Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

MOUNTAINS DON’T DANCE

Your theory is crazy. The question is, is it crazy enough?

—NIELS BOHR, DANISH PHYSICIST AND NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE

SOMEWHERE BEYOND the “Pillars of Hercules” lay the fabled island of Atlantis, home of an advanced civilization that once exerted a profound influence over the known world. After rising to a peak of power, refinement, and grace, this virtual paradise soon succumbed to vice and folly. Then, in a single “day and night of misfortune,” earthquakes shook the island to its foundation, and sent the formerly unrivaled civilization to the bottom of the sea.

This was the story according to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose fourth-century-B.C. dialogues Timaeus and Critias unleashed this fantastic vision onto the world. After a series of marathon discussions about the nature of justice, a wealthy old man named Critias was reminded of the story of Atlantis, which he had heard as a child. His grandfather, also named Critias, had heard it from his father, who in turn had gotten it from the distinguished Athenian Solon. This politician-poet had allegedly come across the old tradition on his journey to Egypt in about 600 B.C., when he met some priests who lived in the town of Sais on the Nile delta.

“O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children,” one of the elder priests dismissed the traveler, marveling at how little the Athenians remembered the past. The Egyptian records, by contrast, he was told, preserved the bewildering tale, fully developed in hieroglyphics carved on stone pillars in the temple. When Solon returned to his native Athens, he hoped to give the island of Atlantis its own full-length epic poem, one that he thought would surpass the masterpieces of Homer.

Having heard the tale as a ten-year-old boy, Critias did not think a single detail had escaped him over the years. The image of Atlantis, he said, had been “stamped firmly on my mind like the encaustic designs of an indelible painting.” With this assertion, Critias proceeded to tell the remarkable story of the world’s greatest lost civilization: its rise to power, its immense glory, and then its violent destruction, which left only a “barrier of impassable mud”—a formidable obstacle that still blocked access to this golden age, supposedly vanished since 9400 B.C.

Plato certainly knew how to capture the imagination. But could it really have happened? Could there have been such an idyllic civilization that was once destroyed by an earthquake and swallowed by the sea?

It is easy to dismiss the whole narrative as the product of an active imagination, and indeed you would be in good company. For just as the story of Atlantis is at least as old as Plato, debate about its existence has been lively since his own student, Aristotle, openly voiced his doubts. After all, with Aristotle’s mastery of ancient knowledge, which prompted the Roman natural philosopher Pliny to label him “a man of supreme eminence in every branch of science,” it is striking that he had not even heard of Atlantis before Plato outlined it in his famous dialogues.

Surely such a tale would not have escaped the attention of every previous chronicler. Not even the colorful historian Herodotus mentioned Atlantis. Like Solon, he had also visited Egypt, had spoken at length with the priests, and had a flair for the sensational and the mysterious. For Aristotle and the many critics who followed after him, Atlantis had of course never existed. Plato had conjured the whole thing out of his head, and then, as if to cover up for an embarrassing lack of corroborating evidence, conveniently made it all disappear.

Yet Plato repeatedly assures us that, however strange it may sound, the story of Atlantis is absolutely true. None of his other portraits of idealized societies, including the utopian community outlined in The Republic, shares the same pretensions to factual accuracy.

Plato’s plan, according to the first-century biographer Plutarch, was to create nothing less than a grand and stirring masterpiece. Solon had been unable to complete his epic poem, preoccupied perhaps by renewed tensions of Athenian political life, or, as Plutarch suggested, restrained by a fear of failure in the ambitious enterprise of trying to surpass Homer. As if claiming his family inheritance, Plato sought to build on this “fine but undeveloped site.” He marshaled his creative talents and then released them on lost Atlantis. It was to be constructed with a magnificence “such as no story or myth or poetic creation had ever received before.”

Unfortunately, however, Plato died before he could fully realize these aims, or perhaps abandoned the project when he struggled to find the fitting climax—and this leaves the oldest known account of Atlantis to end literally in the middle of a sentence.

