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Qwez81 t1_ivkfw9h wrote

Are you trying to pass this off as a fact? Because it seems like you’re trying to pass this off like it’s a fact.

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7LBoots t1_ivkgbst wrote

Even if it was entirely fictional, it wasn't Plato that made it up, right?

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Qwez81 t1_ivkgytz wrote

Yea Plato is correct…everything else is ummm speculation at best?

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predicateofregret t1_ivlxv3i wrote

Plato said it was based on a story told to a distant relative of his who has travelled in Egypt.

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jimmyn0thumbs t1_ivmcbp5 wrote

The original "trust me bro"

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vinneh t1_ivmw4tn wrote

My uncle works at Atlantis

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LurkJerk55 t1_ivnwbv5 wrote

My canadian girlfriend I'm dating over the internet is from Atlantis

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PegaLaMega t1_ivoqsko wrote

My brother's sister used to date Plato. Total jerk-off.

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BrokenEye3 t1_ivn6rtf wrote

A friend of a friend swears his friend has a friend whose friend was friends with a friend of a guy who saw it with his own eyes

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plugubius t1_ivmnvse wrote

Not quite. Plato had an obviously lying character in a dialogue say he had records (but not with him, of course)

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SteakHoagie666 t1_ivm1vo4 wrote

Heroditus actually had a city on his map of the known world named "Atlantes". So the tale was around longer than Plato.

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freiwilliger t1_ivm8b5u wrote

That referred to people from Mount Atlas not the mythical island.

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SteakHoagie666 t1_ivm9hw8 wrote

It wasn't a mythical island until plato said it was a mythical island. It could've been used as some inspiration for the tale. But who knows.

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Torugu t1_ivnxhox wrote

No, not "who knows".

The "Atlantes" are a group of ancient Libyans* who lived in the Atlas mountains. It's not a city, it's a tribe, their history is well established and their descendants are still around today.

The Atlantes are completely unrelated to the mythical Atlanteans. They have literally nothing in common except that their names sound vaguely similar. This is about as close to fact as anything can be.

​

^(*Libya referring here to all of North Africa West of Egypt, not just the modern country)

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SteakHoagie666 t1_ivnyb68 wrote

In platos story one of the sons of posieden, Atlas is " made rightful king of the entire island(atlantis) and the ocean (called the Atlantic Ocean in his honor), and was given the mountain of his birth and the surrounding area as his fiefdom."- from Wiki.

So.. I mean... the king of atlantis is named after the mountain range and ruled over the area as his fiefdom.. in platos story... but if you're sure there was no connection and no inspiration whatsoever drawn from it Okey fuckin dokey.

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sennbat t1_ivlzorx wrote

It was Plato, yes, in Timaeus, which we still have copies of. You can read a translation of it here: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html

It's possible it was inspired by some other story (in the same way as the places in "Gullivers Travels" are inspired by real places and previous stories, I suppose), but Atlantis itself, and certainly all the details he gives, are clearly created part of the allegory.

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BirdUp69 t1_ivmw4kj wrote

I would say the Critias comes across as allegory with regards to Atlantis, describing something like a Utopia. The Timaeus is more matter of fact, describing key historical point passed down through Solon.

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Gyddanar t1_ivo3rde wrote

Technically Atlantis wasn´t a utopia - or if it had been, it was a fallen/failed one.

It was set in a fictional time period where everything was just "better". The tone you should be going for while reading Critias and Timaeus is something like "these days, everything is shit".

The utopias in Timaeus are the Mythic/Golden Athens and arguably Egypt (if only as a source of wisdom, knowledge, and learning)

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bolanrox t1_ivkh142 wrote

first time it was ever heard of was in an Alagory tale by Plato. its certainly based some what on facts (parts of islands have sunk after earth quakes. etc).

Unless someone gets super lucky like with Troy, this one is going to stay as a myth based off of Plato's writings IMO

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howardslowcum t1_ivl1yab wrote

'First time it was heard' is a common statement when referring to Plato. Imagine in 25 years someone writes a fan fic of starwars and 2600 years later people reference that fan fic as the origin of luke skywalker.

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Gyddanar t1_ivo404k wrote

haha, that is a great example really.

The whole concept of "earliest written evidence" is something that needs to be pushed more when discussing history and so on. I suppose it is entirely possible that some poet had written something about Atlantis that just wasn´t valued enough to survive.

