The concept of the "ancient Greeks of the ancient Greeks," as referenced in Plato's works, often draws attention to a cultural memory of an even older civilization that influenced what we know as Classical Greece.
Plato discusses this idea prominently in his dialogues, particularly Timaeus and Critias, where he recounts the story of Atlantis.
Plato describes a highly advanced civilization that existed long before his time.
Plato positions Atlantis as a powerful civilization that rivaled these "ancient Greeks." Atlantis supposedly clashed with the Greeks of that era before being destroyed in a cataclysmic event.
The Phaeacians are depicted as a utopian, isolated group with exceptional maritime skills and divine ancestry, much like Plato’s Atlantis.
The idea of divine or semi-divine ancestry in Phaeacian myth ties to Plato’s narrative of ancient civilizations possessing superior abilities.
Phoenician city-states like Tyre and Sidon had complex governance systems, paralleling Plato's description of Atlantis' organized society.
Continuity of Lost Knowledge: Plato’s narrative suggests that the wisdom and achievements of earlier civilizations were partly preserved and transmitted to later cultures.
Cultural Amnesia: Plato’s Egyptian sources emphasize that the Greeks had "forgotten" their deeper history due to natural disasters, much like how Homeric myths might encode fragments of earlier Mediterranean interactions.
The parallels between Plato's accounts, the Phaeacians, and the Phoenicians hint at how ancient cultures viewed their predecessors as both sources of inspiration and enigmatic reminders of a lost golden age.
The Minoans are a fascinating historical civilization that fits well into discussions about Plato’s "ancient Greeks of the ancient Greeks" and connections to groups like the Phaeacians or Phoenicians.
Plato’s mention of an ancient, advanced civilization aligns with many aspects of Minoan culture:
Plato’s "ancient Greeks" existed roughly 9,000 years before Solon.
While this number may be symbolic, the Minoans thrived millennia before Plato’s time (~427–347 BCE), making them significantly older than Classical Greece.
The Minoans’ technological advancements, societal organization, and artistic sophistication could fit Plato’s description of a golden age civilization.
The timing fits well with Plato’s narrative, even if his timeline is exaggerated.
Their disappearance due to natural and cultural upheaval resonates with Plato’s philosophical message about the impermanence of human greatness.
Plato highlights `theoi` as stemming from the term `thein` which meant to throw oneself upwards and was used to describe stars or individuals possessing the ability to ascend towards the heavens.
Plato: Timaeus(Spoken by a priest of Egypt)
This predates the Greek understanding of history and aligns with Plato’s emphasis on the antiquity of Egyptian records.
Though not as precise as Plato, this framework reflects a structured approach to prehistory.
The works of Plato, specifically Timaeus and Critias, are cited as key historical sources about Atlantis.
Plato describes two distinct phases of the Atlantean civilization:
Keppe explains that Atlantis was destroyed by wars between the Atlanteans and the proto-Greeks, as described by Plato.
According to Plato’s account of Atlantis, a catastrophic flood wiped out a highly advanced civilization, leaving scattered survivors.
Biglino likens this to the way Plato described the gods in “Critias,” as rulers who govern their people like shepherds overseeing their flocks.
A Connection to Atlantis?The mention of Aea in association with the Atlantic suggests a speculative link to Plato’s Atlantis.
Alexander was a student of the Greek philosopher Aristode, who had been taught by Plato, who had learned from Socrates.
Many centuries after Hesiod, Plato wrote in the Statesman that Earth’s poles shifted after the gods left the Earth.
The two men most connected to the legend of Atlantis are theGreek philosopher Plato, a student of Socrates who lived four hundred years before Christ, and IgnatiusDonnelly, a populist congressman and a student of catastrophism in general and Atlantis in particular.
In recent years, theorists havedevised all sorts of hypotheses as to how Atlantis came to be and where it ended up, but the famousphilosopher Plato was the first to introduce the concept of the lost city.
In the dialogue Timaeus in 360 BC, Plato wrote of a great war between ancient Greeksand Atlantis, “a mighty power” spanning the globe “which was aggressing wantonly against the whole ofEurope and Asia.
Notice that Plato referred to a continent opposite Africa and Europe.
This is clear evidence that the American continents were known as far back as Plato’s time, four centuries before the birth of Jesus and way before conventional history has stated that they were discovered by Leif Eriksson and Christopher Columbus.
Plato, writing through the words of Critias, offered this explanation, “I have before remarked in speaking of the allotments of the gods, that they distributed the whole earth into portions differing in extent, and made for themselves temples and instituted sacrifices.
