(ORDO NEWS) — Can an unusual geological formation in the Moorish part of the Sahara Desert be related to Atlantis lost in the centuries (ancient Atlantis is a large island or continent)
If you type the word “Atlantis” into Google, there will be about 120 million results. Obviously, the Platonic legend of Atlantis has long occupied many people, from scientists to mystics, and many candidates have been named as a possible location for this lost and sunken civilization.
But did such a city even exist? And if so, where might its ruins be?
The only mention of Atlantis by name in historical texts is in Plato’s Dialogues (written around 360 B.C.), which provides dozens of precise details about what Atlantis looked like and where it might have been located in relation to other landmarks of the ancient world.
It was this level of detail that led many people to wonder if Atlantis actually existed.
One of the best clues Plato gives about Atlantis is a series of concentric circles around the city, black and red stone, and of course it was a seafaring society:
Poseidon turned the mountain where his love dwelt into a palace, and enclosed it with three circular ditches of increasing width, varying from one to three stages, and divided by rings of earth proportional in size.
The Atlanteans then built bridges to the north of the mountain, paving the way to the rest of the island.
They dug a great canal to the sea, and next to the bridges they cut tunnels in the rings of rocks so that ships could pass into the city around the mountain; from the rock walls of the moats they carved docks.
Each passage into the city was guarded by gates and towers, and each ring of the city was surrounded by a wall.
The walls were built of red, white, and black stone quarried from the ditches, and plated with brass, tin, and the precious metal orichalcum, respectively.
So, according to Plato, Atlantis looked something like this:
Although philologists and classical scholars are unanimous about the fictional nature of this story, there is still debate about what could have been the source of inspiration.
Plato is known to have freely borrowed some of his allegories and metaphors from older traditions, leading a number of scholars to suggest that Atlantis was inspired by Egyptian records of the eruption of Thera, the invasion of the Sea People, or the Trojan War.
However, others insist that Plato created a completely fictional story, drawing inspiration from contemporary events such as the unsuccessful Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415-413 BC. or the destruction of Helika in 373 BC.
However, countless locations have been proposed throughout history for the lost city of Atlantis, including in or near the Mediterranean Sea (Sardinia, Crete, Santorini, Sicily, Cyprus and Malta were considered as possible locations) or in the Atlantic Ocean (Canaries the islands and the Madeira Islands are such examples).
More recently, in a viral and rather convincing (to many at least) video posted in September 2018, Bright Insight’s YouTube channel claimed that the features of the Richat structure, otherwise known as the Eye of the Sahara, fit Plato’s description of Atlantis.
The video has received over 3.8 million views, and the story has been featured in the German edition of Der Spiegel, the Vietnamese newspaper Tien Phong, the Australian Business Insider, major UK tabloids, and more.
or 23.5 km – about 14.5 miles), a waterway outlet in the south, saline groundwater everywhere except below the central point, and mountains with waterfalls in the north of the city.
Regarding the current location of the structure – on a hill and away from any body of water – the YouTube channel pointed out the fact that once there were lakes and rivers in the Sahara, and that since then there has been a gradual uplift of the earth by about 2.5 cm (0 .8 inches) per year.
So could Bright Inside’s claims be true? Well, let’s look at the facts.
We only learned about this mysterious structure when we started sending people into space. And that’s all we really know about her for sure. And also the fact that scientists do not fully understand it. And a few more things:
The Eye of the Sahara, more formally known as the Richat Structure, is located in the western part of the Sahara Desert in Mauritania. On the ground it measures about 25 miles across.
First discovered in the 1930s, the Richat structure was originally thought to be an impact crater.
However, research in the 1950s and 1960s ruled out the possibility that it was formed by an extraterrestrial impact (such as a meteorite) in favor of terrestrial causes (such as volcanic activity).
In the end, scientists settled on the theory that it was a 100-million-year-old dome of molten rock, weathered and shaped by wind and water.
Now even Bright Insight admits that the Eye of the Sahara is a natural structure and claims that the Atlanteans built their city in a natural formation.
This very idea is questioned by Steven Novela in the Neoroligica blog, which refutes Bright’s Insight’s arguments one by one.