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idhtftc t1_ivp7zpg wrote

This makes no sense. If they found that one fanfic, they would also look for corroborating evidence, other scripts, other references, etc. The fact that there is only one place where that name comes up is not definitive evidence, obviously, but it's pretty damning.

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howardslowcum t1_ivpls5n wrote

Pre Plato everything operated upon a verbal tradition. Plato himself while a pioneer of literature was highly critical of the written text saying doctors would stop learning medicine and instead just work out of a book.

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idhtftc t1_ivpyjmh wrote

Then we would have a contemporary or post-Plato account of an empire that attacked "the whole of Europe and Asia", not just one solitary source for a civilization that controlled parts of Africa and Italy. It's obvious if one just reads the texts that it's an allegory.

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howardslowcum t1_ivqcyue wrote

The illiad and the odyssey are only two of six parts of the epic, the remaining four having been lost to history. Remember a 'dark age' does not mean a decline in progress but a loss of that knowledge most likely to purges by an invader. In this example 2400 years from now we have return of the Jedi and the last Jedi as our only extant volumes and the fan fic being the most commonly disseminated piece of literature. Atlantis is the new order, just one of several major antagonist factions presented in the entire narrative.

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idhtftc t1_ivqi184 wrote

Except there's literally zero evidence for any such multiple-continent-spanning civilization, and it only appears in the books. I mean, it works with your example, since Star Wars is also fantasy, but that's not what you were saying above, it would be like saying that Star Wars actually happened because we found the fan fiction.

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howardslowcum t1_ivqoml1 wrote

I guess im talking about Atlantis being real the way Mordor is real today. If we went back to Greece in 600BC and sat around on a saterday night listening to folks tell stories I bet if you brought up Atlantis they would be like 'I know that place, with the three rings? Home of posidon?'

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idhtftc t1_ivrvf7w wrote

Right, and I think we both agree Mordor is not real. I guess I misunderstood the sense of "first time it was heard", I thought it meant something like, "just because Plato is the only written source, it does not mean there weren't oral traditions about it", which might as well be true but cannot really be proven anyway.

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bombayblue t1_ivmxgs1 wrote

Oh god another “Reddit Historical Conspiracy theory” thread

Let me just state this out loud:

Marco Polo did in fact travel to China.

Shakespeare was a real person, though he may have collaborated with other authors.

Slaves didn’t build the pyramids in Egypt

Christopher Columbus knew the world was round and no he didn’t think the world was pear shaped.

Athens had a vast multiple of potential enemies and did not need to invent a fictional one.

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Gyddanar t1_ivo32hr wrote

Having actually studied this and written a paper on it in Uni, there are several bits to unpack re: potential enemies (which is utterly true for Classical Athens to be fair).

A: The "Athens" in the allegory is not Plato´s Athens, but "Mythic Athens". When I say Mythic, I don´t mean heroes and demigods running around messing with mortals. I mean an Athens in which any normal citizen would have held their own in an arm-wrestle with Hercules.

B: A theme running through that particular bit of Timaeus is "Utopia" or the perfect state. Mythic Athens was meant to be a shining example of that perfect state. Atlantis was meant to be a contrast to Utopia - a failed/failing city state which is falling from grace. (There is also a whole thread about Egypt and Athens as a modern contrast - Egypt as the Utopia state and Athens as an analogue for Atlantis - I digress, my professor was a big Egypt fan)

C: This meant that this "Mythic" or "Golden" Athens needed a suitably worthy foe who suffers a suitably fitting end. Athens represented all the worthy human virtues, while Atlantis was in moral depravity. Cue divine smiting - and when the gods smite, they smite hard. Why bring your current enemies into it and need to explain why they´re suddenly so much less impressive? Just make up a fictional city state and sink it when you´re done with it.

D: Using Thebes or Sparta also messes with the whole concept of "Athens used to be great, and now we´re shit and morally bankrupt". Pulls the message off focus.

E: The whole story of Atlantis in the allegory came from an Egyptian priest. Egypt had this whole mystique of "we redefine ancient wisdom" even back in 400-odd BC. Citing random "historical" (bear in mind the concept of history as a science and accurate portrayal of the past, rather than storytelling, would not come around seriously for another couple of centuries) facts as coming from an Egyptian priest is basically the ancient world equivalent of "trust me, I´m a scientist".