While most people today still consider Atlantis a myth, others, including nineteenth-century American congressman Ignatius Donnelly, took Plato’s words as “veritable history,” claiming Atlantis was the place where humankind first rose from barbarism to civilization.
But many even today dismiss Atlantis as mere myth and legend sparked by Plato’s writings.
Based on Plato’s description, and assuming the “Pillars of Heracles” refers to the Strait of Gibraltar, most researchers believe Atlantis was located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas.
Much like the myth of Atlantis’s destruction taken from Plato, the resulting tidal waves, deadly gaseous clouds, famine due to destroyed crops, and opportunistic pirate clans finished off the great Minoan Empire, leaving remarkably little behind.
Cedric Leonard said that Menzies andothers who believe Minoan Empire and Atlantis were one and the same have mistakenly traced Atlantisback to the Bronze Age instead of the Ice Age as described by Plato, who placed the time of Atlantis atabout 9600 BC.
“Plato describes Atlantis as having‘subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far asTyrrhenia.’ The Minoan kings never conquered neither Europe nor North Africa.
But archeologicalevidence is abundant indicating that a cohesive ‘megalithic culture’ occupied those very same areas ofEurope and North Africa in Mesolithic times (5,000-6,000 years before the Minoan empire began).”Moreover, the area of Atlantis as described by Plato was far larger than that ascribed to the Minoanculture.
… Basically,the mantle, the layer beneath the Earth’s crust, shifted by about 40 degrees.” He claimed that Plato’sreference to a “real sea” was to the Ocean of the Atlanteans, or the Atlantic Ocean, which, inprecataclysmic times, stretched unimpeded by northern ice from the South China Sea eastward across thePacific to the present Atlantic.
Maurice Chatelain, who made a detailed mathematical study of ancient sites and legends, wrote, “Personally I am convinced that the story of Atlantis, as Solon heard it from Sonchis and as Plato has given it to us, is true from beginning to end and that someday the ruins of Atlantis will be found, just as one after another we found the once legendary Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Knossos.”
Plato wrote about the destruction of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias.
Key points about the destruction of Atlantis in Plato's texts:
Plato noted that the story of Atlantis was preserved in Egyptian records, as the ancient Greeks had lost their history due to natural disasters such as floods.
Plato, Blavatsky, Cayce, and Donnelly all link Atlantis's destruction to a great flood.
While researching Atlantis, I found that the leading source for Atlantis is Plato.
Plato described Atlantis as a powerful, advanced civilization that existed around 9,000 years before his time.
The legend of Atlantis originates from Egyptian traditions, as relayed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
Plato for his metaphysical frameworks.
The story of Atlantis originated from Plato’s writings around the 4th century BCE.
Plato described Atlantis as a prosperous society ruled by semi-divine kings, descendants of Poseidon.
Atlantis is the legendary continent mentioned by the Greek philosopher Plato, who in one of his "conversations" told how the priests of the Egyptian Temple of Sais related to Solon, the great lawmaker the story of its destruction about 9000 years B.
They first domesticated the horse, hence the association of Poseidon or Neptune, a sea-god, with horses; hence the race-courses for horses described by Plato.
A single engraved tablet dredged up from Plato's island would be worth more to science, would more strike the imagination of mankind, than all the gold of Peru, all the monuments of Egypt, and all the terra-cotta fragments gathered from the great libraries of Chaldea.
Pezron, in his "Antiquity of the Celtæ," make out that the Celtæ were the same as the Titans, the giant race who rebelled in Atlantis, and "that their princes were the same with the giants of Scripture." He adds that the word Titan "is perfect Celtic, and comes from tit, the earth, and ten or den, man, and hence the Greeks very properly also called them terriginæ, or earth-born." And it will be remembered that Plato uses the same phrase when he speaks of the race into which Poseidon intermarried as "the earth-born primeval men of that country."
Although Plato does not tell us that the Atlanteans possessed the decimal system of numeration, nevertheless there are many things in his narrative which point to that conclusion "There were ten kings ruling over ten provinces; the whole country was divided into military districts or squares ten stadia each way; the total force of chariots was ten thousand; the great ditch or canal was one hundred feet deep and ten thousand stadia long; there were one hundred Nereids," etc.
We find in the "Eleusinian mysteries" an Atlantean institution; their influence during the whole period of Greek history down to the coming of Christianity was extraordinary; and even then this masonry of Pre-Christian days, in which kings and emperors begged to be initiated, was, it is claimed, continued to our own times in our own Freemasons, who trace their descent back to "a Dionysiac fraternity which originated in Attika." And just as we have seen the Saturnalian festivities of Italy descending from Atlantean harvest-feasts, so these Eleusinian mysteries can be traced back to Plato's island.
