not done, then we are in danger of clothing the ancient peoples of the world in modern, ill-fitting garments, and transforming them into 21st century ancients who would not have been recognized in their original cultures.
On the other hand, to deny the mysteries of the past completely, to believe that modern archaeology and science have the answers to every ancient enigma, is equally ill-advised. (It also makes dull reading.) Alternative theorists, such as Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and Christopher Knight may sometimes be too uncritical when dealing with the evidence for lost civilizations and ancient technology, but they are better writers than most archaeologists. Academics are never going to convey the fascination of their subject to the general public if their commercial publications read like technical reports, or notes written for a lecture to a group of Ph.D. students. There are, of course, exceptions: Mike Pitts's Hengeworld, Francis Pryor's Britain BC, and Barry Cunliffe's Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500, should be read by everyone with an interest in ancient history.
In Hidden History, ancient mysteries are divided into three categories: Mysterious Places, Strange Artifacts, and Enigmatic People. The choice of subjects included in the book was a personal one, made to bring together the most interesting of ancient mysteries, and to cover a wide range of cultures, time periods, and types of mystery. The book has no hidden agenda; I hope my readers will use the evidence presented to make up their own minds about these riddles of our enigmatic past.
PART I
Mysterious
Places
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The Lost Land of AUlanI.is
Athanasius Kircher's map of Atlantis's possible location.
From Mundus Subterraneus (1669).
The magical lost land of Atlantis has captured the imagination of poets, scholars, archaeologists, geologists, occultists, and travelers for more than 2,000 years. The notion of a highly advanced island civilization (that flourished in remote antiquity only to be destroyed overnight by a huge natural catastrophe) has inspired believers in the historical truth of the Atlantis tale to search practically every corner of the Earth for remnants of this once great civilization. Most archaeologists are of the opinion that the Atlantis story is just that, a story, an allegorical tale with no historical value whatsoever. And then there are the occultists, many of whom have
approached the story of Atlantis from the standpoint that it represents either a lost spiritual homeland (such as Mu/Lemuria), or a different plain of existence entirely. What is it about Atlantis that has inspired such diverse interpretations? Could there be any truth behind the story?
The original source from which all information about Atlantis ultimately derives is the Greek philosopher Plato, in his two short dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written somewhere between 359 and 347 B.C. Plato's supposed source for the story of Atlantis was a distant relative of his, a famous Athenian lawmaker and Lyric poet named Solon. Solon had, in turn, heard the story while visiting the court of Amasis, king of ancient Egypt from 569 to 525 B.C., in the city of Sais, on the western edge of the Nile Delta. While at the court of Amasis, Solon visited the Temple of Neith and fell into conversation with a priest who related the story of Atlantis to him. The priest described a great island, larger than Libya and Asia combined, that had existed 9,000 years before their time, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantis was rule over by an alliance of kings descended from Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes, whose eldest son, Atlas, gave his name to the island and the surrounding ocean.
The Atlanteans possessed an empire that stretched from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean as far as Egypt in the south and Italy in the north. During an attempt to extend their empire further into the Mediterranean, the Atlanteans came up against the combined powers of Europe, led by the city-state of Athens. In this remote time, Athens was already a great city and a society ruled by a warrior-elite class who disdained riches and lived a spartan lifestyle. The armies of Atlantis were eventually defeated by the Athenians alone, after their allies deserted them. However, soon after the victory there was a devastating earthquake followed by huge floods, and the continent of Atlantis sank beneath the Ocean "in a single dreadful day and night," in the words of Plato.
The destruction of Atlantis and its location beyond the Strait of Gibraltar takes up only a few lines in Plato's Dialogues, in contrast to his much more detailed description of the
island's physical and political organization. Initially Atlantis had been an idyllic place, endowed with a wealth of natural resources; there were forests, fruits, wild animals (including elephants), and abundant metal ores. Each king on the island possessed his own royal city over which he was complete master. However, the capital city, ruled by the descendents of Atlas, was by far the most spectacular. This ancient metropolis was surrounded by three concentric rings of