EDIT: Disclaimer - I wrote this paper about 10 years ago so memory might be hazy. It only really stuck in my memory because the professor was making a fun class a pain in the ass, and I wanted to ace the final coursework to prove a point.

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bombayblue t1_ivopgc6 wrote

This is awesome. Thanks so much for posting it

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Gyddanar t1_ivp1gam wrote

so, my professor for that module/class thought Egypt was the best thing ever.

I also did not like him very much.

The coursework/paper at the end of the course was basically about "Utopias in the account about Atlantis in Timaeus". I might have gotten a bit pissed off with him because he worded the question so that "Egypt is a utopia" was a large part of the only "correct" answer.

That annoyance is still with me 10 years later.

Did get one of the best grades I ever received on that essay though. Well... apart from the one essay in which I did a brief experiment to prove my point, then cited myself in an appendix. I think that one was partly points for audacity though.

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Qwez81 t1_ivn416u wrote

Couldn’t agree with you more on all of those. My only possible disagreement would be the pyramids bc there’s very skeptical theories they’re older than 4500 years but it’s not a disagreement of slaves building them more of who built them….other than that idk where the “reddit historical conspiracy theory” thing comes from.

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largePenisLover t1_ivoikoi wrote

Athens had no need for a fictional enemy. However Plato who lived in Athens DID need a fictional enemy for his fictional version of athens that was 9000 years old in his fiction. A fiction he wrote to describe what he considered to be the ideal city state.
A fiction that is only 2 pages long btw.
If you actually go read the text it's very obvious that it's plato going "a long time ago on an island far far away"

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noob_lvl1 t1_ivmaooc wrote

Yeah, I mean what I’ve learned was that Plato was only retelling a story about Atlantis that he heard from someone who was well informed with Egyptian history and lore.

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Heroshade t1_ivnm3bt wrote

I mean Atlantis also isn't real, so is it really a problem?

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sennbat t1_ivlzz1v wrote

It's as close to fact as you're ever gonna get in history, I don't think history is banned from TIL?

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metaldinner t1_ivlihf4 wrote

plato made it up

just because there are cases of islands 'sinking' or the fact that sea levels change, submerging coastal cities, doesnt change the fact that plato made up the story of atlantis.

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Kittenfabstodes t1_ivlvsoo wrote

Troy was fictional until it was discovered to be a real place.....js

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[deleted] t1_ivt28xq wrote

[deleted]

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Kittenfabstodes t1_ivtkej3 wrote

>we declared everything might have been fictional if we had no physical evidence of it.

Hmmm. Seems strangely familiar.

So what your saying is, if there wasn't physical evidence of it's existence, like Troy or maybe Atlantis, we declared it never existed.

There was no written record about Gobleki Tepe which is probably one of the most important archeological sites in the world and when it was discovered, it changed everything we thought we knew about about man from 12,000 years ago.

All I'm saying is just because we don't have any other written record of Atlantis doesn't mean there weren't written records that didn't survive. It probably didn't exist, but it's not a zero percent chance it didn't exist.

Things like evidence or written records have a tendency being getting lost or being destroyed due to a variety of factors. Plato existed less than 2500 years ago. Gobleki Tepe is 12,000 years old. That's almost 10,000 years in between Gobleki Tepe and Plato. How much has been lost to use since Plato so ask yourself how much has been lost since Gobleki Tepe?

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Jorge5934 t1_ivm9yux wrote

When was Troy fictional?

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Kittenfabstodes t1_ivmiz42 wrote

Before they found it but after it actually existed.

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Jorge5934 t1_ivmjnvb wrote

Ah! So you claim it was thought to be fictional, but I guess they looked for it despite your better judgment? The nerve of these people!

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Qwez81 t1_ivluu1b wrote

Yea but today I learned should reference facts. Prove he made it up? Prove he didn’t?

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sennbat t1_ivlywyb wrote

There is no "proof" when it comes to history - all we have is the balance of evidence. Every decent piece of evidence we have available points to Atlantis (at least the version that became widely known and survived into the modern day) being a piece of fiction created by Plato as a rhetorical advice.

Evidence:

Atlantis appears in Timaeus and Critias, works by Plato, as an allegory and express fiction.

There is no earlier reference to Atlantis we have ever discovered.

All references to Atlantis we are familiar with from the time period after Plato seem to be referring directly back to his work.

Plato making Atlantis up is about as close to a fact as you can get, historically speaking. It is the most likely situation based on what we know, and there's no evidence to the contrary.

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