The Search is Over
Atlantis was a 'Megalithic mother culture' - an island in the Atlantic Ocean which was populated by a relatively advanced seafaring people during the Stone Age.
Our team has undertaken the largest ever investigation into the legend and has compiled overwhelming proof that the legend of Atlantis is loosely based on Stone Age Ireland - - the fountainhead from which the 'Megalithic mother culture' sprang.
Our findings go completely against mainstream opinion and revolutionise early human history. Our work will stand up to the highest levels of scrutiny and we welcome any opportunity to debate our work or have it independently verified.
These 400,000-year-old flint tools were discovered at two separate sites in Ireland - one at the Stone Age fort of Dún Aonghasa on the Aran Islands off the Co. Galway coast and one at Mell, Co. Louth - just 9km from Newgrange. This picture was taken in the National Museum of Ireland.
Other similar-aged flint tools were also found in Ireland. For example, a 200,000-year-old "Levallois" flake was also found in Newtownards, Co. Down.
Ireland did not fully freeze over during the Ice Age and has been inhabited far longer than mainstream academia presently realises - more than enough time for a 'megalithic mother culture' to arise.
In the earliest times, Ireland was known throughout the world as the 'sacred island'. In old writings, nothing was described as ‘sacred’ unless it was extremely ancient.
Aristotle spoke of a sacred island in the Atlantic called Ierne. Plato spoke of a sacred island in the Atlantic called Atlantis. Diodorus spoke of a sacred island in the Atlantic called Hyperborea. All were descriptions of Ireland clouded by mythology, superstition and a primitive knowledge of geography. The Romans also described Ireland as 'insula sacra' - the sacred island.
"This Isle is sacred named by all the ancients, from times remotest in the womb of Chronos. This isle which rises over the waves of ocean, is covered with a sod of rich luxuriance. And peopled far and wide by the Hiberni" - Avienus, Roman Scholar
Atlantis was a 'megalithic mother culture' - a seafaring Stone Age people based on an Island ( Ireland ) in the Atlantic Ocean with a large circular temple ( Newgrange ). The island was drowned by a huge natural disaster ( Tsunami ) around 11,600 years ago.
The 'Megalithic Mother Culture' was a seafaring Stone Age people who built mounds, stone circles and megaliths all over the world. Stone circles have been found in virtually every country on earth while the mounds of America are the same as the mounds of Ireland because the same people built them.
We are saying that this 'Megalithic mother culture' originated in Ireland where the most impressive Stone Age constructions on earth are found.
There are over 100,000 Stone Age constructions in Ireland that have yet to be excavated - it must be the most under-excavated place on earth.
A virtually unknown, yet historically proven fact is that the builders of Newgrange, one of Ireland’s spectacular Stone Age temples, transported huge 5 - 10 ton boulders to the site from 30km away by boat. Part of this journey was in the open sea while the remainder was against the flow of the river.
Imagine the quality of boat and level of skill required to load and unload such huge weights, let alone transport them in the open sea and against the flow of the river. The boulders are a very rare type of rock called greywacke which is only found in one place in Ireland - Clogherhead, County Louth - and could only have been transported to the site by boat in the manner outlined.
Newgrange is located at the Brú na Bóinne complex in County Meath, where around 200 unexcavated Stone Age construction are found, including a Stone Age quay and boats. The ancient Irish clearly had spectacular boats that sailed in the open sea.
Newgrange is also perfectly aligned to the rising sun at the winter solstice, as are hundreds of Irish megaliths, which proves the early Irish had obtained a stunning knowledge of construction, astronomy and mathematics.
We know for sure that the Stone Age Irish were master astronomers. We know for sure they had boats in the open sea. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine they explored the wider world using the stars for direction.
With wild forests, wild animals and wild people to contend with, travelling over land was a very dangerous business and up until very recently in human history sailing was by far the safest and most practical form of transport. The sea was not the obstacle it appears to modern man, it was the primary means of travel and idea transfer for thousands of years. The sea once dominated human life andboats were the aeroplanes of the time
Stone Age man was also a lot more mobile than he has been given credit for. Recent scientific breakthroughs prove that man sailed to Australia on rafts 65,000 years ago shattering the previous illusion that Australia was only first inhabited a few centuries ago.
Man has been sailing for a lot longer than most so called 'experts' realise.
The Egyptian civilisation predated the Greeks by thousands of years so rather than rely on Plato’s useful yet unreliable tale it’s much wiser to just go right to the source - Egypt.
Several ancient Egyptian texts, including The Book of the Dead, The Pyramid Texts and The Hymn of Rameses IV describe how their ancestors came from a sacred island in the Atlantic Ocean that was devastated in a great flood. Other texts refer to this ancestral territory as Urini - the ‘sunset land’ or the ‘island of the setting sun’.
To this day Ireland is referred to as ‘the land of the setting sun’.
According to Egyptian texts, this island in the Atlantic was overwhelmed by water. These records tell how the founders of Egypt arrived from an island in the Atlantic around 12,000 years ago.
Pharaoh King Menes is widely accepted as being the founder of the First Dynasty. Towards the end of his life Menes sailed seeking the sunset land, the ancestral home of the Egyptians. When archaeologists opened his Egyptian tomb, it was found to be empty, his body was elsewhere. A hieroglyphic text found by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1901 in his empty tomb says:
‘King Menes, the Ruler of Mizraim [Egypt] made the complete course to the end of the Sunset Land. Sailing in ships, he completed the inspection of the Western Land. He built there a holding in Urani Land. At the Lake of the Peak, fate pierced him by a Hornet (Bee Sting) . . . This drilled tablet set up of hanging wood is dedicated to his memory.’
Here we have proof that the ancestral home of the Egyptians, known as Atlantis in mystical circles, was above water and visited by a pharaoh who died and was buried there. The final resting place of Pharaoh Menes was discovered in Knockmany, County Tyrone, Ireland by explorer Laurence Waddell who wrote about his discovery in in several books including The Makers of Civilisation and Egyptian Civilisation which contain original photographs of stone carvings from the site. He also described how linear writing on a boulder stone at the site was almost identical with that found in the pharaoh’s empty Egyptian tomb.
It seems that Egyptian Pharaoh Menes is buried in Ireland although the site has never been excavated to confirm this find. Nor, indeed, has Scotia’s grave in County Kerry, which is widely accepted as being the resting place of an Egyptian pharaoh’s daughter who arrived in Ireland around 1700 B.C. In fact, very few of Ireland’s ancient sites have been excavated. It must be the most unexcavated place on earth. However, some startling evidence has been found at the handful of sites that have actually been excavated. The 3,800-year-old remains of youth wearing Egyptian faience beads was found at the Hill of Tara, the ancient seat of Ireland’s High Kings. Stone tools dating back 200,000 - 400,000 years have been found in three separate sites across Ireland while the 2,300 year-old skull of a Barbary ape, a small monkey native to North Africa was found at Navan Fort in County Armagh.
Several people over the centuries have declared that the legend of Atlantis was based on Stone Age Ireland. For example, In 2004 Ulf Erlingsson - an exceptional scientist with a serious reputation ( Linnæus Prize Winner ) published a book claiming Ireland was the lost Island of Atlantis. He was largely ridiculed at the time by the ‘experts’ - ridicule just comes with the territory. Here is a copy of a scientific paper he wrote on the subject and also copies of the newspaper articles from the time. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242275382_A_geographic_comparison_of_Plato's_Atlantis_and_Ireland_as_a_test_of_the_megalithic_culture_hypothesis https://www.irishtimes.com/news/expert-says-ireland-is-lost-kingdom-of-atlantis-1.987414 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland-not-lost-kingdom-of-atlantis-says-expert-1.987877
So far three separate finds of flint tools have been found dating back 200,000 - 400,000 years. The bizarre suggestion that these human tools were brought to Ireland by ice sheets is extremely questionable. This theory seems to have originated at a time when it was thought Ireland was completely frozen over during the ice age which has been discredited. Ireland has not been heavily excavated over the years however digs in the Waterford region, an area that didn’t freeze over, have already found stone tools that are over 10,000 years - an exact age has not yet been made public.
We expect a huge breakthrough from this region that pushes the age of humans on Ireland back by at least 100,000 years if not more. We also expect the age of Ireland’s Boyne Valley ( where one of the 200,000 - 400,000 year old flints were found ) to be pushed back and are of the opinion that Newgrange, Dowth and the Hill of Tara are much older than the current estimates.
Rather than rely on Plato's useful yet clearly unreliable tale we went straight to the source - Ancient Egypt.
