 9560 B.C. as that result, which is 560 plus 9,000.

According to Solon, Atlantis perished 9,000 years before his trip to Egypt, or in 9560 B.C.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 19

Why he sets Santorini aside

The page before that sum is his room-in-the-ocean claim, and the page of the sum is his answer to the Aegean theory.

There was plenty of room for Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean at that time.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 19

Professor Galanopoulos held that Thira-Santorin was Plato’s Atlantis. Tomas dates that Aegean disaster to about 1400 B.C. He then gives Galanopoulos’s shortened Egyptian count, and the year it produces.

"It was not 9,000 years, but 900 years," he claims, adding 900 to 560 B.C., the date of Solon's voyage to Egypt, and getting 1460 B.C. or the time of Santorin's cataclysm.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 19

He calls the equation very weak. Plato, in the Timaeus passage Tomas prints here, puts the island west of the straits called the Pillars of Hercules. Tomas adds his own gloss, Gibraltar. The island was larger than Libya and the Middle East, in the wording of this edition. Plato calls the Atlantic a true ocean. Tomas says that sea is the Atlantic, and the Aegean will not carry the name.

The Atlantis of Plato was approximately 600,000 square miles in area. The Santorin-Atlantis of Galanopoulos is only 75 square miles in size.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 19

He adds Plato’s ten governors, and asks how ten provinces could have existed on Santorini. His judgment is that Plato and Solon counted better than Galanopoulos.

What he takes from the geologists

The section “Atlantis and Science” starts at the foot of p. 19. Academician V. A. Obrutchev of the U.S.S.R. held that the legend was not impossible or unacceptable from a geological standpoint. The sentence continues on p. 20: a probe of the northern Atlantic may reveal underwater ruins of buildings. Professor N. Lednev, a Moscow physicist, after twenty years of work, calls Atlantis a real island of a stated size and place.

Lednev states that ancient historical documents and cultural monuments showed Atlantis was "a huge island extending for hundreds of kilometres, situated west of Gibraltar".

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 20

Ekaterina Hagemeister wrote in 1955 that the Gulf Stream reached the Arctic Ocean between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, so Atlantis must have been the barrier that had turned the current south.

Atlantis was the cause of the appearance of the Ice Age. Atlantis was the cause of its end.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 20, quoting Ekaterina Hagemeister

He adds a present-day contrast. Greenland’s ice-cap is 5,000 feet (1524 meters) deep and does not thaw. Norway, on the same latitude, has summer vegetation. He calls the Gulf Stream the central heating of Europe. The Swedish ship Albatross, under Hans Pettersson, found traces of fresh-water plants on the equatorial Atlantic bed at a depth of over 2 miles (3.22 kilometers). Pettersson thought an island had sunk there.

The climate markers on the same page are two foraminifera. Globorotalia menardii coils left and lives in warm water. Globorotalia truncatulinoides coils right and can live in cold water. The warm species does not appear above the line from the Azores to the Canaries. The cold species is in the north-eastern Atlantic. The middle Atlantic, from West Africa to Central America, has the warm species. In the equatorial Atlantic the cold species appears again. He reads that pattern as a warm population that broke eastward through a barrier.

The Lamont workers, from the same shells, dated a sudden warming of Atlantic surface water to about 10,000 years ago. The change from cold-type to warm-type shells lasted not more than a hundred years. He puts the catastrophe around 8000 B.C.

In 1949 a submarine probe by the Geological Society of America raised about a ton of limestone discs from the Atlantic bed, south of the Azores. Average diameter about 6 inches. Thickness one and a half inches. A cavity in the centre, smooth outside, rough inside. He calls them sea-biscuits. They were not identified, and he says they did not look natural. The sentence he takes from Lamont is the one I would keep.

According to Lamont Geological Observatory (Columbia University), "the state of lithification of the limestone suggests that it may have been lithified under subaerial conditions and that the seamount may have been an island within the past 12,000 years".

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 21

The date list on the rest of p. 21 is short enough to copy into a comparison as he prints it.

• Niagara gorge, from the mouth of the river to the present falls: 12,500 years.
• The Cordilleras rose 19,000 feet (5791 meters) about 10,000 years ago.
• Cedar forest on Greater Bermuda, now under water, wiped out about 11,000 years ago.
• Mud from Lake Knockacran, Ireland, traced to the last ice sheet: 11,787 years.
• Spruce at Two Creeks, Wisconsin, crushed by advancing ice about 11,000 years ago.
• Birch in North Germany, uprooted by ice about 10,800 years ago.
• Jericho culture, by radio-carbon: 6800 B.C.
• Plaster skulls of people he compares with the Egyptians, at Jericho: they lived 8,000 years ago.

The page ends on the start of a sentence about a minor glaciation. I stop the quotation there.

Basques, flood texts, and the peoples he sends east

After p. 21 the chapter collects traditions he wants read as one catastrophe. I give the names and the customs, and I leave out measurements I have not re-read on the printed line.

The Basques, in this section, remember a destruction by fire and by water, and a flight into caves. He notes a count by twenties, which he sets beside Maya counting, and he pairs the Basque game of jai alai with the Maya ball game pok-a-tok. The serpent name he gives is Erensuge, seven-headed. On blood he reports group O high, group A low, group B the lowest in Europe, and the highest European share of Rh-negative blood. He relates the Basques to Cro-Magnon, and he says that type resembles the Guanches of the Canaries. The historian he names for Spain is Rafael Altamira.

The flood texts he lines up include Ovid, a Twelfth Dynasty papyrus in the Hermitage which tells of an Island of the Serpent, the epic of Gilgamesh, and the Book of Enoch on a fire in the west and a great sea toward the west. Lucian, about eighteen centuries ago, is his source for the priests of Baalbek, who carried Mediterranean water inland for four days and poured it into a cleft. He identifies that cleft with the northern end of the Great Rift, running south to the Zambezi. That passage is already quoted on Baalbek. He also cites a Bushman memory of a vast island west of Africa, the Maya books including the Dresden Codex, the Popol Vuh, and the books of Chilam Balam. A white Indian community at Paria, in a village called Atlan, in Venezuela, is one American name he keeps. He says more than 130 American Indian tribes tell of a world catastrophe. Charles H. Hapgood’s sliding crust is the geological theory he borrows for a displacement of the outer earth.

