I'm more fascinated by Port Royal. Arhhhhhhggg!

My question is not when or where civilization started, but rather IF civilization exists today.


If you think yes there is, reflect upon the Southside of Chicago, or South Central LA.

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
The early cave painters, at around 40,000 years ago are my first civilized people. (Maybe a little earlier, as earlier paintings may not have been well-protected.) Anyone who deliberately makes art is civilized in my book.

Its more likely that the drawings were written language (hieroglyphics) as opposed to "art". Although, arguably, both could serve the same purpose.

#handprint

quote:

Originally posted by bionic218:


4. For the sake of discussion, let's keep the religious zeal to a minimum. If you believe it's only 106 years because that's how long we've had the prophet JMB's 1911 - that's fine, but state your case and move on.

I mean thats true though? Its not zeal if you can prove that the great JMB graced us 106 years ago. That said, even if you accept God made man, any divine beings timeline is so vastly larger in scope than ours, we may never know.

I refer you to “The Complete Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant, 11 volumes, ~12000 pages, which I acquired and spent much of this past spring reading.

Atlantis is mentioned.

quote:

In approaching now the history of civilized nations we must note that not only shall we be selecting a mere fraction of each culture for our study, but we shall be describing perhaps a minority of the civilizations that have probably existed on the earth. We cannot entirely ignore the legends, current throughout history, of civilizations once great and cultured, destroyed by some catastrophe of nature or war, and leaving not a wrack behind; our recent exhuming of the civilizations of Crete, Sumeria and Yucatan indicates how true such tales may be.

The Pacific contains the ruins of at least one of these lost civilizations. The gigantic statuary of Easter Island, the Polynesian tradition of powerful nations and heroic warriors once ennobling Samoa and Tahiti, the artistic ability and poetic sensitivity of their present inhabitants, indicate a glory departed, a people not rising to civilization but fallen from a high estate. And in the Atlantic, from Iceland to the South Pole, the raised central bed of the oceans VII lends some support to the legend so fascinatingly transmitted to us by Plato, of a civilization that once flourished on an island continent between Europe and Asia, and was suddenly lost when a geological convulsion swallowed that continent into the sea. Schliemann, the resurrector of Troy, believed that Atlantis had served as a mediating link between the cultures of Europe and Yucatan, and that Egyptian civilization had been brought from Atlantis. Perhaps America itself was Atlantis, and some pre-Mayan culture may have been in touch with Africa and Europe in neolithic times. Possibly every discovery is a rediscovery.

Certainly it is probable, as Aristotle thought, that many civilizations came, made great inventions and luxuries, were destroyed, and lapsed from human memory. History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved. We console ourselves with the thought that as the individual memory must forget the greater part of experience in order to be sane, so the race has preserved in its heritage only the most vivid and impressive-or is it only the best-recorded?—of its cultural experiments. Even if that racial heritage were but one tenth as rich as it is, no one could possibly absorb it all. We shall find the story full enough.

There is also a useful discussion of how to define a civilization, as opposed to mere existence.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

Its more likely that the drawings were written language (hieroglyphics) as opposed to "art". Although, arguably, both could serve the same purpose.

Writing would also indicate civilization to me.

quote:

Originally posted by bionic218:

quote:

No. It is a metaphor. It's Plato, who loves a metaphor.

Gotcha on this point, and I agree with that statement. Although it's a stunning coincidence that Plato goes as far as to date the metaphor - 9000 years before the time of Solon(sp?) - which would place it right at the very edge of the Younger-Dryas event 11,600 years ago.

quote:

Why doesn't anyone believe that some dudes kept a bunch of people holed up in a cave and only showed them reflections of reality?

You lost me on this one. What's the reference?

The 9,000 year old date is due to a mistranslation.
"translated, the Egyptian symbol for 100 (a coiled rope) was mistaken for the symbol for 1000 (a lotus flower). This changes the date from 9000 years ago to 900 years ago. "

This does date it to the eruption on the island of Santorini
http://www.kidzworld.com/artic...ost-city-of-atlantis

No Atlantis

Gobekli Tepe is interesting - something like 13,000 years old...

Gobekli Tepe

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dzozer,

quote:

Originally posted by Dzozer:
Gobekli Tepe is interesting - something like 13,000 years old...

Gobekli Tepe

It's only 3x older than Mesopotamia. My school teacher lied to me about the fertile crescent! And I didn't need that stupid algebra in real life!