Plato's sensational legend is very different to the Egyptian records which describe an island in the Atlantic Ocean that drowned in a great flood. Also, the Greek knowledge of geography was poor at the time of Plato's writing and remained so for several centuries - they simply had no idea where Ireland was. Plato himself heard the story of Atlantis from someone, who heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else, who in turn heard it from the Greek Solon who himself heard it from a priest in Egypt who told him a story about an event that happened 9,000 years beforehand and thousands of miles away. When you consider that context it’s not hard to see how the whole legend got muddled. That’s what happens with mythology, you find a grain of truth surrounded by a lot of exaggeration and errors.
In a nutshell, Plato's legend combined two separate places, a lot of exaggeration and several historical errors into one timeless tale yet even after all this time the grain of truth endured.
To put forward any theory on Atlantis is to put yourself up for a certain amount of ridicule - that's to be expected - it is after all one the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time. Many of our academic friends have privately advised us not to publish this theory and they described publicly discussing Atlantis as ‘kryptonite for an academic career’. It’s sad to see how far the ‘traditional’ universities have fallen from their original purpose of investigating the great mysteries.
People can ridicule our theory, our organisation or the very legend of Atlantis itself but in the end we have over 1,000 pieces of evidence to prove our claims.
Our Atlantis Ireland work is groundbreaking and its implications are enormous. Small minds can’t handle big ideas and all big ideas are viciously ridiculed and attacked. Too many reputations are at stake and, as this work goes completely against mainstream opinion academics will snort at the very idea of Atlantis Ireland and label this work nonsense, gibberish, pseudoscience and so on. But a scholar has to do what a scholar has to do and nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
The current version of history is a house of cards that’s about to come crashing down. The trickle of evidence for an Atlantic mother culture has become a dam that is about to burst. We are acutely aware that when proven correct, the claims in this book will send an earthquake around the academic world and completely rewrite human history. It may take a year, a decade or even a century but this work will be proven accurate in the fullness of time.
Ireland did not fully freeze over during the ‘glacial maximum’ - the peak of the last Ice Age - and remained habitable throughout the Ice Age.
It has now been proven that the Atlantic Gulf Stream, which laps Ireland's shores with warm water, did not stop during the Ice Age as was previously thought.
This opens up the possibility that Ireland was habitable for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.
The theory of Atlantis in the Azores is one of the stronger alternatives to Atlantis Ireland and was first suggested by Ignatious Donnelly in his wonderful book on Atlantis. No theory for Atlantis is perfect, least of all our own, however the theory of Atlantis Ireland does have a lot of evidence to support it.
The Azores are tiny in comparison to Ireland, so they hardly meet the description of a large island in the Atlantic. As the Azores are in an unstable area where three tectonic plates meet, it’s plausible there was once a larger landmass there or somewhere along the mid-Atlantic Ridge that subsided. However, ocean mapping of the Azores seabed doesn't indicate this so this theory has largely been ruled out and the area around the Azores has also been explored extensively by Atlantis enthusiasts without much joy. Also, the Stone Age constructions found on the Azores are a pale reflection of what we find in Ireland - the mother culture.
The second problem with the Azores theory is that Ireland is a similar sailing distance from the 'Pillars of Heracles' ( Straights of Gibralter ) and if we are to assume that the ancient people of the Azores had boats we have to assume the same about the ancient Irish. Plato's Atlantis was an advanced Stone Age civilisation with boats and Ireland meets this criteria while Ireland has an incredible number of Stone Age construction just as you would expect if they were very advanced for their time. We think it’s a lot more practical that the legend of Atlantis was based on an ancient large island that does exist rather than one that doesn’t.
Also, if you read Ignatious Donnelly’s Atlantis - the source of the Azores theory and plug in the theory of Atlantis Ireland, it fits like a glove.
Plato's legend of Atlantis combines two separate places into one tale. The Eye of the Sahara in Mauritania Africa was an Ancient Irish settlement called Cerne. This was the City of Atlantis that Plato described but not the Island. The Greek historian Diodorus made several references to the Atlantians who lived in Cerne and that it was here that the warlike Amazons attacked the Atlantians and destroyed the city of Cerne before waging war in the region. Greek historical writings are very consistent in supporting the account of Diodorus but not that of Plato that it was the Amazons, not the Atlantian Irish who waged war in the region. Also, according to Greek mythology Atlas was the first king of both the Island of Atlantis and Mauritania Africa - two separate places which Plato's legend combined. At one time Mauritania was a very fertile region with an abundance of water, gold and elephants while the city of Cerne / Eye of the Sahara was a circular island city surrounded with water just like Plato's Atlantis. His tale simply combined two separate places, some exaggeration and several errors.
Science is adamant that there is simply no room for a large sunken landmass in the Atlantic ocean. While we are open to the possibility of a large island having sunk, perhaps on the mid-Atlantic ridge or the Azores region, a large tsunami is a lot more logical and practical theory for the drowning of Atlantis "in one dreadful day and night".
It's a lot more practical that the legend of Atlantis was based on Ireland, a large island in the Atlantic that does exist rather than one that doesn’t.
The floor of the Atlantic ocean has been mapped dozens of times and there is no room for a large sunken island - it simply doesn't exist.
The 'sunken island' part of the myth is a fantasy, as are many of the recent additions to the legend.
A tsunami is a practical explanation, a fantasy lost island that defies the laws of science is not.
Atlantis Ireland as a theory is based on the assumption that today’s geologists are competent and know what they are doing. Geologists have mapped the entire Atlantic seabed and have been adamant for decades that a large sunken island does not exist anywhere in the Atlantic.
These same geologists were able to map Zealandia and calculate that it was once a large continental island that sunk beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean 23 million years ago. The suggestion they couldn’t find a large island that apparently sank around 11,600 years ago lacks credibility. A tsunami is a much more logical explanation. New Zealand is all that remains of Zealandia today.
Deep sea divers were able to find the wreck of the Titanic, a feat considered impossible by many because it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yet despite numerous deep-sea expeditions a large sunken island in the Atlantic has not been found because it simply isn’t there. Scientists know exactly how tectonic plates work and are adamant there is no large sunken island in the Atlantic. Thisis the primary reason why the legend of Atlantis has not been taken seriously by academics - they know a large sunken island in the Atlantic is not a viable theory. However, evidence has been stacking up to indicate a lost Atlantic mother culture and Ireland - an island in the Atlantic that does exist is a lot more viable explanation than an island that doesn’t.
If a large sunken island in the Atlantic is ever discovered we will be the first to concede that Ireland is merely a remnant of the Atlantian mother culture rather than the source. However, we have made the entirely reasonable assumption that the world’s best geologists are competent and as a result suggest that Ireland is the source of the 'Megalithic mother culture' that first sowed the first seeds of civilisation around the world.
Ironically this is the main objection to our findings. Rather than debate our stunning new evidence it’s easier to just ridicule our new organisation. However, the truth is the truth and our work can stand any level of scrutiny.
We are not a ‘traditional’ university nor do we pretend to be. We are a team of mavericks determined to revolutionise education. We are building a new type of university with a big vision, determined leadership and a razor-sharp team who go where others don't.
We get up every day to revolutionise education globally - the current academic system is too slow, too expensive and too complicated.
We have a completely different business model to most traditional universities. We don't teach three-year programs to teenagers, we teach highly intense three-day seminars to adults. Seminars that are available to anyone regardless of background, race or qualifications.
We are also fiercely independent and unlike others we don't offer paid research projects. The hypocrisy of 'paid university research projects' is truly breathtaking.
Our teachers are the best on the planet and have impressive track records. They are not ‘ivory tower’ teachers, they have done it in the real world. Our seminars compress decades into days. Put simply, if you want a slow mainstream education go elsewhere – if, however, you want a world class education, come to Keystone.
The legend of Atlantis originated in Egypt and if you research ancient Egyptian writings you will find that they described their ancestral homeland as ‘an island in the western ocean’, the land of the setting sun, and that King Thoth arrived in Egypt after their ancestral homeland was destroyed in a great flood.
The academic opinion that Plato, one of the smartest minds of all time, made up the tale of Atlantis just to make some vague moral point or describe the ideal state is as lazy as it is ignorant.
Also, Plato was not the first to reference Atlantis. Writing almost a century before Plato, the Greek Herodotus referred to the Atlantis Sea and describes a tribe of Atlantes living in a settlement in North Africa. Several times in his dialogues Plato pointed out that he was reporting historical events as he had heard them and that even he himself doubted some of the details with which he was provided when he first heard the tale.
Great, we want you to do you own thinking. It’s not our job to convince you - rather it’s your job to study all the relevant information and form your own educated opinion.
We have conducted the largest ever investigation into the legend of Atlantis and have simply followed the evidence to offer the most logical, rational and compelling theory ever produced for the location of the legendary lost Island.
People can attack our findings, our organisation, or the very legend of Atlantis itself but in the end we have over 1,000 pieces of credible evidence to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the legend of Atlantis was based on Stone Age Ireland.
