The story of Atlantis is not as some believe, a work of fiction.
According to some the Greek philosopher Plato fashioned his detailed account of the lost
civilization, just to make a point.
Why did Plato provide so much detail on Atlantis if he intended only to use it as a literary device?
Why did his characters refer to it as genuine history and claim its very existence as a fact?
The flower of western civilization is firmly rooted in ancient Greece.
More than 400 years before Christ, Plato was born to an aristocratic family of Athens.
When still an infant, while he was sleeping, bees came to settle on his lips.
This foretold the sweetness of his words, which one day he would commit to papyrus scrolls.
As a young man he chose the sport of wrestling and his coach dubbed him "Platon", meaning
broad of shoulder and robust, which he used thereafter as his name.
He would go on to wrestle in one of the original Olympic games.
Then Plato traveled abroad through Italy, Egypt and Libya.
Returning to Greece he entered politics.
For opposing the tyrant of Syracuse he narrowly escaped a sentence of death... but he was
sold into slavery.
A friend bought his freedom for twenty dollars and sent him home.
In Athens Plato founded the first school of higher learning... that is to say, he invented
college.
Unlike all other writers who lived at the same time, Plato's work is believed to have
survived intact for over twenty-four hundred years because of the high esteem in which
it is held.
He describes the city of Atlantis in two of his works.
The central mountain was carved into a palace, then enclosed within three circular moats,
separated by concentric rings of land.
A wall surrounded each of these rings constructed of the red rock that had been quarried to
make the moats.
The walls were covered with brass, so that when reflecting the sun they shone as if made
of gold.
The Atlanteans then built bridges northward from the mountain, for access to the rest
of the island.
A great canal was excavated, leading to the sea.
Every passage to the city was guarded either by gate or tower.
Often Plato would base his essays on historical research he conducted himself.
The source from which Plato drew the history of Atlantis may have been the poorly translated
work of another author, who increased by a factor of ten the number of years since the
island sank into the sea.
If the catastrophe occured nine hundred years before Plato's time instead of nine thousand,
the legend would accurately describe the fate of the lost civilization of the Minoans.
Predating the rise of Greece, the seat of Minoan civilization flourished on the island
of Crete for one thousand five hundred years.
Atlantean details fit well with what is known of Minoan culture.
Women of both places held a high social and political status... both cultures enjoyed
the unique sport of leaping over bulls... and both states were fond of imposing military
might upon their neighbors.
However when a massive volcano erupted on the neighboring island of Santorini, a tsunami
was raised with waves reaching a height of two hundred and fifty feet.
As the tsunami washed over the island of Crete, the Minoan empire was extinguished, as it
literally sank beneath the Mediterranean Sea.
The shape of the volcanic caldera can still be seen today.
In 2009 professor and Rabbi, Richard Freund proposed an alternative mailing address for
the lost city of Atlantis.
Based on satellite images from Google Earth of marshlands on the southern coast of Spain,
the footprint of an old city can be discerned in the shape of a circle containing multiple
concentric rings... crossed by straight lines, radiating out from the center.
This location is near the Straits of Gibraltar, formerly known as the Pillars of Hercules.
This is exactly where Plato placed Atlantis.