The English edition, Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled (1956), builds the case in three parts: Egypt's records of the northern invaders and the disasters around 1200 BC, then the North Sea coast and the royal island Basileia, then Homer's Phaeacians as a memory of that island.
The thesis matters because it connects three sources that are usually read apart: Plato's Atlantis report, the Egyptian records of the Sea Peoples, and Homer's island of the Phaeacians.
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus washes ashore on Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians.
The Phaeacians are great sailors with a royal city, a harbour and a temple of Poseidon.
"This parallel survey shows clearly that Atlantis and the land of the Phaeacians were identical."
The Phaeacians and Phoenicians: Homer's island people.
Scheria is the island home of the Phaeacians in Homer’s Odyssey.
This plenty reflects its tie to the gods and the peaceful nature of the Phaeacians.
The Phaeacians are descendants of Poseidon.
No one builds ships or navigates like the Phaeacians.
The Phaeacians live out the Greek value of xenia (hospitality).
He pointed to the Phaeacian ships.
"For the Phaeacians have no pilots; their vessels have no rudders as those of other nations have, but the ships themselves understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world, and can traverse the sea just as well even when it is covered with mist and cloud, so that there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm."
The Phaeacian ships have neither.
So the Phaeacian island and Hephaestus's workshop belong to one world of made, moving things.
The Phaeacians are not ordinary people in Homer.
On my review of Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled I describe how his book ends its case with "Homer's Phaeacians as a memory of that island", the royal island of Atlantis that he placed in the North Sea.
On my page on The Phaeacians and Phoenicians I write that "Plato positions Atlantis as a powerful civilization that rivaled these 'ancient Greeks.'"
The Phaeacians are a seafaring people in Homer's Odyssey.
In Samuel Butler's translation of the Odyssey, the Phaeacians once lived at Hypereia, near the Cyclopes, who plundered them.
King Alcinous on the Phaeacian ships:
For the Phaeacians have no pilots; their vessels have no rudders as those of other nations have, but the ships themselves understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world, and can traverse the sea just as well even when it is covered with mist and cloud, so that there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm.
This site sees parallels between his account and both the Phaeacians and the Phoenicians.
The Phaeacians are an ideal, isolated people with great sea skills and divine ancestry, and in this site's reading Plato's Atlantis is described the same way.
Phaeacian myth gives them divine ancestry, and Plato gives his ancient civilizations superior abilities.
The Phaeacians and Phoenicians may each reflect a memory of an earlier sea people, real or imagined, that shaped how the Greeks saw their distant past.
The older Athenians of Plato could represent a myth built on a real civilization such as the Minoans or the Phoenicians, an ideal of a time when people were closer to the gods, as with Homer's Phaeacians, or a mix of memory and myth.
Plato, the Phaeacians and the Phoenicians point to how ancient cultures saw the peoples before them.
They fit well in the discussion of Plato's older Athenians, and they also connect to the Phaeacians and Phoenicians.
Like the Phaeacians, the Minoans were islanders with strong sea trade.