Most of our team are Irish which gives us insider local knowledge and we have gone to great lengths to challenge our assumptions and avoid bias. Also, one of the main reasons Ireland is not often considered as Atlantis is that most people are completely ignorant of Irish history which was mutilated during the Dark Ages – it’s time to put the record straight.
We want to have our work assessed by the world’s leading experts and also turned into a documentary, tv series or movie. The truth is most people are completely ignorant of Ireland's history and have dismissed it as the location of an ancient civilisation, despite the fact Ireland has almost 100,000 stone age constructions and in Ireland’s Boyne Valley we find the most spectacular Stone Age constructions on earth.
Our research proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the ancient Irish were the first people in the world to develop an advanced civilisation including boat building, sailing, fishing, agriculture, construction, language, sports, music, philosophy and astronomy. The ancient Irish sailed the world giving the gift of civilisation to others, not to build an empire, but to push the human race forward. It's well known that Ireland’s history was written by her enemies during the Dark Ages – it’s time to set the record straight.
Every once in a while a book comes along that changes everything. Atlantis Ireland is that book - a simply stunning read that solves one of the greatest mysteries in human history - the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis. Prepare to have your mind blown as you discover overwhelming evidence that the legend of Atlantis was based on Stone Age Ireland - the real birthplace of human civilisation. Ireland’s history has been written by her enemies - it’s time to set the record straight.
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Atlantis Ireland - The Emerald Enigma
Could the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries have been under our noses all this time?
The legendary lost island of Atlantis. Everyone’s heard of it and everyone’s got an opinion.
Was it just an elaborate fiction given to us by the Greek philosopher Plato in 360 B.C.? Or was it a ‘mother culture’, a real place with an advanced Stone Age civilisation?
The answer is both.
Plato’s legend is clearly exaggerated. It contains many historical errors and combines two places into one tale, yet at its core there is a grain of truth. After all, the legend of Atlantis had already been passed down by word of mouth for thousands of years before Plato himself first heard it, so it’s hardly surprising that some details got distorted over time.
Truth became history, history became legend and legend became myth. But almost 12,000 years later the grain of truth survives.
When you strip back the Atlantis legend to its very core, there are three key factors
Name a place on Earth from Antarctica to Africa, Sweden to South America, and someone will have claimed it was Atlantis.
Scientists roll their eyes whenever a new Atlantis theory emerges because the three key factors—the Egyptian connection, the Atlantic location and the advanced Stone Age civilization—are the first casualties of the next fanciful claim. It seems that every time someone finds so much as a brick underwater, they claim they have found Atlantis.
Scientists rightly demand proof. Surely if such a mother culture existed, a civilisation which predated the Greeks and the Egyptians, then there must be some physical evidence.
Academics claim Atlantis was a fable yet this doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Ancient Egyptian texts describe how their ancestors came from a sacred island in the Atlantic Ocean that was devastated in a great flood.
Others claim that Atlantis sunk to the bottom of the ocean, eliminating all evidence. However, geologists who have mapped the entire Atlantic seabed are adamant that this there is simply no room for a lost sunken island. They insist that it’s not scientifically possible and that any claims of a large, sunken island lack credibility.
Therefore, if the Atlantis mother culture ever did exist, there must still be evidence above ground, not just wild speculation.
So how do we solve this riddle?
By bypassing Plato’s tale altogether and going right to the source: Ancient Egypt.
The Egyptian Connection
Ancient Egyptian texts describe how Egypt’s ancestors came from a sacred island in the Atlantic Ocean that was devastated in a great flood.
Sound familiar? That’s what the team from Keystone University thought.
In the largest investigation ever conducted into the legend of Atlantis, Keystone’s research team used cutting-edge techniques from multiple disciplines and reviewed thousands of ancient texts, including rare manuscripts from Egypt, Greece and Ireland.
As a result, they have compiled over 1,000 pieces of evidence to support a surprising, yet oh-so-obvious location for the lost island of Atlantis.
This is not the first time that Ireland has been cited as Atlantis. In 2004, Dr. Ulf Erlingsson, a renowned, prizewinning Swedish scientist, published the book Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective and a scientific paper which both claimed that Ireland was the legendary lost island. Furthermore, he claimed that the physical description and measurements of Plato’s Atlantis perfectly matched Ireland.
His claims exposed him to the scorn and ridicule of his peers, who informed him that writing seriously about Atlantis was tantamount to professional suicide for an academic. Yet he went ahead anyway. When interviewed he said, ‘Sometimes a scientist has to do what a scientist has to do’.
The Keystone team agree with Erlingsson’s findings. In addition, their research includes many additional pieces of evidence that simply weren’t available to Erlingsson when he wrote his book 16 years ago.
It’s a well-known historical fact that the Egyptian civilisation predated the Greeks by thousands of years.
It’s also well known that Ireland’s Stone Age constructions were built long before the Egyptian pyramids and temples.
A virtually unknown yet historically proven fact is that the builders of Newgrange, Ireland’s spectacular Stone Age temple, used boats to transport dozens of huge boulders to the site from Clogherhead, which is over 30 km away. Some of these boulders weighed as much as 10 ton. Imagine the quality of boat and level of skill required to load and unload such huge weights, let alone transport them. Stone age quays & boats found near Newgrange are estimated to be at least 5,000 years old, making them older than the pyramids.
Newgrange is also perfectly aligned to the rising sun at the winter solstice, as are hundreds of Irish megaliths, which demonstrates a stunning level of astronomical, mathematical and construction knowledge obtained by the early Irish.
We know for sure that the Stone Age Irish were master astronomers. We know for sure they were master builders. We know for sure that the Irish had boats. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine the wandering Irish sailing from their Atlantic island home to explore the wider world.
The Atlantic Location
The most telling characteristic of Atlantis is that it was an island located in the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously, Ireland is an island in the Atlantic with an ancient people, language and culture. There are an estimated 100,000 Stone Age constructions remaining in Ireland including the most spectacular megaliths on Earth as you would expect if they really were an advanced early civilisation. Similar constructions (mounds, cairns, stone circles, dolmens, passage tombs, etc.) are found all over the world, proving that the entire world, not just Ireland, has a stunning and forgotten ancient history.
Some claim that Atlantis lies at the bottom of the ocean. However, science has eliminated this as a possibility and an island in the Atlantic that does exist is a much more viable explanation than an island that doesn’t.
There are many descriptions of Plato’s Atlantis that perfectly fit Ireland, while there are also many that don’t. It’s clear that Plato’s legend is useful but unreliable, that it combined two separate related places, a lot of exaggeration and several historical errors.
Plato’s Atlantis was an island in the Atlantic with a fertile, circular plain which was surrounded by mountains that descended towards the sea. Ireland is the only island on Earth with these features.
Plato’s Atlantis had a temperate climate capable of producing two crops per year. Ireland has one of the most temperate climates on Earth and to this day is capable of producing two crops a year: winter and spring barley. Meanwhile, Ireland’s Ceide fields are the oldest agricultural fields on Earth.
Plato’s Atlantis had many hot and cold springs. Ireland has 27 warm springs and thousands of cold ones, known locally as holy wells.
Plato’s tale also described the city of Atlantis, a huge circular city with an abundance of elephants, gold and ivory. This is actually a reference to the ancient city of Cerne, an early Irish settlement in Mauritania, Africa. Cerne is derived from the Irish word cairn, which means stacked or piled rocks. Cairns are also heavily associated with the Greek messenger god Hermes and his Egyptian equivalent Thoth. The site of the City of Cerne, Plato’s lost city of Atlantis, is also known as the Eye of the Sahara or the Richat structure.
Interestingly, in Greek history the name Cerne actually referred to two separate places: an African city near the Atlas mountains and an island in the Atlantic Ocean that was 12 days’ sail from the Strait of Gibraltar. Similarly, Plato’s Atlantis was a combination of the same two separate places: the island of Atlantis (Ireland) and the City of Atlantis (City of Cerne/the Eye of the Sahara, Mauritania). In Greek mythology Atlas was the first king of two separate places: the Island of Atlantis and the kingdom of Mauritania, Africa. The Atlas Mountains, which encircle the Eye of the Sahara, still bear his name.
The Greek Diodorus, in his ‘Library of History’, describes how the Atlantians were a civilised people who had a settlement called Cerne near the Atlas mountains and that it was here that the warlike Amazons, a ferocious army of female warriors from Libya, slaughtered the Atlantians before attacking Greece and waging war in the region. Greek history is very consistent in supporting the account of Diodorus, but not that of Plato, that it was actually the Amazons who attacked Greece, not the Atlantians.
The old Irish annals contain many records of voyages to Greece, Mauritania and Egypt. The female Amazon warriors are also mentioned, as is an attempted invasion of Ireland by the Greeks and Romans who were defeated at the Battle of Ventry in County Kerry. Perhaps it’s here, on Ireland’s wild Atlantic shore, that Rome’s famous missing Ninth Legion met their demise.