On the culture-bearers he is already pointing at later chapters. Aztlan lies in the east in the Mexican tradition he uses, and Quetzalcoatl comes from there. Viracocha comes from the land of dawn. Thoth, or Tehuti, comes from a western land. The Greek Elysian Fields and Tartarus lie in the west. Amenti, in Egypt, is a western land of the dead. One custom he limits to Peru and Egypt: the soul stays near the embalmed body. Montezuma, in the speech Tomas uses, reigns as viceroy of Quetzalcoatl, and the fathers came from Aztlan. The Popol Vuh sends princes east for investiture. Cristobal Molina of Cuzco is his source for Manco Capac giving the Incas the story of the deluge. On the Denderah zodiac, now in the Louvre, he reads Leo at the vernal equinox, and he gives the precession span as 10,950 to 8800 B.C.

Calendars from Atlantis

The calendar section is on pp. 34 and 35, and the numbers are printed in full. He has just claimed that Central and South America bred more food plants and medicinal plants than any other people. In the pre-Inca and Inca epochs the Andes and the Upper Amazon developed 240 varieties of potatoes and 20 types of maize. Cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkin, beans, strawberries, and chocolate came from the New World. He asks whether ancient Peru and Mexico inherited the science of agriculture from Atlantis.

The calendar link with Egypt is the shape of the year. Both, he says, used eighteen months of twenty days, with a five-day holiday at the end. He asks whether that is coincidence or a shared tradition.

The first year of Zoroastrian chronology is 9660 B.C. when "time began". This is very close to the date given by Egyptian priests to Solon for the doomsday of Atlantis, or 9560 B.C.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 34

The cycles he then runs backward are these. I copy the inputs and the year he reaches, so the arithmetic can be done again beside the page.

• Egypt: solar cycles of 1,460 years. Last astronomical epoch ended in A.D. 139. Eight cycles back: 11,542 B.C.
• Assyria: lunar periods of 1,805 years. The last ended in 712 B.C. Six cycles back: 11,542 B.C. He says the two calendars were presumably created in that shared year.
• Brahmins: rounds of 2,850 years, counted from 3102 B.C. Three cycles are 8,550 years. Added to 3102 B.C.: 11,652 B.C.
• Maya: cycles of 2,760 years. One span begins in 3373 B.C. Three periods are 8,280 years, and they land on 11,653 B.C., within a year of the Indian sages (p. 35).

Vatican Codex A-3738, on p. 35, is his Aztec chronology.

• First cycle, 4,008 years, ended in a flood.
• Second, 4,010 years, destroyed by hurricanes.
• Third, 4,801 years, closed by fires.
• Fourth, 5,042 years, starvation.
• The fifth era is the present one, and it began in 751 B.C.
• The four earlier periods total 17,861 years. He traces their beginning to 18,612 B.C.

Bishop Diego de Landa, writing in 1566, is the Maya count on the same page. In Landa’s time the Maya reckoned from a date Tomas puts at about 3113 B.C. They claimed 5,125 years of former cycles before that date. Tomas moves the origin of the early Maya to 8238 B.C., close, he says, to the Atlantean cataclysm.

The length of the day is his latitude test. The longest Maya day had 13 hours and the shortest 11. In the Egyptian figures he prints, the longest day had 12 hours 55 minutes and the shortest 11 hours 5 minutes. He says those hours match the Maya hours, and that 12 hours 55 minutes is the longest day in the Sudan, not in Egypt. Dr L. Zajdler of Warsaw suggests the reckoning came from tropical Atlantis.

Archaeologist Arthur Posnansky of La Paz, Bolivia, speaking of the uncompleted Sun Temple at Tiahuanaco, claims that the construction was suddenly abandoned about 9550 B.C.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 35

The next sentence ties that abandonment to the priests of Sais and to 9560 B.C. At the foot of the page he quotes E. F. Hagemeister of the U.S.S.R. The sentence breaks at the foot of the page. The complete Hagemeister sentences are the two on p. 20, under the name Ekaterina Hagemeister.

Chapter 2. Exodus

The contents place this chapter after the calendars. The printed opening I can paraphrase is the flight itself.

He treats the last day of Atlantis as a planetary disaster: ocean waves, earthquakes, volcanic explosions, and a fall from civilization into a barbaric state. The rescue stories are then one story told several times.

• Utnapishtim, in the Sumerian tablets of Gilgamesh, survives a vast flood with his family in an ark, and saves people, animals, and birds. Tomas reads the biblical Noah as a later version of that account.
• Yima, in the Zend Avesta, is ordered by Ahuramazda to prepare for a world deluge. He builds a cavern and shuts useful animals and plants inside it. Civilization, in this telling, restarts from the cavern.
• Manu, in the Mahabharata, is warned by Brahma in the form of a fish. Manu builds a ship and takes the seven Rishis and the seeds the Brahmins had listed. The Himalayan tradition Tomas uses puts the landing at Manali, in the Kulu Valley, the town of Manu.
• The Eskimos say they were carried to the frozen north by giant metallic birds. He reads the birds as aircraft.
• Northern Territory, Australia. A flood tale of the Bird-Men. The chief Karan gives wings to Waark and Weirk when the sea covers the country, the hills, and the trees. Karan then flies up and sits beside the moon.
• Gilgamesh again, for the day itself. A black cloud rises from the foundations of heaven. Light turns to darkness. Brother cannot see brother. The folk of the skies cannot recognize each other. The gods fear the flood and climb into the heaven of Anu. Tomas asks who the folk of the skies were. His answer is Atlantean leaders with aircraft, or with ships that could leave the earth. The heaven of Anu, “great above”, is space in his reading.

He also uses a book received from a Himalayan hermitage about a hundred years ago, which he treats as a page of lost history. The lines he wants are that the first Great Waters came, swallowed the Seven Great Islands, and saved the holy while the unholy were destroyed. A commentary, in his account, has the Great King of the Dazzling Face send airships to his brother chiefs with the order to prepare, arise, men of the Good Law, and cross the land while it is still dry.

Later in the chapter he sets ancient flying machines beside modern readings of them, and he is willing to refuse a reading. On the Palenque sarcophagus found by Ruz-Lhuillier, he notes that some writers call the carved figure an astronaut, and he says the dates cut on the tomb make that identification dubious. Indian epic material in the same stretch describes a weapon like ten thousand suns, and a thunderbolt after which hair and nails fell out and birds turned white. Frederick Soddy, in 1909, in The Interpretation of Radium, is his modern witness that an earlier age may have held a power later ages had to discover again.