As for the YouTube channel’s main “evidence” that the Richat structure is a series of concentric rings exactly matching Plato’s description of Atlantis, Novela points out that the simple fact that both are concentric rings is not at all improbable, but since the rings are not discrete and incomplete in places, it is not clear how water could fill the structure.
In addition, if you look at the whole formation, you can count four rings of water, and not three, as suggested by Bright Insight.
In addition, there is no trace of the channel described by Plato, which was supposed to pass through all the walls into the internal structure, connecting the rings.
Bright Insight goes on to state that the size of the Richat structure matches Plato’s description, which translates to about 23 kilometers.
But then what is considered the outer edge of the structure? NASA defines the size of the structure as 45 kilometers. This is a significant difference.
The YouTube channel then points to the surrounding geography: north of the city, which was otherwise surrounded by flat plains and faced the Atlantic Ocean to the south, were mountains.
Novela argues that the mountains to the north are hardly a surprising coincidence, and that since Richat is in the Sahara, where there are no mountains there is desert sand, but these are not plains and are not surrounded.
And as for access to the ocean, Novela points out that the southwest sand drift that Bright Insight talks about is actually west rather than south, not south, as the YouTube channel claims. It also does not face the ocean, which is to the west.
Bright Insight also states that this part of the Sahara was inundated by the Atlantic 12,000 years ago. It also solves the problem that Richat is not on an island – well, maybe he was an island back then. He did not so much sink as he was chained to land.
According to the data we have, the Sahara desert is at least a few million years old, and there is absolutely no evidence that western Africa was underwater thousands of years ago. So this argument also seems unfounded.
Proponents of the “Eye of the Sahara = Atlantis” theory have cited many other “parallels”, some of which seem even more far-fetched.
Five-time EMMY award winner Paul Wagner, for example, claims that King Atlas, aka King of Atlantis and the name of the Atlantic Ocean, is the same person as Atlas of Mauritania; or what is on the map of Herodotus from 450 BC. Atlantis is in the same place as the Eye.
The bad news is that Herodotus didn’t make any maps himself. Therefore, the maps that you see on the Internet under his name are neither real nor a hoax.
They were made thousands of years later, based on his work, to help modern readers keep track of all the peoples and places mentioned by Herodotus.
One of these objects is Mount Atlas, and one of these peoples is the Atlantean tribe (= people of Mount Atlas). But Herodotus never mentions a place called Atlantis.
Wagner makes other interesting claims, including that many elephant bones were found near the Eye, consistent with Plato’s account of the abundance of elephants and many other animals in Atlantis, or that fresh water flowed from the central island of Atlantis, which is also located in the central circle of the Richat structure (there is also almost no evidence of this).
One of Wagner’s most compelling claims is that thousands of artifacts have been found in and around the Richat structure.
He suggests that the items found – including arrowheads, spears, stone spheres, surfboards, oars, ship hulls, and more – date back to the Atlantean era.
Well, the Richat structure is indeed the site of an exceptional collection of Acheulean artifacts – stone tools characterized by the characteristic oval and pear-shaped “hand axes” associated with Homo erectus as well as derivative species such as Homo heidelbergensis.
But Acheulean technology first appeared about 1.76 million years ago, and although its end is not well defined, it may have continued until about 130,000 years ago (much earlier than Atlantis’ estimated time of about 12,000 years ago).
Also, while indeed many of these artifacts have been found in the outer depressions of this structure, they are generally absent from its interior depressions.
In fact, so far no recognizable ramparts or man-made structures have been discovered and reported on the territory of the Rishat structure.
This most likely indicates that the Richat structure was only used for short-term hunting and stone tool making, and that the apparent richness of surface artefacts in places is the result of concentration and mixing by deflation over several glacial-interglacial cycles.
Most importantly, there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for a city in the Richat structure dating back 12,000 years, although Plato wrote of a large, developed settlement.
There are no remnants of artifacts, technologies, even a shard of a clay pot, something. There is no evidence of engineering, real walls or man-made structures, or any improvements to the natural environment.
A civilization simply cannot build an entire city and leave nothing behind. So, it seems to us that the geological history that this formation reveals is much more interesting than the theory of Atlantis.
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