Plato described how Atlantis was ‘swallowed by the sea’. This is reference to a huge tsunami which decimated Stone Age Ireland. Virtually every culture on Earth has an origin story involving a great deluge. What is unique about the Irish is they have several records of life before, during and after this great flood. The ancient Irish annals even contain the names of the flood survivors who managed to escape by boat or survived by reaching higher ground. On Ireland’s western coast there are folk tales of a giant tsunami around 12,000 years ago. Similar tales are found in Iona, Scotland.
So what could have caused this global apocalyptic event?
While a localised tsunami affecting Ireland could easily have been caused by an ocean earthquake, there is only one thing could cause a huge global event: a cosmic impact.
The Keystone team speculate that a comet struck the Atlantic Ocean at the Puerto Rico Trench, triggering a huge tsunami, epic global rainfalls, flooding, ocean volcanoes and earthquakes. Gravitational anomalies often signal a cosmic impact, and the most negative gravitational anomaly on Earth is situated deep in the Puerto Rico Trench. NASA scientists report that beneath the trench is a mass so dense, its gravitational pull causes the ocean to dip and it affects navigational instruments.
The Puerto Rico Trench is located in the infamous Bermuda Triangle and is the deepest point in the entire Atlantic Ocean. The Keystone team suggest that this anomaly is the result of a comet strike around 11,600 years ago. This date perfectly matches the end of the Younger Dryas period, a time of extreme flooding and rising sea levels which oceanographers and geologists call Meltwater Pulse 1B & there is evidence for a huge tsunami that impacted the Caribbean sea during this period.
In short, there is scientific evidence for a cataclysmic event at a time in history when many independent cultures around the world speak of a global flood.
It is also the exact same time Atlantis is said to have drowned.
Scientists used to work on the assumption that Ireland was completely frozen over during the Ice Age, and therefore uninhabitable, until around 10,000 years ago. This assumption has been well and truly shattered by recent evidence.
The Pleistocene Ice Age lasted for two and a half million years and ended around 11,600 years ago. The latest research shows that even at the peak of the Ice Age, ice sheets did not completely cover Ireland. This would explain the lack of drumlins (egg-shaped ridges formed by glacial activity) across the centre of Ireland.
Another study from Norway proves conclusively that the warm, Atlantic Gulf Stream did not stop during the Ice Age as previously thought. This indicates that Ireland’s Ice Age wasn’t as severe as previous estimates, and evidence has been stacking up to support the claim that Ireland was inhabited by humans much earlier than currently acknowledged.
A 12,500-year-old bear bone that was cut with a human tool and found in a County Clare cave proves there were humans living in Ireland during the old Stone Age period.
In three separate places in Ireland flint stone tools have been found dating back 200,000 to 400,000 years. One find was in Mell, County Louth ( 10 km from Newgrange ), one in Ballyculle, County Down, and one on the remote Aran Islands off the County Galway coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
The mainstream opinion remains that these human flint tools were carried to Ireland by ice sheets. This truly bizarre explanation was championed when archaeologists still believed that Ireland was completely frozen over until around 10,000 years ago, a view that has been discredited by modern science. The recent evidence suggests that Ireland has been habitable for hundreds of thousands of years. This would explain its many unique species of freshwater fish, flora and fauna, which differ significantly from those of neighbouring Britain and continental Europe.
Stone age man was a lot more mobile than he has been given credit for. Recent scientific evidence proves man sailed to Australia on rafts 65,000 years ago. In Siberia Russia, an 11,500 year old wood carving called the Shigir Idol was found with the unmistakable pattern of Irish ogham writing, the worlds first alphabet, carved into it. Ogham writing has also been found at several sites across North America.
The Egyptian Connection
Several ancient Egyptian texts, including the Book of the Dead, The Pyramid Texts and the Hymn of Rameses IV, tell of ten kings who ruled during the reign of the gods. One of these was Thoth, the founder of the Egyptian civilisation, who was born in a distant country to the west—a country which was across a body of water.
Other texts refer to this ancestral territory as the sunset land or the island of the setting sun. To this day Ireland is referred to as the land of the setting sun. Another name for this land in Egyptian texts was Urani, which is etymologically very close to Erin, the ancient name for Ireland.
According to Egyptian texts, this island in the Atlantic was overwhelmed by water. The ten kings, including Thoth, travelled east to safety by boat. Stories tell of the founders of Egypt arriving from an island in the Atlantic around 11,900 years ago.
If Atlantis and Ireland are one and the same, and some of the survivors of the tsunami escaped by boat to Egypt, then you would expect there to be clear links between the two places. There are many such links. One of the most interesting of these is genetic.
The stereotypical Irish combination of red hair, blue eyes and milky-white skin is the rarest genetic combination on Earth. Fewer than one million people (0.1 percent of the global human population) possess this genetic combination.
Ireland has the highest concentration of red-haired genes in the world. Throughout history, pockets of redheads have been found scattered across the globe. These are the descendants of the ancient Irish and include the Phoenicians, Hebrews, Berbers and Indo-European Aryans. Red-haired mummies have been found all over the world, including in New Zealand, China, Peru and Alaska.
Thousands of fair and red-haired mummies have been found across Egypt. The Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II had red hair, as did at least six other pharaohs. Despite claims to the contrary, it has been conclusively proven that Ramesses’ hair was naturally red and was not coloured red as the result of a dye pigment or the embalming process. The legendary Cleopatra is also said to have had red hair.
Further evidence backs up the Ireland/Egypt connection. In genetics, a haplogroup is a group from the human family tree that traces back to one individual ancestor. The Irish are part of the same genetic haplogroup as the lineage of the pharaohs. The highest concentration of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s Haplogroup R-M269 is found in Ireland while Tutankhamun’s grandmother also had red hair.
A hieroglyphic text found at Abydos by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1901 in the cenotaph of Pharaoh King Menes says:
“King Menes, the Ruler of Mizraim [Egypt] made the complete course to the end of the Sunset Land. Sailing in ships, he completed the inspection of the Western Land. He built there a holding in Urani Land. At the Lake of the Peak, fate pierced him by a Hornet (Bee Sting) . . . This drilled tablet set up of hanging wood is dedicated to his memory.”
As already mentioned, Urani is another name for Ireland. Intriguingly, when Pharaoh Menes’ Egyptian tomb was opened, it was found to be empty. His body was elsewhere.
Explorer Laurence Waddell discovered the final resting place of Menes in Knockmany, County Tyrone, Ireland. He described how Sumerian linear writing on a boulder stone at the site was almost identical with that found in the pharaoh’s empty Egyptian tomb.
It seems that Menes died from a bee sting in Ireland and was buried in Knockmany, County Tyrone, although the site has never been excavated to confirm this find. Nor, indeed, has Scotia’s grave in County Kerry, which is widely accepted as being the resting place of an Egyptian pharaoh’s daughter who arrived in Ireland around 1700 B.C.
In fact, very few of Ireland’s ancient sites have been excavated.It must be the least excavated place on earth. However, some startling evidence has been found at the handful of sites that have been examined.
A royal Egyptian faience bead necklace was found at the Hill of Tara in County Meath during an excavation in 1955 while a 2,500-year-old Barbary ape skull ( native to north Africa ) was also found during excavations at Navan Fort in County Armagh.
Perhaps most telling of all is the Nabta Playa stone circle, which is located 500 miles south of Cairo, deep in the Nubian desert—an area that once enjoyed seasonal rainfall and fertile soil. Nabta Playa is one of the oldest stone circles in the world and is considered the birthplace of Egyptian civilisation. Stone circles are also known as druid circles. The builders of this stone circle predated the spectacular Egyptian civilisation that followed.
Stone circles & megaliths are found all across the world in virtually every country, proving the entire world has a spectacular ancient history that most people are completely ignorant of.
The builders of these megalithic circles originated where the most spectacular stone age constructions on Earth are found: Ireland.
In Joseph Gwilt’s timeless masterpiece ‘The Encyclopaedia of Architecture’, he informs us that the druid stone circles predated all other forms of architecture, that the druids were the world’s first race of civilised people, and that at one time the language and alphabet of the entire ancient world from Ireland to India was the same—that of the Irish druids.
The Greek Connection
Greek history contains a detailed record of how Pythagoras, who predated Plato by almost a century, learned from an Irish druid called Abaris, who could speak fluent Greek as if he had spoken it all his life. The ancient Irish annals confirm that an Irish druid called Abhras visited Greece, amongst other places, on his travels. The Greeks described Abaris as a healer & prophet from the mystical island of Hyperborea, which, just like Atlantis, was another name for Ireland.