Chapter 3. Antediluvian Colonies

This chapter opens on p. 43, under the subhead “A State about which U.N.O. knows nothing”.

K. K. Doberer, again from The Goldmakers, is the migration he starts from. The wise men of Atlantis, in that account, escape the peril by pushing through the Mediterranean and on into Asia, and they plant colonies on the Roof of the World. Tomas adds an airlift of high priests and princes of the Good Law, with the tools of their culture, into hidden Himalayan valleys and into underground shelters. He cites the Mahabharata for an age of airships and of bombs on cities. When the ocean took Atlantis, the colonies were to remain, cut off from the outside world. Frederick Soddy, 1909, is quoted again, on the chance that ancient scientific tradition echoes an earlier epoch.

Northern Shambhala

The middle of the chapter is a file of hidden-land reports. I list the names he actually uses.

• Ferdinand Ossendowski, and a prince he calls Chultun Beyli, on Agharti, tunnels, and a study of other planets.
• Nicholas Roerich in Sinkiang: strangers paying with old coins that could not be identified. Tomas says he met Roerich in Shanghai after the 1935 expedition. An article of Roerich’s, “The Guardians”, is placed at Tsagan Kure near Kalgan. In 1926 the Roerich party saw a shining disc over the Karakoram. Tomas says three pairs of binoculars were turned on it, and that Central Asia then had neither aeroplanes nor balloons. Tall white men and women carrying torches appear in the same cluster of reports.
• Alexandra David-Neel: a Tibetan bard who produces a blue summer flower in hard frost.
• A Dr Lao-Tsin, in a Shanghai newspaper of the 1920s: a Tower of Shambhala, laboratories, and a use of telepathy.
• A White Island in a former Gobi sea, a chariot of the Sons of the Fire, and Lords of the Flame from Venus. These are the Theosophical names he is willing to print.
• A Hungarian scholar of 1784 to 1842 placed Shambhala beyond the Syr Daria, between 45 and 50 degrees north.
• Father Stephen Cacella, and the name Xembala. Prjevalsky. G. N. Potanin. Grünwedel, The Path to Shambhala.
• An Antwerp map of the seventeenth century, which he says still marks the region.

He wrote the chapter in the Himalayas, and he uses the one word Shambhala for the White Island, for the hidden valleys, and for the catacombs. Lao Tse and Hsi Wang Mu, in the Kun Lun, sit in the same file. From The Mahatma Letters he takes a note of Mahatma Koot Hoomi dated July 1881.

The Russian counterparts are the city of Kitezh, the path of Batu Khan toward Central Asia, and Lake Svetloyar, searched and found empty. Belovodye, or Belogorye, is the peasant name. He cites the Journal of the Russian Geographical Society for 1903 (Korolenko) and a Siberian geographical note of 1916 (Belosliudov). In the Altai, Roerich heard of two men in the nineteenth century who returned from the hidden country and were not permitted to speak of the rest. A lama’s tale, which Tomas repeats, has two men carrying a thoroughbred sheep through a tunnel so that the breed could be improved.

Sacred mountains and lost cities

The peaks he treats as gates are Nanda Devi, Kailas (Kang Rimpoche), Kanchenjunga, and the Greek mountains Parnassus and Olympus. Hindu peoples of the older books, the Asuras, Paulomas, Kalakanjas, and Nagas, and the city Hiranyapura, are named as powers that once had flying cars. The Surya Siddhanta gives him Maya, a ruler of Atala, who received astronomy from the sun. Mount Meru he identifies with Kailas.

In the Americas the same pattern, for him, is a hidden colony rather than a Himalayan one.

• Mount Shasta. A flood story of Coyote. Sky-Spirits. A 1931 forest fire stopped by a fog that held a clean curve. Edward Lanser, in the Los Angeles Times in 1932: tall white men, close-cropped hair, a band on the forehead, white robes, gold nuggets, strange cattle, and wingless silent ships that dive into the Pacific and go on as boats. He also points the reader to Harold T. Wilkins, Mysteries of Ancient South America.
• L. Taylor Hansen, He Walked the Americas: a couple who crash in Yucatan and come on a hidden Maya city.
• J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America: a Spanish padre, in 1838 or 1839, who saw a white glittering city. The people speak Maya and kill white men who enter.
• A. Hyatt Verrill, on Aztec reserve bases in country that was kept apart.
• Quechua tales of tunnels under the Andes.
• P. H. Fawcett, who died looking for a lost city.

Chapter 4. When Gods Walked among Men

The contents place this chapter after the colonies. The pages I have in front of me are 57, 61, and 62, with the Oannes passage on the page that ends at p. 60.

He starts from the historians who gave Egypt and Sumer long reigns of gods before the human kings. The Sumerian king list, in his use of it, marks a great span for the first dynasty after the Flood. Leonard Woolley at al Ubaid, near Ur, is his archaeologist for the temple of Nin-Kharsag and for the gold bead of A-anni-pad-da, son of Mes-anni-pad-da. Eupolemus, in the second century B.C., is cited for a founding of Babylon by people saved from the deluge. Herodotus is cited for a time when the gods ruled Egypt, and for Horus, who defeated Typhon, as the last of them. The page that becomes p. 57 opens in the middle of a sentence about the king of Atlantis, who travelled the world teaching agriculture and ethics.

The Turin Papyrus states that the installation of a dynasty of demigods in Egypt took place in 9850 B.C.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 57

Jean Bailly is his eighteenth-century witness that India, Persia, China, Greece, and Egypt all remember reigns of gods or demigods before the reigns of men. The Chinese titles Bailly uses, and Tomas prints, are Tien-hoang, the Kings of Heaven, then Ti-hoang, the Kings on Earth, then Gin-hoang, the King-men. Tomas’s own gloss is that these are memories of people from an older civilization guiding the children of the survivors.

Thoth

The subhead is “The Torchbearers of Culture”. The Book of the Dead, in his reading, gives Thoth a birthplace in a far western country, a city by the sea, and two active volcanoes. Something extraordinary darkens the sun. The gods are afraid. Thoth leads them east, across water. Tomas says a reader of that passage thinks of Atlantis.