Here's another weird fact that gets subdued by the extreme antiquity of Gobekli Tepe; It was buried - deliberately - over 10,000 years ago!

Not only did somebody build this crazy set of structures 7,000 years before Stonehenge, but somewhere along the line - 3000 years before Stonehenge - somebody purposely buried it. And if you've seen the size of it (roughly 50 times bigger than Stonehenge) this in and of itself is quite a feat.

quote:

It's only 3x older than Mesopotamia.

They - some of the researchers in this field - speak to this consistently as the 'knowledge filter', a term derived by Michael Cremo, wherein evidence that fits the establishment platform (Mesopotamia and evolution) is put forth, and evidence that does not (the antiquity of civilization and megalithic structures) are not.

Very interesting theory of how things work at that level.

True or not? I couldn't begin to say.

quote:

Originally posted by Dzozer:
Gobekli Tepe is interesting - something like 13,000 years old...

Gobekli Tepe

I click on that and get a video about the wisest man.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by Dzozer:
Gobekli Tepe is interesting - something like 13,000 years old...

Gobekli Tepe

I click on that and get a video about the wisest man.

J, this is one of the shorter ones.

G.T. documentary

They go into some of the questions the site raises, like the covering theory and the odd point that the better or best work of carvings and reliefs are also the oldest. Almost like a degradation of skill or ability over time, which seems counter intuitive - at least to me.

quote:

Writing would also indicate civilization to me.

from the dregs of one of my more impressive History professors so long ago, one of his recommended text books for the class on 'Civilization' gave this little comment:
{semi-quoted as best I recall} "In Latin the root word for 'civilization' is 'civitas'....meaning a group of people living together......the Chinese root word for 'civilization' means 'the changing influence due to literature'.

quote:

Originally posted by justjoe:
The Allegory of the Cave is clearly an allegory. Plato talks about Atlantis as a historical reality. Big difference.

No, it really is an allegory.

Both the Timaeus and Critias are Socratic dialogues; they are not history. That is not to say that one can't get historical information from them, but they are categorically not history, and the origins of the sokratikoi logoi as a genre are purely rhetorical, not historical (though the two genres did develop at roughly the same time).

That the story of Atlantis (the Timaeus version) is clearly allegorical can be demonstrated thus, based solely on internal evidence from the dialogues themselves:

- The setting of the dialogue, as stated in the dialogue itself, if the day after Socrates described his ideal state.

- The ideal state was described in previous Platonic dialogue, the Republic. So one dialogue refers explicitly to another dialogue. Among the participants in the Timaeus is a guy named Critias...who is the eponymous discussant of the next dialogue, Critias, which goes into the most detail about Atlantis. The self-referentiality is clearly literary, not historical. Further, no one assumes the Republic of the dialogue of the same name is a real place; it is a utopia.

- The Atlantis discussed in both Timaeus and Critias is also a utopia. The set-up in the Timaeus is thus: A) Socrates sums up the details of his ideal state from the previous day, his Republic; B) Socrates requests the other guests entertain him with a story as a response to his own story; C) Critias introduces his own tale, the story of Atlantis as a response to Socrates' ideal state; D) Critias' tale, which is expanded in the next dialogue, is actually about how swell Athens is, not Atlantis.

- Reading the Timaeus should underscore how UNreliable the information is supposed to be. The tale is told like a million times removed: Critias heard the story from his grandfather, also named Critias, who heard it from his great-grandfather, Dropides, who heard it from Solon, who heard it from some Egyptian priests. Elder Critias was 90 when he told the 10 year old Critias the story. See where this is going? (This is to say nothing about the fact that Solon is as much a figure of legend as he is of actual history.) And, just to raise the point, no one finds it odd that Solon was about to communicate directly with Egyptian priests? I don't really envision an Athenian of the late 7th c. BC being conversant in Egyptian, nor Egyptians in Greek. Not that Plato makes a point of it, but that would undercut the veracity of the account even more.

- In the Timaeus where the lion's share of the story is told, Critias tells us that back in the days of "Atlantis", Athens was much different than in Socrates' day and was fertile and rich and well-watered with springs. This is patently untrue based on archaeological evidence, so the veracity of the story gets even shakier.

- The tale told in the Critias is clearly a story of "good people who go bad and get justice when they attack other good people (i.e. Athens) and then get put in their place by the gods." The manner in which Critias describes the Atlanteans' fall is pretty much exactly like what you hear in Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days; it's a part of the tradition of Near Eastern wisdom literature. Again, this is the language of allegory and metaphor; it is not history. The story of Atlantis uses all the same tropes as other stories of "good people gone wrong" and "divine justice" precisely because it IS a story in that tradition.