Hercules and Perseus, two of the most important characters in Greek mythology, were both said to have visited Hyperborea, which was described as being a fertile island to the north of Gaul (France) with oak trees, a circular temple (Newgrange) and priests with harps. According to the Greeks, Hyperborea was governed by the boreades. In Irish, boreadach means noble chieftain. Clearly, Ireland is the Greek Hyperborea.
The oracle of Delphi - the most sacred site in ancient Greece was founded by three prophets from the sacred island of Hyperborea who took up residence there. The Greeks called these prophets Pagasis, Agyeus & Olen which is a corruption of the three ranks of Irish Druids - Bag-ois, Agh-is & Ollam.
The Greek Pherenicus describes the Hyperboreans ‘as being of the ancient blood of the titans’.
The word Atlantis literally means ‘The Island of Atlas’. The titan Atlas was a key figure in Greek mythology & is depicted as being the bearer of the heavens. According to early Greek mythology Atlas lived in the sacred island of Hyperborea which was also the location of the Garden of Hesperides, a sacred garden with a tree bearing magical golden apples. This garden was also known as the garden of Atlas or the orchard in the west & we are told how the Greek hero Hercules reached Atlas, who was among the Hyperboreans, and asked him to fetch the golden apples before tricking him & leaving with the prize.
Diodorus described the sacred island of Hyperborea.
Plato described the sacred island of Atlantis.
Aristole described the sacred island of Ierne.
All were descriptions of Ireland clouded by mythology, superstition and a poor knowledge of geography.
Over time Hyperborea became Hybernia or Hibernia, the Roman name for Ireland.
That the Roman church undertook a campaign of vicious persecution and destruction against the druids is a well-known historical fact. In A.D. 389 a druid college in Gaul (Bibracte, France) was destroyed by a Christian mob. This sacred druid college had an incredible 40,000 students and offered courses in numerous disciplines, including philosophy, literature, grammar, law, medicine, astronomy and architecture. The opinion of Aristotle that philosophy came to the Greeks from the Gauls (druids) is very striking.
Ireland was the source of Druidism, a philosophy that predated Rome, Greece and Egypt by millennia. Every attempt was made to delete the druids from history, in particular by the Romans as they furiously destroyed the libraries, schools and temples of the ancient world, including the great library of Alexandra. One of the greatest secrets of human history is that all of the world’s religions and civilisations have their roots in one mother soil—Irish Druidism—a master philosophy which predated and influenced all the others.
As hard as it may be for those ignorant of Irish history to accept, the Irish were old when the Greeks were still young. For example, the Irish Tailtean games predate the Greek Olympics by over 1,000 years, while the Irish Brehon laws are the oldest laws on Earth.
The ancient Irish Gaelic language is the missing mother tongue that scholars have sought for centuries. To account for this missing root language, academics have invented a hypothetical mother tongue called the ‘Proto-Indo-European’ language. Old Irish is this language, a forgotten ancient tongue with remarkable similarities to the world’s oldest languages including hebrew, arabic & sanskrit. An ancient language that does exist is a much more practical explanation for a missing mother tongue than a language that doesn’t.
The Egyptians were old when the Greeks were young, but the Irish druids were older still. Irelands Stone Age constructions are the most spectacular on Earth.
No other place on Earth has the ancient history, mythology or culture of Ireland.
We know that the Stone Age Irish had boats capable of carrying 10-ton boulders.
It’s ignorant to think the wandering Irish didn’t use these boats to explore the wider world.
Globally, Stone Age man was a lot more mobile than they have been given credit for, and the ancient Irish were certainly a lot more advanced than most realise.
The current mainstream version of history is a house of cards that’s about to come crashing down. Earlier this year it was proven that people sailed to Australia on rafts 65,000 years ago, shattering the previous illusion that Australia has only been occupied for a few centuries. Many more illusions are about to be shattered.
The brutal truth is that Ireland’s ancient history has been written by her enemies.
For the best part of 1,000 years, Ireland’s culture has been desecrated, her books burned and her ancient language driven to the point of extinction. Some of the most deplorable acts of brutality and genocide ever committed on Earth were committed on the Emerald Isle by the very people who wrote Ireland’s history. It’s time to set the record straight.
The groundbreaking Atlantis Ireland theory has been put forward by Keystone University, a new and highly ambitious organisation based in Dublin. Keystone’s mission is to build the world’s best university, a centre of excellence that pushes the human race forward. A Keystone is an ancient symbol for wisdom.
A spokesperson for Keystone University said, “To put forward any theory on Atlantis is to open yourself up to a lot of ridicule. People can attack our findings, our organisation or the very legend of Atlantis itself, but in the end we have over 1,000 pieces of evidence to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that ancient Ireland is the legendary lost island and the mother culture of human civilisation. We don’t ask anyone to believe a word we say, only to examine the evidence and think for themselves. Sixteen years ago a brave Swedish scientist claimed that Ireland was Atlantis. Hopefully we don’t have to wait this long for the mainstream to catch up, but if we do, so be it. The Irish have waited over a thousand years to clear their name. Another decade won’t make any difference”.
For more information please visit www.keystone.ie
A geographic comparison of Plato's Atlantis and Ireland as a test of the megalithic culture hypothesis
Erlingsson Sub-Aquatic Surveys, Sweden
Based on geographic similarities, Erlingsson (2004) presented the scientific hypothesis that the Atlantean Empire was modelled on the megalithic culture of Europe and Northern Africa. It follows from the hypothesis that the island of Atlantis must have been Ireland.
This is tested scientifically using two geographical tests, one regarding length and width, the other regarding the plain surrounded by mountains. Each of the tests passes at the 2 percent confidence level. In view of these statistically significant matches, the hypothesis is retained.
Similarities are also found with Irish archaeology. Newgrange matches the temple of Poseidon in several aspects, while Knowth matches a second temple on Atlantis. In Irish folklore Newgrange is the mansion of a river divinity, just like Atlantis’ main temple is.
The sinking of Atlantis is found to have parallels with how Dogger Bank sank. The time of the disaster given by Plato corresponds to an earlier dramatic flooding of a North Sea plain, which has been pointed out as a promising area for underwater archaeology.
The conclusion is that Plato rearranged factual information to create a fictional tale of Atlantis. The traditions can have been passed on directly from the megalithic culture to the Old Kingdom of Egypt, as they were contemporary.
Even though the facts are rearranged, they are unique in providing information from the earliest known advanced culture in Europe, many thousands of years before the start of recorded history.
The only original source on Atlantis is Plato, in the dialogues Timaios and Kritias (Timaeus and Critias in Latin). If the tale is true to some extent, it may represent our oldest extant traditions, at least outside Mesopotamia. If it can be deciphered, it may thus add invaluable clues to the interpretation of the more silent discoveries made in archaeology.
We can safely assume that not everything in Plato’s tale matches reality, if not for other reasons so for errors in the transmission and translation. The name Atlantis in a strict sense refers to Plato’s exact description. However, in a lax sense it may be used to refer to a real world model for only a part of Plato’s tale, just like a modern city can function as a backdrop to a novel (and be modified in the novel compared to reality).
The literature on how to interpret Plato’s Atlantis tale is huge, but often of little scientific substance. The signal to noise ratio is very poor, which makes it challenging to discern a research frontier. Having said that, it is my understanding that there does not exist any hypothesis regarding the interpretation of the tale that has stood up to scientific scrutiny. I therefore ask for your indulgence when I now start a scientific study from scratch, building on nothing but the translated dialogues of Plato.
1.1 The scientific method
To suggest that a certain place may be a model for Atlantis in some aspect is to suggest an hypothesis. As a test of the hypothesis, the student compares detail after detail. Any
similarity that the student made use of to come up with the hypothesis, is banned for use in a test.
If a test nevertheless can be devised using independent data, and the result is negative, the scientific method dictates that the hypothesis should be dismissed. However, since we are dealing with a potentially ancient tradition we must allow for some errors to have entered the tale, and can therefore not be that strict.
Unfortunately, the possibility of such errors in the tradition largely defeats the purpose of the hypothetic-deductive method. Clearly some other rejection criterion is needed, lest we be stuck with the present deluge of untested hypotheses.
The solution is to apply the statistical significance test on the null hypothesis. What it amounts to is to raise the bar for a test to pass, by requiring that it be statistically improbable that it passes by chance.
Another benefit of using the null hypothesis is that segments of the tale can be evaluated independently from each other. It is not necessary to assume that all or nothing must be true.
This study is based on the classic scientific hypothetic-deductive method and statistical significance-tests on the null hypothesis. A significance level of 0.02 (2%) was chosen as rejection criterion. The null hypothesis is that Plato made it all up, and that any similarity with reality is purely coincidental.
1.2 Why the case is open
The mainstream opinion is that the Atlantis tale is entirely fictional. However, this has not and can not be proven.