L. Filipoff, astronomer at the Algiers Observatory, worked on pyramid texts of the fifth and sixth dynasties. Thoth is connected there with the sign of Cancer. Filipoff dates the culture-bearer’s arrival in Egypt to the time when the vernal equinox stood in Cancer, about 7256 B.C. Hermes is identified with Thoth. The page says Hermes taught writing, science, religion, art, and music to a people who had lived without law, and then ascended.

Oannes, bronze, and the Indus landing

On the page numbered 60 he reads Oannes, the fish-bodied teacher from the Persian Gulf in Berosus, as a man in a helmet and a pressurized suit. The primitive witnesses, he says, had no other picture to hand. Before Oannes the people of the Euphrates were beast-like, in the chronicle he uses. After him they built cities and canals. By the second millennium before our era, Babylonian mathematicians had algebra and geometry, and the astronomers had tables of the sky. A hymn to Oannes, which he prints, has the god purify gold and silver and mixed copper and tin. Tomas adds that bronze is copper with one tenth part of tin, and that the alloy is easier to explain as a gift than as a slow discovery. Europe, the next page says, has a long bronze age and hardly a copper age. Bronze appears suddenly, already well made. Central American bronze also came ready-made.

He writes in The Goldmakers that between 8,000 and 10,000 B.C. a group of people landed in the Indus delta as well as at the head of the Persian Gulf.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 61

Those men are non-Aryan and non-Semitic, tall, and black-haired. They founded a civilization on metals: gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, antimony, iron, and nickel. What they knew in 8000 B.C., Tomas says, Europe learnt thousands of years later. Doberer goes on to place the birth of alchemy in Atlantis. Artificial gold was shipped for religion only. The priesthoods of Sumer, India, and Egypt kept the method. Sumerian metal objects have been found in southern Russia, at Troy, and in Central Europe. By about 300 B.C. the tin-bronze culture of Sumeria had disappeared, mainly because the tin ran out.

From the land of sunrise

The American teachers start at the foot of p. 61 and fill p. 62. Garcilasso de la Vega is the spelling on the page. The Sun sends Manco Copac and Mama Ocllo. He teaches agriculture. She teaches weaving and spinning. Peru accepts the Children of the Sun and founds Cuzco. A second legend on the same page has bearded white men from the east.

Three out of the five mummies possessed traces of Group A, which is utterly foreign to the American Indian.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 62

The test is the one named above: five Inca mummies in the British Museum, 1952, B. E. Gilbey and M. Lubran, reported to the Royal Anthropological Institute. None was rhesus-negative. One had the substances D and c, without C and E, a combination he calls rare among the Indians. Another royal mummy had C, E, and c, without D, “almost without a parallel on our earth”, in his words. From that he concludes that the Inca kings were not of the original population of South America. He adds that the conquistadores heard the Inca courtiers use a secret language their subjects did not know.

The Mexican, Guatemalan, and Yucatan form of the same teacher is Quetzalcoatl, Kukumatz, or Kukulkan. White, ruddy, long beard, a long black linen robe with short sleeves. The Toltecs, as craftsmen, builders, sculptors, and farmers, followed him. He arrived from an eastern land. One version lands him at Vera Cruz in a winged ship. Codex Vindobonensis shows him coming down from a hole in the heavens. When enemies stopped the work, he returned to the coast and left for Tlapallan on a raft of snakes. Another myth puts him on a funeral pyre. The ashes become birds. The heart becomes the planet Venus. The sentence breaks at the foot of p. 62 on the word planet, and the next page completes it.

Viracocha, “foam of the sea”, is the Peruvian white teacher from the land of dawn in the pages that follow. W. J. Perry’s Children of the Sun are the comparative label Tomas reaches for: one stock, appearing as men, remembered as gods. A Hindu guest-rite, in his note, survives because gods once came as guests.

Chapter 5. Marks of a Mystery Race

The chapter collects footprints, pictures, and objects he thinks are older than the label in the museum. The page with the American animals is p. 70. The earlier pages offer these finds.

• A shoe print in Gobi sandstone, from a Soviet-Chinese expedition in 1959, reported by Dr Chow Ming Chen, and a shoe sole with stitch marks in Triassic limestone at Fisher Canyon, Pershing County, Nevada.
• The Broken Hill skull from Northern Rhodesia, in the Natural History Museum in London. He describes a clean round hole and calls it a bullet hole. The age he gives the skull is on the order of 40,000 years.
• A bison skull, discussed by K. K. Flerov, with a hole that healed.
• Odessa caves, T. G. Gritsai and I. J. Yatsko, 1960: bones of ostriches, camels, and hyenas, and circular holes he says were drilled and then polished.
• Eoliths, from France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Egypt, Burma, and Australia, spread from very old gravels down to post-glacial ones.
• Tassili, Henri Lhote, and the figure Lhote called the great Martian god of Jabbaren. Paintings he puts at 8,000 to 10,000 years.
• The Wandjina of the Kimberley: blue pigment, sandals, no mouths, three or seven fingers, the Rainbow Serpent, and the Dreamtime. A plate in the book calls them the Mouthless Ones.
• An iron pillar in Delhi which he calls the Kutb Minar pillar. It does not rust. The inscription he prints says that while the pillar stands, the Hindu kingdom will endure.
• The Wolfsegg steel cube, found in 1885 at the foundry of Isidore Braun in Vöcklabruck, in coal from Wolfsegg near Schwanenstadt. The cast he saw is at Linz. The original is lost. He cites Nature for November 1886 and L’Astronomie for 1886.
• A wheeled animal toy from near Vera Cruz. He notes that the Maya are said to have had no wheel, and he gives the toys a carbon age of 1,200 to 2,000 years.
• Stone balls in south-western Costa Rica, and in Guatemala and Mexico, of a rock brought from elsewhere.

On p. 70 the American animals are the claim.

Ruzo’s rock gallery shows camels, horses, and cows. Tomas says none of those animals were in the Americas when Columbus arrived. He then drops the old argument over elephant pictures, because bones have been found.

According to a Carbon-14 test, they lived about 9300 B.C., or some 250 years after the traditional date of the sinking of Atlantis.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 70

“They” are the fossil early man and the extinct elephant found by Helmut de Terra at Tepexpan, Mexico. He allows that the age of some elephant ornaments and sculptures in Central and South America can still be argued.

