: Dr. P. P. Flambas
: Plato's Caribbean Atlantis A Scientific Analysis
: Vivid Publishing
: 9781922409775
: Plato?s Caribbean Atlantis
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Altertum
: English
: 750
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Plato's Caribbean Atlantis' (updated edition) provides a scientific explanation for the greatest and most misunderstood archaeological mystery of any era - the lost civilisation of Atlantis.??In his two works, the 'Timaeus' and 'Critias', the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote in about 360 BCE about a powerful Atlantean empire that existed over eleven thousand years ago. Plato described an extensive empire based on an enormous Atlantic Island located in the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlanteans were involved in a war with the people of the Mediterranean but natural disasters eventually destroyed the Atlantic Island, which sank beneath the sea and disappeared.??Plato's Atlantis story continues to intrigue people to the present day. Up to now, the thousands of books written about Atlantis have tried to interpret the details Plato described, with hundreds of theories proposed for its location. All of these past interpretations and theories have attempted to explain a few parts of Plato's story but do not explain the entire story. 'Plato's Caribbean Atlantis' claims that Plato believed the Atlantis story was true and what he wrote was not his invention or a myth. He wrote an accurate account of Atlantis that had been recorded for thousands of years before his time. By using current scientific knowledge of the past, every detail of Plato's story is explained so that one can picture a real Atlantis and its empire. The book's conclusions may cause a radical rethinking of the origin of human civilisation and the geological processes that have shaped humanity. Updated 2024 edition.

Dr Phil Flambas was born in Sydney, Australia in 1953. He attended the University of NSW medical school, graduating as a doctor in 1978. In his early twenties, he went to Sri Lanka as a medical student for a few months and combined it with backpacking through India and Nepal. After he graduated, Phil worked as a hospital doctor in England to gain extra qualifications to be a country GP back in Australia. During his time away from Australia, he spent several months backpacking in Morocco, Greece, Turkey and Egypt and saw the remains of those ancient cultures first-hand. After returning to Australia and practising medicine as a country GP for some years, Phil became interested in the commercialisation of new technologies and wanted a change of career. He returned to Sydney and became the Managing Editor of a long-established medical journal. Realising that he needed more business knowledge to achieve his goals in technology transfer, Phil left medical publishing. He then began a full-time two-year Master of Business Administration (MBA) course at the University of NSW, graduating in 1992. Since then, Phil has worked as a hospital administrator, management consultant and equities analyst, supplemented at times with part-time medical work. Due to family commitments, he returned to full-time medical practice as a skin cancer surgeon for the past eighteen years and is due to retire soon. In his spare time, he researched and wrote about Plato's Atlantis story for the past ten years. To adequately explain all of Plato's numerous descriptions, Phil utilised his scientific foundations as a doctor, his analytical training from the MBA and its application as a management consultant and equities analyst. Because of his analytical experience, he was able to study hundreds of research papers in specialised areas including Ancient History, Archaeology, Human Prehistory, Palaeontology, Climate Science and Geology. Plato's Caribbean Atlantis joins together all of these diverse academic disciplines into a coherent explanation of Plato's Atlantis story. Of course, Phil would like to be involved in any search and discovery linked to his book's radical conclusions.

Introduction

Plato wrote his Atlantis story in two documents called theTimaeus andCritias. These writings date from about 360 BCE and are the only known works that give a detailed description of the Atlantean civilisation.

Anyone interested in Ancient History probably wonders what people like us created many thousands of years before any written records - in what we call “prehistory”. Plato’s Atlantis story provides graphic details of an advanced but long-lost civilisation that rose and fell in the very distant past. The thousands of books and articles written about Atlantis attempt to describe it and locations for it although none satisfy all of Plato’s detailed account. Nevertheless, this book gives rational explanations for every one of the many features contained in Plato’sTimaeus andCritias.

Plato based his Atlantis story on the writings of the Athenian statesman Solon. Solon was a well-known historical figure in Athens in the 6th century BCE, almost two centuries before Plato lived, wrote, and taught philosophy in Athens. In the early 6th century BCE, Solon travelled to the city of Sais in the Nile Delta in Egypt. While there, he met with Egyptian temple priests who possessed ancient historical records concerning Atlantis. The Egyptian priests showed Solon those records and recounted the story of Atlantis. They told Solon about events that had occurred nine thousand years before his time, which is over eleven thousand years ago. In the early 4th century BCE, Plato accessed a document written by Solon about what he had seen and heard in Egypt concerning the Atlantis story. Plato then used the details in Solon’s document to write about Atlantis in theTimaeus andCritias.

In theTimaeus andCritias, Plato describes the Atlanteans as an aggressive imperial military power that originated on what he calls the“Atlantic island”, located outside the Mediterranean in the Atlantic Ocean. According to Plato, the Atlanteans conquered and enslaved Western Mediterranean cultures and then attempted to expand their empire by conquering the remaining free cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Atlanteans were defeated in a war against the free Mediterranean people and eventually were driven entirely from the Mediterranean region. Sometime after the war in the Mediterranean, the Atlanteans’ homeland on the Atlantic Island sank into the sea during devastating earthquakes and floods. Plato also describes a prehistoric society in Athens that fought against the Atlanteans but was also destroyed by natural disasters.

Though there are several English translations of Plato’s original works on Atlantis, only two are used here - Thomas Taylor, who published theTimaeus in 1793 andCritias in 1804; and Benjamin Jowett, who published both translations in 1871. These two translators had opposing views on whether Plato’s account of Atlantis was truth or fiction. Taylor believed that someone who valued truth as much as Plato would not have invented the story; whereas Jowett was sure it was fiction. Regardless of their opposing beliefs, they each translated Plato’s original Ancient Greek text into English. Both translations have a similar substance, but Taylor uses an older, more dated version of English than Jowett. This book mainly uses Jowett’s translation but occasionally adds Taylor’s if it offers a slightly different meaning for Plato’s descriptions. If any Classics scholars are interested, they can still study the original Greek texts to find additional or different meanings to those of the English translations used here.

Both of Plato’s English translators wrote at a time when most Christians believed the Bible’s Old Testament was an accurate history of the Earth. For devout Christians, God supposedly created the entire Universe in six days about six thousand years ago. Plato’s descriptions of anything at all that existed thousands of years before then, let alone advanced human civilisations, would have been considered heresy by many Christians in the 18th and 19th centuries. Science has only recently understood geological time or “Deep Time”, which began with the writings of James Hutton in the 1780s and Charles Lyell in the 1830s. Lyell was one of the first people to believe that the Earth was more than 300 million years old, and he based his belief on geological evidence. Lyell’s writings influenced Charles Darwin, who in 1859 published his radical book,On the Origin of Species, which described the concept of evolution.

In both theTimaeus andCritias, Plato repeatedly describes his Atlantis story as fact and not fiction. Yet, almost from the time Plato wrote about Atlantis in the 4th century BCE, many philosophers and scholars have argued that he created the Atlantis story as a fiction or “noble lie”. They claim Plato fashioned a fictitious Atlantis and prehistoric Athens as a metaphor and moral message for a discussion about ideal societies. But in all of his many philosophical writings, Plato never wrote anything we would call “fiction” genre. Plato believed the purpose of all “philosophy” was the search for “truth” and his writings are devoted to seeking the truth of the way the world works.

In theTimaeus andCritias, Plato writes the Atlantis story in the form of conversations or “dialogues” between various characters. Plato makes the Greek philosopher Socrates the central character who presides over the dial