The Lost City of Atlantis

Atlantis The Lost City 

The lost civilization of Atlantis has been hypothesized to be a variety of places over the ages.

The story of Atlantis began with Plato's Timaeus, in which the great capital and the history of the civilization are described. Plato’s description of the city places Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean west of the Strait of Gibraltar making the Azores Islands a likely location.

The American Ignatius L. Donnelly published a book in 1882 in which he believes that Plato’s story is no mere fable but literal history. His theory on the lost city proposes that the Azores Islands are the remnants of Atlantis’ highest peaks.

Unfortunately Donnelly does not provide any proof for his theory. Commonly the lost city is thought to be in the Mediterranean Sea possibly near the island of Crete, which coincides with theories that there is a connection between Atlantis and the Minoan civilization.

The Minoan civilization was devastated by a tsunami created in the aftermath of the Thera eruption. This catastrophic event destroyed the Minoan city of Akrotiri, which may have been Plato’s inspiration for Atlantis.

Other hypotheses place the city somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean due to the similarity in their names, but modern scientific inquiry has found nothing on the bottom of the Atlantic to support those hypotheses. It seems as though Atlantis will forever be the lost city under the sea.

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