Cocle pottery paints a flying lizard almost like a pterodactyl, beside animals a viewer can still name. Two very old cities in the Nasca district, near Pisco, Peru, belong to a culture he calls immeasurably older than the pre-Inca. About 1920 Professor Julio Tello found jugs of a five-toed llama there. Llamas now have two toes. He says an earlier stage had five, as cattle once did, and that five-toed llama skeletons have been dug up in the same district. A cultured people, in his conclusion, lived in South America while llamas still had five toes.

In the Hermitage at Leningrad, a gold Scythian buckle shows a sabre-tooth tiger, an animal he says has been extinct since the end of the Ice Age.

On Malta a track is cut in the rock, with junctions and sidings like a railway. The grooves run beside a narrow rib of stone where a dragged cart, and an animal, could not have passed. There are no hoof marks and no footprints between the grooves. At one point the track leaves the shore and continues under water. He gives the find an antiquity of 9,000 years, and he says its purpose is still undefined.

Chapter 6. Early Science, a Legacy

This is his longest file of instruments, maps, and machines. The page I would put next to other studies of old charts is p. 95, on the Piri Reis map. The rest of the chapter I summarize by the object and the place.

He argues that a high science was in place before the schools of Greece. Alexander Marshack is his witness for lunar notation in the Upper Paleolithic, back through Magdalenian and Aurignacian work. The Popol Vuh is quoted for watchers who saw the large and the small, in the sky and on the earth. Valery Briusov is quoted for Atlanteans as the teachers of Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. Cortes, in 1520, found his own calendar ten days behind the Aztec calendar and behind astronomical time. Egerton Sykes is cited for a Maya arrival that already had writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, medicine, and a calendar more accurate than Europe’s until the eighteenth century. Cottie A. Burland, at the International Congress of Americanists in Paris in 1956, is his source for a transit of Venus carved on Stela I at El Castillo, Santa Lucia Cotzumahualpa, on 25 November 416. Inca roads, water, and sewage, and Toltec building projects planned over centuries, are the engineering examples. Platinum on the coast of Ecuador is the metal that, for him, implies a heat ordinary furnaces did not reach. A. Braghine’s The Shadow of Atlantis supplies an obsidian mirror from Esmeraldas, in the collection of Salas Franco. The Heye Foundation in New York has Manabi beads, smaller than a pinhead, engraved and pierced. In the Bay of Pisco a great trident cut in the hillside, which a plate calls the Candlestick of the Andes, is read by Beltran Garcia, a descendant of Garcilaso, as a seismograph.

Greek and Indian science, in his account, preserved an older teaching. Anaximenes on dark companions of stars, Anaxagoras on other earths, Democritus on atoms and on a Milky Way made of stars, Pythagoras on a round earth, Aristarchus of Samos on an earth that goes around the sun, and Eratosthenes on the circumference of the earth, are the Greek names. He notes Sextus Empiricus on Democritus learning atomism from Moschus the Phoenician. A Hindu kalpa, the Day of Brahma, is set beside modern estimates of the age of the earth. The Boat of Millions of Years, on the Metternich Stele, is the Egyptian phrase he likes for a long chronology.

Electra, daughter of Atlas, is his eponym for electricity, by way of amber. Wilhelm König’s Parthian jars, found near Baghdad, are the batteries: a copper cylinder, an iron rod, lead-tin solder, an asphalt stopper. He says a replica filled with copper sulphate, at General Electric in Pittsfield, produced a current, and that electroplated objects about 4,000 years old come from the same country. The Agastya Samhita at Ujjain is the Indian cell: a copper plate, copper sulphate, moist sawdust, and a zinc treated with mercury. A hundred such jars, in that text, drive a flying car. Ever-burning lamps fill the next stretch. Numa Pompilius and a fire from the sky. Pausanias, in A.D. 170, on a golden lamp in the temple of Minerva that burnt for a year. Lamps near Memphis that died when air was let in. The statue of Memnon sounding at sunrise. A speaking idol in the Rimac valley. Lucian at Hierapolis on a gem in the temple of Hera. Egyptian tomb paintings with no soot from lamps. Luminous stones in the temple of Hadad at Baalbek. Plutarch on the perpetual lamp of Jupiter Amun. A lamp found in 1401 in the tomb of Pallas, son of Evander. Augustine on a lamp in a shrine of Venus. A lamp at Edessa that burnt for five centuries, in Kedrenos. The Abbé Huc in Tibet. Barco Centenera, in 1601, on a light like a moon over a lake in the Gran Moxo country of Paraguay. Fawcett, writing to Lewis Spence, on cold lights in cities of the forest. Mandan tradition of cities with lights that do not go out, beyond the ocean.

The Great Pyramid and the terrace at Baalbek are his heavy-stone file. Herodotus and Diodorus are the labour figures he repeats, and they do not agree with each other. He argues that the perimeter of the base and the height encode a value of pi, and that other proportions encode the year and the size of the earth. A. K. Abramov of Moscow is the mathematician he interviewed on a septenary reading of those proportions. Pythagoras, he says, could not take in the Egyptian geometry. The Baalbek terrace blocks are, in his comparison, many times heavier than the stones of the Great Pyramid. François Lenormant is cited for priests at On who raised stones by sound. Lucian, in A.D. 155, is cited for an Apollo at Hierapolis that rose by itself. At Shivapur, on the Satara road near Poona, at the mosque of Qamar Ali Dervish, eleven men, or in the other trial nine, lift a stone with their right forefingers while a name is chanted. The rite, the numbers of men, and the place are the claim.

The Piri Reis map

Printed p. 95 is the chart. He has asked the U.S. Hydrographic Office to check it. Commander Larsen, for the U.S. Navy, replies that the Office has verified the Piri Reis map, that it goes back more than 5,000 years, that only a world-wide survey would explain the accuracy, and that the map has been used to correct errors on present charts. Larsen’s sentence as printed contains dashes, so I give his claims in my own words and quote Mallery, whose sentence is clean.

Mallery says the chart records every mountain range in northern Canada and Alaska, including ranges the U.S. Army Map Services once lacked and later found. Longitude on the map is exact. Tomas says we have known how to calculate longitude for only two hundred years.

We do not know how they could map so accurately without an aeroplane.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 95, quoting Mallery

He asks whether Alexander’s expedition obtained papyri from the temple of Sais. The priests of Sais, he says, knew the Atlantic as a real sea, with a surrounding land that might be called a continent. That is his bridge from the map back to Solon.

