Atlantis: The Antediluvian World

Ignatius Donnelly was a lawyer, lieutenant-governor of Minnesota, Radical Republican Congressman and State Senator, and has been described as the grandfather of the junk cross-cultural analogy. His book “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World” published in 1882 established the foundations for pseudo-archaeology and racism for generations to come.

Donnelly begins his book with a list of claims concerning Atlantis that he intends to demonstrate. There are 13 of them so I won’t reiterate them here, paraphrasing them as “Plato’s Atlantis was real, destroyed in a cataclysm 9,000 years prior to Plato’s time, and was the foundation of all subsequent civilizations and mythologies.” Fair enough. History, as a professional discipline, was still in its infancy and while Donnelly wasn’t one of those new academics working out how the “science” of history was going to work, it was good that he started out with a simple list of claims to set out what he was about to attempt to prove with the rest of his book.

I could go point by point and refute everything with modern geology, archaeology, anthropology, history, and probably a number of other scientific disciplines. In spite of what The History Channel would tell you, all that work has been done. Instead, I want to look at some of his claims on their on merits in the own context. Were I a history enthusiast in the late 19th Century, how might I evaluate Donnally’s claims and evidence.

Chapter Two is a translation of Critius, one of the late dialogues by Plato, written around 360 BCE. I appreciate that he has the entirety of the text included, to set the foundations of his claim. Well, already there are issues because this isn’t Plato telling us this story, this is Critius, telling the story to Timaeus, Hermocrates, and Socrates.

The actual Critius (Plato’s second cousin, philosopher, and one time despotic Athenian oligarch) had been dead for over 40 years when Plato wrote the dialogue with his name on it. Socrates had been dead for almost as long. Hermocrates had been gone for longer. Plato had been a student of Socrates and may well have known the others he presents in his dialogue, but that would have been nearly half a century previous and he would have been unlikely to been in the room with all four at the same time to hear them discussing Atlantis.

And Critias does not exist in a vacuum. The first part of this series was The Republic, where Plato (speaking through Socrates and an assortment of other characters) sets out an ideal society (not surprisingly ruled by philosophers, such as himself). Timaeus was presented in the form of a dialogue the next day where the history of the universe is presented. The same cast of characters continue their conversation in Critias, presenting the ideal society presented in The Republic in motion. Hermocrates was unwritten but was likely to detail this proposed ideal societies military as the real Hermocrates was a Syracusan general of the Peloponnesian War.

In fact, the beginning of Timaeus has pretty much the first paragraph with Socrates saying “I want to continue with that stuff we were talking about yesterday (The Republic, which had actually been written decades before). Let’s do a thought experiment about how such a thing would work in practice.”

Plato is not transcribing a conversation, this is a philosophical and literary technique, one that Plato used time and time again. For that alone, there every reason to doubt if everything said by Critius about Atlantis is canonical truth. Taken together, there is no reason to assume that Plato’s use of Atlantis in this context is anything other than a metaphor.

Donnelly doesn’t go there, though. To him, the entire description of Atlantis can be taken as literal truth.

“There are in Plato’s narrative no marvels, no myths, no tales of gods, gorgons, hobgoblins, or giants. It is a plain and reasonable history of a people who built temples, ships, and canals; who lived by agriculture and commerce; who in pursuit of trade , reached out to all the countries around them.”

Yea, except that part where Atlantis was founded by Poseidon. You know, the Greek god of the Oceans? Donnelly hand waves that away by asserting that Poseidon was a real man whose legendary exploits were transformed culturally into godliness by scattered, degenerated cultures after Atlantis’ destruction. A case could be made for such a legendary rather than mythical origin of all the gods as kings and heroes of Atlantis (and Donnelly does exactly that) but it would be a terribly weak hypothesis. Donnelly doesn’t really back that claim up with any evidence that this is what happened, merely asserts that it did happen.

“If, then, we prove that, on both sides of the Atlantic, civilizations were found substantially identical, we have demonstrated that they must have descended one from the other, or have radiated from some common source."

Plato tells us that the Atlantians possessed architecture; that they built walls, temples, and palaces. We need not add that this art was found in Egypt, and all the civilized countries of Europe, as well as in Peru, Mexico, and Central America.”

Architecture. Because Egypt and the Americas built buildings, therefore Atlantis. As if no one anywhere in the world, ever, could have conceived independently that building a wall and putting a roof on it would be a good idea. And that rich people would build bigger houses.

“The mounds of Europe were made in the same way and for the same purposes as those of America.”

As if no one anywhere else in the world, ever, independently thought covering up a corpse with dirt was a good idea.

“Sculpture – The Atlantians possessed this art; so did the American and Mediterranean nations.”

As if no one. . . OMFG! Is this really the best he’s got? He doesn’t even make the attempt at drawing close parallels between artistic styles or material composition or tools or anything to show the actual connection between the sculpture of the Americas and the sculpture of the Mediterranean. Not “substantially identical,” not “proof,” not even remotely “demonstrated.” Donnelly thinks just saying “They both have pyramids” is apparently enough, even though the pyramids asserted to be identical are at most on superficially the same.

Donnelly uses the word “must” a lot. And I suppose this rhetorical technique comes from his having been a lawyer. Presenting such a case on behalf of a client, in this case the historicity of Atlantis, it makes sense to discard all contradictory evidence and any language of doubt or uncertainty, so as to sway the jury in favor of his singular narrative.

As Donnelly was writing, linguistic scholarship had already worked out that many languages had evolved out of a root Indo-European language. This language became a proto-italic, then had evolved into Latin, which branched off into the “Romance” languages French, Italian, Spanish, and so on. One might expect that, if there was some common source of languages between Indo-European and the languages of the new world, a similar linguistic tree would reveal these connections. Instead, Donnelly just picks a bunch of individual words from one side of the Atlantic, points out that they have similar sounding words with comparable meanings on the other side of the Atlantic, and asserts Atlantis in between to bridge the gap. The Aztecs had a word atl, signifying water, whereas in Greece Atlas was the son of Poseidon. Therefore Atlantis.

Donnelly makes much of “identical” flood myths but then presents myths that are, like his pyramids, only superficially similar. And where he lost me was that he credited those differences to the degeneration of culture after the destruction of the high civilization of Atlantis but in no way addresses that somehow the perfectly accurate history of Atlantis was able to find its way, without flaw or degradation, to Plato. Even as all of Greek civilization had the flawed version of history that transformed the Atlantian kings into mythical gods, Plato alone held the truth.

Carl Sagan told us that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Donnelly’s claims are extraordinary, resting on that nigh impossible foundation of Plato’s historical inerrancy, but he fails to deliver the evidence necessary to substantiate that claim. His evidence is superficial at best, even given the state of 19th Century history and archaeology.

But as with so much of the hoaxes and pseudo-science of the 19th Century that were debunked in their own time, that did not stop charlatans from taking that ball and continuing to run with it (and make money doing so). To this day, the careers of men like Graham Hancock and Erich von Daniken rely, virtually unchanged, on Donnelly’s arguments, and I’m not even going to delve into Himmler’s Ahnenerbe SS unit.

And Madam Blavatsky is a topic for another day.