Atlantis = Ireland?

August 7, 2004 1:32 PM

Atlantis has been found, and it's... Ireland? So says Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson, who thinks the sinking of the island in Plato's story may have referred to the inundation of Dogger Bank, which connected Britain and Denmark. Sorry Spain. [Via MonkeyFilter.]
posted by homunculus (13 comments total)

Isn't it a bit more likely to be made up? The mists of time seem to make people forget that mankind has always been rather good at writing fiction and claiming otherwise, for fun and profit.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 1:45 PM on August 7, 2004

woo, i could be an atlantean, at least partially.

no, i AM an atlantean. shh, pretty_generic.

---

also, i guess all that highly advanced civilisation stuff wasn't just so accurate then....
posted by knapah at 1:53 PM on August 7, 2004

The second link ends with:
Others locate it solely in the long-decayed brain of Plato.

Hahahahaha! Wit in a news article. Those are such gems these days.

So, uh, how can it be Ireland if Ireland didn't sink, but instead some dodgy bank much larger than the dimensions Plato provides?
posted by linux at 2:03 PM on August 7, 2004

maybe if they clarify this, our scientists can finally begin work on the tube technology.
posted by NationalKato at 2:06 PM on August 7, 2004

Noticed this on the web - thanks for a well researched, multiple link posting of it in the blue.
posted by geekyguy at 2:56 PM on August 7, 2004

how can it be Ireland if Ireland didn't sink, but instead some dodgy bank much larger than the dimensions Plato provides?

Perhaps some the details got fudged over millennia of transmission. And Plato certainly could have bent them to make the moral points of his tale.

I find it pretty far fetched, but it's always fun to speculate. And the similarity of the dimensions of the islands is remarkable.
posted by homunculus at 3:25 PM on August 7, 2004

And don't forget a teensy bit of geography: Ireland isn't even in the same sea as the Dogger Bank.
posted by raygirvan at 6:41 PM on August 7, 2004

But it's within the geographic distribution of the megaliths. Different pieces of information, like there being a certain island and there different an area which was flooded, could have gotten confused over the centuries.

A bigger problem I have is how the measurements of Ireland could have been made in the first place, and then handed down unaltered while the rest of the story changed. Both seem unlikely to me.
posted by homunculus at 7:26 PM on August 7, 2004

I swear I thought this came from the Weekly World News when I first saw the headline.
posted by SisterHavana at 8:56 PM on August 7, 2004

Location hypotheses for Atlantis.. including the latest entry of Doggers Bank.
posted by stbalbach at 9:39 PM on August 7, 2004

Maybe I'm one of the few that saw that awful animated Atlantis movie, but I think the premise there was that Atlantis was off the coast of Ireland.

Or was it Iceland?
posted by tracicle at 11:52 PM on August 7, 2004

A-ha! It wasn't the Gods or global warming that destroyed the Atlantean civilization, and the real culprits are still on the attack!
posted by homunculus at 10:46 AM on August 9, 2004

i still like the off the coast of japan idea aligning it with constellations in 10500bc, like giza and orion and draco with ankar wat (?)
posted by ethylene at 4:04 PM on August 10, 2004