Satellites have shown the earth somewhat pear-shaped. A letter of Columbus already calls the earth pear-shaped. Tomas asks how Columbus knew. The next witness is medieval.

Nasireddin Tusi, an Azerbaijan mathematician and astronomer of the thirteenth century, was aware of America 220 years before Columbus. The figure on the page is two hundred and twenty, not twenty. G. D. Mamedbeily, of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, reports that seven centuries ago Tusi wrote of a land called Dzhezair Haldat, eternal isles, whose coordinates correspond to a coast in the Americas. The sentence runs off p. 95 onto the next page. The coast Tomas is matching is the east coast of South America.

Skyships close the chapter. The Ramayana vimana, as he describes it, has a yellowish-white liquid, two stories, windows, a dome, the speed of the wind, a melodious sound, and hangars. Emperor Shun, about 4,200 years ago in his chronology, has a flying chariot. Chu Yuan (340 to 278 B.C.) is named among the Chinese poets of flight. Jonathan Swift, in 1726, on two moons of Mars, and Asaph Hall’s discovery in 1877, are his case that a precise astronomical fact can sit in a book long before the observatory. The Voynich manuscript, found in 1912 near Rome, written about A.D. 1500, is the book he cannot read: plants that seem to need a microscope, and a spiral he compares with Andromeda. The Latin on the last sheet, in his translation, says “Thou wert opening to me many gates.”

Chapter 7. Pre-Deluge Treasure Vaults

He argues that Atlantean teachers hid books and instruments where a flood would not take them, and that a few of those stores may still be found. The classical claims of very long archives come first. I list them as his citations.

• Sonchis of Sais, speaking to Solon.
• Cicero, De Divinatione: Babylonian observations running for a vast span of years.
• Strabo: the Turdetani of Spain, with writings of great age.
• Diogenes Laertius: a long series of solar and lunar eclipses, which Tomas reads as thousands of years of watching the sky.
• Gilgamesh engraving the story of the flood on stone before the disaster.
• Manetho, in the third century B.C., on pillars near Thebes, translated after the deluge by Agathodaemon, the second son of Hermes.
• George Syncellus, on Egyptian chronicles covering a great span.
• Proclus: Plato at Sais with Pateneit, at Heliopolis with Ochlapi, and at Sebennytus with Ethimon.
• Crantor, about 300 B.C.: pillars at Sais, inscribed in hieroglyphs with the history of Atlantis, and shown to Greeks.
• Ammianus Marcellinus: underground passages built by people who foresaw a flood.
• Herodotus, shown 345 statues of high priests, a line he takes back many thousands of years before the visit. Herodotus was in Egypt in 455 B.C., and Tomas notes that Herodotus found no burial in the Great Pyramid.

The modern search, for him, is the joint Pyramid Project of Ein Shams University and the University of California, under Luis Alvarez, using cosmic rays in the burial chamber of Khephren. He says the agreement was signed in the middle of the 1960s, and that he wrote to Alvarez in August 1966 asking for a sounding under the foundations, not only a raying of the upper mass. He cites a Moscow article in April 1967 and a Sunday piece on 26 November 1967, and John Tunstall in the Times Saturday Review of 26 July 1969, whose report was that the readings had been thrown into confusion. Arab accounts of moving walls and of flashes inside the pyramid are, in his suggestion, a generator still under the building or under the Sphinx.

The Sphinx section ties the lion body to the age of Leo, and the dream of Thutmose IV to a clearing of the sand. He hopes for a vault under the Sphinx or under the pyramids. The lion body is his date, and the date points at a chamber still closed.

On the Alexandrian library he has already been quoted on this site. The lines about disconnected fragments, and about a history of science that would look different if the library had survived, are on Sumer, the First Known Civilization. His point in this chapter is that the library was the heir of older temples, and that its burning left the vaults as the remaining chance.

Andros, Bimini, and the Blue Hole

The sea search is on pp. 120 to 122, and it is the part of the chapter with dates and measurements I have read on the page.

An American pilot, Robert Brush, flying low over the Bimini islands, photographed a square shape on the sea-bed. He showed it to Dimitri Rebikoff, French-born, twenty years in the Mediterranean, president of the Institute of Underwater Technology. Rebikoff went to Dr J. Manson Valentine, a former Yale professor.

In 1968 they discovered that the dark rectangle on the sea-bed covered by 6 feet (1.83 meters) of water and overgrown with sea plants, was an ancient building, possibly a temple, approximately 100 by 75 feet (22.86 meters) in size. It is located near the north end of Andros Island, the largest island in the Bahamas.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 120

The footnote gives The Miami News, 23 August 1968, and The Miami Herald, 11 September 1968. Rebikoff’s remark about square angles, and his rule that a temple-like plan implies a town, contain dashes, so I leave them in paraphrase. Nature, he said, does not make a square angle. A temple-like structure, in his experience of more than a dozen sunken cities, means a city or a town nearby. He was as excited as he had been at any Phoenician or Greek site.

What seems certain is that the ruin is pre-Columbus as established by its position relative to present water level.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 120, quoting J. Manson Valentine

On p. 121 Valentine says he and Rebikoff made out chambers. The building faced due east and west and resembled the Temple of the Turtles at Uxmal, which at first suggested Maya builders. Two further finds changed that reading. In 1967 Rebikoff saw, from the air, a rectangle a quarter of a mile long, in water 3 fathoms deep, on the Great Bahama Bank. Valentine himself photographed dozens of pathways, parallel sides, geometrical figures, and circles, running for 60 miles (96.56 kilometers) from Bimini to Orange Cay.

The dive he describes is 2 September 1968, in 3 fathoms, off the north-west coast of North Bimini. The findings in it are an extensive pavement of rectangular and polygonal stones, shaped and aligned, the edges of the largest stones rounded by time, some of them true rectangles, the larger pieces at least 10 to 15 feet (4.57 meters) long, set as the width of parallel avenues, and a second layer of stones where the sand between the upper stones had washed away.

"might be as ancient as the legendary lands of Atlantis which were supposedly destroyed 11,500 years ago".

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 121, quoting J. Manson Valentine

He believes the Bahamas once held an advanced civilization, because the Bimini builders could move blocks as heavy as those of the Great Pyramid or of the stonework of Cuzco. The sentence ends on p. 122, where Valentine states the conclusion in his own words.