Sure enough, over the last two thousand years, scientists, adventurers, visionaries, mystics, eccentrics, and lunatics have raced to fill in the missing details of this unfinished dialogue. Redrawn maps place the supposedly submerged civilization almost everywhere, and many come complete with elaborate theories painstakingly or at least passionately argued. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, few places have not been named as possible locations for the legendary island of Atlantis.

But few, it seems, were as unlikely a candidate and few would inspire as much enthusiasm, for a time, as the theory put forward by Uppsala’s professor of medicine, Olof Rudbeck.

“BY GOD’S GRACE, I have recently found such antiquities for our country and its great praise in the oldest Greek and Latin texts that it is unbelievable,” Rudbeck wrote to Chancellor de la Gardie at the end of December 1674, promising, though, to save the full details until he saw De la Gardie in person.

It must have been quite a conversation when Rudbeck told the count about his latest discovery. For that matter, it must have been quite an experience when the idea first struck him. The lost world of Atlantis, Rudbeck was growing convinced, had actually been in Sweden! Its capital was in fact just outside the university, in a place called Old Uppsala.

All learned Swedes knew this town as one of the earliest inhabited sites in the country. Popular belief, medieval sources, and Rudbeck’s own archaeological investigations had all confirmed its great age. Now, reading Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias closely, Rudbeck must have felt a strange sense of deja vu. Here in the philosopher’s tale was a place beyond the Pillars of Hercules, that is, at the ends of the world, with a reputed center of culture, just as he had envisioned in the land of the Hyperboreans. And upon inspection it sounded increasingly like what he knew about Old Uppsala.

Blessed with many attractions, this town would indeed have been a most appropriate place for the kingdom builders. Just as Plato regarded it as the “fairest of all plains,” Old Uppsala was well known as a fertile, rich region, and at one time it had been the most populated area in Sweden. Its pleasant meadows and adjacent farmlands also enhanced the appeal of this ancient center.

According to Plato, this plain stretched some 3,000 stadia in length (about 550 kilometers) and 2,000 stadia in width (365 kilometers) reaching from the capital city to the “great sea.” Each of these points, Rudbeck ventured with typical boldness, could be found in Sweden. Although he concluded that Atlantis was in fact 5,000 stadia in length, the first measurement (3,000 stades) approximated the size of the kingdom, calculated from the capital at Old Uppsala to Torne in the Arctic north (the other 2,000 stadia ran south from Old Uppsala to Skane). The width of 2,000 stadia estimated the distance across the center of the realm and did in fact end at a great sea, the North Sea in the west. The rocky, mountainous terrain encircling Atlantis also fit well, Rudbeck proposed, pointing to the Scanderna chain in the west and north, from which came the name Scandinavia. Enclosing the region of Old Uppsala, too, were many famous burial mounds—could these be the “sacred hills” of Atlantis?

When Rudbeck went out to the proposed capital city for the first time to investigate, he was amazed to find more than coincidental correspondences. Accompanying him that initial day, most likely in the summer of 1674, were four sons of the powerful nobleman Gustaf Kurck, who also marked out and measured the dimensions of the old capital. Eight other Uppsala students, who came along on the expedition, confirmed the length, breadth, and width of the capital, the dimensions laid out almost precisely as Plato had written two thousand years before. They had measured, remeasured, and, to his astonishment, found that the dimensions corresponded “not only with stadia but also with feet and steps.” The team concluded with another round of measurements using Rudbeck’s “mathematical instruments.” “Because neither I nor they,” he added, “could ever before believe this to be true.”

Leaving aside for the moment the many difficulties Rudbeck would face (and soon for the most part confront), there was actually good reason for his bursting enthusiasm. He had combed the pages of Plato’s dialogues, especially the more detailed Critias, looking for precise information about the physical location of the city: “At a distance of about fifty stades, there stood a mountain that was low on all sides.”