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Every Atlantis story on this site passes through one city. Plato says the account came to Solon from the priests of Sais, a temple city in the Nile delta, and almost every writer I collected repeats that chain before adding their own view. I wanted to see what the site actually says about Sais itself, so I gathered it here.
A city in the delta
The German book Atlantis, die Urheimat der Arier quotes the opening of the story in Plato’s Timaeus, where Critias, one of the speakers, places the city:
There is in Egypt, began Critias, in the Delta, at the tip of which the Nile splits, a district; one calls its inhabitants the Saitic, and the greatest city of this district is Sais, the birthplace of King Amasis.
Plato, Timaeus
The same passage says the people of Sais honored a founding goddess the Greeks called Athena, and so counted themselves friends and kin of the Athenians. The Phaeacians and Phoenicians identifies the site as modern Sa el-Hagar. 7 Rivers of the Nile points to the Durham University Expedition to Saïs for work on how the Nile branches around the city changed over time.
The priests and Solon
Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis dates Solon’s visit to around 560 BC and notes the priest’s claim that Sais was founded 8,000 years before Solon and Athens 9,000 years before (Timaeus 23e). Timaeus and Critias gives the priests names from Plutarch: Psenophis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Sais. James Churchward treats the story as too well known to repeat, on What Was the Lost Continent of Mu?:
The description of that land given to Solon by Sonchis, priest at Sais; its destruction by earthquakes, and submergence, recorded by Plato in his Timaeus, have been told and retold so many times that it is useless to encumber these pages with a repetition of it.
James Churchward
Ignatius Donnelly quotes the priest’s rebuke to the Greeks on The Kings of Atlantis become the Gods of the Greeks:
You Greeks are novices in knowledge of antiquity. You are ignorant of what passed either here or among yourselves in days of old.
A priest of Sais to Solon, quoted by Ignatius Donnelly
Proclus on the Timaeus keeps the same numbers, nine thousand years for Athens and eight thousand for Sais.
What the priests remembered
The priests did not only speak of Atlantis. Donnelly notes on The Destruction of Atlantis described in the deluge legends that the priest of Sais told Solon of a noble race in Athens before “the great deluge of all”, which resisted Atlantis before the destruction came. On The Indentity of the Civilizations of the Old World and the New the same priest explains the myth of Phaëthon as a memory of “a declination of the bodies moving round the earth and in the heavens”, which Donnelly reads as comets. Paschal Beverly Randolph, on Estimates of human origins, links a “Mysterious Event” in early Chinese annals with the catastrophe the priests of Sais described to Solon.
In the video Solon 11,600 Catastrophe, Randall Carlson works through the same dialogue. He takes the priest’s 9,000 years before Solon as a date around 11,600 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas, and the 8,000 years for Egypt as a founding after a thousand years of recovery.
Later echoes
The Adam and Eve Story counts the archives of Sais, with those of Alexandria and Heliopolis, among the lost writings Moses may have known. Jerusalem notes that Sais was later called the City of Hagar, the same name Galatians 4:25 gives Jerusalem. And in the letter Paul Schliemann published on How I found the lost Atlantis, his grandfather’s last note points straight back to the city:
Investigate the east of the ruins of the temple of Sais and the cemetery in Chacuna Valley.
Paul Schliemann, How I found the lost Atlantis
Related pages
- Timaeus and Critias
- Proclus on the Timaeus
- Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis
- The Phaeacians and Phoenicians
- Jerusalem
- How I found the lost Atlantis
- The Destruction of Atlantis described in the deluge legends
- Plato
For every page I tagged with Sais, see the Sais tag archive.
