CAN A WATER KINGDOM OR SWALLOWED BY A PARADISE LOST FOREVER?
That a great civilization may have existed and suddenly disappear is enough to fascinate. A name, Atlantis, summarizes the story or the dream. The word evokes a mysterious island, bathed in the rays of a burning sun, and a people, the founder of a brilliant culture and ephemeral.
In the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato is the first to mention the existence of Atlantis. Since then, the city inspired ramblings and utopias.
The testimony of Plato
Two dialogues of Plato, Timaeus and Critias, found the myth of Atlantis. The texts are in talks with several people: Socrates, the teacher of Plato, Timaeus, Pythagorean philosopher, Critias, Plato's relative, has narrated a story that his grandfather, who was told by his father, having heard the latter report by the Greek sage Solon. When Solon was in Egypt (590ac), a priest of the temple of Sais him confided, 9,000 years ago there was an island called Atlantis, <output atlántico> sea, located beyond the Pillars of Hercules (now Gibraltar), and larger than Libya and Asia put together (at the time, represented the north Africa and Asia Minor). It was then possible to go from this island to another and, from these, reaching a continent that lay before them (Is America?)
The history of the people who inhabited this island is as follows:
The Atlantean kings, powerful and prosperous, driven by expansionist goals, conquered the shores of the Mediterranean, seizing particularly Libya and Egypt and going to Europe to Tirrenia (Western Italy).
But they were finally repulsed and defeated by the Athenians. Occurred shortly after huge earthquakes and cataclysms and proud Atlantis was swallowed by the sea.
THE END OF ATLANTIS.
According to Plato, Atlantis disappeared in a day and night, the victim of a cataclysm. Several authors, on the basis that the island really existed, have tried to find an explanation for the disappearance.
The most obvious solution to the eruption of a volcano, but it is unthinkable that an explosion, although daunting, does away with an island of the dimensions described in the Critias Plato.
Also some evoke the hypothesis of a giant meteorite that had fallen on the ground, triggering the most formidable tsunami of human history-a catastrophe of the flood myth that would keep the memory-
Atlantis according to Plato:
"If Solon was a time before the biggest destruction by water, where it is today the city of the Athenians was, in all the best for war <...>. At that time you could go through this sea (the Atlantic Ocean?). There was an island that passage before you call the Pillars of Hercules <...>. Now in this island of Atlantis, its kings had formed a great and wonderful empire <.. .>. this power, having concentrated all his forces, launched a single impulse, the domination of your land and ours, and we all found on this side of the strait. it was then, O Solon, that the power of your city exploded in the eyes of all his heroism and energy. Because the beat on all its moral force and the military art <...>. But in the time that followed was dreadful earthquakes and cataclysms. in single day and a terrible night, your whole army was at once swallowed by the earth, and, likewise, the island of Atlantis sank into the sea and disappeared. that is why even today, the ocean is difficult and unexplored by the obstacle of muddy and very low to the island, sink, storage. "
