01.23
Atlantis as a reality was rescued from legend in the 15th century, the age of European exploration and discovery. The cartographers of the time included it on their maps, though imagination was their only reference point.
When America was discovered, it was frequently identified with Atlantis, in spite of the obvious objection that it was clearly dry land and had not been submerged.
Such errors and inconsistencies did nothing to discourage the renewed interest in the lost continent. The quest for the historical Atlantis had begun. A bewildering proliferation of theory and counter-theory culminated, in the 19th century, in the birth of a new ‘science’ – Atlantology.
An early eminent Atlantologist was the American politician and member of the US Congress Ignatius Donnelly. In 1882 Donnelly published his masterwork, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, which became a best-seller and the bible of Atlantology.
Donnelly’s thesis was based on certain similarities he observed between the pre-Columbian civilisations of America and ancient Egyptian culture. Among these he cited the building of pyramids, the art of embalming, the development of a 365-day calendar and the tradition of the Flood.
He believed that the two civilisations had a common origin, a continent which existed between the Old and New Worlds before the Flood. After the continent sank, two cultures developed, one in the East, one in the West.
Donnelly borrowed wholesale from contemporary science in constructing his theory. Archaeology, mythology, linguistics, ethnology, geology, zoology, botany – they were all brought in and mixed, with considerable literary skill and remarkable erudition, to support his argument.
This scientific hodge-podge was to have a brilliant future, providing an enduring source for a long line of disciples.
Donnelly’s supporters had an arsenal of theories to bolster up their case. Atlantology appeared to provide the answers to so many hallowed enigmas. The mysterious breeding habits of eels, for instance, which make a long and perilous journey from Europe across the Atlantic to lay their eggs in the Sargasso Sea, were explained by past experience in the rivers of Atlantis.
Atlantis was said to be the original home of the Basques, who are racially and linguistically different from all other Europeans, and of the scattered tribes of white Indians who were occasionally found in places such as Venezuala. The Guanches, cave-dwelling aborigines of the Canary Islands who were wiped out in the Spanish conquest of the islands, could only have been descendants of the Atlanteans. They were white-skinned, tall and had an indecipherable written language.
The bearded, white pre-Columbian god who was called Kukulcan by the Mayas, Quetzalcoatl by the Toltecs and Viracocha by the Incas brought civilisation over the sea from the east – could he have come from anywhere but Atlantis?
How do Donnelly’s theories hold up in the light of modern science, especially of oceanic geology which has become so much more sophisticated in the past 30 years?
Many of the analogies Donnelly drew were disturbing enough to draw furious controversy at the time; but today it is clear that his scholarship was riddled with errors. He attempted to show that every enigma and puzzle was in some way related to Atlantis and, in trying to prove everything, laid himself open to the criticism that he had proved nothing.
The fundamental base on which all Donnelly’s theories are constructed – that Atlantis was in the mid-Atlantic – has now been substantially refuted. Oceanographic studies of the sea-bed and the formation of continents show that nowhere in all the Atlantic’s 93 million square kilometres is there evidence that a cataclysm on the scale of Atlantis has ever occurred or that any such continent has ever existed.
There is an enormous submerged mountain range which runs approximately 20,000 kilometres from north to south, emerging at the Azores. But although this is a volcanic range, it is ‘in expansion’ – rising towards the surface – whereas Atlantis would be subsiding.