been quarried long ago for construction projects. Certainly Rudbeck knew many elderly gentlemen who remembered hearing tales in their childhood about how desperate the town dwellers had been to obtain all the necessary materials for building the large Vasa castle in Uppsala. Ransacking old monuments was unfortunately a timeless practice (Hadorph’s pioneering law had only recently granted the vulnerable monuments protection, at least legally). In any case the ruins of the Atlantis palace were probably lost for good, either consumed by the flames or recycled within the walls of nearby castles and churches.
One thing Rudbeck was sure about, though, was that the palace had not been destroyed exactly as Plato had claimed, swept away along with the rest of Atlantis in a massive earthquake and flood. Rudbeck was in fact amazed that anyone could believe that this part of Plato’s story was literally true. For instance, Plato had claimed that the destruction buried the civilization, leaving only “a barrier of impassable mud which prevents those who are sailing out from here to the ocean beyond from proceeding further.”
How could such a cataclysm produce so much mud that would, centuries later, still be unsettled, and make the nearby ocean an unnavigable graveyard? This, Rudbeck said, was “an explanation for children.” For readers who did not share Rudbeck’s interest or expertise in natural history, he provided another argument.
Plato’s words, quite simply, conflicted with sacred history. The book of Genesis recorded God’s promise never to flood the world again with another overwhelming deluge: “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
According to Rudbeck, both sacred and natural history ruled out an actual annihilation of Atlantis. It made much more sense, he argued, to see Plato’s words as describing the figurative destruction of a society sinking into decline and oblivion—a degeneration brought on by their love of war and their tragic slide into corruption.
Discussing the last days of the old kingdom brought Rudbeck back to another challenge that has long bedeviled Atlantis hunters: the chronology of the events. In
There was no reason to assume that the Atlanteans had used the Gregorian calendar or the older, less accurate Julian calendar, Rudbeck rightly noted. In fact it was highly unlikely. A calendar based on the sun was far from the easiest to discover, or even, for that matter, the most natural to use. Ancient astronomers were much more likely, Rudbeck the stargazer argued correctly, to devise a system of time reckoning based upon the moon. Unlike the sun, the moon passes through easily visible and predictable phases. At such an early time in history, there was no recorded evidence that the solar year had even been discovered.
As a result, the chronology of the Atlanteans could be much better explained as consisting of periods of time based on the regular movements of the moon. If this was correct, then a quick calculation reduced Plato’s 9400 B.C., at one stroke, to about 1350 B.C. (Plato’s “nine thousand years in the past” divided by twelve converts to 750 solar years, which is then added to the starting point, which Rudbeck traced back to Solon’s discussion with the Egyptian priests, about 600 B.C.). This calculation also inserts neatly into Rudbeck’s reconstructed chronology of ancient Sweden, based on measuring the distinctions in the soil around the oldest ruins. The Atlanteans’ war and destruction would have occurred around 1350 B.C., about one thousand years after Sweden was first settled.
Despite some manifest difficulties that still needed to be ironed out, Rudbeck believed that Plato’s words described Sweden “as clear as day.” No other place on earth had even a fraction of the evidence for Atlantis that he had found in Sweden. So close was the fit that, Rudbeck said, a Swedish blind man hearing the tale could sense with his cane the very landscape of Atlantis under his feet. Ten years later Rudbeck would still be proclaiming his theory with even more evidence and greater enthusiasm, gladly taking visitors to Uppsala on a guided tour of the lost world of Atlantis. Another ten years into the search, Rudbeck would issue a challenge to any scholar in Europe to come to Sweden and prove him wrong. Rudbeck would, he said, cover the expenses.
Yet no matter how many tours he would give, or challenges he would offer, some difficulties still remained, as if to taunt him. Rudbeck was virtually incapable of resting as long as any doubt or ambiguity lingered about his Atlantis. Even the slightest hint of uncertainty would be assaulted with an astonishing vigor, as if the search itself were under threat. Such striving for perfection drove Rudbeck deeper into the labyrinths of myth, and further into the realm of obsession.
ENJOYING THE THRILL of the search, Rudbeck was spending less time at the medical school. His lectures were languishing, and university authorities were once again warning him about neglecting his duties. Fortunately for Rudbeck, his old friend Professor Petrus Hoffvenius was picking up the slack, though it was clear that he could not continue to do so indefinitely.
Rudbeck’s waterworks system, meanwhile, had broken down; its pipes had burst in a severe winter a few years earlier. His anatomy theater needed a new roof, and one of his suspension bridges over the town river had collapsed in a recent spring flood. There were many matters that needed attention, but Rudbeck had first to be satisfied with his work on Atlantis.
Hunting down every possible claim about the legendary civilization, Rudbeck came across one of the great unsung heroes in the tradition of Atlantis: the first-century-B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus.
Writing during the bloody upheavals that tore Rome apart during the last days of the republic, this Sicilian- born scholar spent three decades gathering materials for his monumental work, the
Although Diodorus does not earn much praise today as a reliable authority, he nevertheless preserved many invaluable traditions that would otherwise have been lost. By the time his eccentric chronicle reached the history of Atlantis, he essentially took Plato’s vision of an advanced civilization and magnified it considerably. Even more, Diodorus added a twist to the tale; he claimed to have access to the traditions of the Atlanteans themselves.
After this rather surprising revelation, Diodorus really dropped a bomb. Zeus, Poseidon, and the gods of ancient Greece had, according to these same records, come originally from the island of Atlantis! Such a claim was “in agreement with the most renowned of the Greek poets, Homer.” In the
From the vantage point of 1670s Sweden, these were extraordinary words. In the version of the classical myth most widely known, Tethys was an important though hazy figure who had married Oceanus and played at least some role in raising Hera, if not also the other gods as Homer sometimes seems to suggest. Now the assiduous collector of old traditions, Diodorus Siculus, had preserved some vague legend that connected Tethys to the island of Atlantis. Rudbeck could only wonder about how well this information fitted with his own emerging vision of the past. For Tethys sounded strangely close to a place on his Atlantis, called Tethis Fiord, which was located firmly in the far north, at the sixty-eighth meridian, indeed, as Homer put it, “at the ends of the fruitful earth.”
But Tethys was also known to be a Titan, and some descriptions of this powerful race of giants have actually survived. In the oldest extant account that offers some detail, the eighth-century-B.C. Greek poet Hesiod described their home as “hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth.” The shepherd poet further described their “awful home of murky Night wrapped in dark clouds.” Where Tethys and the Titans dwelt, “the glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams,” just as actually happens, every winter, at Tethis Fiord in northern Scandinavia.
DIODORUS SICULUS WAS not only greatly encouraging the Swedish doctor, but now also helping direct his enormous energies. Rudbeck had started to follow some fascinating leads, particularly about the classical gods and those vague, supposed traditions connecting them with the kingdom of Atlantis.
Zeus, Apollo, and the other gods of Mount Olympus were known to every educated person in Rudbeck’s day. Needless to say, nowhere the Olympians were said to have lived, visited, or otherwise had anything to do with Sweden or with the Scandinavian far north. All the oldest surviving accounts clearly place the Olympians somewhere