I believe there was an Atlantis. I believe in it because of fact, because of various pieces of evidence that I have found in explorations in Yucatan, South America, Mexico and the West Indies.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 122, quoting J. Manson Valentine

Rebikoff expects sunken cities and buildings on the Bahama banks. Tomas adds that an oceanographic probe may one day find the civilization, and that the evidence of a violent Atlantic cataclysm is already in hand and agrees with Plato.

The 'Calypso' expedition of Jacques Cousteau discovered a huge grotto off the same island of Andros, with stalactites and stalagmites 165 feet (50 meters) under water.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 122

Stalactites form in air, so the grotto was a cave above the sea. Sediments on the walls date the drowning to 12,000 years ago. Cousteau’s party also entered the Blue Hole off British Honduras, 1,000 feet (304 meters) wide. The stalactites and stalagmites there stand slanted, as if an earthquake had shaken them. Scientists in Miami examined one stalagmite and concluded that the deep grottos were above the sea 12,000 years ago. Tomas prints the sea as Carribean.

It is apparent from these discoveries that violent geological upheavals occurred in the Atlantic basin about 10,000 B.C., the date of the proverbial 'Great Flood'.

Andrew Tomas. Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery (Sphere, 1973), p. 122

The page then turns to museums. Objects already on the shelves may be older than the culture they were filed under. That sentence is the bridge into the last chapters.

Chapter 8. It Has All Happened Before

The chapter argues that a civilization is inherited, and that the teachers of Greece stood on older teachers.

His chain of ideas runs from the Egyptian priests to the Greeks, and behind the priests to Thoth, who came from an island in the Western Sea. Behind Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno he places Pythagoras, Aristarchus, Anaxagoras, and Anaximenes. Newton’s line about standing on the shoulders of giants is the motto. Jean Bailly is cited again, for ideas that engender ideas. Alexander Kazantsev, on a page numbered 125, is quoted on unknown scientists who observed the stars. Kanada’s atoms are placed about a thousand years before the age he calls the decadence of Greece and Rome.

The American inheritance, in this chapter, is practical. Peruvian roads and tunnels still in use, asphalt roadways, megalithic walls, and textiles. The Maya and Aztec calendar, in which every day in a long cycle had its own name. The Inca state, which had no money, and in which property belonged to the state. Quechua memory, as he reports it, of doors left unlocked because there were no burglars, until the Spanish fitted bolts. Half of the foods we eat, he says, come from pre-Inca and Inca fields. He has already given the potato and maize counts on p. 34.

Chapter 9. From Legend to Discovery

He argues that a myth can be a report, and he lists finds that arrived after the text had been dismissed.

• Heinrich Schliemann at Hissarlik in 1870, after Homer.
• Diego de Landa, 1566, later used as a key to Maya writing after he had been blamed for burning books.
• Chow Ta-kuan on Angkor, set aside until the city was studied in 1858.
• Marco Polo, doubted, then mapped.
• Petra, described by Eratosthenes before the modern visit.
• Herodotus on griffins, which Tomas says were matched by later finds in the same kind of country.

Thoth returns with titles. In the Book of the Dead and in pharaonic inscriptions he is Lord of the Overseas and Guardian of the Two Lands. A myth says he carried the gods on wings to the other side of the lake Kha. Tomas reads that as an airlift from Atlantis to Egypt. The I-Ching credits celestial genii with the introduction of agriculture. Australian tribes credit Baiame, Daramulun, and Bunjil, and they say they know nothing of those beings before the arrival.

On p. 136 the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, has a large Maya jar. A pattern drawn on a flat surface was transferred onto the jar with an exactness he says few living draughtsmen could match. He takes that as evidence of instruments and of mathematics.

Iranian tradition gives him a gallery in the mountains of Khaf, in the Caucasus, with statues of the Wise Kings of the East. Taimuraz, the third king of Iran, visits it on a winged steed, Simorgh-Anke, born before the Deluge. Tomas reads the steed as an Atlantean aircraft.

Under Cuzco, caverns hold treasure. Adventurers go in and do not return. One man comes back with two gold bars and his mind gone. The government then walls the entrances. L. Taylor Hansen hopes the caverns hold libraries as well as gold. Oliva heard a quipu-reader say that the real Tiahuanaco is a subterranean city. From Mexico the conquistadores brought a story that Maya priests, under torture, would not reveal fifty-two golden tablets on which the ancient history of the New World was written.

He cites Diogenes Laertius for a great age of the Egyptian priestly archives. His question from the citation is whether savagery is sometimes the fall of a high culture. The Maya of Yucatan, he says, fell through wars and through colonial rule. A flood and a volcanic outbreak can do the same work faster.

Chapter 10. Authorities, Anecdotes and Atlantis

The chapter opens on p. 143. He says the book contains theories, and he states them in a short list.

• Atlantis was destroyed in a global cataclysm.
• Philosophers and scientists who would not serve the warmongering rulers withdrew into inaccessible places.
• After the disaster, demigods appeared and taught the survivors. That was the age when gods walked the earth.
• The facts in the book hint at a prehistoric science.
• The Atlanteans left underground museums and libraries before the flood.

He allows that the book may contain minor errors. Those errors, he says, will be forgiven if one antediluvian museum is found. He thinks this century may find one, and that the find would vindicate the thesis of a high culture thousands of years ago.

The rest of the chapter is a list of experts who refused a later fact. The names he lines up include Lactantius, a seventeenth-century denial of flight, Francesco Sizzi, the 1633 condemnation of Galileo, a dismissal of Edison, the British Association in 1838, Cuvier, a resignation at the U.S. Patent Office in 1875, P. G. Tait, the denial of heavier-than-air flight in 1903, A. W. Bickerton in 1926, F. R. Moulton in 1935, and the scepticism about space travel still current in January 1957. The coelacanth, caught in 1938 and again in the early 1950s, is his animal that had been declared extinct for an immense span of years. The moral he draws is that a refusal by authorities is not a date.