One flawed line of argument is this: “If it is fictional it exists to serve the story. It serves the story. Thus it is fictional.” The logical operator (if A so B) is false only when A is true and B is false. When, as in this case, B is true, A can be either false or true. Thus, the argument is logically false (illogical). An argument has to be both logically true and relevant to be valid, why this one is invalid.
Christopher (2001) is another example of a flawed argument. Plato advocated the use of lies in the service of propaganda to maintain a militaristic, hierarchically structured society,
and to prevent real democracy. We can therefore not rule out that Plato may have intended to create a political myth, but even if that is the case, it does not imply that everything is fiction.
However, Christopher, a linguist, considers any partial resemblance meaningless. Given that, as he states, all legitimate scholars have jettisoned the conclusion that the account is entirely factual and inerrant, it of course becomes somewhat of a truism that Atlantis does not exist.
Old tales like the Icelandic Sagas were notorious for mixing fact and fiction. If we reject all old tales as potential sources of factual information, we loose a large part of our history. It is by choice, not necessity, that Christopher closes the door to the past.
Any student of prehistory is forced to lay puzzle with incomplete data, and any piece of information may turn out to be crucial. Even if the only thing that can be proven from this line of inquiry is that Plato had access to knowledge from a specific time and place, it is still a potentially invaluable result.
Therefore I elect to use a paradigm in which the goal is to search for pieces of facts in the Atlantis tale, and to use these pieces to deduce how the traditions were transmitted and the tale assembled by Plato.
All quotes of Plato’s dialogues are from Benjamin Jowett’s translation unless otherwise stated.
2.1 The empire in Kritias
The hypothesis was formulated by Erlingsson (2004) based on information in Timaios only (not Kritias), notably this passage: “This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the
Figure 1. The cairn at Haväng in southern Sweden. It is a typical megalithic tomb of the type without passage.
surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.”
The text seems to be referring to the North Atlantic islands, which can be used to divide the crossing to America into many short legs, like the Vikings did. In my experience, it is by far the best route to take across the ocean for a boat without proper sleeping quarters. During the climatic optimum in the Atlantic Period, it will have been even easier to make a crossing at this latitude.
The text in Timaios continues: “Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.”
Megalithic tombs (Fig. 1) are found on several islands in the Atlantic Ocean, on parts of the European continent, and, furthermore, the parts of Africa inside the Straits of Gibraltar almost as far as Libya, and in Europe as far as the Tyrrhenian Sea and southernmost Italy (Fig. 2). Considering that “the pillars of Heracles” was understood in Plato’s time to mean ‘the Straits of Gibraltar’, and that “Libya” meant ‘Africa’, the extent of the empire of Atlantis in Plato’s account matches that of the megalithic tombs quite well.
I therefore hypothesize that the empire of Atlantis refers to the entity responsible for the erection of the so-called megalithic tombs in Europe and northern Africa, an entity that I for short call the megalithic culture. I avoid the word tomb since they also erected standing
stones (menhirs, stone circles), and since it is far from obvious that the primary function of all so- called tombs were as burial places.
The construction of the megalithic tombs ended suddenly around 2,800 BC, in connection with a climatic deterioration. Note that the term megalithic culture in this sense does not imply any connection with megaliths on other continents.
In the hypothetic-deductive method a prediction is made from the hypothesis, and tested using independent data.
Plato let us understand that the empire Atlantis was based on a large island (after which the empire was named) along the path from the Mediterranean to the opposite continent (America), and that they completely controlled that island. A quick look at Figure 2 shows that there are only two large islands off Europe, and that of those, only Ireland is completely within the distribution area of megalithic tombs.
I therefore deduce that for the hypothesis to be correct, Ireland should correspond to the description of the island Atlantis.
2.3 Independence criterion
The test must be made using independent data. This is satisfied since the hypothesis and the deduction were formulated without knowledge of relevant Irish geography, geology, archaeology, or mythology, and furthermore without knowing the content of Kritias. By using only information from that dialogue, the data are even doubly independent.
Among the geographical information in Kritias is the following: “The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia.”
This information about Atlantis is compared with modern geographic data on Ireland, derived from encyclopedias, and from digital geographic information system (GIS) databases in vector and raster format.
Figure 2. The extent of megalithic tombs and the location of Newgrange (star). From Erlingsson (2004), which is largely based on Burenhult (1999, Fig. 77).
3. DIMENSION TEST
require is the length of a stadion at the time and place we are interested in: Megalithic Ireland.
Based on the investigation of many megalithic sites on the British Isles, Thom (1967) found a common denominator of 0.829 m. He called it a megalithic yard. Since there are 200 yards on a stadion, a megalithic stadion equals 166 m. The dimensions of Ireland in this unit are 2,950 times 2,060 stadia—within 3% of Plato’s values. Ireland also matches Atlantis by having the greatest width “across the centre inland”.
The real test is, though, if the correspondence is statistically significant. The null hypothesis is that Plato invented Atlantis, and happened to give the dimensions of Ireland by chance.
The question thus becomes, what is the probability that Plato would have stated the dimensions as 3,000 times 2,000 stadia by pure chance?
Based on the size of territories in the Antique world, Erlingsson (2004) estimated that a reasonable length could have been in the range of 700 to 10,000 stadia. Assuming a width of at least 600 stadia, the number of possible values becomes 91. The probability that the null hypothesis is correct is thus 0.011, well under 0.02, which means that the correspondence is statistically significant and the null hypothesis is rejected.
An alternative scale-independent calculation can be made as follows. As the reasonable size of the island varies by more than one order of magnitude, it would be conservative to disregard the order of magnitude in the dimensions, and only consider the significant digit. For each of the length and width, the digit can be any one in the range one through nine. This creates 81 possible combinations and a significance level of 0.012, why the null hypothesis still is rejected.
An assumption in both cases is that each size or digit has the same chance of being picked. A poll (www.macpolls.com/?poll_id=332) online asked “Pick a number between 1 and 10”. Removing the 10, the number 2 had a frequency of 4.95%, and 3 had 11.21%, among the 4252 respondents. The probability that someone would pick 2 and 3 can therefore be estimated to
The first test compares the length and width of Atlantis and Ireland.
On a digital chart of the world in scale 1:250,000, the longest dimension of Ireland was measured to 490.0 km and the greatest width to 341.8 km (Fig. 3). This has to be converted to stadia for comparison with Atlantis.
In Greece a stadion was 600 feet, while in Egypt it was 400 Royal cubits. A cubit being 1.5 foot, it is the same thing. The Greek and Egyptian stadion had different lengths, though. Since Plato gave all measures with only one significant digit, he evidently simply exchanged the Egyptian units for the corresponding Greek units.
If Plato’s account is correct, the Egyptians got the measures from another country (his alleged Atlantis). We may assume that also the Egyptians took over the measurement values, regardless of small differences in the measurement units. Hence it is irrelevant how long a stadion was in Egypt or Greece. What we
Figure 3. The elevation of Ireland with the location of Newgrange (star). The lines show where length and width measurements were taken. Based on ETOPO2, adopted from Erlingsson (2004).
0.0055, which means that the null hypothesis is rejected. (The number that most pick is 7, with almost one third of the votes.)
The megalithic yard is still not generally accepted. However, the existence of a statistically significant smallest common denominator in many stone monuments requires an explanation. The megalithic yard seems to be the best explanation offered. At any event, it is not crucial for the statistical significance test, as any value of the stadion between 137 m and 196 m would result in the rejection of the null hypothesis.
Using virtually any other stadion, from the Sumerian of 148.5 m to the Olympic of 192.3 m, the conclusion holds true. Only the Egyptian stadion is too long with its 209.2 m.
However, as was argued earlier, even if we do not accept the existence of a megalithic stadion there is still no logical reason to infer that the Egyptian one was used to measure Atlantis (unless the hypothesis being tested is that the Old Kingdom of Egypt was a direct continuation of the Atlantean civilization, which, however, would contradict what Plato
wrote about the war). Furthermore, the Egyptian stadion seems to be an outlier, being about one seventh longer than the average stadion—the same relationship as between a common cubit and a Royal cubit in Egypt. There is thus strong reason to suspect that the unit being used, megalithic stadion or otherwise, was less than 196 m long.
In evaluating the conclusion, another relevant question is if the translation that was used correctly interpreted Plato’s words.
The size and landscape of Atlantis is primarily described in Kritias 118a. Some translations describe the plain as rectangular, but there does not seem to be any tangible support for that in Plato’s text. There are also some translations that interpret the dimensions, 3,000 x 2,000 stadia, as referring to the plain and not the whole island. Due to the way of writing in Plato’s time—without punctuation marks or even spaces between words—and since Plato lined up these descriptions without repeating the subject of the sentence (and since the measurements are in genitive, which is identical in every genus), it is not completely clear what he was referring to.