It accords with Plato's description of the religion of Atlantis.
The Atlanteans were, as Plato tells us, a maritime, commercial people, trading up the Mediterranean as far as Egypt and Syria, and across the Atlantic to "the whole opposite continent that surrounds the sea;" the Phœnicians, as their successors and descendants, and colonized on the shores of the Mediterranean, inherited their civilization and their maritime habits, and with these that invention without which their great voyages were impossible.
Plato knew (" Dialogues, Phædo," 108) that the earth "is a body in the centre of the heavens" held in equipoise.
This surprising discovery brings the Chinese civilization still nearer to the Mediterranean head-quarters of the races, and increases the probability that the arts of China were of Atlantean origin; and that the name of Nai Hoang-ti, or Nai Korti, the founder of Chinese civilization, may be a reminiscence of Nakhunta, the chief of the gods, as recorded in the Susian texts, and this, in turn, a recollection of the Deva-Nahusha of the Hindoos, the Dionysos of the Greeks, the king of Atlantis, whose great empire reached to the "farther parts of India," and embraced, according to Plato, "parts of the continent of America."
There is abundant proof--proof with which pages might be filled--that there was a still older mother-tongue, from which Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic were all derived--the language of Noah, the language of Atlantis, the language of the great "aggressive empire" of Plato, the language of the empire of the Titans.
Were not these the inhabitants of Atlantis, who, according to Plato, carried their arms to Egypt and Athens, and whose subsequent destruction has been attributed to divine vengeance invoked by their arrogance and oppressions?
This is the universal empire over which, the Hindoo books tell us, Deva Nahusha was ruler; this was "the great and aggressive empire" to which Plato alludes; this was the mighty kingdom, embracing the whole of the then known world, from which the Greeks obtained their conception of the universal father of all men in King Zeus.
Can any one read these details and declare Plato's description of Atlantis to be fabulous, simply because he tells us of the enormous quantities of gold and silver possessed by the people?
If the story of Plato is true, there now lies beneath the waters of the Atlantic, covered, doubtless, by hundreds of feet of volcanic débris, an amount of gold and silver exceeding many times that brought to Europe from Peru, Mexico, and Central America since the time of Columbus; a treasure which, if brought to light, would revolutionize the financial values of the world.
There can be little doubt that a fair-skinned, light-haired, bearded race, holding the religion which Plato says prevailed in Atlantis, carried an Atlantean civilization at an early day up the valley of the Amazon to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, precisely as a similar emigration of Aryans went westward to the shores of the Mediterranean and Caspian, and it is very likely that these diverse migrations habitually spoke the same language.
It is, however, more reasonable to suppose that the Quichuas and Aimaras were a race of emigrants from Plato's island than to think that Atlantis was populated from South America.
Neptune was Poseidon, according to Plato, founder of Atlantis.
Sanchoniathon tells us that "Chronos (king of Atlantis) visited the South, and gave all Egypt to the god Taaut, that it might be his kingdom." "Misor" is probably the king "Mestor" named by Plato.
In connection with all this we must not forget that Plato described Atlantis as "that sacred island lying beneath the sun." Everywhere in the ancient world we find the minds of men looking to the west for the land of the dead.
The Toltecs possessed a pure and simple religion, like that of Atlantis, as described by Plato, with the same sacrifices of fruits and flowers; they were farmers; they raised and wove cotton; they cultivated fruits; they used the sign of the Cross extensively; they cut and engraved precious stones; among their carvings have been found representations of the elephant and the lion, both animals not known in America.
As we find gold and silver mined and worked on both sides of the Atlantic at the earliest periods of recorded history, we may fairly conclude that they were known to the Atlanteans; and this view is confirmed by the statements of Plato, who represents a condition of things in Atlantis exactly like that which Pizarro found in Peru.
The same process doubtless led to the vast accumulations in the temples of Atlantis, as described by Plato.
They do not prove that the Altai outburst is Plato’s Atlantis, or that one Altai day is the sinking of an island empire.
Proclus, a prominent 5th-century Neoplatonist philosopher, referenced seven islands sacred to Persephone in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus.
Plato's description of Atlantis in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias portrays it as an expansive maritime power.
According to Plato, Atlantis had dominion over several islands and coastal regions, which could align with the idea of a thalassocratic empire.
The Atlantic Ocean, as mentioned, was indeed named after Atlantis, according to the tradition mentioned by Plato, which made a significant cultural impact.