Where I leave the book

The pages I would actually carry into a comparison are p. 16 (Titicaca, Nan-Matal, Payon, Neith, 9560 B.C.), p. 19 (the Santorini test, 600,000 square miles, 75 square miles, ten provinces, 1460 B.C.), pp. 20 and 21 (Lednev’s island, Hagemeister, the foraminifera, the discs, the carbon dates), pp. 34 and 35 (the calendar stack and Posnansky’s 9550 B.C.), p. 57 (Turin 9850 B.C. and Filipoff’s 7256 B.C.), pp. 61 and 62 (the Indus and Persian Gulf landing, the Inca blood groups, Quetzalcoatl at Vera Cruz), p. 70 (Tepexpan 9300 B.C., the five-toed llama, Malta), p. 95 (Piri Reis, Tusi, 220 years), and pp. 120 to 122 (Andros, Bimini, the Blue Hole).

The chapters on Shambhala, on aircraft in the epics, and on lamps and batteries are a second shelf. They tell me which text he is using and which modern report he trusts. I would not enter a Karakoram disc of 1926, or a Mount Shasta story of 1932, in the same column as the Sais date.

He says himself, on p. 143, that the book contains theories. The theory is one Atlantic catastrophe, a survival of teachers, and stores of books still hidden. The dates are what he contributes to a table. They are not yet one date.

Where to read it

The book is in copyright. Editions Robert Laffont, 1972. Robert Hale published it in Britain in 1972. The pages cited above are the Sphere Books edition of 1973, reprinted in September 1973, ISBN 0 7221 8542 1. The quotations in this review are short excerpts for review and study. A library copy is the way to check a page against the footnote.

FAQ

Where does Andrew Tomas place Atlantis?

West of the Pillars of Hercules, which he identifies with Gibraltar. Lednev’s wording, which Tomas adopts, is a huge island extending for hundreds of kilometres west of Gibraltar. Tomas gives Plato’s island an area of about 600,000 square miles. He says there was room for it in the Atlantic of that time. The Bahamas, later in the book, are a place where he expects ruins of that same catastrophe.

What year does he use for the sinking?

9560 B.C., from Solon’s voyage to Egypt about 560 B.C. plus the 9,000 years of the Sais archive (pp. 16 and 19). Beside that year he prints 9660 B.C. for the first year of Zoroastrian time, about 9550 B.C. for the abandonment of the Sun Temple at Tiahuanaco, 9850 B.C. for the Turin demigods, about 7256 B.C. for Filipoff’s arrival of Thoth, and about 10,000 B.C. for the upheaval he reads from the drowned caves. I keep those as separate claims.

Why does he reject Santorini?

Galanopoulos dated the Thira-Santorin explosion to about 1400 B.C., and by reading 9,000 years as 900 he reached 1460 B.C. Tomas says Plato’s Atlantic is a true ocean west of Gibraltar, that the island was about 600,000 square miles against 75 for that Santorini, and that ten provinces will not fit on the smaller island (p. 19).

What is his Bahamas evidence?

A 1968 building off the north end of Andros, about 100 by 75 feet (22.86 meters), in 6 feet (1.83 meters) of water. A 1967 rectangle, a quarter of a mile long, in 3 fathoms on the Great Bahama Bank. A pavement of cut stones off North Bimini, dived on 2 September 1968, with pieces at least 10 to 15 feet (4.57 meters) long. Valentine’s guess of 11,500 years. Cousteau’s Andros grotto, stalactites 165 feet (50 meters) down, drowned 12,000 years ago. The Blue Hole off British Honduras, also 12,000 years. Tomas’s summary is violent upheaval in the Atlantic basin about 10,000 B.C. (pp. 120 to 122).

Related on this site

1. Timaeus & Critias: Plato’s account. Tomas’s pp. 16 and 19 are his use of Solon, Sais, and the size of the island.
2. Where Was Atlantis: other proposed locations, including the Aegean one he rejects on p. 19.
3. Lewis Spence’s The History of Atlantis: a 9600 BC Atlantic land, argued from Cro-Magnon and Azilian migrations and from a set of customs. Tomas’s clocks are the calendars and the carbon dates.
4. Ignatius Donnelly: the 1882 Atlantic case. Tomas is a later holder of an Atlantic island and of colonies of teachers.
5. Baalbek: his note on Lucian, the priests, and the four-day carrying of sea water, already quoted there.
6. Sumer, the First Known Civilization: his lines on the loss of the Alexandrian library.
7. The wise teachers of Atlantis: a figure taken from this book.

Sources

The book

• Andrew Tomas, Atlantis: From Legend to Discovery. First published in Great Britain in 1972 by Robert Hale & Company. Copyright Editions Robert Laffont, 1972. First Sphere Books edition 1973. Reprinted September 1973. Set in Linotype Lectura. Printed by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks. ISBN 0 7221 8542 1. Dedicated to Nicholas Roerich (1874 to 1947). Page numbers above are the printed footers of this Sphere reprint.

Plato, as he uses him

• Timaeus and Critias, through Solon and the priests of Neith at Sais. The Greek dialogues are discussed on Timaeus & Critias. His pp. 16 and 19 give the 9560 B.C. date, the 600,000 square miles, and the ten governors.

Geology and the Atlantic floor, as he cites them

• V. A. Obrutchev. N. Lednev. Ekaterina Hagemeister, 1955 (printed E. F. Hagemeister on p. 35). Hans Pettersson and the Swedish Albatross. Lamont Geological Observatory, Columbia University. The Geological Society of America, 1949, on the limestone discs south of the Azores.

Calendars and American dates

• Vatican Codex A-3738. Diego de Landa, 1566. L. Zajdler of Warsaw. Arthur Posnansky of La Paz, on the Sun Temple at Tiahuanaco. Helmut de Terra at Tepexpan. Julio Tello, about 1920, on the five-toed llama.

Teachers, metals, and blood

• The Turin Papyrus. The Book of the Dead, on Thoth. L. Filipoff of the Algiers Observatory. K. K. Doberer, The Goldmakers. Garcilasso de la Vega. B. E. Gilbey and M. Lubran, 1952, Royal Anthropological Institute, on five Inca mummies in the British Museum.

Maps and the Bahamas

• Commander Larsen, U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, on the Piri Reis map. Mallery. Nasireddin Tusi, as reported by G. D. Mamedbeily. Robert Brush, Dimitri Rebikoff, and J. Manson Valentine. The Miami News, 23 August 1968. The Miami Herald, 11 September 1968. Jacques Cousteau and the Calypso, off Andros and at the Blue Hole of British Honduras.