There is a detail that seems to have been missed in translations, all of which give the width as two thousand stadia. However, after mentioning the length, Plato writes “κατα δε μεσον απο θαλαττης ανω δισχιλιων”, which I translate as ‘in the middle from the sea more than two thousand’. Recall that the width of Ireland is 2,060 megalithic stadia—hence more than two thousand from sea to sea.
4. LANDSCAPE TEST
The second test compares Atlantis’ central mountain-surrounded plain with Ireland.
This is what The World Factbook (2004) has to say about the geomorphology of Ireland: “Mostly level to rolling interior plain surrounded by rugged hills and low mountains; sea cliffs on west coast”. Compare it with this quote from Kritias: “The whole island was high and steep on the side of the sea, but at and around the city the surrounding was a plain,
Figure 4. Cliffs of Mohrer on the west coast of Ireland. Composite of two photos ©Mike Goldsman 1997.
which in turn was surrounded by mountains that sloped down to the sea.”
Plato’s text first stresses the sheer cliffs with a plain on top, which also exists on Ireland (Fig. 4). Just like The World Factbook, he comple- ments that with mentioning the plain surrounded by mountains.
The Irish “central plain” is clearly visible in Figure 3, which is based on a digital elevation model (DEM) of the world, with 2 minutes resolution. The plain is roughly rectangular, extending from the east coast to the mountains on the west coast, between N53o and N54o.
Ireland clearly matches the description as regards the landscape, but the question is again if this similarity is statistically significant, or if it could have been caused by chance.
Coastal cliffs are very common on oceanic islands, especially those with a volcanic origin. Mountains and plains are equally common. But how frequently is a plain, obviously of substantial dimensions, surrounded by mountains?
Using the ETOPO2 DEM, the landscape of the 50 largest islands in the world was evaluated as regards one specific parameter: If they have a plain surrounded by mountains. All remaining islands were too small to evaluate in a 2 minute DEM.
A careful scrutiny of the GIS came up with only one island that had a plain surrounded by mountains, and that is Ireland. As expected, the typical situation is a central mountain with a low coastland, or a low island without mountains.
With only 2% of the islands having a plain surrounded by mountains the result is significant, and the null hypothesis is rejected.
The test assumes that Plato would have described Atlantis in a normal and typical way for islands if he had been making it up. That is, it assumes that the likelihood for him to describe a certain feature is directly proportional to the frequency of that feature on real islands. In the view of this, it is perhaps more relevant to look at insular geography in Plato’s part of the world, than on the entire planet.
Such a comparison was made using a DEM with 1 km resolution. Ireland plus the five largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea were analyzed as follows: The distance from the coastline was calculated for each cell, and the cells divided in 1-km distance classes. The average elevation for each distance was calculated. Both the average elevation and the distance were normalized.
The 6 resulting curves (Fig. 5) show how clear the distinction is between Ireland on the one hand, and all the major Mediterranean islands on the other. Ireland alone is lower in the inland than near the coast.
A large plain surrounded by mountains violates the normal geomorphology of islands, and especially the situation in Plato’s part of the world. The description of Atlantis closely resembles that of Ireland.
Based on the geographical tests, the hypothesis that Plato was describing Ireland and the megalithic culture is retained. Before reflecting on how Plato could have access to this information, some other aspects than the geography will be compared.
If Ireland is the island Atlantis in Plato’s tale, and the megalithic culture is the empire, then the finest megalithic monuments ought to be found on Ireland. A university textbook in archaeology provides the answer.
Burenhult (1999) writes, “Ireland possesses the without comparison largest number of
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Crete Cyprus Sicily
Sardinia Corsica Ireland
Figure 5. Normalized average elevation plotted against normalized cumulative distance from the coastline for Ireland and the five biggest Mediterranean islands.
megalithic tombs in relation to the surface area of the island” (p. 284), and “...the choicest megalithic constructions created in Europe. To these belong principally Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth in the Boyne valley, richly ornamented [...] The monuments bear witness to deep astronomical knowledge...” (p. 287; my translation). Some of the oldest megalithic monuments are also found on Ireland, in Carrowmore in County Sligo, dating back to the mid sixth millennium BC (Burenhult 1999, p. 286; Bergh 1995). Ireland is thus a likely central region for the megalithic culture, and the hypothesis holds up.
Newgrange is shown in Figure 6, in a frontal view and a close-up of the entrance. Compare it with the rather typical megalithic cairn in Figure 1, where a rectangular chain of standing stones mark the sacred area, in the middle of which is a tomb created by a few megaliths, with one of them serving as roof. It is of similar age as Newgrange.
Plato mentioned that the Atlanteans quarried white, black and red rock, and wrote in Kritias 116b, “Some of their buildings were simple, but in others they put together different stones,
varying the colour to please the eye, and to be a natural source of delight.”
The end of it reads in Greek, “μειγνυντες τους λιθους ποικιλα υφαινον παιδιας χαριν”. According to the online dictionary of the Perseus project, μειγνυντες means ‘mixing’ (properly used of liquids), and τους λιθους is ‘the stones’. The last three words mean that they were ‘weaved together to a childish grace’, literally. The remaining word, ποικιλα, means ‘many-coloured, spotted, mottled, pied, dappled’, suggesting that in a façade of stones in one colour, there were spots made of stones in a different colour (the form of the word is dualis).
Compare this with the façade of Newgrange (Fig. 6), made up of quartz (white) with spots of granite stones (dark). The wall is a restoration, since the original one collapsed over 4,000 years ago (the monument was built around 3,200 BC; O’Kelly 1982). The decoration is another match between Atlantis and Ireland. It may prove statistically significant since it is rather unusual.
Plato mentioned two temples, one being for both their ancestors: “in the centre was a holy temple dedicated to Cleito and Poseidon, which remained inaccessible”, while the other was for their divine ancestor alone: “Here was Poseidon's own temple which was a stadium in length, and half a stadium in width, and of a proportionate height, having a strange barbaric appearance.”
As was argued in Erlingsson (2004), the passage tomb of Knowth (Eogan 1987) with its two chambers may correspond to the temple for both Cleito and Poseidon, while Newgrange may correspond to that of Poseidon alone (the Irish monuments are about half a megalithic stadion across). Note that while there are hundreds of burials in Knowth, there may not be a single one in Newgrange. This would seem to agree with the latter being a temple for a god, rather than for a mortal ancestor.
The single chamber in Newgrange has a corbelled vault, whereas in Knowth there is one chamber with a corbelled vault and one with a flat stone slab for roof like in the majority of megalithic tombs. When caliph Abdullah Al- Mamun of Baghdad in AD 820 broke into the Great Pyramid in Egypt, he first found a chamber with gabled roof and named it the Queen’s Chamber, since they buried their
Figure 6. Newgrange. Note the granite stones in the quartz façade. The original façade continued straight out to both ends of the decorated entrance stone. Above the door there is a light opening, through which the rising sun’s rays reach the grave chamber on Midwinter solstice.
women in tombs with gabled ceilings, but men in tombs with flat ceilings. This distinction
based on sex might be the reason for Knowth having two chambers with different roof types, which would be in line with it being a temple for both the earthborn ancestral mother Cleito, and for their divine ancestral father Poseidon.
Plato mentioned that the distance from the sea to the city was 50 stadia (Kritias 115d and possibly 113c). The Boyne valley monuments are located 50 stadia from the sea (Erlingsson, 2004, p. 50).
In conclusion, there is reason to suspect that Plato also had access to a description of the monuments in the Boyne valley in County Meath, Ireland.
Ireland has a long oral tradition. The location of Newgrange was unknown during four millennia, after it collapsed into an inconspicuous hill when the retaining wall gave way (it is now concrete reinforced). In spite of this, Irish folklore remembered it. The Irish name is Brú na Bóinne, which means ‘Mansion of the Boyne’. The river name Bóinne means ‘white cow’ (a cognate to Sanskrit Govinda), and it is related to the name of the river goddess Boann (or Boand), whose son Oengus now inhabits the mansion. Incidentally, the Milky Way is called ‘the way of the white cow’ in Irish.
Boann, without permission, approached a sacred well. The well sprang up in a flood and took her out to the sea, thus creating the river Boyne, a most revered river on Ireland. The well belonged to the river god Nechtan, a name cognate to Roman Neptun, i.e., Poseidon, originally a river god. There is thus a connection between Newgrange and Poseidon. Since the word that Plato used for temple also means ‘residence of a god’, the Mansion of the Boyne is a namesake of Poseidon’s temple on Atlantis, except for the sex of the river divinity.
Irish mythology contains elements that hint at an ancestral homeland that was flooded by the rising sea, and myths of sunken cities exist on much of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. However, since such myths are common all over the world they tend to be dismissed. Nevertheless, most of the planet did experience a significant sea-level rise after the Ice Age, so the omnipresence of the motif is logical. The question is, though, if the motif has a
psychological origin common to all people, or if it is a very ancient tradition.
