I’ve been reading about Atlantis again (Pellegrino, 1991); one of those conceptual places that loom large in the history and the imagination of most Western cultures for many reasons. But this wasn’t about weird and wonderful theories or relating to that wonderful film of the 1940s, but to the possibility that the Greek island of Thera might have been the model for Plato’s Atlantis.

Atlantis — a word that conjures up a whole gamut of ideas ranging from the whacked out to the New Age to the most probable and possibly boring.
My favourites are the one where dinosaur types – Lemurians – had a war with the mammal types – read human Atlanteans – and blew them up in the world’s first atomic war, which explains why pyramids are to be seen on three of the five continents as they were built by fleeing Atlanteans. That is closely followed by the idea that Atlanteans had massive crystal based power generators but they got greedy and managed to blow them-selves up which is supposed to stand as a warning about greed and being too powerful (I think that was influenced by the movie though).

But both those ideas seem to predicate that there is some kind of reason for such huge disasters. Humans are story-tellers and naming creatures. We (as a collective noun) know that for a certain effect there has to be cause. The trouble with that is that sometimes there is no cause. Things just happen.
However, if you think about it, the whole thing about Atlantis that has been handed down to us is that it doesn’t do to get too powerful because “god”, or some power greater than is understandable, will cut you down to size or destroy you utterly. (Which just goes to show that the Australian ‘tall poppy syndrome’ is at least as old as civilisation!)

Plato used the story of Atlantis in just such a way, as a warning to the future about arrogance and corruption. But he placed it ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the west’, with the result that for centuries people thought that the Atlantic Ocean was the location of the lost island. But more recent information has demonstrated that there could not possibly have been an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, because that is where one of the ‘seams’ of the earth is, the mid-Atlantic trench from which quantities of magma and lava are forcing the continents of America and Europe apart demonstrating that this ‘solid earth’ on which we stand is just a collection of big rocky ice-floes on a liquid rock sea. But you have to consider it very slow stop-motion photography to be able to see that sort of thing in real-time.

Part of the fascination for me is that until relatively recently, Thera (which apparently means ‘fear’ in Greek – which makes living on the island an interesting proposition “I live on Fear”!) was a very quiet almost unknown archaeological site. Various scientific disciplines have come together over the years to find out about what and how the buried city, rediscovered by Spyridon Marinatos in the early 1960s, came about and who were the people who lived there. It fascinates me how so many disciplines have different interests in what happened to the island of Kalliste (apparently the original name for Thera) and how it affected the nations and the subsequent flow of history and trade goods in the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean.

In some ways I think it has implications for what happened last year in New York and Washington DC. Pellegrino suggests that the interruption and damage done to the Cretan Empire by the explosion of the Theran volcano was such that it allowed the mainland Dorian Greeks to become such a powerful entity that it has subsequently influenced the rest of history, as we know it. Unlike Thera, where the heart was ripped out of a creative and apparently progressive civilisation by a physical incident, the modern USA is currently having the heart ripped out of it by an ideological incident. The physical damage is small by comparison, though devastating to those concerned compared to the physical damage done to the Cretan Empire. What bothers me most though is the way in which because of the ideas that prompted the men who flew the planes the last bit of their flights into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we are being talked into behaving violently towards a group of people who don’t think like us.

Pellegrino also suggests that because the Greeks were able to fill the vacuum left by the damage done to the Cretans, they stopped being as creative and inventive as they might otherwise have been, and in a way the destruction and deterioration of the Cretan Empire was also the beginning of the end for the Greek civilisation. Perhaps there is a lesson in that as the USA is suddenly finding some of it’s most sacred institutions have “been arrogant and wicked” and that the Greeks are already within the walls ready. Somehow I don’t think it will be as easy today for the “Imperialists” to take control of the American “empire” as it was for the Greeks to take over that of the traumatised Cretans, perhaps Plato’s adaptation of the story his many times great-grandfather heard in Egypt about the destruction of a mighty empire in a day and a night has had an effect on our civilisation and we have learnt from it … I hope so!

· Pellegrino, C. R. (1991). Unearthing Atlantis: an archaeological odyssey. (1st ed.). New York: Random House.