In the real world of archaeology, we are decently informed about prehistorica Athens, the Athens from the time of "Atlantis". Sure, the Acropolis and the areas immediately around it were settled more or less continuously since the Neolithic (though relatively late in the period, compared to other Greek sites), but evidence points to mud huts. Literally. If we fast-forward 1500 or so years to the Late Bronze Age, Athens shows none of the comparable cyclopean masonry seen at other Greek sites at the time (e.g. Mycenae), nor any of the rich burials. Indeed, when the major Mycenaean sites of the Peloponnese had moved into other artistic styles, Athens was still rocking styles of pottery that were outdated by centuries. Elsewhere around Athens, new communities are popping up and adopting the latest fashions in pottery, but Athens stays stuck behind by a century or more. Only at the end of the Late Bronze Age does Athens experience an expansion and show things like luxury goods and the latest trends in ceramics. Athens also finally adopts the cyclopean masonry fortifications of its earlier contemporaries like Mycenae or Thebes, and even then, they're less impressive.

Archaeology tells us that, for all its glory in the 5th century, Athens was very far from the cutting edge in the Bronze Age (when "Atlantis" supposedly attacked Athens). Indeed, they remained the Johnny-come-lately to the Greek civilization party all the way up through the Archaic period.


The story of Atlantis is unequivocally an allegory. Cursory study of the Platonic source texts shows this.

Knowledge of Athenian prehistoric archaeology is the final nail in the coffin: we know pretty well what Athens was like in the time period of "Atlantis". They didn't go waging any wars with a hyper-civilization, that's for sure.

TL;DR: Yes, Atlantis is not real. It is an allegory.

That said, I certainly wouldn't discount the possibility that Plato's inspiration for the story was some vague cultural memory of the eruption on Santorini, but please trust me that event happened far, far, far before any accurate record keeping (nor did the ancient mind have the same ideas about historical truth as our modern mind), and therefore any idea of that eruption surviving in Plato's day would itself be apocryphal. The eruption probably happened some time in the Late Minoan period; the Cycladic civilizations (of which Akrotiri was one) weren't writing, at least as far as we know; at best, the Minoans were using Linear A. All the writing we have from the Greek world at that period is basically inventories. No stories, histories, religious texts, etc. Just lists. And receipts. And inventories. For an account of the eruption to have been written down would defy literally everything we know about the history of Greek literacy. Word of mouth for more than a millennium before Plato retold it, at best.

I go on at length about this because I am someone who has specialist knowledge about these things. I have worked with the primary sources. I have colleagues who dig in the dirt and study Athens in that time period. I've been to Santorini; I've also had to research it during a grad seminar. I taught a class about pseudo-science, especially Atlantis.

The people who promote theories like Atlantis almost never have ANY specialist knowledge, let alone specialist knowledge in the field they're making claims about. I can tell you beyond a doubt that the modern Atlantis craze stems from one guy, Ignatius Donnelly, in 1882. He decided to read Plato literally and we're off to the races. For him, to hell with the mountains of evidence from Plato himself that the story is just an allegory...that would require engaging with the primary source on a deeper level.

Donnelly and others like him promote "alternative methods" of inquiry and they interpret wildly because they have no specialist knowledge to ground their theories. They connect dots that ought not be connected, not because they're "ingenious" or have some new insights, but because they don't understand that those dots CAN'T be connected for verifiable reasons. Having an AM radio show, a pod-cast, a blog, writing books to be published in a vanity press, etc. is not expertise. Please don't make the mistake.

I'm not saying that something like Gobleki Tepe isn't profoundly interesting and may cause us to seriously rethink the origins of civilization (i.e. do you need farming to have a town). Indeed, I'm sure there's a ton we don't know about our ancestors and we should rightly be impressed by their achievements. Unfortunately for the people interested in flashy stuff like Atlantis, the ancient world was generally banal; the Pyramids, for example, are an awesome achievement, but you don't need a hyper-civilization to build them. There is a lot to be amazed about in the ancient world, but we need to remember that they had the same capacity for intelligence as we do; they were not smarter, nor were they dumber, and they surely didn't need the help of aliens. Human labor and ingenuity, probably with a good admixture of religious devotion, was enough to build even the most astonishing monuments.

That said, Atlantis is still just a story in Plato.