As a test of whether a myth about geographic changes can survive for such a long time, we may look at an island that has experienced the opposite, namely rising from the sea: Gotland in the Baltic Sea. The creation myth of that island, preserved in the introduction to their law, recalls how the island used to sink in the sea every morning and rise every evening, until Tjelvar came and brought fire.
Modern geology has shown that Gotland melted out from the inland ice as barren rocks barely protruding from the Baltic Ice Lake some 10,000 years ago. The core element of the tradition is therefore correct, since the myth reflects that this island has risen from the sea, while the majority of coasts have been flooded. This hints at the possibility of very ancient memories being preserved in oral tradition, especially on remote islands where there has been a long continuous occupation.
Ireland did not sink in the sea, but Atlantis did, according to Plato. For this aspect of the tale Ireland is obviously not the model. A distinct possibility is that it is a memory of some other place that was preserved in megalithic Ireland.
Erlingsson (2004, p. 22) suggested a real world explanation for Atlantis’ sinking, namely that Dogger Bank was destroyed by the Storegga tsunami. By coincidence, the flood wave came at a time when Dogger Bank was about to sink anyway in the rising sea level.
It was a very powerful tsunami (Bondevik et al. 2003) that may well have converted large low-lying areas into mud banks. This is especially true if they were protected against storm floods by coastal dykes or natural sand dunes, since those would prevent the sea from withdrawing. The apparent effect would have been that the island sank in the sea after a dramatic natural disaster. Furthermore, it would have created a mud bank that made the sea un- navigable, just as the case was with Atlantis (Timaios 25c-d and Kritias 108e).
In Timaios 24e Plato positions Atlantis before the mouth that the Greeks call the columns of Heracles. In this context it is worth noting Tacitus’ report in Germany and its tribes
(XXXIV) that the columns of Heracles are located by Friesland, which in turn is located by the Rhine. Dogger Bank being located off the mouth of the Rhine, one must contemplate the possibility that it was the Phoenicians who first applied the name pillars of Heracles to Gibraltar, and that they did so to keep others away by exploiting the fear connected with an old myth (Plato apparently considered it well known that the sea outside the pillars of Heracles was un-navigable).
It is also worth noting that at the time when Dogger Bank was sinking it formed a tidal bank that covered most of the distance between the shores of England and Denmark. It thus effectively prevented the navigation from the Rhine to the open North Sea—just what Plato claimed happened when Atlantis sank. In stark contrast, an Aegean island that sinks in an earthquake does not create a mud bank that hinders navigation. As Plato’s description fits the geography of Dogger Bank of six millennia ago well, while being so exotic to his own part of the world, the match is noteworthy.
An alternative reason for the apparent sinking of Dogger Bank could be the rising world sea level after the Ice Age. It is usually dismissed as a potential cause of disastrous floods, since the melting of ice is a gradual process that should not produce rapid transgressions. However, some scientists are suggesting multiple events of rapid sea-level rise triggered by jökulhlaups and ice-marginal lake bursts from the Laurentian inland ice (e.g., Blanchon & Shaw 1995; cf. Fig. 7). The last cataclysmic transgression would have drowned Dogger Bank, and the previous one would have drowned a plain to the south of Dogger Bank, considered to be a promising location for underwater archaeology by Flemming (2002).
This plain, called Doggerland by Coles (1998), would have been flooded in a rather short time some 9,000 years before Plato. This is precisely the number of years Plato said had passed since the disaster. That transgression coincided with the end of the Ice Age, and represented a global change-event on a scale that makes the gloomiest predictions today seem inconsequential. Incidentally, there was a comparable event of equally rapid sea level and temperature rise a mere three thousand years earlier.
Figure 7. Suggested context of the Atlantis tale in climatic change and sea level rise. The x-scale is in thousands of calendar years before present, defined as 1950 AD. The thin line is the δ18O temperature proxy from Greenland (GRIP Members 1993). The Ice Age ended at 11.5 kBP. The bold line is the sea level from Blanchon and Shaw (1995). There were drastic rises around 11.5 kBP and 7.6 kBP. The flood wave symbol marks the tsunami from the Storegga submarine slide around 8.1 kBP. Insert: The dashed line illustrates the drastic cultural decline ca 7.5 kBP from the Kongemose (K) to the Ertebølle (E) Mesolithic culture. Rectangles represent the temporal extent of Dogger Bank as an island, the megalithic culture, Egypt, and Antiquity. The arrows show how the tradition of the sinking may have been transmitted between them. Since there are significant reservoir effects when calibrating from radiocarbon years to calendar years, it is quite possible that all events around 8 kBP occurred in a short time span and were related in some way. The earliest megalithic tombs on Ireland also date from that time frame.
The evidence for these alleged rapid transgressions are not universally accepted, though; nor are Laurentian jökuhlhaups, although they appear theoretically possible through the captured ice shelf mechanism suggested by Erlingsson (1994a, b).
What is irrefutable is that Dogger Bank became an island during the Holocene transgression (Isle of Dogger in Fig. 7). The final sinking of this island was the last great cataclysm before Plato’s (and our) time, whether it was caused by the Storegga tsunami or the final drainage of Lake Agassiz through Hudson Bay.
5.4 The origin of the Atlantis tale
The image that emerges is that megalithic Ireland kept alive the memory of the disaster that struck Dogger Bank, during three thousand years (Fig. 7). After the collapse of the
megalithic culture, the memories of it, as well as of the Dogger Bank cataclysm, may well have been kept in Egypt just as Plato claimed.
As the insert in Figure 7 shows, there is no gap in time between these cultures. Nor is there any sizeable spatial gap, since the Atlantean empire, like the megalithic culture, reached the eastern Mediterranean.
It seems a reasonable conclusion that Plato got hold of historic data the way he claimed, and used it to create a political myth in the way he himself advocated.
Plato based the description of Atlantis on megalithic Ireland, which at the time appears to have been the focal point of a large culture. It seems feasible that the memory of the Storegga tsunami on Dogger Bank was kept alive in that culture, and carried from there to Egypt, eventually to be mixed up with Ireland itself. When Plato wrote his dialogues, he either put the fragments together in a novel order while adding some flair, or someone else before him had already done that.
Although we must take into account that Plato may have added many fantastic details to the description of Atlantis in order to glorify Athens’ victory over the empire, his tale can still give us clues. Even if the tale is partly fictional, whatever factual details can be extracted are invaluable, since there simply is no other source of recorded tradition from the European Stone Age.
Incidentally, this result is also proof that Atlantis in the strict sense never existed.
The author would like to acknowledge the assistance from friends during the long research process that led up to this study, especially the generously offered help from Torgny Frembäck and Athina Tavoultzidou. Thanks are also due to prof em J.O. Norrman, Å. Sundborg and W. Karlén, whose critique of the analysis has been most welcome.
The Perseus project website at www.perseus.tufts.edu was consulted for the original Greek and Latin texts.
The paper is dedicated to my father Erling Nilsson, and his father, Knut Nilsson, for proving that anyone can see through propaganda if he only uses his wits and logic.
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Blanchon, P. and Shaw, John (1995). Reef drowning during the last deglaciation: Evidence for catastrophic sea-level rise and ice-sheet collapse, Geology 23: 4-8.
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Flemming, N. C. (2002). The scope of Strategic Environmental Assessment of North Sea areas SEA3 and SEA2 in regard to prehistoric archaeological remains. UK Department of Trade and Industry, Report Nr TR_014.
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A Swedish academic says he has found vital clues in Ireland to prove that the country is actually the lost kingdom of Atlantis.
Dr Ulf Erlingsson, whose radical theories have caused a storm of debate, is on a three-day tour here to prove Ireland contains remnants of the mythical land described by Greek philosopher Plato in 370 BC.
Dr Erlingsson, 44, today visited Newgrange and Knowth megalithic passage tombs in Co Meath which he believes are linked to the ancient temples of Poseidon and the Ancestors in Atlantis. He also believes the Atlantis capital can be connected with Tara in Co Meath - the legendary seat of the high kings of Ireland.
He said: "Atlantis had a central plain fringed by mountains which is exactly what I saw at Newgrange today.
"And Plato said that 10 kings met in the Atlantis capital every five years, which would equate with Tara's historical connection with the high kings."
Dr Erlingsson also believes that the geography of Atlantis matches Ireland perfectly as it is 300 miles long, 200 miles wide, and broadest over the middle. The geologist's theories are contained in his book Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land, to be published next month.
Irish experts have described Dr Erlingsson's views as "bizarre" and say the actual existence of Atlantis has never been scientifically proven. The exact location of the lost kingdom, which sank after a massive flood-wave 12,000 years ago, has perplexed explorers and scientists for generations. Some theories claim it is in the mid-Atlantic Ocean or under the North Sea.
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